Call Him Mine

by Tim MacGabhann

  But before I could get back to my stool and drink my beer, the curtains whispered apart, the lace-clad woman stopped fixing her hair in the mirror, the teenagers stopped giggling and the Totonaca builders went rigid in their chairs. The scrawny guy in the Pemex uniform, he turned around all right, but then he turned away again once he saw who had come in, and emptied his beer, and then everybody in the bar got up almost in unison to spread their hands on the wall, their feet shoulder-width apart, their eyes aimed at the ground.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry for the interruption,’ said a voice behind me. The accent wasn’t Mexican. The aspirated ‘h’, the dropped ‘s’ were pure El Salvador. ‘Ordinarily, we’d invite you to sit and enjoy a drink with us.’

  Someone’s feet squeaked against the grit of the floor.

  ‘But we have to speak with this man in private, so we must ask you to leave.’

  A couple of heads craned, then went back to staring at the wall.

  ‘Please allow me to take care of your bills. Now, if you don’t mind …?’

  The lace-clad woman, the scrawny guy on the chair, the teenagers, the builders, they half-jogged from the bar, leaving me alone with Osama Bin Laden and Mangueras and El Prieto. Beside them stood the vendor with the pyramids and the clean white linen trousers. His face looked carved out of wood.

  When I saw the other man with them, the man who’d spoken, a sound rose from my throat that was too tired to be a sigh, too shallow to be a groan.

  His face had loomed out of my sleep most nights since the first time I’d seen it, peering sombre out of the photograph of an army battalion surrendering its rifles on a soccer field in 1992, oval, olive-skinned, with a shapely nose and a neat black crew cut.

  Puccini had aged well. His hands could have been a teenager’s, the skin was so unbroken, and no grey hairs flecked his crew-cut. Except for the scar that bisected his face, his expression could have been a teenager’s too, all relaxed floating bravado, like none of anything was a big deal.

  ‘Is that him?’ Puccini asked.

  ‘That’s him, jefe,’ said El Prieto.

  ‘I asked our colleague.’

  The Totonaca guy nodded.

  ‘Very good,’ said Puccini, and shook his hand. ‘You can go now.’

  The four guys behind him parted the curtain to let him pass, his brass pyramids jangling in his hands.

  ‘Search him,’ said Puccini.

  Mangueras crossed the floor nice and slow, scratching his stubble, looking at me like I was an idiot. His pats were practically punches. Then he slid a gun from a shoulder-holster and clouted me across the jaw, the crack bright and loud, and the grit on the bar-room floor cut my cheek. A cloud of receipts and plane-tickets and small bills flurried around my head when he pulled the gun from my pocket. A foot clumped down hard on my neck and turned the bar-room into a long black tunnel of white shooting stars, whooshing like deep space.

  The gun in Prieto’s hand clicked wetly as he cocked it at my head. Next there’d be a bang I wouldn’t hear, I’d twitch once in a pool of brains and teeth and hair, and then I’d be gone for good: just like Abel Carranza, just like Carlos, just like Julián Gallardo, just like two hundred thousand other names I’d never know.

  ‘Bag him,’ Puccini said, over the jukebox’s explosion of orchestra and choir.

  Prieto walked forward with a plastic-coated hemp sack marked CAFÉ DE CÓRDOBA spread in his hands and pulled it over my head.

  The room went dark, and I breathed air that smelled itchily of dirt and coffee.

  That’s what really killed me, knowing that the smell of the bag would be my last breaths, and not your broad gold odour of gardenias, or the leather sting of a cigarette, or the chlorophyll tang of the plants in my apartment, or the cold nick of woodsmoke in the air above your town.

  Then I felt it. The rabbit-tremble of Carlos’ pulse under my thumb in the car that time, it was under my skin now.

  A rough hand grabbed my wrists, zipped shut a plastic tie. Hands reached around my neck, I thrashed, my feet caught nothing, and one of them kicked me so hard in the ribs that all I could do was curl around myself like a prawn.

  ‘Not so tight around the neck,’ said Puccini.

  The tie zipped shut: loose enough to breathe, sure, but barely enough; the breath rasped through the pinched hole of my throat.

  ‘Feet,’ said Puccini.

  The bones of my ankles knocked together hard, and the hem of my pants rode up over the plastic, and the plastic pinched my leg hairs.

  ‘OK, we’re good,’ said Puccini.

  They clunked me against the door on my way out but I was too dazed to wail, and then my body slammed to the floor of the police pickup, a pair of boots squeaking behind me.

  ‘I don’t get you, cabrón,’ Prieto said above me, his foot on my neck. ‘We do you all the favours in the world, and you throw it back at us.’

  The jeep’s engine roared and we were gone, through the noise of Papantla’s main streets at night on to the silent back roads, every bump in the road slamming my head against the floor.

  The jeep stopped.

  There’s a dozen ways to make a body disappear.

  You throw them off a bridge.

  Prieto took the foot from my neck and knelt over me, his knee on my shoulder. He whipped off the bag. A fantail of my sweat sprayed the warm night air. Above us, half lit up by the police jeep’s headlights, the pyramid of El Tajín loomed down like a pile of empty eyes. Puccini stood behind the pickup in his Veracruz State Police uniform.

  You dump them in an oil-tank.

  ‘I want to apologise for the nature of your transit,’ said Puccini. When he scratched his cheek I saw that the MUFC tattoo across his knuckles was the stick-and-poke kind. ‘You may get down out of the pickup,’ came a southern United States drawl. ‘Prieto, help him.’

  Prieto hauled me by the oxters until my ankles hung above the bumper.

  You chop them up, jam them into a fracking well.

  ‘I’ve got it from here, thanks,’ I said. The words came out in a bubble of blood.

  He threw me to the ground, onto my sore ribs. My breath skittered gravel.

  Puccini knelt over me with a long clean hunting knife in his hand and snicked off the wrist-ties with the tip. He did the same for my ankles and went to sit down on a fallen column engraved with snakes and stained green with moss.

  ‘Sit.’ Puccini indicated the space beside him. ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘You got water?’ My voice was a rasp. I shunted across the grass-spined dirt track as far as the fallen column and sat in the halogen glare of the headlights.

  He handed me a flask. The gulps rocked my throat.

  ‘Since you can’t grasp it by yourself, I will tell you this now,’ he said. ‘You won’t find a paper trail on my relationship with Ajenjo. Our relationship was verbal. We held one meeting with their CEO, at a small restaurant in Narvarte, in April 2011, and his instruction was clear: to break local resistance to their plans for the region. By what means, you know already.’ He lit his cigarette.

  My wrists were welted pink from the ties. My head rang. Prieto and Mangueras watched the track with their rifles.

  ‘Your guys,’ I said. ‘They talked about favours you did us.’

  Puccini nodded through a broken screen of smoke. ‘You know by now that we didn’t kill your friend, or Gallardo.’ He held the pack out to me. ‘In fact, we protected you from the people who did: Abel Carranza and the Guardia Civil.’

  ‘But he was one of yours.’

  ‘Was.’ Puccini shrugged. ‘Mexico is full of talkers,’ he said, his eyes on the empty track that led from the pyramids back to the main road. ‘Word got out about the pact with Ajenjo, and it looked bad for the state. A show was made of going after us, but really the Guardia Civil is doing what we used to do, with a stamp of state official.’ He ground the cigarette out with his boot heel. ‘We were replaced. Didn’t look good for the state or the companies that we were working for them. S
o they brought new people in to do what we did – the kind of people who could hide behind a badge.’

  ‘And then Abel Carranza betrayed you.’

  Puccini looked at me and nodded. ‘He saw which way the wind was blowing, took his men to the company director, and said he could help the Guardia Civil do their thing. And they hunted us down like dogs, and Abel became the new disposal man for every activist in the city. He’d bring the bodies, and the Guardia Civil would vanish them. Took them to the army barracks crematorium, apparently.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing to do with us. Me, I wanted your friend alive. I wanted Gallardo alive. They could have made enough noise to cause problems for those bastards in Ajenjo.’ He took a drag. ‘Collapse their share prices, I don’t know. Anything to get back at them. Taking our help, then cutting us loose when they felt like it.’

  ‘You’d have killed us three years ago.’

  ‘Oh, no question,’ Puccini said. ‘But the protests and your story might do worse damage to Ajenjo than we could. So we let you keep going, as a favour. And when Abel went after you two, we went after him.’

  Rats scurried in the long grass. The empty sockets of the pyramid watched us, breathing their river-smell of forgotten history.

  ‘And so,’ Puccini said, crossing a leg and sitting back on the stone bench, ‘you owe me two favours.’ He took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. When I unfolded the page the neat blue cursive had the address of a restaurant in Narvarte written on it. ‘Tomorrow night, at eight thirty, the CEO of Ajenjo is going to be expecting you to arrive at this address for an interview. I got some kid who speaks English to call him and pretend he was your personal assistant.’

  I looked up from the paper. ‘Where’s the favour to you here?’

  His eyes moved to meet mine. ‘Just interview him. Be out by nine p.m. When you’re done, you go home, you publish your story, and you never so much as think my name again.’ He held up a finger. ‘That’s the first favour.’

  I could barely feel the mosquitos strafing my arms, my body was so tense.

  ‘The second is you smoke another cigarette with me.’

  When we’d lit up he said, ‘I hated every minute of this life, you know. In the battalion, they used to cut us if we failed an exercise.’ He ran a finger down his scar. He squinted, rolled his cigarette between his fingers. ‘Scarface was big at the time. Everyone started calling me Al Pacino. All most people could say was “El Puccini”.’

  Colonel Monterroso on the edge of the football field, his acne-pitted cheeks catching shade from the booming flares.

  ‘Fail twice,’ Puccini went on, ‘and they’d leave you in a cage with the mastiff dogs we used on raids, and the dog would rape you.’ He looked at me. ‘I only failed once.’ He took a drag. ‘They told us it was to help us serve God, country, and family.’

  In my head I saw the L.A. Times article again, saw the photo of Alfredo Cristiani, with his neat moustache and neater suit on the edge of the football field: ‘You served a transcendental mission in the armed conflict.’

  ‘After the war,’ said Puccini, ‘if there was a god, he was worse than the Devil.’

  ‘You fought with mysticism and discipline, courage and valour.’

  El Puccini pursed his lips, shook his head. ‘And then there was no country. With my pension, I helped my cousin buy his auto-repair shop. Set us up forever. That was the plan. And then?’ He clapped his hands. ‘Eight days, two Yankee boys fresh off the deportation plane shoot him down from their bikes.’ Puccini leaned forward.

  ‘No God, no country,’ I said.

  When Puccini ground out his cigarette the steel toecap of his boot winked through the worn leather. ‘In those years, people were killed like chickens. Still are. Economy was dead, too. Still is. Only job I could get was driving a bus. Fourteen hours a day, hands gloved in dust, red eyes going home. Could have joined the police, the interior ministry, the secret service. But better a tired father going home in the evenings than no father at all.’ He took my wrist. ‘Here. Touch here.’ He pressed my finger to a pit in the back of his neck, just behind the ear. ‘You feel a lump?’ He wagged his finger. ‘Eight years in the army. Ambushes, shootouts, you name it. Wasn’t even grazed. And I drive a bus for three weeks in San Salvador, two kids get up on the footboard, and plug me in the skull.’ He laughed. ‘Didn’t hear the gunshot. No tunnel, no heaven, no light. Woke up with blood and teeth pooled around me in the bus seat.’

  He went on. ‘Dragging myself out of there, the pain in my head was no worse than a smack to the head – the endorphins, you know, they rush in fast. But when I get to the public hospital, they won’t treat me. Too scared: they think the kids are going to come after me.’ He scratched the scar bisecting his face. ‘Thing with head injuries is they look worse than they are. You’re not likely to faint as long as your brain is in one piece and you can resist the shock. So I drag myself to the private hospital.’ He took a drag of smoke. ‘Bill was enough to ruin my family. So I caught a plane to Atlanta. Paid my medical bill in dollars, working construction. And I stayed, because those dollar paycheques meant my daughter could go to a safer school. Not that this means anything any more.

  ‘My daughter. She was smart. Really good kid. On Skype, she’d show me the tests. A, A, A.’ His eyes were aimed at the hissing undergrowth. ‘Then she turns thirteen. Kid turns up outside our house. Playing a voice message from the local gang boss. Tells her to go to his house. She ignores him. Next day, the kid comes back. Says she doesn’t have a choice this time. This kid, he brings her to a safe house – about four blocks from ours. Down a street we always told our daughter not to go down. And that’s where they keep her.’

  The voice telling me all this, that voice was dead.

  ‘No family,’ I said.

  ‘Goes on for a year. Nobody tells me. When I come home, that girl is someone else.’ He shook his head. ‘A kid, with a soul more ruined than those of the two men guarding that road.’ He swatted the air. ‘And that’s when I made my mistake. Told the police. But the kid who’d raped her, he was a minor. Sixteen. All they could do was give him a caution. But, knowing my background, they did me a favour. Gave me a gun and a patrol car. Gave me a week to kill him.’ He shrugged and gave a bitter laugh. ‘Couldn’t find him. So my daughter and I drove to Guatemala before they could find out I’d ratted. Left her with the nuns.’

  ‘After that, to stay safe, my family needed a lot more money than building work could bring in. So I went to find a fellow veteran working in the city. And then I started working for him.’

  ‘That’s certainly one way of putting it,’ I said.

  He just looked at me like I’d been rude, and continued as though I hadn’t said anything. ‘After a few years, my boss sent me to Tabasco. The governor here in Veracruz liked what he saw. So did the company. And so they brought me to Poza Rica, tripled my wages, and every penny I made went back to Guatemala, to my daughter, and back to Salvador, to her mother.’ He sat back. ‘And now that’s all over, and I’m here, with a handful of men, the entire police force after us, and no God, and no country, and no family.’

  My cigarette had burned out. A long tusk of ash hung from the filter.

  ‘Can I offer you another?’

  ‘I think I’m all right.’ I raised his flask.

  He held up the back of his hand in deference. ‘Please, go ahead.’

  When I’d emptied the thing I set it back down, wiped my mouth, and said, ‘Can I quote you?’

  Puccini laughed. ‘Make that interview tomorrow, and you can quote whoever you want.’ Then he got up from the fallen column. ‘We’re done,’ he shouted at Prieto and Mangueras. ‘You two, in the back. He’s riding up front.’

  Back at the hotel my sleep was dreamless and total. Next morning, I zombied my way from the hotel on to a plane, then back to the car park at the airport in Mexico City where I’d left my jeep, and the coffee cups, the fug of stale smoke, the gun in my glove compartment. Even though the air was
warm, I shivered in my jacket and drove through thickening traffic to the address Puccini had given me. The sky was the colour of smoke when I parked around the corner from the restaurant, and I killed the hour until the appointment with a meal of bad doughnuts and worse coffee snatched at the wheel, the AM radio playing boleros while I ate.

  The restaurant where Puccini had sent me was about four blocks from my old apartment, with a dark oak door and windows that looked in on a bar like Los Angeles in the 1950s. Outside the hipster mezcaleria on the opposite corner stood kids with neat haircuts and pressed clothes and moneyed brays.

  A Lexus SUV was parked at the door, leaving a lot of space for mine. When it was two minutes to eight thirty by the dashboard clock, I crawled my jeep around the corner, a hand raised to the large suited man standing by the door. He nodded and let me park, then patted me down at the door.

  ‘Thank you.’ He swung the door open. ‘My employer is waiting for you.’

  Roberto Zúñiga sat at a red leather banquette, with a bottle of Centenario Reposado and a half-full tumbler in front of him. He looked more imposing than the business pages made him out to be: six foot four, hale, and white-skinned, his hair full and grey as his moustache. He switched on his smile like it was a set of high-beams.

  ‘Andrew,’ he said, ‘so good of you to come.’

  ‘The pleasure is mine, Don Roberto.’ I extended a hand.

  ‘Please, have a seat.’ He filled a second tumbler for me.