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at the country club, attended by the mayor
of Santa Teresa, Jose Refugio de las Heras, the police chief Pedro Negrete, and
Mr. Pedro Rengifo and Mr. Estanislao Campuzano. The meeting lasted until four
in the morning and a few things were cleared up. The next day it seemed as if
all the police in the city were on the hunt for Javier Ramos. No stone in the
desert was left unturned. But in the end they couldn't come up with so much as
a convincing sketch of him.

For many days Juan de Dios
Martinez
thought about the
four heart attacks Herminia Noriega had suffered before she died. Sometimes he
thought about it while he was eating or while he was urinating in the men's
room at a coffee shop or one of the inspector's regular lunch spots, or before
he went to sleep, just at the moment he turned off the light, or maybe seconds
before he turned off the light, and when that happened he simply
couldn't
turn off the light and then he
got out of bed and went over to the window and looked out at the street, an
ordinary, ugly, silent, dimly lit street, and then he went into the kitchen and
put water on to boil and made himself coffee, and sometimes, as he drank the
hot coffee with no sugar, shitty coffee, he turned on the TV and watched
late-night shows broadcast across the desert from the four cardinal points, at
that late hour he could get Mexican channels and American channels, channels
with crippled madmen who galloped under the stars and uttered unintelligible
greetings, in Spanish or English or Spanglish, every last fucking word
unintelligible, and then Juan de Dios Martinez set his coffee cup on the table
and covered his face with his hands and a faint and precise sob escaped his
lips, as if he were weeping or trying to weep, but when finally he removed his
hands, all that appeared, lit by the TV screen, was his old face, his old skin,
stripped and dry, and not the slightest trace of a tear.

When he told Elvira Campos what
was happening to him, the asylum director listened in silence and then, for a
long time afterward, as they lay naked in the dusk of the bedroom, she
confessed that she sometimes dreamed of giving up everything. In other words,
making a drastic break, no holds barred. She dreamed, for example, of selling
her apartment and two other properties she owned in Santa Teresa, and her car
and her jewelry, selling everything until she had collected a decent sum of
money, and then she dreamed about
flying to Paris, where she would rent a tiny apartment, a studio, say between
Villiers and Porte de Clichy, and then she would go to see a famous doctor, a
wonder-working plastic surgeon, get a face-lift, get her nose and cheekbones
fixed, have her breasts enlarged, in short, when she got off the operating
table she would look like someone else, a different woman, not fiftysomething
anymore but fortysomething, or better yet, just over forty, unrecognizable,
new, changed, rejuvenated, although of course for a while she would go
everywhere wrapped in bandages, like a mummy, not an Egyptian
 
mummy but
 
a
 
Mexican
 
mummy,
 
which would be
 
something she
enjoyed, walking to the metro, for example, knowing that all the Parisians were
watching her surreptitiously, some of them even giving up their seats for her,
imagining the horrible suffering, burns, traffic accident, that this silent and
stoic stranger had undergone, and then getting off the metro and going into a
museum or an art gallery or a Montparnasse bookstore, and studying French for
two hours a day, with joy, with excitement, French is so pretty, such a musical
language, it has a certain je ne sais quoi, and then, one rainy morning, taking
off her bandages, slowly, like an archaeologist who has just discovered an
incredible bone, like a girl who carefully unwraps, bit by bit, a present that
she wants to make last, forever? nearly forever, until finally the last bandage
falls, where does it fall? to the floor, to the rug or the wooden floor, in any
case a top-quality floor, and on the floor all the bandages slither like
snakes, or all the bandages open their sleepy eyes like snakes, although she
knows they aren't snakes but rather the guardian angels of snakes, and then
someone brings her a mirror and she stares at herself, she nods at herself, she
approves of herself, with a gesture in which she rediscovers the sovereignty of
childhood, the love of her father and mother, and then she signs something, a
paper, a document, a check, and she steps out into the streets of Paris. Into a
new life? asked Juan de Dios
Martinez
.
I suppose so, said the director. I like you the way you are, said Juan de Dios
Martinez
. a new life
without Mexicans or
Mexico
or Mexican patients, said the director. I'm crazy about you the way you are,
said Juan de Dios
Martinez
.

At
the end of 1996, it was reported or hinted at in some Mexican media that films
of real murders, snuff films, were being shot in the north, and that the
capital of snuff was Santa Teresa. One night two reporters
talked to General Humberto Paredes, the
former police chief of
Mexico City
,
in his walled castle in Colonia del Valle. The reporters were old Macario Lopez
Santos, who had been on the crime beat for more than forty years, and Sergio
Gonzalez. The dinner with which the general regaled them consisted of pork
tacos with extra chile sauce and La Invisible tequila. Anything else the
general tried to eat at night only gave him heartburn. When inroads had been
made on the food, Macario Lopez asked the general what he thought about the
snuff industry in Santa Teresa, and the general told them that over the course
of his long career he had seen many terrible things, but he'd never seen films
like that and he wasn't sure they existed. But they do exist, said the old reporter.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, answered the general, but what's strange is
that I never saw one, when I saw and was informed of everything. The two
reporters agreed that it was strange, although they hinted that maybe, back
when the general was on the job, this particular brand of horror hadn't yet
emerged. The general begged to differ: according to him, pornography had
reached its fullest flowering slightly before the French Revolution. Everything
you might see today in a film from the
Netherlands
or a collection of
photographs or a dirty book had already been
set
before the year 1789, and for the most part was a repetition, a
filip on an already-gazing gaze. General, said Macario Lopez Santos, sometimes
you talk just like Octavio Paz, you wouldn't happen to be reading him, would
you? The general burst out laughing and said the only thing he'd read by Paz,
and this was many years ago, was
The
Labyrinth of Solitude,
and he hadn't understood a single word. I was very
young back then, said the general, eyeing the reporters, I must have been
forty. Oh,
mi general,
said Macario
Lopez. Then they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom
where evil is like a Ferrari, and after a while, when an elderly maid cleared
the table and asked whether the gentlemen would be having coffee, they returned
to the subject of snuff films. According to Macario Lopez, the situation in
Mexico
had changed. On the one hand there had never been so much corruption. To this
you had to add the problem of the drug trade and the heaps of money revolving
around it. The snuff industry, in this context, was just a symptom. a virulent
symptom in the case of Santa Teresa, but ultimately just a symptom. The
general's reply was dismissive. He said he didn't think corruption today was
any worse than under past governments. It wasn't as bad as it was during Miguel
Aleman's administration, for example, or Lopez Mateos's presidency. The
desperation might be worse now, but not the corruption. The drug trade, he
conceded, was something new, but the real burden of the drug trade on Mexican
society (and on American society) was overstated. All you needed to make a
snuff film, he said, was money, nothing but money, and there was money before
the drug lords made their fortunes, and also a pornography industry, and still,
the films, the famous films, weren't made. You may not have seen them, General,
said Macario Lopez. The general laughed and his laughter was lost among the
flower beds in the dark yard. I saw everything, Macario my friend, he answered.
Before they left, the old crime reporter remarked that he hadn't had the
pleasure of saluting any bodyguard when they got to the walled house in Colonia
del Valle. The general answered that this was because he didn't have bodyguards
anymore. And why is that,
mi general?
asked
the reporter. Have your enemies given up? Security is getting more and more
expensive, Macario, said the general as he walked them to the gate along a path
lined with bougainvilleas, and I would rather spend my few pesos on pleasanter
indulgences. And if you're attacked? The general reached behind him and showed
the two reporters an Israeli Desert Eagle .50 Magnum with a seven-shot clip. In
his pocket, he told them, he always carried two replacement clips. But I don't
think I'll have to use the gun, he said, I'm so old my enemies must think I'm
already pushing up daisies. Some people hold grudges for a long time, observed
Macario Lopez Santos. True, Macario, said the general, in
Mexico
we don't know how to be good
sports. Of course, if you lose you die and if you win sometimes you die too,
which makes it hard to keep up a sporting attitude, but still, the general
reflected, some of us try to fight the good fight. Oh,
mi general,
said Macario Lopez Santos, laughing.

In January
1997,
five members of the Los
Bisontes gang were arrested. They were accused of several murders committed
after Haas was caught. Those arrested were Sebastian Rosales, nineteen, Carlos
Camilo Alonso, twenty, Rene Gardea, seventeen, Julio Bustamante, nineteen, and
Roberto Aguilera, twenty. All five had previous convictions for sexual abuse
and two of them, Sebastian Rosales and Carlos Camilo Alonso, had been held in
custody for the rape of a minor, Maria Ines Rosales, a first cousin of
Sebastian, who withdrew the charges a few months after
Sebastian was sent to the Santa Teresa
penitentiary. It was said that Carlos Camilo Alonso had been renting the house
on Calle Garcia Herrero where the bodies of Estefania and Herminia were found.
All five were accused of having kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed the two
women found dead in the Podesta ravine, in addition to being charged with the
murder of Marisol Camarena, whose body was found in a drum of acid, and the
murder of Guadalupe Elena Blanco, plus the killings of Estefania and Herminia.
During the interrogation to which they were subjected, Carlos Camilo Alonso
lost all his teeth and suffered a fracture of the nasal septum, supposedly in a
suicide attempt. Roberto Aguilera ended up with four broken ribs. Julio
Bustamante was locked in a cell with two butch queers, who sodomized him until
they were tired, as well as beating the shit out of him every three hours and
breaking the fingers of his left hand. a lineup was assembled, and out of ten
residents of Calle Garcia Herrero only two recognized Carlos Camilo Alonso as
the tenant at 677. Two witnesses, one of whom was a known police informer,
stated that they had seen Sebastian Resales in a black Peregrino during the
week when Estefania and Herminia were kidnapped. According to Rosales's own
testimony, it was a car he had just stolen. Three firearms were found in the
possession of the Bisontes: two CZ model 85 9mm pistols and a German Heckler
& Koch. Another witness, however, said that Carlos Camilo Alonso had
bragged about owning a Smith & Wesson like the one that had been used to
kill the two sisters. Where was the gun? According to the same witness, Carlos
Camilo had told him he'd sold it to some gringo drug traffickers he knew.
Meanwhile, after the Bisontes were arrested, it was discovered by chance that
one of them, Roberto Aguilera, was the younger brother of a certain Jesus
Aguilera, an inmate at the Santa Teresa penitentiary who went by the nickname
El Tequila and was a good friend and protege of Klaus Haas. It wasn't long
before conclusions were drawn. Very likely, said the police, the series of
killings carried out by the Bisontes were murders for hire. According to this
version, Haas paid three thousand dollars for each dead woman who resembled his
own victims. The news was soon leaked to the press. Voices were raised
demanding the resignation of the warden. It was said that the prison was under
the control of organized crime gangs, in turn reigned over by Enriquito
Hernandez, the Cananea drug lord and true boss of the prison, from which he
continued to manage his affairs with impunity. An article appeared in
La Tribuna de Santa Teresa
that linked
Enriquito Hernandez to Haas in the trafficking of drugs disguised as a legal
cross-border import/export business in computer parts. The article wasn't
attributed and the reporter who wrote it had seen Haas only once in his life,
which didn't stop him from putting statements in Haas's mouth that Haas had
never made. The serial killings of women have been successfully resolved, said
Jose Refugio de las Heras, mayor of Santa Teresa, on
Hermosillo
television (and his declaration was rebroadcast on the news programs of the big
Mexico City
stations). Everything that happens from now on falls under the category of ordinary
crimes, what you'd naturally find in a city in a constant state of growth and
development. This is the end of the psychopaths.