Donkey Show, part one

DONKEY SHOW



Chapter One

In the fall of 1993, as the United States and Mexico negotiated continental free trade, a reporter named Tom Harley prowled the Mexican border at El Paso, Texas. He was looking for nuggets of news that would fuel the free-trade debate, stories that could get picked up on the wire and send his byline up to Washington or New York. It was this vague hope of a career event that had Harley biking around on the Mexican side of the border, looking for news on drugs. His reporting method in Mexico, rarely successful, involved eating in cheap restaurants and eavesdropping.
This café, within sight of El Paso, served up tasty enchiladas and lots of loud conversation. The man doing most of the talking was stretched out under the restaurant stove, banging on pipes with what sounded like a monkey wrench. In his border Spanish, he was describing the murder of a radio reporter. "He got his lungs ripped out," he said.
A cop who was sitting at the table next to Harley's disagreed. "You tell me," he said, his mouth brimming with refried beans, "just how they'd go about ripping a reporter's lungs out. That's no easy job." The cop had his feet crossed, one of them tapping at Harley's chair.
"Through his neck!" came the voice from under the stove.
"God help me," the policeman said, laughing.
"Then with a hacksaw."
Harley looked with a waning appetite at his steaming plate of barbecued ribs. He'd sparked the discussion a few minutes earlier, casually asking if anyone had ever heard of Gustavo Jiménez.
Heard of him! Everyone had a story or two about the local drug lord. The man under the stove claimed that Jiménez had pet tigers roaming through his mansion on the east side of Juarez. He had a harem, too, he said, and threw all-night parties. The cop added that Jiménez sometimes popped out his glass eye and dropped it in people's drinks, for a laugh. They went on to discuss the radio reporter, who had aired stories about Jiménez's cozy relations with the government. Later the reporter washed up on the south side of the Rio Grande with his neck slit. Or his lungs ripped out.
Harley, who'd already heard a few of these stories, asked why no one arrested Jiménez.
This provoked hoots of laughter from under the stove. The cop looked gravely for a moment at his feet, still tapping at Harley's table, and then asked a waiter if they had any salsa de chipotle. The beans were awfully dry.
Harley was rolling meat into his first burrito when the cellular phone beeped loudly in his pocket. The small crowd in restaurant looked at him, aware that the tall Gringo's questions may not have been purely casual. Harley hurried outside. But by the time he got there, the phone stopped beeping. He peered down for a second, as if a small animal cradled in his hand had stopped breathing. Then he folded it and jammed it into his pocket.
He finished his lunch in silence and paid his bill. Then he unlocked his bike and pedaled around the ragged downtown of Ciudad Juarez.
Harley was no drug reporter. In his 10 years at the El Paso Tribune, he cheerfully handled jobs no one else wanted, like weekend cops, obits, even the weather page. He wrote droll features about the latest in rattlesnake chili, and profiled retired astronauts in Alamogordo. It was Harley's good nature and versatility, in large part, that protected his job during the financial crises at the Tribune, which were growing more common. The man had no enemies. But he also had few friends, and kept his personal life under wraps. He seemed to avoid the women at the paper, and he hid his dark good looks in sloppy clothes that he bought by the pound in the warehouses near the river.
Harley had a remarkable ear for language and spoke perfect Spanish, far better than the reporters on the Juarez beat. But he'd long abandoned any dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent. In truth, he didn't know what he wanted. One year, dreaming of the Tour de France, he biked the desert mountains and picked up French. Later, he took an interpreter's course in Spanish, thinking about a career at the United Nations. It didn't pan out. His latest dream was to cash in on his impersonations, maybe develop a routine for one of the comedy clubs.
He was working on a syrupy Bill Clinton as he peddled around Juarez, digesting his ribs, on this steamy September afternoon. His idea for the Jiménez story was merely to profile the drug lord, work up a Style piece, something he might be able to sell to a magazine.
As he rode past the concrete Juarez Cathedral, the phone rang again.
He jumped off the bike and answered. His city editor, Duane Canfield, wanted to know what he was working on.
A truck roared past, blowing a black cloud in Harley's face. "Drugs," he yelled.
"What's that?"
"Drugs, Duane." Harley yelled louder. He glanced at a traffic cop, who seemed to be looking his way. Another loud truck was moving by.
"Harley, shut your goddamned windows and speak up. I can't hear you."
"I'm on my bike, chief."
"You say you're in Mexico on your bike?"
"Right. That way I skip the lines at the bridge on the way back."
The truck passed, and Harley could hear some laughter from the El Paso newsroom, and he heard Canfield's Marine-Corps voice telling them to keep quiet. Then, "Harley, you pedal back here right now. We got another story we want you to put together."
He hustled back across the bridge, playing Canfield's drawling voice in his mind.

* * *

Hank DuChamps, the only reporter at the Tribune to type with two fingers, was pecking away when suddenly his screen blanked, and another story popped up on it. DuChamps was just about to abort this apparition when he saw that it came from the competing paper, under a byline: by Rick Jarvis of the Journal Staff. DuChamps leaned forward on one elbow, running his free hand through shoulder-length blonde hair, and started to read.
City Editor Duane Canfield was walking in from the bathroom, still tucking in his shirt when DuChamps called him to his terminal and showed him the Journal story, something about industrial development in Juarez.
"A billion dollars," Canfield whistled between his teeth, not bothering to ask DuChamps how he got the story on his screen. "This is the company that did the IPO last week, right? Grupo Espejo?"
DuChamps shrugged.
Canfield nudged him from his seat, and maneuvered his bear like body in front of the computer. Then he scrolled down the story with his right pinkie. "We're going to have to do this one ourselves," he said, "or something better."
He was about to assign it to DuChamps, but then held back. DuChamps was a good reporter, but ignorant. This story didn't need more reporting, just a snappy lead and a couple paragraphs of analysis. A perfect assignment for Harley, a horseshit reporter who could think.
Pressure was mounting on Canfield. Earlier that day, his boss, Ken Perry, had dragged him into the corner office and delivered a grim message. The Trib was getting scooped too much, he said. Though this was hardly a new problem, the implications were growing. The board of the parent company was meeting in ten days in St. Louis, and they'd be deciding whether to pull the plug on the 100-year-old El Paso Tribune. In the meantime, Perry said, he was instructed to FedEx copies of both morning papers, the Trib and its rival, the Journal, to all of the board members. "They're watching us get scooped every goddamn day," he said.
"With what you're spending on postage," Canfield said, "we could probably run this paper for a couple more years."
"You do your job, I'll worry about mine."
Canfield lumbered out of the corner office. To save the paper, he'd have to step it up a notch, spend more time developing stories and stop fooling around so much on the job with his investment portfolio. And he'd have to squeeze more production out of staff deadbeats.
When Harley walked in the newsroom, carrying his bike helmet, Canfield was conferring with a couple of assistant city editors. Barely looking in Harley's direction, the editor pointed to his computer. "Read this."
Harley craned his head in front of Canfield's screen and stretched his right hand over to the scroll key. "Whose story is this?" he asked.
"Yours," Canfield said. "Your first big scoop. Read it."
After Harley read the article, Canfield questioned him about his drug reporting in Juarez. Harley told him about the drug lord, Jiménez, and a few of the stories. He was building a luxury hotel called Xanadu near the airport. Harley kept quiet about the tigers.
Canfield, slumped in his swivel chair, scratched his mustache, looking unimpressed. "Who are your sources?"
"On this side, the DEA," Harley said. "A guy I know in the Embassy in Mexico City. Then, there are people in Juarez. And a sergeant I know in the State Judicial Police."
"Does the DEA think Jiménez's people slit that reporter's neck over in Juarez?"
Harley was surprised Canfield knew enough to ask. "They're not sure. They were going to do a computer search for me, on the name."
"This is the cocaine king in Juarez, and they have to do a computer search on his name?"
"The people here know him. But they don't tell me anything about him. It's my source in Mexico City who's going to do the computer search."
Canfield sat looking at Harley, bemused, still stroking his mustache with his long, nicotine-stained fingernail. "Since when do you have sources, Harley?"
"Not really a source," he conceded. "But I talked to a guy." He sat back and crossed his arms. He wasn't used to this kind of grilling from Canfield. "Look Duane. I wasn't expecting to write this up today. All I have now is the bare bones of the cocaine business... and some color."
"What color you got?"
"Nothing we can go with yet."
"Give it to me Harley."
"What's going on with you?"
"Don't ask."
Harley leaned back and sighed. "OK. He lives in a palace over by the Centro Cultural. He has a glass eye he pops out. He has a harem. He's got a bunch of pet tigers running around his house as pets."
"Tigers? Real tigers? In his house?"
"Well I don't guess they're Siberians," Harley said. "Probably just the mountain cats they have in Central America."
"But they call them tigers, right? Tee-grays."
"Yeah. Tigres."
"That's the kind of detail we're looking for." Canfield nodded, looking impressed. He paused, thinking for a second. "If this guy's sitting over there with tigers and a harem, and everybody knows about it, why don't they just arrest him?"
"From what I'm hearing, Jiménez owns the cops. He might even be a cop."
"Oh." Canfield looked gravely at Harley for a couple seconds and then announced the plan. "OK Harley. You're going to tie your drug story together with this maquiladora story. See if you can get those tee-grays into the lead."
"We stole this story from the Journal," Harley said, "and you expect me to use it in my own story?"
"You got a problem with that?" Canfield asked, staring him down.
"Well..." Harley looked down. "Couldn't they sue us for plagiarism?"
"Fuck no. Just change the lead."
"OK," Harley nodded. "And I'm just going to go into the implications of it all?"
"Uh huh. This company, Grupo Espejo, just did an IPO last week. The timing couldn't be better." Canfield slowed down. "You do know what an IPO is, don't you Harley?"
"Sure, they sold stock."
"That's right."
"But what are the implications, of the story?" Harley asked.
"Drugs. Don't you see it?"
"You mean the trucks."
"Of course! You've got them building all these maquiladoras, which means that thousands more trucks will be crossing those bridges, carrying components and wires and solder and what-have-you to Juarez, and then shipping all the assembled stuff back. Any fool can guess they'll be putting cocaine on those northbound trucks... At least they could. Get the Mexican developer..." Canfield scrolled the text looking for the name. "Get this Onofre Crispín to answer some questions about this. At least get his denial." He lowered his voice and swung his head toward the corner office. "I'll tell you something," he added, "Ken'll love it. He hates the fucking hypocrisy over there."
Canfield heaved to his feet, pulled at his belt, and began walking toward the snack bar. "Get writing," he said. "And don't go soft on that color you got, or I'll just edit it in there myself."
"All right," Harley said. "But I don't see how I'll get the tigers into the lead."



Chapter Two

A photographer named Eddie Stevenson was on call near Canfield's desk the following Monday afternoon when the phone rang. An editor at The Baltimore Sun told Canfield he'd picked up Harley's story on the news wire. He wanted to know if the Tribune had art to run with it, maybe a picture of the drug lord's new hotel in Juarez, Xanadu. Canfield was surprised that a reputable paper like the Sun would want to run Harley's story. But he knew it could pay off for the Trib, as it struggled to survive, to break a national story. He told Stevenson to head over to Juarez and shoot the building.
For Stevenson, an assignment in Juarez was a license to disappear for a half day. Lunch at Julio's, with a bowl of tortilla soup, and maybe a margarita or two. He hadn't read Harley's article on drugs, but to shoot a hotel, who needed to read?
Stevenson, who'd been at the Tribune nearly as long as Harley, wasn't much of a photographer. But he cultivated a certain image as an artiste. He wore cowboy boots and drove a beat-up '65 Dodge Dart. Unconventional. And he'd been living in the South El Paso barrio the last few months with a Mexican woman. No Gringo at the paper had ever done that.
He hurried to the lot and pulled the Dodge east onto I-10. He cranked up some Blue Oyster Cult on the stereo and groped under the floor mat for a joint. Lighting it, he checked the rear-view mirror for cops and noticed an old Plymouth with Juarez plates riding his tail. Stevenson accelerated and left the Plymouth in a cloud of exhaust. A few minutes later, he crossed the Cordova Bridge to Juarez, flicking the roach out the window toward the Rio Grande.
He'd been having some problems with his girlfriend, Estela. She said she was pregnant, which he doubted. And she was bugging him quite a bit about moving out of the barrio, into some air-conditioned condos near the mall. Stevenson, who couldn't communicate too well with Estela, was hard-pressed to explain the appeal of a Third-World romance. But he knew it wouldn't survive a move to a First-World condo. A couple of times, he'd had to get rough with her.
As he drove through the back streets of Juarez, stoned and heading for his favorite restaurant, Stevenson was able to put aside the problems and concentrate on what he liked about life with Estela: her soft voice when called him "Eduardito," the taste of spices in her mouth, breasts the size of mangoes.
Stevenson lunched in grand style, with guacamole and chips, tortilla soup and beef tacos, washing it all down with a pitcher of margaritas, followed by coffee and dessert. He later made his way out through the parking lot to the Dodge, feeling dizzy in the heat. As he struggled to steer the Dodge in a single lane, he wondered if he was getting sick. He kicked himself for ordering the flan.
He finally found the hotel. It was rising in the shape of a pyramid on a sun-splashed lot. He parked and was reaching toward the back seat for his camera gear, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
"Huh?"
It was two young men. Kids. Saying something in Spanish about "private property." They said their boss wanted to talk to him. They loaded Stevenson and his gear into the back seat of an old Plymouth Duster. Then one of them strapped a bandanna around his eyes.

* * *


It was almost dark when Stevenson limped back into the newsroom. He had a nasty cut over his eye and matted blood in his black mustache, dirt all over his shirt, and he smelled like soiled diapers. Wordlessly he emptied broken cameras and flash gear from his black bag, leaving a pile of it on the assignment desk. Then he turned to no one in particular and said, "Rough shoot."
Ken Perry, the tall, tweedy editor, with a desperate ambition to escape his sinking paper in El Paso, emerged from his corner office carrying the front-page lay-out just as Stevenson was turning to leave. Perry recoiled at first, thinking some hobo had found his way into the newsroom. But when he recognized the photographer, he zeroed in for the story. He shepherded Stevenson into his office, laid a newspaper on a chair and asked him to sit down. Then, considering Stevenson's smell, Perry told him to stay on his feet.
Perry had never thought much about Stevenson. He'd always considered him a burned-out case, a good candidate for the next round of downsizing -- if the Trib survived to see it. The editor had never noticed how short Stevenson was, probably only about 5-7 or 5-8. And the mustache curving over his lips made him look Mexican.
Perry sat on the corner of his desk and asked the photographer what happened.
"I got my ass kicked," Stevenson said. "They broke my cameras, too."
"Who's they?"
"Jiménez. You know. The drug lord."
Perry's face snapped to attention.
Stevenson went on to explain that a couple of Jiménez's thugs picked him up as he was shooting the hotel. They blindfolded him and drove him to a lot where they beat him, mock executed him with a pistol, stamped on his cameras. Then Jiménez himself came in, he said, and talked to him a little bit about American newspapers, Nafta, the DEA.
"Wait a sec," Perry said. He opened the door of his office and yelled, "Hold the front page!" Then he called in Canfield, who was back from the snack bar. And he told a reporter, Hank DuChamps, to bring in a notebook and a pen.
"Did Jiménez say anything about Harley's story?" Perry asked Stevenson, as Canfield and DuChamps made their way into the office.
"Oh yeah," Stevenson said. "He told me to tell Harley he was 'dead meat'."

* * *

Harley inhabited a small, bare apartment in the oldest neighborhood in El Paso, Sunset Heights. His building, an old, partitioned mansion with a courtyard, was wedged between the downtown and the University. It was within pistol range, Harley figured, of the Juarez slums, whose constellation of light bulbs sparkled each night out his living room window. Downstairs from Harley lived his friend Claudio, who used to be an assistant editor at the Tribune. Claudio, who was gay and didn't do much to hide it, never got along too well with his boss, Duane Canfield. And when a teaching position opened up at the community college, he said good-bye to the Tribune and Canfield, and immediately grew his dark, thinning hair into a ponytail.
Monday night, after Stevenson dragged his beaten body back to the Tribune, Claudio heard Harley's phone ring. It didn't stop. Claudio, who was cooking a Spanish omelet, turned on some Mozart to drown it out. When the CD was finished and his omelet eaten, the phone was still ringing.
Something was up. Claudio hurried downtown, to Miguel's Cafe, where he figured Harley would be watching Monday Night Football. But that night, Harley was watching it up on Mesa, near the university, speaking Portuguese to an Angolan bartender he'd met. By the time Claudio got back home, the phone was quiet. A couple hours later, he heard Harley banging up the stairs with his bike, singing to himself in a foreign language.
The next morning, as usual, Claudio put on hot water for tea and turned on some jazz, softly, so as not to bother his upstairs neighbor, Harley. Then, wrapping himself in his black silk housecoat, he went outside for Harley's paper. Claudio was whistling, looking at Juarez and the silhouette of mountains behind it. But he stopped suddenly when he looked at the paper and saw the screaming headline: "Photographer Abducted, Beaten in Juarez." And when he read the sub-head, "Drug Lord Jiménez Issues Death Threat to Trib's Harley," Claudio remembered the ringing phone.


Chapter Three

By the time Harley reached the Tribune that morning, a copy of the paper under his arm, he was a hero. Ken Perry, his tie already loosened a quarter of the way down his shirt, hurried out of his corner office to greet him. Harley had never seen him smile quite so broadly. "Tommy," he said, grabbing his arm. Perry led him into the corner office, followed by Canfield, and shut the door.
"I think there's been some kind of misunderstanding," Harley said, looking dazed.
"I know you have some personal concerns here. And we're going to think about that first," Perry said. "Right Duane?" Canfield nodded and sat down. Harley sat next to him on the couch.
Perry reached into his jacket pocket for a lighter and worked on his pipe, producing a cloud of smoke around his head. "Security's number one," he said. But this is a hell of a great story. And we're going to ride it. I know you're probably worried now. But you're going to look back on this as a career-maker."
The phone rang. Perry nodded at Harley, as if to punctuate the career message, and then walked to his desk to answer it. "Yeah, I'll take it in here." He shielded the phone from his mouth and whispered to Harley and Canfield, "AP, Dallas."
"Hi there. Yeah...Let me tell you something. We're here on the border, and maybe we have a different way of looking at these things. But a gentleman named Jiménez just sent us a very clear, unequivocal message. He beat up our photographer and he sent a death threat to our reporter, who incidentally, is reporting the hell out of this drug story... The message he sent us is that he can run around there in Juarez, selling drugs, poisoning our kids, raking in his millions, and then just thumb his nose across the river at us. We're taking that as a challenge... We're going to expose that señor and his whole rotten business, even if it takes us to the president of Mexico. And we're going to get him thrown in jail... What's that? No. Get the drug lord thrown in jail." Perry leaned back in his desk chair and puffed on his pipe.
Perry went on say that Harley, who "broke this story wide open," was the Trib's "lead drug reporter."
As his editor talked, Harley recalled that he carried a flattened joint in his wallet. He'd found it a few weeks before on the Sun Bowl parking lot, and planned to send it to his old college roommate, who still smoked dope. Now that he was the drug reporter, Harley figured he should flush it down the toilet.
"I'm on drugs now, for good?" he asked, as Perry hung up.
"If we took you off drugs," Perry said, "Jiménez would think we were scared of him."
Harley straightened up on the couch and cleared his throat.
"Listen," Perry said, "do you realize where this story could put you?"
"I'm trying not to dwell on it," Harley said.
"You're going to be on the front page of The Dallas Morning News tomorrow," Perry said. "The State Department's hot on this story. This is leverage, Tom. They can use this to make the Mexicans open up on the drug business. But it's leverage for us too, and for you. You could work here another 50 years and never get another story like this."
"I think I'd trade this story for 50 years of life," Harley said.
Perry ignored him. "First we have to think about tomorrow's paper. You're going to go through your notebooks, work your sources on the phone, and write a follow-up to your story last week. We need more details on Jiménez's life style. More about the tigers, parties. His women. His contacts with the politicos over there. We're going to get inside that guy's skin."
Harley sat back, wondering how he was going to come up with all this reporting. He turned to Canfield and said, "I guess I'll have to trade in my bike for an armored car."
Canfield laughed. "At least you wear that helmet."
Harley played back Canfield's voice in his mind, repeating "hailmut" to himself a few times.
"One thing I want to figure out," Perry said. "What the hell went on over there between you and Jiménez that has him behaving like this?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Harley said. "Do you think Stevenson heard him right when he was talking about 'dead meat'? Does Stevenson understand Spanish?"
"He lives in the barrio with a Mexican girl," Canfield said.
"Do you know whether Jiménez was speaking Spanish?" Harley asked. He wondered about "dead meat." Carne muerta? No one ever said that.

* * *

About three miles away, across the border from the towering Asarco smelter, Gato pulled his '75 Duster up to the gate of the Lavarama. It was a car wash where he and his partner, Simón, ran their drug business. Alfredito, the little car-washer, was sitting on the sidewalk outside the locked gate, in the shade of the dumpster with his friend who worked a Popsicle cart. As Gato stepped out of the car to open the big sheet-metal gate to the car wash, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. He handed it to Alfredito. "Go over to El Paso," he told him in Spanish, "and buy the newspapers."
"Over the bridge?" Alfredito asked.
"No, just down to Anapra, through the fence."
When the Popsicle boy saw that Alfredito had money, he tried to collect for back popsicles. Alfredito pulled away from him and jammed the bill into his pocket. And the two boys ran toward the border.
Despite the fancy name, the Lavarama was just an empty dirt lot surrounded by brick walls. The car wash sat right where the city of Juarez, with its paved streets, gave way to a shantytown called Colonia 20 de Noviembre, where people kept pigs and chickens in little backyard pens. A water trough ran along one wall. A pyramid of motor oil stood near it, and on a picnic table shaded by an umbrella was a selection of car waxes and detergents. A little brick building in one corner of the lot housed the office and bodega, or warehouse, where Gato and his partner Simón stored the cocaine, and sometimes a little marijuana.
Gato, gangly and bow-legged, with a Fu Manchu mustache, started to open the padlock on the office. Then he remembered to close the Lavarama's gate and hang out the hand-painted sign, Cerrado. He didn't want anyone coming for a car wash before Alfredito got back.
The office smelled like a bus-station bathroom and looked like the scene of a cockfight. There was a broken chair and a streak of blood along the wall, a cream-colored puddle of vomit under the desk, and even a few drops splattered across the poster of Miss Bardahl, a blonde with a monkey wrench, whose body seemed to shine with grease. A pool of mineral water covered the desk, barely bubbling now. That was Simón's stupid idea, to put soda water up the photographer's nose. The toy pistol with the plastic ivory handle lay on the floor by a piece of the chair. Gato still couldn't believe the photographer took that pistol, with its little plastic click, so seriously.
Gato filled a bucket in the trough and began swabbing the floor. After a few seconds, he stood up and turned on the radio, searching out a station with boleros. When the news came on, Gato stopped swabbing and listened. El magnate H. Ross Perot making more noise against Nafta, claiming Mexico was a country full of corruption. Well, that much was true, agreed Gato, thinking about the cops he knew, and about don Gustavo's contacts in the political world.
Gato listened to the news half hoping and half afraid that they'd mention something about that photographer. Beating him was probably a mistake. But Rubén, the American, said the photographer was snooping around don Gustavo's businesses. At first it seemed like something the boss might be grateful for. News interdiction. Practically as soon as Simón introduced himself as Jiménez, the photographer shit in his pants, which was funny to see. Gracioso. And then Rubén took over as Jiménez, talking English, and the guy didn't even notice.
The radio news came to an end without word about the photographer, leaving Gato a little disappointed.
Gato and Simón had been working for Jiménez's organization for nearly three years, first as drivers. They picked up shipments in Chihuahua City and at air strips around the state, and brought them to Juarez. It was a year ago that the boss set them up at the Lavarama. They made more money there, running a small distribution center. And don Gustavo even gave them the chance to go into business for themselves. They set up their retail network for El Paso, and paid him a cut. In the middle of the summer, they hired Rubén to run El Paso for them. He was an American citizen, born in an El Paso hospital. He spoke good English. But he hadn't brought in much business yet. Simón was already fed up with him. Rubén was more interested in politics than money, he said.
It was true. But Rubén's politics were contagious. During those long empty days at the Lavarama, Rubén talked to them about their business and their ambitions, and he convinced them, little by little, that they were getting screwed.
"You're pawns," he said one hot afternoon. "Peones."
"But if you work for us, you're even lower," Simón argued.
"No," said Rubén, shaking his finger. "I let myself appear to be lower. But I have a different agenda than you."
Because he was a homo? Gato wasn't sure. But Rubén was right that don Gustavo, with his French champagne and his women, was living a lot higher than Gato and Simón at the dusty Lavarama.
Gato was carrying the pieces of broken chair out to the trash can when Simón slipped through the gate like a burglar. He always moved like that. Short and thin, with steel-rimmed glasses and close-cut hair, he wore a button-down shirt and carried a leather shoulder bag. He looked more scholarly than Rubén, who actually went to college in El Paso, or at least said he did.
Simón had a violent side. The day before, he wanted to hurt that photographer. Gato could tell. It was when Gato and Rubén told him to go easy that he got angry and pounded the flimsy chair in half with his fist. Lately, Simón had been saying that violence was the only way up in the drug business. "No one promotes you for running a good warehouse," he said. "They don't even notice."
Gato looked back from the trash can to see Simón heading into the office. "Don't walk in there!" he shouted. "The floor's wet."
Simón waved him off and tracked muddy footprints into the office. Gato heard him fiddling with the radio, turning from the boleros to heavy metal. "Any news?" Simón yelled.
"El magnate Ross Perot says there's corruption in Mexico," deadpanned Gato.
Simón stuck his head out from the office, waiting for a serious answer. "Come on," he said.
"I sent Alfredito for the El Paso papers."
"Mmmmm" Simón appeared to give the matter some thought as he walked out toward his partner. "Do you think we went too far with it yesterday, using the jefe's name?"
"Probably," Gato said.
Alfredito banged at the gate and burst in with an arm full of English-language newspapers. He dropped them on the ground, sending up a cloud of dust.
Gato ran to the pile, knelt down and flipped through the papers. A National Enquirer, with a front page story about Roseanne Barr. Nothing on the El Paso Journal. Then he saw the Tribune, with its banner headline about the drug lord Jiménez kidnapping the photographer in Juarez. A picture of Stevenson, looking dazed, stared up at him. Gato felt a wave of panic, followed by indignation. "How could they say it was Jiménez?" he said. "It wasn't him."
Simón, standing over him, laughed. "Because we told him we were Jiménez."
"You told him you were Jiménez," Gato said, his voice high and nervous.
"Ah, don't start blaming. Look," Simón said, pointing to Stevenson's picture, "you can see some of the vomiton on his shirt."
Gato raced through the article, while Simón, who didn't understand much English, picked up the Enquirer.
"Ay Dios," Gato said, reading. "They're asking the State Department to press for Jiménez's arrest."
"Look," Simón said, laughing. "A old woman with three tits."
"Don't you hear what I'm saying?" Gato ripped the Enquirer from Simón's hands. "They might have to put Jiménez in jail to save the Nafta!"
Simón, suddenly serious, said, "don Gustavo's arrest could work out nicely for us." He took the paper from Gato and looked at Stevenson's picture. Then he turned the page and studied Harley's face. He threw the paper to the ground and walked toward the gate. "I'm heading over there to take a look."
"Where?"
"Across the river."


Chapter Four

Harley emerged from the dark lobby of the newspaper building into the blinding mid-morning sunlight. He was doing his voices, a little Marlon Brando now, trying to sound tough. He had no plan. He just wanted to get away from the editors, who were clamoring for more reporting. Harley had trouble adjusting to the new demands of his job. When he wrote about alligator chili, Claudio never banged on his door, as he did this morning, yelling at him to catch the first plane out of town. Before running away, though, Harley wanted to taste a bit of stardom, even if it came with a death threat.
He walked toward the old Paso de Norte hotel. He'd eat an expensive lunch there, and think things over.
Walking in past the potted palms, he saw a lovely dark-haired woman he recognized from a few parties he'd gone to. He tried to remember her name. He remembered listening to her voice once, and thinking he’d impress her by identifying it not just as New York, but as Queens or Brooklyn. But by the time he’d settled on Queens, she was talking with someone else.
There was something tough about her, Harley thought as he looked at her, and she looked like she spent a lot of money on clothes. She was wearing a beige linen suit and eating an $10 club sandwich. He saw she was reading the front page of the Tribune. The article about him. Standing in the doorway of the Tiffany room, with its big sun-splashed dome, he studied her until she looked up, right at him, and invited him to sit down.
Harley obliged, feeling that his life was entering a new stage.
She said her name was Diana Clements and yes, she remembered him. She sat rigid in her chair, eyeballing him, her brown eyes speckled with gold. Harley, fiddling with a salt shaker, started to say something about seeing his name as a headline instead of a byline...
She interrupted him, asking what he'd done to make a drug lord so angry. Her accent sounded exotic, even a little crooked, like a moll in a James Cagney movie.
"I'm not sure. This is new for me," Harley said slowly, searching for words. "Usually I write for the Style section, about bike trips in the Big Bend, balloon races... People get mad at me sometimes, when I try to be funny, but..."
He paused and wondered if someone had actually called him "dead meat." He pictured himself hanging from a meat hook with a blue USDA stamp on his chest.
He looked at the woman across the table. She had her lips apart, and he could see a gap between her front teeth. He felt a stirring inside. She reached up to her neck and gave it a little rub where it met the shoulder, her thumb disappearing beneath the fabric of her blouse. He watched her fingers digging into the smooth skin and he imagined himself leaning across the table and kissing her.
"Jesus," he said.
"What is it?"
"Just something disgusting I heard about Jiménez," Harley improvised, wondering if the death threat was rocking his libido.
She nodded, sensitive enough not to ask. But Harley pursued it. "Have you ever heard of anybody getting his lungs torn out?" he asked.
"On purpose?"
"As a way of getting killed."
She thought for a second and shook her head. "No. Never. And I've heard about lots of different types of murders." She took a sip of coffee and put the cup down, leaving a red crescent of lipstick on the rim. "What did you write that made him so mad?"
"Hardly anything, really. Nothing everybody doesn't know."
Harley pictured himself guiding her upstairs, to one of the hotel rooms, for lunchtime sex, a nooner. He absently picked up a quarter of her fat sandwich, nibbled off a corner, and then realized it was hers and put it down. He'd never had a nooner before, not even when he was married, and it wasn't his style to propose it to a woman he hardly knew.
"That article," he said, "it was just a round-up of what everybody in Juarez knows about this guy. But the paper played it up big."
"You're talking about the one about the tigers running loose in his house, and the harem?"
"Uh huh."
How could he gracefully move the discussion toward sex, and put nooners on the table? Of course she'd have to spring for the room, probably about $125, since Harley only had about $20 on him, and had left his Visa card at home.
She was nodding. "The guy who pops his glass eye out. I couldn't really figure out what he had to do with Grupo Espejo and the maquiladora industry. At my company, we do some financing for Onofre Crispín, the president of the company. Everybody was sort of blown away by the story."
"Well, those are examples of things they played up," Harley said. "I didn't exactly..." He groped for the right word. "I didn't authorize them to use it."
"You didn't write it?"
"I did, but not every word. They took some things I told them, and played it all up."
"You think all of this happened to Eddie?" She pointed to a color picture of Stevenson. His face looked puffy, his shirt filthy.
"I guess so," Harley said, wondering why she called him Eddie, as if she knew him.
"But you think they're playing this up?" she asked.
"Oh, well... Of course, I mean, look at it. They love these stories."
"But do you believe it? Do you believe your paper?"
Harley found himself staring at her eyes, wide and questioning. He hadn't felt this way since junior high school dances in San Marcos. It was as if all the anxiety produced by the death threat had settled in his glands. He had to send her a signal of some kind.
"You ever see the movie "High Noon?" he asked.
"Yeah," she said slowly. "Why?"
"Just wondering." Of course the idea that this professional woman would make the jump from "High Noon" to a nooner was preposterous, but no more so than Harley's leap from a sleepy features writer to death-threatened crusader on the drug beat.
She was talking about other Gary Cooper movies now. "There was one about a newspaper reporter. 'Meet John Doe,' I think. But the guy wasn't really in your situation."
Harley changed tack. "Do you know Stevenson?" he asked.
"No." She fidgeted in her seat. "Not really. Not yet, anyway." She looked up at Harley. "I'll tell you something funny," she said. "I was going to have lunch with him today. He stands me up. I buy the paper. No offense, but I don't usually read it. And it's about you and him, and then you show up for lunch. Funny, huh?"
"Weird," Harley said. He didn't like the idea of a lecher like Stevenson moving in on this woman -- though if she liked Stevenson, maybe a nooner wasn't out of the question. "When did you set up this lunch with him?" he asked. "Yesterday?"
"No. Saturday. We met up with him..." Her voice trailed off. She rubbed her neck again and then rested her chin on her fist. "Are you worried?" she asked.
"I'm sure I will be once I collect my thoughts." He went on to tell her that he was out when they called with the news, and didn't find out about it until the paper arrived. Yes, maybe he should buy an answering machine. But he hated them. He talked on, telling her about Canfield and Perry, about his neighbor Claudio, who read his paper every morning. He told her how Claudio underlined mixed metaphors and split infinitives in his stories, wrote suggestions in the margins, and then left the paper at his door like a graded exam.
Harley saw he was rambling. He didn't hold out much hope for the nooner, but he had to see this woman again. "So," he said, winding up, "they got pretty upset that I didn't have an answering machine."
"Tell them you unplugged it when you started getting too many calls from what's his name." She scanned the paper. "Jiménez."
"Good idea."
They sat, looking at each other across the table. "I'd better get to work," Harley said, getting up.
"No lunch?"
"Maybe tomorrow."
"Well," she said, "keep in touch."
"Right. What's your last name again?"
"Clements."
She picked up the paper. "I won't have any trouble remembering yours."

* * *

Later in the afternoon, Harley lay back on the hotel bed, flipping with the remote control, and talking on the phone to his ex-wife, Cheryl. "This probably sounds stupid," he was saying, "but I finally feel like somebody recognizes my abilities."
"You mean the drug lord?"
"Not him. I just mean... Well, I told you it would sound stupid."
"You mean," Cheryl said, "that when we went out to West Texas, you expected to be a star."
Harley had come to El Paso with Cheryl 10 years before. They'd met playing volleyball in Austin. Harley was halfway through a masters in international relations, which he later abandoned, and Cheryl was finishing up her teaching degree. They became best friends and eventually ended up in bed. Nothing passionate, but they liked each other a lot. When Harley landed the job offer in El Paso, they got married, on a whim, and seven months later, when Cheryl was offered a fifth-grade post in Corpus Christi, they divorced. No hard feelings. That was before Harley's parents both died, within a year of each other, in San Marcos. Cheryl, remarried now, with three kids, was the only family Harley had. They talked a lot on the phone.
"And now," Cheryl went on, "all these years later, you're finally getting some sort of notoriety. Even if it comes with the inconvenience of a death threat."
"Not really," Harley said.
"I mean, one minute you tell me this drug lord had a reporter's lungs ripped out. And next you're telling me that you're finally getting the respect you deserve. If you're getting respect for your death threat, that other reporter must be getting a Pulitzer for dying."
"No, no," Harley said. "That reporter was Mexican."
"So?"
"I feel like I called my ex-wife and got the D.A."
Cheryl showed no pity. "Tell me why it matters that he was Mexican."
"It's an entirely different case..."
"Because he was Mexican? Isn't that what you like about El Paso, that the border doesn't mean anything? You ride your bike to Mexico to buy beer and hot sauce, right? And now you're counting on the border to save your life... I think you should just catch a plane."
"And go where?
"You could come stay here, if you wanted to," Cheryl said. "We have an extra bedroom."
"Thanks."
"No, really."
"I'm not going to run away, Cher," Harley said, picturing Diana Clements unbuttoning her white blouse.
"You're going to become a real reporter now. It that what you're saying?"
"I guess."
"You'll have to work a little harder. Cut back on the bike-riding, maybe. Stop studying Portuguese, or Urdu, or whatever language you're studying now."
Harley was silent. He'd stopped flipping channels and was staring at a Roadrunner cartoon. Then he told her about his new beat. "Ken made me the new drug reporter today."
"Oh my God. And what's Canfield think about that?"
"Probably thinks it's a riot." Harley started switching channels again, stopping now on Jeopardy. "He spends most of his time reading The Wall Street Journal, calling up his broker."
Cheryl, who always asked Harley for at least one impersonation per phone call, requested some Canfield, one of her favorites.
Harley gladly launched into a loud, drawl. "DAWGONE IT DUCHAMPS, I WANT YOU TO GO OUT THERE TO FORT BLISS AND ASK SOME TOUGH QUESTIONS. YOU HEAR ME?"
Cheryl giggled.
"HARLEY, WHEN YOU FINISH YOUR AN-THRO-PO-LOGICAL PURSUITS, YOU MIGHT CONSIDER FINDING OUT WHAT THE HAY-L IS GOING ON IN OLD MEXICO. AND WHEN YOU WRITE THAT STORY, I WANT THOSE TEE-GRAYS IN THE LEAD."
Doing voices lifted Harley's spirits. He said good-bye to Cheryl and wandered into the hotel bathroom shouting newsroom orders in the drill-sergeant voice of Canfield. When the phone rang, he ran to it and, without thinking, answered with Canfield's "HELL-O."
"Uh, Duane?" It was Hank DuChamps, sounding very confused.
Harley stuck with Canfield's voice. "WHAT THE HAY-L YOU CALLING HERE FOR DUCHAMPS, YOU DAWGONE WEASEL!"
"But... You told me to." He added a plaintive "Remember?"
"ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT. YOU WANT TO TALK TO HARLEY?"
"Yeah, please."
Harley returned to his own voice. "Hi Hank."
"Hi."
Harley had never heard the cocky DuChamps sound so meek. "Don't tell me you're working this story with me."
"Yeah. Canfield must have told you."
"Nah. He's just been raiding my minibar. Hey!" he yelled away from the receiver. "Easy on those cashews, Duane. They're a buck fifty a pop. And fattening." He turned his attention to DuChamps. This was a chance to be tough on him, and take control of the story. "So you're working this story with me. But you don't know any Spanish, right?"
"I know some."
"Hmmmm."
"How about if I get started tonight looking up Stevenson?" DuChamps proposed.
"OK," Harley said. He wasn't happy to be sharing this story with DuChamps, Canfield's favorite. But he figured that without Spanish, DuChamps wouldn't be able to steal it away from him.
"Can I talk to Duane again for a minute?" DuChamps asked.
Harley didn't feel like bringing back the city editor voice. DuChamps might detect something on a second hearing. "He's taking a shit," he said.
"In your bathroom?"
"Where else?"
DuChamps, sounding disgusted, signed off.


Chapter Five

Simón reached into his knapsack for his wallet and was surprised to touch the cold metal of his gun. He'd forgotten it was in there. He was sitting at a Dairy Queen on Paisano Drive, eating soft ice cream, thinking about overthrowing don Gustavo Jiménez and replacing him. The idea, which came to him in a flash at the Lavarama, was to create more bad news in don Gustavo's name. With the Nafta vote coming up, Simón thought, the government would throw him in jail, or kill him.
Simón had been reading a self-help book by a Mexican psychologist, Dr. Ernesto Rivapalacios. The doctor's idea was that by following some simple rules and setting clear goals, people could accomplish just about anything. Simón carried the book everywhere. Now, as he spun on the stool, enjoying the American ice cream and air-conditioning, Simón finally had his career goal. The only question was how to put his assets -- $3 and a gun -- to best use on this hot afternoon in El Paso.
He considered shooting bullet holes through Tom Harley's window, or maybe scratching a message on his door. Walking near the Greyhound Station, he found a long nail on the street and thought maybe he'd break into Harley's house. Leave him a note, something frightening. He called an operator from a pay phone on the Plaza. He sweet-talked her in Spanish into telling him Harley's address.
Then he slung his knapsack over his shoulder, student-style, and walked toward the shady hill called Sunset Heights.
When Simón reached the big yellow building at 519 Prospect, with its courtyard and fountain, it occurred to him that Harley was a very rich man. This house was almost as big as Jiménez's. He wondered if Harley was in the drug business too, because he knew that newspaper reporters didn't make much money, not even in the United States. A man with this much money, he thought, would probably be surrounded by armed bodyguards -- especially a day after receiving a public death threat.
But when Simón looked through the window of the door, he saw a foyer with mailboxes and realized it was an apartment building.
Just then, a tall man with a ponytail came out one of the doors and asked him something in English.
Simón said, "No, no, sorry," and retreated across the street and back toward the bridge over I-10, where he ducked down behind a few bushes. He reconsidered his plan. The man with the ponytail was still standing outside the building, hands on his hips, looking his way.
Simón pulled his gun out of his leather pouch and considered throwing it down a drainage ditch. But after some quick risk-reward calculations, he decided to hold onto it.
From behind the bushes, Simón saw the neighbor return to his apartment. Simón stood up, dusted off his pants, and tossed the leather bag over his shoulder. He considered visiting Rubén, but decided not to chance it in El Paso much longer with his gun. He'd wait until dark and then walk across the Interstate and back toward the Rio Grande.

* * *

At that moment, Eddie Stevenson was lying naked on a motel bed of his own, in Truth or Consequences, N.M., idly playing with himself and watching MTV. He suspected the sun had already set outside. He had the shades drawn and the air-conditioning on high. Stevenson had a hangover and a sore throat. Worse, he felt guilty, though he didn't know exactly why -- whether it was for leaving Estela, abandoning his job, or stretching the truth about what went on in Juarez. Whatever the reason, it seemed to be affecting his sex drive. A video showing lots of leg and cleavage left him surprisingly cold. He thought about Estela for a second. That didn't work. Then that woman he met after that party. What was her name? He tried to conjure her face and then remembered that they had a lunch date. Was that for today or yesterday?
The TV played a video by REM called "Everybody Hurts." Stevenson moved to the edge of the bed and watched. It featured a bunch of angry people in a traffic jam. At the end of the song, they abandoned their cars and started walking.
Stevenson could relate. After that incident in Juarez, he went on a walk-about of his own. He hurried back across the bridge with his busted camera gear, all of it except for his favorite Leika, which he apparently left behind. He was probably in a state of shock, Stevenson figured, as he drove around El Paso, listening to Rush Limbaugh, wondering what to do. It never even occurred to him that his ordeal in Juarez would make news.
When it was happening, he first thought his tormentor really was Jiménez. Then it seemed like Rubén and his friends. The guy speaking English even sounded a little like Rubén. But Stevenson was still terrified. He dirtied his pants when they put that bag over his head and played around with the pistol. That cracked them up. Later, while they were putting the club soda up his nose, it occurred to him that Jiménez might be one of Rubén's friends. He vomited. They laughed some more and called him names like cabrón. They kicked around his camera equipment. Finally, they let him go and he found his Dodge. He made his way to the bridge and then inched forward in the slow bridge line, sweating like a horse, his car smelling more and more like dirty diapers.
He had no desire to go home to Estela. Even if she and Rubén weren't involved, the barrio felt much too close to Mexico. He stopped by a Wal-Mart near Fort Bliss, bought a pair of khakis and a three-pack of underwear, and changed in a gas station bathroom.
Then he went to work to tell his story.
He walked into the paper that afternoon wearing clean pants and a filthy shirt, carrying the bag of broken gear. Worried that he still smelled bad and embarrassed about the wrecked cameras, he climbed up the back steps and avoided the newsroom by cutting through the snack bar. He'd planned to explain it to his partner Billy in the dark room, fill out a lost equipment form, and scoot. But next thing he knew, he was in Ken's corner office, explaining his story to Canfield and Ken Perry, both of them beaming with excitement, while Hank DuChamps took notes. Stevenson didn't alter the story one bit, but left out all personal connections, saying nothing about his messy life in the barrio. It didn't seem to matter. Canfield and Perry were too hungry for the Jiménez story to pry into Stevenson's affairs. They feasted on every detail of his miserable afternoon, especially the death threat to Harley. He had to give that one to them verbatim, with the business about 'dead meat.'
The only down note came when Stevenson transmitted Jiménez's critique of Ken. "He said, 'Tell Ken Perry he's a horseshit editor'," Stevenson said.
Perry's smile dropped for an instant. "Since when does this dude get off as a media critic?" he asked, perplexed, as Canfield hid a smile.
Stevenson hurried out of the building that afternoon, right to his car, and drove north. He wanted to distance himself from Juarez and Rubén and Estela, and now, even more urgently, his own paper. If Jiménez wasn't involved, he worried, how would the drug lord respond when the news broke?
Stevenson drove past Las Cruces and into the desert night. He stayed awake by sipping 49-ounce Big Gulps of Coke. Every 20 or 30 miles he stopped and wiped the dead bugs off his windshield with spit on a paper towel. Around midnight he finally pulled into a false-adobe motel outside Truth or Consequences -- far too exhausted to note any irony in the name. The desk clerk, probably noticing the specks of vomit on his shirt, asked him to pay cash in advance.
The next morning, it took Stevenson a minute to remember where he was, and to convince himself that the episode in Juarez hadn't been a bad dream. His fat lip was evidence, and the dirty shirt lying on the floor by the bed closed the case.
He decided to take a vacation. First he considered driving out to L.A., to swim in the Pacific. Then he decided instead to head down to Austin, to visit his brother Doug. That would mean driving through El Paso, which bothered him a little. So he put it off and paid for another night in the hotel. He wished he'd brought his bong with him, or at least a couple joints. He needed to relax and put all of this into context. By mid-afternoon, he settled on a six-pack of Guinness and a pack of Marlboros as surrogate reefer.
When he was buying the beer, Stevenson saw a Tribune coin box. At first he tried to avoid it. He walked to the Dodge with the beer, got in, turned the ignition and stole one more glance at the newspaper machine. That was when he saw the headline about the Trib photographer abducted in Juarez. It was bigger than he could have imagined. He turned off the ignition and walked over to the machine. He hunched down to look at it. At first he didn't recognize himself in the picture. Then he saw the shirt he was wearing the day before, with the filthy collar. His hair looked as if it had been rubbed in tar, and his expression was pure zombie. As he looked at the front page, with the subhead about Harley's death threat, Stevenson found himself smiling and then laughing, wondering if this mess he'd created might just lead to something good.


Chapter Six

DuChamps looked up into the darkening sky and saw a Mexican woman leaning out the window, her long black hair waving in the breeze. "Are you going to throw me down the key?" he yelled.
"Wha you say?"
DuChamps saw the figure in the window wriggling, her head bobbing, as if pulling on a tight pair of pants. "Are you going to throw the key?"
"Wha you name?"
"Hank DuChamps." Estela, done with her wriggling, looked down impassively. DuChamps glanced up and down the sidewalk at the early evening shoppers, still ducking into the pawn shops and discount shoe outlets. He wasn't used to the barrio, and it scared him a little. He noticed that a man working a candy stand on the corner was starting to look at him. He lowered his voice. "I'm from the paper? I just called a few minutes ago?"
"Wha you want?"
"Can I come inside and talk about it?"
Estela looked down at DuChamps for a moment and then shook her head slowly. "Naa now. I don think so. Sorry." She reached out a long brown arm and pulled the window shut.
DuChamps tried the door again. Locked. He considered leaving. He didn't really know what he was going to ask this woman. And her English sounded pretty bad. But if she didn't want to talk to him, he figured, she probably knew something worth knowing. He stood in the doorway and looked up at her window. Gone. He pushed the button and rang number five again. Her face appeared in the window. She had shadows around her eyes, almost like bruises. She didn't open this time, just waved him away with her hand.
DuChamps stayed put. When sources want you to leave, you stay. He'd learned that from Canfield, and it paid dividends in the bail bond story. Time and again, bail bondsmen and cops and convicts told him to get lost. And when he stuck around they grew frustrated and often threw bits of information his way. "Listen," Canfield told him over coffee in the snack bar, "when you're investigating, your sources think you're an asshole. That much they take for granted. The only question is whether you're a persistent one or a lazy one."
DuChamps was persistent. This was a big story, one that could make national news. When Canfield put him on it, he mentioned the Pulitzer. DuChamps wouldn't take such talk seriously from a dreamer like Ken Perry. But Canfield was all business. That afternoon, the city editor sat him down and told him, in his quiet drawl, that he was giving him the chance of his career. Harley was lazy, Canfield said, an anthropologist. DuChamps' mission was to light a fire under the story, using Harley as a Mexico guide. "But if he tells you that something is wrapped in mystery, hidden behind Mexican masks, all that bullshit, fuck him," Canfield said, looking left and right to make sure no other reporters were within earshot. "Just go find it yourself and work it with me."
Remembering that talk, DuChamps wondered whether Canfield might be giving Harley the same sort of pep-talk at the hotel, and saying nasty things about him. The whole telephone episode bewildered him. Why would Canfield be wasting time up in Harley's room, eating cashews? And the idea of Canfield taking a crap in Harley's bathroom... That was deeply unsettling. He must have been drunk, DuChamps thought, ringing the bell again. And why did Canfield call him a weasel? Was he joking?
Just then, a skinny young man wearing a muscle shirt and dark glasses, and carrying notebooks under his arm, walked to a spot below Estela's window and yelled up, "Estelita! Abreme!"
Estela appeared again in the window and pointed to DuChamps. Then she shook her head and disappeared. A moment later she opened the door. Resigned, she opened it for Rubén and let DuChamps walk in too. She led them up the dark, stifling staircase, giving both of them a good look at her hips swaying in the tight Guess jeans.
"Y este?" Rubén asked, as they climbed.
"Reportero," she said.
"Oh yeah?" Rubén said, looking over his shoulder. "What's your name, man?"
DuChamps, surprised to hear English, said his name.
"Hey, I read your stuff," Rubén said, as they reached the landing. "The bail-bond story. That was dynamite."
DuChamps smiled. Estela opened the door with a key and said gruffly, "Pasen de una vez." She stood sideways as Rubén walked past quickly, heading straight to a photo of himself hanging on the wall. DuChamps, following, looked inside the apartment and then stole a glimpse of her chest.
DuChamps walked over to sunken brown couch along the wall, clunking loudly in his new cowboy boots, and sat down. On the coffee table he saw a glass pipe that looked like his mother's oil cruet, but much sootier. Maybe an opium pipe, he thought. He reached to pick it up, looking first at Estela and her friend, who were arguing in Spanish by the kitchen. The pipe smelled like a swamp. A piece of debris flew up DuChamps' nose and he sneezed.
"Salud," Estela said instinctively. Then she continued talking to Rubén. DuChamps put down the waterpipe and wiped his eyes with his shirt sleeve. He looked at the two of them in the corner and tried to listen. He heard Estela say "cabrón." That was like calling somebody a bastard, he knew. He looked at her profile, the breasts jiggling ever so slightly as she waved her arms about and yelled at the guy. DuChamps felt a tightening in his pants and quickly crossed a leg. He wondered how Eddie Stevenson ever landed with this woman. If they printed Penthouse in Mexico, she had to be a centerfold candidate. But who was this skinny guy she was yelling at?
While DuChamps stared at Estela's body, she and Rubén argued in Spanish about the incident with Stevenson in Juarez. Rubén assured her that her boyfriend was OK, that he and some friends just gave him a scare on the Mexican side of the river.
"What did you do to him?" Estela asked.
"Didn't you see the paper?"
"The paper? You did something to him that came out in the paper? Cabrón!"
"He's OK, he's OK," Rubén said, patting her arm. "He came back and exaggerated everything. And now they've made it into a big scandal." He smiled and reached for his notebook on the table. "Look," he said, opening it.
"Leave it," Estela said, looking over at DuChamps, who was staring at her.
"He doesn't understand anything," Rubén whispered. "Look at this." He showed her the front page of the Tribune, with its screaming headline and front-page editorial.
Estela's dark eyes widened. "You... You did this?"
"It's nothing," Rubén said, looking at DuChamps, who was sitting back in the couch, with his legs crossed.
"But why? To protect me?" She touched the darkened skin under her eye.
Rubén looked down at his feet. "Sort of," he said. "But it's going to be useful for my career, my journalism."
"Ay cabrón," Estela said in a low voice, shaking her head. "You're the rarest mixture of macho mexicano and maricón I've ever met."
DuChamps suddenly spoke up. "Macho mexicano?" he said with a cowboy accent. "Who's a macho mexicano?"
Estela glared at him. "Vete," she said. "Go. Go out. Fuera!" She pointed angrily toward the door.
"Esperate," Rubén said. "Wait a minute. I want to talk to him about this story." He walked toward DuChamps, holding out the newspaper in his hand. "What do you think really happened over there, Hank?" he asked. "Do you think the paper got it right?"
DuChamps, still smarting from Estela's eviction order, took a second to focus on Rubén. "I guess so," he said, without much conviction.
"Did you consider the sourcing in this article," Rubén said. "Whose word do they have except for our friend here, Eddie? Did you consider that?"
"Jeez, I'd like to talk about this some," DuChamps said, but..." He looked past Rubén, who was now standing in front of him, at Estela, smoldering by the kitchen door. He wondered why he tried so hard to get into this apartment. There was nothing to learn here, as far as he could tell. Just a woman who was nice to look at and this weird guy, who acted like a journalism student on coke, asking these questions and bouncing on his toes.
"Do you know where our friend's at?" Rubén asked, smiling. "You know, Eddie?"
"He lives here, right?" DuChamps said.
"Yeah. But I think he, like, split." Rubén paused for a second and added, quietly, "Where do you suppose he went to?" He stood before DuChamps with his lips pursed and his eyebrows knitted, as if Eddie might be in trouble and in need of his help.


Chapter Seven

Adam Pereira stood at Diana Clements' office door, trying to talk his way in.
"So, like I'm saying, Crispín summons me over there, you know the Espejo stock's dropped three points, and he's not too happy about that. I guess A.P. Dow Jones picked up something from that story in the Tribune. And I get over there -- He's got this pink mansion, over toward the Juarez airport, with flamingos walking around -- and it turns out he just wants to play racquetball with me."
Diana turned away from him, hoping he'd take the hint and leave. She gazed out her window at the brown Franklin Mountains, the dusty brown tail of the Rockies that poked into the downtown, about a mile from her perch at Dunwoody & Briggs, on the 16th floor of the Texas Commerce Building. Looking to her left, past the Asarco smelter, she could see the wind kicking up dust devils in Juarez. They seemed to peter out at the river.
"He's got this racquetball court right in his house," Adam Pereira went on. "He has spare sneakers and racquets. I think it's like, part of his gig." Diana could see his reflection in the window: the starched white shirt and yellow tie, the hang-dog eyes looking at the back of her head, wanting so much for her to like him.
"The guy's in a miserable mood, acting like a real jerk, ordering me around. He has the maid bring us little glasses of mango juice, on a silver tray, and then we go out on the court..."
He's going to tell me that he won, Diana thought. That's what men do.
"...And the guy, he kicks my butt, I mean just annihilates me!"
Diana turned around and smiled. She felt better about Adam Pereira, though she knew she'd never like him the way he wanted her to.
"After that, he's like, my best friend. Real buddies." Adam was standing in her doorway, waiting for her to say something. "So where'd you go for lunch? I was looking for you."
"Just... for a walk," Diana said.
She didn't mention that she walked south from downtown, through the sun-baked blocks of the barrio, and up the dark wooden staircase of an apartment building, where she knocked on a door and asked a beautiful Mexican woman if she knew where Eddie Stevenson was. It was a stupid thing to do, even cruel. Estela stood in the doorway, wearing an oversized Pearl Jam tee-shirt and looking confused, saying things in Spanish that Diana only vaguely understood. Diana took a little pad from her purse, wrote down her name and address and gave her the piece of paper. "I'm sorry," she said, and walked down the staircase.
Diana couldn't understand why she felt anything for Eddie Stevenson. It had something to do with the way he talked to her that night, after the party, a directness that appealed to her, even though he was drunk and probably lying.
When she and her friend Elke walked out of the party Saturday night, they heard Stevenson's heavy footsteps following them down the walk. He joined them, talking only to Diana, treating Elke as though she didn't exist -- which, for him, was a fact. He was drunk and rude, but Diana couldn't resist talking to him. He walked unsteadily on one side of Diana as Elke walked on the other. "You wanna go dancing somewhere?" he asked her. Diana shook her head, but smiled. Then Stevenson stopped, and Diana stopped too, as Elke kept striding up the dark sidewalk.
Stevenson looked in her eyes, smiled crookedly, and whispered, "Let's imagine we're in Paris, you and me." He pointed down toward the I-10 overpass. "Let's take a walk along the Seine."
"You mean along the Rio Grande?"
"Along the wild side."
"That's the corniest thing I ever heard." She looked ahead. Elke was almost at the top of the hill. "Listen, I got to go," she said, and started to walk.
But Stevenson grabbed her hand and studied at her palm. "Lemme tell you something about your future," he said.
She started to pull her hand from him. But he looked up at her, and suddenly he appeared altered -- not only sober, but serious. With his deep-set brown eyes, he seemed to gaze through her. Diana was always a sucker for astrologers and fortune-tellers, dating back summer days as a kid at Coney Island. And deep down, no matter how much she tried to repress it, she believed her life was mapped out, that every coincidence was a sign. With her hand still in Stevenson's, she braced herself for the future.
"You're going to make millions of dollars through financial dealings," he said, sounding impressed. She wondered for a moment if he'd learned somehow that she was a stockbroker. But the message was so appealing that she found herself believing it. Then, still gazing at her, he said, "And there's one very important person in your future."
"I bet I can guess who that is," she said, smiling.
"That's right." He was looking earnest now, much more handsome than at the party. "It's me. But I'm not kidding. How 'bout having dinner with me, tomorrow."
Diana agreed to a date, but for lunch, on Tuesday, not dinner. That would keep sex out of it, at least for a while.
The next morning, she regretted making the date. By the light of day, the fortune-telling seemed like a cheap come-on -- even though the financial forecast was intriguing. Later she learned from Elke that he had a Mexican girlfriend. She gave a thought to canceling the lunch, but didn't get around to it. Then, when she showed up for lunch at the Paso del Norte and saw Eddie's picture on the front page, she immediately believed that he was right, that she and he were somehow linked. The newspaper was talking to her...
The phone rang on her office desk. Diana sent Adam away with a flick of her eyes and then picked it up. It was a raspy voice she couldn't quite place.
"Is that you, Diana?"
"Yes..."
"I'm sorry I missed lunch the other day..."
Eddie Stevenson. His timing was uncanny. Any doubts she had about him evaporated. He said he was in New Mexico, but would stop by for a visit. He'd call.
"Anytime," Diana said.

* * * *

Gays were always hitting up on him, DuChamps frequently complained. He figured it had to be his hair. Or maybe the bulging pecs. It didn't usually happen at lunchtime. But here was somebody making eyes at him in the middle of the midday rush at Whataburger, the orange-roofed restaurant near UTEP. DuChamps ran a hand through his blond mane and bit into his hamburger, trying not to look self-conscious. He looked down at his folder of drug clippings, trying to ignore the little dark-haired guy. But he couldn't concentrate. Now the man seemed to be motioning to him. "Fucking A!" DuChamps said to himself, resting his head on his hand to block the guy out of his sight.
A minute later, DuChamps looked up to see a familiar face smiling down at him. The guy from Stella's apartment.
"Do you mind?" Rubén said, sliding into the booth across from him and depositing his cup of coffee on the table.
"Well, actually..." DuChamps said, pointing down at the clippings.
But Rubén was already digging into a big manila envelope, pulling out clippings of his own and a wad of three-by-five cards, bound with a fat rubber band. "I just thought I could help you," he said.
"With what?" DuChamps asked, still fretting about sex.
"Your story. Listen," Rubén said, leaning forward and tapping his fingers on the table, "I got contacts over in Juarez you wouldn't believe."
DuChamps didn't know what to make of this. Last thing he wanted was to work with this person. He didn't even want to tell him what he was up to. But the guy seemed to know. DuChamps looked at the pile of dog-eared index cards. The top one had some meticulous writing in pencil, with red-lettered notes below it.
"Hey, I don't need any help," DuChamps said, putting his clippings into his red notebook. He placed it on the table. Then, seeing DRUGS written on it in big letters, he quickly turned it over.
"I've done a shitload of work on this," Rubén said. "I want to help you."
DuChamps took the last bite of his hamburger and looked at his watch. "I gotta go," he said with his mouth full.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Rubén said. "Look. You go see one of my contacts in Juarez. If this person doesn't help you, then forget about it. I won't bother you no more."
"What's in it for you?" DuChamps asked.
"You go see this contact," Rubén said, handing him a three-by-five card. "There's the number right there. See the name. Pedro." He pronounced it in Spanish. "But it don't matter. Call him Pete. He speaks English."
DuChamps took the card. Maybe now, he thought, the guy would leave him alone. But he still wanted to know what he was angling for. "You don't expect me to pay you for this?" he said, folding the card and putting it into his shirt pocket."
"No, no, no, no," Rubén said, getting up, waving empty hands at DuChamps. "You go see Pete. He's expecting your call. Later you and I can chat about things."
He drained his coffee, stuffed his cards and clippings into the manila envelope, and hurried away, before DuChamps could return the card with Pedro's number. He mouthed the words "good luck" to the reporter as he bolted out of the restaurant and into the blazing midday heat.
As DuChamps watched him hurrying down Mesa, the envelope under his arm, he realized he didn't even know the guy's name.

* * *

The first thing that struck Harley as he walked into the apartment was Stevenson's festering waterpipe. It was sitting on the coffee table, with its moldy debris floating on clouded water. He looked up at Estela and saw her eyes, big black ones set back above her cheekbones.
He took his reporter's notebook out of a back pocket and sat on a sunken brown couch near the water pipe. He felt change tumbling out of his pocket and reached with a hand to staunch the flow.
He'd had trouble at first talking his way into the apartment. But now that he was here, Estela seemed friendly, even flirtatious.
Estela offered him a cup of coffee and he declined.
"Agua mineral?"
"Tampoco, gracias."
It was hot in the apartment, even though an air conditioner behind Harley was making a grinding noise. He looked at the old hardwood floor and wondered what made it buckle. He wondered if cockroaches came up through the cracks at night. He looked at Estela, who sat across from him in a folding chair, elbows on knees, looking at him with those big eyes. He looked behind her, at a framed photo on the wall. A skinny Mexican in a sleeveless tee-shirt standing in front of a graffiti-covered wall, looking angry, like a Palestinian rock-thrower. It was probably one of Stevenson's pictures.
Harley was having trouble figuring out exactly where to start. "This is a nice building," he finally said, speaking with the local Chihuahuan accent, which made him sound a little like Speedy González. He pointed to the bay windows, overlooking Overland Street. "They have windows like that in the old buildings in New York."
Estela shrugged. "The air conditioning doesn't work."
"A building like this in New York City would go for a million dollars."
"Maybe they don't need air conditioning there."
Harley looked down for a moment, feeling Estela's eyes on him. "Listen," he said. "What do you know about what went on in Juarez?"
"With Eddie?"
"Yes."
"I always told him not to carry all of those cameras over to Juarez. He doesn't even know his way around there. I told him that people would steal his equipment, and probably rough him up too. He paid no attention. He thinks I'm just some campesina. Now look."
"But you saw the paper..."
"About the drugs? Hah. You don't believe that, do you?"
"Why not?" He dragged out the "noooo" of "porqué no" a bit far, he noticed, making it sound too cartoonish. He had to watch that.
Estela smiled at him and said something.
"What?" Harley asked.
"Come on. You're in the business."
Harley wondered if she knew something or was just playing the usual Mexican conspiracy game, blaming the Mexican president or the CIA for everything.
Estela stood up, walked to the couch slowly, shifting her weight from one hip to the other, and flopped down beside Harley.
Or maybe she's just flirting, he thought.
She was close enough now for him to see the long lashes, bending under the little globs of mascara. Her eyes were a little puffy, as though bruised. Harley wondered if Stevenson beat her.
"It's just a story," she said slowly, as if to a child. "That's how newspapers make money. They tell stories."
"And how about the threat to me?"
"Which threat?"
"Jiménez sent back a message with Stev... Eddie, saying that I was carne muerta. That is, dead meat."
"But," she said, building him back up. "You're not worried about that. You know how things go in Mexico."
"You're right," Harley said, with more conviction than he felt. "I'm not that worried. But I'd like to figure it out. Why didn't Eddie come back here?"
She waved her hand, dismissing the question, and said "Bah!" Harley felt her breath on his face. "That's Eduardo," she said.
"What about him?"
"He's a child. He gets hurt, he runs away for a while."
Estela smiled at him. She was a big woman, he noticed, built like a 1950s movie star, the kind they could cast with John Wayne or Burt Lancaster, but way too big for skinny guys like Sinatra and Fred Astaire. She seemed to treat men like little boys.
"So you don't know where Eddie is?"
She was gazing at him. "What's that?" She was almost whispering now, and Harley had a feeling he was losing control of the interview.
"Where's Eddie?"
She shrugged and made a dismissive noise, "Ffff." He felt her breath again.
She unsettled him. He felt like throwing himself on her (which he'd never do), or sprinting out the door and into the sweltering barrio below. He stood up suddenly, brushing down his pants, and said to Estela, "Does Eddie hit you?"
"Hmmm?" She collected herself for a second, and then said, "Oh, you don't have to worry about that."
"I was just wondering..."
Estela smiled playfully and fanned herself. "What heat! Is your apartment air-conditioned?"
Harley didn't know how to say "swamp-cooler" in Spanish. "Sort of," he said.
"Where do you live? North of I-10, no?"
"In Sunset Heights."
"Oh." She was disappointed. "An older building, like this one. There are much newer places, with big windows, over by Cielo Vista Mall."
Harley, always uneasy around beautiful women, figured he was imagining her come-on. Relaxing, but without sitting down again, he chatted with Estela for a few minutes. Then he retreated back into the heat of the barrio.

* * *

As Harley walked north from Estela's apartment, on El Paso Street, he smelled tortillas and ducked into Leon's Cafe, a little Mexican restaurant with checkered plastic tablecloths. Figuring he'd gather his thoughts over lunch, he took his reporter's notebook from his back pocket and ordered a plate of enchiladas con salsa verde.
Jiménez, he wrote and paused for a second, remembering the drug lord's first name. Gustavo. He tried to put Jiménez's business into the context of Mexican politics. Presumably, this man had a thriving drug business, and ran it with the full support of the politicians and police in Mexico. But now the Mexican government wanted to sign this free trade agreement with the United States. And with Congressional pressure coming down on them from Washington, the Mexicans couldn't afford to let racy drug lords make a lot of noise and build luxury hotels on the border. So what would Harley do if he were Jiménez? He thought about it, his pen poised over the notebook, his untouched bottle of Mexican mineral water bubbling quietly at his side. Canfield's scenario, with Jiménez piggy-backing his cocaine onto the maquiladora trucks, was outlandish. It would mean putting an entire industry full of Fortune 500 companies into the drug business. Even while he was writing it, Harley thought the story was foolish. Now it seemed absurd.
So what was Jiménez up to? If Harley were the drug lord, he thought, he'd cash out of the drug business, now that Nafta was coming, and use the political contacts to get into something legitimate. Leave the dirty business to the Colombians, and keep his one eye focused on saving his skin. Harley sketched out various scenarios, but decided it was hopeless to try reading Jiménez's mind without knowing the man. Try as he might, Harley couldn't come up with a motive for Jiménez to beat up a photographer from El Paso.
But if he didn't do it, who did? Harley's thoughts were interrupted by a steaming plate of enchiladas, covered with a rich green sauce, topped with cream and sprinkled with white cheese. With his mouth watering, he put down the pen and picked up a fork and knife.
As he was finishing his lunch, mopping up the sauce with a corn tortilla, two Mexican men walked into the restaurant arguing loudly in Spanish about something they've seen on the Geraldo Rivera Show. One of them carried a newspaper under his arm. He sat down and laid the newspaper on the table, declaring that if his daughter were as fat as the one he saw on the show, "I'd chain her to a treadmill." Harley looked at the paper and saw the headline: ¡SE FUE EL TUERTO!. Harley wondered who El Tuerto was, and why it was such big news that he'd departed. He marveled at the wealth of words in Spanish for body mutilation, with manco, cojo, and tuerto, for one-armed, one-legged, and one-eyed people. Cervantes was a manco. Harley remembered the Spanish saying, "En la tierra de los ciegos, el tuerto es rey," or, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Then with a start, Harley recalled that Gustavo Jiménez was a tuerto.


Chapter Eight

Alfredito the car-washer was gone, probably off drinking a soda. Gato was picking up a shipment at Villa Ahumada. A dusty blue Falcon from the '70s sat baking in the Lavarama lot, waiting to be washed. For a moment, Simón considered washing it himself, but then decided against it. He didn't want to set any precedents.
He unlocked the office. It felt like an furnace. He took the pistol out of his leather bag and started to put it in the desk drawer. Then, impulsively, he lifted the gun and aimed it out the window, above the Falcon at the Lavarama's brown wall. He pulled the trigger, just to see if it was working. The gun kicked and the bullet flew over the wall, toward the shantytown near the border.
His ears still ringing, Simón put the pistol away and reached into his bag for the Dr. Rivapalacios book. Then he went outside, where it was a bit cooler, and sat in the shade of the adobe wall to read. Simón's favorite chapter, which he'd been reading over and over for the past week, was called "Triunfar! Claro Que Puedes!" or, "Win! Of Course You Can!" The chapter seemed to be written just for him. The book didn't go into details about how to wrest power from drug lords like Jiménez. But clearly, if usurping power was one of the clear goals, and a series of logical steps led to it, Simón could make it happen. Claro que Sí!, as Dr. Rivapalacios often wrote.
Simón found the chapter on mentors perplexing. Dr. Rivapalacios suggested seeking out older people who have trod the path you're on, to ask for their friendship, advice and support. That didn't seem smart to Simón. The less people knew about his plan, the better. He thought about it a little, wondering if Rubén could be his mentor. He was a bit older, 24 to Simón's 22. He spoke good English and knew a lot about the United States, about politics and business. He'd also been to college -- unlike Simón, who dropped out of the junior high when he was 14. Rubén, though, had his shortcomings. He was still learning the ABCs of the drug business. He didn't know how to use a gun. And he looked a lot like a maricón. Simón pondered homosexuality for a moment and then resumed reading.
A half hour later, Simón stood up, stretched, and wandered back into the office to turn on the radio. He switched from Gato's ranchera music to a Metalica song on an El Paso station, and then walked back outside. He poured a bucket of water on the Ford and briefly considered washing it.
He was settling back with the book when he heard a pounding on the sheet metal gate. "Quién?" he yelled.
"Enrique." It was a child's voice.
"Que?"
"Es que, es que..." The boy started to explain something. But Simón couldn't hear him over the music. He walked into the office and turned off the radio.
"Es que... Se llevaron a Alfredito," the boy yelled, telling Simón that people took Alfredito away.
"Quienes?"
"La policia."
At first, Simón wondered what Alfredito did to get arrested. Then he connected it to the beating of the photographer, and his throat went dry. He ran to the gate, looked out the peep hole, and slid open the door a foot and a half for the skinny little boy to squeeze through.
Simón recognized the boy as Alfredito's friend who operated the popsicle stand. He led him into the office and sat him down at Gato's gray steel desk. The boy looked tiny behind the big desk. He had a red popsicle ring around his mouth. He ran his fingers nervously through his short black hair, which stood straight up. "He wasn't doing anything," he told Simón. "Just sitting with me on the sidewalk, under that tree near my stand, eating a popsicle. He only had that one car to wash," he added, pointing at the Falcon, which was already dry and streaked with mud. "And the customer wasn't coming back for a couple of hours."
"Who arrested him," Simón asked.
"La policia."
"One?"
"Two."
"Did you recognize them? People you've seen around here?"
The boy shook his head.
"Were they in a police car?"
He nodded.
"Did they say why they were picking him up? Did they know his name?"
"They just asked him if he worked here. He said yes, and they took him." The boy looked down at the desk and started to fiddle with Gato's solar-powered calculator.
Simón tried to think. He didn't know where the arrest orders came from, the government or Jiménez. He hoped it was the government. That would mean he could count on don Gustavo for protection, at least until the drug lord found out what Simón and his friends had been up to.
Simón wracked his memory, trying to figure out who could have implicated the Lavarama in the photographer's beating. He looked at the boy sitting across from him, looking less nervous now and working intently on the calculator. "What did Alfredo do?" Simón asked him. "Did he tell you?"
The boy looked up with a knowing look. "He was arrested for working here," he said matter-of-factly.
This calm reasoning incensed Simón, who jumped to his feet, took two steps around the desk and grabbed him. He lifted him by his shirt and pinned him to the wall with a thump. "You ratted on him, didn't you! Pinche cabrón!" He slammed the boy against the wall again, hard, just as he'd slammed the photographer. But this boy was much lighter, and Simón was able to lift him higher and pound harder. The boy started to cry. Simón kept shaking him, ripping his shirt. He lifted his right hand onto the boy's neck. Then he heard a pounding at the metal gate. He lowered the boy, who was whimpering quietly, and pointed to the chair. "Sit there and stay there," he instructed him, as he rushed to the gate.
Simón looked out the peep hole at a small gray-haired man wearing a freshly ironed white guayabera, a type of pleated white shirt Simón associated with barbers. "Cerrado," Simón said, still breathing heavily.
The man looked at his watch. "I just came to pick up the Falcon. The boy said he'd be here until six."
Simón whispered "puta madre" and opened the gate. "He didn't clean it well," he said. "You can just take it. No charge." Then he hurried back toward the office for the boy. But he saw him standing between the Impala and the water trough, half crouched, his fuzzy hair on end and his eyes hooded, looking like a hunted animal.
"Correle, chamaco," Simón said to him with a smile, telling him to run along. "We'll be seeing you later." The boy rushed out the door with the Impala, looking dirtier than ever, following him. The gray-haired client gave Simón a withering look.
Before Simón could close the gate and collect his thoughts, Gato strode in, looking his usual sloppy self. He was wearing American short pants and a shirt with something in English written across the front. Gato waved and said "hola," smiling broadly, as if he'd been sampling some of the product. He said that his Duster died, and he seemed happy that he got 200 pesos, or $60, from a junk dealer.
Simón wondered whether Gato had what it took to climb with him to the top. He considered lending him Dr. Rivapalacios' book. Gato certainly could learn a lot from the chapter on clothes. Of course, even if Gato bought nice clothes, he'd have to straighten up his posture too. Dr. Rivapalacios was adamant about that. Maybe the book could also give him a sense of priorities. When they made their run against Jiménez, it would be suicide to be testing the product, Simón thought, as he followed Gato toward the office.
"Oye, Gato," he called. "We've got a problem, real serious."
Gato looked around, still smiling.
"The police picked up Alfredito."
"What did he do?" Gato asked innocently.
"Pendejo!" Simón said. "What do you think he did. He worked here."
Gato's smile dropped. "Were they cops that work for Jiménez?"
Simón said he doesn't know, that the popsicle vendor told him.
"I saw that boy tearing out of here when I came," Gato said, questioning Simón with his eyes.
Simón looked down.
"As if someone was chasing him..." Gato continued.
"He was probably in a hurry," Simón said.
Gato sat on the edge of the desk and picked up the same calculator the boy played with minutes before. He bent over it, thinking. After a moment he looked up at Simón and asked him, "Where are you going with this thing?"
"What thing?"
"What do you mean 'what thing'? The thing the police picked up Alfredito for. The thing you went to El Paso for. The thing... Whatever you did to that boy. What's your plan?"
Simón felt flustered. "We're going to ... We're going to..." He was about to say "overthrow don Gustavo." But he cut himself short, afraid it might sound juvenile. "We're going to keep making news in El Paso, putting on political pressure and forcing some ... changes in the... high command. And when that happens, we should be able to find something better for ourselves too. Se pesca mejor en rio revuelto," he said, paraphrasing a Spanish proverb he vaguely recalled about good fishing in turbulent waters.
Gato looked unimpressed. "Is this a plan, or do you just like to hit people?"
"A plan," Simón said, his voice coming out higher than he wanted.
"Did you take your gun to El Paso yesterday?"
"No."
Gato walked around the desk and opened the drawer. "It wasn't here after you left yesterday afternoon."
"Well I took it," Simón clarified. "But I didn't use it. In fact, I was thinking of throwing it away over there..."
"Because the police were after you?"
"Just to be prudent."
Gato shook his head. "This could get us killed."
"You have to be audacious to reach the top," said Simón.
"Dr. Rivapalacios isn't going to get us through this," Gato said. "I want to know what your plans are. Because depending on what they are, I'll either leave or stay."
Simón fought back a desire to grab Gato's know-it-all face and rip it apart. "Well, first," he said, affecting a carefree tone, "I'll stop by the police station and see what they have Alfredito charged with."
"And you called me a pendejo?" said Gato. "They'll just arrest you too."
"But don Gustavo probably won't let them touch us," Simón said, with more hope than conviction.
"He's probably the one who ordered the arrest. And even if he isn't, how much power does he have now? We'll probably end up in the same cell with him, if we survive."
Simón took off his steel-rimmed glasses, breathed on them, and polished them with a tail of his shirt. "So how do we find out what they picked up Alfredito for?"
"Send his mother to the station," Gato said. He stood up and walked from the office, his baggy shorts flopping down to his knees. "I'm going to see Rubén," he said over his shoulder. "You'd better leave too. They might shoot us before they arrest us."


Chapter Nine

When Harley stepped off the elevator by the newsroom, Canfield was standing there, expecting him.
"What have you got?" he asked.
"Were you waiting for me?" Harley looked flushed. He had the Juarez papers rolled under his arm.
"I looked out the window and saw you coming, down Kansas."
"Oh."
"Talking to yourself."
Harley didn't try to defend himself.
"So what have you got?"
"Jiménez left town," Harley said dryly.
"He just ran off?"
Harley nodded. "By the looks of it."
"Where'd you hear this?"
"Just around town. The Juarez papers have already picked it up."
The two journalists, one twice as broad and a head shorter than the other, strolled slowly from the elevator toward the newsroom. "Where would he be heading?" Canfield said.
"That's what I've got to find out."
"They have an arrest warrant out on him?"
"Not as of this morning. But that might have changed. More likely he got wind of something coming, before it became official."
"Hmmm." Canfield looked down at his shoes, thinking. He pawed the linoleum tile with his foot. "You had a chance to talk this whole thing over with Stevenson yet?"
"I can't find him."
"Hmmm." More pawing. The silence made Harley feel edgy, and in a hurry to write his story. "You don't think he's planning to sue us, do you?"
Harley said he didn't know. He was in a hurry to get away from Canfield, who seemed to be in a rambling and curious state of mind.
"Hey," Canfield said, brightening up. Look in your cue. DuChamps put together a nice background file on Jiménez." He headed back toward his terminal, adding: "Seems like he squeezed more out of one of those sources than you did."
Harley nodded dumbly at Canfield's insult, walked into the newsroom, and slumped down in his cubicle, surrounded by press releases, old newspapers, and a picture of himself smiling self-consciously atop Macchu Picchu. He wasn't surprised that DuChamps had already come up with a background file. And it was just his style to copy the editors on it, letting everyone know he was racing ahead with the story. Harley turned on the computer, called up DuChamps' file, and started to read.

To: Harley
From:DuChamps
cc:Canfield, Perry
re: background on Jiménez
Date: 9-12

Tom,
I had a spare hour this a.m., so decided to call the DEA. Sorry if it's your sources. Had to orient myself, and reading the clips didn't help much (No offense). Learned some interesting stuff on Jiménez.
From Timothy A. Giamotto, deputy district director, DEA:
OFF THE RECORD (If this guy sees his name in the paper, he says he'll shit.)
Name: Gustavo Jiménez Pavon
Birthdate: 11-12-38, Chihuahua City
never married, lived with his mom (no name yet) in Juarez until a year ago, when he moved into a palace on the east side of Juarez, near the road to the airport.
Tall and skinny, about 6'4", he guesses, 180. Has left eye of glass, from some barroom brawl in Chihuahua City when he was young.
Nickname: "El Tuerto", which I guess you know means one-eyed person in Spanish.
Hasn't got a hand in the growing heroin biz yet. Looks like Colombians out of Chihuahua City control that. He didn't have names to give me. Jiménez started making big money about three years ago, when he started taking payment in kind from the Colombians. In other words, they paid him for his transportation with cocaine, and he began marketing his own stuff. Much higher profits.
Now Jiménez is getting into the contracting biz, as you mentioned in your story. Giamotto thinks it could be a career switch for him, if the Colombos get too powerful. He says that to get big in those two businesses, drugs and construction, he must be well connected in the ruling PRI party. No names yet.
Giamotto says Jiménez started running a small cross border retail business with an American base in Canutillo, just up the river. That was in the late '70s. Had a network of mules that carried small shipments across the river, and then a few dealers who sold nickel and dimes in El Paso. Nothing big. Local sheriffs tried to bust him. (No date yet; he was telling me this off the top of his head.)
He escaped. The story's awesome. He was sleeping in some barn in the Mexican neighborhood of Canutillo. Says it's called Chihuahuita. And most of the people there still have pigs and chickens in their yards. Anyway, Jiménez was sleeping in the barn, and the sheriffs knew that he had dope there. So one dawn, about four of them went to bust him. They tried sneaking through the backyards of Chihuahuita. But all the animals started braying and barking and clucking, and that probably tipped Jiménez that something was up. He ran out of the barn, and through the next couple of yards, jumping fences. The sheriffs ran after him. Finally, when it looked like they had him cornered, he grabbed a piglet and held it up, squealing, as a sort of hostage. And he put a knife to its throat. He said, hold it there, or I'll cut its throat. Giamotto says the sheriffs just stood there, not because they cared much about the piglet, but because cutting that pig's neck would have been so bloody. So they stood there a while in this kind of face-off. And then Jiménez suddenly jabbed the piglet in the ass with his knife and threw it right at them, bleeding and squealing, and took off over the fence.
He kept on running, down to the river. And he swam across it, thinking he was crossing into Mexico. But at that point of the Rio Grande, he was only crossing into New Mexico. They just drove across the bridge and arrested him. But then he got bailed out and jumped.
Giamotto says to be careful with this story, to check it out a little, because he doesn't know how much is legend, and what's true. I bet we can use some of it though, at some point.
I asked Giamotto if Jiménez was known to be violent. He said no, more of a party animal. But he did mention one killing in Juarez a month or two ago, a radio journalist who ended up in the Rio Grande with a slit throat. You probably know about it. Giamotto says that a lot of people attributed it to Jiménez, since this reporter (name?) was hitting on him pretty hard. I asked him what the journalist was saying. He said he didn't know. You'd have to listen to one of those Juarez radio stations to find out. I don't think Giamotto understands Spanish. Anyway, he says he doesn't think Jiménez would have been dumb enough to kill that journalist, because it almost got him into trouble with the government, which is the last thing he wants. So why did Jiménez get himself involved with Stevenson??
Gotta run. Let's talk this pm.

Harley looked up from his terminal and saw Canfield talking on the phone. He was standing up and waving his free arm. It had to be DuChamps. Harley walked toward Canfield's desk, and he heard the city editor saying, "...Yeah, we know he's left... But you say you got witnesses? He left in a Porsche? Baby-blue? Good detail, DuChamps. Real good. You got these guys on the record?" Canfield looked up at Harley and winked. "Listen," he went on, "I got your partner here. What's that? I'll ask the expert."
Canfield laughed and turned to Harley. "He wants to know what the word pendejo means."
"It's a cross between 'idiot' and 'asshole,' but tell him not to take it too hard," Harley said.
"I'll let you tell him that on a conference call," Canfield said, laughing. He sat down and began pushing buttons on the phone and calling to Rosita, the office manager, for help. Then he yelled, "Fuck!" as the line went dead.
Canfield swiveled around to Harley. "I can't see why their phone company's such a hot stock when the lines always go dead. IBM builds top-of-the-line computers, and their stock crashes, and goddam Telefonos de Mexico can't pull off a five-minute call and everybody wants to own it. I sometimes wonder..."
Harley cut in. "He's got sources in Juarez?"
"He's over there, getting drunk from the sound of it," Canfield said, leaning over to pick up his Wall Street Journal, which fell while he tried to set up the conference call. "But you got your story. Go ahead and write it. He left Juarez alone, speeding south in a late model baby-blue Porsche. At 11 a.m., Juarez time."
Harley leaned down toward Canfield's desk. "You say he's drunk?"
Canfield laughed. "He says he's drinking with a bunch of cops in a pool hall. Probably taking shots of tequila with that red sauce. What's it called? Sangria?"
"Sangrita."
"That's it. He could hardly talk, his tongue was so thick."
"Maybe I better go over there."
"Harley, you go over there, you'll get your neck slit."
"Oh, yeah." Harley considered it for a second. "But if Jiménez left town, maybe it's not so dangerous now. I'm thinking that DuChamps might not know who he's dealing with. If those cops belong to Jiménez, they might have been feeding him a line."
"It corroborates your reporting, right?" Canfield answered belligerently.
"Well, yes," Harley said.
Carmen, the office manager, tapped Canfield on the shoulder. Channel Eight's downstairs, she said, with a camera. Should I let them come up?"
"Hold 'em off for a minute." Canfield stood up and grabbed Harley tight on the elbow. "Come with me for a second," he said, leading him into Ken Perry's empty office.
"Listen Harley," he said, closing the door. "I don't know much about Mexico. You know that. If I did, maybe I'd understand why everybody wants to buy that miserable phone company." He had his face close to Harley, his breath smelling of tobacco. "But I do know a few things about Mexico," he said. "I know about Cortes burning his boats in Veracruz. I know about Maximillian trying to run a European court in Mexico City, and getting executed for his trouble. But more important than that, or I should say, more relevant to our case..." Canfield looked Harley in the eye and tightened the grip on his elbow. "I know something about the Mexico mystique. What was it Churchill said about Russia? The enigma wrapped in the mystery? People think the same thing about Mexico. It's a fucking enigma wrapped in a tamale behind a mask. It's so mysterious, in fact, that we can never even aspire to understand it."
He let go of Harley's elbow. "Let's sit down," he said in a calmer voice. As soon as they were settled on Ken's couch, Canfield started again. "There's a certain type of reporter that covers Mexico. I call 'em anthropologists. You’ve heard me. They're always telling you why, for one reason or another -- the Mexican mystique or the many masks of Mexico or the Mexican masquerade or I don't know what the fuck else. They're always telling you why they can't get information over there. They know so much about the country that they know it's useless to ask questions. You can't ask a cop a question, because you don't know who owns him." He raised his voice. "And they make people like me feel like we're ignorant when we treat Juarez like any other place in the world and say 'go over there and find out what the fuck is going on!' But think about this, Harley: You speak fluent Castillian Spanish and you know when you can say "tu" and when you should call somebody "usted", and when you can call someone a "coño" in polite society. And yet you're over here working your story on the phone, and DuChamps, who doesn't know shit, is over there getting the story."
Harley looked up at Canfield, nodding very slightly, surprised that Canfield knew the word "coño". Canfield lowered his voice to a friendlier pitch. "What I'm trying to say is you've been writing anthro here for 10 years. And now that you've got a hard-news story, it's tough for you to start collaring people and asking hard questions. I get this feeling you're tip-toeing around. You've been through a couple of tough days here. But you've also got the chance of a lifetime." He paused, theatrically, and then whispered, "You could win the goddamn Pulitzer Prize! But you're not going to win it with anthropology. You're only going to win it if you go over there and get dirty. Ask questions. Even if you sound like an ignorant Gringo. Even if you sound like me. Talk to people. You don't know the answers until you dig. Ask...the...fucking...questions."
"Fair enough," Harley said. "So let me ask you one question."
"Shoot."
Harley stood up so that he towered over the editor and then launched into Canfield-talk. "WHERE THE HAY-IL DID A GOOD OLE BOY LIKE YOU LEARN TO SAY COñO?"
Canfield looked thunderstruck. "I'll be..."
"SOUNDS LIKE YOU BEEN DOING SOME AN-THRO-PO-LOGICAL RESEARCH OF YOUR OWN OVER IN THOSE DAMN JUAREZ CAT HOUSES!"
Canfield broke into a smile. "Dammit, Harley! You should find some way to put that voice to use."
Perry's phone rang. Canfield, still shaking his head, stepped to the desk and answered. "Yes, we'll pay for it," he said. He listened for a few seconds and muttered, "Jesus Christ. OK, DuChamps. Take a cab back here. We'll deal with it." He hung up and looked at Harley grimly, and then he broke into a howl of laughter. "Can you believe it? They stole his fucking car while he was talking to the cops!"


Chapter Ten

Dawn in Colonia Club Campestre, the snootiest section of Ciudad Juarez. Onofre Crispín, wrapped in a silk kimono, took a glass of papaya juice from a maid and strolled through the atrium, its 17th century fountain bubbling quietly, into the breakfast room. He sat at a massive worm-eaten table that he bought at a convent years ago, when he still had to think about prices. He flicked on the remote-control and a wide-screen TV, built into the wall and surrounded by hand-painted tiles, flashed to life. It was a familiar El Paso commercial, an old man wearing shorts hawking Toyotas. Crispín took a sip of the papaya juice and grimaced. "Dolores!" he shouted.
"Sí Señor," she answered, hurrying through the atrium.
"You forgot to put lime in the papaya juice," he said in Spanish.
"Ay perdóneme señor," she said to Crispín, who was intently touring the world of channels on his TV. He didn't answer. But as the maid walked away he yelled after her, "Y Dolores!"
"Sí señor."
"Un café también. Negro."
"Sí señor, como no."
Only 41-years-old, Onofre Crispín considered himself the modernizer of northern Mexico, a private-sector peer of President Salinas and his cabinet of American-educated economists. Crispín was bald, just like Salinas. And when he wore a mustache, as he did now, the resemblance was striking. Like Salinas, Crispín had his roots in Monterrey, the parched industrial capital of Mexico's north. In fact he briefly dated one of the president's cousins, who even visited him when he was studying at SMU. That was when Carlos, the president to be, was up at Harvard.
Salinas and his team simply mapped out the future of Mexico, Crispín believed. But they relied on people like him -- modernizers on the ground -- to put up the factories, build the roads, link the cities with fiber-optic cables. In short, to make it happen. In many ways, the job in Mexico City was easier. The government controlled the capital and dealt with the Gringos in faraway Washington. Here in Juarez, though, two parties actually jockeyed for power, the ruling PRI and the conservative PAN. That made business much more complicated. And here, the Gringos were right across the river, ready to raise an enormous racket whenever anyone in Mexico offended their tender sensibilities. The recent newspaper stories in El Paso, with their ridiculous claims about maquiladora trucks carrying cocaine, made Crispín's life miserable. Investors were calling brokers in New York and Dallas, asking about rumors that drug money was driving up the Grupo Espejo stock. One of his bankers said he should fly up to New York and soothe the analysts. "Even with the three-dollar drop, the stock's doubled in two weeks," Crispín told him. "And you think the analysts need soothing?"
Instead, Crispín considered flying down to Mexico City and asking the commerce secretary for a show of high-level support. Maybe he'd talk to Salinas. It wouldn't be the first time. But before any presidential audience, he'd have to shave his mustache. Otherwise, Salinas might think he was an imitator. Everywhere you looked in the capital these days, there were swaggering bald guys with mustaches.
The maid brought in the demitasse of steaming coffee and the papaya juice, along with a small plate with half a lime. "Gracias," Crispín said, squeezing the lime into the orange papaya juice. "You know, without lime it just doesn't taste like anything," he said with a smile, trying to make up for his gruff treatment.
"Claro que no, señor," Dolores said. "Desea azucar para el café?"
But Crispín had shifted his attention from the juice and coffee to the TV, where a tall American, with angular features and mussed up brown hair, was talking about a death threat.
"I found out about it reading my own paper, believe it or not," he said, looking out the corner of his eye at the older man sitting next to him. Their names popped up on the screen. Tom Harley, reporter and Ken Perry, editor.
At that point, the editor jumped in. "Let's focus on what really matters here. There's a señor across the river from us who poisons our kids with drugs, lives like a prince, and when we write a story about him, well, he just beats the daylights out of our photographer and sends a death threat to our reporter. And where's the Mexican government while all this is happening? For them, it appears, this is just business as usual. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Gustavo Jiménez were a card-carrying member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party."
The TV reporter, off camera, asked if that was true.
Perry, ignoring the question, continued. "Let me tell you, this is the most important story I've been on in 25 years in journalism. Harley here likes to downplay it sometimes, because he's a little uncomfortable in the spotlight. But the political question is whether we want to step up to the altar, economically speaking, with a government that coddles folks like this Gustavo Jiménez."
Disgusted, Onofre Crispín put down his coffee and reached for the cellular phone. He stood up and began pacing around the breakfast room, wondering who to call.
The editor was talking about Mexican law now. "This man Jiménez openly terrorizes the border, and for some reason, no one ever charges him with anything. Could it be political connections? I'd say yes. And I'd imagine he has pretty cozy ties with the maquiladora barons who really run Juarez's economy."
The reporter asked Harley how he planned to cover the story with a death threat hanging over him.
"By phone," Harley said, smiling. "No, just kidding. You know, Jiménez left town yesterday, driving south. So I don't think there should be a problem going over to Juarez."
The news broke for an ad.
Crispín angrily punched in a number in his cellular phone. Seconds later, he was talking to a groggy Juarez police chief
"Beto. Te habla Crispín.
"Hombre..."
Crispín cut short the pleasantries and told him about the television news. "I don't think you understand the damage this could inflict upon the country," he said, nervously scrapping the sugar from the bottom of his coffee cup. "These irresponsible reports from El Paso could sink the Nafta -- and all the work we've done to modernize Mexico."
"Uh huh," the chief said.
"They said on TV that the reporter, Tom Harley, would be coming to Juarez. I'm sure you have photos of him on record. Maybe if you just picked him up for a chat... I think he can be talked to. Much more than his boss."
"Mmmmm." Chief Roberto Muller thought it over. "Wouldn't they consider that some form of harassment? I just think..."
"Roberto. Come up with a way to do it," Crispín ordered. "Take him out to lunch at Julio's or the Paso del Norte. Feeding isn't harassing." He hung up and marched upstairs to get dressed, the kimono flapping at his shins.


Chapter Eleven

Drunk and heartsick over his stolen car, DuChamps still managed to write up the front-page story. And despite Harley's work, it was DuChamps' well-known byline that ran under the Thursday headline: "Juarez Kingpin Scrams." This put pressure on Harley to produce. After watching himself on the morning news shows, he took off for Juarez.
He planned to sniff around Jiménez's house. If no one answered, he'd call on neighbors, look in windows, visit the Xanadu hotel.
Driving across the Bridge of the Americas, Harley imagined knocking on Jiménez's door and finding himself facing a beautiful woman, a member of the harem. She'd invite him inside to a party room with cocaine on the coffee table, in little vials with silver spoons, and a black velvet portrait of Elvis, or maybe Emmitt Smith, on the wall. He pictured a mountain lion padding through the room, looking at him with a bored expression, and then jumping softly onto an overstuffed couch, stretching and falling asleep. Harley wondered how he'd ask the woman the delicate question of whether she belonged to a harem...
In Juarez now, Harley noticed a car creeping up behind him and looked in the rear-view mirror. He saw a policeman in a blue cruiser, lights on, motioning him toward the curb.
Harley watched the cop in the rear-view mirror. He saw him climb out of out of his cruiser and close the door. Then he pulled up his belt, walking forward. Finally he stuck his head in Harley's window.
The policeman, a fifty-year-old, Harley guessed, with a gray mustache and bright green eyes, smiled. His name tag read Pérez.
"Buenos días, señor Pérez," Harley said.
"You ga two problems," the policeman said in English. "One, you go through a stop sign back there. Two, you war espeeding, going nearly eighty kilometers per hour right here.
Harley didn't contest the charges. He sat quietly, waiting for the usual negotiations to begin. Pérez ordered him to park the car by the curb and turn off the ignition. This wasn't normal procedure. Then he told him to get out of the car, with his keys, and to lock it. Harley quickly saw he was facing arrest for business unrelated to stop signs or speeding.
Pérez asked for his identification and made a clicking sound with his tongue as he studied Harley's license. "Six feet four inches. Is that two meters?"
"One ninety-four," Harley said, speaking English for the first time.
"And tell me, Mister..." He looked back at the license... "Harley. Whar war you driving at such espeed?"
"I'm a journalist," Harley said. "I was driving to Gustavo Jiménez's house for an article I'm writing."
"He's not home, from what I hear," the policeman said. He motioned Harley into the cruiser, and the reporter, after locking his own car, jumped in.
"I wasn't expecting that you are so amable about this," Pérez said, looking at Harley in the rear-view mirror.
"I figure if someone wants to talk to me, we'll talk," Harley said.
Pérez didn't respond. He pulled the car into a lot full of blue and white Ford cruisers.
Harley followed the policeman through the dingy waiting room of the State Judicial Police office. He'd been there once before, waiting hours for an interview with the captain. He remembered watching a pastry vendor shoo flies and yellow-jackets away from his old eclairs and donuts. And as he walked through, with Pérez's arm lightly on his elbow, he saw the vendor was still there. The man waved at Harley and gestured toward his glass stand, but lowered his arm suddenly when he saw Harley was in custody.
Pérez led him to a desk, where a tired-looking clerk wearing a clip-on tie shuffled through a stack of papers as thick as Harley's office dictionary.
Pérez leaned over and murmured to the man. Harley heard something about "an appointment with the comandante."
"Claro," the clerk said, nodding without looking up. He rapped on the desk three times with a brass paperweight, and another policeman stepped forward.
"Regístralo," the clerk said, ordering him to frisk Harley.
"No, no," Pérez said, trying to stop his colleague. "He's here for an appointment. He's not under arrest."
Harley, who had just visited a bank machine before driving over, and had $60 in his wallet, worried about theft. He plunged a fist into his pocket, forcing the policeman to pry his brown wallet from his fingers.
Then, walletless, he flopped down in a folding chair, wondering what kind of form he'd have to fill out at the paper to get his money back.
Pérez came over to comfort him. "You don have to worry," he said. "They not going to steal nothing. They just look at your identification."
But his last words were drowned out by shouts at the desk. The cop who frisked Harley was shouting "Mira, mira," and holding a flattened joint above his head. The clerk, looking up for the first time, let loose a loud whistle.
"Uh oh," Pérez said.




Chapter Twelve

Rubén's aunt Julita called his cluttered third-floor bedroom "el gallinero," or the hen house. Sometimes she asked him what he spent so much time doing up there, with the temperature hotter than a Chihuahua hen house and all those newspapers cut to pieces on his table, overflowing onto the floor. He even had them taped all over his wall. Didn't he want her to climb up there from time to time and tidy things?
No, he said. Never. Those papers were necessary for a study he was doing.
Aunt Julita told him she'd never heard anything so foolish in her life. "Newspapers only teach you how to lie," she said more than once.
Rubén had been living with his aunt since his mother died. He was 14 when he arrived at the bus station in Juarez. He didn't know a word of English. But he knew where he was going. He walked straight from the bus station to the river, asked another boy to watch his suitcase, and then dove in. Minutes later Julita opened the door of her tenement apartment on Fr. Rahm Street, two blocks north of the river, to a skinny, curly-haired boy, dripping wet. He never went back for his suitcase.
Rubén's mother, Esperanza, had rafted across the river after her water broke, and she gave birth in Thomason General Hospital. That made Rubén a U.S. citizen, which meant he didn't even need to swim the river, or worry about la migra once he was across. He learned English quickly from the TV and breezed through high school. He even went for a few months to the community college, where he studied journalism and wrote articles for the school newspaper. Julita told him that newspapers weren't for serious people. But quietly she was proud of him. His career in journalism ended, however, with an article that angered a lot of people. Julita figured the article must have been true. Otherwise people wouldn't have been so upset. But he never told her what it was about.
Julita knew what people in the neighborhood said about Rubén. But when Julita's friends even hinted that Rubén wasn't the marrying kind, she defended her nephew. He was in love with Estela, his childhood sweetheart from Villa Ahumada, she said. Estela was just the girl for Rubén -- as soon as she got over that Gringo she was dating.
Julita didn't get out much anymore. For the last two years her knee had been swollen to the size of a grapefruit. The pharmacist sold her pills that at least made it easier to sleep. But the swelling didn't go down, and she couldn't afford a doctor. She often wondered how she'd get by if her brother Raul ever stopped sending monthly checks from Chicago. She doubted she could count on Rubén as a provider. True, he was brilliant, but too flighty.
For the last several days, Rubén had been all wound up, acting jumpy and excited just as he did when he worked on that last newspaper article. Julita's friend Ana, who brought groceries to the house twice a week, saw Rubén dash into the house one afternoon, and run up to the gallinero and down three times while making himself a cup of hot tea. She asked Julita whether he was on any kind of medication. No, responded Julita, he's just excited by his work. When asked what kind of work Rubén was doing, she said she wasn't sure. Something to do with newspapers. It didn't seem to pay very well.
Thursday afternoon, Julita was scrubbing floors in the small living room and kitchen, a small pillow under her bad knee. She was anxious to make the house presentable for visitors. The night before, a young Mexican man knocked on the door. He was Rubén's first visitor in ten years. She heard Rubén call him Gato, and the two of them went upstairs for 15 or 20 minutes. When they came downstairs, Julita was in the living room, watching Juarez TV. She struggled to her feet to prepare agua de limon for the young men. But they paid no attention to her. Rubén had his arm on Gato's shoulder, and was busy telling him how to get to Estela's apartment. "You can sleep on the couch," he said. "She'll appreciate the company."
Julita wondered if that meant the Gringo was out of the picture. If it was true, she hoped Rubén would pursue Estela himself. Sending a friend to sleep on her sofa was a roundabout way of courting, at least to Julita's way of thinking.
The phone rang and Julita answered. A Mexican man asked for Rubén. She heard him thumping upstairs, and then he picked up his phone in the gallinero. "Ya, Tía," he yelled down to her, telling her to hang up.
Julita waited a moment. She heard Rubén speaking in Spanish. "What news do you have?" he asked.
"Very well, very well. All went very well." The man chuckled.
Julita moved the phone closer to her ear.
"Did he swallow the story?" Rubén asked.
"Sí si si si si."
"Did he take notes?"
"You mean did he write in that little pad? Yes, plenty."
Julita felt a bit of dust in her nose. She wanted to keep listening, but a sneeze could get her into big trouble with her nephew. She laid the phone gently on the table and yelled up toward the gallinero. "Did you pick it up yet, hijo?"
"Ya, Tía," Rubén shouted down, sounding friendlier than usual. Julita limped back to the table and hung it up. Then she sneezed.
Rubén wondered for a moment if his aunt had been listening. His police contact, Pedro, was going on about how much DuChamps ate and drank. "I never saw a Gringo who could eat so much chile," he said, marveling. "And when he was drinking mescal, one of the companeros put that worm from the" he said, opening it.
"Leave it," Estela said, looking over at DuChamps, who was staring at her.
"He doesn't understand anything," Rubén whispered. "Look at this." He showed her the front page of the Tribune, with its screaming headline and front-page editorial.
Estela's dark eyes widened. "You... You did this?"
"It's nothing," Rubén said, looking at DuChamps, who was sitting back in the couch, with his legs crossed.
"But why? To protect me?" She touched the darkened skin under her eye.
Rubén looked down at his feet. "Sort of," he said. "But it's going to be useful for my career, my journalism."
"Ay cabrón," Estela said in a low voice, shaking her head. "You're the rarest mixture of macho mexicano and maricón I've ever met."
DuChamps suddenly spoke up. "Macho mexicano?" he said with a cowboy accent. "Who's a macho mexicano?"
Estela glared at him. "Vete," she said. "Go. Go out. Fuera!" She pointed angrily toward the door.
"Esperate," Rubén said. "Wait a minute. I want to talk to him about this story." He walked toward DuChamps, holding out the newspaper in his hand. "What do you think really happened over there, Hank?" he asked. "Do you think the paper got it right?"
DuChamps, still smarting from Estela's eviction order, took a second to focus on Rubén. "I guess so," he said, without much conviction.
"Did you consider the sourcing in this article," Rubén said. "Whose word do they have except for our friend here, Eddie? Did you consider that?"
"Jeez, I'd like to talk about this some," DuChamps said, but..." He looked past Rubén, who was now standing in front of him, at Estela, smoldering by the kitchen door. He wondered why he tried so hard to get into this apartment. There was nothing to learn here, as far as he could tell. Just a woman who was nice to look at and this weird guy, who acted like a journalism student on coke, asking these questions and bouncing on his toes.
"Do you know where our friend's at?" Rubén asked, smiling. "You know, Eddie?"
"He lives here, right?" DuChamps said.
"Yeah. But I think he, like, split." Rubén paused for a second and added, quietly, "Where do you suppose he went to?" He stood before DuChamps with his lips pursed and his eyebrows knitted, as if Eddie might be in trouble and in need of his help.



Chapter Twelve

Ruben's aunt Julita called his cluttered third-floor bedroom "el
gallinero," or the hen house. Sometimes she asked him what he spent so
much time doing up there, with the temperature hotter than a Chihuahua hen house
and all those newspapers cut to pieces on his table, overflowing onto the floor.
He even had them taped all over his wall. Didn't he want her to climb up there
from time to time and tidy things?
No, he said. Never. Those papers were necessary for a study he was doing.
Aunt Julita told him she'd never heard anything so foolish in her life.
"Newspapers only teach you how to lie," she said more than once.
Ruben had been living with his aunt since his mother died. He was 14 when he
arrived at the bus station in Juarez. He didn't know a word of English. But he
knew where he was going. He walked straight from the bus station to the river,
asked another boy to watch his suitcase, and then dove in. Minutes later Julita
opened the door of her tenement apartment on Fr. Rahm Street, two blocks north
of the river, to a skinny, curly-haired boy, dripping wet. He never went back
for his suitcase.
Ruben's mother, Esperanza, rafted across the river after her water broke, and
gave birth in Thomason General Hospital. That made Ruben a U.S. citizen, which
meant he didn't even need to swim the river, or worry about la
migra once he was across. He learned English quickly from the TV and
breezed through high school. He even went for a few months to the community
college, where he studied journalism and wrote articles for the school
newspaper. Julita told him that newspapers weren't for serious people. But
quietly she was proud of him. His career in journalism ended, however, with an
article that angered a lot of people. Julita figured the article must have been
true. Otherwise people wouldn't have been so upset. But he never told her what
it was about.
Julita knew what people in the neighborhood said about Ruben. But when Julita's
friends even hinted that Ruben wasn't the marrying kind, she defended her
nephew. He was in love with Estela, his childhood sweetheart from Villa Ahumada,
she said. Estela was just the girl for Ruben -- as soon as she got over that
Gringo she was dating.
Julita didn't get out much anymore. For the last two years her knee had been
swollen to the size of a grapefruit. The pharmacist sold her pills that at least
made it easier to sleep. But the swelling didn't go down, and she couldn't
afford a doctor. She often wondered how she'd get by if her brother Raul ever
stopped sending monthly checks from Chicago. She doubted she could count on
Ruben as a provider. True, he was brilliant, but too flighty.
For the last several days, Ruben had been all wound up, acting jumpy and
excited just as he did when he worked on that last newspaper article. Julita's
friend Ana, who brought groceries to the house twice a week, saw Ruben dash into
the house one afternoon, and run up to the gallinero and down three times while
making himself a cup of hot tea. She asked Julita whether he was on any kind of
medication. No, responded Julita, he's just excited by his work. When asked what
kind of work Ruben was doing, she said she wasn't sure. Something to do with
newspapers. It didn't seem to pay very well.
Thursday afternoon, Julita was scrubbing floors in the small living room and
kitchen, a small pillow under her bad knee. She was anxious to make the house
presentable for visitors. The night before, a young Mexican man knocked on the
door. He was Ruben's first visitor in ten years. She heard Ruben call him Gato,
and the two of them went upstairs for 15 or 20 minutes. When they came
downstairs, Julita was in the living room, watching Juarez TV. She struggled to
her feet to prepare agua de limon for the young men. But they paid
no attention to her. Ruben had his arm on Gato's shoulder, and was busy telling
him how to get to Estela's apartment. "You can sleep on the couch," he said.
"She'll appreciate the company."
Julita wondered if that meant the Gringo was out of the picture. If
it was true, she hoped Ruben would pursue Estela himself. Sending a friend to
sleep on her sofa was a roundabout way of courting, at least to Julita's way of
thinking.
The phone rang and Julita answered. A Mexican man asked for Ruben. She heard
him thumping upstairs, and then he picked up his phone in the gallinero.
"Ya, Tia," he yelled down to her, telling her to hang up.
Julita waited a moment. She heard Ruben speaking in Spanish. "What news do you
have?" he asked.
"Very well, very well. All went very well." The man chuckled.
Julita moved the phone closer to her ear.
"Did he swallow the story?" Ruben asked.
"Si si si si si."
"Did he take notes?"
"You mean did he write in that little pad? Yes, plenty."
Julita felt a bit of dust in her nose. She wanted to keep
listening, but a sneeze could get her into big trouble with her nephew. She laid
the phone gently on the table and yelled up toward the gallinero.
"Did you pick it up yet, hijo?"
"Ya, Tia," Ruben shouted down, sounding friendlier than
usual. Julita limped back to the table and hung it up. Then she sneezed.
Ruben wondered for a moment if his aunt had been listening. His police contact,
Pedro, was going on about how much DuChamps ate and drank. "I never saw a
Gringo who could eat so much chile," he said, marveling.
"And when he was drinking mescal, one of the companeros put
that worm from the bottle into his glass and told him, you know, that it was the
custom to eat it. The Gringo took it out and laid it on the table,
and then he took his steak knife and cut the worm right down the middle, and
spread it like a heart steak. He said he wanted to see what was inside. Then he
ate it! Me, if I'm going to eat something like that, I don't want to look at it
too closely..."
Ruben interrupted. "But he did listen to what you were telling him about
business in Juarez?"
"Si, si, si. As I tell you, he wrote down little notes
constantly."
Ruben started to sketch out plans for further contacts with DuChamps. Feeding
stories to the El Paso paper, he thought, was so much slicker and safer than
Simon's method of prowling El Paso with a gun. Later, Ruben would make the point
to Simon that the pen is mightier than the sword. He'd take a copy of the
Tribune over to the Lavarama. Let him see for himself.
As he planned ahead, Ruben heard the doorbell ring. He was wondering if it was
Gato returning for some reason when he heard Pedro say something about a
"desgracia," or misfortune.
"Que desgracia?" he asked.
"Just one little problem," said Pedro. "Towards the end of our session with him
in the cantina, we'd all been drinking tequila and mescal, and some of us
weren't -- How should I say this? -- as alert as we might have been, and it
turns out, as I say to you, that one of the camaradaas, when
we were diverted -- maybe when the Gringo was cutting that worm --
appears to have driven away in the Gringo's car."
Ruben was stunned. "Who stole it?" He heard his aunt calling him from
downstairs. "Un momento!" he yelled. Then he asked Pedro again," Who
stole it?"
"We'll get it back."
Ruben heard his aunt calling his name again, and then the heavy sound of her
footsteps limping up the steps. "Un momento," he said to Pedro. He
put down the phone and stuck his head out the door. He could see the top of his
aunt Julita's head as she made her way up slowly.
"There's a nice-looking friend of yours downstairs, who says he must see you,"
she said. "Very well dressed."
Simon, Ruben thought. The last visitor he wanted. "Tell him to wait a minute,"
he said, returning to the phone.
He picked it up. "Pedro?"
"Si?"
"You say that one of yours stole his car?"
"You should have seen him," Pedro said, laughing. "He was drunk, as I tell you,
and he ran up and down Calle Lerdo shouting 'cabron!
cabron!' and pulling at that hair of his. I tell you
amigo, I know this is unwelcome news. But you would have
laughed."
"What kind of car was it?" Ruben looked up as he asked the question, and saw
Simon, dressed in pressed gray flannel pants and an Oxford shirt,
slip though his door and sit down carefully between the clippings on his bed. He
laid his leather shoulder bag on the pillow, and took out a paperback book.
Pedro was talking, and Ruben had to interrupt him. "What kind did you say?"
"What kind of what?"
"Of car."
"Ah, a very beautiful red Pontiac. I can't say I blame them. He was in no
condition to drive anyway," Pedro added. "I mean we would have had to detain
him."
Ruben wondered whether Pedro himself stole the car. He blamed himself for
entrusting a crucial job to such an unreliable character.
"We'll get him back his car," Pedro said. "And you and I can discuss the bill
later."
"Yes, later." Ruben said, hanging up.
Simon looked at him over his reading. "You buying a car?" he asked in Spanish.
"No."
"I heard something about a red Pontiac."
"No that's just something..." Ruben paused and changed the subject. "What are
you doing here?"
"There's, there's trouble in Juarez," Simon said wearily, closing his book.
He went on to tell Ruben about the police picking up Alfredito. Following
Gato's advice, Simon said he sent the boy's mother to the police station. But he
never heard back from her. Instead, a whole delegation of men from the
neighborhood pounded on the gate of the Lavarama and told him to
leave. A few of them had guns.
Ruben wasn't surprised. "Did they know about the photographer?"
"Probably," Simon said, lying back on the bed and looking deflated. "There was
one other thing, too. They said that someone shot a gun from the
Lavarama, and that the bullet hit some boy in the barrio. In the
arm. Nothing serious. But they say they have evidence that the shot came from
the Lavarama."
Ruben didn't need to ask if it was true. "What's this mean for us?"
"Changes," Simon said in a low, determined voice. "Operations move to the north
side of the river. You know," he added, "your greatest opportunities arrive at
your lowest moments. It's merely a matter of recognizing and seizing them."
Ruben didn't bother teasing him about the lifted quote from Dr. Rivapalacios.
He had his own bad luck to report.


Chapter Thirteen

Duane Canfield balled up the stock pages of The Wall Street Journal
and threw them away. "Son of a bitch," he murmured to himself. Hillary's health
reform was murdering the drug stocks. He figured he'd lost $40,000 by betting on
Merck over Telmex. And then he bought into this maquiladora stock that had
doubled in two weeks, and it promptly dropped two points.
Canfield scanned the newsroom, taking in his staff of zombies. Some reporters
read newspapers. Others sat slumped in their chairs, the phone jammed between
shoulder and ear, taking the usual information from the usual sources: the lists
of drunk drivers and burglaries, the weather, details of the latest battles over
bilingual education at the Ysleta School District. DuChamps, usually his most
energetic reporter, was bent over his terminal, mourning his stolen Trans-Am. At
one point, Canfield walked over to comfort him, saying that with pressure from
the paper, the Mexicans were sure to return it. But DuChamps shook his head
slowly, saying, "They rip them apart, with blow torches."
Canfield wondered how to keep the Mexican drug scandal on page one without a
story. He knew Perry would be no help. The editor had celebrated his TV
performance and now he reeked of margaritas and cigars. When Canfield told him
he had no drug story for the front page, the editor in chief couldn't be
bothered. "I'll write another editorial," he said. Then he tossed Canfield a
fuzzy picture taken from the TV. It showed Perry gesturing expansively, his
right hand in front of Harley's face. "Think we could clean that up for the
front page?" he asked.
"I'd save it for your scrapbook," Canfield said, flipping the picture back.
Perry studied it for a moment. "It doesn't really do justice to Harley," he
said. "He's kind of in the shadow there. You know," he went on, trying to engage
his city editor in a chat, "I've been thinking about old Harley. Talented guy
like that, smart, all those languages. Damn good writer. No reason he couldn't
take this story and run with it."
"I guess," Canfield said, looking bored.
"Where is Harley, anyway?" Perry asked. "I'd like to have a little talk with
him."
"Damned if I know," Canfield said, standing up. "But I'd be a fool to count on
him to fill page one."
Front-page relief finally arrived over the fax machine. The Border Patrol
announced a new program to block illegal immigration, and cut back on car thefts
and purse snatching. "Operation Blockade," as it was called, would place a
virtual wall of Border Patrol agents along 12 miles of the north side of the
river, from the Hacienda Cafe near the Asarco smelter all the way to the
Zaragoza Bridge, by Ysleta. The idea was to discourage Mexicans from even
dipping a toe into the Rio Grande.
Canfield loved it. He walked over to DuChamps' desk and smacked him on the
back. "Enough of your whimpering. You got a story to write," he said, dropping
the release next to his keyboard. "Tie it to drugs."
The city editor pictured Operation Blockade fitting into a broad, front-page
package. DuChamps' story would detail how increased surveillance might put a
crimp into border drug traffic. Ken would write an editorial commending the
Border Patrol for responding so quickly to the Tribune's call for
government action against Gustavo Jimenez and other Juarez drug lords. Canfield
would assign one of his zombies to write about Mexico's reaction to Operation
Blockade, which was sure to be angry. And then maybe a business story about the
effects this blockade would have on the maquiladora trucks going back and forth
across the border. Too bad Harley wasn't around to write that story. Canfield
looked out the window at night falling on El Paso, and he wondered where Harley
was.
Within two hours, the package was nearly complete. DuChamps, lacking other
reporting, used some of the details those Juarez cops gave him before stealing
his car. He stayed clear of names, but sketched the structure of the drug
business, from the kingpins in Colombian cities like Cali and Medellin, to their
local envoys in Mexico, and their Mexican underlings like Jimenez. He hinted at
Jimenez's political connections and described his "stable of human mules, who
carried drugs across the river, creating a convoy of narcotics." It was this
convoy, DuChamps wrote, that would likely crash into Operation Blockade.
While Canfield was helping lay out the front page, Ken Perry walked out of his
office reading the hard copy of the lead article. He looked concerned. Standing
behind Canfield, who was leaning over the wire-service news desk, Perry coughed.
The city editor paid no attention, and Perry coughed again, saying, "Duane?"
Canfield looked up, and Perry gestured that he wanted a word with him. "Does
this mean," he whispered, "that people who work in Juarez won't be able to cross
the river unless they have a green card?"
"Yup," Canfield said, looking pleased.
"Even my maid?"
Canfield laughed. "And most likely your gardener too."
"It's not just me," Perry whispered angrily. "We're talking about real economic
impact here. Think of all the work these people do on the El Paso side of the
river."
Canfield didn't look impressed.
"I just think we should mention this in the coverage," Perry said. "It's not a
win-win deal."
"You're right," Canfield agreed, placating his boss. "We should come back with
that angle tomorrow." Perry nodded, walked back to his office and shut the door.
Then DuChamps came over with more news. He'd found out, he said, that the new
Border Patrol chief who was orchestrating this Operation Blockade was a
Mexican-American whose grandfather sneaked across the border, from Juarez to El
Paso, in the '30s. Canfield beamed. This was too rich. He was about to order up
a profile of the chief. But then he thought better of it. Better not to waste
all the good stories on the first day, even at the risk of getting scooped by
the Journal. Plus, he didn't want the coverage straying far from the drug focus.
"Don't go with it tonight," he told DuChamps. "I want you to follow that man
tomorrow from the minute he drinks his first cup of coffee. I want you in his
skin. You'll get the profile, and you might learn something about drugs while
you're doing it."

* * *

They escorted Harley into a small windowless room with a blinking neon light
and a linoleum floor worn down to the wood. Sit down, they told him. Then they
shut the door.
Slumped on the lone chair in the room, Harley wondered just how much trouble he
was in. Funny, he thought, like most people, he'd gotten away with so much in
his life. Some drunk driving in high school, coitus less than fully interruptus
in a half dozen love affairs, raw oysters in Galveston. Libel? He thought about
it. If sloppiness was an excuse, probably not. But through the years Harley had
made plenty of mistakes in his reporting. And no one ever called him on it.
And now, he was in a Juarez police station for possessing a joint he had no
intention of smoking.
Harley slumped lower in the chair, trying to think of something cheerful. He
thought of sex with Estela, pulling that oversized tee-shirt over her head. He
switched to Diana Clements. There was something a little nasty about her that
appealed to him. And her small, lithe body was much more his type than Estela's
Jayne Mansfield a la Mexicana. He thought about that split between Diana's front
teeth. It reminded him of someone, just a flash from his childhood, and he tried
to remember who. It wasn't Lauren Hutton, someone further back. Not David
Letterman. Someone from the '60s. Harley tried to picture Khruschev's mouth. Not
him. Jackie Kennedy? Then suddenly it came to him. Vince Lombardi, sitting on
the shoulders of his lineman, beaming, his teeth looking just a little like
Diana Clements'.
Now Harley had his work cut out: To appreciate Diana Clements, he'd first have
to purge Vince Lombardi's mouth from his memory.

Chapter Fourteen

Stevenson would have been happy to jump in bed as soon as he walked in the
door, without a word. But things were rarely that simple. He quickly saw that
the way to the bedroom involved the usual string of rituals and talk. Women
always felt this need to get acquainted.
The two of them sat in Diana's living room at sunset, music on, drinking
margaritas. Stevenson yawned and then draped his right arm around Diana's
shoulder with his hand dangling about three inches away from a breast. He felt
her stiffen slightly and then relax. He looked at a mole on the side of her neck
and considered kissing it. But he worried about sexual politics. "What's this
music?" he asked.
"K.D. Lang. Like it?"
"Pretty nice," Stevenson said, wondering if she might be a lesbian. After all,
she left that party with a blonde who looked like a Marine.
Diana grabbed his hand and pulled on the fingers affectionately, moving it away
from her chest. "So," she said, looking at him, "Do you want to talk about what
went on over there?"
Stevenson mixed a smile with a grimace. "Not, not now. Do you mind?"
"Oh no." She slipped out from under his arm, stood up and poured some more
margarita from a Mexican glass pitcher. "Want more salt on your glass?"
"Just ice," Stevenson said.
"OK." She went into the kitchen, tapping with the music on her hip.
Suddenly Stevenson tensed up. It was crazy for him to be here. They both knew
it. And he was getting the feeling that they'd be talking about it when she came
back with the ice. It all seemed so easy when he called from the hotel. But now
he saw they'd have to negotiate the terms of his visit. Stevenson hated that
kind of talk.
But there weren't many options. He was on the run, he felt, and he needed to
sleep somewhere. This was where he's ended up, this ugly little condo off of
Memphis Street, with an old Bobby Kennedy poster and French art prints on the
wall, and a little porch with a view of the mountains. If these quarters came
with a bedmate, he thought righteously... Well why shouldn't they?
The refrigerator door shut and Stevenson looked up to see Diana Clements coming
back to the couch, describing something she found "hilarious." With the music
playing, Stevenson couldn't hear what she was talking about. But she pronounced
"hilarious" with a long and loud "Larry" in the middle of it, sounding like
Edith Bunker. Stevenson realized he still hadn't asked her where she was from --
though he had a good idea -- or what she did for a living. He sat back and
looked at her as she placed a glass bowl of guacamole with some chips in it on
the table. Then she smiled at him and plopped the ice into his now-saltless
margarita.
They sat quietly side by side, sipping and munching and listening to K.D. Lang.
They hardly looked at each other, just glancing from time to time while reaching
for the chips. Stevenson didn't put his arm around her again. Instead, he was
formulating a question in his mind about K.D. Lang and lesbianism. He was
working on the phrasing, which he knew would have to be delicate.
Suddenly Diana piped up. "Tell me about your Mexican lover." She said it as if
she were asking about his home town or favorite movies.
Stevenson hated the word lover. It sounded so graphic. He didn't want to talk
about Estela, but saw no way around it. He nibbled on his mustache, which gave
him a pained and sincere look. "We broke up," he said quietly, raising his eyes
to Diana.
"Just recently?"
"Ummhum. A couple days ago."
"I'm sorry about that. You've had a killer week, haven't you?"
Stevenson nodded, looking at her. He saw for the first time how pretty her eyes
were, especially now with their sympathetic mist. They were small and sharp,
like gems, the brown shining with yellow specks. So much more chipper than
Estela's black lagoons.
He knew he had to say more. Betting from the Kennedy poster that she was
liberal, he appealed to Diana's politics. "It just didn't work out," he said.
"There's a bourgeois side to her, very materialistic, you know. She wants to
spend all of her time at the mall."
"I think she's gorgeous," Diana said.
Stevenson conceded that much with a shrug and a half smile.
"Did you move out?"
"Yeah. Pretty much."
"And now you want to stay here." It wasn't a question. But it demanded a
response.
"Oh," Stevenson said, waving his palm toward her. "No really. Not at all. I
mean..."
"Listen," she said. "You can stay here. We just have to figure out what kind of
guest you're going to be, a refugee or..."
"No, no," Stevenson blurted, before she could say "lover." "I still have a lot
of things to figure out. I don't think I'll even be staying in El Paso, not with
what happened over in Juarez. It just makes me feel creepy." He kept talking,
just to keep Diana quiet. "I was thinking of driving down to Austin, to visit my
brother. Well, first I was thinking about driving out to L.A. I sort of feel
like swimming in the ocean, know what I mean?" Stevenson went on talking,
looking down at his hands. "But then I figured that maybe I should go to Austin,
'cause at least I have my brother to stay with there." He was quiet for a moment
and looked up.
"You're taking a leave from the paper."
Another one of those statements of hers. He decided to slow down for a moment
and figure out what he wanted from Diana Clements. He looked at her, sipping
from her margarita, her eyes studying him over the salt-coated rim of her glass.
He didn't want sex, he decided. She was already seeing through him now; sex
would make it worse.
So if he didn't want sex, what was he doing? Stevenson picked up his margarita
and took a slow sip. He tried to imagine a sexless friendship with a woman. He
hadn't had one of those since high school; and even then, it was only that way
because the girls said no. He tried to imagine just sitting here with this
woman, listening to music and drinking, without any of this tension. What would
they talk about? He didn't know. But he found the idea strangely appealing.
"Eddie," she asked. "Are you taking a leave from the paper?"
"Yeah," he said, nodding.
"Did you tell Canfield? I think he was looking for you today."
"How do you know about Canfield?"
"I called him."
"And asked about me?"
She shrugged. "What else? He's kinda friendly."
Stevenson was shocked that this woman whose name he could barely remember had
been calling his boss, asking about him. He remembered Fatal
Attraction, where Michael Douglas finally had to shoot Glenn Close in the
bathtub. He felt relieved that this was going to be a sexless relationship.
"Who else have you been talking to?" he asked.
"Well, I went over to the apartment and talked to Estela."
"Jesus Christ!"
"It wasn't any big deal."
"So she's still staying there?"
"Yeah."
"What did she say?" he asked.
"Well, my Spanish isn't too good. But I got the impression that she'd sort of
like to know where you are. Canfield would too. He says you're taking a leave
from the paper."
Stevenson sat looking at his margarita, chewing on the inside of his cheek.
Then, remembering something, he stretched back on the couch and reached into the
tiny square pocket of his Levi's.
"Do you have some problem at the paper, Eddie?"
Stevenson didn't hear her. He was carefully extracting a skinny joint -- a long
forgotten treasure -- from his pocket. "Would you like to smoke this?" he said.
"With me?"
Diana shook her head. "You go ahead. I haven't smoked that stuff in years."
But after Stevenson lighted the joint and inhaled deeply, she reached for it
and took a small puff, as if to be sociable, and then a bigger one. Then she
coughed. "Shit!" she said, coughing. "I forgot how much it hurts."
They smoked the rest of the joint together, Stevenson taking big puffs and
Diana little ones, both of them dousing the burning in their throats with more
margaritas. Then they sat side by side on the couch, each in a trance. At one
point, Diana got up to change the music. She stood gazing at her tape
collection, apparently unable to make up her mind.
This gave Stevenson his first chance to look at her closely. She had a compact
little body, he noticed, which looked wonderful in the tight-fitting bluejean
shorts. The fact that she looked so appealing, he thought, would make this
sexless relationship even more meaningful. He was intrigued by it. If Diana were
just his friend, he could go back to Estela and be a father to her child -- if
she wasn't lying about being pregnant. Why hadn't he thought about this before
in such a positive light? He imagined playing with his little bilingual child in
Azcarate Park, and taking pictures. He thought about having Diana over to have
dinner with him and Estela in the barrio. What language would they speak? He'd
probably have to interpret, a job that would be easier once he really tackled
Spanish. That was something he'd do this fall, take a Spanish course at UTEP.
By the time Diana picked out the music and returned to the couch, Stevenson was
visualizing his life as a border version of "Father Knows Best." He suddenly
felt very close to Diana. By asking him all these questions about his visit,
she'd made him come to terms with his own thinking. His return to Estela -- and
the baby -- might not have happened if Diana hadn't pushed him. He wanted to
thank her for her help, for being such a good friend. But as he turned to look
at her, sitting entranced again on the couch, listening to Linda Ronstadt
singing in Spanish, he realized that he hadn't answered any of her questions
yet. She didn't know about his plans for a sexless friendship, or his new vision
for family life in the barrio. He couldn't imagine explaining it all to her,
especially now, drunk and stoned. But he decided to give it a start. "I'm really
glad I came over here," he said to her.
She didn't respond for a second, and then said, "Huh?"
"I'm glad I came over."
"Me too," she said slowly. "But I don't think I should have smoked that pot. I
feel... pretty weird."
Stevenson felt giddy. "Say hilarious," he said.
She looked at him, bleary-eyed. "Huh?"
"Say 'hilarious' for me."
"Whhhhy?"
"I like the way you say it."
Very softly and slowly, she said, "huh-LARRY-us."
Stevenson watched her mouth as she said it, and giggled.
Diana got up slowly and made her way to the stereo. She bent over and turned it
down a little, giving Stevenson one more look at her in those blue jeans. She
walked back to the sofa wobbling a little, and plopped down, the outside of her
thigh landing on his. Stevenson looked at her face, about six inches from his.
He could see the faint black hairs on her upper lip. He could smell her. It
wasn't a perfumy smell, like Estela's, but clean and human, maybe with a touch
of Camay soap. He looked at her neck, the black hairs pulled up and wrapped in a
knot, clamped with a barrette. He blew lightly on her neck and saw goosebumps
rising like little waves when a breeze blows across a lake. He looked at that
brown mole he'd been eyeing earlier. He wondered if this sexless friendship
could survive just a little dry kiss on the mole. He leaned over, breathed in
her fragrance, and brushed it with the outside of his lips. Diana exhaled
softly, as if releasing all the tension between them. She pivoted slowly,
wrapped her arms around his neck, and fell back on the couch, pulling Stevenson
on top of her, searching with her mouth for his.



Chapter Fifteen

The police chief, barely visible behind a huge metal desk, was talking on the
phone when they delivered Harley to the door of his dark office. Upon seeing
Harley, he spoke a few words into the phone and hung up.
He flashed a smile and rose to his feet. Even upright, most of him remained
hidden by the desk. "Roberto Muller, Mr. Harley. Please have a seat."
Harley wordlessly sat down on a folding chair and brushed his hand through his
hair. Instinctively he reached into his back pocket for his reporter's notebook,
but then decided to leave it there, since his status, as reporter or prisoner,
was uncertain.
"I appreciate your coming by," Muller said, nearly dropping out of sight as he
sat down. His Texmex accent reminded Harley of Rudi Torres, a copy editor at the
paper. "I understand we had you... How should I say... cooped up for a while.
Sorry about that. Must have been a misunderstanding."
"That's OK," Harley said, almost whispering. He wondered if the chief knew
about the joint.
The small man shifted his chair and pulled his elbows up on the desk, bringing
his face into view. He fiddled with his finger tips, touching them together in
the form of a church roof. He had a round fleshy face and thinning brown hair
combed across his head. He looked like a German butcher, or maybe a well-fed
accountant.
"OK," Muller finally said, exhaling slowly. "Let's be frank. I had you brought
in here. You know that. And I'm sure you know why."
Harley nodded slightly. The little chief's precise English, so unusual along
the border, disoriented him.
"How about this?" Muller said, standing up again. "We'll sit over on those easy
chairs and have a talk, you and I. You tell me what you're looking for. I tell
you the same. I bet we'll both come out of this meeting with a much clearer view
of things." He walked across the dingy linoleum floor to a dark corner of the
office, where a pair of Naugahyde easy chairs and a sofa were arranged around a
coffee table. The only light came from two dim electric candles on the
wood-panelled wall. Between them hung a photo of a stern President Salinas, with
a green, red and white sash over his shoulder.
"Since I initiated this meeting," Muller said as they sat down, "how about if I
start by telling you what's on my mind?"
"Fine," Harley said.
"I'm sure you've heard all sorts of nasty things about the Judicial State
Police. I'm sure you have because you've published some of them in your paper."
Harley made signs of protesting, but Chief Muller raised his small hands a
second and continued. "I heard many of those things myself before I took this
job. And many of them, I'm very sorry to say, are true. We have people here who
are intimately -- in-tim-ate-ly -- associated with all sorts of criminal
activity. You know that. I know that. Why should I hide it from you??" He smiled
for an instant, and proceeded. "When I took this job, I told the governor -- You
know, he and I are both members of the opposition party, the PAN -- I told him:
'Governor, you know I don't think I can straighten out the Policia Estatal
Judicial all by myself. That would be like the task Hercules faced in
cleaning those Augean stables.' Are you familiar with that?"
Harley smiled. "You'd have to reroute the Rio Grande."
"Well, I'm not Hercules," the chief said. "Hardly. But the governor -- he's a
very inspiring man -- he told me to do the best I could. So here I am." He
paused, as if expecting a question. But HHarley just looked at him.
"Now I hear that you were hoping to visit Gustavo Jimenez's house this
afternoon..."
"Yes," Harley said. "You know that business with Eddie Stevenson, the
photographer, and then the... the threat he brought back for me, it's raised a
lot of questions."
"But you're aware that Jimenez left yesterday," the chief said.
"Where'd he go?"
The chief shrugged, pushing his double chin into his face. "Who knows? South. I
suppose I could find out if I wanted. But Gustavo Jimenez, he's not a man to be
taken terribly seriously." He saw a look of astonishment on Harley's face. "I
hope you didn't lose sleep over that death warning," the chief said. "Jimenez is
just... a playboy. A rake. Do you use that word anymore? I very seriously doubt
that he was involved with your photographer. And if he was, he was having a
little fun, maybe drunk. He's never hurt a fly."
"How about the reporter who had his lungs..."
"Oh, that wasn't Jimenez's work," the chief said, with a dismissive wave of his
hand.
"But people said..."
"Oh, yes. He's what we call a 'chivo expiatorio.' A scapegoat. He's
often used in that manner. He might even face some problems resulting from this
incident with your newspaper. He could even land in jail. I suppose that's why
he left. But really Mr. Harley, Gustavo Jimenez is quite an innocent. If he were
all I had to worry about, this would be a much simpler job. Did you ever watch
Andy of Mayberry?"
Harley nodded.
"Do you remember that drunk who let himself into jail every day?" The chief
thought about it for a second, and said, "No, I suppose that comparison is a bit
far-fetched. After all, Gustavo Jimenez does run a bit of the drug
business..."
"Do you know him?" Harley asked.
"Gustavo? Of course. Everyone knows him."
"Oh."
At that point, Chief Muller jumped to his feet. "I've been extremely rude, Mr.
Harley. Can I get you a cup of coffee, tea, agua mineral?"
Harley asked for a Coke.
The chief leaned out of his office and ordered a Coke and a coffee. Then he
came back and pulled a box of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and held out the
box toward Harley. "It would be rude not to offer," he said, taking a cigarette
for himself, and tapping it on his thumbnail. "But I know Americans don't smoke
anymore. At least Americans like you."
After the chief lighted his cigarette, Harley asked, "So who do you think beat
up Stevenson?"
"Could be anybody," the chief said. "Probably not a very intelligent person.
Might be a couple of my men. Who's to say?" He shrugged, pushing his chin up
again. "If I had to guess, I'd say your friend Stevenson probably has some sort
of relations that none of us knows much about. But I must say, I haven't looked
into it. Despite the diplomatic stir and all the headlines, no charges have been
filed. I can understand Mr. Stevenson's reluctance to come over here again to
press charges. But until he does, we don't investigate."
"So," Harley said, "if Jimenez is like the drunk on Andy of
Mayberry, which criminals around here cause the real problems?"
"Remember," the chief said, exhaling smoke and pointing a finger at him, "I
said that the Andy of Mayberry comparison was not quite right. I
don't want to see that in your newspaper."
"Right, but..."
"But if you want to know about that, I'm happy to tell you. But let's first
order some food. If I'm going to tell you about crime here, I've got to tell you
also about politics and economics of the border. It's quite a long story."


Chapter Sixteen

The lanky one with the funny short pants showed up at Estela's apartment at night, and by noon the next day, he'd already turned the living room into an extension of himself. First he scraped all the dirt and tar off the sides of Eddie's glass pipe and then smoked it, stinking up the apartment. By breakfast time, his papers and clothes were piled on the coffee table, and he was busy scraping more tar out of the waterpipe, followed by more smoking and coughing. Despite all this, Estela thought, this Gato had a nice smile.
But now it looked like his friend was moving in, and things were getting more complicated. Estela had no idea where he'd sleep. This new arrival, Simón, certainly dressed better than Gato and seemed far neater. But Estela hadn't seen him smile yet. He just sat on the edge of the sofa, reading some book he carried, and then studying a map of El Paso. Once she heard him swearing under his breath.
Estela was drying dishes in the kitchen, eavesdropping, when she heard Simón say something to Gato about a stolen car. Gato burst into a fit of laughter that was cut short by what sounded like a punch. Estela looked into the living room to see Gato struggling for breath and Simón shaking his right hand, as if he'd burned it. "Todo bien?" she asked them. They both nodded, and she retreated to the kitchen.
If these men were Rubén's friends, they were probably the ones who helped him beat up Eddie. It didn't matter much to Estela. Her life was full of men hitting women, the way Eddie hit her, and then men hitting men, usually while drinking. Estela's bruises were clearing up, and she imagined Eddie's were too. But Eddie was gone, and she had to find a new place to live. For a moment, she thought that the tall Gringo who spoke Spanish so beautifully, Tomás, might take her in. But he ran away from her like a cat splashed by water. He was different from Eddie. He probably didn't hit women, if he had anything to do with them at all.
The sun was setting. Out the kitchen window, Estela could see the sky darkening from pink to red over Juarez, right over that mountain with big white letters on its side: Lee la Biblia, Es la Verdad. When she first moved up from Villa Ahumada, she lived with some cousins in a little shack with a tin roof at the foot of that mountain. It used to take her two hours in buses to get to her work at the maquiladora from that house. She did that for a few months, spending four hours a day on the buses, and another eight threading little silver and copper wires into a piece of white rubber than looked like macaroni, until she ran into Rubén one afternoon on Avenida Juarez. At first she didn't recognize him. He was speaking English with an American and was carrying a load of books under his arm. She walked right by him. But he followed her, yelling, "Estelita!"
Early on, she thought Rubén had a crush on her and was shy. He couldn't look at her eyes and he fidgeted with his silver ring, taking it off his finger and spinning it around his baby fingernail, like those wheels that mice run around in pet-shop windows. But she began to wonder about the crush when he took her out to dinner the first time. Estela wore stockings and her best black dress, a tight one with a slit up the leg, and high heels and a necklace made of little white shells that her aunt had brought back from Guaymas. Dressed like that, she waited for three quarters of an hour in front of a juice bar on Calle Guanajuato, fighting off waves of men. She expected Rubén to pick her up in a car and take her to a fancy restaurant in El Paso. This would be her first trip north of the border, and she was excited. But when Rubén finally showed up, he was on foot, wearing dirty blue jeans and a sleeveless tee-shirt, which made him look scrawnier than ever. At dinner at La Nueva Central, a Juarez café that felt like a bus station, he ordered enchiladas and coffee for both of them, and then talked about politics and newspapers and the maquiladoras, while drinking cup after cup of coffee. He talked about "explotación." If that meant bad pay at the factory, Estela agreed. But she thought he meant more than that. That night he still couldn't look at her eyes.
Estela carried a load of clean clothes from the bedroom of her apartment into the living room, and dumped them on the floor. Gato was asleep on the couch, snoring gently. Simón paged through a pile of newspapers from Juarez and El Paso. He still had the El Paso map spread open on his lap. He paid no attention to Estela as she set up the ironing board and stretched out one of Eddie's white button-down shirts.
She decided to try talking to him. "Looking for a job?" she asked in Spanish.
He looked up, bothered. "No. I already have work."
"On this side?"
"No, in Juarez."
"Oh." She started ironing. "I saw you with the map and the newspapers, and I figured you must be looking for work."
Simón nodded, and looked again at the map.
"You have any dirty clothes, I can handle them," Estela said to Simón.
"Not yet," he said, without looking up.
Did this mean they were staying for a while?
She flicked a bit of spit on the iron. It sizzled. She loved ironing. It helped her think.
Back to Rubén. Estela remembered how angry he got when she told him about the work she was doing after the maquiladora, the "dating." They were sitting in that same café, La Nueva Central, where they'd had their first dinner. She told him and his foot began to shake. They were sitting in a green booth, and she could feel the shaking up and down her spine. The formica table shook. Estela looked at him, and the muscle of his clenched jaw looked like something alive, as if a horsefly were trapped in there. He wasn't looking at her, but out into the distance. Estela watched his coffee, probably his sixth or seventh cup, the wobbly little circles lapping up against the edge, and then spilling over onto the saucer. Then with one big shake the whole cup tipped over, and the bottle of mineral water landed in her lap. That was the night they went to the dance in El Paso, where she met Eddie.
Now Rubén was mad at Eddie. He said it was for punching her face, that he was going to hurt Eddie.
That's when Estela told Rubén that she thought she was pregnant. She said she wanted the baby to have a father. She didn't want to lose Eddie. He wasn't so bad. She didn't mention that Eddie was her only ticket to the American life. She knew Rubén didn't like that kind of talk. He called it "materialista."
He looked blankly at her and then said, "I'll make sure he's a good father."
That was before the incident in Juarez. Afterwards, he had a different story, arguing that somehow it fit into his journalism career. This led Estela to wonder if she understood what the word journalism --periodismo-- meant. She thought she did. But maybe on this side of the river, journalism was altogether different, a profession tied up somehow with police work and punishment.
She looked over at Simón, who seemed puzzled about something in the newspaper. "Come here and take a look at this," he said, sounding a little friendlier. He opened up the El Paso Tribune editorial page and pointed to the words 'Editor in Chief: Ken Perry.' "This man here, is he the president of the paper?"
"Umm. I think so," Estela said.
"And where is the Coronado neighborhood?"
"Ahh, that's where the rich live. Come here." She led Simón to the window, stepping over Gato's shoes and his own little knapsack. Estela leaned out and pointed north, to the darkening Franklin Mountains, now purple, with just a trace of pink at the top. "See those hills?"
Simón looked instead at her chest, where the blue fabric of the tee-shirt was stretched tight. Then he glanced out the window.
"Coronado climbs up on those foothills," she said. "On the west. It's called the Wes-sye."
Simón nodded. "Listen," he said, fidgeting. "I have a bit of a problem with money. I have plenty back in Juarez, but I can't go over there until tomorrow, or maybe Saturday."
Estela nodded sympathetically. She understood financial problems.
"So," Simón continued, "do you think I could have a little session on credit?"
"Session?" Estela asked, knowing what he meant but playing for time.
Simón grabbed her head with one hand, digging his fingers under her hair and pushing down towards his waist. With the other hand he unzipped his fly. "Just a little one," he whispered. "I won't even take off my pants."
Estela twisted free from him and swung a fist at his face. Simón, still holding a handful of her hair, turned sideways. The punch caught him on the ear, sending his glasses flying. He stumbled backwards, tripped over his knapsack, and fell backwards on the couch, landing on Gato's legs. Estela, pulled by her hair, fell on top of him.
Gato awoke and surveyed the pile-up. "Hey Simón," he said, "didn't your mama ever tell you not to pull girls by the hair?"


Chapter Seventeen

The chief offered to send him back to the border in a cruiser, but Harley wanted nothing to do with Mexican police cars. He said no, thanks, and the chief seemed to understand. He shook Harley's hand cordially, bowed slightly, and closed the door.
Harley made his way through the corridors back to the lobby. It was crowded, but the pastry vendor had gone. Outside it was dark and cool, and Harley could smell tortillas cooking.
At first, he walked the wrong way down Calle Lerdo, eventually coming upon a strip bar called La Lagunera. A pink neon sign in the blackened window showed a garter-belted leg. He stood there looking at it for a moment. The detached limb reminded him of the little silver prayer charms the Mexicans offer to the Virgin -- hearts, legs, arms, eyes, for whatever's afflicting them. He wondered which charm would do him the most good. A brain maybe?
A taxi driver came up behind him and whispered, "Donkey show?"
"Como?"
"Donkey show, you wanna see?"
Harley heard "Don Quichotte," and wondered for a moment why a Juarez taxi driver would be talking about Don Quixote in French.
"Girls," the driver said. "Pretty ones." He grimaced and pointed to La Lagunera. "But not here. Ugly! Fat!"
Harley, usually a stickler for speaking Spanish in Mexico, felt dreamy and found himself playing the taxista's game. "What's a donkey show?" he asked in English. If he could survive getting caught with a joint in a Mexican police station, he figured, he could make it through anything.
The driver smiled and came close to him, gripping his arm.
Harley instinctively placed a hand on his wallet.
"You see a donkey? With a prick this long." The taxista put his hands a foot and a half apart. Harley could smell rum on his breath.
"He does it with a very very beautiful woman," the man said, arching his eyebrows.
Harley wasn't feeling quite that quirky. "No, thanks," he said, striding off quickly towards brighter street lights.
The driver ran alongside of him. "It's worth the pain, my friend."
Harley finally freed himself from the cabdriver, but got lost in the process. Two women were calling to him. He walked away from them, toward a vacant lot. From there he can see the red radio towers on the Franklin Mountains.
He directed his long strides north. As he walked, he pulled out his wallet and checked to see if the cops took his money. There was still a $20 bill, along with a bunch of receipts from bank machines.
Harley was so unnerved when he left that he didn't even think about his money. Through most of the evening, he had felt more and more comfortable talking to the chief, even joking with the man. But as Harley and the chief were finishing a second batch of liverwurst sandwiches, there was a knock on the door. The chief called out "Pásale!" and a policemen dressed in a waiter's black jacket came in carrying a white plastic tray. More food, Harley thought, as the waiter deposited the tray on the chief's desk, said "Con permiso," and left.
But when Harley looked at the tray, he saw his wallet. And, next to it, lay the flattened, curved joint. He felt a surge of panic.
The chief chuckled. He walked to the desk and tossed the wallet to Harley. "They told me about this," he said, holding the joint between his thumb and forefinger. "But I didn't pay any attention." He paused and then said, "It's quite surprising that they would plant something like this on you. Apparently they thought I needed more 'palanca.' How do you say that? Leverage. More leverage than I had." He smiled, holding the joint above a black waste-paper basket. "I suppose we should throw this away... Unless you want to smoke it?"
Harley shook his head violently. The chief chuckled again and let the joint fall into the basket.
He didn't say another word about it.
But as Harley walked toward El Paso, he wondered if Chief Muller had quietly taken possession of him. How could Harley ever write critical articles about Muller, knowing that the chief could revive the drug case against him in the Mexican press? Of course, even if Muller brought it up, Harley could claim it was planted. Muller himself said as much, and the Americans were always ready to believe the worst about Mexican police.
Harley wondered what to do with all the history Muller gave him. It was rich stuff, but more suited to a book than a daily newspaper. Muller outlined for him the power structure of Juarez. First, the chief said, there were the great landholders, like the Terrazas family, who owned pieces of Chihuahua that were bigger than states like Delaware and Rhode Island. Maybe even bigger than New Jersey. He wasn't sure. This old money supported the ruling party, the PRI, and in exchange for that support, the government didn't expropriate their estates -- or at least not too many of them -- in the waves of land reform following the Mexican Revolution. The rural police served these landholders, breaking strikes at the saw mills and cotton plantations, scaring away and even killing rabble rousers and revolutionary journalists. Muller smiled at Harley when he said that, and added, "But never Americans, as far as I can recall."
While the millionaires ran their haciendas in the countryside, Juarez was little more than a tavern and whorehouse for El Paso. It served drinks to thirsty Americans during prohibition, and provided women for thousands of Fort Bliss soldiers. Juarez police took bribes to look the other way. "They still do," Muller added, matter-of-factly. And the cops also made money from Juarez's growing smuggling business, the chief said, "which is what brings you here." He smiled and Harley nodded.
Chief Muller took a last bite of his liverwurst sandwich and then lighted a cigarette. In the '60s, he said, lots of new players came to the Juarez area. America's drug appetite grew, which brought the narcos, who quickly established joint ventures with the local police. At the same time, industry came to the area. That brought American managers to the border, where they met tens of thousands of poor Mexican workers coming north from Durango, Michoacan and Puebla. At first, the American companies set up sewing operations. But in the '80s, when the Japanese started taking away American markets, U.S. companies moved all sorts of manufacturing south of the border. "TVs, auto harnesses. You know what those are? The whole electrical system in your car?"
Harley nodded.
To build and run these new factories, the chief said, the Americans looked for Mexican parters. "They had no need for the sons of Chihuahua planters, or barkeepers or corrupt policemen. They needed sophisticated, multi-lingual businessmen, people who were as comfortable in El Paso -- or Dallas or Chicago for that matter -- as in Juarez."
"People like you," Harley said, flattering the chief.
"Since you mention it, yes," the chief said, as he exhaled. "But they were really looking for entrepreneurs with a vision for the region. Do you know, by chance, Onofre Crispín?"
Harley said he didn't. But the name was familiar.
"You wrote about him, I believe, in a recent article," the chief said. "Perhaps you didn't get a chance to interview him for that piece of work."
Harley recalled Crispín's name in the article about Jiménez and the tigers, and he blushed. "Oh. Right," he said, nodding.
The chief went on to describe Onofre Crispín and other entrepreneurs like him as a great modernizing force along the border. They were men, he said, who owed nothing to the PRI. "These are the people who are bringing North American civilization south into Mexico. And I'm not talking only about foreign investment. They are also introducing new political ideas in Mexico. Many of them, you know, are members of the Acción Nacional Party."
"But it seems like Salinas is leading this revolution, and he's with the PRI," Harley said.
The chief nodded gravely. "But in his heart he's a Panista."
Muller went on at length about Onofre Crispín. He was a graduate of Southern Methodist University, he said, fluent in English, a patron of the arts, a season-ticket holder of the Dallas Cowboys, perhaps a future governor of Chihuahua or -- who could say? -- president of Mexico. "If you want to learn about what's really happening here," he said, looking sternly at Harley, "you must talk to Crispín." He went to his intercom and ordered a secretary to bring him a copy of Crispín's phone numbers for his guest.
Harley was still replaying the conversation with the chief as he paid a peso and walked across the bridge to El Paso. He was almost at the Paso del Norte Hotel, on the border between the barrio and downtown, when he realized, with a start, that he'd left his car parked in Juarez. For a moment, he considered going back for it. But what would he do if he walked all the way back there and didn't find it? Go to the police? Instead he walked into the Tiffany Dome Bar at the Paso del Norte and ordered a margarita.


Chapter Eighteen

Diana Clements lay in bed listening to Eddie Stevenson's gentle snores, wondering if her superstitions had landed her with another loser. He wouldn't be the first. Outside that party, he seemed so forward, and direct. But while they drank margaritas, he was just feeding her a bunch of lines and waiting for sex.
For a while, it didn't seem like he wanted it. Then, once he kissed her, the talking was over. They kissed on the couch, not even slowing down when Eddie slowly reached up to her chest with his hairy hands, and unbuttoned her blouse and, after a fumbling around, unfastened her bra. Kissing all the while, as if he wanted an excuse not to talk, he began on her blue jean shorts. Diana finally helped him by wriggling out of them.
The kissing felt fine, though the mustache took some getting used to. But Diana realized after a while that while she was naked, Eddie was fully clothed, and apparently waiting for her to undress him. She didn't want to. He was pulling her hand down toward his belt buckle. Then, to make the point, he pulled loose the belt and placed her hand on the snap of his pants.
"Why don't you take your clothes off?" she whispered. He grunted and stood up, and Diana slipped back into the bedroom.
She wasn't too excited. But sometimes, she found, sex was the path of least resistance. Within seconds he jumped onto the bed and immediately buried his head in her breasts and began kissing them. No sense in talking she thought, lying back on the pillow.
Her mind drifted as Stevenson devoured her body. She found herself wondering what time it was, and whether he was enjoying it more than she was. She looked out the window at the mesquite tree waving in the breeze and wondered if it would rain. She dozed off before he was done.
Now, at three a.m. with Eddie asleep beside her, Diana could feel a hangover coming, and her throat was scratchy from smoking that joint. She went into the bathroom for water and an Advil. Maybe she'd just dump him in the morning. It wasn't as if they'd invested much in each other. He didn't know about her break-up with Raymond or her job at the brokerage. He didn't know where she was from, and he didn't show any interest -- except to laugh at her pronunciation of "hilarious." Diana felt resentful. She'd send him away, right after breakfast.
She returned to bed and was surprised to find him awake.
"Cotton mouth?" he said.
"Yeah."
"Me too."
"There's Advil in the bathroom, if you want."
"Thanks." He got up and made some noise in the bathroom. Then he was back. "Ya sleepy?"
"Not really," she said.
"Hmmm." Taking that as an invitation, Stevenson rolled on top of her and gently wedged a knee between her legs.
This time it was better. He asked her if she was comfortable, if she liked it quicker, or slower, or how about this? She appreciated the questions. The rhythm was better too. He reached down with a finger, and she surprised herself with an orgasm and then, with a little concentration, another.
He came himself, with a sigh, and collapsed on top of her. Diana expected him to fall asleep. But instead, Stevenson propped himself on one elbow and looked around her bedroom for the first time, studying the Matisse print she had over the desk and the bunch of red chile peppers that hung on the white wall between the windows. Then he pointed to a window and said, "Look at the moon framed by those cypress trees. Looks like Greece or Italy."
She nodded, remembering that he was a photographer.
"You can see the Juarez mountains in the moonlight," he said.
Diana twisted in the bed and looked. "Where?"
He pointed. "Out there."
"That's the hedge."
"No, no. Over there, see?"
"That's the roof of the Fina station."
"Oh. Yeah."
Then he rolled over and fell asleep.
Diana lay awake, wondering what she was getting into. Just two years before, in B-School, she seemed to have so many friends, and so many choices. But when she followed Raymond to El Paso, the whole world got narrow in a hurry. Raymond left her for another woman at his law firm, and Diana found herself all alone on the border. She was stranded halfway between Dallas and L.A., not rich enough to quit her job at the brokerage, and hating men. She began to hang out with Elke and her lesbian friends, who were fun and a little crazy. She went dancing with them a few times, but wasn't interested in sex. The night she met Eddie Stevenson, Elke told her that her friends didn't want her to bring Diana around anymore. They weren't interested in Elke’s failed projects.
So later that night, when Eddie read her palm, Diana was in a receptive mood.
Looking at him curled up in bed, scratching his nose in his sleep and then rolling over, she felt disgusted with herself for following signs and superstitions. She went into the bathroom to clean herself up. At some point she had to stop taking what was thrown her way. But she'd known that for a long time.
Climbing back into bed, she wondered if there was something wrong with her. She asked herself for the thousandth time why Raymond left her. At first it was simple enough to explain: he wanted a woman who shared his interests, in law, cocaine, and golf. But now that she thought about herself and the way she had of grabbing for quick answers, like this man snoring beside her, she wondered if Raymond saw some defect in her. It was a question she'd buried for months.
She thought about it, watching a breeze blow the white curtain. The wind picked up. She heard it rolling a plastic bottle down the street. A garbage can lid blew off and clanged on the sidewalk. Clouds covered the moon, and she heard the first thick drops of rain ping on the metal awning over her porch.
By morning, the rain was gone, leaving behind just a slow dripping from the gutter. Through the open window she could smell the charcoal odor of desert creosote, which followed every rain. When Diana first came to El Paso, she thought it was exhaust from a chemical plant or the Asarco smelter. But once she discovered that the smell was from plants sucking up rain, she learned to love it. It was like cilantro. The first time she tasted it, in a tortilla soup, she thought that a pot had lost its coating, and had bled some sort of poisonous alloy into the food. Raymond, who had taken a semester in Colombia, told her it was a plant. He had this know-it-all approach that drove her crazy, and she said that she still hated the taste, even if it was from an herb. But once that he was gone, she started putting cilantro into just about everything, even sprinkling it on frozen dinners and scrambled eggs.
Thinking about breakfast, she opened her eyes, expecting to see Eddie Stevenson. But he wasn't there. He'd sneaked out to avoid the morning after, she thought, hating him, and hating herself for inviting him in, especially when she knew he was lying about Estela. She felt abused and angry. She took a shower, practicing what she'd say to Eddie when she saw him again. She turned off the water, dried herself, and wrapped the towel around her hair. When she walked out of the bathroom, wearing only the turban, she saw Eddie standing at the doorway, carrying a bunch of red carnations and a bag of bagels. "Jesus!" she said, covering her breasts with her arms.
"Come here," he said tenderly.
"No wait a minute." She felt confused. "Let me get dressed first." She pointed at a window. "The neighbors..."
Dropping this guy wasn't going to be quite as easy as she thought. By the time she came out of the bedroom, wearing a dark blue dress with big black buttons up the front, he had the table set up for breakfast, with capuccinos and bagels, and the carnations in a vase. He'd even cleaned up the margaritas and chips from the night before.
Stevenson looked up and was startled to see her in business clothes. "What are you, a lawyer or something?" he asked.
"I'm in finance, at Dunwoody and Briggs."
"Oh. I was going to say that if you were a lawyer, maybe you could handle the case if I decide to sue the paper."
Diana sat down and reached for a bagel. "I could help you invest the money if you win," she said.
"I don't know. It probably won't turn into anything..." He took a bite of a bagel, and cream cheese spilled out the sides of his mouth.
"At some point," Diana said, averting her eyes while he wiped his face, "we're going to have to talk about what we're doing here."
Stevenson, his mouth full, nodded. After swallowing, he said, "But not today..."
"When?"
He shrugged.
"I don't think you're being straight with me about Estela."
"We broke up," he said.
"That's not what she told me."
"I can't believe you went over there," he said, shaking his head. "We hardly knew each other."
"We do now."
Anxious to change the subject, Eddie sipped his capuccino and grimaced. "I still have this cut in my mouth. It's a little sensitive."
"So I was saying," Diana continued, "she doesn't seem to think you've broken up."
"I thought you didn't understand her Spanish."
"Not all of it. But some. She was ironing a big pile of your shirts."
Stevenson smiled. "She's a nut about ironing," he said.
Diana looked straight at him, waiting for a serious answer.
He took another drink of coffee and put down the paper cup. "Listen," he said, "there's some things I guess I should tell you. This whole thing isn't probably as simple as it looks." He went on to describe Estela's friendship with Rubén and Rubén's ties to the drug world, as he understood them. He noted that Rubén was jealous, but didn't mention that Estela was pregnant, or that he'd hit her a few times in the face.
"And you think this guy, Rubén, set up this whole beating in Mexico because he was jealous?" she asked.
"I don't know why he did it. But I'm pretty sure he was involved. I think I even heard his voice once. And Estela knows about it. She has to. So I'm staying away from her..."
Diana leaned back in her chair, twirling a bit of hair by her ear with one finger and waiting for Stevenson to say more. She enjoyed conversations like this. They gave her a sense of power.
"She and I weren't right for each other, anyway," Eddie said. "Nothing like you and me."
Diana let that one pass.
"But the story you told the paper..." she said.
"I wasn't going to spill out my whole private life! And anyway, I told them the truth. Just left out a few details."
"A few crucial details."
Stevenson shrugged.
Diana pressed on. "Did you tell Tom Harley about those details?"
"Ahhhh. Yeah. For the most part. He knows what's going on."
"What, you called him from Truth or Consequences?"
"No. Before I left."
She cleared her throat.
"He wasn't there," Stevenson said, as if recalling. "But I left a message on his machine. Told him not to get all bent out of shape. But I didn't think it was going to turn into such a big stink..."
"He doesn't have a machine."
Stevenson looked startled. "Yeah he does."
She shook her head. "He hates them."
He started to protest. But Diana looked at her watch and stood up. "I'm late," she said. She rushed around the apartment, gathering her purse and car keys. "Just one more thing," she said, as she opened the door. "Why did you follow me out that night, after the party?"
Stevenson, relieved by the change of subject, smiled. "It was either you or that friend of yours," he said. "And... and no offense, but she looked like some kind of linebacker."





Chapter Nineteen

"It's open, está abierto," Claudio shouted.
Rubén, holding a manila envelope, opened the door. He looked in to see his former professor in a black silk bathrobe, ironing a pair of pants.
"Look who's here," Claudio said, surprised. "Lemme just..." He hurried to unplug the iron and began to fold the ironing board. "Lemme just put this stuff away and..." He disappeared with the ironing board into the bedroom.
Rubén sat on the couch. He stared at a big wooden Indian in the corner for a second, as if to make sure it wasn't alive. Then he looked at the newspaper on the coffee table, while holding the manila envelope with both hands on his knees.
"You want a cup of tea?" Claudio shouted from the bedroom.
"Yeah, sure," Rubén said.
Claudio emerged still in bare feet, wearing khakis and a grey tee-shirt, his greying hair combed straight back into the ponytail, horn-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose. "Two for tea," he said. He glanced at the newspaper, with its headline about the border blockade, and asked Rubén what he thought about it.
"It won't last," Rubén said. "The Latinos are too strong here to put up with that."
"The Latinos are the ones who want to keep the Mexicans out," Claudio said. "You should have seen all the letters to the editor we got at the paper. 'This is an American city, you should cover American news, signed, Juan Torres, El Paso.' And the paper's playing right into it," he said, "tying everything in Mexico to drugs."
"That's sort of what I came to talk to you about," Rubén said.
Claudio had moved to the kitchen, where he was pouring drinking water from a big glass jug into a teapot. He put the teapot on the stove, lit it, took down the Celestial Seasonings box and a jar of sugar, and then dried off two delicate Chinese tea cups and saucers. Walking back into the living room, he said, "You come to me to talk about the Tribune?"
"About the journalism in it," said Rubén. He opened the manila envelope and dumped dozens of newspaper clippings, marked with blue ink and yellow highlighter, onto the coffee table.
"This is a case in point about everything I've been telling you," he said earnestly. "It's so fucked up, man." He paused and tried to clean up his language. "Excuse me. I mean what they done with this story." He started piling through the clippings with his hands. "It's all lies and make-believe. Es una farsa."
"You came here to tell me that?"
"I want to go through this story with you and show you how wrong everything is."
"And then what?" Claudio asked.
Rubén shrugged. "Then I'll leave."
"No, I mean, what do you accomplish by showing me that the Tribune does sloppy work? I don't work there anymore."
"First I'll show you how they're doing the story wrong. Then I'll do it right," Rubén said. He looked up at Claudio, who was standing by the coffee table, scanning the pile of clippings.
"I don't see where I fit in," Claudio said.
"You'll be my editor."
The teapot started to whistle. "So now you think you need an editor," Claudio said, disappearing into the kitchen. "That's quite a concession, coming from you, Rubencito."
Claudio and Rubén had worked closely together on the community college newspaper, Semana, the previous school year. Claudio was faculty adviser. Rubén, his most talented student, edited the paper and reported all the big stories. He wasn't much of a writer yet. He still thought in Spanish, Claudio believed, and struggled with English grammar. But in 20 years in journalism, Claudio had never seen a more tenacious reporter. By the end of his first semester, Rubén was out-reporting the Journal and the Tribune at city hall and on drugs.
His biggest splash came at the community college itself. In the course of his drug reporting, he found out that a director, Edgar Sussman, was funneling most of the college construction projects to his cousin's company. At first, Rubén didn't even see the story. Claudio had to define conflict of interest for him. It was foreign to Rubén, who thought that in America, like Mexico, the whole point of business was to make connections like Sussman's, and then to cash in on them. "It's just 'palanca'," he said, using the word for leverage. Even after Claudio explained it, Rubén wanted to wait on the story. "I think the guy's trafficking drugs, and I know he's got this conflicto de intereses. Why not wait for the drug story," he said. "Write that, and then say, 'Oh, and by the way, this guy also has one of these conflictos de intereses too." Rubén was convinced that if he went ahead with the construction-project story, Sussman would cover his tracks in the drug trade.
Claudio finally forced him to go with the story. They worked together on it through an entire weekend, and put it across the front page. It exploded. The El Paso papers and TV jumped on it, forcing Sussman to resign from the college board and to drop his candidacy for City Council. But Sussman didn't go down without a fight. His supporters sent letters to the papers, alleging that homosexual activists at the community college had targeted Sussman for his "pro-family" agenda. Several of the letters suggested that Semana's faculty advisor and its star reporter were lovers.
This angered Claudio. He still hadn't figured out where Rubén was, sexually. He suspected that Rubén himself didn't know, and that his obsession with journalism was a convenient distraction. The journalism gave him a bit of star status, at least for a while. After breaking the Sussman story, Rubén strutted around the community college campus. He took to wearing dark glasses and an oversized black silk jacket, usually over a sleeveless tee shirt. He began barking out orders in the Semana offices, not even quieting down after a couple students announced they were fed up and quit. Rubén barely needed their help. He kept breaking news, and he promised Claudio that the big story, the one on drug trafficking, would rock the power elite in El Paso.
In April, Claudio finally sat down with Rubén and went over all the reporting on drug story. Rubén had all the reporting on five-by-seven cards, with the confirmed facts in red ink and conjecture in pencil. He spread them across Claudio's desk, and then unfolded a map of El Paso and Juarez, covered with arrows and little boxes. This was the drug network, he said, with its tentacles reaching from the maquiladora business into city hall.
Claudio had a hard time focusing on all the boxes and arrows, but the cards were clear enough. The confirmed facts in red ink pointed to what looked like a run-of-the-mill drug story. They included tonnage figures for exports and imports, the number of addicts in El Paso and elsewhere, a Who's Who of narcos in the north of Mexico. In the red ink, Claudio didn't see any high-impact stories.
But the penciled conjecture was incendiary. It pointed to business connections between members of city council and the maquiladora magnate of Juarez, Onofre Crispín. It drew lines between Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, Colombian drug lords, and the local Republican committee in El Paso. Nafta fit in too, though Claudio couldn't understand how. On one card, Rubén, apparently in a burst of excitement, had written: "If proven, this could destroy both H. Ross Perot and General Motors Corp."
Claudio told Rubén to narrow the focus of the story. "If you could prove just one of your penciled notes, you'd have a blockbuster," he said. "But to prove it all is like trying to win 10 Pulitzers at the same time."
"But they're all little pieces of the same big story," Rubén said.
In the end, Claudio ordered Rubén off the drug story. Rubén didn't fuss too much about it. He cheerfully shifted his focus from scandal to cuisine, writing a story about growing vegetarianism in Tex-Mex food. For the last issue of the year, he splashed the Tex-Mex story across the front page. The story selection surprised Claudio. But instead of looking into it further, he simply marked a couple of grammatical mistakes on the page, okayed it, and left for a weekend of water skiing in Elephant Butte. When he came back to the college the following Monday, he was shocked to see the new Semana in the racks. Gone was the vegetarian story. In its place was a screaming headline about drugs, and beneath it a familiar map of El Paso and Juarez with arrows connecting little boxes on both sides of the Rio Grande.
Claudio managed to reclaim 1,493 copies of the paper. He kept one for himself, locking it in his bottom desk drawer as a memento, and destroyed the others. That meant that only six were circulating. And those six, it appeared, never made it to the newspapers or TV. Semana escaped the incident without facing a single libel suit, which Claudio considered a small miracle. Still, he had to discipline Rubén. After much soul-searching, he suspended him from the newspaper for a year. Rubén was unfazed. He dropped out of school and continued investigating the drug market in Juarez. Claudio often wondered if he was investigating from the inside, dealing drugs -- making money from his sources: The kid still wouldn't recognize a conflict of interest if it bit him.
Claudio walked into the living room carrying two cups of steaming tea. He wants me to be his editor, he thought sadly, looking at the skinny young man hunched over the clippings, and he doesn't have anywhere to publish. "So Rubén..." he said.
But Rubén interrupted him. "Here's what's wrong," he said. "Have you read the story?"
Claudio nodded, pushing aside a few of the clippings and setting down the tea cups.
"First, this Stevenson goes over to Juarez. He's stoned out of his brain. He drives over there and eats lunch at Julio's -- you know Julio's, on Dieciseis de Septiembre? -- He drinks margaritas there, and then he goes over to the hotel, the Xanadu, and starts taking pictures. Now in that condition, how the hell does he know who he was talking to, who puts this bag over his head and pretends to execute him?"
"How do you know all this?" Claudio asked.
"There," Rubén said, pointing at him. "You're a good journalist. You ask me about my sources. You ask me how I know and I'll tell you. But the editors at the Tribune, that huevón Canfield... Stevenson comes back from Juarez probably still smelling of tequila and dope, and he says he's been beaten up by a drug lord, and they put it across the front page. No further questions!"
"I was wondering about that myself," Claudio said, sipping his tea. "It's as if they..."
"As if they would print anything about Mexico and drugs!" Rubén said.
"But I'm sure Stevenson must have known who he was dealing with," Claudio said. "They just forgot to write that part into the story."
"He didn't know!" Rubén shouted.
"How do you know?"
"I have my sources," he said, pursing his lips to repress a smile.
"Get out of here."
"I'm not kidding."
"And your sources tell you he was stoned and drunk?"
"I was driving east on I-10, and I see Stevenson's Dodge. I drive behind him and I see him smoking a joint, right there in the car. So that much I know myself."
"And how about the rest of it? Were you watching him drink margaritas in Julio's too?"
"No. That I got from my sources."
"And you won't tell me who they are."
"With time, with time," Rubén said, holding back another smile.
Claudio stood up. "You're just playing stupid games with me, Rubén. You want to tell me something, but you want me to beg you for it. I'm not going to do it." He carried his teacup into the kitchen and shouted back. "You want me to be your editor, and you don't even have anywhere to publish." He ran water over the teacup, sponged it and dried it with a towel. Then he stuck his head out from the kitchen and looked darkly at Rubén. "I don't give a damn about your conspiracy theories."
"OK, OK," Rubén said, jumping to his feet. "Sorry, sorry. Do you have any idea what kind of a prick this Stevenson is? He punches Estela in the face."
Claudio stared at him, startled by his change in tack. "What's that have to do with the story?"
"Nothing. I just thought you should know."
"But don't Mexican men beat women all the time?"
"Stevenson's not Mexican," Rubén said.
"So what?"
"You said Mexican men. He's not Mexican."
"What in the world are you getting at?"
"Forget about it." Rubén sat down again and picked up the clippings. "Let me just tell you what I think about this story, and then I'll leave you to your ironing. This is my thesis: The papers here will print anything sensational they hear about Mexico, with no questions asked. I want to prove that. I want to show exactly how bad they are. I want to expose them."
Claudio took a deep breath. "Everybody already knows these papers are bad, Rubén," he said. "It's not an expose if you show that a bad paper is bad. Now if you did it with The New York Globe..."
"But I'm going to show everything, step by step, how they take lies in Mexico and turn them into headlines here. Don't you see how important it is? This," he said, waving his clipped copy of the Stevenson kidnapping story. "This is a lie, and they print it as truth. And so people here think that Mexicans are animals. Unas bestias."
"I think your time would be better spent discovering the truth yourself, and worrying less about other people's lies," Claudio said, piling the clippings back into the manila envelope and stealing a sip from Rubén's tea, which was untouched. "And anyway, you haven't proven to me that the story's based on lies. I think those narcos are after him. There was this guy the other day..."
"After who?" Rubén said.
"Harley," Claudio said, pointing upstairs. "You know, the reporter who lives above me."
"He does?" Rubén lifted the tea cup to his mouth and put it down, apparently remembering that Claudio drank from it. "What makes you think they're after him?"
"This guy the other day was looking at the mailboxes, and when I came out he ran away."
"What'd he look like?"
"Sort of a Latin preppy."
"You report it to the police?"
"No. For all I know, he might have been a student at UTEP. Still, I was a little suspicious."
"You tell Tom Harley about it?"
"I haven't seen him," Claudio said. "He's staying somewhere else... And as I say, I can't blame him. I think some nasty people are after him, for some reason or another. It sure isn't for breaking great stories."
"You don't think he's much of a reporter?"
"I don't know if he wants to be."
"How about Hank DuChamps?" Rubén asked. "Is he hot?"
"He's Canfield's favorite," Claudio said, relaxing on the couch as he settled into shop talk. "He's ignorant as hell, but a pretty good reporter."
"You think he'll do pretty well with this drug reporting?"
"I don't know," Claudio said. "I know he doesn't speak Spanish. I can see him swallowing a lot of different lines over there. He's very eager."
Rubén coughed and suppressed a smile. "How about Ken Perry?" he said. "You think he'll stick with this story?"
"All the guys he plays golf with are going to start getting on his case for trashing Nafta," Claudio said. "I can't see him sticking with it too long unless there's a real upside for himself, like a big award. I know he wants a Pulitzer. But the idea that he could win one at that paper, with that reporting, is a joke."
"But he still believes it, right?"
"He's delusional, I guess," Claudio said, standing up.
Rubén gathered his paper and envelope from the table and stepped toward the door. "I'm going to keep on this. I know you think it's crazy, but you'll see," he said. "Next time I'll come with documentation."
"Well I'll look at it, I guess," Claudio said. "But don't get all catty with me about your sources.


Chapter Twenty

Duane Canfield called Harley "a goddamn pussy," and dragged him by the elbow into Ken Perry's corner office.
Perry, talking on the phone, gestured toward the couch and the two men sat down. Canfield immediately sank to the back of the couch and crossed his legs, while Harley sat erect on the edge.
"... We may have to pay more," Perry was saying. "Well, someplace in this city, there must be an American who'll clean a house... OK, I'll ask around." He signed off and looked at his two visitors.
"I told you that goddamn blockade was going to make life miserable," he complained to Canfield. "My kid won't eat breakfast. He's crying for María, María, María..."
Canfield nodded. "We should probably go ahead and do a disruption story today, don't you think?"
"Just send a reporter and photographer to Coronado Heights. It's an easy one."
"That seems too pat," Canfield said. "The poor rich people without their maids and gardeners. How about if we look for some middle class folks that are hurting from the blockade. People you wouldn't expect."
"Coronado Heights is middle class," Perry answered, stiffening in his chair. "That's where the problem is. I know."
"OK, OK," Canfield waved both hands in surrender.
"So," Perry said, putting the unlit pipe in his mouth and leaning back in his chair, "why were you calling Tom a pussy? My wife even heard that one."
"Harley here got arrested and held in a Mexican jail yesterday, and he doesn't want to go with the story. Says it'll burn his sources," Canfield said.
"I didn't say it would burn them," Harley said. "I just said we'd get more mileage out of them if we didn't blow this thing out of proportion."
"You know what a euphemism is, Harley?" Canfield said. "You probably know how to say it in six languages. Getting more mileage out of sources by not blowing things out of proportion is a eu-phem-i-sm for not burning 'em."
Harley weighed the semantics. "I think a euphemism has to be one word..." he started to say, when Perry interrupted him, asking if he really got thrown into a Mexican jail.
"It wasn't exactly jail," Harley said. "Just a room. They had me there for a couple hours. But I think it was all just a misunderstanding."
"But you were arrested?"
"Picked up," Harley said. "A cruiser stopped me when I was heading east, to Jiménez's house."
"And the cop knew who you were?"
"Of course he knew who he was!" Canfield said. "He took him to the station, where they booked him. And then they locked him up in this room for four hours. And Harley doesn't think it's worth writing about." He heaved forward on the couch. "I'm going to call in DuChamps. He's going to interview you," he said, turning to Harley, "and he's going to write a story based on your account. Meanwhile, you're going to write a sidebar, something about My Goddamn Day in the Black Hole of Calcutta."
Harley nodded solemnly.
"I don't get it," Perry said. "Did they tell you when they arrested you that your reporting was anti-Mexican or something?"
"No," Harley said. "First the guy stops me and tells me I was speeding, which wasn't exactly true. Then, instead of waiting around for the bribe, like they usually do, he pushes me into the cruiser and takes me to the station. And that's where they shut me up in the room."
"Harley," Canfield lectured, "you been writing for ten years about Indian mating rituals, and what have you. Now you got a real story, and you got to put that anthropology bullshit behind you. If you weren't so busy looking for excuses for the Mexicans, you'd recognize official harassment when you see it. That's going to be the point of our coverage."
"But the chief just wanted to talk to me," Harley said. "That's why I was brought in. He was waiting the whole time I was in that room."
"Waiting to harass you," Canfield said.
"No. Just to talk."
"You're going to take his word for that? This jerk has you arrested and held, and you excuse it 'cause he just wants to talk?"
"What'd he say?" Perry asked.
"We talked for about two hours."
"And became fast friends," Canfield said. He held up two fingers together. "Like this."
Harley rolled his eyes, but didn't respond. Then he remembered something. "Know what?" he said. "I left my car over there in Juarez. I'd better go pick it up."
"Jesus!" Ken said, throwing up his arms.
"It's probably gone by now," Canfield said. "Talk to DuChamps and write your first-person piece. Then you two can both go car-hunting in Juarez."

* * *

DuChamps wasn't around to interview him; he was tracking down the new Border Patrol chief, whose grandfather long ago sneaked across the border. So Harley sat down at his terminal and began to outline a first-person account of his day in Juarez. His only problem was the joint. Writing the truth -- that he unwittingly carried drugs into Mexico -- would get him fired. So the choice boiled down to omitting the joint altogether, and praying that the Mexicans wouldn't bring it up, or charging the Mexicans with planting it on him. The planting gave him a much better story, which could boost his stock at the Tribune. But if Harley even mentioned cops planting a joint, Canfield would splash it across the front page, provoking the Mexicans to respond. Toning down the writing, he knew, would be useless. Canfield would simply rewrite it, putting the sexy stuff up top, the way he did with Jiménez's tigers.
Harley was still fooling around with the lead when Canfield stopped by his desk. Maybe, Harley thought, he could refocus his story on the interview with the police chief, and steer clear of the jail. "You know, I didn't get to tell you much about the talk I had with the police chief," he said.
"No, you didn't," Canfield said, resting a buttock on the corner of Harley's desk.
"He knows Jiménez. Says he's a small-timer, a scapegoat. He compared him to the drunk..."
"That's 'cause he's in bed with him, right?" Canfield drawled.
"I don't think so," Harley said. "This police chief..."
"Is a model of civic virtue."
"I wasn't going to say that."
"Well, let me ask you," Canfield said. "Do you think Jiménez is a small-timer?"
"I don't know, yet."
"But you think we should tell our readers that maybe, just maybe, this vicious drug lord we've been screaming about is just a pussy cat?"
"Probably something between a pussy cat and one of those tigers prowling around his house."
"Well that's for you and DuChamps to figure out," Canfield said, speaking like a teacher to a slow-learner. He tapped the terminal screen. "In the meantime, write up your first-person story in a hurry. And put in lots of color."
Harley began to type:

Whoops. Something I forgot about when I made my television debut on a Thursday morning news show: The people who sent me a death threat might be tuning in.
It wasn't until later in the afternoon, when I found myself cloistered in a dingy cell at Juarez police headquarters, that I considered my potentially hostile viewers south of the border.
The adventure began around lunch time on Thursday, four hours after appearing on El Paso Sunrise with my boss, Ken Perry. I'd answered a few questions about Gustavo Jiménez, the reputed drug lord who reportedly had referred to me on Monday as "dead meat." Jiménez left Juarez on Wednesday, heading south. Naturally, I felt a bit safer with him out of the picture -- safe enough, in fact, to venture into Juarez. My mistake was to announce my plan on TV.
A minute after I crossed the Free Bridge, right near all those liquor stores, a blue police cruiser was behind me, lights a-swirling.
The policeman, a sergeant Pérez, seemed friendly and courteous, as he told me that I was speeding. But instead of extorting the usual dollar or two for a soft drink, he pushed me into his cruiser and hauled me off to the headquarters of the State Judicial Police.
As we worked our way through Juarez's congested traffic, I tried to remember exactly what I'd said on TV, knowing that it could be used against me. I didn't come up with much, since -- truth be told -- Ken Perry did virtually all of the talking.
I prepared to charge the police with harassment. But then it occurred to me that if I was locked up in a cell, deep in the bowels of the Judicial Police Building, I could charge them with all sorts of crimes -- and no one would hear me. I remembered that I was in a foreign country, one with no First Amendment protections and only a hazy recognition of legal concepts such as habeas corpus. This was enormously depressing.
Worst-case scenarios popped into my mind. If some child had been run over within the previous day or two, they could charge me with hit-and-run. Or maybe they could plant a marijuana cigarette or a packet of cocaine in my wallet. I looked out the back window, at the bank towers of El Paso, and the gentle slopes of the Franklin Mountains, and I wondered when I would see them again.
One of my worst cases almost came true. As police officers inspected my documents, I heard one of them suggesting planting marijuana into my wallet. Clearly, he didn't know I understood Spanish. And I didn't let on. For a minute or two, several of them debated the idea. I think they would have implemented this strategy if one of them had had a joint handy. Luckily for me, none did.
Nevertheless, they called an armed guard, who escorted me down a seemingly endless corridor and finally shut me in a small room. For hours, the guard waited there while I pondered my grim future as an inmate.
But then I heard a voice outside my door. "Señor Harley," he said in Spanish. "The chief wants to talk with you." So I proceeded to the office of the Chief, a polished linguist named Roberto Muller. He told me that he merely wanted to talk with me. That was the reason for my arrest. And the delay? He said it was just an administrative mix-up.
Hours later, I emerged from the State Judicial Police Building. It was dark. I hurried north to El Paso. So great was my hurry, in fact, that I forgot to pick up my car. I guess I'll go now to see if it's still there. Nah... On second thought, I'll wait a while.


Chapter Twenty One

Simón and Gato had never seen so much green in their lives. They made their way through Coronado Heights, gawking at the dozens of sprinklers, some of them sending the water in long waves back and forth, and others whirling in circles. Passing in front of one lawn, where the water splashed onto the sidewalk, Gato stood still, spread his arms, and let the water rain down on his head and chest. "Ay quédelicia!" he said.
"Stop that," Simón hissed, dancing away from the water. "You're making a spectacle of yourself."
Simón had a vague plan for this excursion to Coronado Heights. He and Gato would shoot holes in the windows of Ken Perry's house. Afterwards, he'd call the paper, or maybe one of the Spanish-language radio stations, and claim responsibility in the name of Gustavo Jiménez.
Simón hadn't discussed these plans with Gato. After Estela kicked them out, he merely told Gato that a contact in Coronado owed Rubén money, and that they could pick it up. Since they were running out of money and had nowhere to sleep, it seemed like a reasonable approach.
"Where's this contact going to be?" Gato asked, looking at a street sign. "This says Alvarado Terrace. That must mean terraza."
"Camino Alegre," Simón said. "Veinticinco sesenta y cuatro Camino Alegre Estreet."
"How much does he owe?"
"Rubén doesn't remember. About $500, I think."
"Let's hurry," Gato said. "Once it gets dark, they start arresting Mexicans in neighborhoods like this.

* * *

"It's just something I heard from a couple of the women at golf today." Ken Perry's wife, Karen, set the patio table for dinner as she delivered the rumors to her husband.
"An advertising boycott?"
"Something like that." Karen lit an orange candle and placed a platter of corn on the table. "They weren't that comfortable talking to me about it. But I thought I should tell you."
"For attacking Nafta?"
"Uh huh." Karen disappeared into the kitchen and called Timmy to supper. She told him to turn off the TV. Then she returned with the butter and salt.
"Wait a minute, honey. Slow down." Ken was pacing on the patio, with a computer print-out rolled up in his fist. "They said that if we didn't stop attacking the free trade agreement, their husbands might call an advertising boycott? That's what they said?"
"They said they were talking about it."
"And did they say anything about the drug lord beating the crap out of our photographer?"
"No."
"Fuck 'em," Ken said in a low voice. He sat down and moved his place setting, and then spread the print-out of his latest editorial on the glass-top table. When his wife and four-year-old son were seated, he began reading aloud. "There comes a time, in the life of a community, when it has to unite together... Ooooh. Unite together," he said under his breath, pulling out a pen and making a note. "That's superfluous, isn't it? I'll have to call in a fix on that one."
Karen, who was buttering an ear of corn for Timmy, looked up. "I think that beginning, 'There comes a time?' It sounds very familiar... Timmy! Not to Bessie. It's bad for her!"
Timmy had given the corn to a fat collie and was giggling as the dog made off with it.
Ken put aside the editorial, bothered, and picked up a chicken drumstick. "You say everything sounds familiar. If I listened to you, I'd never write anything." He took a big bite and chewed vigorously.
"I think it's from Roosevelt's war declaration," Karen said, now buttering another ear of corn. "Or maybe something Churchill said."
"Yeah, sure. Or maybe Stalin."
Karen ignored him. "I want you to eat at least four green beans, Timmy. Here. I'll put a little butter on them."
"And salt!" shouted the boy.
"OK, just a little salt."
For eight months of the year, the Perry's dined on this shaded patio of their ranch-style house. As they ate, they could hear the next door neighbor, Gladys Cummings, who was struggling to give pruning orders to her gardener in Spanish. "Cortar muerto," she said. "Vivo bueno, muerto malo."
Ken looked toward the Cummings' garden and listened for a few seconds. "How'd her gardener get across the river?" he asked his wife.
"He probably lives in the barrio," she said.
He reached for an ear of corn and spread on a dollop of butter. "Well, maybe he knows someone down there who could clean our house."
"Maybe," Karen said, wiping her black bangs from her forehead.

* * *

"Puta madre", that dog's coming right toward us," Gato whispered to Simón. The two men were lying in the bushes behind the mesquite tree, halfway between the Perry and Cummings houses. "Let's leave, now!" Gato said.
"Can't," Simón said. "If we do, they'll see us." The woman with black hair was facing their hiding place. The man, who had to be the editor, also had a sideways view. But he seemed too busy eating corn to notice them. There was a little boy with his back to them, and maybe someone else closer to the house. Simón's view was blocked by the barbecue.
The dog seemed to be slowing down, sniffing, with the ear of corn still in its mouth. "Vamos," Gato whispered. "Ya!" But Simón didn't budge.
The dog took a few more steps toward them and then lay down. She put the corn between her front paws and began to lick it.
"What are we doing here?" Gato whispered. "You said you just wanted a look." He rolled over and tried to pull some prickers out of his arm. This neighborhood might look soft and green like the jungle, he thought. But down on the ground, under these bushes, it was still desert. He felt dirt caking the inside of his nostrils.
Simón still hadn't told Gato about the gun. He quietly unclipped the shoulder bag and reached inside. If that dog comes any closer, he thought, it dies. He fingered the gun, but didn't pull it out.
"I'm going by myself," Gato said, pushing up with his elbows.
"Keep still," Simón said. He pressed down on Gato's back with his right hand. With his left he pulled out the pistol.
"Ay Dios!" Gato said. "You didn't say..."
"Silencio!"
Simón aimed the pistol at the dog. The collie stopped licking the corn. It looked up with its head tilted and ears cocked, a puzzled look on its white face.
"I'm going to kill it," Simón said through clenched teeth.
Then they saw the little boy with brown bangs running toward the dog. He was wearing a green Ninja Turtles tee-shirt. "Come back here, Bessie," he said, laughing. "Come back here with that corn." He stopped and turned back toward the table. "Mommy, I think she's going to bury it, like a bone!"
"Don't take it away from her, Timmy," Karen yelled back. "Remember, she snaps!"
Ken Perry didn't pay any attention to the boy and the dog. He had a big red Bartlett's book of famous quotations on the table, and was paging through the Roosevelt section.
Simón saw the woman get up and walk toward the little boy. "Timmy, didn't you hear me," she said. "I told you not to pat the dog while he's eating..."
Simón had the pistol trained on the dog. Then he aimed it at the woman as she approached them. He gnawed on the inside of his lip. She was leaning over the little boy, pulling him back from the dog, who was still licking the corn.
Gato was trembling beside him. "Por Dios," he whispered.
"Don't shoot."
The dog looked up, right at them, and began to walk toward them, wagging its tail in small, low arcs.
Simón aimed at it.
Gato saw the flesh of Simón's finger flatten against the trigger.
"No!" he yelled. He tried to stand up from under the bushes.
The woman looked toward them, saw the gun, and threw her arms around the boy. She tackled him, rolling on top of him. She put her hands to his face, and then twisted her head to look back toward the bushes.
Gato escaped from under the bushes and began running up the driveway, leaving a cloud of dust behind him. The dog barked and ran after him.
Simón saw the editor hurrying his way with a piece of paper in his hand. If he shot them now, he knew, he'd be caught. He fought his way out from under the bush and pointed his pistol toward the picture window at the house next door. He pulled the trigger, and the explosion jerked his arm into the air. He heard shattered glass falling and a scream as he ran up the driveway toward the shade trees of Camino Alegre Street.
A few minutes later, Simón came upon a gray Lexus with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. He combed the neighborhood in the Lexus until he found his partner, crouched behind a bush. He coaxed him into the car and then took off toward the barrio in style.


Chapter Twenty Two

One big problem with Mexico, thought Onofre Crispín: Not enough racquetball players. In the sports corner of his pink Juarez mansion, Crispín had an air-conditioned court with a TV in the wall, just across the hall from the pool. But no one would play with him.
Wearing a sleek white sweat suit with red bands around the collar and wrists, Crispín rallied by himself, rocketing backhands against the wall, about a foot off the ground. The TV was on. Some lightweight from the Colegio de Mexico was raving about Nafta. Crispín barely listened, but was too busy with the backhands to turn the channel. What he needed now, he figured, was a voice-activated remote control. That way he could just shout ESPN, without putting down his racquet. They sold those things now. Someone told him so, the guy from Goldman Sachs. Not much of a banker, but one of the few who crossed the bridge for a game.
The telephone rang. Crispín put down the racquet, walked to the back of the court, and picked up the phone. "Bueno."
"Está el jefe de policia para verlo, Señor."
Crispín told the guard, Oscar Olmos, to let the police chief in. He'd forgotten that he’d invited Muller to lunch. He didn't feel like eating yet and wondered if it would be rude to summon the chief to the racquetball court. Maybe they could talk while he hit the ball. Or maybe Muller knew how to play...
A minute later, Olmos poked his head into the court. A enormous Oaxacan with his black hair greased back and a nose bent almost sideways, he always kept his body off the court, as if the black ball were a bullet. "I have him sitting out on the patio," he said, flinching when the ball came his way. "I had the girl serve him a glass of papaya juice."
"Have him change into sweats," Crispín said. "Give him a racquet and find him a pair of tennis shoes."
"He's going to play?"
"We'll just hit the ball and talk."
"You're not going to ask him, Señor? He's a very small man."
"Move!" Crispín shouted, hammering the ball so it ricocheted near Olmos' head.

* * *

It turned out the chief could handle a racquet. He took long tennis strokes, keeping the wrist below the racquet handle. It looked stylish, but was too slow for racquetball. Playing caroms off the walls baffled him. Crispín told him that with time, he'd learn.
As they rallied, Crispín asked the chief for the latest news in the Jiménez drug case.
"He's laying low," Muller said, reaching for a forehand and missing. "He doesn't have a clue. Turns out the ones who beat up the photographer run a warehouse for him at a car wash, over by Anapra."
"How do you know this?" Crispín asked.
"We heard about it from the neighbors, and one of the kids who washes cars."
Crispín held the ball in the air, dropped it, and lofted a serve high off the wall. "They actually wash cars there?"
"As a side business," the chief said, swatting at the ball and hitting the wall. He inspected his racquet. "Do these things break easily?" he asked.
"I've got plenty."
The two men settled into a longer rally. Muller was getting more wrist into his shots. He even managed to play one off the back wall.
"You've got potential," Crispín said, panting as he picked up the ball from the floor. "Here try this." He smashed a serve about a foot and a half off the ground. Muller flailed at it and missed. "We'll just need to work on the reflexes a little," Crispín said, sweat glistening on his bald head.
Trying serves of his own, Muller told the maquiladora magnate that a few transit cops, traditionally jealous of the high-rolling judicial police, met with an American reporter in a bar, Cantina Gato Negro, and briefed him on the drug business. He heard about it, the chief said, from one of his own cops who had contacts in the bar. Apparently, the interview degenerated into a mescal blow out.
"How's that going to influence the story?" Crispín asked.
"Not much. I talked to the reporter a couple days after that. It didn't seem as though he'd learned much."
"He's the one who brought the joint into Mexico, right?" Crispín laughed. "Sounds like a pendejo."
"I don't know," the chief said. "They might have planted it on him, though they swear up and down that they didn't."
"Maybe I should talk to him. What's his name again?"
"Tom Harley."
"Right. The pendejo who wrote that pendejada about maquiladoras and drugs... Harley Davidson," Crispín murmured, smashing another low serve against the wall. "I was thinking of getting one of those."


Chapter Twenty Three

Eddie Stevenson lay back on Diana Clements' bed, naked, trying to focus on the Saturday Tribune. He was feeling edgy, hungover. Sex with Diana had been a bit of a struggle, not much fun. Gazing at his paper, with its front-page immigration story by DuChamps, Stevenson found himself worrying about his job, thinking maybe he was screwing up by taking this leave, and by talking to lawyers about a law suit. He thought about burned bridges, which led him to wonder what Estela was up to. He heard Diana singing something in the shower, in a foreign language. He felt like yelling for her to shut up.
The phone rang.
Stevenson answered. "Hello."
A man asked if it was Diana Clements' house.
"Uh huh."
"Is she there?"
"She's uh, busy now. You want to leave a message?"
"Is that you, Stevenson?"
He paused and considered hanging up. Finally he said, "Yeah, who's this?"
"Tom Harley."
"Harley!"
They were both silent for a moment, until Harley said, "Listen, I think we have to have a talk. Pretty soon."
"Yeah, I'm just sort of camping out here for a while."
"I see."
"Hey," Stevenson said brightly. "I talked to a lawyer yesterday? It sounds like I can get a lot of money from the paper if I sue. And you probably can too. I was thinking..."
Harley interrupted. "Did that guy really call me 'dead meat'?"
Stevenson stammered, and Harley continued. "I mean, was it "dead meat or carne muerta? Was he speaking Spanish or English?"
"Ah, English," Stevenson said. "But I..."
"Listen, we got to talk," Harley said. "Did you hear that a couple of guys attacked Ken Perry's house last night? With a gun?"
"Ho-ly shit." Stevenson was awed. "Did they shoot anybody?"
"Just a window."
"They get caught?"
"No."
"I don't see anything about it in the paper. Just this story by DuChamps..."
Listen," Harley said, all business. "How about if I come over there. Where is it, near Austin High? Or maybe we could meet someplace..."
"Yeah..." Stevenson, sitting on the side of the bed, nervously twisted pubic hairs around his forefinger. He looked up as Diana walked in from the bathroom, wearing a red bathrobe cinched tightly with a sash. "How about a little later in the day?" he said to Harley. He placed a hand over the mouthpiece and lipped the name HARLEY to Diana. She widened her eyes and nodded slowly, as if the story were becoming more interesting.
"I'll be over in about an hour," Harley said.
Stevenson was still interpreting Diana's expression when he heard Harley hang up.
"He knew you were here?" Diana asked. She turned away from him, opened her robe and began fishing through her top bureau drawer.
Stevenson watched her step into her panties, still covered by the robe. Then she dropped the robe to the floor and, in one quick motion, pulled on a turquoise tee-shirt, pushing both arms out at the same time. Stevenson got just a glimpse of the back of her naked torso. He wondered if she'd let him photograph her nude sometime. He doubted it. She didn't seem the type.
"You're not going to wear a bra?" he asked.
"It's Saturday." She pulled out a pair of khaki shorts from her second drawer. She looked at herself sideways in the mirror and ran a hand down her stomach, as if making sure it was still flat. Then she tucked in the shirt and snapped her pants. It made her look trim, and very sexy, Stevenson thought. Still looking at the mirror, she untucked the tee-shirt, which made her breasts jiggle.
"Tom Harley's coming over in an hour," Stevenson said.
Her eyes widened again, and she repeated the slow nod. "You invited him to my place?"
"He invited himself and then hung up."
"And that's why you want me to wear a bra? Cause he's coming over?"
"Oh no, I was just... asking."
"Hmmm." She sat down next to him on the bed and began putting on white socks. She pointed her toes as she did it, softly flexing the muscles in her calves. "How'd he know you were here?"
"He didn't. But he recognized my voice."
"You mean he was calling for me?"
He nodded. "At first."
"That's interesting."
Stevenson didn't like the sound of that. Still sitting naked, he looked down and noticed that he'd become aroused while watching Diana get dressed, thinking of those photos. He reached over to her and pulled up her right hand, which was busy tying a sneaker, and placed it on his penis.
"Gross me out!" She yanked her hand free and stood up.
"What's wrong?"
With her sneakers half on, Diana hopped to the corner and sat down on a white wicker hamper. Stevenson stood up and followed her, his penis pointing right at her. "What's the matter?" he said.
"I don't feel like touching that thing right now. I just took a shower."
"What's the matter? Last night you were..."
"Just get dressed." She stood up and brushed past him to the door. "You guys think those things are a lot more popular than they are. I mean frankly... And I'll tell you something else. We've got to set up some ground rules here, if we're going to keep... doing this, you and I. Look at this." She pointed to a purple spot on her thigh. "I have bruises like this all over my body."
She turned and stalked into the kitchen, where Stevenson, heard her banging around with the coffee pot.

* * *

Reawakened to the risks surrounding him, Harley locked his bike to a telephone pole a few houses down Prospect Street from his apartment. He looked up and down the street before hurrying up the steps to his building, his battered white helmet still strapped around his chin.
When he was nervous, Harley did voices under his breath, the way some people hum or whistle. Now, as he emptied his overflowing mail box into his brown backpack, he was doing a raspy Eddie Stevenson, talking about legal suits and poontang and carne muerta.
He heard Claudio's door open behind him.
"So they finally let you out of jail in Juarez."
Harley zipped shut the backpack and turned around. "You read the story?"
"Pretty strange stuff, Tom." Claudio was still in his black bathrobe, his hair tousled, as if someone had run a strong hand through it. Harley was a good six inches taller than Claudio, and looked taller still with his helmet on.
"It wasn't exactly jail," Harley said. "They just sort of brought me in there for a talk."
"And what if you didn't want to talk?"
"Well, I guess I didn't have to... You know where it all started?" Harley said, changing the subject. "I was on my bike at the Sun Bowl a couple weeks ago, and I saw this joint in the parking lot..."
"They caught you with a joint over there?"
Harley, embarrassed, looked up at the ceiling. "Sort of. I forgot I had it. I don't even smoke the stuff. I was going to give it to a friend..."
"So they held you on drug charges?"
"I don't think they charged me with anything. It was all murky. They kept me in a room for a while. Then I talked to the police chief for hours."
"And did he offer you some sort of quid pro quo for letting you loose?"
"No. In fact, he was the one who mentioned that they probably framed me."
"But that wasn't what he believed!" Claudio said. "He was giving you a look at his side of the bargain, letting you see what he'd say if you kept your side up. Don't you see?"
"I see it OK," Harley said, feeling defensive. "But he never told me what my side of the bargain was. He just gave me this long talk about Mexican politics."
Claudio looked up at Harley and shook his head. "Two things I don't understand," he said. "One, why they ever let you go, and two, even more bizarre, why you came back and wrote about it."
"Canfield made me."
"You're getting batted around, Tom," Claudio said. "You've got the police chief and Canfield and Ken Perry, and they're all using you. You have to take control of the story."
"I never had a story like this."
"We have to sit down and map out some sort of strategy. It's your life that's at stake here."
Harley went on to tell Claudio about the attack at Perry's house the night before, about the two guys under the bushes, one of them with steel-rimmed glasses and a gun. He told him that Perry called him in a panic at about nine, telling him to write the story. But by the time Harley reached Coronado Heights with his reporter's notebook, the editor, concerned about his family, told Harley to sit on the story at least over the weekend, until he had something to tie the shooters to Gustavo Jiménez.
"You say one of the men wore wire-rimmed glasses?" Claudio asked.
"The one who shot out the window."
Then Claudio told Harley about the intruder the other day, who looked at first like a UTEP student, but ran off to the I-10 overpass when Claudio opened the door.
"I should probably write some of this down," Harley said, pulling his thin reporter's notebook from his back pocket.
"This is really incredible," Claudio said.
"What?"
"You. Covering an ongoing crime story in the first person."
"Yeah," Harley said. "I've been thinking about that myself."

Chapter Twenty Four

Hank DuChamps sat at his kitchen table, carefully cutting out his immigration story from the Tribune and pasting it into his clip book. This was one of his best stories in weeks. In fact, he was considering sending it to the editors at The Dallas Morning News, which DuChamps saw as his next career step.
He didn't like to admit it, but that scrawny Mexican, Rubén, actually helped him pull the immigration story together. First, he called to apologize about the stolen car, and told DuChamps about the Border Patrol chief's Mexican grandfather. Later, he somehow came up with a picture of the old man for DuChamps. He said he was just making up for the stolen car. But DuChamps suspected the guy wanted a job at the paper. He didn't look the part of a reporter and his English grammar was borderline. And of course he'd have to be to get a job offer from Canfield, who hated gays almost as much as Mexicans.
The phone rang. DuChamps answered, half expecting Rubén to be calling with another tip. But instead a man introduced himself as Byron Biggs of The New York Globe. DuChamps' heart started galloping. He struggled to control his breathing. Biggs was saying something about coming to El Paso -- Coming to see him?! -- and DuChamps was saying, "Uh huh, uh huh," wondering if he'd have time to rework his resume. And buy a decent suit. Maybe get a hair cut. But then he realized that Biggs wasn't an editor on a recruiting mission: He was the Houston bureau chief, already in El Paso on a reporting trip.
"I was wondering if we could eat lunch someplace," Biggs said, "and talk about a couple of these stories."
"Sure, sure," DuChamps said. He was disappointed. But still, if he got to know Byron Biggs, and helped him out, maybe he could string for The Globe from El Paso.
DuChamps suggested meeting at Luby's, a downtown cafeteria, a couple blocks from the paper. Biggs balked for a moment, but DuChamps assured him the food was good.
"OK," Biggs said. "How'll I recognize you?"
"I'll be carrying a red notebook with some clips," DuChamps said. "And," he added, wishing it weren't true, "I have pretty long blond hair? Sort of like Andre Agassi?"

* * *

Simón hardly looked like Dr. Rivapalacios' poster boy for success. He'd borrowed a pair of Gato's baggy blue shorts and Estela had loaned him a big paint-spattered tee-shirt from Eddie Stevenson's wardrobe. It pained him to dress like this. But he suspected that once the police found that Lexus, they'd be combing the barrio for a Mexican prepster.
Gato pointed out that they'd be looking for him, too.
"The difference is," Simón answered, tucking in the tee-shirt, "that thousands of people around here dress like you." Under his breath, he added: "All of them losers."
Gato, who'd found a cache of Stevenson's marijuana behind the coffee cups in the kitchen, exhaled a cloud of smoke and said, "I heard that."
Simón didn't pay any attention. He sat on the couch in his sloppy clothes and pouted. Things weren't working out for him. Even though Estela finally let them in the night before, after a lot of banging on the door, she made Simón feel like an outcast. She went out of her way not to look at him. At breakfast, when she was eating oatmeal and he asked for some, she practically flung the pot at him and said, "Scrape it." Worse, she seemed to be cozying up to Gato, probably just to make Simón jealous. After eating, Simón tried to convince Gato to go out for the newspapers. Gato wasn't interested. So Simón had to venture outside in the shorts and sloppy tee-shirt. He sensed people were laughing at him. Then he bought the papers and saw nothing about the attack at the editor's house the night before. Not a word! Grumpier than ever, he climbed the steps back to Estela's apartment, and plotted his next move.
Perseverance, Dr. Rivapalacios wrote, is the mother of invention. That meant that if he stuck to his scheme long enough, he should come up with a way to depose and replace Gustavo Jiménez. As he watched Gato smoke, Simón worried that he was wasting too much time north of the river. While he and Gato were in El Paso, others over in Juarez must be battling to take Jiménez's place. For them, he and Gato were conveniently out of the picture, probably washing cars for real now. That was if anyone bothered to think about them.
Maybe, he thought, he should go over to Juarez, find out who was doing what, and then track down Jiménez in Guadalajara, or wherever he was. And then offer himself as an ally! An ally coming at the boss's time of greatest need. The idea intrigued him. He pictured Jiménez embracing him and offering him a place at a banquet table covered with suckling pigs and bottles of French champagne. He could hear the Jefe calling him "compadre."
But what could he offer Jiménez, other than friendship? He didn't have money or political contacts. After squeezing him for information, he figured, Jiménez would probably just use him and Gato as soldiers an upcoming battle. That didn't appeal to him much. No, it wasn't the right time to drop the current plan, just because the newspaper didn't pick up one story. He had to persevere, he told himself. A good idea would come.
He watched Estela fold piles of clothing into boxes. Rent was coming due, she said, and she'd have to move out, unless Eddie came back with a check, which was unlikely. Estela wouldn't talk to Simón. But he heard her say to Gato that she'd be heading back to Mexico. She offered Eddie's clothes to Gato. She was mad at Eddie, she said, though he had no reason to leave her until "that guy" -- she pointed with her chin at Simón -- "brutalized him." That was the first time she'd brought up her guests' connection to the beating in Juarez. But Gato just smiled and told her that he didn't want Eddie's clothes. The arms and legs were too short.
Watching them, Simón wracked his mind for an idea to get his campaign moving. He looked at the papers. He recognized the words "border" and "immigration," and could tell they were writing about the closing of the frontera.
How could he push these papers to write about his attack on Ken Perry's house? If his English were better, he could simply call the papers himself, from a phone booth, and claim responsibility for the attack. He tried to put together an appropriate English sentence in his mind. Llamo, I call, para, for, reivindicar... To reivindicate? What's a smaller word for that? Aceptar, to acept. Let's see, I call for to acept... Responsibilidad, responsibility, por, for, el ataque, the attack, contra, against. He pictured himself talking to some Gringo editor and saying, "I call for... to acept the responsibility for the attack against..." It would take so long, the editor would probably hang up before he got through the sentence.
He picked up The El Paso Journal, the paper that hadn’t written anything about the attack in Juarez. He looked at the bylines. Rick Jarvis, Anna Symonds, Ignacio Torres... That was it! He could call this Ignacio Torres and speak with him in Spanish. Flipping through the paper, Simón found a telephone number on the editorial page. He picked up a couple of quarters from the coffee table, and ran out of the apartment with the paper in his hand.
Standing at a phone booth on Stanton Street, Simón flipped through the paper and found another Spanish name, Lucinda Rodríguez, for back up. Then he dialed the Journal's number.
A woman answered, "El Paso Journal."
Simón paused a second, and said, "Ignacio Torres, please."
Next thing he knew, another voice said, "City desk."
"Ignacio Torres, please."
"Uh, I'm not sure he's here. Lemme check." Simón heard the man asking, "Anybody seen Nacho around?" He came back to the phone. "He's not here. Want to leave a message?"
Simón switched to plan B. "Lucinda Rodríguez, please."
"Uh, she's on the sports desk. I'll transfer you."
Another voice answered, "Sports."
"Lucinda Rodríguez, please."
"Just a minute."
A woman's voice. "Hello."
"Lucinda Rodríguez?"
"This is Lucy."
Simón launched into his message. "Llamo por parte de don Gustavo Jiménez para reivindicar el..."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," she said. "I don't speak much Spanish."
Simón slowed down. "El...ataque...contra...la...casa...de..."
"Hold on a minute," she said. "Let me get somebody who speaks Spanish."
She put down the phone, and Simón could hear her asking for help.
He noticed that women carrying plastic shopping bags were lining up next to him for some reason. He looked up and saw that his booth was next to a bus stop. They were laughing and talking in Spanish, and Simón could hear every word, which meant they could hear him. He thought about hanging up, and trying later.
Then an American voice on the phone said, "Habla Rick Jarvis. En qué puedo servirle?"
Simón, with one eye on the women, whispered, "Hola."
"Hola. En qué puedo servirle?"
Simón cleared his throat. He cupped his mouth and whispered into the phone, "Llamo en el nombre de Gustavo Jiménez para reivindicar el ataque..."
"Usted es Gustavo Jiménez?" the American asked.
"No," Simón explained in slow, clear Spanish, "I'm calling in his name."
"You represent him?"
"Exactly. And last night he ordered an attack against the home of Señor Ken Perry, which was carried out at approximately 20 hours."
"Holy shit," Rick Jarvis said in English. Then he switched back to his laborious Spanish. "You attacked Ken Perry's home in the name of Gustavo Jiménez at 8 o'clock last night."
"Precisely," Simón said, feeling pleased. He looked at the women in the bus line. A couple of them seemed to be looking at his bare legs. He crossed them at the ankles.
"What's your name?" Jarvis asked.
"My code name," Simón said, improvising, "is Comandante Enrique."
"Comandante Enrique?"
"At your command." Now he was having fun.
"How can I..." Jarvis's Spanish gave way for a moment. He started again: "How can you prove that what you are saying is true?"
"Call Ken Perry. Or go ask the police," Simón said. He looked at the women in line. Now they seemed to be listening to him. The Gringo was asking another question. But Simón abruptly said "adiós" into the phone and hung up.


Chapter Twenty Five

Looking over Eddie Stevenson's shoulder, into the bedroom, Harley could see Diana Clements, eyes down and jaw clenched, snapping the blanket on the bed and pounding the pillows. Then she began to jam clothing into a bureau and slam shut the drawers. She was seething about something, which made Harley feel like leaving.
Stevenson, leaning back in an easy chair, didn't seem to notice. He was telling Harley about the two nights he spent in Truth or Consequences, coming to terms with life as a marked man. "I don't know why," he said, "but I had this real strong desire to go swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Even though I'm not that crazy about swimming."
"How about we go out for a cup of coffee," Harley suggested.
"We can probably have one here," Stevenson said, gesturing toward the kitchen with his face. "Probably have to make it ourselves though. She's not really the waitress type." He yelled back towards the bedroom. "OK if we make some coffee, Diana?"
"Go ahead."
"You want some?"
"Not now. Thanks." She slammed shut another bureau drawer.
Stevenson mouthed some words to Harley and smiled.
"What?" Harley asked.
Stevenson, still smiling, whispered. "On the rag."
"Oh." Harley wondered for the hundredth time that day why Diana Clements ever let this guy into her life.
Stevenson groaned as he climbed out of the easy chair. "I'm still feeling that beating I took," he said, making his way into the kitchen. "I'm worried that my kidneys might be damaged." He began opening cabinets in search of coffee utensils. He located a coffee pot and a black plastic funnel. "We just need one of those drip filters," he said. "Lemme see if she knows..."
"Wait a minute," Harley said, grabbing him by the arm. "We can find one ourselves. He filled the tea kettle with water, lit a back burner on the stove and placed the kettle on it. Then he located a flat box of filters, pulled one down, measured three heaping scoops of coffee into it, added a fourth for good measure, and fit the funnel onto a Pyrex coffee pot. Turning to Stevenson, he said, "What did the guys who beat you up look like?"
Stevenson sighed at the change of subject. "They had my eyes bound most of the time. And plus, I had a bag over my head, except when I was throwing up."
"But you must have seen somebody before they put the bag over your head. How did they get you into that office?"
"Well, I was taking pictures of that hotel, the Xanadu. And a couple guys who worked for Jiménez picked me up in a car, and said the boss wanted to talk to me before I took more pictures. These were young guys, gofers. Know what I mean? Then, as soon as they had me in the car, one of them pulled out a gun and told me to put my head down and cover my eyes. I really didn't see them again. 'Cause when we got to this place, it must have been about a 15-minute ride from the Xanadu, they bound my eyes."
"But what did these gofers look like?"
"Just Mexican kids. You know. Black hair, mestizos. I never got to see Jiménez. He he was behind me the whole time."
"How did you know it was him?"
"Well... He introduced himself. And the kids seemed to pay him respect. You know, calling him 'Señor' and 'don Gustavo'."
"And the kids? Did one of them wear glasses?"
"Oh. You think Jiménez might have sent them over to shoot at Ken's house?" Stevenson frowned, coming to terms with a new idea.
"Could be," Harley said. He hadn't yet told Stevenson about the intruder at his apartment building.
"He wouldn't have sent them on a mission like that, into Texas," Stevenson said, pulling the boiling water off the stove. He poured it too fast into the funnel, and water with coffee grounds bubbled over onto the counter. "Shit," he said.
He ripped five or six paper towels from a rack and mopped off the counter and a little puddle on the floor. "He'd send over more sophisticated guys for an attack in El Paso," he said. "Those kids barely knew how to talk English."
"But Jiménez knows English?"
"Oh, yeah. You could tell he'd been around El Paso a lot."
"Did he say 'dead meat' in English, or 'carne muerta?'"
"Dead meat. Definitely, dead meat. That I remember," Stevenson said, nodding.
"So. Did one of these guys wear glasses?"
"You know what kills me," Stevenson said, ignoring the question. "I lost my Leika camera over there. The thing's worth fifteen hundred bucks. I brought back all the other worthless stuff that belonged to the paper. And I left my own camera over there. I could kick myself."
Harley tried again. "Did one of those guys wear glasses?"
Stevenson looked for a place to throw out the wet paper towels. He finally laid them on the counter. "I think they both wore glasses," he finally said. "One of them looked like a hippie, with a Frank Zappa mustache. And the other one, with a gun. He was sort of... neater. More clean cut."
"Wire rims?" Did either of them wear wire rim glasses?"
"Maybe... No, I think they were plastic. No. Shit, I can't remember."
Stevenson poured the coffee into two brown, earthenware mugs. Harley took a sip and looked for sugar. He didn't see any.
"So you haven't been back to your apartment since this thing in Juarez?"
"Nope... Hey," Stevenson said, brightening up. "Maybe you could stop by there and pick up my clothes."
Harley seemed to weigh the idea for a second. Then he said, "I know it's none of my business, but, what happened between you and Estela?"
"Oh, it was happening for a long time, a couple of weeks maybe. I just decided to break it when I was up there in Truth or Consequences. You know, I had a chance to think about things."
Harley took another sip of the bitter coffee and blew into the cup, saying nothing.
"I'll tell you what happened," Stevenson said, motioning Harley toward him and lowering his voice. "She wanted to get married to me, and live up in some condos near Cielo Vista Mall? So she got herself pregnant."
"Got herself pregnant?"
"Trapped me," Stevenson whispered. "Or tried to. Then when I called her on it, she really got pissed off. Like offended. She and her friends."
Harley was about to pursue this when Diana walked into the kitchen. Appearing calmer now, she looked up and smiled at Harley. He smiled back, working hard not to look at her body.
She reached up for another mug and poured herself some coffee. "I smelled it and changed my mind," she said. She leaned up against the dishwasher, between the two men and took a sip. Stevenson edged away from her, the way people shift about when someone else steps into an elevator. But Harley stayed close. With this tension between Stevenson and Diana Clements, he couldn't understand why they'd stay in the same apartment, much less sleep in the same bed. He wondered if she knew Estela was pregnant.
"So Eddie thinks he can make a lot of money suing the paper," Diana finally said. "I tell him he'd better be ready to handle some pretty intense cross examination. These plaintiffs attorneys make it all sound so easy when they're looking for work."
Harley nodded, though he knew next to nothing about attorneys or cross examinations.
"Who's your lawyer?" he asked Stevenson.
"I don't have one yet; I've talked to a few of them."
"Oh." More silence, broken only by the sound of sipping and Stevenson drumming his fingers on the counter.
"I haven't seen you since that day at lunch," Diana said to Harley. "How you making out?"
"Some ups and downs." He didn't want to bring up his time at the Juarez police station. "Did Eddie tell you about the attack on our editor's house last night?"
"Yeah. It made me wonder how smart I was to have him hanging around here." She said it matter-of-factly, as though Stevenson were far away. "Or you either, for that matter." With that she smiled at Harley, showing him that little gap between her front teeth, and then brushed against him as she opened the refrigerator door. She pulled out a quart of milk and poured some into her cup. "That's bitter coffee you make, Eddie," she said.
"Harley made it," Stevenson said dully.
"Hmmm." She flashed him a smile, as though she could learn to like bitter coffee.


Chapter Twenty Six

As he pushed his tray along the rail, Hank DuChamps informed his guest, New York Globe reporter Byron Biggs, that the meat loaf at Luby's was "awesome."
But Biggs, a small, wiry man with a fringe of black hair around a big bald head, looked skeptically at the dish. "I usually try to eat Mexican food when I'm down on the border," he said.
"Then try the chili," suggested DuChamps, who was already supervising the pouring of gravy onto his mashed potatoes.
As they sat down in the nearly deserted cafeteria, just two blocks up Kansas Street from the paper, Biggs asked DuChamps if it was a Luby's in Waco, or maybe Temple, where a gunman shot a dozen customers a few years ago.
"Probably was." DuChamps nodded as he put a forkful of meat loaf in his mouth. He chewed for a moment and added, "Luby's are real popular."
Biggs looked blankly at DuChamps and then tried a small forkful of chili.
"What I mean," DuChamps explained, "is that a guy with a gun could probably find a dozen people to shoot at a Luby's, because they're so popular."
Biggs surveyed the empty cafeteria, where only one man sat at the counter. "We must be early," he said.
"Weekend," DuChamps said. "That's when whites -- I mean Anglos -- head out to the malls and leave the downtown to the Mexicans."
"But the Mexicans can't cross now, with Operation Blockade, right?" asked Biggs, perking up as he hit upon the subject of his upcoming story.
"Some still cross," DuChamps said. "But I guess they don't come to Luby's. How's the chili?"
"It's OK."
As DuChamps finished his lunch, he moved his tray to one side and placed his red Drugs notebook and an envelope full of newspaper clippings on the table. Then he laid out the Operation Blockade story for Biggs. He gave the Globesman phone numbers for all of his sources for the story, from the Border Patrol chief to the academics at UTEP, who could discuss immigration trends. Biggs took out his own notebook and scribbled down the numbers.
"Is this your beat, immigration?" Biggs asked. "Or do you cover anything that has to do with Mexico?"
"I just cover the big stories, wherever they are," DuChamps boasted. "I'm sort of a cherry picker." He opened his drug notebook and asked Biggs if he planned to write anything about the Jiménez story.
"Iiii don't know," Biggs said. "It's kind of crazy story. I see the other paper hasn't even picked it up. They're just doing the series on drugs in schools."
"That's the way they operate," DuChamps said. "When we get way ahead of them on a story, they just pretend it doesn't exist."
"Well anyway," Biggs said, "I usually leave stories like that to our Mexico City bureau. I only had one year of college Spanish, and my professor was from Madrid. You know, he spoke pure Castillian, with the TH sounds on all the Zs. So I have trouble with Mexican Spanish. I really admire you guys," he went on, "who can cross the border and report in Spanish. You must be fluent, right?"
DuChamps blushed. "I'm pretty good," he said. "But even I sometimes have some trouble understanding this border lingo. They tie everything up in knots. Some of my sources on this drug story -- undercover cops, people like that -- have probably never opened a grammar book in their lives."
He flipped through the notebook, eager to share his reporting with Byron Biggs. "See this guy Jesus Silva?" He pointed to the name in his book. "He works for the cops, but has friends who run drugs. See, he gave me the name of a town south of Juarez that's run entirely by the narcos. I'm going to be following that up as soon as I get a car." He looked at Biggs, who was nodding, his pen poised over his notebook. "See what happens," DuChamps explained, "is that they know who we are now. Just last week, they stole my car while I was reporting over there. And the cops over there arrested another reporter, and held him for a few hours."
"The photographer? They arrested him?"
"No. The other reporter. Harley. Tom Harley."
"Oh, I didn't see that."
"We didn't give it much play," DuChamps said. "I think our editors are a little bit worried. You know, for our lives."
Biggs asked DuChamps how he saw the drug story fitting into the ongoing debate over North American Free Trade.
"It's definitely an issue," DuChamps said, combing his hair with his fingers. "I mean the Mexicans need Nafta. And they're willing to ah, pay any price, as it were. That gives us a certain amount of leverage ... at this juncture..."
Biggs looked at his watch and closed his notebook. He thanked DuChamps and gave him his number at the Paso del Norte. "Oh, one more thing," he said, standing up. "Do you know anyone who could work a couple days as an interpreter?"
DuChamps thought about it for a couple seconds. "I'm going to be too busy to do it myself," he said. "But I do know one guy. A Mexican American who's real interested in journalism."

* * * *

"Did you get the feeling that these guys were really serious about hunting me down?" Harley, standing outside Diana's house with Eddie Stevenson, was having trouble getting answers from the photographer.
"I can't tell you, Harley." Stevenson opened the door to his mid-60s Dodge Dart.
"Come on."
"I felt they were crazy," Stevenson said. "Which I guess means they're capable of anything."
"Think they were on drugs?"
"Maybe one of them. The guy who broke the table in half with his fist. But Jiménez was under control. He talked in this whisper, right behind me. Talked about all sorts of things. He even had comments about the paper, said your article was full of shit. That's when he sent the message to you. And he also -- and this is what I thought was funny. I would have thought it was funny," he corrected himself, "if I hadn't been getting the shit kicked out of me. He said to tell Ken Perry that he was a 'horseshit editor'."
"He used those words?"
"Uh huh. 'Horseshit editor'."
"That part didn't make it into the paper..."
"What do you expect?" Stevenson swung into the car. "Want to go get some breakfast?"
"I already ate," Harley said, moving towards his own car. "Anyway I've got to get reporting on this story about the attack at Ken's house. He wants it in the paper Monday."
Stevenson started his car, which coughed and sputtered.
"Hey," Harley shouted. "Where'll you be if I want to find in the next few days?" He pointed to Diana's duplex. "You going to stay there?"
"Sure," Stevenson said. "Wouldn't you?" As he drove off he waved his left arm blindly out the window.

* * *

Oscar Olmos, Crispín's big Oaxacan bodyguard, parked the jeep at a dusty corner in west Juarez, right next to a little store. He stepped over the dog sleeping in the doorway and grabbed a Squirt from the refrigerator. He opened it, and pulled down a bag of Sabritas potato chips from a shelf. "Cuánto me cobra?" he asked the old woman behind the counter, wanting to know how much she charged.
"Buenas tardes," she said.
"Qué me cobra, Señora?"
"Como?" She turned down the radio.
Olmos placed on the counter two one-thousand-peso coins -- two "new" pesos, now that the government had taken off three zeros.
She dropped the coins into a box below the counter and began to fish around for change. Olmos told her not to worry about it. He poured half the bag of chips into a massive hand and pushed the load into his mouth. Then he took a swig of Squirt and swished it around like mouthwash.
"Any place I can get this jeep washed around here?" he asked her in Spanish.
"I wouldn't know, Señor," she said.
"I tried that car wash around the corner. But it was closed."
"Closed. Yes."
A little boy wearing no shirt and striped pants that looked like old pajamas came into the store. He reached into a pocket, put an old five-hundred-peso coin on the counter and began pulling penny candies out of a big jar.
"You think they're just taking a lunch break?" Olmos said to the woman. "The car's very dirty, with all this dust in the air."
"I wouldn't know to tell you, Señor," she said.
The little boy looked up at Olmos and stared at the big Oaxacan's bent nose. "You want your car washed?" he asked. "My friend and I can do it." Before Olmos could answer, the boy hopped over the dog and out the door, shouting, "Alfredito, Alfredito!"


Chapter Twenty Seven

Downtown was dead, with so little traffic that Harley was free to fishtail on his bike as he passed the paper. He straightened out when a taxi passed him. That was when he saw DuChamps coming out of Luby's Cafeteria with a short, bald man. Harley waved and yelled "Hey!" as he whizzed by. But DuChamps didn't see him. Harley wondered who the bald guy was. He looked too mature to be hanging around with DuChamps.
As he locked his bike to a chain-link fence by the Police Headquarters, Harley wondered why anyone would eat lunch downtown on a Saturday, and at Luby's, of all places. If he couldn't understand something as simple as that, he thought, how was he supposed to understand the mind of a Mexican drug trafficker?
Behind the dispatcher's desk, Harley saw the big cop who'd given him a hard time the night before, at Perry's, for trampling footprints. The cop was flipping through papers on his gray steel desk, but looked up when Harley approached. His name tag read Sgt. Raymond Buendía.
"I told you to stay put last night, and you moved," he growled with the trace of a smile. "I saw you."
"I jumped to the grass," Harley said.
"Yeah, with those long legs you probably did. Well, we have some clues to go on. I don't know if I should tell you about them, though."
"Come on." Harley sat on the corner of his desk. "More witnesses?"
Buendia looked at him for a moment. "You going to take your goddamn helmet off?
"Oh, yeah." Harley unbuckled it and jammed it into his knapsack.
"Witnesses aren't clues, first of all," Buendía said. "But there was a stolen car near that house last night, at about the same time. We found it over on Paisano and Stanton. It has prints all over it, and a little blood on the passenger seat."
"Blood?" Harley stood up.
"Probably just from a scratch. But it could come in handy. What they really liked were the power windows. There are prints all over the buttons."
Buendía looked up at Harley, towering over his desk. "Wanna sit down?" he asked.
Harley said no, but then sat again on the corner of the desk, careful not to knock over a framed portrait of Buendía, with a wife and little girl. "Is that your daughter?" he asked.
"Yeah," the sergeant smiled. "She's bigger now."
Harley nodded for a moment, giving the girl her due, then asked: "So you think these two guys left the car in the barrio and then crossed into Juarez on foot?"
Buendía shrugged. "They might still be here. There's still more money on this side of the border, if that's what they were after."
"Did the prints match up to anything?"
"They're putting them into the computer now. We'll see."
"And the blood?"
"That won't get tested until we catch somebody."
"You think maybe these guys were just crackheads?"
"I don't know what I think," Buendía said.
He was getting a little snappy, Harley thought. He paused, waiting for the sergeant to say more. But instead of talking, the policeman began organizing his desk. He placed the papers into neat piles. Then he moved the picture of his family away from Harley's corner to the other side.
"Listen," he finally said, looking around to see if anyone was within listening range. "Can I go off the record with you?"
Harley nodded.
"I'm telling you this, because I know you're sort of involved in this case, not just as a reporter, OK?"
Harley kept nodding.
"If we believe these guys were tied to a foreign drug lord, we have to handle it as a terrorism case. We do that, we have to call in the FBI. We do a DNA test on that blood. We put those prints through the whole… the whole Interpol network. The chief doesn't want to call in the FBI if it just turns out to be a couple of crackheads. Know what I mean?"
"Uh huh," Harley said. The word "terrorism" knocked him back a little.
"But if it is terrorism, we probably do want the FBI. The trouble is, we don't know. That's why I'm working on a Saturday."
"Are you talking to the Juarez police about it?"
Buendía dismissed it with a wave. "No comment. That's what you say, right?"
"Come on. We're off the record."
The sergeant looked around again. The office was practically empty. "Listen," he said. "For all we know, those two guys were Juarez cops. You know that."
The sergeant's phone rang and he picked it up. "Yeah... Uh huh. Just what I was talking about." He arched his eyes at Harley, asking him to leave.
But Harley stood above him with his thumb and forefinger in a nearly closed circle, asking for one more question.
"Wait a minute," the cop said, putting one hand on the receiver.
"What kind of car was it?" Harley asked.
"Gray 93 Lexus, New Mexico plates. It's all in the report."
"OK," Harley said, backing away. "Thanks."
He skipped down the stairs out into the heat and unlocked his bike. He started pedaling toward Juarez to look for Chief Muller. But the big new El Paso Jail reminded him of his drug bust, and he turned around. He didn't want to fool with Juarez, not with that stupid first-person story of his in the paper. He pedaled back to the Tribune, to call Muller from the newsroom.
The office was emptier than the police station, since the Trib didn't publish a Sunday edition. Harley sat at his desk and dialed Muller's number. A secretary told him the chief was out. Was there someone else who could take the call? "No," Harley said in his Chihuahuan Spanish, "I need to speak to the chief."
"Then call Monday," the secretary said, hanging up.
Harley figured he'd call back and talk tougher, in English. But he had to wait a few minutes for it to work. He walked down the dark hallway to the snack bar, mulling his strategy, and bought a Hawaiian Punch. He saw Rick Jarvis of the Journal sitting at one of the tables with one of his editors. They were looking at him, apparently waiting for him to leave. Harley decided to make their life difficult. He opened his Hawaiian Punch and waved at them. Then he sat down and picked up a Journal sitting on the table. He paged through it, waiting for Jarvis and the editor to start talking again. They didn't.
Harley pretended to ignore them, reading an article about a dog that followed its master across the river, to Juarez, when the man began working as a maquiladora manager. An amusing story, Harley thought.
"Hey," he yelled over to Jarvis' table. "Did this dog make it back past Operation Blockade?"
The two men smiled, without answering. Then they made off to their offices.
Harley finished his drink and returned to his empty newsroom. He was curious about what Jarvis was working on, and wondered briefly if he might be able to call it to his screen, as DuChamps had the week before.
When Muller's secretary answered this time, saying, "Bueno, Jefatura," Harley bulled ahead with rapid-fire English. "I need to speak to Chief Muller please."
"Ah. The chief, he is not here," she said in slow English. Harley could hear her self confidence deflating.
"Can you patch me through to his house or cell phone?"
"Sorry?"
"Connect me to his house."
"One moment."
Next thing Harley knew, the phone was ringing, and Chief Muller answered. "Bueno?."
"Chief. Tom Harley here, from the Tribune?"
"Mr. Harley."
Before the chief could ask him about his silly first-person article, Harley rushed to tell him about the attack at Ken Perry's house.
"Ou la la," the chief said, sounding like one of the Gabor sisters. "I didn't see it in your paper this morning. You say it was two young men wearing glasses?"
"At least one of them wore glasses," Harley said. "With wire rims."
"And you know they were Mexicans?"
Harley thought for a moment. He never doubted they were, but realized he had no evidence. "No," he conceded. "I guess we don't know that. But it looks like they stole a car and took it back to the border."
"Ah, hum."
"Have you heard anything about Jiménez? Or do you know how I could find out whether he's got anything to do with this?"
"Tom, we already discussed this."
"I know, I know. But you were just surmising that he wasn't behind it. I need facts. I need... I guess I need to find him and ask him."
"Well, I can't help you much there... Though I did hear he was staying somewhere near Copper Canyon."
"Who told you that?"
"Ah... I don't remember."
"At a private home near Copper Canyon?"
"I couldn't say. But... Have you called Onofre Crispín? Remember I told you..."
"Not yet," Harley said. "I haven't had time."
"He is anxious to get to know you. Wait a minute here." Harley heard the chief moving around and talking. Then his voice returned. "Tom, I have Onofre Crispín on the other line here."
Harley listened as the chief explained in Spanish that he had the "joven americano" on the line. Then he told about the attack at Perry's house.
When he returned to Harley's line, he said, "Onofre Crispín wants to know if you're a football fan."
"Well," Harley said, surprised by the question, "sort of."
"He wants to know if you'll go with him tomorrow to the Cowboys game."
"The Dallas Cowboys?"
"Dallas, yes."
"That's like 600 miles!"
"He has a jet."
"Maybe I should talk to him."
"He's in his car, on his cellular now, and I'm beginning to lose him. He switched to Spanish. "Como Onofre? De acuerdo. Se lo digo."
"Tom, he'll pick you up at 11:30. Where do you live?"
Harley paused.
"Where do you live, Tom. I'm losing him."
"The Mountain Inn, off Brown Street," Harley said gravely.


Copyright 2009 Stephen L. Baker