City Without Stars Read online

  City Without Stars

  TIM BAKER

  For my wife, Julie,

  and in loving memory of our mothers,

  Lorel Baker and Sheila Curtis

  This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

  William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Mexico, May 2000

  I City Without Stars

  Day 1

  1. Isabel

  2. Pilar

  3. Isabel

  4. Pilar

  5. El Santo

  6. Pilar

  7. Ventura

  8. Fuentes

  9. Pilar

  10. Ventura

  11. Fuentes

  12. Pilar

  13. Ventura

  14. El Santo

  15. Padre Márcio

  16. Fuentes

  17. Fuentes

  18. El Santo

  19. Pilar

  20. Fuentes

  21. Ventura

  22. Padre Márcio

  23. Nomen Nescio #352 (Jane Doe #352)

  II The Mirage of the Dunes

  Day 2

  24. Nomen Nescio #352 (Jane Doe #352)

  25. Ventura

  26. Fuentes

  27. Ventura

  28. Pilar

  29. Fuentes

  30. Padre Márcio

  31. Pilar

  32. El Santo

  33. Pilar

  34. Fuentes

  35. Ventura

  36. Padre Márcio

  37. Fuentes

  38. El Santo

  39. Nomen Nescio #352 (Jane Doe #352)

  40. Fuentes

  41. Ventura

  42. Byrd and Gordillo

  43. El Santo

  44. Pilar

  45. Padre Márcio

  46. Pilar

  III The Other Side of the Mirror

  Day 3

  47. Gloria

  48. Pilar

  49. Fuentes

  50. Padre Márcio

  51. El Santo

  52. Pilar

  53. Fuentes

  54. Padre Márcio

  55. Gloria

  56. Ventura

  57. El Santo

  58. Gomez

  59. Pilar

  60. Fuentes

  61. Pilar

  62. Paredes

  63. Pilar

  64. Ventura

  65. Padre Márcio

  66. Fuentes

  67. El Santo

  IV Los Caminos de la Vida

  Day 4

  68. Fuentes

  69. Pilar

  70. Gomez

  71. Pablo Grande

  72. Pilar

  73. Fuentes

  74. Ventura

  75. Fuentes

  76. El Santo

  77. Pilar

  78. Fuentes

  79. Ventura

  80. Pilar

  81. Padre Márcio

  82. Pilar

  83. Ventura

  84. Padre Márcio

  85. Fuentes

  86. Padre Márcio

  87. Fuentes

  88. Pilar

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  MEXICO, MAY 2000

  I

  City Without Stars

  DAY 1

  Victim 873 – Isabel Torres

  1

  Isabel

  It arrives with the storm, approaching floodlights bruising the desert night. Yellow dogs raise their heads, their eyes glittering then going black with the passing lights. The Lincoln Navigator blasts across the wasteland, impaled plastic rustling from its passage, frantic to escape the snare of barbed wire.

  The shriek of braking tires sends the dogs scattering into shadows. Trash circles in anxious eddies then disappears with the headlamps. The animals quiver in the sudden silence, pawing the ground, greedy and afraid.

  Two men get out, silhouetted against desert hills that tremble with the nervous kick of lightning. They open the cargo hatch and heave something into the darkness. There is the crash of cans spilling.

  Doors slam shut and the car pulls away.

  The dogs nose the storm-crumpled air then cautiously re-emerge, padding silently towards the whisper of settling dust.

  2

  Pilar

  Sunlight forces its way through the grime of the windows, disturbing a man in his sleep. His arm scouts for a companion, but finds only an empty pillow which he gathers close to his face.

  A shower runs in the adjoining bathroom, steam escaping through the open door, examining the detritus of the night before: an empty bottle of tequila, a crowded ashtray; the silver foil of a torn condom pouch.

  Hotel rooms.

  Contained universes.

  Hidden histories for everyone except the people caught within them. The man on the bed is the past. The woman in the shower is the future.

  Pilar soaps her black pubic hair, the hot water running out. She turns it off to build up the pressure of the cold jet, tensing her muscles under its challenge; feeling alive again.

  Another morning.

  Another chance to make things right.

  She stands in front of the veiled mirror, her hips tilted in contemplation as she pats her small, muscular body dry, water pooling at her feet. Toothpaste. Hairbrush. Deodorant. Her life has always been composed of modest needs combined with a desire to change the world. Paradox is not a word she uses. She glances at her watch, curses; now dresses hastily. Plain briefs, fraying bra, jeans and a tunic with a company logo on it. She pockets a pack of cigarettes and opens the door, letting traffic noise in. The man in the bed stirs but Pilar’s already gone.

  The room shifts with her absence, reconfigures into a dormitory, solitary with slumber. Noises retreat into the amber world of sleep – the neighboring room’s radio, car horns, the hum of a distant vacuum cleaner all vanishing as he falls into a deeper cycle, lost in dreams of his childhood, of stealing watermelons from the fields before the factories came. Esteban turns away from the sunlight which does its best to wake him. The lost power of Nature in an urban environment. Proud but futile.

  In an hour, maybe less, the killers will arrive.

  Ten years ago, it would have been just a warning. Routine. Punches to the gut, slaps around the face. Maybe a broken finger. But that was ten years ago. Things change fast when people die for no reason. Fists had been replaced with razor blades. Knives with guns. Now they don’t even bother to mask their faces. Immunity destroys prudence.

  And murder becomes mundane.

  In an hour, maybe less, the door will be kicked open. Three strangers will enter, will douse the bed with gasoline, flick a flaming match. The mattress will leap alive, Esteban sitting up, already dead, his scream lost in the roar of combustion, the flames inside his lungs, feasting on his oxygen. The killers will walk away, just one step ahead of the smoke.

  The desk clerk will see the license plate of the blue Ford pickup and immediately forget it. But it won’t make any difference. They’ll come back later and kill him anyway.

  3

  Isabel

  The sun-blistered cinder block of the maquiladoras stretches across the arid landscape, forming a chaotic monument to free trade, special border incentives and tariff exemptions. Like all the other raw materials they consume, the factories swallow young women and transform them into viable merchandise: sweatshop workers. The logic of exploitation is too profitable to resist. Dummy corporations are established in tax havens. Earnings are shifted to overseas accounts. Pension schemes are improvised, then plundered at will. Toxic by-products are vented into bereaved stream
s filled with poisoned wildlife.

  Or simply dumped in communal garbage.

  A janitor hoses down the front entrance of the factory, the plump gush of water drowning out the whine of machinery from behind barred windows. He hates the nocturnal dogs and leaves traps for them. Occasionally he discovers the tip of a paw or a sun-inflated corpse, but mainly he just finds tipped-over trash cans and refuse colonized by humming flies. He moves along slowly, tugging at the heavy hose, the pressurized blast loud against the wall. Normally he would never waste water like this, but the bosses are on alert. Sindicalistas from Europe are heading their way, to create trouble about hygiene and safety. Fire hazards and health. Profits and pay slips. Pinche foreign assholes, making more work. For what? There were no trade unions for people like him. Uneducated. Unskilled. Aging and aching. Lucky to have a job and angry that it can only be this: hosing down shit.

  A pack of dogs darts out from behind a dumpster, the janitor opening the jet so hard that it knocks over two of the scavengers as they flee. He trains the water back on the trash, and a woman’s shoe skitters away fast as a rat. The janitor peers behind the pile of garbage, then drops the hose and runs; the water snaking backwards and forwards on the ground, the dead woman’s hair writhing to its punch.

  4

  Pilar

  Just like when she was a teenager, Pilar sits with the bad girls at the back of the bus, all of them smoking cigarettes. Maria looks Pilar up and down. ‘So tell us, how was Esteban?’

  Pilar glances out the window, the bus slowing in traffic. ‘He snores.’

  Maria slaps at Pilar playfully. ‘You know what I mean. How was he?’

  Pilar pauses, the other women gathering close for the verdict. ‘I only had three minutes to find out before he started snoring.’

  The women all laugh. Only Maria can keep a straight face. ‘But were they a good three minutes?’

  ‘For him!’

  The girls erupt. At the front of the bus, the driver stares in the rearview mirror. Laughter is like money. You hate people who have it. He grinds the gears in irritation and turns his radio up.

  Pilar looks out the window, at the traffic jam swelling the way it does every morning: an exercise in collective torment. Esteban was a nice guy, as far as guys went, but Pilar had expected more from him. His selfishness in bed was something he shared with too many young men. Quick gratification on the horn tip of alcohol. She remembers the things that led her to want to sleep with him. The way he spoke to her, never raising his voice in a town full of shouts. The way he made her laugh. He was a friend in the cantina, but a stranger in bed.

  Pilar will be spared any guilt from her postcoital assessment of Esteban. She won’t even see the first news reports of the killing, before Esteban is identified. Later the police will contact his family in La Angostura and then forget about him, the way the media will. In the old days murder was front-page news. Banner headlines rare and raw with evil. Now it is an embarrassed side-glance, a hurried step over another drunk on a crowded, ugly street. Distasteful but routine. By the time Pilar finds out that Esteban is dead, too much will have happened for her to even cry. Her main emotion will be selfish relief. She’ll know what Esteban could never have known: that the killers were really after her. And she will also know that with every miss, you become stronger. Statistics don’t lie. If they’re going to get you, it’s on the first attempt. If not; the second. This is her fourth, counting that time in Tijuana. She is on her way to becoming immortal.

  In Ciudad Real, that’s a very favorable condition.

  Pilar leans her head against the glass of the window and is rocked into a shallow sleep. Car horns sound not with fury but with mournful resignation, like church bells at a country funeral. For a glorious moment, Pilar is able to forget where she is and what is expected of her in only a few days …

  Then there is the lurch of arrival, Pilar suddenly awake and embarrassed, brushing away the trace of saliva from the corner of her lips.

  She follows her friends out, holding her breath through the haze of diesel fumes as they hurry past rows of idling buses, hundreds of other women emerging ghostly from the clouds of exhaust, moving together across the barren fields, like soldiers in a gas attack: ready for slaughter.

  The regular thump of machinery grows louder as Pilar approaches the perimeter fences of the maquiladoras. She breaks into a run when she sees the police cars and ambulance already circled by a crowd of women. ‘We’ll be late!’ Maria shouts after her, but Pilar doesn’t even glance back. Cursing to herself, Maria runs after her, more workers from the buses darting forwards in a spontaneous wave of curiosity.

  Two municipal policemen try to keep them away. A short woman in her twenties grabs Pilar’s arm, steering her to the front of the group. ‘It’s Isabel!’ Lupita’s voice is husked with disbelief. The ring expands with the new arrivals, pushing past the ambulance, outflanking the cops, who give up trying to hold them back. The workers take turns looking at the body lying between the trash cans, crying out with sobs of horror and crossing themselves when they see it.

  A young detective, Gomez, takes a pen out of his jacket and gingerly lifts something with it. It’s the high-heeled shoe, still dripping water as Gomez holds it by the ankle strap, displaying it to his partner, Fuentes. ‘Wearing shoes like this, what did she expect?’

  Fuentes looks at the young man. He feels like slapping him for the sheer fucking ignorance of the remark, but what good would that do? He is stuck with Gomez, whether he likes it or not. So far, it’s all not. Gomez has the bullying swagger of all athletic men who come into power too early. The question is: what will Gomez do with all that power? Fuentes likes to believe the answer is up to him. He opens an evidence bag and Gomez drops the shoe into it. ‘Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t this.’

  It never is.

  Getting off a bus at night; walking out a front door; waiting for friends who are late, who got distracted with a drink too many or an unexpected kiss in the shadows of an awning. Hurrying to pick up a child from school or do the shopping before the miscelánea closes. The last thing on anyone’s mind when they’re running for the first bus of the day or stepping outside to have a cigarette is I am about to die.

  This is the basic fault not just of Gomez’s comment but of the arrogance of his logic. Routine implies continuity, not eradication. Everyday habits, whether good or bad, make you blind to the unexpected. The dead girl had strapped on this shoe with the certainty that she would unstrap it at the end of the night. Just because she has no future now doesn’t mean she didn’t have one yesterday. And it is Fuentes’ job to make sure that the people who stole her future will pay for it with their own. He wants to take their future out into a dark alley and execute it against a graffiti-stained brick wall. Fuentes doesn’t believe in God but he believes in Yin and Yang. Light and dark. Give and take. This is why he requested the transfer to Ciudad Real. To be the one who finally makes a difference. The one who finds and punishes the killers. Who smashes their fucking complacency. And if he can teach a dumbass hotshot like Gomez how to think intelligently on the way, so much the better.

  Pilar stares at the body of the young woman, at the trickle of water still coming from the nearby hose. She doesn’t make the sign of the cross like the others. She doesn’t retreat behind the protective blanket of prayer. She prefers the chaos of the clenched fist raised in an angry crowd. She calls out to the two plainclothes detectives standing just a few feet away from the corpse. ‘It’s a disgrace! You should take her away, instead of just standing there doing fuck all.’

  Fuentes and Gomez turn and look at her. The intensity of Pilar’s gaze unsettles Fuentes. It’s familiar in its defiance. He rolodexes faces fast in his mind, screeching to a stop under T. ‘This is a crime scene,’ Fuentes says to Pilar. ‘Please, just let us do our work.’

  ‘If you did your work, she wouldn’t be lying there, dead.’

  There is a chorus of agreement from the women. Gomez gives Pil
ar a smirk of hateful admiration, like a mark who’s just been suckered by a short-con artist. He nods in the direction of the maquiladora. ‘Don’t you have dresses to make?’ He turns to one of the uniformed policemen. ‘Get the goddamn chicas out of here.’

  The uniformed cops begin to shove the women around the breasts, happy to hurt as they push them away. But Pilar rushes past them to the garbage cans, snatching up two lids and crashing them together, chanting with the beat: ‘Protection for the women! Justice for the victims! Protection for the women, justice for the victims!’

  Maria and Lupita join in, also grabbing lids. The bystanders pick up the chant. More women from the buses come running across the field. The two detectives watch the spontaneous protest growing larger and louder. They exchange looks. ‘That’s all we need,’ Gomez shouts over the clamor. ‘Fucking ballbreakers.’

  5

  El Santo

  Three black Suburbans and a red Dodge Ram pull up outside a fancy brick house with large windows looking out onto a low wall – as far as security goes, a fatal combination. It’s a snooty new neighborhood. Actual lawns. Sprinkler systems. Audis and Mercs in driveways. A setting unused to the crisp snap and click of semi-automatics being racked.

  The killers are already eight hours late. El Santo had told them they’d hit the house just before midnight, but then they’d all gotten wasted at Mary-Ellen’s place after the barbecue and the next thing he knew the sun was leaching through the smog and Mary-Ellen was making her breakfast specialty – not that any of them ate that shit, particularly in the morning. El Santo peered over her shoulder as she drizzled maple syrup over the pancakes or waffles or churros or whatever the fuck that thing was that she cooked. He had to think of an excuse, fast. ‘Jesus, look at the time.’