The Most Dangerous Animal of All (37 page)

She wrote back, disputing my facts. She said that her father had never been arrested in the United States. “You wrote that the police officer told you my father was arrested again in 1996 in California. This is totally absurd because my father died in the year 1984 in Mexico.” She went on to say that after suffering so much hardship, she, her brothers, and her mother had closed the chapter on her father and his family in the States for good. “We do not want to have anymore ties to my father’s side of the family and so we do not want you or anyone to interfere in mine, my brothers, or my mother’s lives. We all ask you to respect our wish. Of course we wish you and your family all the best for the future.”

I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. Of course no one would want to find out that they had a brother and then be immediately told that their father was a criminal. I had assumed that, because she was my sister, she would automatically relate.

I wrote Guenevere another letter, trying to explain myself, and received a response that was more amicable.

“Imagine how I felt,” she wrote, “when you told me on the phone: I am your brother, your father had a relationship with a minor and he was a criminal too . . . I felt and still feel like I’ve been run over by a truck without any warning!”

She asked to see my birth certificate so she could be one hundred percent sure that I was her brother, and she asked for time to absorb everything. “If all of this is true, it would be a shock for my mother, who is not in good health.”

She said that my father had “suffocated” in Mexico and her mother had traveled there to say good-bye for all of them. “He is buried in an unmarked grave because the wife of my grandfather did not want to fly him over to the States to give him a proper funeral.”

She went on to say that she had never met my grandfather. “We never got one small toy from him, and when I was 11 years old I was sent to an international camp in the States where he could have visited me, but he did not want to see me. Or when I finished law school and was chosen by the dean of the Rutgers Law School to work as a university assistant there for a year, I wanted to visit his wife, Eleanor, but she did not want to see me either.”

Guenevere concluded that she did not understand why it was so important that I have contact with her, but that she would need proof and she would need time.

She signed the letter “Gueny.”

That gave me hope.

I gave her the time she needed. Over the next few months, I tried repeatedly to get my original birth certificate from the state of Louisiana and eventually took my case to court, but to no avail. My birth records were sealed, and that was that.

As the months went by, I began to lose hope that I would ever hear back from Guenevere, although I had written and explained that I was doing my best to get my birth certificate from the state.

Finally, after seven months, I retrieved from my mailbox a letter with a stamp marked
ÖSTERREICH
. My heart skipped a beat as I tore open the envelope.

The letter wasn’t from Guenevere.

It was from Edith, her mother.

With a feeling of foreboding, I went inside and sat down to read the letter.

My father’s third wife wrote that it was natural for children who have been adopted to want to find their birth parents, but that few can deal with the reality of what they find. She pointed out that the things Harold Butler had told me about Van had been wrong, that her husband could not have been in prison in 1996, because he had died in 1984. “This is for me a fact, or you telling me I was standing on the wrong grave. If my children are missing some small detail about their father, they can ask me,” she wrote. “Stop stressing my children and upset me. Just STOP IT, since you are not the only one, who wants after 30 years, to be related to me (how practical fly to Europe and have a stay in Vienna).” She then informed me that people can choose their friends, but not their relatives, and wished me “the great fatherly family” her children never had.

I sat there, stunned, a thousand thoughts running through my head. Guenevere must have told her mother everything about me. Gueny had sounded so lighthearted in her last letter. Edith clearly didn’t want to hear anything about a child from a former marriage.

Tears streamed down my face as I realized that I had to let this go.

55

As 2008 began, my efforts to get my birth certificate were ongoing, but I had not been successful. I had even brought Judy with me to the Office of Vital Statistics with proof that I knew who my real mother was, and my request was still turned down.

As soon as I received the letter from Edith, I realized why the Social Security Administration had no indication that my father was dead: Edith had gone back to Austria without reporting his death. Although I did not have the exact date, I decided to file a report so there would be a record in the United States. I guessed he had died in August 1984. I was wrong.

I was finally able to get my father’s official report of death through the U.S. Department of State. According to the report, my father had died in a hotel—Hotel Corinto—in Mexico City. “Asphyxiation by blockage of major air passages by passing gastric matter.”

I knew what that meant. He had choked to death on his own vomit.

Dr. Aurelio Núñez Salas had performed the autopsy.

Van had died on May 20, 1984, and had been interred at the Panteón San Lorenzo Tezonco, in Mexico City.

I hopped on a plane. I had to go see the man who had haunted my thoughts and dreams for the past five years.

As I sat in the Hotel Corinto, in downtown Mexico City, I felt as if I was experiencing déjà vu. It was here in this very hotel that my mother and father had stayed in 1962. I knew that because Judy had described a nine-story hotel with a swimming pool on top. This tall structure, near the Monumento a la Revolución in Plaza de la República, was the only hotel that had a swimming pool on the ninth floor. Here was where my mother and father had shared the most romantic time in their relationship.

Here their honeymoon had begun.

And here, in the same hotel, their story had ended.

As I sat down at the bar, with its mirrored walls and blue backlighting, lined with bottles of Crown Royal and Jack Daniel’s and tequila of every variety, I wondered how many times my father had sat in this same spot, maybe this same seat, looking at the man who stared back at him from those mirrors. I wondered what he thought of that man, if he ever really understood what he had allowed himself to become.

And I wondered what his thoughts were just before he died.

The irony of it all struck me: the man who had hurt so many died choking on his own vomit.

It seemed fitting, in a way.

I shook my head to clear my reverie, ordered a drink from the bartender, and casually said,
“Mi padre murió aquí
.
”

An old woman sitting on a stool nearby stared at me for a long moment and then nodded her head. “Ah, bambino Van Best.”

I tried to ask her how well she had known my father, hoping to hear some stories about his life in Mexico, but she did not speak English, and my feeble efforts to speak to her in Spanish were fruitless.

Finally I gave up and headed to the ninth floor.

I sat in one of the poolside chairs and looked at the incredible view of the city, with Popocatépetl, the second-highest mountain peak in Mexico, looming forty-three miles in the distance. The sometimes active volcano, or “smoking mountain,” is often referred to by the locals as “El Popo” or “Don Goyo.”

I imagined my mother frolicking in the pool and my father laughing at her antics. She had been so young then, only fourteen, and her playfulness must have been catching. She had been so beautiful, and Van had looked at her lovingly, ignoring the other guests, who must have been giving him strange looks, wondering about their relationship—was he her husband or her father?

The sun was setting over the mountain, and I watched until it disappeared. Finally I got up and headed back to my hotel, the Sheraton Maria Isabel. I had not wanted to stay at the Hotel Corinto. That would have been too much.

The next morning I called the concierge and asked if I could hire a driver for the day. I had important business and needed someone reliable. At 9:45 a.m., a short, white-haired Mexican who introduced himself as Sergio met me in front of the hotel.

“Señor Gary?” he said.

“Sí
,
”
I replied.

“I understand you have a very special request today?”

“Sí, señor
,
”
I said, shaking his hand. I had explained to the concierge that I wanted to find my father’s gravesite.

“Well, then,” he said, in his heavily accented voice. “Let’s not keep your father waiting any longer, my friend.”

Although the San Lorenzo Tezonco cemetery was less than fifteen miles from the heart of the Zona Rosa, the drive was lengthened considerably by the construction and endless traffic through the community of Iztapalapa, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Mexico City.

“I don’t drive through here,
señor
,” Sergio informed me. “Never in my life. In all my years,
señor
, I have never had one request like this one. I feel very honored to take you to see your father for the first time in Mexico City.”

The trip south from the ancient city of Tenochtitlan—the name given to the area by the Aztecs before it became Mexico City—took nearly two hours. I thought we had reached our destination when I began to see wooden vendors’ shops with tin roofs that offered beautiful flowers, crucifixes, and monuments, including La Catrina, for the poor peasants visiting the final resting places of their loved ones. My thoughts drifted back to William’s remark when I first told him I wanted to visit my father’s gravesite.

“Be sure not to go on Día de los Muertos,” he had warned.

“What is that?”

He had explained that in Mexico, people believe that on the Day of the Dead—November 1—and the days surrounding it, their dearly departed have divine permission to visit earth. There is a festival that takes place over the course of three days, during which the living welcome the souls of the dead with offerings of flowers, specially prepared food, candles, photographs, and incense. It is a peaceful and happy occasion to keep the memory of their loved ones fresh in the minds forever.

“But it’s not for outsiders,” William said. “And you don’t want to run into any of those spirits who may have stuck around.”

I was still thinking about that when we drove into the cemetery. Black letters on a small sign made of plywood announced our arrival at Panteón Civil San Lorenzo Tezonco. My gaze fixed on that sign—the symbol for the last stop in my father’s miserable life.

My stomach began churning as we drove in.

“Here we are,
señor
. I’m so sorry. It is a very, very poor place.”

I looked around and saw what he meant. My father was buried in the poorest cemetery in the worst neighborhood in all of Mexico City. I began to feel everything decelerating, like a slow-motion action scene in a movie where the silence drowns the senses. Everything seemed surreal. Breathing became difficult. Although I had experienced fatigue on my first day in Mexico City, due to its 7,500-foot elevation, this had nothing to do with that. This was stemming from the reality that I was really here in this place.

With my father.

As I watched for the cemetery’s administrative offices, Sergio slowly drove up the divided, tree-lined boulevard.

“Turn right,” I said when I saw an old brick office tucked behind a grove of mesquite trees. He pulled into a parking space in front of the building while I dug through my Swiss Army backpack for my father’s death report and birth certificate.

Once inside, Sergio spoke to an elderly woman sitting in front of a typewriter and explained why we were there. She instructed us to walk around the counter to the far end of the building and go through a small door.

Inside the office, another elderly lady sat at a desk, and a middle-aged man attended to some filing. The back wall was lined with file cabinets, but it was a particular black double file cabinet with white doors that immediately caught my eye. It was labeled “1980–1984.”

When Sergio explained to the second woman why we were there, she pointed to this file cabinet.

I pulled out a large book marked “1984” and began flipping through the pages, checking each name. When I turned to May 23, I saw my father’s name as it had been recorded for the last time. Sixteen people had been buried there that day—eight children and eight adults. My father was number fifteen, between Francisca Quintero Cruz and Fernando Lecuona Armaz. There was a blue check by his name. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was because he was American.

I called the man over. He wrote the plot number down on a small piece of paper and then muttered something to Sergio.

Sergio put his arm around me. “His name is Alejandro. We will follow him,
señor
. He will take us to your father.”

As we walked out of the office, I struggled to keep it together. I had waited for years to get to this place, had experienced so many heartaches and frustrations since I had learned this man’s name. Now that I was here, I wondered what I was doing, why I was doing this.

I headed toward Sergio’s van, but he took me by the arm. “No,
señor
. We will walk. He says it is not too far.”

I battled with my emotions as we walked into a small, tree-lined area with dirt pathways leading to what had once been a beautiful old stone chapel. The chapel walls had crumbled around the windows and doors, and the roof had collapsed—a casualty of an earthquake that had devastated Mexico City in 1985.

Thunder, a short distance away in the mountains, rumbled as dark clouds filled the sky. I tried not to look ahead, because I could feel we were getting close, and the closer we got, the more difficult it became for me to breathe. I reached into my pocket to pull out a handkerchief and wiped my eyes. Suddenly everyone stopped.