Godchild (5 page)

Chapter 6

“I’ve done some rather extensive—and
expensive — research
in the days since Ms. Barnes was arrested in Monterrey,” announced Don O’Brien, the tall, balding, nattily dressed young lawyer belonging to Richard Barnes and his Reel Productions. “And, in turn, I’ve learned quite a bit. The main point being that Mexico is a country consisting of two worlds.
One
of extreme wealth and resource. Another of poverty and not-so-silent desperation.”

We were sitting inside Tony’s rectangular-shaped office. Like Tony himself, the penthouse office was sleek, with polished hardwood floors and mahogany-paneled walls accented with custom-framed prints, including an original Picasso torso sketch.

On the glass coffee table in the far corner of the room sat the remnants of our lunch — mostly just the white deli paper our roast beef sandwiches had come wrapped in. Tony sat at his desk, jacket off, the sleeves of his white oxford rolled up to his elbows, the thumbs of each hand positioned under gray-and-black-striped suspenders.

Barnes sat in the wood chair beside me.

If I had to guess, I’d say he was about forty, with well-groomed salt-and-pepper hair and a narrow face. He wore a charcoal gray single-breasted suit, similar to the one his lawyer wore, and rimless eye glasses that made him appear the filthy rich public-relations man he had become in recent years since latching onto political candidates and their causes, including our present Republican governor. As for me, I had changed into my power-lunch best: Levis jeans, Tony Lama cowboy boots, and a black leather jacket.

O’Brien paced the floor. “What we’re clearly looking at in Mexico, gentlemen,” he said, hands folded behind his back, eyes gazing out the window, like a professor who’s been over the same material a thousand times before, “is a land of haves and have-nots.”

“Brilliant,” Richard Barnes interrupted, from his chair. “But can we please dispense with academic jargon and get to the heart of this matter, Donald, while my wife still has a shot at staying alive?”

O’Brien looked like he’d just been kicked in the shin. Both shins. “Please. Richard,” he said, “I feel it’s of the utmost importance to establish a little historical background,”

Barnes shook his head. “Just make it quick, please,” he said.

I looked at Tony. He was leaning back in his swivel chair, elbows planted on the armrests, fingers locked together and pressed up against his mouth, choking back a laugh.

O’Brien coughed. “Now, where was I?”

“To have and have not,” Tony volunteered, speaking through his fingers.

“Oh yes,” O’Brien said. And then he began pacing again. He told us that during the sixteenth century, Mexico was considered the El Dorado of the Spanish-speaking hunters blinded by greed over its vast gold treasures. “That precious gold,” he went on saying, “has now been replaced by cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and cheap labor.”

While O’Brien went on with his lecture, I sat far back in my chair and noticed that set on the floor besides Barnes’s feet was O’Brien’s briefcase. The case was wide open. Set on a stack of papers was a small paperback book. From my chair I could see that the book was titled
In Focus Mexico: Guide to Politics and Culture
. The cover photo depicted two Mexican natives dressed in festival garb — wide-brimmed hats, bright red vests with swirling patterns of yellow and purple over plain white linen pullover shirts. The natives appeared to be members of a larger team carrying a heavy wooden platform that supported a tall statue of Jesus Christ. Draped all around the statue was an array of colorful flowers and gold vases.

I’d been sitting in one spot for too long.

I decided to cross my legs.

In the process I hit the open lid of the briefcase, tipped it back, spilling out the contents, including the papers and travel guide.

“I’m sorry,” I said, bending over to collect the papers and the book. “Let me get that for you.”

Barnes bent down too. “That’s not necessary. Mr. Marconi.”

I sat up, handed him the papers, but slipped the travel guide into the side pocket of my leather jacket. While an annoyed Barnes once again focused on O’Brien, I slipped the book back out and scanned the first few pages until I came to a chapter that had been marked with a yellow Post-it note. Some of the type on the pages had been highlighted in transparent yellow marker.

“You see, Mr. Angelino, Mr. Marconi,” O’Brien went on, now standing at the window, hands casually in pockets, “my extensive knowledge of Mexico tells me that this is a land of un — ”

“—predictable extremes,” I said, reading directly from the guide. I lifted the book up high so everyone, including Barnes, could make it out.

“What’s the point, Keeper?” Tony asked.

I slapped the paperback down on my lap.

“Let’s face it,” I said. “This man doesn’t know squat about Mexico. Nor does he know squat about how to get Barnes’s wife out. Meanwhile, it’s my ass that goes on the line if I decide to take the job.”

O’Brien affected this hand-caught-in-the-till kind of smile. I turned to look at Barnes. He had a tight, that’s-my-till-you’re-stealing-from expression on his face.

“You’re right, Mr. Marconi,” Barnes said in a calm, dry voice, eyes never veering from O’Brien. “We don’t know ‘squat,’ as you put it, about Mexico and its recent wave of drug-related atrocities, other than what’s reported in the papers. So there’s no use pretending we do.” He turned to me. “But we do know this about Monterrey Prison.” He reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out two neatly folded sheets of 8½-by-ll paper, which he then smoothed out on his lap.

Tony sat up in his chair.

Barnes handed over the article to Tony, who perused it quickly but then handed it to me directly across his desk.

I glanced at the headline on the first page: IN MEXICAN PRISONS, HOPE IS QUICKLY ABANDONED!

“All we had to do,” Barnes said, “was
Google
the subject of ‘Mexican Jails’ and voilà.” He made quotation marks with his fingers when he said, “voila.”

“I did a little more research than that,” O’Brien insisted.

“You know, you’re absolutely right, Donald,” Barnes said, lifting the paperback off my lap. “You also took a little trip to the bookstore. Now, there’s an excursion I’m going to insist you bill me double for.”

O’Brien’s lower jaw seemed as though it were hanging off his belt buckle. “I did spend a night in the library, Richard. My wife had to miss her bridge — ”

“Oh shut up,” Barnes said.

Chapter 7

Tony suggested we all calm down and take what he referred to, among men, as a “piss break.” Barnes retrieved a cell phone from his briefcase. He said he needed a few minutes to check up on some of his clients anyway. That left me alone to read the Internet article which, I noticed, had been penned originally for the
New York Post.

A man making his way past the iron bars and concrete walls in the half light and foul stench of Monterrey Prison emerges upon a nightmare of humanity: dozens of tranquilized men and women packed together like sardines in six separate holding cells
.

I stopped there and read the paragraph again.

First off, I was trying to comprehend co-gender incarceration. Then I was trying to imagine dozens of inmates packed into a few narrow holding cells where finding enough space to sit down would be a major problem. Even for a man who had spent most of his life in some of the most crowded prisons in New York, I couldn’t fathom how a prisoner would be expected to eat, sleep, and clean up in that kind of environment, let along survive from one day to the next.

Maybe that was the point.

I read on.

If the prisoners behaved themselves they might have the “opportunity” to move into a four-person cell after only a couple of months. A cell-block delegate who had agreed to be interviewed stated proudly that he’d been able to maintain five inmates to a ten-foot cell while a total of 344 men and women in his block managed to share three toilets.

Señor
and
Señorita
, welcome to your worst nightmare.

The more I read, the more I realized it wasn’t the lack of personal space or proper sanitation that posed the greatest threat to Renata. According to one Amnesty International official named in the report, from January 1993 to April 1998 more than one thousand inmates had suffered violent deaths inside Monterrey Prison, not only at the hands of other inmates but also at the hands of the guards. It was even suspected that the prison warden himself (a suspected member of the Contreras Brothers crime family) partook in the death party from time to time. The stats, if they were accurate, astounded even me. Last year alone, Monterrey experienced 232 homicides, over one hundred attempted intentional body-damage incidents, eighty or so rapes, fifty-two inmate-to-inmate robberies, and over eighty drug-related, nonviolent crimes.

Because the prison’s total population stood at around four thousand and change, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Renata had about a one-in-four chance of making it out alive. Maybe less, considering the rancid conditions. That is, unless someone or something acted fast.

That’s where I came in.

Or didn’t.

Tony was the first to return.

He took his usual place behind the desk.

Then came Barnes, O’Brien on his tail.

Barnes folded up his cellular. Instead of packing it back inside his briefcase, he stuffed it inside the interior pocket of his suit jacket.

I set myself on the edge of Tony’s desk, crossed my arms. Very official-looking.

“I know why you want to hire me, Mr. Barnes,” I said. “And I think I know what the job entails. But maybe you can shed some light on how exactly you’d expect me to pull it off.”

Without hesitating, O’Brien stepped forward. But then he stopped dead in his tracks when Barnes shot up.

“Please, Donald,” he said. “Just stay out of the way for now.”

There was a weighted silence in which I wasn’t quite sure if O’Brien was going to cry or throw up or both. Both, if I had to place a bet. But he just backed into the far corner where the glass and mahogany walls met and lowered his head like a scolded kid.

“I’m not going to pretend you can go this one alone, Mr. Marconi,” Barnes said, looking me in the eye. “I’ll be providing you with a contact.”

“What contact, Mr. Barnes?”

“Richard,” he said. “Please call me Richard.”

“Who would act as my contact, Mr. Barnes?”

He swallowed. “I have a man in mind who would be happy to take the job on.”

“Mexican man?”

“Of American and Mexican descent, actually. An antiquities trader who, on occasion, hires out as a guide.”

“How’d you find him?”

O’Brien tore himself away from the wall. “It’s none of your business how we run our operations, Mr. Marconi.”

I caught O’Brien’s eyes with my own, locked onto them. I was just about ready to tell him to shut up when Barnes made it perfectly clear that his “services would no longer be required for the remainder of the proceedings.”

O’Brien’s face turned Harvard red. “But who will you use as a witness, Richard? You just can’t solicit the services of a private investigator you know nothing about, even if he claims to be an expert on prisons.”

“That’s enough, Donald,” Barnes snapped. “Now, please leave the room before I ask you to return my retainer.”

Another silence. You could almost hear the pigeons perching outside Tony’s window. If there were a ledge for pigeons to perch on in the first place. O’Brien pursed his lips, bent over, and packed up his briefcase. “Well, then,” he said, in a strained voice, “since I am no longer wanted, I’ll take my leave.”

As he was going for the door, I shouted out for him to stop.

I grabbed the travel guide off Tony’s desk, flung it to him from across the room. O’Brien bobbled the book with his free hand but somehow managed to hang on. Not bad, I thought. For a dweeb.

He let out a breath and stared at the book’s cover until a broad smile appeared on his face. He raised his head and, at the same time, positioned the book in his right hand, like a Frisbee.

He tossed it back to me.

I caught it one-handed.

“Actually, Mr. Marconi,” he said, “I believe it’s you who’s going to be needing it more than I.”

And then he walked out.

After apologizing on behalf of his counselor, Barnes loosened the knot on his tie. His way of getting down and dirty, I supposed.

I asked him how he expected me to recognize this contact.

“He’ll recognize you,” Barnes said.

“What about weapons and a safe house?”

 “You won’t have to worry about a thing. They’ll already be there waiting for you. Nor will you have to worry about Customs giving you a problem.”

Tony sat up straight. “If I may,” he said.

“Please, Anthony,” Barnes said.

He explained to me that Richard already had several business ventures in Mexico and other parts of Central America. “Some people owe him favors here and there,” he went on. “So you won’t have problems getting in and out, if you know what I mean.”

I knew what he meant. But the whole operation sounded a little too good to be believable. Just cruise into Mexico, break into a major Mexican prison, steal the damsel in distress, escape to the border, fly off into the sunset, run the credits and the closing music. Just one big easy. If Tony weren’t my friend, I’d swear he and Barnes were feeding me directly to the dogs. Or, in this case, coyotes.

“What about your wife, Mr. Barnes?” I said. “I don’t know anything about her other than what I’ve read in the papers or seen on TV.”

Barnes reached down to the floor, picked up his briefcase, set it on the edge of the desk. He took out a manila folder. “In there you’ll find all you need to know about Renata. Photos, bios, and a copy of her novel.”

He set the package on his desk.

 “
Godchild
.” I volunteered.

“Yes,” a suddenly morose Barnes said, as if the very mention of the novel caused the plug to be pulled on his heart. “
Godchild
. ”

He closed up his briefcase. “Well, if there’s nothing else…” He let it dangle.

He forced a smile and held out his right hand. I took it, shook it loosely.

“I trust the money would be to your satisfaction.”

“So long as it’s okay with Tony,” I said.

I took my hand back. It felt cold and wet.

“You won’t speak with me again,” Barnes said. “You can give your answer to Mr. Angelino. He, in turn, will relay your decision to me.”

He took his case and left, leaving me along with Tony.

I turned to him, after a time.

“Well,” he said, holding out his hands. “Yes or no?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“When
will
you know?” he said.

“Can you give me until tomorrow morning?” I asked.

He nodded. “Okay, sleep on it. But I can’t wait much longer than that. Renata doesn’t have that kind of time.”

I glanced at the Internet article on his desk. He was right.

“I’ll let you know first thing,” I said. “Now, how’s about a ride back to my motel?”