George told him the story of how he had been abducted at gunpoint from a corporate minibus, destined for the rural outpost of his employer. Explained that he hadn’t been seen since.
The driver shrugged. ‘As you can see,’ he said, steering his taxi slowly around the body in the middle of the almost gridlocked street. ‘That sort of thing happens all the time, here. Unless you can afford to live behind high walls and barbed wire and get yourself a bodyguard, you’re at the mercy of the gangs from the moment you get up to the moment you go to sleep, and every goddamned minute in between. And, more often than not, the police either turn a blind eye or don’t have the capacity to solve crimes. I get robbed. My son gets robbed. You don’t walk through the parks at night, here. You don’t walk through the parks during the day! This is Honduras!’ Honking his horn and carving up a yellow school bus, he was finally free of the traffic and picked up pace.
‘I might be wasting my time. Maybe he’s dead …’ George said, peering at the buildings that now appeared more robustly built as they neared the commercial centre. In the distance, the Bank of Honduras loomed. It was as though some big gleaming corporate block of glass and concrete had been shipped in from the City of London and simply plonked in the middle of a down-at-heel Central American capital. Thick cables spanned the length of the street overhead, weeds grew from the central reservation and verdant mountains provided an unlikely backdrop. The sort of country where the rich got richer and there was zero trickledown effect. A broken country. The ultimate banana republic.
‘Lady, if he’s dead, he’d have been found in the middle of the street, like that poor bastard back there.’ He gesticulated towards the scene of the carjacking with his thumb. Took a cigarette from the packet in his shirt pocket and lit up. ‘You smoke?’
George took one of the loosely packed cigarettes and lit up. Offered thanks, mulling over the opportunity that had suddenly presented itself.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked, studying the back of the driver’s head.
‘Javier,’ he said. ‘But I’m not telling you my family name!’ He grinned, showing off a mouth full of nicotine-stained teeth in the mirror. Indicated and pulled into a parking bay by a medium-sized concrete block. The head office of her father’s employer, Earhart Barton.
Reaching into her handbag, George pulled out a sheaf of US dollars. ‘Wait for me while I’m in there,’ she said. ‘And then, I’ve got a proposition for you.’
CHAPTER 26
Mexico, a Cancun police station, 27 May
‘These are the photos of the kids that were found dead in New York,’ John Baldini told Van den Bergen. He laid fourteen photographs onto the table in the stiflingly hot office of the police station. ‘This is what mi amigo Gonzales here asked me to come down to Cancun to talk to you about.’ He tapped the corner of one of the photos with a meaty finger. A rippling mass of testosterone and policing enthusiasm, representing God’s own country, apparently – the US of freaking A.
The DEA officer had been a surprise introduction to Van den Bergen’s itinerary. Met at the airport by his Mexican counterpart, Juan Felipe Gonzales himself, Van den Bergen had been transported to the local police station in a Policía Federal black-and-white pick-up truck. In a cage of sorts in the loading area behind the cab, three helmeted, Kevlar-clad members of the Gendarmería had been standing to attention, clutching what appeared to be army-issue rifles.
‘You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,’ Van den Bergen had said absently, forcing a smile, thinking all the while about George’s sudden disappearance into the crowds at the airport, bound, no doubt, for one of the onward destinations that flashed up on the departures board. He had swallowed down a lump of fear, relieved that Gonzales had no inkling as to how a Dutch Chief Inspector normally looked. For all the Mexican had known, panic-stricken might have been Van den Bergen’s default expression. ‘Is this how you normally travel?’
‘This is Mexico, my friend,’ Gonzales had said, keen eyes on the taxi drivers and tourists that swarmed around them. He had gestured that Van den Bergen should get in the vehicle promptly. ‘Welcome, Paul!’
Inside the truck, Van den Bergen’s jet-lagged mind had been so overtaxed with lack of sleep and worry about his lover, he had barely taken in the new, colourful world that flashed by, brightly lit by strong Caribbean sunshine. Lush and unfamiliar trees had studded the main boulevard that led from the airport. Modern buildings were square, flat-roofed in the main and cheaply constructed, with every wall stuccoed and painted either white, yellow or some other ice-cream shade. On the highway, which had been little more than a dual carriageway, battered trucks, mopeds and the odd gleaming people carrier or SUV from the States had weaved from lane to lane haphazardly. American-style school buses painted all over with startling Mayan designs had crawled along the slow lane, advertising some aquatic theme park called Xel-Ha. The route had hosted checkpoints of armed police every so often and had been peppered every now and then by the grand, manned entrances to holiday resorts and the high walls that surrounded them. He had been treated to glimpses of the perfect azure Caribbean Sea in the distance. These had been sights that should have refreshed a jaded brain that had grown accustomed only to the grind of work and the grey skies of Northern or Eastern Europe for decades. But Van den Bergen’s party of two had been one member short, so he had been unable to concentrate on anything else.
‘Where is Dr McKenzie?’ Gonzales had asked, pausing in his ad hoc guided tour of the outskirts of Cancun, as if he had read Van den Bergen’s mind. He had scratched at hairless cheeks that were pocked with acne scarring, giving him the appearance of a much younger man. Not a single grey hair among the black.
‘Oh, she wasn’t feeling well,’ Van den Bergen had said, wondering why his mouth had spat out such a blatant lie while his brain had been diligently trying to work out a justifiable excuse as to why his criminology expert had absconded. ‘Her suitcase turned up before mine, so she’s gone straight to the hotel. Upset stomach.’ He had tried to wince convincingly, patting his own stomach, which had concealed an inferno of stress-induced acid that could have engulfed the entire dense jungle of the Yucatan Peninsula in flames. Where the hell was George?
He had spent his first exhausting day sweating profusely in an office at the back of the police station, where the air conditioning had broken, learning about the difficulties faced by the Mexican Federales in policing a country on its knees.
‘The cartels are entrenched,’ Gonzales had told him in perfect English spoken with a Mexican accent that had a Texan tang to it. ‘People are so poor and the politicians have failed them so often that gangs have gotten a foothold in small towns and villages.’ He had run through a slide show of photos taken in rural locations where shirtless gang members had been arrested and lined up against graffitied walls, their hands cuffed behind them. Pictures of broken bodies, deep red blood pooling beneath them in the dazzling sunshine of bleached-out, dusty streets. Several shots of homespun meth labs that had been raided, set up in shabby kitchens or shacks built in the seclusion of thick jungle. Basic equipment stacked on picnic tables. Buckets and hoses and Bunsen burners connected to huge butane canisters. ‘This is what we’re up against,’ he had said. ‘If you’re starving and can’t get a job, and some scary, badass gang guy comes to you and offers you hard cash to get involved in this kind of thing or says he’s going to kill you and your children if you don’t keep your mouth shut, what are you going to do?’
Van den Bergen had shaken his head. Staring at a slide of a tiny woman, standing by a shack that had been constructed from little more than sticks, with a thatched roof. Clutching a baby, with two other small children at her feet, the camera had caught her weeping as members of the Gendarmería had led a young man away in cuffs. ‘Poverty. I get it. Not everybody can work in the hotel trade or get a job in a supermarket.’
‘We’re a transit country,’ Gonzales had said. ‘It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. Colombian coke ne
eds to find its way north to the USA. Central American countries are the only way through. While there’s a culture of corruption in government and a desperate underclass that can barely feed itself, those cartel boys know they’ve got the entire country in the palm of their hands. That’s where all the money and the power is. They’re the real kings of Mexico and they’re brutal. They kill with impunity. They traffic coke, people, guns … whatever they can turn a profit from. Life is worthless. The law means nothing to them. They are afraid of nobody.’ Gonzales had punctuated his points with a dismissive slice of his hand through the air. His lips had pursed. ‘And the worst thing is, as the DEA and the Mexican police have clamped down on the coca coming in from South America, these clever sons of bitches worked out they can make meth on their own turf instead and make even more money. The entire world is their market.’ He had thumped the table that had held the projector. ‘Crystal methamphetamine is gonna be the death of this country if we’re not careful. And it’s already killing our kids.’
‘And that’s why I’m here,’ Van den Bergen had said, nodding and wishing George was with him. He had pulled the files on the canal deaths from his bag and passed them to his Mexican counterpart.
‘Tomorrow,’ Gonzales had said, leafing through the notes on Floris Engels. ‘You’re gonna meet a friend of mine from the DEA. All the way from New York City. John Baldini. You’ll like him. He’s one of the good guys. And he’s got information you’re gonna be very interested in.’
And so it was that. Van den Bergen watched as John Baldini arranged the fourteen photos of seven dead kids on the table in the roasting hot office. A set of two photos for each victim – one taken while they had still been alive and the second, a forensics snap of their corpse.
The place was perfused with the smell of cheap disinfectant and too much deodorant that failed to mask a lingering undertone of stale sweat.
Van den Bergen surreptitiously sniffed his armpits. Regarded the images in front of him.
‘They came to me from homicide because they were all poisoned by the same bad batch of crystal methamphetamine,’ Baldini said. ‘Same shit as you got over there in Amsterdam, Holland.’
‘Lead poisoning?’ Van den Bergen asked.
‘Yes siree. Lucky for us, because they didn’t see death coming for them, they didn’t throw the meth down some storm drain or flush it in case they got picked up by the cops. All but one of them still had crystals on their person. Mainly, we found them collapsed on the street in the Meatpacking District, downtown, and they all died in the small hours. It’s real busy round there, but under cover of darkness – I guess a guy could still pass out and just be taken for some bum who liked his liquor too much. It’s New York City. You know? Ain’t it the same in Amsterdam?’
Van den Bergen contemplated the comparison. Hadn’t his victims been abandoned? Not quite. They had in the main disappeared into the water. Alone. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We have a population of less than a million. I like to think it’s nothing like New York. In London, maybe, you could die in a crowd and not be noticed. Bigger cities. But not Amsterdam.’ He thumbed his goatee, feeling the sweat moisten his fingertips. Resolved to shave it off once he got back to the hotel. He was just too damned hot for an extra layer. ‘If a body lies undiscovered in my city, it’s generally because somebody wanted to hide it.’
Baldini and Gonzales exchanged a look that Van den Bergen couldn’t be bothered to interpret. He tugged at his trousers that stuck to his thighs unpleasantly, mulling over the text he had received from George around 5 p.m. the previous evening.
I am alive. I love you.
That had been it. Nothing more. No detail of where she had gone, though he had asked Marie to find out what flight she had taken. Marie was taking a suspiciously long time coming back to him with the information, though. Bloody women, ganging together!
Feeling jet lag and anxiety tugging his attention span out of the room and away from the voices of the DEA agent and the Federale, he pinched himself on the back of the hand. Zoned back into the New Yorker’s presentation.
‘My guys in homicide … they figured these kids felt a little queasy, came out of a club. Badabing badaboom. The bad meth had gotten into their bloodstream. They were dead pretty damn quick.’
‘Lucky they weren’t robbed,’ Gonzales said, raising an eyebrow.
‘I know, right?’ Baldini bumped fists with the Mexican detective. ‘Sometimes you get lucky, you get a piece of the puzzle you’d been missing. That’s what makes our job the greatest. Am I right?’ He turned to Gonzales and grinned.
‘Exactamente, bro!’
Sipping from a plastic cup of coffee that was too strong and which was wreaking havoc with his stomach, Van den Bergen clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Popped a paracetamol from a blister pack and swallowed it with the bitter drink. Fixed Gonzales with a questioning stare. ‘Why am I only hearing about this match now? How can you be sure?’
Before Gonzales could answer, Baldini leaned forwards, balancing both elbows on the table which made his overdeveloped biceps look like thick, gnarled branches on a tree. ‘My hombre Gonzales here forwarded me the email you sent to him, containing the chemical composition of the meth you found on your latest dead guy. You gotta interpret the data like analysing a fingerprint. And our lab guy found it’s an exact match.’
‘My people in the Mexican Polícia Federal Ministerial narrowed it down to having been manufactured near here,’ Gonzales said. ‘I would make an educated guess that there’s some meth lab in the Yucatan jungle churning this crap out. We will find it.’ He smiled and nodded sagely.
Picking up two of the photos, Van den Bergen pushed his glasses onto his nose and contemplated the faces – a young man of about 20 and a girl of no more than 18. Scabbing around their mouths and dead eyes. All of the seven victims appeared far older than the ages shown in their case files.
‘Meth plays havoc with dental health,’ Van den Bergen said, tutting as he scrutinised the photos where the victims were smiling; scowling at the rotten, blackened stumps that counted for teeth, barely embedded in receding, florid gums. ‘These are almost as horrible as the postmortem photos.’ He touched his own carefully tended teeth. Grimaced. ‘Christ! That must have been very painful. Didn’t these kids see your anti-drugs poster campaigns with the dried-up old junkies? Even I’ve seen them!’
Both his American and Mexican counterparts laughed dryly, making Van den Bergen feel like he was missing some kind of joke. Were they laughing at him, he wondered? If George was here, she’d be able to pick up any sarcasm in their English that he might otherwise miss. Or irony. Except he probably did irony better than them. And why weren’t they bothered by the insane heat and humidity? He watched them, patting nonchalantly at their glistening foreheads with folded tissues as if it wasn’t thirty-seven degrees outside. As if he wasn’t a wringing wet spectacle, wearing suiting that was designed for the distinctly non-balmy climes of Bijlmer, where it was a steady twelve degrees with a stiff wind coming off the North Sea, all summer long. And how much of a freak did he feel, towering over Gonzales – a tiny barrel-chested descendant of the Maya – with his six feet five of white hairy limbs like some ludicrous albino spider? Where the hell was George to tell him that he was a passable-looking human being?
Juan Felipe Gonzales held up one of the photos of a young man. Clearly a mugshot that had been taken in some police station in downtown NYC. ‘Kids like this don’t pay attention to advertising campaigns, my friend,’ he told Van den Bergen. ‘Maybe kids who go to college and have parents who care. They’re the kind that listen to good advice and act on it. Not these kids.’ There was sadness in his half-smile.
Gonzales’ gold tooth and slicked-back black hair glinted under the fluorescent lighting, giving him the look of a tubby 1980s porn star, Van den Bergen imagined. George would say he was being uncharitable. But then George wasn’t bloody well there. Acid erupted along his gullet at the thought of her gallivanting on her own on
some wild-goose chase in a gang-ravaged shithole … Best not to think about it.
‘They’re no different from our boys and girls who get sucked into the cartels as street dealers, lookouts, informants, muscle … By the time kids like this wind up dead, they’ve usually got rap sheets as long as their arms. Am I right, John?’ Gonzales turned to the stocky American.
‘You sure are, buddy,’ Baldini said, patting at his shaved head with the tissue paper. ‘These kids get sucked in young – usually through peer pressure and lack of opportunity.’ He thumped himself on the chest. Van den Bergen was just about to offer him an antacid when he started to speak again. ‘New York’s a fucking great city and I’m proud to live there …’ Not acid reflux. It had just been some overly dramatic show of civic pride. ‘But there are still some tough neighbourhoods. There’s just too many damn kids using drugs to deal with the boredom or dull the pain of a shitty home life. Some of them just wanna get laid easy.’ The muscles in his bull neck flinched.
John Baldini picked up a plastic glass of water and held it with a degree of swagger. Made a smacking sound with his lips as he sated his thirst. Van den Bergen noted how he sat with his legs slightly apart. Was this the sort of alpha male who never doubted his place in the world or that his life was evolving exactly as he would wish it to? He brought his own bony knees together and resolved never to sit with his legs astride like that again.
‘Anyway, the reason we’re here today, gentlemen,’ Baldini said, holding those meaty arms aloft like a pontificating, pumped-up Jesus, ‘is that Gonzales here has got a problem with some douche in his jurisdiction supplying toxic waste that’s infesting the whole fucking world. And you, Van den Bergen … you and me got the same pain in the ass. We both got tax-paying citizens dying on the back of this shit. Gentlemen, we got work to do in Cancun.’
The Girl Who Had No Fear Page 17