“Oh, I don’t know,” Ellen said, confused by the question. “I was only like, thirteen.”
“Do you have a photo?”
“Not on me,” she said, laughing. She resumed her dinner, which featured some sort of meat—she couldn’t tell which—in green sauce. It was so delicious, both spicy and just a bit sweet, that she didn’t even consider using her boost to tinker with the taste.
“You must have a photo on your chip,” Don Paquito said.
She finished chewing the food in her mouth and swallowed it before saying, “Yes, I suppose I do.”
“Send it to me.”
She wondered if he was a sexual deviant. People like that back home had sites to go to. But maybe over here, they needed physical photos, or even real people. “I can’t send you a photo from my boost,” she said.
“Yes you can.” He told her that he had a laptop computer with an e-mail account. “So do the reporters,” he added. “That’s how they do a lot of their reporting. By e-mail.”
“And you have a network?”
“Oh yes.”
“But I can’t send anything over here. There’s no boost network.”
“There is,” he said. “Right here.” He explained that the Chinese built wireless local area networks, or LANs, for the boosts when they first came out, in the ’40s. The idea was to let the early adapters trade messages with their uncapped friends and colleagues, who were still on the Internet. “I got one of them a few years ago,” Don Paquito says. “Never got a chance to use it, until now.”
“I’m not getting anything, though,” Ellen said. She looked up her friends in Washington, and then Simon. All the connections were dead.
“No, you’ll only get what’s on this LAN,” Don Paquito said. “All you’ll see is my computer, once I turn it on. And the newsroom.”
He went on to explain how to send him e-mails. It involved digging into the archives of her boost and unearthing an old e-mail. “Just search for @hotmail.com or @gmail.com,” he said.
Ellen did, and hundreds of historical e-mails popped up. Most of them were from the ’20s and teens. The earliest one, from May 1995, caught her eye. It was from Bill Gates, the chairman of a company called Microsoft Corporation. It had to do with jumping on “the Internet Tidal Wave.”
“Now what?” she asked.
Don Paquito told her to erase the message from the e-mail, and to cut and paste the photo from her boost into the message space, then to place PacoCorazon@Juárez.mx into the address line, and send. Ellen was convinced it wouldn’t work. Instead of picking out an image of herself, she browsed a collection of old movie photos and selected one of an actress named Julia Roberts. She attached it to the Bill Gates e-mail, added the address, and sent it.
Don Paquito, visibly excited, hurried out of the dining room to check his computer. “Not yet!” he shouted every minute or two, while Ellen finished her dinner. Finally he returned, looking crestfallen. He asked her what year her e-mail came from.
“1995,” she said.
“Oh that’s why! It’s too old,” he said. “Find a newer e-mail, preferably from the ’40s.” It was back then that they added an e-mail “bridge” into the boost.
Ellen obediently harvested an e-mail from 2042. It was from the White House, and it concerned the news of the Chinese boosts. She pasted in the image of Julia Roberts, addressed it, and sent again, confident that it would never reach Don Paquito’s Mac.
But two minutes later he returned with a printed photograph. He waved it back and forth to dry the ink, and then laid it down on the table. Julia Roberts looked up from the paper, her broad toothy smile, her nose tilted ever so slightly to the left, her shiny almond eyes. “You look older than thirteen,” Don Paquito said, shaking his head. He leaned down and inspected Julia Roberts’s face for several seconds, and then lifted his eyes to Ellen, studying her perfect Artemis eyes, her straight nose, the closed parentheses of her mouth, which were turned, for the moment, into a slight frown. “Yes,” he said finally. “I can see why you had the procedure done.”
Ellen felt offended. “Why?” she asked.
“You were a bit…” He struggled for the right word. “Do you say ‘horsey’?”
She washes, dresses in yesterday’s clothes, and ventures out of the bedroom. The same people are back in the newsroom, typing again on their machines. She wonders if she could send them e-mails, or receive messages from them. A door opens on the far side of the room. A young boy, probably only twelve or thirteen, hurries past the computers. He’s saying something in Spanish. Ellen can’t hear enough of it to replay it for her translation app. But it interests the people in the newsroom, and almost all of them are now looking at her.
“What is it?” Ellen asks.
The workers look back and forth at each other, as if to nominate a spokesperson. But no one speaks. The boy rushes to Don Paquito’s office and pounds on the door. When the door opens, Ellen catches a single phrase—Han secuestrado a los americanos—and runs it through her translator. A moment later a tinny voice inside her head says, “They’ve kidnapped the Americans.”
Twenty-two
3/8/72 10:49 a.m. Juárez Standard Time
From the moment the two shorter militia members burst into the garage, Ralf can tell something has changed. They’re jumpy and excited. They shout to each other. They laugh hysterically. Their balance seems off. The one with the glasses comes over to Ralf, still bound to his stool, and squeezes his cheek between his thumb and forefinger. It hurts. Still squeezing, he shouts something, and Ralf feels bits of spit on his face. The young man leans over until his eyes, on the other side of the thick glasses, are only an inch or two from Ralf’s. Ralf can smell onions on his breath. He braces himself, wondering if the guy is going to kiss him. Then the man laughs again, releases him, and says, “¡Cabezudo!”
Simon tries to tell them that he’s the cabezudo, not Ralf. But the kidnappers are not in a listening mood. They continue yelling. Then one of them leaves with the tall one, and the truck roars away.
Silence returns. They’re alone with the young man with the glasses, who now appears to regard them with an air of sadness. He sits at a makeshift desk in the corner, a board supported by two steel trash barrels. He picks up a pen, writes something on a piece of paper, and then slams it to the desk, as if the words he wrote offend him. He stands up and starts to sing hideously out of tune:
“Acuerdate de Acapulco, de aquella noche, Maria Bonita, Maria del alma…”
“He’s totally amped up on something,” Simon whispers. Ralf nods.
When the man stops singing, Simon asks him his name. At first he refuses to answer. Then he shouts, “¡Comandante Zeta!”
The garage is silent again. Ralf hears heavy congested breathing. “You stuffed up?” he whispers.
“¡Cállense!” Comandante Zeta hisses. He walks over to Ralf and runs his finger along the red line of Ralf’s wound. “¿De verdad te arrancaron la máquina?” he asks.
Simon answers for Ralf, saying that yes, they pulled out Ralf’s chip. Ralf remembers that he still carries the blue Chinese snuff bottle with his chip in his front pocket. He worries that this drug-addled Comandante Zeta will steal it from him.
Zeta goes back to the desk and returns with a long silvery blade, an old letter opener. He waves it in front of Ralf’s eyes. The blade has rust on it, Ralf sees, and the edges are dull. Zeta is smiling. “Vamos a echar un vistazo, ahi dentro,” he says, telling them that he plans to look inside Ralf’s wound. He wipes the blade on his pants. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cigarette lighter. He runs the flame up and down the blade.
Ralf hears the congested breathing again, and looks over at his brother. Simon’s eyes are bugged out, and Ralf can see that he’s working his hands on the knotted bandannas, trying to free himself. He’s not making any progress that Ralf can see.
Zeta brings the blade close to Ralf’s head. He giggles. Ralf can feel the heat on the blade. “Don’t do this!�
�� he shouts.
Zeta giggles again, and then is silent as he moves the blade closer to the wound. His lips are pursed. Ralf swings his head away.
“Quieto,” Zeta says under his breath.
He grabs Ralf by the hair and brings his head closer to the blade. He starts giggling again, but this is cut short by an eruption from under the table between Ralf and Simon. The table falls and jars of paint crash to the ground as a giant emerges between two men and swings a potent right fist into the startled face of Comandante Zeta. His glasses shatter and his nose makes a splintering noise as he falls backward onto the garage floor, out cold.
Oscar Espinoza, breathing loudly through his own flattened nose, smiles broadly. “I haven’t had that much fun in years,” he says to the two brothers. He bends down and unties the bandannas.
“Are you going to … arrest us?” Ralf asks.
“Over here?” Espinoza says. He laughs. “I was just doing hourly work in El Paso,” he says. “But I think that gig is over.”
The three of them hurry out into the busy street. Simon recognizes the neighborhood and guides them toward Trastos, where his friends are. As they walk, Espinoza tells them about his adventures, about eating goat at the restaurant that was destroyed by the drone, not knowing how to get back to the tunnel—with his geolocation service gone kaput—and finally finding a place to sleep under the table in the garage across the street.
When they reach Trastos, Ralf and Simon order grapefruit soda and Espinoza asks for two beers. He asks Simon how to say “goat” in Spanish.
“Cabra,” Simon says.
“Could you ask them if they have any cabra here?”
It turns out they don’t, and Espinoza ends up settling for a ham and cheese sandwich with a family-sized bag of potato chips. As he eats, he tells them about the assignments he handles for George Smedley, who works for a rich man named Vallinger.
Simon nods knowingly. “Does George Smedley spend a lot of time on sex sites?” he asks.
Startled by the question, Espinoza says, “Not with me, he doesn’t.”
“Just curious,” Simon says.
Espinoza goes on to tell them about the headaches that Vallinger’s machines can deliver, and how he almost went mad chasing them around El Paso with Smedley running shotgun.
Ralf asks him what happened to Ellen.
“The Artemis?” Espinoza asks.
Ralf nods.
“She walked across a board to Juárez,” Espinoza says. “She was scared of me. I told her I just wanted her to get away from the border, that she could even come with me, in my KIFF, to Cielo Vista Mall—which is much more her type of place than these stores in South El Paso. She’s very classy,” he explains. “There are some things you just see.”
Outside, they hear the roar of a truck. Ralf and Simon freeze, but Espinoza keeps eating. “That’s not the same one,” he says, reaching for another handful of chips. “Different engine. I wouldn’t worry about those three that had you tied up. The two that are still standing don’t want to end up like their friend.”
The truck engine turns off. A young man pokes his head into the store. He sees Simon and breaks into a broad smile. Simon waves at him and tells the others, “Don Paquito sent a truck to pick us up.” The three of them thank their innkeepers and pile onto the back of the old pickup truck. It first stops at the Juárez side of the tunnel, where Oscar Espinoza climbs down. He makes off for the tunnel, and his KIFF, while the truck turns around and heads eastward, toward downtown Juárez.
PART III
Family
Twenty-three
3/8/72 12:09 p.m. Juárez Standard Time
The driver drops Ralf and Simon a few blocks from Don Paquito’s headquarters. In the streets surrounding it, anti-drone barriers crafted from steel and cinder obstruct all but pedestrian traffic. Ralf and Simon wind their way through what feels like a war zone. But when they reach headquarters, the lobby is bustling. Women clutching purses occupy the benches and the scattered chairs. Men, looking uncomfortable, mill about in ill-fitting jackets. Small boys circulate, selling chewing gum and coconut candies. The pastry vendor stands to one side, offering discounts on bear claws and sugared palmeras.
On the way downtown, Simon tried to prepare Ralf with background. “There’s some stuff I haven’t told you,” he said as the truck bumped along dirt roads.
“Well, duh,” Ralf grumbled. “You might start with who the hell is Don Paquito?”
“I told you. He’s in the information business.”
“And you’re an informer?”
Simon laughed. “No, no. I don’t know that much.”
“But you work for him, right?”
“Sort of.”
“In drugs?”
“How many times do I have to tell you that there’s no more export business for drugs? That’s just American propaganda.”
Ralf glowered at Simon and then turned away and stared out the truck window. Every time Simon mentioned propaganda, Ralf felt that his brother was implicating the boost and, by association, him. It angered him. What did Simon expect the United States to do? Remain wild? Revert to dirt roads like Juárez, where kids, from what he was seeing, spent their days playing in mud puddles? The brothers didn’t exchange another word until the truck turned left off Avenida 16 de Septiembre and dropped them off.
As they make their way through the waiting room, Simon grabs Ralf’s arm and whisks him past the pastry vendor. “I’ve got something to show you,” he says. He pushes open a door and leads Ralf into the newsroom. “Just like I told you,” he says. “The information business.”
About half of the people in the room look up from their computers. A few of them recognize Simon and wave. One of them yells, “¡Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiimón!”
On the far side of the newsroom is a hall with a skylight, potted palm trees, and tables set up like an outdoor café. Ralf sees Ellen walking his way past the tables. She’s the loveliest sight he’s seen in weeks. His heart skips and he takes two running steps toward her and wraps her in his arms. He feels his chest heaving and his cheeks are wet. He buries his head into her hair, to hide it from his brother and the people at the computers.
“You missed me,” Ellen whispers.
He grunts that he did, but feels embarrassed that his emotions are on such vivid display. He wonders if it has something to do with being wild.
He pulls her back, studies her face, and kisses her on the mouth.
Simon, who has been standing next to Ralf, touches his brother’s shoulder and points to a man standing behind Ellen. Brushing Ellen’s hair from his eyes, Ralf looks up. The man is shorter than he is and trim for his age. He seems to be standing at a slight angle.
Simon starts to make the introduction. As Ralf steps back from Ellen, he looks at Simon and the man, who he assumes is Don Paquito. They’re both smiling at him. Still self-conscious about his tears, he looks from one to the other, and back again. It’s the same smile, the same broad cheeks, the same eyes.
“Oh my God,” he says.
Ellen, standing next to him, is seeing the same thing. But for her, the show is in triplicate, a father and his two sons. She stands speechless.
Ralf, at a loss for words, finally says: “You didn’t die in Paraguay.”
Don Paquito, once known as Francisco, steps forward, favoring his left leg, and tries to embrace the son he never met. Ralf, still stunned, stands tall and motionless as the shorter man awkwardly wraps his arms around him and whispers something Ralf doesn’t understand in Spanish. Then he releases him.
Ralf turns away from his father. He’s confused, and now even more embarrassed. He doesn’t know what to call the man, or whether he speaks English. Speaking to no one in particular, he asks, “Does Mother know he’s alive?”
3/8/72 12:33 p.m. Juárez Standard Time
Minutes later, sitting at one of the café tables with Simon, Ralf repeats the same question. No, Simon says, their mother does not know that the father of her
children is alive, much less that he is Don Paquito, the legendary power broker and reputed drug lord of Ciudad Juárez.
“That makes me almost ill,” Ralf says.
“He wanted to protect her,” Simon explains. “And you.”
Ralf ignores the point. “What do you call him?” he asks. “When I first heard the name, I thought ‘Don Paquito’ was a bit ridiculous. But now that I know he’s my father—at least biologically—it sounds almost obscene.”
“I call him ‘Papá,’” Simon says, pronouncing it in Spanish.
“Well, I won’t do that.”
“How about Paco?”
“Where’s that come from?”
“It’s short for Francisco. I think it comes from Saint Francis of Assisi. They called him Pater Comunitas, or father of the community. That turned into Paco.”
“Maybe I’ll just call him Don,” Ralf says, getting up and walking away from Simon.
Spotting Ellen walking through the newsroom, he hurries to catch up to her. “You might be the only one who hasn’t been lying to me, one way or another, for my whole life,” he says.
She smiles and touches him on the cheek. “Feeling a little sorry for yourself?” she asks. When he nods vaguely, she guides him toward her bedroom. A maid, who is fluffing the pillows on the bed, leaves as soon the two step in, saying, “Con permiso.”
Ralf strips off his clothes, walks into the bathroom, and takes a shower. When he comes out, he finds Ellen lying on the bed, naked. He lies down next to her and softly traces with his finger the outline of her face. As he begins to kiss her cheek and eyes and her neck, she tells him how Don Paquito went to such great trouble to see a photo of her as a child. “I just figured out why,” she says.
“Why?” he asks, pulling back from her.
“He wanted to see the genes that might—” She pauses for a second, searching for the right word.
“He was looking at you as the mother of his future grandchildren,” Ralf says.
The Boost Page 14