Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  It couldn’t hurt to get somebody like El Capataz. A source at that level? Could make Dufresne’s career.

  And your own.

  Which is why she was here sitting in no-breeze heat, breathing sour exhaust. For her career.

  She leaned out the window a little bit, hoping to get some fresh air, but that didn’t help much. Still so steamy. Just sitting in the cab she was soaked, sweat on her back, her legs, her lips, everywhere. She felt like the sunflowers in the median looked—drooped and downcast from the morning shower.

  Finally the traffic broke and they got up to pace. There were pedestrians everywhere, catching up with the day’s work after the rain, she guessed. The cabbie kept tapping the horn at someone he knew walking, at intersections, at another cab. He worked the horn in a kind of crude Morse—warnings, touts, and acknowledgments.

  They closed in on the beach, where roadside fruit sellers chopped watermelon and pineapple. Men on bikes towed carts full of inner tubes, swimsuits, goggles. Hawkers held shells and shook towels in the air. They were right close to the water now. She could smell salt spray and yesterday’s shellfish and melon rinds and meat smoking on grills. Playa Miramar, even the name was pretty. She craned her head, hoping for a glimpse of the water, but all she saw was a lighthouse, white and green with streaks of rust.

  She texted Childs. Landed. Going to the place. I’ll be in touch.

  It was her work phone—she’d left her personal phone in the glove box, waiting on a subpoena. It wouldn’t come to that. Dufresne would come around, she’d come back with this cartel underboss. Something good would come.

  The cab turned up a street that evolved into a long boulevard that took them away from the ocean and tourists. A tinge of polymer now, chemicals. Looming concrete walls topped by razor wire. Cranes and towers and grids of pipes and stairs and smokestacks. They went into the Zona Industrial, past a long line of Pemex oil tankers sitting idle on the railway tracks, gated parking lots full of trucks. Jumpsuited workers chatted idly in spangled reflective vests.

  They turned into an oil-slicked gravel drive and came to a gate with a security guard who halted them. The man took a miffed interest in Harbaugh in the back seat, as though she were the latest of the day’s outrages. He called on the phone in his little station. He inspected the trunk, and the car grew hot in the forced stillness. He finally let them through.

  A large American—tanned, late fifties, wearing Brooks Brothers and a silverbelly Stetson—came out of a trailer and waved them on ahead toward a building the size of an Arkansas Walmart.

  When the car pulled in front of a set of huge open bay doors, she paid the cabbie, got out, and stood there with her black duffel, watching the man labor under the heat toward her. Travis Moman. She’d asked Childs to do a background check on him. No priors. Divorced, a house in Houston, mid-six-figure income, permanent-resident status in Mexico. Nothing hinky.

  The cab pulled away as he came up. He took off his hat. He had the welcoming eyes of a natural salesman.

  “You’re Agent Harbaugh?”

  “Diane,” she replied, shaking his outstretched hand. Soft. Fat.

  “I’m Travis Moman,” he said with a Texas-gladhander accent that matched the open road he repropped atop his head. Underneath his manners, she could see he had all kinds of things on his mind, her presence just the latest. He took her bag and headed toward the door next to the open bays and threw it open, beckoning her to go first. He was watching the fence and she looked too, but if there was anything beyond the palms to see, she didn’t.

  “Welcome to Tampico,” he said, in a helpless and wry way.

  She nodded and stepped inside. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness. A sweet tang of solvents. Long rows of pipes and fittings. Crates on high shelves. An idle forklift parked against the wall. It felt like the depot where her father maintained the school buses. A feeling of hidden things. Daddy’s liquor in his tool locker. A feeling she had on cases that found her in auto shops and outbuildings. Bales of coke in hidden compartments. She realized this was such a case, that a narco was tucked away somewhere in this warehouse. An inevitable aptness, a kind of bloodhound déjà vu.

  “What do you do?” she asked, her voice swallowed in the warehouse’s vastness.

  “I sell refinery equipment mostly,” he said as he beckoned her into a side door into a reception area. A few chairs, magazines. Air conditioning.

  “So where’s our guy?”

  “I gotta give you something first,” he said, setting her bag behind the counter, leading her into a hallway through an open door. They passed a lavatory, a supply closet, stopped at an office door, vertical blinds closed against the floor-length window. He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and stood in front of his own desk, hands on his hips. He pointed with his belly and belt buckle at the bricks of cash stacked under the lamp.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “The way it works down here is, I pay. Customs. State, municipal, Pemex, the Finance Ministry. They all get something. No one buys me off.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Back in my day a phone call was a dime.”

  “What else is he paying for?”

  “My everlasting silence, at the very least. A sum like that, I assume he feels entitled to an array of services.”

  “Right.”

  He waved a hand in the direction of the money. “So take it.”

  “Take it where?”

  He stepped over, licked a thumb, and pulled off a bill and held it up. “Tell him no problem for the phone call, we’re square. And then give the rest of the twenty-five Gs back.” When she didn’t make a move for it, he sighed. “I don’t want any trouble. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “I get it,” she said. “But I’m not gonna open with ‘Your money’s no good here.’ Let me get the lay of the land first.”

  “You came alone,” he observed.

  “Just like he asked.”

  Moman looked at the ceiling. The floor. Then over her shoulder at the doorway.

  “Do you have a plan?” he asked. A thing he wouldn’t have asked a man. But a fair question.

  She did not have a plan so much as a few . . . options. For contingencies. If things broke right in any of a half-dozen ways, she’d get Dufresne on the phone and explain and make nice. After all, El Capataz had jumped into her lap. What was she supposed to do? It was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. She could only imagine what an informant at his level could bring in. Operations. Conspirators. Dirty money, dirty banks, dirty authorities. Who knew? Maybe he was just making contact, would have to head back in, would turn informant.

  “Of course I have a plan,” she said. “Why don’t you show me where he is?”

  Moman led her down the wide middle of the warehouse and then hung a left at a row of shelves, unmarked metal objects arranged on them according to some obscure method.

  “There’s about ten refineries just north of here,” Moman said. “Petromex and so on in the Zona Industrial. I move odds and ends for the tankers that come in and out of the port, but most of the stuff here is for refineries. The old man was a wildcatter, so I reckon I come by it natural.”

  Harbaugh listened as the heat and the light streaming in from the high clouded windows in the distant ceiling gave the vast space a cloistral quality. Like summer mass. Stained glass. Smoke from the censer.

  “So he just appeared at your doorstep yesterday without warning?”

  Moman tipped back his hat and let out a thoughtful sigh.

  “Naw. He called ahead, made an appointment with the receptionist to see me. But then I got hung up, ran late. He sat here a few hours at least. I figured he’d blow out and didn’t really give a damn, not knowing who the hell he was. But there he sat, pretty as a prom date. Decked out in the spiffy Western-cut sport coat and the pressed denim jeans and the real silver on his black leather belt. Only thing missing was his boutonniere.”

  “You know he’s a narco.”


  “First impression was only that he was norteño. But him wanting me to call the DEA kinda telegraphed it.”

  Travis slowed their pace in a canyon of shelves, the gloom and heat and odor of metal growing more hellish with every step in this hot warehouse. A true cathedral of the Americas. Not a church—a warehouse. Her head swam. Sweat beaded on the Texan’s neck, ran down his shirt collar. He breathed heavy, this air like a fever.

  “He’s way back here?” Harbaugh asked, sounding more wary than she wanted.

  Travis looked over his shoulder and stopped before a heavy steel door, industrial beige like the walls. Lever handle, key lock. He took off his hat, his hair pasted like a decal to his forehead.

  Then she felt it. A cool stir of air. A smile broke across his face. Then hers. She tilted back her neck to the cool breeze.

  “This joint can get hotter’n a Willie Fourth of July picnic,” he said softly. “Times we’re really busy in the warehouse, I work in there.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the door. “Doubles as a temperature-controlled storage space. There’s a leak in the duct, makes a nice little pool of cool right here.”

  “He’s inside?” she asked, patting the sweat from her neck.

  “Never thought someone would rack out in here, but there you go.”

  “You’re whispering.”

  “Installed a jam bolt yesterday can only be undone from inside.” Moman said this as though it were a sly secret, almost a playful thing. “Why we’re not going in yet. He might could shoot us, we’re not careful.”

  “He’s armed?”

  “Yeah, he’s armed all right,” he said, amused by the question.

  The heat had been oppressive a moment ago, but now she was freezing. She started to cross her arms, but stopped. She didn’t want Travis thinking the cold bothered her, thinking that any of this bothered her. She buttoned her blazer, as if in preparation to meet the man.

  “Three quick, two slow, three quick. A pause and then do two quick, three slow, two quick. And step back for him to open up. He don’t come out. You gotta go in.” He performed the knocks. “You just make sure he knows I ain’t taking that money,” he said, stepping away from the door. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  Ten minutes, and she found she still couldn’t enter the room. It wasn’t fear so much as dread, the same dark-hued knowing feeling that preceded Oscar. Like she was the door.

  She just kept standing there shivering, air-conditioned air pooling at her stationary feet.

  The fuck are you doing.

  After the long flight, she’d had the urge to take off running through an empty alone place. She wanted to feel her muscles straining, sweat stinging her eyes, her lungs thrumming. Instead she was here, standing still, suddenly freezing. No backup, no middle ground between sweltering and freezing, and nothing to do but knock.

  Chapter Nine

  Man in the Box

  The door sealed behind her with a heavy thump. Gustavo Acuña Cárdenas—El Capataz, the Foreman—stood before her on a worn grass mat, his hands open at his sides as if to show her he wasn’t armed. An embroidered brown suit jacket, tan piping. Cowboy angles, gold-and-black untucked Versace button-down, designer jeans with a straight-edge crease broken in places, like a man back from a night out at the dancehall.

  “Buenos días,” he said. “¿O tardes ya?”

  “No, it’s morning—mañana, Señor Acuña,” she said.

  “Llámame Gustavo, por favor,” he said. He pointed behind her. “Cierra la puerta.”

  She looked at him, unsure what the word meant.

  “Lock it,” he said.

  She nodded and popped the bolt in place and he thanked her. It was cold in here too. She resisted a shiver, took stock of the room. His musty musk. A floor lamp with a naked bulb that burned too bright to look at. A 1950s metal desk against the wall, a faux leather office chair and a newer mesh-back one. Filing cabinets, a cot, a cooler, and a rather large television. A greasy paper sack, a sixer of empty Jarritos bottles. Through an open door in the back she could see a toilet and sink. And atop a rumpled sleeping bag on the cot lay two semiautomatic pistols. A Taurus 9 mm and a FN Five-Seven, looked like.

  “I left them over there,” he said of the guns, “to put you at ease.”

  “All right.”

  “To say to you I can be trusted. See?”

  “Yes, I understand. Thank you.”

  He lifted his chin as if to say You’re welcome, of course. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t plain or ugly. His appeal lay in the sense of importance he radiated. Like a beloved mayor or corrupt bureaucrat.

  “I’m a bit surprised you had my card all these years.”

  “I didn’t. We all put them in the trash.” He made a dramatic pause. “But I got a good memory.” He smiled. His veneers glowed.

  “Why’d you memorize it?”

  He pulled over the faux leather chair for her and sat on the cot, springs squealing. He asked her if she wanted anything to drink. Don’t take anything from him. She passed. He nodded, and took up with her question.

  “First time I got arrested in El Norte, I was muy joven, twenty-one, something. Cops on purpose put me in a cell with a bunch of Los Trece Locos. Me, I’m no Loco, they knew I wasn’t, they knew I knew it. Some bad shit.”

  Gustavo held up his fingers. They looked like they’d been broken and glued back together many years ago. He pointed to his left eye socket, which she saw now was out of shape, his nose a bit bulby.

  She nodded, letting him know that she understood.

  “I broke everything defending myself. I bled like an animal.” He popped out his front dentures and sucked them back in. “Went to the dentist, mmmm, five times? Something like that. Some puto finally kills me someday, they gonna get rich with all the gold out my mouth for sure.”

  “That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”

  “Eh, American cops are like that. Pero you, you”—pointing at her—“weren’t like that. You gave me my own cell, made sure I got some food.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah, it was you. And after you left, even one guard start calling me Mister before they deport my ass. Not saying I was treated like no boss. Just like a man, same as others. But that mattered to me, that these things changed after your visit.” He shrugged. “So I remember you. I make sure I remember your number from your card, ’ey.”

  Harbaugh nodded, didn’t say anything. She waited to let him talk. That was the whole point of giving out her card all the time—maybe someday someone would have things to say. Maybe even then she saw it in him. A seed of a notion of a desire to talk.

  But now he sighed and stared off.

  “You never worked in Mexico before, right?” he finally asked.

  “No. California mostly. Virginia, Louisiana, all in the States.”

  “Nobody yet touched you.”

  “Touched me?”

  He laughed. Stopped to look at her—was she serious? foolish?—and then laughed again.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I never seen your name. ¿Entiendes? I never heard Diane Harbaugh mentioned. Never found it wrote down. Nobody down here know you.”

  Was he actually trying to diminish her? You called me, she wanted to say.

  “Mira, I know the books, and there’s names all over,” he said, solemnly. “Many many many names. You got no idea all of them. They keep so much records of things—híjole, ustedes don’t even know.”

  She realized what he was on about.

  “You mean dirty cops,” she said.

  “Dirty anybody. Dirty peónes to dirty presidentes. I’m talking everybody that’s got touched.”

  “You don’t know who to trust.”

  “These days, everyone been touched. Todos. That’s why you are special.”

  “You trusted Mr. Moman.”

  “I paid Señor Moman.”

  “A pretty penny too.”

  “Pretty penny?”

  “Twenty-five grand
.”

  He smiled.

  “What?”

  “Are you—what you call it? ‘Shaking me down’?” He tugged at his sport coat, popped the sleeves.

  She sat up straight, noticed right away what her own body was unconsciously telling her: she needed leverage. A foothold. It ached, in a way. And she’d fucked up, mentioning the money, putting him in the position to give and take.

  So flip it. Find out what he wants. Grant him a wish, so you have something to take away.

  “I’m not shaking you down. Only you can tell me why I’m here now, Señor Acuña.”

  “That is three questions.”

  “Is it,” she said, a touch of tough bitch in it.

  “Por qué you. Por qué here. Por qué now.” He counted these off on his broken fingers. “You? Because you give me your card. And you’re not in the books.” He folded down his ring finger. “Here? Because in this box”—he folded down his middle finger—“nobody can fuck me up.”

  “So why now?”

  He regarded his index finger aloft and then tapped his temple with it.

  “Because what’s in here.”

  He smiled.

  Those front teeth were stunningly white. Enamels like tiny tile. His nails, long crescents, almost delicate. He might have been broken, but he’d been put back together, groomed and perfected. He looked as though he hadn’t a need in the world.

  “I got a big secret,” he finally said. “Enorme.”

  Don’t ask. You don’t give a shit. Let him know you’ve heard this a million times before. And you don’t want a secret. You expect a pipeline of secrets.

  She crossed her hands on her lap.

  “About the Cartel del Golfo,” she said, flatly.

  “Claro. That’s why you came right away, no?”

  He was still smiling. Joy in this sense of leverage. You came right away, you came running. Not in the books. A nobody. An errand girl. Calm down. Choose your words and level the playing field. Find out what he wants . . . and then withhold it.

  “What can I give you for this?” she asked, slightly emphasizing “give,” the gift, her gift to him.

  “A lot. Big help from you is what I want. Enorme.”