It was postsiesta on the Zócalo. I had made a quick call to one of my México City contacts, a radio journalist known to the NPR crowd back home, David Welna. His wife, Kathleen, answered and supposed I could find him in front of the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Of course, she was being facetious. Two hundred and fifty thousand, maybe more, people were wall-to-wall in México’s version of Tienanmen Square or, say, the Washington Monument. Considering that the city’s got twenty-five million inhabitants, that was one percent of the city. It was one of those Todos Somos Marcos events. Maybe a quarter of the crowd were sporting ski masks and wooden rifles. As far as I could figure, hundreds of unions and political concerns were all converging. Of course not all of them were Marcos; there was Welna and me and about five thousand federales. For some reason, the whole thing seemed to be swelling and mobile. It felt like being in a school of fish, a salmon run. I had to keep moving, presumably forward, but for all I knew in circles, to keep my relationship to the crowd and to the plaza. I readjusted my backpack, heavy with the notebook computer and modem thrust upon me by Emi. It wasn’t a large exertion on my part, at least for the moment.
This moving perceptibly and imperceptibly with the great flow seemed to characterize my existence in México from the moment I’d deplaned. On the major roads to and from the capitol, noticeable were the convoys of federales, Red Cross trucks, human rights observers, United Nations reps, liberation theologians, and press buses crisscrossing each other on the roads to peace and civil war in endless commotion. Soldiers at one checkpoint uncovered a cache of arms and ammunition in a pickup presumably moving south into the mountains, but I was told this was just one checkpoint. The DEA made its moves on a Guatemalan biplane flying a load of cocaine in its fuselage, but I was told this was nothing compared to the seventy tons that regularly made it across the border every year. Two high-level government officials were arrested for fraud, but I was told that the real culprits were too prominent, too powerful to touch. And besides, no one would believe the amount of money that had long seeped out of the country into international bank accounts.
Meantime, I pursued my hunches into Central America. C. Juárez plus a shipment of spiked oranges. My México City meeting was hardly a meeting in the formal sense. I had been told that it would be at their time and convenience. All I had to do was arrive; they would find me. Figures appeared out of shadows and suggested directions to pursue. They seemed to find me anywhere, but their directions got me through a series of loops only to land me at a family planning clinic. I did the loops several times over and found myself at an adoption agency, an orphanage, and a miserable shantytown of abandoned children on the edges of a vast dump. If I took one lead down one road, it brought me around to the same road again. Impoverished kids, orphaned kids, street kids, dead kids, disappeared kids. The whole system was a damn cloverleaf, and I began to have this nauseating sense of moving constantly to no good purpose. I was doing overtime and getting nowhere. I made this confession to Emi over the net.
Typically, she replied, Knock it off, Gabe. It’s México. For godssake, focus. By the way, she added. Your package arrived. What should I do with it?
What’s in it?
I haven’t opened it. It is addressed to you. The box says faucets. Maybe it’s a bomb. Can I find “bomb squad” in the Yellow Pages under b?
I can’t think about that just now.
I went through my notes again. Emi was right. I hadn’t focused. Everything was in this notebook. Interviews with Zapatistas. Notes on collusive military operations out of San Ysidro. A list of recent assassinations. Current value of the peso. Even my last telephone conversation with Rafaela. I proceeded to rip the pages out. I read my cryptic scribble: “Body parts. Kidneys for a two-year-old. Do you think?” The revelation made me gag.
I got Emi back on the net. What did you do with the package?
You mean the bomb? We’re dismantling it as we speak.
Don’t joke. This is serious.
Okay. Okay.
Don’t open it. Give it to Buzzworm. Tell him it’s connected to “C. Juárez.” Let him deal with it.
You mean—
I don’t mean anything. Stay out of this. Do you read me? STAY OUT OF THIS!
Alright. You don’t have to yell.
The fearful voice of Rafaela rose up from my notes, rattled the old memory banks. Meanwhile, her two-year-old, Sol, chased his imagination in my imagination. The story was in my own backyard. Now I had to find Rafaela; if she had taken what I thought, she was in big trouble.
I made a series of calls to my neighbor Doña Maria. “Lupe went to see,” she explained. “The house is wide open, so they can’t have gone far. Just a little walk. She’s that way you know. What you call a free spirit.”
“I will call you back in an hour or two, but perhaps if they can’t be found, you should call the police.”
“Whatever for?”
I squirmed, remembering Rafaela’s cryptic question about Doña Maria’s son. How much could the old woman know? “I will be there as soon as possible,” I said and hung up.
But for the moment, I was caught in the current at the Zócalo, one more flushed salmon pregnant with expectation. The entire crowd was waving paper money in the air: floating the peso they called it. Primer Mundo. Ja Ja Ja!
I got a tap on the shoulder from a ski-masked Marcos. “Gabriel Balboa?” I didn’t know how he’d found me, but of course he did. Now it was pay-up time. We made the necessary passwords and signals for proper ID. He didn’t waste time, “Have you brought it?”
“In my backpack.”
“Follow me.” We made our way out of the current, through side and back streets, into a restaurant and out the back, through doors and alleys. The final destination was a small office with a couple of telephones. Marcos pointed at the telephone plug. I took out the computer, plugged in the modem, called up Emi. Marcos handed me a set of disks.
“What’s in this?” I asked.
“The first is a database: names, dates, descriptions, work, family, relations, everyone who lived in that village. Everyone who died or was killed or disappeared, and who did the killing if that is known. The second and third have the stories, the past, memories. The entire history of the village since anyone can remember.”
I nodded. All these years, computer-stupid, I was supposed to save this man’s village. If he only knew the incompetence he trusted. At least, I thought, Emi was on the other side prompting me through. “Copy everything to your hard drive first,” she commanded.
I hung my ear over the phone, stared at the monitor, and tried to seem professional. Meanwhile Emi said, “Take it easy. Let’s not be premature. Ouu,” she purred.
I rolled my eyes, relieved Marcos couldn’t hear her. Only Emi could find a database sexy. She moved me through those windows, coaxing this computer virgin into its innermost temples. “Easy on the AccuPoint. Digital manipulation can make all the difference,” she purred.
I clicked through the menus, trying to ignore the insinuations.
“Okay, now you’ve got your very own newsgroup. Voila! Nothing there yet, but wait ’til you post. It’s gonna be swimming in news. A reporter’s wet dream. Okay, message your posting.” She said it like massage. “And, baby, don’t forget to CC me.” She took me deftly through the last steps. “That’s it. You’re getting better all the time. A real natural. Attach files. Ready for take-off? Okay, let her rip.”