Call Him Mine

by Tim MacGabhann

  The pale amber liquid rose up the glass. My heart ticked in my throat. We were alone apart from a suited bodyguard standing watch beside the toilet.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll need to take up a huge amount of your time.’

  ‘Oh, be as comprehensive as you like. We want the world to know what we’re doing,’ he said through a gentle laugh. ‘Poza Rica went from a field to a city in just five, six years. Up as far as the early eighties, our people suffered from cholera, dysentery – diseases to shame any modern nation. And what solved that? Oil money.’ He sat back against the studded banquette. ‘It’s what we want to do now. We want to put the people of Poza Rica first once again.’ He raised his glass. ‘A toast to that.’

  But I ignored the glass and held up the voice recorder, and said, ‘May I?’

  ‘Go ahead. Like I said, we want the world to know.’ Don Roberto held up a hand. ‘But, before we begin – your accent, is it American? British?’

  ‘The opposite. Irish.’

  His laugh was a deep, unctuous ripple. ‘Wonderful symmetry. The story of Poza Rica begins in 1898, you know. An Irishman struck oil there. Refined it as kerosene.’ That laugh again. ‘And then, of course, the English took it from him.’

  ‘What can I say. It’s tradition.’ I settled back in my chair.

  Don Roberto laughed. ‘So, what did you want to talk about, specifically?’

  ‘Where to begin.’ I scratched under my chin, idly flicked a page. ‘Well, I guess it’s just that the new oil rush could be a big moment for your city.’ I switched on the voice recorder. ‘Could you tell us about your hopes for Poza Rica?’

  Don Roberto smiled. I’d started him on safe territory. ‘The day the expropriation was announced,’ he said, ‘was March 19, 1938. If you went to our union building, you may have seen the bust of our esteemed President, Lázaro Cárdenas. He is the grandfather of this city. Before his great gesture, there was a lot of abuse of the worker. Unions were forced to hold their meetings in silence, in secret, and, when the American companies found them, they would be beaten, kidnapped, tortured, killed. That very brutality –’ he raised a finger ‘– is the very reason why our president decided to nationalise our great country’s petroleum assets, and make them the property of all Mexicans.’

  I wrote nothing down. I’d heard these lines before, read them before, in interviews with him going back years. ‘So the city owes you a favour.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous.’ Don Roberto relaxed in his chair, on autopilot. ‘After 1938, the oil belonged to Mexico, and, some of it, to our company. The war brought wealth to us.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘We sold to America and Japan, to Russia and Germany, to France and Italy. And, afterwards, we had a workers’ paradise made by and for Mexicans.’ He spread his hands. ‘Oil flows in our veins. Poza Rica is the union, and the union is Poza Rica.’

  ‘So what about the decline of the city?’ I flipped a page of my notebook. ‘You know, people talk a lot about crime rates, the oil thefts, displaced Totonaca people.’

  His easy smile froze. ‘Oh, it’s all very sad. The decline of Poza Rica is the decline of oil itself.’ He shrugged. ‘But, as you say, new investment means a new hope.’

  ‘Are you not afraid of a return to the situation in the ’30s, though? I mean, you just mentioned abuses by foreign companies. There’s a lot of it about.’

  ‘It’s a different time.’ Now his voice was a blade. He took a curt sip from his tumbler.

  ‘No, but this workers’ paradise you talk about.’ The air in the bar turned jungle-humid against my skin. ‘I mean, it’s basically hell for other people, right? Totonaca people cleared off their land, poisoned water, poisoned air.’

  Don Roberto’s frown deepened. ‘We made reparations to those affected.’

  ‘Oh, like in San Antonio Ojital?’ I asked.

  He coughed into his tumbler. ‘What about it?’

  ‘I spoke to the mayor,’ I said. ‘You offered her a low sum for her land.’

  ‘We offered her the market value of her land.’

  ‘But how much oil did you expect to pump out? How much was that worth?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say,’ Don Robert said. ‘We had yet to explore the wells underneath her land. It could have been a lot. It could have been very little. We offered her the sum we believed to be fair.’

  ‘Twenty thousand dollars.’

  ‘Something like this, yes.’

  ‘Did you also think it was fair to send a death squad to her house?’ I asked.

  His eyes narrowed and he leaned on the table. ‘Excuse me?’

  I swiped my iPad unlocked and tapped open Abel Carranza’s mugshot.

  His reply was instant. ‘I have no knowledge of this man.’

  ‘What about these two?’ From my bag I slid the printout of Julián Gallardo’s peeled face onto the table. ‘You had him killed.’ On my iPad I opened the photo Gallardo’s mother had sent of her dead husband. ‘And you tried to disappear his father.’

  Zúñiga fingered his tie, his face still. ‘I have no knowledge of these events.’

  ‘OK.’ I flipped through the pages, as far as my interview with Leo. ‘A former employee alleges that bodies were disposed of in your company’s fracking wells.’

  He scoffed. ‘That’s an issue for his line manager.’

  The bodyguard by the toilet uncrossed his hands and took a step forwards.

  I took the worn copy of Proceso from my bag and flung it to the table. The glass of tequila Zúñiga had poured for me tinkled to the ground, leaving a stain across Carlos’ face.

  Carlos stared up at the man who’d had him murdered.

  ‘Recognise him?’

  Zúñiga didn’t say anything.

  I tapped the magazine cover. ‘He was mine.’ I shoved the magazine at him and said, ‘“We want the world to know”.’

  Zúñiga uttered a disgusted sound as the magazine hit him in the paunch, then he stood up from the table.

  ‘With the greatest respect,’ he said, ‘I must ask you to leave.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said, then pocketed the notebook and the voice recorder, folded the copy of Proceso up like a fly-swatter, and made for the door, Roberto Zúñiga’s eyes lasering into my back, Carlos’ face snug against my chest.

  ‘Safe driving.’ He emptied his tumbler down his throat.

  Be out by nine, El Puccini had told me.

  It was eight fifty-eight by the grandfather clock in the restaurant lobby.

  The man and the car guarding the door had gone when I stepped outside. The sudden draught of a passing vehicle slammed me against the jeep before I could open the driver door. The car that had passed was a black Lexus SUV.

  Through my open window I reached for the glove compartment. The gun was cold and light in my hand. I hunkered down, flat against the car door, and watched the SUV’s reverse lights wink on four blocks away. Then it screeched in a wild circle and righted itself, and its high beams were a white dazzle.

  The engine roared and the SUV leapt forward, three blocks away.

  Osito’s words in my head: ‘Laser-sight switch is on top of the stock.’

  Two blocks.

  I flicked the switch and took a deep breath.

  One.

  A pheasant rising from a hedge in Ireland, a rabbit springing across a field, and my finger pulling back the trigger of an air-rifle in the field behind my house.

  The boom of that SUV’s blown-out tyre swallowed the crack of my handgun, and his brakes squalled, dragging rubber over the tarmac, but it didn’t work: glass shattered, and the SUV crumped to a halt against the wall of the hipster mezcaleria, making the kids out front shriek, while the horn blared under the pressure of the unconscious driver’s forehead.

  Don Roberto stood alone at the window of the restaurant, his mouth open, his eyes on the wreck. I didn’t look at him, and just climbed into the car.

  The kids were already running to help the guy in the car, phones at their
ears.

  ‘Fucking three-point turns,’ I said, reversing backwards and swinging onto the roundabout. When my foot hit the accelerator, a coffee cup bounced over my feet.

  Don Roberto’s face in the rear-view mirror shrank and was gone. I accelerated, and the sudden speed was a heel pressed against my stomach. Passing the Parque Delta I texted Maya and told her to get to Dominic’s, the headrest wet against my skin.

  First bin I saw, I pulled up, dropped the gun in a coffee cup and dumped them both.

  A few blocks from Dominic’s house, I dropped the two Café Garat bags of bullets to the curb, pulled off my licence plates, and slid them into a discarded pizza box that lay propped against a bin, then pulled the key from the ring and left it in the ignition with the door unlocked, then walked to Dominic’s with my bag on my back and a cigarette wagging between my lips.

  24

  Dominic answered the door looking rumpled and tired.

  ‘Weren’t you in Uruguay?’ he said. He ushered me through to a sitting room wallpapered in frames from Tintin. The long table was a sea of business cards and printouts. He shoved a space for me. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Car tried to run me down,’ I said.

  ‘Did they follow you?’

  ‘Don’t think so. The guy crashed. Knocked himself out.’

  ‘Let me get you some water,’ Dominic said. ‘I’ll get the guard downstairs to call a patrol car.’ He returned to the table. ‘This is good timing, sort of. I was going through last night’s draft. Have you got anything else? This thing about cartel death squads doesn’t quite stand up.’ He paused. ‘You’re smiling.’

  And then I took out my notebook and my voice recorder, and by the time I had finished explaining Dominic sat slumped forward with his hands on his temples.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, and turned his laptop around and pushed it towards me. A drift of business cards and pages rustled to the ground. ‘Fucking fuck. You write this up. We need this on the wires by the morning.’ He stood up. ‘And I need a drink. Want anything?’

  The feathery twitch in my eye was back. ‘You couldn’t do us a coffee?’

  The door buzzed.

  ‘That’s Maya. Uh. I was just. You know. Trying to be safe, or whatever.’

  ‘What, you want a posse or something?’ He opened the door.

  ‘Before you ask,’ she said to me, ‘I didn’t bring the cat.’

  ‘She has a name, you know.’

  ‘What’s this all about?’ said Maya. ‘The shooting in Narvarte?’

  ‘What?’ said Dominic.

  My spine froze.

  Interview him.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Maya. ‘Your Ajenjo man got himself waxed.’

  And be out of there by nine.

  ‘Twitter says it was three guys in a Veracruz State Police car,’ Maya said, looking at her phone. ‘Shot up a restaurant in Narvarte, right on the roundabout.’

  ‘Only one victim, though,’ Dominic said, reading over her shoulder. ‘Roberto Zúñiga. CEO of Ajenjo. One bodyguard had a concussion after crashing his jeep, another took a bullet to the shoulder.’

  ‘Look at all these bullet casings in the photo,’ Maya said. ‘Lead-free.’

  ‘Think we all need a coffee,’ Dominic said.

  ‘Beer, if you have it.’ She sat down on the couch. ‘So, when did you get back?’

  My fingers clittered on the keys. ‘Hard to say.’

  ‘He’s got to do a story,’ Dominic said. ‘We’re both his boss tonight.’

  ‘Well, he’s been an abusive employee,’ Maya said. ‘He tell you about the cat?’

  ‘He’s told me everything else,’ Dominic said from the kitchen.

  ‘Dumped her on me.’ She pointed at me. ‘The second you’re done with that article, I’m throwing you off Dominic’s balcony.’

  Dominic slid the coffee in at my elbow and handed me a pair of headphones. ‘You might need these. I have a six-pack in the fridge.’

  Maya and Dominic kept me going with hits from the coffeemaker before the six-pack they’d gotten through left them dozing. By the time the early-morning gas-man yawped his way down the block, the story was done.

  ‘Hey, so,’ I said. ‘Uh. I think we’re done.’

  Dominic fixed his glasses. ‘Oh. Terrific. Let me just …’ I turned the laptop towards him. His eyes scanned the document and I went to lean on the balcony beside Maya, who was asleep under a blanket in one of the Acapulco chairs Dominic kept there.

  The skyscrapers on Reforma glowed brass in the dawn. The cigarette I smoked made me shiver all over. Through the morning haze the apartments looked like little caves of dark wood and mellow light.

  ‘This is sterling work,’ Dominic said from behind me, holding a printout with no red ink on it. ‘We may need a follow-up.’

  ‘It’s all here.’ I clamped the cigarette in my teeth and handed him the USB.

  Dominic frowned. ‘So what you’re saying is you won’t be available by email.’

  ‘Technically, yes. But – well, you know.’

  Dominic shrugged. ‘I suppose you never did finish that holiday.’

  ‘Where you headed?’ said Maya, yawning on the chair.

  Carlos, if you get this, your mother scares me more than El Puccini, Mangueras, El Prieto, and all those boys put together.

  ‘Guatemala,’ I said. ‘Antigua.’

  ‘Nice place to relax,’ said Dominic. ‘Go see the churches.’

  ‘Which church?’ said Maya. ‘There’s three hundred of them.’

  ‘One of the old ones,’ he said.

  ‘Again: three hundred of them.’

  ‘I’m not pressed for time.’ I turned the tape recorder over in my pocket.

  Dominic’s BlackBerry tinged.

  ‘That’s the Baron.’ He looked at the screen. ‘Your story’s going out in twenty minutes.’ He pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. ‘More coffees, I think.’

  ‘I’ll make these,’ I said.

  ‘Would you?’ Dominic sat down slowly on the couch.

  Maya followed me to the kitchen. ‘So, Guatemala, then.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I rinsed out the moka and tamped in coffee-grounds. ‘Carlos’ mother.’

  ‘Give her my best.’

  ‘Oh, I will. She likes you.’ I put the moka on the stove and lit the flame.

  ‘Likes you, too. At the drinks after the funeral, she wished you’d been there.’

  ‘To cut my head off, is it?’

  Maya swatted my shoulder. ‘Don’t be like that.’ She huffed out a sigh. ‘Go see her, yeah? See what happens.’ With a last squeeze of my shoulder she went back to the sitting room.

  The moka whistled on the stove and I switched off the gas, but I couldn’t even pour the coffee out, I was crying so hard there at the sink.

  25

  There’s a flight every couple of hours from Mexico City to Guatemala, and so four hours after leaving Dominic’s I was sitting on the roof-rack of a converted US school bus painted turquoise and red, talking shite and smoking fags with the baggage guys, and looking over Guatemala City from the hilly forest road to Antigua.

  Behind me cheeped a bunch of baby chicks in cardboard boxes. The bus suspension was loose as old bedsprings, so that cheeping got pretty wild every time we hit a bend – and that was pretty often. The draught buffeted my face and killed every thought in my head but the wind on my skin, the dappled light through the trees, the smell of petrol and warm tarmac and humid vegetable life beyond the verge.

  We arrived at the market by late afternoon, where I tipped the baggage guys and walked off through the yellow late-afternoon glare, dusting roadside grit from my fringe and carrying my whole life in a single bag.

  At the hotel, I got online to text Maya and say I’d arrived OK – which was when all the buzzing started – congratulatory texts, shares, retweets, all of that.

  ‘Great tribute to Carlos,’ wrote Sadiq.

  I clicked open the link Dominic had sent and scrolled through th
e article – the story me and Francisco had finished, the story that had finished Carlos, the story that everyone was talking about, the story with his name and Francisco’s name and my name at the top.

  ‘The Mexican business world is in a state of shock this morning after Roberto Zúñiga, 61 – the CEO of fast-growing oil company Ajenjo and a fixture of business pages talking up Mexico’s “oil miracle” – was gunned down at a restaurant in the middle-class neighbourhood of Narvarte.

  ‘A police spokesperson refused to speculate on the motive behind the crime, but eyewitnesses report that gunfire from a Veracruz State patrol car strafed the restaurant where Mr Zúñiga was drinking alone with two bodyguards – both of whom escaped with injuries that are not believed to be life-threatening.

  ‘“We’re devastated,” said a representative of Ajenjo who declined to be named. “Roberto Zúñiga did more to transform his home city of Poza Rica than anybody.”

  ‘Ajenjo’s US-based contractors refused to comment on the incident, stating that “while tragic, the event is an internal matter, and our thoughts are with Zúñiga’s family and his outstanding legacy for the company.”’

  My phone buzzed again. Kelleigh: ‘Kept that one under your hat!’

  ‘But questions linger over the nature of that same legacy for Mexico’s crumbling oil capital, Poza Rica.

  ‘An investigation conducted out by this outlet has uncovered a web of cartel muscle, union corruption, and intimidation stretching from Zúñiga’s boardrooms to the high-profile disappearance of environmental activist Julián Gallardo, the murder of photojournalist Carlos Arana, and the assassination of two other Ajenjo employees, all of whom tried to blow the whistle on the company’s attempt to crush protests against the pollution choking the region’s air and waterways.’

  Another buzz: Pau from CNN. ‘How did you do all that?’

  ‘A local cartel figure, veteran of El Salvador’s civil war, Evelio Martínez – who goes by the nom de guerre “El Puccini” – went on the record about a verbal pact between his faction of the notorious Zetas cartel and Mr Zúñiga himself, established in 2011.

  ‘“You won’t find a paper trail on my relationship with Ajenjo,” Martínez said. “The relationship was verbal. We held one meeting, in April 2011, and his instruction was clear: to break local resistance to their plans for the region.”