The Demands of the Dead (16 page)

“Seriously.
Chaya, violeta...
b
ut I'll tell you what I'm doing right now. I'm trying to draw the cops away from this village. Whoever did kill those cops, they risked starting a war here.”

“I told Seguridad Publica that I was looking into Tapachula and Oaxaca.”

“That's where I'm going. To Oaxaca.”

“Not to Tapachula? Not with Evelyn?”

Walter smirked. “You haven't married Maria yet?”

When I didn't reply, he spoke again. “I hope you aren't waiting out of some kind of respect for Shawn. She chose you when he was still alive, remember?”

I shook my head, changed the subject. “Do you have a plan, for how you're going to draw attention away from here and towards Oaxaca?”

“I drew you here, didn't I?”

“Clever but specious,” something about Walter's informal speech sometimes made me involuntarily respond more formally. “I am a lifelong friend of yours, and your parents, who thought you were dead. This is an army, and you won't be in friendly territory, your face doesn't blend in, and you don't speak Spanish.”

“Thanks Momma. But I'm not the one who got caught today.”

“For your Mom's sake, don't get caught out there, either. And,” I added, “I'll take care of Evelyn in Tapachula.”

I asked:

“Why
did
you draw me here?”

“Now that you here and you got this job, I could use your help with this situation. But the reason I sent you that message in the first place was to tell you – just you and maybe one other person, but not mom, and not dad - in person what I found in my brother's apartment.”

“Which is?”

“Not yet,” he said, pointing out Emi with his eyes. We spent the rest of our lunch speaking in Walter's terrible Spanish, to include Emi. Other than brutal soreness all along my ribs and a split lip, I was uninjured.

As the sun started to set, Emi wrapped all three AK-47s, his and Walter's M-16s, in cloth, and went back to the village carrying them across his back with a strap across his forehead, Mayan style – via wherever they were cache-ing their weapons - while we tore down the camp. No one would be coming back here. Walter walked me back to the highway, to a hill where we could see down to the road but not be seen.

“What are we waiting here for?” I asked.

“Your ride to Tuxtla,” he said. Then, after a few minutes: “How's your music collection?”

“Fine...?”

“Still using CDs?”

“Yes...”

“There's a song on 2Pac's greatest hits that I used to really like. 'I ain't mad atcha'. You know it?”

“Sure. He's coming back from jail and all his friends have moved on, and he's saying he understands, he's not mad about it.”

“I wonder what Maria would think about it.”

A car passed on the highway, heading towards Hatuey. The wrong direction.

“Should I get her to listen to it?”

“Probably. The first line is the most dope, I thought.”

“The whole first line?” I asked. “Like, 'now we was once two niggaz of the same kind'?”

“Yeah, that whole line. No caps, no spaces.”

I took just a moment to assimilate the fact that, at some point after Shawn's murder, Walter had entered my apartment, taken a CD case off of my shelf, replaced the CD inside it with a CD that he had taken from Shawn's files, and left for Mexico without me having the slightest idea that he was anything but dead at the bottom of the Hudson. “I'll tell her,” I said.

He smiled, and I heard an engine. It was fully dark now, and I saw the lights in the distance. The car – a van, actually – was traveling slowly.

“Down you go, Mark.”

“Look for me in San Cristobal,” I said. “The Cafe Historia.”

“Nice place. Lot of heat though.”

“Look for me there.”

“Don't worry Mark. We'll meet again.”

The white Nissan Quest minivan came to a slow stop in front of me on the roadside. The side door in the back slid open and I got in. Driving the car was father Raul Cruz, who had briefed me and sent me to Hatuey. In the passenger seat was Francois Tourelle, the journalist who, according to Marchese of the American Embassy, was some kind of communist menace, and one who had met with Chavez of Seguridad Publica.

I closed the door behind me as the van picked up speed. It smelled faintly of recent cigarette smoke, probably out the front window, covered up with father Raul's priestly cologne. Tourelle turned around and smiled at me warmly with a mouth full of small, yellow teeth.

“I understand,” he said in Spanish with a perfect, Mexican accent. “You are headed to Tuxtla Gutierrez?”

“Francois Tourelle, I presume,” I said, extending my hand. “Of course I already know Raul.”

“Do you have any information for us?” Tourelle asked.

“I might, Mr. Tourelle. I presume you are going to Tuxtla because you have heard that Antonio and Rodolfo Garcia have been transferred there.”

“We had heard they were transferred, but we didn't have confirmation about where.”

“Well now you do,” I said. “Also, they have been arrested on drug charges, which should be easy enough to disprove, and not with the murders.”

“Thank you,” Tourelle said. “That is all very helpful information.” He turned around and in the driver's seat and started working with a big Motorola mobile phone.

“You are welcome. Now, if you don't mind, at the first opportunity, I need to get to the internet. I need to communicate with my employer,”
and with Maria...

Chapter 7

We couldn't drive all night and we had to avoid roadblocks, so when we got to Ejido Morelia, where Raul had contacts, we stopped for the night.

Ejido Morelia was a village like the one we'd left. We were greeted with businesslike hospitality and more warmth than Emi had shown me and Evelyn at Hatuey. Two families, and lots of kids, greeted us like old friends, and it was clear any friend of Raul and Francois was a friend of theirs. We were taken to a dark, dirt kitchen, sat on a wooden bench, and fed cold beans, rice, and bean tamales. Francois went off with the responsable, to send the message about the Garcias, the drug charges, and the transfer to Tuxtla, leaving me and Raul in the kitchen.

This land, Raul told me, was once owned by a vicious general who had been governor of Chiapas in the 1980s. He was famous for being a killer of indigenas. In re-payment, the Zapatistas kidnapped the general during the uprising and sentenced him to a lifetime of hard labour in the communities—working the way they did. But they commuted the sentence and used him for a prisoner exchange. There was a period between when the Zapatistas nabbed him and the prisoner exchange when the general was gone and no one knew where he was.

We were eating in one house but sleeping in another, so we were seen off by our dinner hosts immediately after the first cup of warm black coffee. Raul explained the army's investigative technqiues to me as we walked through the village. He kept his measured tone the whole time, but he was stung, it was obvious.

“400 soldiers came in armoured personnel carriers. They forced the men to lie here, all afternoon.” We were standing alone at a paved, dusty basketball court with low baskets. “They took don Sebastian, don Severino, and don Ermelindo Santiz and many others. They drowned them, electrocuted them, burned them, and drove them all over the state in a truck. Then they put them in Cerro Hueco and starved them. They released everyone but the Santices.

“The bones of the 3 men were found near here in a vulture pit a month later by a hunter.”

“Why did they do it?”

“The army? They wanted to know about the General, they wanted to avenge the General, and also they wanted to know about a non-indigenous doctor who had visited.”

We got to the door of the small house where we would spend the night. No internet, no phone, no hope of secure communication tonight. Raul, Francois and I were staying in a bedroom that three people had vacated to make room for us. Luis was in another house. Francois was in the room when Raul and I arrived, and he'd brought our bags out from the car.

“As of this afternoon, as far as our sources in Cerro Hueco know, the Garcias haven't arrived yet,” he said.

It meant there was no hurry to get to Tuxtla. Even though they may be there, there was a chance the Garcias were on a truck or some other military prison or secret location.

We got back onto Highway 199 before dawn to avoid checkpoints again. The 199 would take us to Ocosingo, then San Cristobal, and then Tuxtla. Since there was no new information about the Garcias whereabouts, we stopped in Ocosingo, where I would definitely be able to get onto a computer.

We got to Raul’s church in the late morning and he set us up with a room. I called Hoffman while Francois shuffled with his stuff. I couldn’t give Hoffman most of the story on the phone so I told him about the arrests, my brief visit with the paramilitary hospitality committee, and the conversation with Beltran. He told me to find Chavez instead of pursuing the Garcias. I told him I suspected they were in the same place, and that I had a lead I was going to pursue here in Ocosingo before I made my way to Tuxtla and hung up. Then I borrowed Raul's computer, ran through the encryption routine with my disk (which the paras had left intact in my bag), and wrote the rest of the story out to Maria, who had given up on double encryption and written me a fairly direct message using public key encryption:

“There are two people of interest. One is Officer Pike, and the other is codenamed the Trainer. Pike and our friend were friends once and suddenly stopped being friends about a year ago. The Trainer and our friend have exchanged a lot of very suspicious messages for two years now, and I am thinking you will want to see them. I think the Trainer is the author.”

I knew who Officer Pike was, and even though he was no shining example of humanity, I didn't think he was the guy.

When Shawn and I were students, we both volunteered for a project, affiliated with the law school, that tried to ensure an adequate defense to people who wouldn't otherwise get one. I was too interested in too many things to be dedicated, but it started Shawn on the road he never got off of. Before he even finished school, he was sought-after by public defenders as a researcher, specializing in police abuses. He got very good at using the media and publicity and humiliating the police. Police were rarely punished for anything, no matter how hard he worked, but their names and detailed evidence of their abuses got out on the public record, and quite a few unlucky, young, black men and women walked away from “assault police” charges thanks to Shawn. “Assault police”, Shawn said, “is what they call it when they beat you up.” The NYPD taught me different, that bad guys assaulted police all the time. But Shawn wasn't wrong.

Our last semester, Shawn was working with an art student, Zarela, who had stood around watching two cops pushing a homeless woman around on the street around Christmas time. She asked them what they were doing, and one of them wound up and knocked her out with a right hook to the jaw. Assault police. He got the story out and eventually someone came forward with a video of the punch. Handed it to me, actually, because I was in the office that night. Officer James Pike became quite famous for a time, and Zarela's assault charges were dropped.

I had looked at Pike for months, after, but found no connection to Salant, Brewer, Carr, or Rossi, or their rotten precinct. It was somebody like that, though. Someone Shawn had beaten, getting him back. Maybe the Trainer. It would be in the files.

I wrote her back:

“Don't think it's Pike. In other news, I've made contact. He seems fine, focused, doing well actually. Better than I was, probably. Here's what he told me: In my CD collection there's 2Pac's greatest hits. Try playing it in the computer. If it's encrypted the password is the first line of the song 'I ain't mad atcha', with no caps and no spaces. I think it contains all the case files that the brother was keeping on the people you're looking at. By cross-referencing, you might be able to figure out who the Trainer is. I am going to Tuxtla now to see this local case through. Also,” I wrote, thinking:
fuck it
, “I miss you and I love you.”

Meanwhile, it was past noon and if I wanted to talk to Hernan Diaz’s mother, I would have to leave now. There was a big difference between how easily a person talked to a stranger who shows up in the day time and one who comes after dark. I made plans to meet Francois and Raul back here a few hours later. Raul was meeting with some members of the church and giving a mass. Francois would go meet people too. I looked at myself in the mirror above the basin in the room Raul had put us in. My lip was still swollen. My bruises were starting to fade. It was possible someone meeting me for the first time could think I just looked this way. I hoped Diaz’s mom would buy it.

I drove Raul's van to the address indicated in Diaz’s file, a townhouse on a narrow street just a few minutes from Raul's church, and knocked on the metal outer door.

“Who is it?” The voice was too young to be Diaz’s mother.

“Mark Brown, Corporate Research and Analysis Resources, investigating Diaz’s death. We met briefly at Diaz's funeral. May I come in?”