Saint Death - John Milton #3 (3 page)

Felipe considered himself an expert in the tastes and preferences of his clientele and, so far as he was concerned, meth was the drug of the future. He had been a little slow in getting into it but that would all change now.

He had seen enough and went back outside. They were high in the mountains. The lab was stuffy but the air was fresh and clean. It was a perfect spot for the operation: the only way to get to the lab was along a vertiginous road that wound its way around the face of the mountain, slowly ascending, a unguarded drop into a ravine on the right hand side as the road climbed. There were shepherds and goatherds all along the route, each of them furnished with a walkie-talkie that Felipe had provided. In the unlikely event that an unknown vehicle attempted to reach the summit, they would call it in and the
sicarios
who provided security for the laboratory would take to their posts and, if necessary, prevent further progress. The government made all the right noises about closing down operations like this one but Felipe was not concerned. He knew the rhetoric was necessary for the public’s consumption but there would always be the cold, hard impracticality of putting those fine words into action. They would need helicopters and hundreds of men. It wasn’t worth the effort.

His second-in-command, Pablo, was behind him. The man was as loyal as a dog, perhaps a little too enamoured of the white powder, but very dependable.

“It is done, El Patrón,” he said.

“You have spoken to Adolfo?”

“I have.”

“It was straightforward?”

“Apparently so. They killed them all. One of them was still alive. Adolfo cut off the man’s head and posted the footage on YouTube.”

Felipe tutted. His son had a weakness for the grand gesture. There was a time and a place for drama––it was practically
de rigeur
among the younger narcos these days––but Felipe preferred a little more discretion.

Pablo noticed his boss’ disapproval. “It will be a message for the Italians.”

“Yes,” Felipe said shortly.

Pinche putas
. Traitors. They had it coming.

La Frontera had been doing business with them for five years and, until recently, it had been a fruitful and mutually beneficial relationship. The Italians needed his drugs and his ability to get them over the border; he needed their distribution. In recent months, they had overestimated how much he needed them and underestimated how much they needed him. He had tried to make them understand but they were stubborn and wrong-headed and kept asking for more. In the end, he had had to withdraw from the arrangement. It had to be final and it needed to provide an idea of the consequences that would flow should they not accept his decision. For all his son’s drama, at least that had been achieved.

“What about the gringos?”

“It is in hand,” Pablo said. “The plane will collect them tomorrow morning. They will be in Juárez by the evening. I thought you could conclude the business with them there and then fly them here to see all this.”

“They will be impressed, yes?”

“Of course, El Patrón. How could they not be?”

“Is there anything else?”

“There is one other thing, El Patrón. Your son says that they have located the journalists.”

“Which? Remind me.”

“The bloggers.”

“Ah yes.” He remembered: those irritating articles, the one that promised to cast light on their business. It had started to get noticed, at home and abroad, and that was not something that Felipe could allow to continue. “Who are they?”

“A man and a woman. Young. We have located the man.”

“
Estupido!
Take care of them, Pablo.”

“It is in hand.”

4.

CATERINA MORENA stared out into the endless desert, grit whipped into her face by the wind. It was just past dawn and she was on the outskirts of Lomas de Poleo, a shanty that was itself in the hinterland of Ciudad Juárez. She had driven past boulevards of empty shopping malls to get here, nightclubs and rooms-by-the-hour places with names like San Judas Quick Motel, then into the contaminated desert, the compounds of prefabs built to house the fodder who worked in the factories and the sprawling
colonias
built from scrap in wastelands ruled over by gangs. They had passed through a fence marked PRIVATE PROPERTY and out onto land that was known to have connections with La Frontera cartel. There were rumours that there was an airstrip here for the light planes that carried cocaine north into America and roads used by no-one except the
traficantes
.

Caterina looked up into the crystal clear blue sky and searched for the buzzards that would be circling over a possible cadaver.

She was standing with a group of thirty others, mostly women but a handful of men, too. They were from
Voces sin Echo
––Voices Without Echo––an action group that had been established to search for the bodies of the girls who were being disappeared from the streets of Juárez. She was young and pretty, with her finely-boned face and jet black hair just like her mother’s, long and lustrous. Her eyes were large and green, capable of flashing with fire when her temper was roused. Her eyes were unfocussed now; she was thinking about the story she was halfway through writing, lost deep within angles and follow-ups and consequences.

She already had the title for the post.

The City of Lost Girls.

That was what some people were calling Juárez these days. It was Murder City, too, and people were dying in the drug wars every day, more than seven hundred this year already and not yet Easter. Caterina was obsessed with the drug wars, it was the bread and butter of Blog del Borderland: post after post about the dead, mutilated bodies left in plain site on the city’s waste ground, drive-by shootings with SUVs peppered with hundreds of bullets, babies boiled in drums of oil because their parents wouldn’t do what they were told, bodies strung up from bridges and lamp-posts. Grave pits were being dug up all around the city, dozens of bodies exhumed, the dead crawling out of their holes. And all the awful videos posted to YouTube and Facebook showing torture and dismemberment, warnings from one cartel to another, messages to the government and to the uncorrupted police and to the people of Mexico.

We are in control here.

We own this city.

Caterina reported on all of it, three thousand posts that had slowly gathered traction and gathered pace, so much so that Blog del Borderland was attracting a hundred thousand visitors every day. She had an audience now, and she was determined to educate it.

People had to know what was happening here.

The City of Lost Girls.

She kept coming back to it. The drug war was Juárez’s dominant narrative but there were other stories, too, drowned out in the static, stories within the story, and the one Caterina had found was the most compelling of them all. They were calling it
feminicidio
––femicide––the mass slaughter of women. In the last five years, three hundred women and girls––mostly girls, fifteen, sixteen years old––had been abducted as they made their way home from the
maquiladoras
that had sprung up like mushrooms along the southern banks of the Rio Bravo. The multi-nationals had hurried in under the auspices of one-sided trade agreements to exploit wages a fraction of what they would have to pay their workers north of the border. Sweatshops and factories, staffed by young women who came from all over the country for the chance of a regular pay check and a better life. Women were favoured over men: their fingers were nimbler and more dextrous and they could be paid even less.

These girls were nobodies, anonymous ghosts who moved through the city, barely disturbing its black waters. The kind of women who would not be missed. Some of them were abducted from the streets. Others were taken from bars, lured to hotels and clubs and other rendezvous, promised work or money or romance or just an evening when they could forget the mind-numbing drudgery of their workaday lives.

No-one ever saw them alive again.

Their bodies were dumped without any attempt to hide them: on patches of waste ground, in culverts and ditches, tipped out of cars and left in the gutters. The killers did not care and made no attempt to hide their handiwork. They knew that they would not be caught. Not all of the missing were found and desperate parents glued posters to bus shelters and against walls.

Caterina photographed the posters, published them all, noted down the names.

Alejandra.

Diana.

Maria.

Fernanda.

Paulina.

Adriana.

Mariana.

Valeria.

Marisol.

Marcella.

Esperanza.

Lupe.

Rafaela.

Aciano.

She had a notebook full of names, ages, dates.

This one was called Guillermina Marquez. She had worked for Capcom, one of the large multinationals who made transistors for western appliances. She would normally have walked home from the bus-stop with her friends but the company had changed her shift and she had walked alone. It was dusk; there should have been plenty of people to intervene and police officers were around, including a special downtown patrol. But Guillermina disappeared. After she failed to return home, her mother went to the police. They shrugged and said that there was nothing that they could do. Her mother made a thousand flysheets and posted them around the neighbourhood. Caterina had seen the posters and had interviewed the mother. She had posted an appeal for information on the blog but nothing had come of any of it. And this was two weeks ago.

Caterina knew that they wouldn’t find her this morning. Her body would appear, one day, in a place very much like this. She was here to write about the search. She took photographs of the participants scouring the dirty sand and the boiling rocks for anything that might bring some certainty to the idea that they must already have accepted: that the girl was dead.

Because only a handful of them ever came back alive.

They gave up the search for the morning and headed back to the place where they had parked their cars. Young women were emerging from their shacks and huts, huddling by the side of the road for the busses that would take them to the factories. As they passed through the fence again, Caterina watched as dirt-biker cutting through the dunes to intercept them, plumes of dust kicked up by his rear wheel. He rolled to a stop fifty feet away and removed his helmet. He was wearing a balaclava beneath it. He gunned the engine two times, drawing attention to himself, a reminder that they were trespassing and that they needed to get out.

5.

SIX HOURS LATER. Caterina sat in front of her laptop, willing a response to her last message. She bit her lip anxiously but the cursor carried on blinking on and off, on and off, and the message did not come. She ran her fingers through her long dark hair, wincing as she stared at the screen. She had scared the girl off. She had pushed too hard, gone too fast, been too keen for her to tell her story, and now she had lost her.

Damn it. Damn it all. She kicked back, rolling her chair away from the desk a little and stretched out her arms above her head. She was tired and stiff. She had spent eight hours at her desk, more or less, just a five minute break to go and get lunchtime gorditas and quesadillas from the take-out around the corner, bringing them back and eating them right here. The papers were still on the floor, next to the overflowing bin where she had thrown them. Yesterday had been the same, and there had been little sleep during the night, either. When she was in the middle of a story, like this, she allowed it to consume her. She knew it was a fault but it was not one that she was prepared to correct. That was why she did not have a boyfriend or a husband. It would take a very particular type of man––a very patient, very understanding man––to put up with a woman who could become so single-minded that she forgot to wash, to eat properly, to go out, to do anything that was not in the service of furthering the story.

But that was just how it had to be, she reminded herself.

The story was the most important thing.

People had to know.

The world had to know what was happening in Ciudad Juárez.

She did her work in the living room of her one bedroom flat. The walls had been hung with large sheets of paper, each bearing scribbled ideas for stories, diagrams that established the hierarchy of the cartels. One sheet was a list of three hundred female names. There was a large map to the right of the desk, three hundred pins stuck into the wall to mark where the bodies had been found. Caterina’s second-hand MacBook Pro sat amidst a whirlwind of papers, books and scrawled notes. An old and unreliable iMac, with an opened Wordpress document displayed, was perched on the corner of the desk. Minimised windows opened out onto search results pages and news stories, everything routed through the dark web to ensure that her presence was anonymous and untrackable. Caterina did not know whether the cartels themselves were sophisticated enough to follow the footprints from the Blog del Borderland back to this flat in the
barrio
but the government was, and since most of the government was in the pocket of the cartels, it did not pay her to be blasé. She was as sure as she could be: nothing she wrote could be traced, and her anonymity––shielded behind a series of online pseudonyms––was secure. It was liaisons like this one, with a frightened girl somewhere in the city, that were truly dangerous. She would have to break cover to write it up and all she had to go on with regard to the girl’s probity was her gut.

But the story was big. It was worth the risk.

She checked the screen.

Still nothing.

She heard the sound of children playing outside: “
Piedra, papel, tijeras, un, dos, tres!
” they called. Scissors, paper, stones. She got up and padded to the window. She was up high, third floor, and she looked down onto the neighbourhood. The kids were playing in front of the new church, the walls gleaming white and the beautiful new red tiles on the domed roof. The money to build it came from the cartels. Today––and yesterday, and the day before that––a row of SUVs with tinted windows had been parked in front of the church, a line of men in DEA windcheaters going to and from the garden at the back of the house three doors down from her. She could see all the gardens from her window: the backs of the whitewashed houses, the unused barbeques, rusted satellite dishes, the kid’s trampoline, torn down the middle. The third garden along was dominated by pecan trees and an overgrown creosote bush. The men in the windcheaters were digging a deep pit next to the bush. Cadaver dogs sat guard next to the pit, their noses pointing straight down, tails wagging. Every hour they would pull another body out.