The Guilty (11 page)

Tania had just learned the word “sinister” and she was finding many uses for it. We should have been happy; Keiko would have babies off in the depths. Tania gave me a cross-eyed look. I thought she was going to say it was sinister. I pulled out a picture book she had in her backpack and started to read it to her. It was about carnivorous carrots. She didn't think that was sinister at all.

The whale had been trained to say good-bye to the Mexican people. He waved adiós with his flipper while
we sang “The Swallows.” A ten-trumpet mariachi band played with enormous sadness, and the singer exclaimed,

“I'm not crying! My eyes are just sweating!”

I confess, I got choked up in spite of myself. I silently cursed Katzenberg, incapable of appreciating the richness of Mexican kitsch. He only paid to see violence.

Keiko leapt from the water one last time. He seemed to smile in a threatening way, with very pointed teeth. On our way out, I bought Tania an inflatable whale.

There were forest fires outside of Ajusco. The ashes brought night on prematurely. From the hill Adventure Kingdom was built on, the city's filthy skin glinted like mica. The perfect backdrop for Cristi's dreams of a good monster.

We got onto the highway without saying a word. I'm sure Tania was thinking about Keiko and the family he would have to travel so far to find.

I dropped Tania off at Renata's house and headed to Los Alcatraces. When I got to the table, it was four in the afternoon. Katzenberg had already eaten.

I'd chosen the restaurant carefully; it was perfect for torturing Katzenberg. I knew he'd thank me for taking him to a genuine locale. They were blasting
ranchera
music, the chairs had that toyshop color-scheme we Mexicans encounter only in “traditional” joints, there were six spicy salsas on the table and the menu offered three kinds of insects. All calamities picturesque enough for my companion to suffer them as “experiences.”

Baldness had gained ground on Katzenberg's scalp. He was dressed like a Woolworth's shopper, sporting a shirt with checks in three different colors and a watch
with a see-through band. His little eyes, intensely blue, darted around. Eyes faster than flies, on the lookout for an exclusive.

He ordered decaf. They brought him the only coffee they had:
café de olla,
with cinnamon and panela sugar. He barely sipped it. He wanted to be careful about food. He felt a throbbing in his temples, a little sound going
bing-bing.

“It's the altitude,” I assured him. “No one can digest anything at 7500 feet.”

He told me about his recent problems. Some colleagues were jealous of him, others hated him for no apparent reason. He had been lucky enough to visit places where conflicts broke out on his arrival and it got him incredible scoops. He was the first one to document the forced relocations in Rwanda, the Kurdish genocide, the toxic gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in India. Everywhere he went, he'd won prizes and made enemies. He felt his adversaries breathing down his neck. We were the same age, 38, but he'd aged in subtle ways, as if he'd crossed all of Africa with no air conditioning. I thought I sensed a bit of pathological lying in the precise enumeration of his grievances. According to him, nobody had forgiven him for being in Berlin the day the wall came down, or for having run into Vargas Llosa in a shirt shop in Paris a week after he'd lost the elections in Peru. I figured he was one of those investigative reporters who brag about the facts they've dug up but lie about their birthdate. Many of the conflicts he'd had with the press must have been sparked by the way he got his stories, taking advantage of people like me.

He eyed the neighboring tables.

“I didn't want to come back to Mexico,” he said in a low voice.

Was it possible that someone hardened by coups d'état and radioactive clouds was afraid of the Mexican way of life?

I'd ordered
empipianadas.
Katzenberg looked at my plate as he spoke, as if he were drawing conviction from the thick, green sauce.

“It's an elusive thing. Evil is
transcendent
here. People don't cause harm just because. Evil means something. It was hell, hell that Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry found in this country. It's a miracle they got out alive. They came into contact with overpowering energies.”

Just then, they brought me a clay jug of hibiscus water. The handle had broken off and been taped back on. I gestured at the jug:

“In Mexico, evil is improvised. Don't worry, Samuel.”

4.
Oxxo

Katzenberg's paranoid side was much more likeable. He wasn't the overbearing lion of New Journalism he'd been on his last trip. Whether it was real or imagined, all this intrigue was having a positive effect on him. Now he wanted to write his story and get out fast.

I spoke like only a screenwriter would:

“Is there something I should know?”

He answered like one of my characters:

“What part of what you know don't you understand?”

“You're a nervous wreck. Are you in trouble?

“I already told you about that.”

“Are you in trouble you haven't told me about?”

“If I don't tell you something, it's for the good of the mission.”

“‘The mission.' You sound like a DEA agent.”

“Come on,” he said, very amused. “I have to protect my source, that's all. I'll tell you what you need to know. You're my Deep Throat. I don't want to lose you.”

“Is there something you haven't told me?”

“Yes. Remember the anti-Semitic Irishman?”

“The one who wanted to fuck your girlfriend?”

“That's right. He wanted to fuck my girlfriend because he had already fucked my wife.”

“Ah.”

“They just named him foreign news editor of
Point Blank.
He knows I haven't been very rigorous with my sources. There's already a price on my head. He's waiting for the tiniest slipup so he can jump on me.”

“I thought everyone hated you because you got to Rwanda first.”

“There's some of that, too, but with this guy it's all about his uncircumcised dick. Us goddamn gringos have personal problems too. Can you understand that,
güey?”

“You speak Spanish too well. Everyone here ends up thinking you're CIA.”

“I lived here for four years, from 12 to 16, I told you that. I went to school in Mixcoac. Are you going to trust me or not? We need a pact, a marriage of convenience,” he smiled.

“They don't teach you to say ‘marriage of convenience' at The Mixcoac School.”

“There are dictionaries, don't be a jerk. In Mixcoac, I learned what you learn in any high school: to say
güey,
man.” He looked at me, his eyes two blue sparks. “Can you understand that I feel like shit, even though I'm paying you three thousand dollars?”

We made peace. I wanted to reward him with some quotidian horror of Mexico in this, the year 2000. I borrowed his phone and dialed up Pancho, a dealer I've considered trustworthy ever since he said to me, “If you want to see the devil smile, give me a call.”

Pancho had me meet him two streets away from Los Alcatraces, in the parking lot of an Oxxo minimart. I wanted Katzenberg to see a coke deal, as simple and cheap as ordering Domino's. Routine crime.

Pancho showed up in a grey Camaro, with his little girls in the back. He walked up to my car window, leaned over, dropped a folded-up piece of paper, and pocketed the 200 pesos I palmed him.

“Take care of yourself,” he said, an alarming sentiment coming from someone with trembling fingers, a wasted visage, papery skin. Pancho's face was the best antidote against his drugs. The devil wasn't smiling at him. Or maybe that's his secret and bewitching charm, like some poorly-embalmed Phoenician king. Samuel Katzenberg eyed him greedily, extracting adjectives from that ravaged face.

I went into the Oxxo to buy cigarettes. I was at the register when a fast-moving shadow crossed my field of vision. I thought the store was being robbed. But the guy behind the counter looked more curious than horrified. He was watching something going on outside. I turned to look at the parking lot. Katzenberg was being dragged out of my car by a guy in a ski-mask, a Glock held to his head. A
second guy in a ski-mask got out of the rear seat of my car, as if he had been searching for something back there. He turned to face all of us watching from inside the store:

“Motherfuckers!”

We didn't need to see him fire. The minute we heard him we dropped to the ground. I went down surrounded by cans, boxes, and a rain of glass. The shot shattered the front window. A second shot shook the building and kept us floored for five minutes.

When I got out of the Oxxo, the doors of my car were still open, infusing it with the helplessness of recently vandalized vehicles. As for Katzenberg, all that remained was a button torn off his jacket in the struggle.

There was a chemical smell, and a cloud of colored smoke drifted towards the sky. The second shot had shattered the two X's of the neon Oxxo sign. Strangely, the other letters were still lit: two glowing circles like drunken eyes.

5.
Buñuel

Lieutenant Natividad Carmona had very specific ideas:

“If you chew, you think better.”

He handed me a pack of blue raspberry gum.

I took one even though I didn't want it.

I sat in the patrol car, an artificial taste in my mouth. From the passenger's seat, Martín Palencia informed his partner:

“El Tamale snuffed it.”

Carmona made no comment. I didn't know who El Tamale was, but seeing the news of his death received with such indifference terrified me.

It had taken me a while to react to Katzenberg's kidnapping. That's what happens when you have a slip full of cocaine in your pocket. What do you do when you hear sirens approaching? Pancho sold top-notch product; it would be a crime to dump it.

After searching through my car (in vain, of course), I'd gone back into the Oxxo and headed for the cans of powdered milk. I picked one for infants with acid reflux, the brand that saved Tania when she was a newborn. I pulled off the plastic cap and slipped the paper between the cap and the metal seal. With a little luck, I'd be able to get it back the next day. That milk is a luxury item.

When I got back to the car, there were two cops on the scene. They made a big show of opening the glove compartment and pulling out a baggie of marijuana. While I'd been hiding the coke, they'd been planting this lesser drug in my car. They didn't need it to take me down to the station, but they decided to soften me up just in case. I was about to slip them a bill (with traces of something more incriminating than marijuana on it) when a rat-gray car with lights on its roof screeched to a stop in front of us, its brakes squealing in that magnificent way police cars never seem to pull off in Mexican movies.

That's how I met officers Natividad Carmona and Martín Palencia. They had ferrety hair and manicured fingernails. As I watched them go over the car with dead-beat delight, I noticed a scar on Carmona's forehead and, much more worrying, a Rolex on Palencia's wrist. They treated the uniformed cops with utter disdain. They found my Screenwriters Guild I.D. and the bag of marijuana. I was surprised at how easily they broke it down.

“Look, Daddy-O,” Carmona said to one of the cops, “you really think a filmmaker's going to get high on skunk weed like this ?” He gestured at me and his voice took on a respectful tone: “The artist is into much finer things.” He handed the bag to the cop. “Take that shit away.”

The grunt cops took their hopes of extortion elsewhere. I was left in the hands of the Law, trained to sniff out my drug habits from my screenwriter ID.

We were in the parking lot for hours. The officers called Katzenberg's hotel, Interpol, the DEA, and the consular officer at the United States Embassy. Their efficiency turned terrifying when they said,

“Let's go to the holding cells.”

I got into the patrol car. It smelled new. The dashboard seemed to have more lights and buttons than were really necessary.

“How close are you and Mr. Katzenberg?” asked Carmona.

I told him what I knew, speaking quickly and stumbling over my words, wanting to fill each sentence with sincerity.

We drove through a neighborhood of low houses. It had rained in this part of the city. Every time we pulled up next to a car, the driver would pretend we weren't there. I've been in that situation hundreds of times: not looking at the Law, trying to pretend it is invisible and will continue along its inscrutable parallel course.

Where could Katzenberg be? Holed up in some shan-tytown, gagged in some safehouse? I imagined him being dragged by his kidnappers in a series of confusing shots: a back pushing forward into a roiling fog; a body with its
hands tied, already lifeless, being dragged through the dirt; a corpse on its way to becoming anonymous, just a faceless victim, the product of a random misunderstanding; an inert mass, licked eagerly by feral dogs.

I imagined an atrocious end for Samuel Katzenberg to avoid thinking about my own. Thirty-eight years in the city is enough to know that a trip to the “holding cells” doesn't always come with a return ticket.
But there are exceptions,
I thought. People who make it through a week eating newspaper in a ditch, people who survive fifteen ice pick wounds, people who are electrocuted in bathtubs full of cold water and live to tell the tale, though nobody believes them. I tried to reassure myself by thinking about hideous possibilities in great detail. I imagined myself deformed but alive, ready to terrify Tania with my embrace. Horrendous, but with the right to a future. Then I wondered if Renata would cry at my funeral. No, she wouldn't even show up at the wake; she wouldn't be able to handle my mother hugging her and saying sad, tender words meant to console her for being guilty for my death.