The Guilty Page 8

  Yes, I disconnected the answering machine to erase any record of the voice that obsessed me. When the phone rang twenty times, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of psychopath was trying to get hold of me. That’s how I ended up talking to Katzenberg again.

  He was still on the line. He had run out of polite phrases and was waiting for my response.

  I looked in my wallet: two green 200-peso notes, with traces of cocaine (not enough). The sight alone convinced me, but Katzenberg still made an emotional appeal:

  “This isn’t the first time they’ve asked me to come back to Mexico. Believe it or not, the Frida story was a hit. I didn’t want to come back, and a colleague, an anti-Semitic Irishman who was trying to fuck my girlfriend, spread the rumor that I didn’t want to come back because I’d done something dirty. It wouldn’t be the first time a gringo reporter got into trouble with the narcotraffickers or the DEA.”

  “You came back to clear your name?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he answered, humbly.

  I told him I was not “one of the locals.” If he wanted to refer to me, he’d have to use my name. It was a question of principles and the proper attribution of sources. Then I asked him for three thousand dollars.

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. I thought Katzenberg was doing calculations, but he had already moved on to the subject of his story.

  “How violent is Mexico City, really?”

  I remembered something Burroughs wrote to Kerouac or Ginsberg or some other big-time addict who wanted to come to Mexico but was scared he’d get jumped.

  “Don’t worry: Mexicans only kill their friends.”

  3. Keiko

  Those days, the only interesting thing in Mexico City was Keiko’s farewell. On Sundays, divorced fathers depend heavily on zoos and aquariums. I got in the habit of taking Tania to Adventure Kingdom, the theme park that we thought of as a whale sanctuary.

  I decided to spend the morning with Tania, watching the whale swim in powerful circles (my daughter, more accurately, referred to it as an “orca”) and in the afternoon I’d look for attractive, violent settings with Katzenberg. That wouldn’t be easy. All the spots I’ve been mugged are too ordinary.

  One thing was still unresolved: when would I write that first draft for Cristi?

  While I tried to salvage some cocaine dust from a bill with Sor Juana’s face on it, I came up with an ontolog-ical excuse for my block. What was the point of writing scripts in a country where the Cineteca Theaters exploded while they were showing The Promised Land? I remembered the problem we’d had with an extra who got beat up in a scene, and my script had him say “Aggh!” The union decided that since the victim had a speaking part, he should be paid as an actor instead of an extra. After that, my victims died in silence.

  Anyway, I’ve never seen the slightest resemblance between what I imagine and the handsome stud or bottle blonde who garbles my words onscreen.

  “Why don’t you write a novel?” Renata asked me once. We were still married then and she was still willing to change me for my own sake, starting with imagining me as a novelist. “In novels, special effects are free and the characters aren’t unionized. All that counts is your inner world.”

  I’ll never forget that phrase. A time actually existed when Renata believed in my inner world. As she spoke those words, she looked at me, with the honey-colored eyes that Tania unfortunately didn’t inherit, as if I were a landscape: interesting, but a little out of focus.

  None of the accusations she hurled at me later nor any of the fights that led to our divorce hurt me as much as that generous expectation. Her trust was more devastating than the critics. Renata saw in me possibilities I never possessed.

  In scripts, “INT” refers to the interior, and mine is decorated with sofas. That’s as deep as I go. Anything else is the delusion of a woman who made a mistake searching for depths in me, and who hurt me by believing I was capable of plumbing them myself.

  I called Gonzalo Erdiozóbal to ask him to take care of the script. He doesn’t write, but his life is like a documentary on syncretism. Before Vienna, he was a veteran of university theater productions (he’d recited Hamlet’s monologues waist-deep in a very memorable swamp), he was involved in a freshwater shrimp farming project in Río Pánuco, he left a woman and two children in Saltillo, he financed a video about Monarch butterflies, and he launched a website to give voice to the 62 indigenous communities of Mexico. Plus, Gonzalo is a marvel of practicality. He fixes motors he’s never seen before and makes delicious dishes with surprising ingredients he finds in my pantry. His zest for pioneering and love of hobbies are a little annoying, but in times of desperation, there’s nothing better. When Renata and I separated, he ignored my pathetic attempts to isolate myself and visited me habitually. He would show up with magazines, videos, and a very hard to find Caribbean rum.

  I called Gonzalo and he said he’d never thought about writing a script, which meant yes. I felt so relieved that I got carried away talking. I told him about Katzenberg and his return to Mexico, but he wasn’t interested in the journalist’s news. He wanted to talk about other things. An old friend from university theater was producing one of Genet’s plays in a gymnasium. When Gonzalo describes them, scenes run the risk of lasting as long as they do in real life. I hung up the phone.

  I went to pick up Tania. The city was plastered with pictures of the whale. Mexico City is a wonderful place for breeding pandas—the first panda born outside of China was born here—but orcas need more space to start a family. That’s why Keiko was leaving. I explained this to my daughter while we waited for one of the goodbye performances to start in Adventure Kingdom’s gigantic tank.

  Tania had just learned the word “sinister” and she was finding many uses for it. We should have been happy; Keiko would have babies off in the depths. Tania gave me a cross-eyed look. I thought she was going to say it was sinister. I pulled out a picture book she had in her backpack and started to read it to her. It was about carnivorous carrots. She didn’t think that was sinister at all.

  The whale had been trained to say good-bye to the Mexican people. He waved adiós with his flipper while we sang “The Swallows.” A ten-trumpet mariachi band played with enormous sadness, and the singer exclaimed,

  “I’m not crying! My eyes are just sweating!”

  I confess, I got choked up in spite of myself. I silently cursed Katzenberg, incapable of appreciating the richness of Mexican kitsch. He only paid to see violence.

  Keiko leapt from the water one last time. He seemed to smile in a threatening way, with very pointed teeth. On our way out, I bought Tania an inflatable whale.

  There were forest fires outside of Ajusco. The ashes brought night on prematurely. From the hill Adventure Kingdom was built on, the city’s filthy skin glinted like mica. The perfect backdrop for Cristi’s dreams of a good monster.

  We got onto the highway without saying a word. I’m sure Tania was thinking about Keiko and the family he would have to travel so far to find.

  I dropped Tania off at Renata’s house and headed to Los Alcatraces. When I got to the table, it was four in the afternoon. Katzenberg had already eaten.

  I’d chosen the restaurant carefully; it was perfect for torturing Katzenberg. I knew he’d thank me for taking him to a genuine locale. They were blasting ranchera music, the chairs had that toyshop color-scheme we Mexicans encounter only in “traditional” joints, there were six spicy salsas on the table and the menu offered three kinds of insects. All calamities picturesque enough for my companion to suffer them as “experiences.”

  Baldness had gained ground on Katzenberg’s scalp. He was dressed like a Woolworth’s shopper, sporting a shirt with checks in three different colors and a watch with a see-through band. His little eyes, intensely blue, darted around. Eyes faster than flies, on the lookout for an exclusive.

  He ordered decaf. They brought him the only coffee they had: café de olla, with cinnamon and panela sugar. He barel
y sipped it. He wanted to be careful about food. He felt a throbbing in his temples, a little sound going bing-bing.

  “It’s the altitude,” I assured him. “No one can digest anything at 7500 feet.”

  He told me about his recent problems. Some colleagues were jealous of him, others hated him for no apparent reason. He had been lucky enough to visit places where conflicts broke out on his arrival and it got him incredible scoops. He was the first one to document the forced relocations in Rwanda, the Kurdish genocide, the toxic gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in India. Everywhere he went, he’d won prizes and made enemies. He felt his adversaries breathing down his neck. We were the same age, 38, but he’d aged in subtle ways, as if he’d crossed all of Africa with no air conditioning. I thought I sensed a bit of pathological lying in the precise enumeration of his grievances. According to him, nobody had forgiven him for being in Berlin the day the wall came down, or for having run into Vargas Llosa in a shirt shop in Paris a week after he’d lost the elections in Peru. I figured he was one of those investigative reporters who brag about the facts they’ve dug up but lie about their birthdate. Many of the conflicts he’d had with the press must have been sparked by the way he got his stories, taking advantage of people like me.

  He eyed the neighboring tables.

  “I didn’t want to come back to Mexico,” he said in a low voice.

  Was it possible that someone hardened by coups d’état and radioactive clouds was afraid of the Mexican way of life?

  I’d ordered empipianadas. Katzenberg looked at my plate as he spoke, as if he were drawing conviction from the thick, green sauce.

  “It’s an elusive thing. Evil is transcendent here. People don’t cause harm just because. Evil means something. It was hell, hell that Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry found in this country. It’s a miracle they got out alive. They came into contact with overpowering energies.”

  Just then, they brought me a clay jug of hibiscus water. The handle had broken off and been taped back on. I gestured at the jug:

  “In Mexico, evil is improvised. Don’t worry, Samuel.”

  4. Oxxo

  Katzenberg’s paranoid side was much more likeable. He wasn’t the overbearing lion of New Journalism he’d been on his last trip. Whether it was real or imagined, all this intrigue was having a positive effect on him. Now he wanted to write his story and get out fast.

  I spoke like only a screenwriter would:

  “Is there something I should know?”

  He answered like one of my characters:

  “What part of what you know don’t you understand?”

  “You’re a nervous wreck. Are you in trouble?

  “I already told you about that.”

  “Are you in trouble you haven’t told me about?”

  “If I don’t tell you something, it’s for the good of the mission.”

  “‘The mission.’ You sound like a DEA agent.”

  “Come on,” he said, very amused. “I have to protect my source, that’s all. I’ll tell you what you need to know. You’re my Deep Throat. I don’t want to lose you.”

  “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

  “Yes. Remember the anti-Semitic Irishman?”

  “The one who wanted to fuck your girlfriend?”

  “That’s right. He wanted to fuck my girlfriend because he had already fucked my wife.”

  “Ah.”

  “They just named him foreign news editor of Point Blank. He knows I haven’t been very rigorous with my sources. There’s already a price on my head. He’s waiting for the tiniest slipup so he can jump on me.”

  “I thought everyone hated you because you got to Rwanda first.”

  “There’s some of that, too, but with this guy it’s all about his uncircumcised dick. Us goddamn gringos have personal problems too. Can you understand that, güey?”

  “You speak Spanish too well. Everyone here ends up thinking you’re CIA.”

  “I lived here for four years, from 12 to 16, I told you that. I went to school in Mixcoac. Are you going to trust me or not? We need a pact, a marriage of convenience,” he smiled.

  “They don’t teach you to say ‘marriage of convenience’ at The Mixcoac School.”

  “There are dictionaries, don’t be a jerk. In Mixcoac, I learned what you learn in any high school: to say güey, man.” He looked at me, his eyes two blue sparks. “Can you understand that I feel like shit, even though I’m paying you three thousand dollars?”

  We made peace. I wanted to reward him with some quotidian horror of Mexico in this, the year 2000. I borrowed his phone and dialed up Pancho, a dealer I’ve considered trustworthy ever since he said to me, “If you want to see the devil smile, give me a call.”

  Pancho had me meet him two streets away from Los Alcatraces, in the parking lot of an Oxxo minimart. I wanted Katzenberg to see a coke deal, as simple and cheap as ordering Domino’s. Routine crime.

  Pancho showed up in a grey Camaro, with his little girls in the back. He walked up to my car window, leaned over, dropped a folded-up piece of paper, and pocketed the 200 pesos I palmed him.

  “Take care of yourself,” he said, an alarming sentiment coming from someone with trembling fingers, a wasted visage, papery skin. Pancho’s face was the best antidote against his drugs. The devil wasn’t smiling at him. Or maybe that’s his secret and bewitching charm, like some poorly-embalmed Phoenician king. Samuel Katzenberg eyed him greedily, extracting adjectives from that ravaged face.

  I went into the Oxxo to buy cigarettes. I was at the register when a fast-moving shadow crossed my field of vision. I thought the store was being robbed. But the guy behind the counter looked more curious than horrified. He was watching something going on outside. I turned to look at the parking lot. Katzenberg was being dragged out of my car by a guy in a ski-mask, a Glock held to his head. A second guy in a ski-mask got out of the rear seat of my car, as if he had been searching for something back there. He turned to face all of us watching from inside the store:

  “Motherfuckers!”

  We didn’t need to see him fire. The minute we heard him we dropped to the ground. I went down surrounded by cans, boxes, and a rain of glass. The shot shattered the front window. A second shot shook the building and kept us floored for five minutes.

  When I got out of the Oxxo, the doors of my car were still open, infusing it with the helplessness of recently vandalized vehicles. As for Katzenberg, all that remained was a button torn off his jacket in the struggle.

  There was a chemical smell, and a cloud of colored smoke drifted towards the sky. The second shot had shattered the two X’s of the neon Oxxo sign. Strangely, the other letters were still lit: two glowing circles like drunken eyes.

  5. Buñuel

  Lieutenant Natividad Carmona had very specific ideas:

  “If you chew, you think better.”

  He handed me a pack of blue raspberry gum.

  I took one even though I didn’t want it.

  I sat in the patrol car, an artificial taste in my mouth. From the passenger’s seat, Martín Palencia informed his partner:

  “El Tamale snuffed it.”

  Carmona made no comment. I didn’t know who El Tamale was, but seeing the news of his death received with such indifference terrified me.

  It had taken me a while to react to Katzenberg’s kidnapping. That’s what happens when you have a slip full of cocaine in your pocket. What do you do when you hear sirens approaching? Pancho sold top-notch product; it would be a crime to dump it.

  After searching through my car (in vain, of course), I’d gone back into the Oxxo and headed for the cans of powdered milk. I picked one for infants with acid reflux, the brand that saved Tania when she was a newborn. I pulled off the plastic cap and slipped the paper between the cap and the metal seal. With a little luck, I’d be able to get it back the next day. That milk is a luxury item.

  When I got back to the car, there were two cops on the scene. They made a big sh
ow of opening the glove compartment and pulling out a baggie of marijuana. While I’d been hiding the coke, they’d been planting this lesser drug in my car. They didn’t need it to take me down to the station, but they decided to soften me up just in case. I was about to slip them a bill (with traces of something more incriminating than marijuana on it) when a rat-gray car with lights on its roof screeched to a stop in front of us, its brakes squealing in that magnificent way police cars never seem to pull off in Mexican movies.

  That’s how I met officers Natividad Carmona and Martín Palencia. They had ferrety hair and manicured fingernails. As I watched them go over the car with dead-beat delight, I noticed a scar on Carmona’s forehead and, much more worrying, a Rolex on Palencia’s wrist. They treated the uniformed cops with utter disdain. They found my Screenwriters Guild I.D. and the bag of marijuana. I was surprised at how easily they broke it down.

  “Look, Daddy-O,” Carmona said to one of the cops, “you really think a filmmaker’s going to get high on skunk weed like this ?” He gestured at me and his voice took on a respectful tone: “The artist is into much finer things.” He handed the bag to the cop. “Take that shit away.”

  The grunt cops took their hopes of extortion elsewhere. I was left in the hands of the Law, trained to sniff out my drug habits from my screenwriter ID.

  We were in the parking lot for hours. The officers called Katzenberg’s hotel, Interpol, the DEA, and the consular officer at the United States Embassy. Their efficiency turned terrifying when they said,

  “Let’s go to the holding cells.”

  I got into the patrol car. It smelled new. The dashboard seemed to have more lights and buttons than were really necessary.

  “How close are you and Mr. Katzenberg?” asked Carmona.