Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  “Roibal has been in the process of losing his left eye for a year and a half due to a car crash and an infection. That’s what got him admitted. He was traveling with Pizarro and took advantage of the trip.”

  According to Miller, Roibal had gone in for surgery. For an eye operation? But could Pizarro’s fatal or nearly fatal injuries, injuries inflicted by bullets from Chanes, have been treated in a trauma unit? No. Neither could the cancer described by my contact. Neither cancer nor bullets would have landed him in a trauma unit.

  “The picture of events you painted last December was completely different.” I scratched at the frog, scraping away the dirt caked in the chinks of its stone haunches.

  “The picture was exactly the same,” my contact said. “But at the time I had to account for another disturbing bit of information that I got from you.”

  “Namely?”

  “That Rojano’s widow had hired a professional gunman to kill Pizarro.”

  “Rojano’s widow didn’t hire anyone to kill Pizarro,” I reminded him. Calling Anabela “Rojano’s widow” sounded like deliberately antiseptic police jargon, and it irritated me. “She just happened to hear about Chanes’s plan.”

  “That’s right,” my contact said, “but that wasn’t what I heard at first. What you told me at first was the she’d hired Chanes to kill Pizarro.”

  “That,” I suggested, “was a mistake on my part.”

  “Chanes actually turned out to be exactly what the widow said he was, a loose cannon, a crook on the prowl for a ‘job’. Some contraband here, a hit there. It’s perfectly possible he went to Cuernavaca to see if he could squeeze some money out of the widow by telling her he’d decided to ‘eliminate’ Pizarro. Do you know if she gave him any money?”

  “So far as I know, she didn’t,” I said without knowing one way or the other.

  “The fact is the attack never happened.”

  “Then how did he die?”

  “That’s another thing. I’ll tell you if you promise not to report it.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “I’ll tell you anyway. So long as you don’t print it in the next 10 days and obstruct my investigation.”

  “I’ll go along with 10 days.”

  “The Chanes affair is connected to the office of our friend the chief of metropolitan police,” he said. Instinctively and characteristically, he grasped his dark glasses and adjusted them on the narrow bridge of his nose.

  “Would it be a connection that has to do with public safety?” I said.

  He acknowledged my irony with a smile. One of his major professional difficulties lay in the lawlessness, shady dealings, and threats to public security that flowed like a river from the offices of the chief of metropolitan police.

  “The Chanes affair appears to be about a settling of scores in the police department,” my contact said, taking the last quick drags on his cigarette: a trace of anxiety in a haystack of self-control and restraint. “It could have been a fight over a seizure of stolen goods worth 50 million pesos. It would’ve taken Chanes and his pals several hauls to accumulate and warehouse merchandise worth that much, and people working for our friend would have noticed. They’d have tortured Chanes and his accomplices into confessing, then taken all the merchandise. To cover their tracks, they’d have staged the fatal road accident.”

  “On the very days that Pizarro’s cancer took a turn for the worse and forced him to travel to Houston with Roibal?” I asked reluctantly.

  “On those very days, paisano.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as too much of a coincidence?” I shifted my gaze from the frog to him.

  “Too much of a coincidence, maybe.” He fidgeted with his glasses, then ran his thumb and forefinger over the corners of his mouth.

  “This all happened on days when an emergency forced Pizarro to cancel at the last minute activities he was scheduled to take part in with the state security secretary for Poza Rica,” I went on, bolstering my argument with objections.

  “That’s right, paisano.”

  “The days Chanes said he’d launch his attack on Quinta Bermúdez,” I reminded him.

  “Rule that out,” my contact said hastily. “There was no attack. We’ve got that fully investigated. Never mind Chanes and the attack,” he reiterated, trying once again to focus on the blue sky through the dense foliage of the privet trees.

  “Which should I believe, what you say now, or what you told us in December?” I said by way of voicing my discomfort.

  “You can believe one of two things,” my contact said with a smile, “but only what I’m telling you now is true, paisano. Think about this. It’s a fact that Pizarro already had cancer in December. But in December it also appeared to be a fact that Rojano’s widow took a gamble on getting the cadaver killed.”

  “She never ordered him killed,” I said, sticking to Anabela’s version.

  “I said appeared, paisano. We have nothing to go on but appearances. The widow appeared to have ordered the killing of Pizarro, Pizarro appeared to have taken out the man the widow sent to do it, and he appeared to have threatened the widow by sending her the leather pouch. Sheer appearances, paisano.”

  “But the pouch was delivered. Who sent it if not Pizarro? And why would Pizarro send it on the days immediately following the date when Chanes vowed to attack? And we haven’t heard another word about Chanes since then. Too many coincidences once again.”

  “Once again coincidences,” my contact said softly. “But I’m talking about facts and causes, not coincidences.”

  “Who sent the pouch, then?”

  “I don’t know. It could have been Chanes himself trying to make it easier to get money out of Rojano’s widow.”

  “How was Chanes going to know about the pouches?”

  “As I once told you, paisano, you have the great advantage of being a widely read columnist. Anyone who read your Chicontepec columns knew about the pouches and knows their significance according to you.”

  “Their significance according to Pizarro,” I said.

  “According to you, paisano, and according to your friends.”

  I felt him turn tough the way he had in December at the house in Cuernavaca, then he caught himself and pulled himself together. “You know where those pouches came from?” he said. “Pizarro handed them out during his campaign for reelection as president of Local 35 in 1975. The way others pass out fountain pens he gave away those pouches. Your friend Rojano made them out to be death threats to get your attention. We’ve already talked about that. I don’t think it bears repeating.”

  “And by your reckoning where did Chanes get the pouch to send?”

  “I didn’t say Chanes sent it. I told you I don’t know who sent it. One hypothesis is that Chanes did it to frighten the widow, to pressure her into giving him money.”

  “You didn’t get that impression in December when we showed you the pouch in Cuernavaca.”

  “In December the situation looked to be different.”

  “So do I believe what you’re telling me now or what you told me in December?”

  “Believe whatever you like.”

  He took out his lighter and a second cigarette. I understood the rhetorical usefulness of this small, becalming ritual. It slowed the pace and rhythm of any conversation, inducing cooler heads and mutual restraint, the secular muses of negotiation and harmony. He lit up and exhaled, mildly gratified. “Keep these facts in mind. Pizarro has cancer, and as you’ve just seen, he’ll be dead in a matter of weeks. The widow’s outside the country where she can’t be linked to or held responsible for his death. Once Pizarro’s dead, the real or imagined threat posed by the pouches is moot. Chanes was crazy, and the tangle of problems leading to his death is a whole different story that I hope to have circulating in the national press within a few days.”

  “With charges pending against our policeman friend?” I said, fishing for more information.

  “With charges pending again
st our mutual friend.”

  “A resignation?”

  “There ought to be at least one. But what I need right now is for you to understand me. In December, my only concern was to get Rojano’s widow off the board.”

  “Just call her Anabela. It’s easier.”

  “I use that name strictly to be precise. Don’t misunderstand me.”

  “Don’t mind me either,” I said, acknowledging the senselessness of my irritation.

  “If the widow made the mistake of sending someone to kill Pizarro, as you told me she did, it was in my interest to talk her out of it. With Pizarro dying of cancer, it made less sense than ever. The situation for the two of you was bad enough already, politically speaking. Too prone to scandal, too much pushing and shoving, and extraordinarily dangerous, believe me. It was dangerous for the two of you and also for the government’s relations with the oil workers’ union. And for me as the negotiator caught in the middle. If at the time I’d told Rojano’s widow that Pizarro had cancer, she’d have simply assumed that I wanted to marginalize her. So I said her attack had succeeded.”

  “The widow didn’t order any attack,” I said, sticking with her version to the bitter end.

  “Chanes’s supposed attack,” my contact said by way of clarification. “And that’s what convinced her to leave the country for a while. I lied to her with the truth. What was true then is false now and vice versa. That’s all. As for the rest…” He removed his glasses and again looked up at the sky with an expression of sadness and something like longing that disintegrated into a melancholy smile, “…let me say this. I understand you very well. The widow’s an impressive woman. I still haven’t figured her out, and I don’t think you have either. I call her ‘the widow’ not to belittle her but out of respect. And also, as I might as well tell you, with a bit of envy for not having met her under more favorable circumstances. Envy of you, of the mayor, of the men who have left their scent there.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” I said.

  “I know you do, paisano.”

  He put his cigarette out on the haunch of one of the frogs, cleanly removing the ember. “Some friends are getting together in private tonight.” He took his glasses off. “Do you want to come?”

  I wrote up a detailed account of the interview and had an Eastern Airlines pilot take it to Los Angeles for Anabela. On April 28, I learned from the correspondent in Veracruz and confirmed with Bucareli that Pizarro was comatose. On an afternoon a week later, the newspaper got notice of his death. I happened to be in the office of the editor in chief discussing a lengthy series of interviews with labor leaders that the paper had spent a month trying to set up. The oil workers’ leadership wanted me to be the interviewer, and the editor was spelling out the journalistic advantages of such an arrangement. The cable reached his desk in the hands of an aide.

  “Pizarro died,” it said.

  My stomach did a quick somersault followed immediately by a kind of uncontrollable euphoria. “Tell them I agree to do the interviews,” I told the editor, “on whatever terms you decide.”

  It was 3:00 in the afternoon. I left the office and called our correspondent to check on details of the death. Then, from the long distance booth at the newspaper, I called Los Angeles. Anabela herself answered the phone.

  “Pizarro died at noon,” I told her.

  There was a long silence from the other end of the line.

  “What’s the date today, Negro?” She sounded dazed.

  “Wednesday, May 4.”

  “Wednesday, May 4, 1980,” Anabela said. “It makes me want to cry.”

  “Then cry.”

  “I don’t know how to cry. Rojano was right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “Revenge is a dish you have to eat cold,” Anabela said, her voice frozen solid. “When’s the burial?”

  “Tomorrow in Poza Rica.”

  “With full honors?”

  “With full union honors, yes.”

  “Will you be home tonight? I’d like you to talk to the children for a while. They’ve missed you.”

  “I miss them too.”

  “Send me a kiss. I feel a void in the pit of my stomach. It seems to me like wanting to cry.”

  I ate at Passy with a presidential adviser bursting with enthusiasm for the SAM project announced on March 18. I listened placidly as he went on and on in minute detail about the possibilities and resources for achieving nutritional self-sufficiency in Mexico, about the aberrant use of farmland for cattle grazing, about returning rural areas to crops strategic to the Mexican diet, about the prospect of enriching food staples in just a few years through agroindustrial processes that would add soy to tortillas and double at a single stroke the national protein intake.

  After eating, for the first time since Anabela left for Los Angeles, I drank a cognac and smoked a cigar. I cancelled a commitment for a late evening meal, bought magazines from Spain at Sanborn’s, and took refuge in the Cine Latino.

  Back at Artes, I gave Doña Lila the news that the children would be calling. I took off my shoes and tie, poured myself a whiskey, and got down to reading the SAM documents I’d been given at Passy They amounted to a history of its bureaucratic gestation that began with a memo from Cassio Luiselli, who dreamed up the scheme, and culminated in ambitious agroindustrial proposals buttressed by import substitution and the adaptation of new technologies. Two whiskeys later, around 11:00 at night, I heard a knock on the door and the click of a key in the lock as she came in. She was dressed in black leather from head to toe with a red bandanna tied around her neck. She was radiant as if bathed in an aura whose power over me had been cushioned by distance and forgotten. Once again I was caught by surprise as I’d been three and a half years before. She invaded my privacy and deprived me of the means to respond to her intervention.

  “I couldn’t resist, Negro.” She rolled her wheeled suitcase into the apartment as if it were a purebred dog. “I got the 6 o’clock flight out of Los Angeles. I couldn’t resist.”

  I remained seated on the sofa where I was reading. The sight of her maneuvering the suitcase while deploying her alibi dazzled me. In the most flattering way she could, she explained her decision to travel and come to me. She was like a model doing a turn on the runway to show off her outfit, graceful, fresh and euphoric. “Rather than cry, I decided to celebrate,” she said. “But we haven’t slept together. Aren’t you even going to kiss me?”

  I stood up and embraced her. We kissed. Then Anabela got out her cigarettes and lit one, staining it as always with her lipstick, then she sat down in one of the pigskin chairs with one leg crossed and nervously jiggling.

  “Won’t you at least offer me a vodka on the rocks?”

  I poured her a vodka on the rocks.

  “I wouldn’t want to catch you off guard,” Anabela said. “You need to tell me if there’s someone in the bedroom.”

  “There isn’t anybody.”

  “If there’s someone in the bedroom I can turn my back to the hallway for about 15 minutes while you get her out of here. I promise not to look, listen or remember. Do you need 15 minutes.”

  “No.”

  “You mean she just left?”

  “No.”

  “Then why the degenerate face of a guy who just got laid? You look like you’re about to tell me you’ve come down with a case of Vietnamese gonorrhea. You didn’t take on an admirer or a beginner without protection, then?”

  “No beginners,” I said

  “Then veterans only? You caught the Vietnamese clap?”

  “No.”

  “Boyfriend, sweetheart, consoler, confidant?”

  “Nothing of the kind.”

  “So you’ve missed me, Negro.”

  “Lots.”

  “Enough to be faithful?”

  “To overflowing.”

  “And may your cock fall off if you’re lying to me?”

  “May you come down with the Vietnamese clap if I’m lying to yo
u.”

  She took two gulps of vodka and proceeded to the bedroom with her suitcase in tow. From the bedroom she asked for another vodka which I took to her, but by then she’d crawled under the covers and left her clothes on the floor and her earrings, watch and bracelet next to the night table.

  The first encounter was quick and superficial, but half an hour later the second was prolonged and intense. I went for more whiskey and vodka. When I returned, Anabela was setting the alarm clock.

  “That’s it,” she said. “We have to get up early tomorrow. You know why, don’t you?”

  She hesitated before holding my face in her cold hands, which weren’t quite so cold now, and looked at me for a moment, smooth, relaxed and blindingly beautiful, before asking, “You know why I came, don’t you, Negro?”

  “For Pizarro’s burial,” I said.

  “And to see you, Negro. To see you. But the burial’s a one-time thing. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “I’ve got to improve my relations with the oil workers. I’m about to do a long series of interviews with their leadership.”

  “Then you’re coming with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I bought tickets on the plane to Tampico for 7:00 tomorrow.”

  “I know the way,” I said.

  And I did.

  I fell asleep thinking about the “reasons of accuracy” that invariably motivated my contact to refer to Anabela as “Rojano’s widow.” I was also aware of the rocky road his possession had traveled and which once again seemed to be reaching its end.

  There was no need to ask the way to Pizarro’s funeral in Poza Rica. All you had to do was follow the garlands and banners bidding Pizarro farewell, vowing to remember him always and to walk in his footsteps. The garlands began right at the turnoff to the cemetery on the city’s outskirts and stretched all the way to its center along the major thoroughfares and down the side streets leading to the headquarters of the oil workers’ union. From there the mortal remains of Lázaro Pizarro would depart on the stroke of noon. The way was even easier to follow by virtue of the crowds lined up behind an interminable string of barriers set up along the sidewalks of the route to be taken by the funeral procession. We left the car barely ten blocks from where we entered the city and set out to follow the flowers and the crowds.