Miguel's Gift

by Bruce Kading

  Hayden darted between the squat, shingled garages and down a narrow cement walkway. Hearing footsteps, he circled the garage until he again faced the alley and a tall, crosshatched metal fence—the man climbing it frantically.

  “Stop right there,” Hayden called out in Spanish. “Federal agent.”

  The man had reached the top rung of the fence when Hayden grabbed his belt from behind and pulled hard, so that the man lost his grip and tumbled to the cement, sprawled out helplessly at Hayden’s feet. For a moment they stared at each other, both wheezing from the run. As the man slowly raised himself, Hayden, feeling a surge of anger, thrust his elbow into the man’s chin, a jarring blow that knocked him on his back.

  Hayden, suddenly dizzy and weak, dropped to the ground, his hands and knees on the cement. Even after thousands of arrests, many of them rough, he’d never struck a person except in legitimate self-defense, and he felt a twist of shame.

  He was woozy and not sure how long he’d been on his knees when he realized he was being helped to his feet by the dark-skinned man he’d struck. There was a cut and a bit of blood on the man’s chin.

  “I sorry, sir,” said the man calmly. “Is foolish to run. You are la migra?”

  Hayden needed a moment to steady himself before answering. “Yeah, Immigration,” he said weakly and nodded at the man’s chin. “Sorry about that.”

  “Is not bad.”

  “You speak good English. You’re Chavez?”

  “Yes, Miguel Chavez,” he said, holding out his hand to Hayden.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he shook Miguel’s hand. “Good to meet you,” he said. It was an odd thing to say to a person he had just assaulted and arrested, but Hayden knew the man could have escaped—could easily have scrambled away instead of helping him.

  At that moment Tom Kane appeared breathlessly around the corner of the garage to find Chavez and Hayden facing each other.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” said Kane, his face flushed. Not waiting for an answer, he grabbed Miguel’s arm and pushed him against the side of the garage.

  “It’s OK,” said Hayden. “He’s all right.”

  “You pat him down yet?”

  Chavez, sensing Hayden’s disorientation and Kane’s impatience, placed his hands up against the garage.

  “Is he our guy?” asked Kane, as he checked Miguel’s pockets.

  “Yeah . . . Miguel Chavez.”

  Kane handed Miguel’s wallet to Hayden and was about to handcuff him behind his back.

  “We don’t need to cuff him, Tom,” said Hayden, wiping sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief.

  “He already tried to escape,” Kane said. “Now you’re both covered with fucking berry stains, you’re all scratched up, he’s got a bloody face, and you don’t want to cuff him?”

  “That’s right,” said Hayden firmly. “We won’t need the cuffs.”

  Miguel stepped between the two agents with his hands outstretched. “Is OK,” he said to Hayden.

  “No, Miguel,” said Hayden, and then to Kane, “We don’t need them.”

  Kane’s expression eased, and he looked at Chavez cautiously. “Well, if we aren’t going to cuff him, you’ll have to sit with him in back.

  “OK,” said Hayden, patting Kane on the back. “What happened to you, anyway?”

  “Damn garbage truck was blocking the alley.”

  Hayden peered absently out the window as they drove to the office. He was replaying the incident in his mind, the elbow driving forward, Chavez falling back on the cement, then helping him up. How had it come to this? For most of his life, Nick had thought of violence, except to protect yourself or another person, as cowardly. His father had taught him that.

  “Nick, you OK?” Kane was looking at him through the rearview mirror.

  Hayden shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “I’m fine.”

  “You gonna check his documents?”

  Hayden wiped his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. He opened Miguel’s wallet and pulled the contents from beneath a buttoned leather flap. There were frayed business cards and a driver’s license issued nearly two years earlier with an address on Francis Street. Then the photos—a girl, perhaps three years old, in a pink dress; a boy with a baseball glove; a woman with a humble smile and black hair swept behind her ears; then the family together, the children laughing as if the photographer had made a funny face. Nick had rifled through countless wallets like this but had never paused to look at personal photos.

  Finally he came to the counterfeit permanent resident card—the quality of the printing quite good, but not good enough to fool an agent. It looked identical to any number of counterfeits he had come across in recent months. The social security card was also an obvious phony.

  Kane had been looking curiously at Hayden, who was moving at half speed, and adjusted the mirror to view Chavez, who was sitting impassively. Blood was now trickling down his swollen jaw.

  “How’d he cut his chin?” asked Kane.

  Before Hayden could speak, Chavez said, “I cut on fence.”

  “It looks like more than a cut,” said Kane. “Your whole chin is starting to swell up.”

  Chavez shrugged and looked out the window. Hayden offered his handkerchief. “Here, Miguel, your chin is bleeding.”

  Nick then turned to Kane: “The cards look the same as the ones we’ve been finding. They’re all coming from the same printer.”

  * * *

  Hayden leaned over the sink, splashed cold water on his face, and patted himself dry, but the nausea grew more intense. He staggered into an open stall and threw up violently into the bowl. Perspiration rose in a hot wave from his forehead as he gripped the sides of the stall. He was pulling himself together at the sink when Tom Kane entered the washroom.

  “Jesus, it smells like puke in here,” said Kane.

  Hayden was wiping his hands with a paper towel and said nothing.

  “What the hell went on back there between you and the tonk?” demanded Kane.

  “He just tried to get away,” said Hayden.

  “Did he come at you?”

  Hayden looked wearily at Kane through the mirror.

  Kane persisted: “Come on—I need to know what to expect from this guy, especially if he’s going to work for us.”

  “He didn’t do anything. He’s fine.” Nick knew Kane wouldn’t understand. Or, worse, he would understand and suspect that Hayden was going soft.

  “Well, whatever happened, I’m gonna keep an eye on this guy,” said Kane.

  * * *

  Miguel Chavez sat in a chair beneath the flat, fluorescent light and wondered whether it had all been worth it. He thought back to the trip north, finding work, arranging for his family to join him, the enormous effort of it. Now it was over. Still, he had earned more money in the past two years than he would have earned in ten years in Mexico. He had even gotten used to the precarious nature of his life. His wife and children would be terribly disappointed, of course, as they were now comfortable here. He knew of others who had lived here for years without papers and never had an encounter with INS. Eventually they were able to legalize their status. The quickest and most certain avenue was to fake a marriage to a US citizen, but he could not do that. It was one thing to cross the border without papers, quite another to enter a dishonest scheme like that.

  He felt a subtle pounding in his chin and ran his fingers over the cut. If he were in Mexico and had run from the police, he would likely have been severely beaten. This was nothing.

  Miguel hesitated briefly before answering the agents’ questions about the documents, but there was no reason to protect Salvador Rico. He told them how he had met and bought documents from Rico at El Palacio, the rumors about the demise of Marcos Ortega, and how Rico had taken control of the counterfeit document trade. Though Rico told people he’d been born in Puerto Rico, there was talk that he was really from Panama. Hayden and Kane listened intently until Miguel had told them everyt
hing he knew or had heard about Rico.

  “You may be able to help us and yourself at the same time, Miguel,” said Hayden.

  “How?”

  “If you’re willing to do undercover work for us, we can let you stay here and keep your job at Poindexter,” said Hayden. “You won’t have to go back to Mexico. It could end up being permanent.”

  “What you want me to do?”

  “You would have to meet with Rico and wear a wire,” said Hayden, who reached to the far side of his desk and picked up a wire with a tiny microphone attached to its end. He held it up for Miguel to see. “You’d be buying a lot of documents this time.”

  Miguel nodded. “And my family?”

  “They could stay. But you’d have to be willing to testify later, if the case against Rico goes to trial. You need to understand that,” said Hayden, who noticed Kane frowning. The idea of testifying in open court wasn’t normally thrown at a potential informant right away. Many were scared away, so it wasn’t mentioned until later, if at all.

  “We stay and get the papers if I do this?” Miguel asked.

  “We could carry you as an informant as long as we want,” said Hayden, “but you’d have to be productive. You know, help us make criminal cases. There’s a possibility of getting permanent papers if you’re here long enough.”

  Miguel stared at the floor, mulling it over for several moments, and then looked at Hayden. “Is dangerous, no?” he asked.

  “We’ll be there along the way,” said Kane. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “There is danger, of course,” said Hayden. “We have to assume Rico and his buddies will be armed and dangerous. But we’ll provide protection. If you come through, we’ll take care of you. You can trust us to do that. In a worst-case scenario, we may have to move you to a different part of the country, but we’ll protect you.”

  Miguel wasn’t so sure about the other agent, but there was something about this man that he trusted, despite their altercation. “Yes, I do this. I think the Lord wish it for my family . . . and for him also.”

  “For who?” asked Kane.

  “This man . . . Salvador Rico.”

  11

  Kane felt like the captain of a small submarine. On his knees in the back of the van, he gripped the handles of the periscope and scanned the street in front of El Palacio. A series of lenses inside the periscope column delivered an image from a mirror on the van’s roof that could be adjusted by pushing the handles left or right. The mirror was concealed by a metal cap that looked like an air vent. Parked in front of a small grocery store, the van was an inconspicuous part of the scenery along Sheridan Road.

  Wearing jeans and a sweat-soaked T-shirt, Kane muttered profanities at Floyd Baker, the cerebral little technician responsible for outfitting the only legitimate surveillance van in the Chicago INS fleet. Thanks to Baker there was no cooling system in the rear of the van, aside from a small fan, and almost no ventilation. This was fine during the cooler months, but now, the second week of an unusually hot and humid September, it was like a furnace. To provide cover for the van, Baker, with unintentional irony, had attached removable magnetic signs that read, FLOYD’S HEATING & AIR CONDITIONING SERVICE.

  A week of surveillance had revealed a pattern of sorts. Rico would arrive at El Palacio in midmorning, parking his black Volvo directly in front. At about eleven o’clock, a colorful assortment of young men would begin parading through the bar. Unlike regular customers who would come for drinks or Chacon’s greasy tamales, they would remain for only five or ten minutes, just long enough to conduct business with Rico and his subordinates. Wearing gym shoes and T-shirts, some carried backpacks or thin briefcases. Though they weren’t from the neighborhood, the area surrounding the bar was such a revolving farrago of pedestrians and vehicles that their comings and goings went largely unnoticed by the casual observer.

  Through license plate checks and photos, Hayden and Kane had identified two men as lieutenants in the Rico organization. Rosario Nieto was a large, muscle-bound Bolivian, whose arms and neck were covered with tattoos. INS records showed that he’d been deported twice. The other, Felix Pinal, was a thin, studious-looking man who had no known prior deportations but was presumed to be illegal. Both of them spent a good deal of time at El Palacio and could often be seen conversing with street vendors in front of the bar. Salvador Rico usually remained inside, hidden from view.

  On alternate days one of the agents, in the suffocating heat of the van, would snap photographs through a camera with a powerful telephoto lens. The other agent would conduct surveillance from a separate vehicle, parked close enough to pick up a loose tail on Rico’s business associates.

  On this day Nick had followed one of Rico’s briefcase-wielding associates to Twenty-Sixth Street and sat in his Firebird watching the young man and others ply their trade. Cars pulled up, and items were exchanged and passed to couriers, who would deliver the orders to pads where the cards were manufactured. The customers would return in a couple of hours to pick up their orders. The whole operation churned along briskly, unimpeded by authorities and ignored by almost everybody, aside from business owners, who sometimes angrily chased vendors from one sidewalk location to another.

  As he watched, a question began to prey on Nick’s mind: Who was Salvador Rico? They had done criminal checks using the name and date of birth on Rico’s driver’s license and come up empty. But it made no sense. A confident man in his midthirties, firmly in command of a large criminal enterprise, doesn’t appear out of nowhere. Hayden’s gut told him that Rico had a history, probably a bad history, and wouldn’t hesitate to blow to smithereens anybody who would threaten his little empire—precisely what they were asking Miguel Chavez to do.

  * * *

  As Nick climbed the staircase to Miguel’s flat, the scent of old wood gave way to the savory aroma of fried sausage and onions. A makeshift coat rack was fastened near the door—a length of plywood with several nails sticking out. A crumpled Cubs baseball cap hung on one of the nails. He rapped on the door and could hear the shuffle of feet and the muffled ebb and flow of conversation.

  When the door opened, Miguel and his family were standing in a row, like soldiers awaiting inspection.

  “Mr. Hayden,” said Miguel, who was wearing a stiff white shirt with ironed creases at the shoulders. “Is great honor to welcome you. Please come in.” Miguel quickly introduced his family. Paco stood rigidly beside his father, while the tiny Maria leaned against her mother’s leg and smiled radiantly. Miguel’s wife, Carmen, appeared shy and uncertain.

  Hayden was touched by their innocence and sincerity. “Thanks for inviting me, Miguel,” he said, reaching out to shake his hand.

  Nick glanced around the flat. The hardwood floors badly needed refinishing, and the old plaster walls had a few cracks and blemishes, but the overall atmosphere was clean and warm. There were handsome moldings and baseboards, which he’d noticed were common even in modest houses built in the early 1900s. The flat was furnished with old furniture they had probably found discarded or at flea markets.

  “Would you like beer or soda, Mr. Hayden?” asked Miguel.

  “What are you having?”

  “Ginger ale. I no drink anymore.”

  “Ginger ale is fine.”

  Miguel gave him a can of soda and went into the kitchen to help Carmen, while Hayden sank into a lumpy armchair in the living room. On the wall behind the sofa was a framed image of Jesus that looked as though it had been cut out of a magazine. A white plaster-of-Paris sculpture of the Virgin Mary hung next to it. A Bible with frayed edges rested on a small end table next to the chair.

  Nick became aware of Paco sitting on the sofa, watching him curiously. Hayden spoke in Spanish. “Is that your cap out in the hallway, Paco?”

  Paco smiled, showing teeth that looked exceptionally white next to his tan cheeks. He replied in English with only a slight accent. “Yes, my father got it for me. Are you a Cubs fan, Mr. Hayden?”

>   “Yeah, big Cubs fan. Your buddies down here on the South Side must give you grief about that—not being a White Sox fan.”

  “What is ‘grief’?”

  “You know, they must razz you about being a Cubs fan.”

  “‘Razz’? I don’t know that word either.”

  Hayden silently cursed his ineptitude. “It’s just that . . . the Cubs aren’t too popular down here.”

  Paco smiled. “I like both teams the same.”

  “That’s a good attitude, Paco.”

  “Do you want to see my baseball cards?” Paco had already grabbed a stack of cards from a shoebox on the sofa.

  “Sure, let’s take a look.”

  Paco shuffled through the stack, stopping in the middle. “This is my favorite, Ozzie Guillén,” he said, standing and handing the card to Hayden. “He’s a great shortstop.”

  “No question about it,” said Hayden, pleased with so quickly finding common ground. “You’ve got a nice collection here.”

  Paco sifted through the deck as Hayden looked at the back of the card showing the player’s career statistics. Nick had collected hundreds of baseball cards as a boy and understood their magical quality—as though possessing a player’s card established a personal connection with him.

  From the dining room, Miguel announced that dinner was ready.

  “We can go through the rest after dinner, Paco,” said Hayden.

  The Chavez family stood, politely waiting for Hayden to take his seat. A small ceiling light cast a soft glow over the table, which was covered with a freshly ironed white tablecloth.