I was trained how to fall by the Vaqueros. This was pre-Tlateloco. Late 1967 or thereabouts. An entire month of riding and falling. All this to pad out a photo-story for the National Geographic which ultimately didn’t run (kind apologies from the editor – a tiny kill fee). Nothing wrong with the words, but the pictures were disappointing. Kimberly was off her game. Second month of pregnancy. Then the miscarriage. But I learned how to fall from the Vaqueros. And God only knows it came in handy. I’ve certainly done a fair old bit of it since then.
In fact, the editor who killed the piece was the same man who later put me in touch with Winston Scott (was it merely out of guilt or by design? I now wonder). Scott – former CIA Mexico City Bureau Chief – was writing his memoirs and needed someone ‘in the know’ to tidy them up a bit. But was that generous National Geographic assignment (which landed in Kim’s lap, quite out of the blue – a virtual Gift From God) merely part of some coordinated attempt to banjax my bumbling investigations into the pre-1968-Olympic socio-economic meltdown? I’d written several pieces for the English press about President Ordaz’s government’s brutal suppression of Mexican farmers and the independent labour unions. Now he’d set his sights on those poor students …
There are still no firm statistics on the number of people who died that day. But I saw with my own eyes the bodies piled up high on the pavements. How they just bundled them – like so much garbage – into the back of their trucks and sped off.
Strange that we should suddenly receive that call – just as things were really starting to hot up in Mexico City – to spend a month getting saddle-sore in the back of beyond. If I recall correctly, it was Kimberly who convinced me to take the commission. We were a team. She desperately wanted me with her on that job. I did it for her – against my better judgement. I did it for us.
Do I suspect Kim, too?
Yes.
No.
God. Who don’t I suspect?
(I barely even trust my devout Catholic housemaid, Juana. I’d do anything for her. She knows that. Anything. But I’ve still been known to carefully count every teabag left in the tin, just to be sure.)
Once burned, twice shy.
Scott was noxious and paranoid. He and I had history. It was Scott – he later confessed this to me in one of his many late-night drink-fuelled rants – who came up with the spiel about Chinese rifles being used at the Tlateloco massacre. My source had seemed legit. A social worker called Juan Manuel Reyes Vargas whose brother Paulino was in the military. And I ran with it. Oh, how I ran with it! Even though – perhaps even because – everything I had discovered under my own steam (the fruits of my own messy observations), added up to something entirely at odds with this theory.
I guess I just lacked confidence. Or maybe I had an excess of it back then? (What a fool, though! What a gullible fool!)
Just try and imagine (if you can) how that might feel? If the sum total of your role in the grand panoply of human history was that of an idiotic obfuscator? Not a traitor or a plotter (surely there’s some measure of glamour in those Judas roles? I mean at least you have the comfort of a dark yet coherent subterranean agenda?), but as someone who persistently – no, determinedly – gets things wrong. An incompetent dope. You are presented with the facts (whatever they may be) and then you gamely proceed to cook up a series of the worst possible hypotheses. You conjure a miserable five out of a happy two plus two.
When Scott died, unexpectedly (from a heart attack), while the book was still being edited, I carefully pondered my options and then ran, long-distance (like a skinny barefoot Kenyan) with the information provided. How could I not? I fully understood the risks. But this was huge. The CIA had known – they knew! – way in advance, that Lee Harvey Oswald posed a serious threat to American national security. Scott had all the documentation to prove it! Why didn’t they admit to this, you wonder? Because it made them look like a bunch of incompetent chumps, that’s why. But they knew. They knew.
This was career-making stuff. This was the world’s biggest scoop. A coup. This could finally undo the Tlateloco mess. This could set me up for life. Was Scott’s death suspicious? Yes. No. Who could say? Were the FBI desperate to stop the book? Uh … does a rabid dog crave water?
Publish and be damned, though! That was my mentality. So I put out my feelers. I cast around for all my best media contacts. I made calls. I wrote letters. I honestly thought they’d be biting my arm off at the wrist! But nobody – nobody – seemed eager to take the bait. I was ignored, fobbed off, laughed at, avoided. No one wanted to risk it. But why? Why?! My theory (but who can trust my theories?) was that British Intelligence had put the word out on me. Institutional self-protection. Their people knew people who knew people … Everybody was implicated. I suddenly found myself (although it wasn’t actually sudden, it was lethally gradual, like frostbite) sitting bang in the middle of yet another ‘left-wing cover-up’ scenario. There were sly winks and subtle nudges, casual rumours, incriminating documents in circulation which nobody ever read, nobody ever saw – even compromising photos.
What could I do? I booked a flight to England (we were broke, but I needed to confront this many-headed Hydra, head-on) then suddenly there were a whole host of ‘visa problems’ (if I leave, they tell me, there’s no guarantee of ever getting back in again). A house burglary. My car’s brakes are tampered with. The bank stops my credit. A friend is imprisoned. I can’t travel, can’t travel; so Kimberly takes the flight instead – and … and, well, she never comes back.
Bye-bye, Kim old girl.
Fine. So it was pretty much over by then anyway. My fault. My fault. I had contracted the virus of cynicism. It’s a kind of flu of the soul. It fed on me like a cancer. It hollowed me out. It finished me off. Because there was no agenda. I was a pragmatist. I wasn’t political. I didn’t … I didn’t feel that stuff (the heart, the gut, the soul) so much as want to … Let’s put it this way: I was a surfer. Just a surfer. I was never the wave.
But now I’d been voided. I was a blank. I’d been silenced. I had no means … no way of getting the information out there. It wasn’t even as if I cared about the information, as such (no agenda, remember? No great battle between right and wrong, no sense of a profound moral and political injustice having been done), I just cared that I couldn’t … had been … was straitjacketed, was disgraced. I was helpless. Helpless. I just wished there was some way of … a means to … some way to reach out and … and share what I knew with the world. Not because I needed to … but just because I … because I …
Who knows?
Vaquero is actually a transliteration of cow man. Not cow boy (note). Cow man. I told Mr Pemberton this as I clambered to my feet and brushed myself off.
He seemed astonished that I was unhurt. In truth, I was quite astonished. Not so much as a scratch on me! And my suit – apart from a tiny tear on the seam of a pocket – was fine.
I went on to tell Mr Pemberton how the cowman had been rendered obsolete, virtually overnight, by the invention of barbed wire in 1873. I said, ‘It was the New Mexican equivalent of enclosure. You know – when the British landed gentry eradicated the right for peasants to graze their livestock on common land?’
‘I do know what enclosure is, Mr Huff,’ Mr Pemberton assured me. Then he apologized for speeding. Then I apologized for kissing Miss Hahn. I tried to explain, once again, how I wasn’t … it wasn’t … I’d just been trying to stop her from … from talking. He seemed to find this strange. He said, ‘I thought you wanted Miss Hahn to talk.’
I said I was beginning to suspect that I had developed a series of unconscious phobias in relation to Miss Hahn and the book. That being around Miss Hahn made me feel a deep sense of panic. I also said that the secret she’d told me was about the four digits – the 4.0.0.4 – not about … well … and that I would treat the information that he had shared with me – about her ‘relationship’ with Bran Cleary – with great sensitivity and discretion.
He responded to this statement in an emphatic manner (arm waving, reddened cheeks etc.) but was rendered inaudible when a nearby bird-scarer started to quick-fire, indiscriminately. He suggested (a series of hand gestures) that we climb back inside the van. I refused. I said – in as polite a way as I possibly could – that I would never knowingly get into a moving vehicle with him again. Not ever. I then added that I didn’t intend this to be a criticism of his driving, per se. But I think it was obvious that this is exactly what it consisted of. A devastating criticism of his driving. Per se.
I hope we parted friends.
I really do think that Mr Pemberton is intensely unstable. I like him, though. And I am absolutely convinced now that it was he who put the shark under my bed in order to cast suspicion on Miss Hahn and make our relationship untenable. Hang on … Let me put that … uh … ‘our relationship’ (mine and Miss Hahn’s) into inverted commas. Yes. Good. That’s so much better.
I feel deeply sorry for him. I do. And for Miss Hahn, too. He must’ve been a thorn in her poor side for many a long year now. He plainly believes that every man she ever has contact with finds her completely irresistible!
Kimberly – poor, dead Kimberly (they were her photographs. In circulation. The compromising ones. They were hers) – was perfectly right about our Miss Hahn, though. She’s this story’s barbed wire. She is the thing that both contains and expels. She is the truth at the heart of it all. But if I see the truth (or the heart) how might I tell? My instincts for such things are notoriously unreliable, after all. And if I do find out the truth (stare it in the face, but don’t recognize it) will I find Kimberly (with her white-blonde hair and her beatnik style and her chattering camera) still more compromised? Will I discover that everything was a lie? My whole adult life? That I was just … That I am just … what’s that phrase again? In the approaches? On the outskirts? But never reaching a destination of any note? Just driving around on life’s eternal ring-road – too frightened, too unwitting, too stupid, too compromised to make that sharp turn into the very heart of the matter?
These were my thoughts as I walked home. And when I arrived, I discovered two things. The first was a line of dilapidated caravans (old cars, several horses) blocking the road to Toot Rock. Oh, and a host of disgruntled neighbours raising merry hell about it. The second was a painstakingly typed letter from Father Hugh Tierney (having been placed under considerable pressure by Miss Alys Jane Drury I don’t doubt. Ha! I knew the old trout would ultimately prove useful!), finally agreeing to meet up.