by Danny Lopez
“And that’s it?”
She raised her hands. “Eso es todo.”
We had dessert and a shot of cognac and then walked together, her arm laced with mine, her body leaning slightly against me. It was easy to be with her, here, surrounded by all the hipness of the city. The sidewalk and restaurants were busy, crowded with wealthy Mexicans. We came up to a four-story art deco building. Flor pointed up. “This is me.”
“Home?”
She nodded and looked away with a tight little smile. “Would you like to come up?”
She lived in a small apartment on the third floor. It was decorated in a way that reminded me of a classy Mexican restaurant, but with personality. She set her bag down, served a couple of tequilas, and we had a toast.
“To you,” I said.
“To Maya, for bringing you here.”
We sipped the nectar of the Aztec Gods. We moved closer, her eyes on mine like a hawk. I set my glass down and took her in my arms. The rest is history.
* * *
When I woke up in the morning, Flor was gone. She had left a note on the door: Make yourself at home. Coffee on the stove. Went to find the axolotl.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WHEN I GOT back to my hotel, the desk clerk handed me a note: Meet me at the end of the lake in Chapultepec Park where the children learn to bullfight. M.
I laughed. Nice. Malcolm was full of drama and mystery, but he couldn’t keep a fucking appointment. For a moment I contemplated not going. But then I thought of Toni. Maybe Malcolm had gotten word from her.
I tried calling Malcolm, but he didn’t answer. I didn’t leave a voice mail. I went up to my room and did some Googling. I found Maya Edwards. She was a student registered at New College. She had a closed Facebook page. I sent her a friend request just for the hell of it. She was also mentioned in a couple of news articles—one was in the Sarasota Herald about New College students making the grade beyond the classroom. The other was her mother’s obituary in the Naples Daily News. It said she died in 2006 and was survived by her only daughter, Maya. There was no mention of Nick Zavala.
Then I looked up Flor Quintero in Mexico. I sent her a friend request on Facebook and looked over some of her articles on the axolotl, but they were all in Spanish. From what I could make out, she’d been studying the little critter for seven years. A census in 2003 counted nearly a thousand axolotl. A decade later, in 2013, it counted zero.
I knew nothing of this little animal, but it struck me to know that in just ten years they had been wiped out from that giant lake. I empathized with Flor. And Maya. Damn. I guess I was getting attached to the damn water lizard.
I made some more notes on my Maya document. Now, the big gaping hole was why did Nick not tell me she was going by her mother’s last name? What was the connection here? If Nick was her father by way of Maya’s mother, wouldn’t he be mentioned in the obituary? Just as things began to come together, they broke up again. Nothing seemed to line up.
I took a quick shower and grabbed a taxi to Chapultepec Park—Mexico City’s version of Central Park—a huge green expanse with a zoo and a lake and an old castle atop a hill that had been turned into a museum. I walked along a trail and found an old man selling ice cream from a little cart. I tried my best Spanish on him, inquiring about the place where the children learned to bullfight. He tilted his cowboy hat and pointed toward the lake. “A la orilla del lago,” he said, something about the side of the lake.
I bought a scoop of mango ice cream on a cone from the old man and walked along the bend of the lake. In a small clearing in the distance, a man was working with half a dozen little boys. He yelled directions at them. One of the boys held a pair of bullhorns on his head and charged at another boy holding a red bullfighting cape. The other boys watched in silence. The place where children learn to bullfight.
But Malcolm wasn’t around. Nobody was. I tried calling him on my cell phone, but it went directly to voice mail. I looked out at the lake, green and opaque like the canals of Xochimilco. I wondered if there was any life in there. Maybe frogs. I turned back to face the park. One of the boys had broken away from the group of young bullfighters and was running to where I was. When he caught up with me, he stopped and bowed. Then he extended his hand, offering me a folded piece of paper. “Señor Vega?”
I took the paper, and he ran back to the bullfighting lesson. I read the note: I’m behind the castle.
I put the note in my pocket and glanced up at the big castle in the distance. What the fuck? I started walking, slowly, looking at the young couples in rowboats on the lake, eating my ice cream, listening to the whistle of the man selling balloons.
I came around the side of the hill. There was no one around, except two men in suits and sunglasses about thirty, forty yards away. I glanced up at the castle. Maybe he’d meant up in the castle. I tossed what was left of my ice cream cone in a trash bin and pulled out my phone to call Malcolm.
“Why are you looking for me?” A woman’s voice, deep, confident.
I turned around. Maya. She wore denim jeans, leather boots, and a burgundy coat. She was stunning. Her eyes were like water—not just the color, they were liquid. Her entire person seemed to glow like the sun. And yet, she looked sad.
I swallowed hard, my saliva thick with the taste of mango. “Your father,” I managed to blurt out like a starstruck teenager. “He’s dead.” It just came out of me like vomit. I’d been caught off guard. I had been expecting Malcolm’s ugly mug, his hunched shoulders, a stinky Faro cigarette protruding form his fat lips. But this—
“I know,” she said. “He died when I was a little girl.”
I gestured with my hands, reaching out, then hung them on the sides of my waist. “I don’t think you understand. Nick’s been murdered.”
Her face was like ice. “Nick Zavala is not my father.”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here. But Nick’s dead, and the cops are looking at me as their prime suspect.”
“And, did you?” We were eight, maybe ten, feet from each other. She kept her hands in the side pockets of her jacket.
“What, kill Nick? No. Jesus. He asked me to find you—”
“Are you a detective?”
I laughed and shook my head. “My name’s Dexter Vega. I’m … I’m an unemployed journalist.”
She turned her head slightly and looked in the direction of the two men in suits. There was something about her manner, her movements, her voice. She was calm, royal. Like how a princess might behave.
“That man,” she said with a narrow grin, “he never gave up.”
“What man? Nick? What’s going on?” I was feeling smaller and smaller, but I was also getting a little angry.
“You say you’re a reporter?”
“Was.”
“Your career ended with a job?”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. Here I was by Chapultepec Park and I didn’t know if I was a reporter, a detective. And who the hell was this woman?
“Do you mind if we walk?” she said, and we started off back toward the front of the castle. She smelled of expensive perfume, sweet.
“I was running away from Nick,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t want to be found. I learned of his death from an acquaintance in Sarasota. Then I heard you were in Mexico City looking for me.” She paused for a moment and glanced at me. “Why did Nick want you to find me?”
“I don’t know. He said you were his daughter and that you were missing. He paid me a lot of money.”
“And that made sense to you?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Do you have any children, Mr. Vega?”
“I have a daughter. Zoe. And please, call me Dexter.”
She smiled and looked at the path ahead. Around the side of the lake we could see people making their way toward the entrance to the castle. “I don’t how to describe Nick. Who he was. What he was.”
She sounded angry—subdued venom.
“My real
father died when I was two. He was not a great man. I suppose you’d say he was average. But like most people, he didn’t expect to die so young. There was no insurance. Just debt.”
“I’m sorry.”
She laughed in a way that was supposed to make me feel at ease but kind of spooked me. She had total control of herself.
“My mother dated a man who became a problem for me so I ran away from home. I was fourteen. I lived in the streets for a few months. Then I met Nick. He took me in. You could say he took care of me. But he wasn’t my father.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Nick was worried about you. He hadn’t heard from you—”
“Nick didn’t hear from me because I didn’t want him to hear from me. I didn’t want to be with him. I wanted out of his world.”
I stopped walking and looked at her, tall, beautiful. The sunlight filtered through the trees and spilled around us in little spots. “I’m not getting it.”
She smiled.
“His world?”
She looked at the ground and began to walk. “How well did you know Nick, Mr. Vega?”
“Not very well,” I said. “We actually met at a bar and he offered me the job of finding you. It seemed simple enough at the time.”
“Nick Zavala was a very sick man. He picked up girls from the streets, young teenagers, twelve, thirteen, maybe older. Fourteen in my case, and forced us to have sex with him.”
For a moment, all I could hear were children’s voices, calling out names, saying, “Aqui, aqui.” Across from us, a small group of boys in school uniforms were playing soccer. And in my blurred vision I saw my daughter, Zoe. Something inside me was emptying out, a silence, confusion. I was struck with a sharp wave of nausea. It was as if the ground was sucking down my feet, my legs.
Maya nodded. “He took us in, cleaned us up, took care of us, fed us well, gave us alcohol and drugs. But we had to pay him back with our bodies. When you’re fourteen, fifteen, there is a part of it that feels like you’ve won the lottery: a fancy house with a pool, drugs, food, friends. A perpetual party. You don’t see it because you’re still a kid. You’re blind to the sickness. It’s a thousand times better than being in the streets or a shelter. I mean, he was rich. You could almost say we had a nice life there.”
“And then?”
“And then you get it. You understand what’s going on. How this man is abusing your body. Violating you. You can’t say no to him when he comes in your room. You want to escape, but you can’t.”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“It wasn’t that we were prisoners. But we had nowhere to go. There comes a point where sex just becomes this abstract thing. You turn off, I suppose. You want to leave but you don’t want to leave.”
“I didn’t know.”
She looked away for a moment. “He didn’t hold anyone against their will. Not by force. Except me.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Nick didn’t know how to let go of me. He could let go of everyone else. Girls were always coming and going from his place. But me? He wanted me there.” Maya stopped walking again. She ran her hand through her hair and looked at me. “He was obsessed with me. He paid for my school, sent me to New College. I was everything to him: daughter, wife, lover. But I just wanted out. I hated him.”
“So you came up with this axolotl project to get you out of town.”
She was looking away at the lake. A pleasant wind was blowing and her hair was gliding like a dream. Her presence was like a treasure, like being at a museum. There was something incredibly powerful about her. She spoke so freely of this, of Nick’s perversions.
“I thought he would forget about me. That time away from me would ease his hunger for me. But it did the opposite. He sent me a check every month.” She looked at me. “He had other girls. That was never an issue. He had them young, willing and unwilling. He had everything he wanted. But he wanted to possess me completely, and that was something he couldn’t have. I think that with people like Nick, it’s about absolute power. He wanted what he couldn’t have. Maybe that was part of his sickness. Maybe he wanted children because they were forbidden.”
“Jesus …” I put my hands to my face, massaged my cheeks, my forehead, my temples. My mind swirled with thoughts of Nick, Tiffany, Maya. And Zoe.
The cops knew nothing about this. Or if they did, they didn’t let on. I felt queasy. I took a deep breath and stepped back. “I’m sorry,” I said, and shook my head violently like I was trying to exorcise a demon. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know him.”
She placed her hand on my shoulder and moved her head close to mine. “Don’t be a victim, Mr. Vega. Don’t put it on you. Don’t let him win. The things he did, with me and the others, we—”
She stopped abruptly. I looked at her. I felt like a child in her presence. All my problems became tiny.
“Nick was a manipulator,” she said.
“But you were children,” I said. “You were high on drugs. You had no control.”
She smiled and pressed my shoulder. “No. We were grown up. We were twelve, fourteen, sixteen, but we had grown up. If it hadn’t been Nick who picked us up and, I suppose in a way saved us, it would have been some pimp working off the North Trail. Some of the girls that left never found anything better. From there, it only got worse for most of them. Sexual abuse turns your brain inside out. It kills your soul. You don’t know how to function in real life. And the streets … you don’t know how it is. For those of us who ended up with Nick … you could say we were lucky.”
It didn’t sound that way to me. And it was wrong. I felt cheated. Tricked. I could only imagine how she and the others felt. If Nick weren’t dead, I would kill him. What did he fucking expect from me?
But then I knew. If he hadn’t been killed, I would have told him Maya was in Mexico City and he would have come to get her back. Or maybe not. Ten thousand fucking dollars.
I hated myself. I would have done it. I was a whore. “So what now?” I asked.
“I want you to forget about me.”
“Why?”
“I want to disappear, Mr. Vega. I’m happy here. I’m making a life. A new life with new friends and no past. Nick doesn’t exist here.”
“What about the axolotl?”
She smiled the way a friend smiles when you talk about a pleasant memory. “I will forever be grateful for the axolotl. And for Dr. Tabor who pointed out their existence to me. They helped me escape.”
“So you don’t care about the axolotl?”
“I care a great deal. I care about all living beings. But I’m not investigating their existence. No.”
I laughed. “Tabor said you were terribly ambitious.”
“Not ambitious, Mr. Vega. Desperate. The axolotl was my only way out of hell.”
“Why didn’t you go to the cops?”
She laughed and looked away. “It’s complicated. When you’re picked up from the street like a piece of trash and then given all these luxuries and the years pass, at some point you start feeling as if it was your doing, that you wanted it, that it’s your fault that these things happened to you—that you were not held hostage but were a guest. Believe me, it’s a lot to deal with. The guilt over what I’ve lived through in the last ten years will never disappear.”
We walked a little farther, leaving the castle behind and walking toward the lake. I wasn’t sure whether she was leading the way. Maybe I was. I was afraid to ask about Nick, about her life. I kept thinking of Tiffany, too. How many more were there?
“It’s complicated,” she said suddenly. “When you’re in it, in that world, it feels normal.”
She grabbed my arm, her fingernails digging hard against my skin. “Somewhere in the back of my head I knew it was wrong. But I was powerless. I didn’t know how to do it. Like kicking a habit you don’t know you have.”
She was shaking. I embraced her, my arm around her shoulder, and she pressed her face against my chest and allowed a single soft sob to esca
pe her lips.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
She stepped back and shook her head. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t want you or anyone’s sympathy or help. I just want to disappear and live a normal life.”
“I understand.”
She backed away from me and wiped her tears with a handkerchief. Then she smiled. “Thank you.”
We started walking again, my hand touching her elbow. I thought of her situation, how someone like Nick was allowed to exist. How I had been roped into this when all I ever wanted was to be a journalist, to break these stories, to help people who did not have a voice, or did not have the foresight to see the wrong that was being done to them. But instead I was being used. I had been used by the newspaper and I had been used by Nick.
If my father’s murder at the hands of a policeman and my years as a journalist had not turned me sour on humanity, this did. I was that much closer to becoming a cynic, of never believing in this shitty world of sick, opportunistic fucks. It was as if the things that made us human had vanished from our genes, washed out like Flor had said about the axolotl in captivity. We were no longer humans. Humanity was extinct like the axolotl. Gone from our hearts was the most important trait we had once possessed: trust.
Except I could see some of that in Maya. Despite everything she had lived through, she had dug her way out. She smiled and managed herself in a way that offered hope. Whether she cried herself to sleep or had nightmares was something only she would know.
She stopped walking and turned to face me. “So, we’re good?”
I nodded.
“I hope I was able to help you.”
“You did.”
She took a short step back and bit her lower lip.
“Just one thing,” I said. “Do you have any idea who might have killed him?”
She turned her eyes to me. “It could have been anybody. He was involved in drugs. He could have crossed a pimp. Picked up the wrong girl.”
I nodded, but she was walking away, back toward the castle.
“Maya,” I said. “How did you know I was looking for you?”