The bus journey was long and Iwata drifted in and out of sleep. He listened to the portable radio of the old woman in front of him. Somewhere in Arizona it started receiving Mexican frequencies. He enjoyed the frequent usage of the accordion and found the awkwardly translated government messages interesting.
An hour south of Tucson, the bus slowed. Iwata glanced at the billboard by the side of the road:
– US BORDER PATROL –
YOUR CAREER IN BORDERS. YOUR CAREER WITHOUT BOUNDARIES.
The border fence came into view. It was of underwhelming height, no taller than two men, a rust-coloured vertebrae undulating over dry hills, repurposed Vietnam War landing mats.
Iwata entered Mexico just before midnight.
A few yards in, he got off the bus. Except for little shrouds of neon and streetlamps casting amber in convex, the city of Nogales was in darkness. Iwata could feel eyes following him, silent assessments being made. He had his gun, but it was still empty. Leaving the bus station, he stepped into the crisp desert night. At the nearest motel he paid for a single room, slipped his gun under his pillow and fell into a black slumber.
Iwata woke early and squinted out of the window. The buildings were of varying size, each one painted brightly; marigold, jade, celeste. The street was lined with hotels and bars, a few sleeping mendicants in the doorways of closed bordellos. People were sitting outside having coffee, sharing the banal in-jokes of their day-to-day.
In the dusty old courtyard Iwata ate spicy chilaquiles on a plastic plate and drank cold milk to calm the burn. Leaving the motel, he walked down the street and entered the pawn shop, where he asked for bullets. The man behind the counter rummaged around in the back and returned with two that were compatible with Iwata’s gun. He quoted an exorbitant price. Iwata paid and left.
At the car dealership across the road he made an offer for an old Mazda sedan with a questionable past. Iwata was a foreigner paying cash but nobody was looking for long-term commitment here. In less than half an hour Iwata was, more or less, armed and mobile.
A few miles clear of Nogales he stopped at a gas station by an abandoned farm. The land was a goulash of rough-hewn hummocks and wild greens. Dirty argentite clouds pressed down low. Sipping coffee with ground cinnamon, Iwata watched an old weather vane creaking in the wind.
At 4.30 p.m. Ciudad Cabral appeared in the distance. The city crouched over a desert basin, a polluted river slicing through its centre and surrounded on all fronts by serrated mountains. On the largest mountain, a colossal message had been carved in lime, its white letters like a jagged Hollywood sign:
LA HIERBA SE SECA Y LA FLOR SE MARCHITA, PERO
LA PALABRA DE DIOS PERMANENCE PARA SIEMPRE
The grass wizens, the flower withers, but the word of God lasts for ever
Iwata entered the city from the south. On either side of the motorway ramshackle houses of sheet metal and plastic huddled together. He passed churches doubling as schools, hole-in-the-wall taquerias, a sprawling graveyard. The streets were practically empty, the only movement to draw the eye twines of black pigeons across the grey sky.
Just before his exit Iwata noticed an object up ahead – something hanging from the massive concrete flyover. Swaying gently in the breeze was a naked male body. It had no head and no testicles, as though a butcher had cut away the inedible portions. It hung from broken ankles, a thick caking of blood and shit everywhere. A cardboard sign had been attached to the torso:
Yo, José Velasco, follaperros, descuidé de las reglas. Con este gesto, quedo perdonado.
– La Familia Cabral
I, José Velasco, the dog-fucker, failed to heed the rules. With this gesture, I am forgiven.
As the car passed underneath Iwata glanced up through the sunroof at the exposed stem of the man’s neck. It looked like a cartoon shank steak, something Tom and Jerry would eat. Shocked, Iwata made his turning and tried not to wonder who José Velasco was or what he had done.
In a hotel near the old centre of the city Iwata hid his money under a loose floorboard and allowed himself a little rest in the hot gloom. Through the window he watched a rusty crane move, casting a dial of shadow over the square. From somewhere below he could hear Mexican ballads over lamenting guitar chords, and a football being kicked. As Iwata closed his eyes the building site’s end-of-day klaxon went off and a flock of pigeons scattered. It sounded like insincere applause.
Cursing the universe, Detective Valentín slumped off the toilet without bothering to inspect the pink mess she had left behind. Between gritted teeth and tears she reached for the handle as though it would flush away what was happening inside her body. Every muscle ebbed between a constant ache and violent twists of suffering. Her breathing was feeble, her thighs and armpits were barnacled by a savage rash, her migraine was unrelenting.
Valentín ran her hand across her bony ribcage now, feeling the small, quivering life beneath. She was at peace with death – as much as anyone could be – yet she would lurch out of bed screaming every night. While her mind accepted the end, her body was still only made up of simple animal parts. It was easier to be here during the nights, surrounded, at least, by other people. Even if they were cops.
Valentín slipped her hand in her pocket and grasped the small knife Morel had given her. She had scolded him at the time: Bad-luck gift. But she loved its small solidness. It was real. He had given it to her. And it was still here. Still here.
Valentín commanded herself to stand up now, knowing that if she closed her eyes there would be no getting up again. She splashed her grey face, tried to gargle away the vomit taste and left the bathroom.
The precinct chief, a fat man with an agricultural face who addressed only men or tits directly, followed her with his eyes as she returned to her desk. It came as no great surprise when he shunted her on to the missing-persons desk. He might as well have tasked her with solving Fermat’s Last Theorem using an abacus. And so the last few weeks had drifted by in a haze of painkillers and laughably hopeless cases. She tried to limit the amount of times per day she glanced over at Morel’s empty desk.
Valentín thought back to how it began – a drunken send-off for a colleague somewhere, a year after being paired together. They had staggered back to the car. When he tried to kiss her on the back seat, she surprised herself by not rejecting him. Without considering the madness of it, she had thrust his head downwards and closed her eyes as she felt his beard scratch the inside of her thighs, the prickling and the tingling indistinguishable, the tongue of this unattractive man against her suddenly imperative. After she came, Morel rested his head on her hip and she fell asleep running her fingers over his scalp.
Nothing was said about it the next day. Externally, things carried on as normal but from then on the car itself was their own private chamber. Everything played out there. Exasperations, victories, laughter. Valentín loved being in that old car with him. Even silently sitting in traffic gave her pleasure. For a time, they were astronauts in orbit and Valentín had control of the stereo.
But Morel had kids to put through college. An angry ex-wife and lawyers to pay. Ends had to meet. Valentín never confronted him about his moonlighting with La Familia. After a while she had even come to help him on a few jobs. But Morel had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar – over sixty thousand American cookies, to be precise – and nobody was surprised when he didn’t turn up for work one day. His rotting body was found a month later.
The graveyard shift was when Valentín would look at his file – a few sparse pages pertaining to an unsolved murder – signs of torture, plastic bag over the face, buried in the desert. It wasn’t that she harboured any hope of his killer being brought to justice, that was beside the point for her; she just liked being able to see Morel’s face.
Valentín looked out of the window, a dreary night stretching out. Little plats of streetlight, peach-coloured from the sodium vapour, twinkled against the swathes of darkness. Mist was crawling down from the mountains, swallowing what men had made.
Outside the police station a small group of Honduran women stood in quiet protest. One woman in her sixties, no taller than five feet, wore a sandwich board with the photograph of a young man on it.
ALIVE HE WAS TAKEN.
ALIVE I WANT HIM BACK.
The woman’s eyes were hidden by the brim of her Nike cap but the tears on her cheeks shone in the streetlight. All the women wore these sandwich boards, as if their existence had been reduced only to finding those faces.
Valentín closed her eyes and thought of the beach cabin she’d grown up in. As a little girl, when she had nightmares she would creep out to the porch to look at the ocean. As night turned to dawn dove-grey cloud would roll in and the wind chimes would fuss. That was all she needed. In the mornings her father would wake her with a kiss on the forehead and a mug of chocolate.
But the cabin was long gone. Her father was gone. Morel was gone too. All she was left with was Ciudad Cabral and missing persons.
Her phone rang now. ‘Valentín.’
‘Front desk. There’s a guy here asking to look at missing-persons records.’
In the waiting area of the central Ciudad Cabral police station Iwata was looking at the missing-persons posters that coated the walls. A large ceiling fan stirred the hot air. The Mexican flag hung limply behind the front desk.
A door opened and a short woman with a pale face emerged. The desk sergeant gestured to Iwata and she sized him up before approaching. ‘You speak Spanish?’
Iwata nodded. ‘I’m looking for some missing women. I think they came here.’
Valentín led him out to the parking lot behind the station. In the shadow of a cottonwood tree she lit up. ‘I’m Detective Valentín. You a journalist?’
‘Private investigator,’ Iwata took out his ID.
‘Well, this isn’t America. You can’t just walk in here and get access to our records. There are forms to fill out; it takes time. Even then I can’t guarantee you’d get the relevant permissions.’
‘How long?’
‘A week. Maybe more.’
Iwata took out the pictures of the missing women and laid them on the brick wall. Valentín sighed but put on her spectacles.
‘All American, I presume? If they were missing here, I’d know about it.’ She looked at them in turn, but shook her head.
Then she came to Mara Zambrano’s driver’s licence. Valentín looked at it. She looked again and nodded.
‘You know her?’
‘She’s not missing. Her name was Evelyn Olivera. She’s dead.’
‘That’s not possible. I saw her two days ago.’
‘Dead women make good aliases. This is fake. Evelyn had no driver’s licence, let alone one from California.’
Iwata looked at the ID again. The cop was right. It was a close likeness but it was not Mara Zambrano. Whoever he’d spoken to at Club Noir was not the person in the photograph. Why did she have a dead woman’s ID?
‘They found Evelyn’s body a few hundred metres across the US border. She had been raped and shot.’ Valentín shrugged. ‘She was trying for a better life.’
Another connection. Another murder.
‘So this is a fake name – you’ve never heard of Mara Zambrano?’
‘Sure I have. Who hasn’t? She was one of the most important actresses in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Hell, she was known in all of Latin America.’
Iwata scowled at the fake ID and pocketed it. ‘Detective, where can I find Evelyn’s family?’
‘Thing is’ – she blew out smoke – ‘you’re licensed to practise private investigations in the state of California, Mr Iwata. And that’s a way away from here.’
‘It would just be a few questions. It’s very important.’
‘To who? Your business?’
‘The families of these women.’
Detective Valentín searched his eyes. Sighing, she stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’ll give you the address, but you listen to me. You leave this city straight after, understand? The man that looks under rocks in Ciudad Cabral quickly finds the scorpion.’
Río Rosita was in the centre of Ciudad Cabral, on the south side of the eponymous river, so-called for its evening pink. But despite the delicate name, its banks had been concreted over long ago, hills of silt and trash now stacked up over the slow, putrid water. The night was tinted a sickly peach by the streetlight. Little makeshift bunkers, ñongos, had been burrowed in the concrete here, in the dirt, in the storm gates – a festering Xanadu for the marooned. Further along the river a sluice gate doubled as a shopfront for the dealers. A long line had formed.
At the bend in the river Iwata went up some rusted old stairs, as per the policewoman’s instructions. This was Cuauhtémoc, a market since pre-Hispanic times, an open-air kermis of barter, bliss, bereavement. If Ciudad Cabral was a family, then this market was the problem child. The streets here were not so much streets, more little runnels of black-market life. The smell of grilled meat and the sound of cumbia music buffeted him. Everywhere Iwata looked he saw love, scuffed knuckles, scams. To him, it just looked like another version of Santee Alley.
Iwata weaved through bodies, the night crowd merry on cheap beer-margaritas. Never-ending stalls formed of rickety metal frames were clad in multicoloured tarpaulin – cloned DVDs, counterfeit sneakers, fake soccer jerseys, Real Madrid, Atlético and FC Barcelona. Though it was open air, the fairy lights overhead gave the market a feel of containment. Everywhere there was the sound of scooters and the bellowed mantra of Cuauhtémoc: Ofertas! Ofertas! Ofertas!
The market was heaving tonight; it was Holy Week, after all. Though the official saint of Ciudad Cabral was Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of this quarter was La Flaca, the skinny one – Santa Muerte. Iwata saw her shrine in the middle of the market, festooned with flowers and offerings. The skeleton was dressed in white, her bones primped with pearls and flowers. At her feet, people had left apples, toys, money, tequila. There were cakes, bowls of chicken with mole, small clumps of marijuana. Her bony hands were outstretched, beseeching outsiders unto her – the outcasts, the wretched, the non grata. Those with illnesses, those with terrible secrets, those that lived with curses. The inhabitants of Río Rosita knew that, where other saints would not, Santa Muerte was willing to grant darker blessings.
At the end of the market Iwata saw his destination, a colourful tenement block one earthquake away from crumbling. Inside, it was a maze of cracked concrete and precarious narrow walkways, children playing in its corridors, plants spilling over balcony railings, clothes on the line like bunting.
The door to Evelyn’s mother’s apartment was ajar.
Iwata nudged it open. ‘Mrs Olivera?’
Inside there were six beds, each one occupied with men and women at varying stages of deterioration. They were stick thin, their legs little more than bones wrapped in skin, their kneecaps wider than their thighs. All over they had track marks and ruined veins – at the joints, at the ankles, toes blackened. The tang of death hung in the air.
A man in a nappy at the end of the room had his face covered with a cloth, too weak to fend off the flies. In the next bed a gaunt young man with tattoos ignored his neighbour’s death rattle and watched TV. The local team was playing. It was still 0–0 as the match entered its final throes.
A woman in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt wearing latex gloves came out of the bathroom holding a tray of syringes. ‘Who are you?’
Iwata showed his card. ‘I’m a private investigator. Are you the mother of Evelyn Olivera?’
‘No, and she died a few months ago.’
‘Are you a relative?’
‘I live next door. She was my friend. But what does a man in your business want with Patricia Olivera?’
‘I’m investigating missing women.’
The neighbour led him out to the balcony. Children were playing in the courtyard below. ‘I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care to. If you want to ask about my friend, I’m willing to talk. But you should know that asking questions here will lead to bad things. You understand that?’
‘I understand.’
She nodded. ‘Evelyn left her mother’s place to live with a relative. They had argued, I know that. But Patricia wouldn’t go into detail. She only found out Evelyn had left the county later. She held on to the hope that maybe the girl would call or send a postcard. But it was the police that called. When Patricia found out her daughter had been killed, she lost the will to live. They even told her Evelyn was pregnant when she died. Can you imagine? It led my friend to the river, to drugs. She ended up with the same sickness as those people inside. I cared for her at the end. Before Patricia died, she asked me to look after others suffering from her sickness. Here I am.’
Iwata nodded respectfully. They both looked down at a little girl on the floor below them explaining to a Labrador how to tie shoelaces.
‘Ma’am, did Evelyn know somebody called Mara Zambrano?’
‘Like the film actress? I don’t know. Did she cross the border too?’
‘Then there is someone you could ask. They call him Lalo. He’s the one that helped her cross over. Like everyone else in this city, he belongs to Bebé Rivera.’
‘Where can I find him?’
‘You’ll find him in church.’