Death in Veracruz (32 page)

“Love can do terrible things,” Little Darling said sadly.

“The mayor of Chicontepec is dead,” I said.

“That doesn't matter any more,” Pizarro said.

His lips trembled, and saliva drooled down his chin, but his voice was firm, his diction perfect.

“As I once told you, people are always dying, but our people don't die in vain. They never will. Our deaths are caused by need, by history, not revenge, my journalist friend. So you don't have to worry about reprisals from us. We're not spiteful people, we're workers. As I told you, we built a river. We remove what gets in the way and put what helps in its place. That's all. Whether your lady lives or dies at this time is of no importance to our work.”

He sounded like an oracle, as if someone else were speaking through him. A true, solemn, and guttural ventriloquist's dummy.

“I am asking you not to attack the union in return,” Pizarro continued. “Don't meddle. The little you learned about its machinery ought to have sunk in. Don't stick your hands in the gears. Leave us to our work, don't judge us without first getting to know us. And don't try to get to know us by provoking us.”

He lay his head against the back of the wheelchair. He seemed utterly overcome with fatigue. In my mind's eye I could see the immaculate corrals of “La Mesopotamia” in El Álamo, the mangroves and the stables, the parts shop and the complex at the center of it all. Once again I found myself admiring Lázaro Pizarro, the boss of Poza Rica, leader of his people, and founder of civilizations. His lips were trembling. It took enormous physical effort for the voice to maintain for even a few minutes the power and resonance required to match its owner's opinion of his role in history.

“If you'd like to ask him something, you may,” Little Darling said in her dulcet voice. “We know what it's like to be hopelessly in love.”

“Do today's presidential decisions mean the whole Chicontepec project is on hold?” I asked.

“It was shut down by total lack of foresight,” Pizarro said, regaining his strength.

“God gave it to us, and God is taking it away,” said Little Darling.

“Then it was all in vain,” I said.

“Nothing's in vain, my journalist friend,” Pizarro said with renewed vigor. I felt the full force of the anger driving his indomitable will, the passion smoldering in that ruined body. “Everything comes from the same source: the showers that water the land and the flood that washes away towns, lives and animals. History makes mistakes too. It gets off on the wrong track as the saying goes. Our job is to keep it on the right track, to make the corrections. And it's a high-risk undertaking, my friend, just like the oil business. You have to greet the losses with open arms. Losses, as you can easily see, are part of the game.”

He thrust his head back and stared up at the ceiling, clearly exhausted. His jaw tensed. His lips had gone dry, and his hands trembled ever so slightly.

“God is taking him away from us,” Little Darling said, kissing Pizarro's arm as she stroked it.

When he leaned back to rest on that same arm, the light from the lamp struck the left side of his face, exposing the moisture that came with his grief.

We started back to the hotel without speaking, but my contact made a surprise stop on the way at a small plaza with red benches and privet trees saturated with birds. He had me get out, and we stood next to a dry fountain. All around us were teenage couples, old men basking in the sun, ice cream vendors, and street sellers hawking local delicacies in the holy Mexican peace, marking the anniversary of the day the oil was nationalized.

“Now you've seen him,” my contact said. He brushed
the dust out of the orifice from which one of the fountain's four frogs ought to have been spouting water.
“I
hope you realized his days are numbered.”

“I did,” I replied.

He rested his impeccable ox-blood shoe on the edge of the fountain and in his customarily deliberate fashion took the time necessary to extract and light a cigarette.

“Now it's my turn to apologize to you for what I'm about to say.” He released the smoke from the first drag on his cigarette.

I began picking at a frog of my own.

“The Pizarro you were looking at in the wheelchair wasn't the work of Edilberto Chanes.” My contact looked up at the sky. He furrowed his brow, trying to hold the brilliance of the open sky in his gaze. “What you saw in that motel was a man consumed by cancer, not wounds inflicted by someone else. Much less Edilberto Chanes.”

“Are you telling me that Chanes never got to Pizarro?”

“I'm telling you Chanes didn't so much as launch an attack.” Once again he inhaled and tried to look up into the cloudless sky. “The attack never happened.”

“I got direct confirmation of Pizarro's wounds from Houston,” I said drily.

“I don't know what you confirmed in Houston,” my contact said. “It's true Pizarro was in Houston at the time of Chanes's death. He went to get treatment for the cancer that was eating him away and for no other reason.”

I tried hard to think back. I got no information from Miller concerning the exact reason for Pizarro's admission to Methodist Hospital. She did mention they put him in the trauma unit.

“Roibal was also admitted with injuries,” I pointed out.

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

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

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

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

“Namely?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The fact is the attack never happened.”

“Then how did he die?”

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

“I can't promise that.”

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

“I'll go along with 10 days.”

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

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

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

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

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

“On those very days,
paisano.”

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

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

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

“That's right,
paisano.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who sent the pouch, then?”

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

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

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

“Their significance according to Pizarro,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“In December the situation looked to be different.”

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

“Believe whatever you like.”

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

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

“With charges pending against our mutual friend.”

“A resignation?”

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

“Just call her Anabela. It's easier.”

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

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