by Bacon Thorn
Peñas was not surprised when Navarre said, “Yuma’s in the city, at Cid Camaro’s house. She is frightened, couldn’t talk. What should we do?”
It did not take long for Peñas, Navarre, and the agents at the strategy meeting to conclude that if Yuma Haynes was a guest of Cid Camaro, then Pappe Nuños knew it, and her presence in the famous bullfighter’s house was no protection. It meant that the bloody sheriff of Chihuahua would spare no expense of money and lives to take her hostage.
“What were her exact words?” Peñas asked Navarre.
“She said, ‘I can’t talk. I don’t trust what’s happening here. Hurry! I’m at Cid’s House . . . I . . .’ Then, she was gone.”
“You know what this means, don’t you, compadre?”
Navarre nodded his head; his face hardened, his eyes flat and determined. “Yes, I know. If Nuños gets his hands on her, he plans to use her as a hostage, probably to lure me into a trap. With us both dead, unless you catch him red handed at the assassination, you’d have nothing to hold him on.”
Navarre paused, fixed an unflinching gaze on Peñas, then said, “You understand that I’ve got to go to her, don’t you? Find a way to save her if I can.”
Peñas shrugged. “Of course. But we don’t desert our friends when they’re in trouble. You’ll have some hard company.”
Quickly, his black eyes snapping like sparks lighting holes in the night, he explained that he had been a guest in Cid Camaro’s house on several occasions and knew the general layout of the old Mexican colonial. He explained that it was a three-story house in an older neighborhood not far from the Museum of the City of Mexico. And perhaps that was a fortunate location, because one of the ancient tunnels that ran beneath older parts of the city originated in the museum. Such tunnels were used as escape routes by the wealthy during the revolutionary period and other national emergencies when family treasure could be evacuated underground, safe from seizure by bandits. According to Peñas, the tunnel led directly beneath the block of houses on which Camaro’s was built.
“If I remember right,” Peñas said, “the old tunnel lies almost directly beneath Casa de Camaro.” He added quickly, “I don’t know whether or not the big earthquake of eighty-five damaged it. And we don’t have time to chase down on a Saturday the people who could give us information on the status of the old subterranean tube.”
He explained that his strategy was to send a team of armed men to surround the old mansion and demand entry. If, as he foresaw, the house was occupied by armed intruders, they would resist, and their attention would be focused on repelling the assault team of federal agents, who had strong firepower. Because the old house, rebuilt by a wealthy remote ancestor of Camaro’s, Count Pedro de Campeador y Camaro, was constructed like a fortress with massive stone pillars, high vaulted ceilings, sturdy mahogany beams, and barred windows, all these modifications together would prevent any attempt at breaking into the house, rendering attempts futile . . . short of explosives that would kill everybody inside if they were used.
But Peñas wanted to stage a deliberate confrontation that would result in a standoff to buy time for a second team of men to make a subsurface entry through the thick cement basement of the mansion. If his surmise was correct, the basement floor was probably cracked and crumbling from the slow sinking that many of the city’s buildings were undergoing. He was certain this was true, because the Museum of the City of Mexico was slowly subsiding into the ancient lakebed upon which the city had been erected. Many buildings had sunk almost a foot in depth, despite efforts to stop the descent.
He explained that he had been in charge of a team of federal agents several years earlier that had been given the task of inventorying the treasures of the museum after it was discovered that several valuable paintings were missing.
He turned his eyes on Navarre and the others and said bluntly, “It’s not much of a plan, but it might work if the old tunnel beneath Casa de Camaro has not collapsed. I don’t believe anybody has been in it since the earthquake. If it’s open and luck’s on our side, then we’ll come up through the basement of Camaro’s house. If not, at least we’ll know that we can stop anybody inside from escaping. Now, for the teams . . .”
In the next five minutes Siempre Bombito, whom Peñas chose to pick and supervise both assault teams, speedily organized the attack plan. Refugio Virrey was to head the assault group aboveground. The tall, gangly Bombito with the pockmarked complexion made three quick telephone calls to assemble agents at a rendezvous point. Then, after thanking Virrey for loading the equipment, arms, and ammunition into one of two waiting cars, he turned to Navarre and said, “Will you come with me through the old tunnel?”
Navarre looked at the steel-gray eyes and lazy smile on Bombito’s scarred face and said, “Thank you.”
He turned and caught Peñas’s approving nod as the chief of Mexican federal agents frowned, then said, “Damn it, I’d love to be with you, but I’ve got to stay here with our primary goal—discovering how and where attack dogs can be smuggled into the Plaza México without anybody finding them.” He looked directly at Navarre and said, “Hurry back.”
His silent message of confidence could not be mistaken. At the last minute before going their separate ways, Bombito and Virrey decided on an alternative strategy. They agreed to allow Bombito’s group until 6 p.m. to penetrate the house from the basement. No later than six, Virrey would surround the target without being seen and prepare his men to challenge those behind the closed doors. Of course, if anyone tried to leave before the target hour, he would be taken into custody. The deadline gave Bombito and his men one hour and fifteen minutes to enter the house by the subterranean route, capture or kill the invaders, and signal Virrey of their victory. It was an impossible time limit—just the kind of challenge men of action loved to beat.
As Navarre slipped into the back seat of the limousine driven by Bombito, he glanced at the cars parked in the space provided for vehicles to one side of the pensión. A flashy bronze Jaguar caught his attention. There was a colorful military decal low on the driver’s side of the front window.
The presence of an eighty-thousand-dollar classic vehicle disturbed Navarre. How could an army major afford a luxury car? Unless Gil came from a wealthy family, it was far beyond a major’s salary. This sign of extravagance added to his suspicion of Gil.
Also, Navarre was unable to dismiss Gil’s persistent claim to superior authority on canine behavior. It was based solely on his limited experience in police-dog training techniques and as a minor functionary in the drug-related amapola war. For the moment, Navarre put aside his uneasiness about Gil, but he was certain there was something wrong with the man. He had to find out what it was.
On their hurried way to the museum, as they sped by a corner of the popular Chapultepec Park, Navarre saw a tableau of skeletons made of white plastic and dressed in white pantaloons and matching shirts with bright red sashes knotted around their waists. They were posed in a fashion of people talking animatedly, with their bony arms arranged in gestures of enthusiastic conversation. A mother and two of her children sat together at the feet of the skeletons, licking purple shaved ices.
He thought briefly of how the Mexican people despised death and those people who did not hate it. On their ghost day, once a year, they made fun of it and mocked it. Wasn’t it fitting, in a macabre way, he observed, that Nuños had chosen the Day of the Dead to carry out the assassination.
As the limousine whisked by the growing crowds of celebrants, he remembered, with a tightening of his throat, that the year Meg had died, the two of them had spent a joyous, carefree, and reckless evening on Día de los Muertos celebrating their love for each other. A few lines he thought he had forgotten popped into his head, words he had whispered to Meg while he held her hand at midnight.
-
When I die, my dear,
Of my clay make a cup.
When you have thirst, from me drink.
The clay which clings to y
our lips
Is a kiss from me, your lover.
-
He could no longer remember where he had found the words.
Twenty minutes later Navarre and Bombito stepped out of the swift, black Buick in a no-parking zone adjacent to the museum next to the corner of Calle República del Salvador. Just inside the courtyard of the converted mansion built in 1528 and known originally as the house of the Counts of Santiago de Calimaya, they met three dark-haired men with the same alert bearing that distinguished the agents Navarre had met earlier. As they came forward from where they had been standing, next to the museum’s elegant old horse carriage that was a nostalgic reminder of the past, Bombito hastily introduced them as Jaime Validod, Thomas Servando, and Franco Gomez. Gomez was the heaviest of the three, with thick shoulders, powerful biceps, and a roguish smile. He was identified as the tool and powder man, and, as Navarre discovered later, the havoc he could create with a wrecking bar was remarkable.
The new men wasted no time on pleasantries. Picking up the heavy black duffel bags they had brought with them and preceding Navarre and Bombito, they ran, light footed and breathing easily with their burdens, up the massive stone staircase that led to the entrance of the museum. It was unnecessary for them to contact any official in the museum, for the staff had been forewarned by telephone to ignore the five men dressed in ominous black assault uniforms that made their way unerringly to the staircase leading to the basement. As they started to descend, Navarre’s eyes fell briefly on the diorama on the first floor depicting the prehistory of the city, with the arrival of man in the Valley of Mexico. The prehistoric figure was portrayed as a nomad and hunter of the anthropological period known as Paleolithic Superior.
The sight of the display gave Navarre a jolt of dread and sadness, for the last time he had seen it had been in the company of Meg, whom he had lost a few weeks later in the desert. He thought there was a terrible irony in his presence at the museum on an errand to save the life of another woman he had met in the same desert where the first had gone to her death.
Franco Gomez led the way through the cluttered, dimly lit basement crowded with stacked religious paintings of saints and sinners and figures dressed in period costumes. There were shelved books, ancient sculptures, and a huge portrait of Emiliano Zapata, the agrarian martyr bristling with arms who inflamed Mexico with his fierce demands for land reform.
Franco Gomez stopped his sturdy march through the gloomy basement when he circled behind an old, silent steam boiler covered with years of dust and shone his flashlight into an empty space no bigger than a utility room.
Pointing his light at the dust-covered floor, lined with dozens of cracks and ruptures, he knelt in the center of the room and brushed away the accumulated dust, revealing a round iron plate resembling a manhole cover.
He turned to Bombito and said in Spanish, “No question that the floor is weak, undoubtedly from the earthquake. It’s a good sign that the basement in Cid Camaro’s house is probably in the same condition. If the tunnel below is cracked like this, I’ll be surprised if we don’t find some cave-ins.”
“That’s a chance we’ve got to take,” Bombito said with a grin, glancing at his watch. Thirty-five minutes had expired.
“Bueno,” Gomez agreed lightly, and from the top of his pack he quickly unstrapped a sturdy, four-foot steel wrecking bar with one end tapered sharply. He inserted the curved and tapered end into the circular opening between the iron plate and the cement and pried the cover up. As soon as the plate lifted, there was a sharp hissing sound and a stream of whitish air blew upward, disappeared, and left a dank odor in the small room.
“Harmless trapped air pressure,” Gomez explained, sliding the iron cover away from the gaping hole in the floor and shining his flashlight downward. He pointed to the crumbled edges of cement where he had pried off the cover and said, “The cement’s rotten. Age and corrosion. If this is the original floor, which I doubt, it dates back to the sixteenth century. Didn’t you say Cid Camaro’s house was built at about the same time?”
Bombito nodded. “If that’s the case, punching through his basement will be as easy as cracking eggs.”
“Well, here goes!” Gomez said, lowering himself through the hole carefully, depending on his powerful arms to suspend his body as he searched with his feet for the rungs of the rusty iron ladder his flashlight had revealed. When he reached the bottom, he shouted up, “Air’s okay down here. Be careful on the ladder; it’s slippery and loose.”
Five minutes later the four men had descended to join Gomez and followed in his steps as he started westward carefully, shining the way with his flashlight in the direction of Camaro’s mansion.
They had traveled no more than a few feet when Navarre whispered a question to Bombito that suddenly popped into his mind. “How are we going to know how far to go before we find Cid’s house?”
“Good question,” Bombito responded. “When I talked to Gomez on the phone, that was his first concern. We figured that Casa de Camaro is about the same size as the museum. He got the museum director on the phone, and he confirmed that that is true. It’s about three hundred and fifty feet wide and five hundred feet long. Also, it is the first one next to the museum. And there are only two other houses on the far end of the same long block. He estimated that the distance from the museum to the center point below Cid’s house is about nineteen hundred feet. We have to take his word for it and hope we’re right. One thing we do know is that the basement is the same size as the three floors above.”
“So Gomez is counting his footsteps?”
“Afirmativo.”
Navarre lapsed into silence, following behind Jaime Validod and Thomas Servando. Behind him, Bombito brought up the rear. In the blaze of the five powerful flashlights, the old, brick-walled tunnel with its oval ceiling was illuminated brightly, and the shadows and darkness leaped ahead of the penetrating glare like the ancient night fleeing the flaming swords of dawn.
Only once did the men slow their pace, to crawl over a break in the north side of the wall, where the ancient rocks and soil must have contained relics of the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, destroyed by the Spaniards. It had poured through to partially block their passage.
As Gomez slowed his pace uncertainly and examined the roof of the tunnel with his flashlight, Navarre suddenly recalled again the third part of the curse the scrawny, hunchbacked Zopilote had placed on him: “You will meet death in a tunnel.”
But it was not going to happen here, he thought, oddly confident that he would survive the five-hundred-year-old passageway, probably built by the Aztecs to help drain the lake on which their city floated.
He heard Gomez shout a warning: “I’m going to crack the ceiling—watch your heads!”
Stepping back, Navarre observed the powerful man, with both hands gripping his wrecking bar, plunging the sharp steel into the dull red brick over his head. He stepped back, wriggled the buried steel vigorously, and retreated as a four-foot section of aged bricks, mortar, cement, and soil dropped soggily to the floor with hardly a whiff of dust.
Within ten minutes, Gomez, aided by Validod and Servando, had cleared the overhead area and erected two steel poles with locking sections that fitted into three horizontal metal planks which screwed tightly into place against the ceiling on each side of the hole. It was now five thirty, half an hour to deadline.
Gomez was cautious about shining the beam of his light through the unobstructed hole in the ceiling; it shone through the basement floor of the building above. It had to be the Camaro house, but there was no clue as to their location in the basement. From this moment on, the five men spoke in whispers and moved carefully and silently as Servando hoisted the wiry-framed Validod up on Gomez’s back. Validod’s head and shoulders rose as Gomez slowly stood up.
When Validod was through the hole, Servando and Gomez pushed the two bulky black duffel bags up to him. Then, one by one, Servando, Navarre, and Bombito used Gomez’s back as their step
pingstone through the basement floor. As for Gomez, he waved off assistance from above and sprang up through the hole, gripped the edges of the opening with his hands, and jacked himself up.
The men stood utterly still for at least one minute, gauging the danger by the noises of the house. They decided their entry was directly beneath the kitchen because they could hear vague footsteps, the slight murmur of voices with indistinguishable words, and faintly the sound of dishes. Nothing ominous about that. Carefully, in the beam of Bombito’s flashlight, the two bags were quickly opened and weapons distributed. Navarre accepted a fifteen-shot Beretta from Bombito. It was decided in a whispered conference that if their luck held, surprise was on their side. Bombito would lead the group up the stairs, followed by Servando with an automatic pistol and grenades hooked on a belt of thick canvas around his waist. He was fearless, an expert pistol shot, and moved with stealthy grace. Validod, equipped with a light machine pistol, would follow, and behind him would be Navarre. Last of all, Gomez would hold back to guard their rear and silence the kitchen help with tape on their mouths. Once they reached the kitchen, they would disperse but remain in visual contact as they searched for the intruders.
There was a frightened older woman in a black silk dress and white collar in the kitchen when Navarre stepped through the basement door. Her eyes went wide with alarm, but she remained frozen in the grasp of Bombito, whose arm circled her neck with his hand covering her mouth. Quickly, as the other men slipped through the door, he whispered in her ear, “Mother, we are the federal police. Nobody’s going to hurt you, but you must tell me who’s in the house. Where are Señor Camaro and his American guest, the woman with the blond hair? Have they been hurt? I’ll take my hand away if you promise not to scream.”