First thing, I shot a bunch of faxes out: the feature story on the El Zócalo demonstration, insider interview with a revolutionary, plus the flyer to Bobby—hoping he’d know what the hell to do with it. Hoping he was going to find his kid. If I could get the rest of my stories pieced together, maybe I’d make it myself to the Ultimate Wrestling event.
Next off, I got back to LAX in time to meet Mexicana flight 900 for a second time to look for the woman with the baby and yellow bag. She turned out to be a no-show. I should have known. Rafaela had diverted the merchandise. I called the travel agency in México City. “I was expecting my cousin. Her last name is Juárez, traveling with her baby boy. She never arrived. I’m very worried,” I lied.
“Why don’t you just call her at home?”
“I don’t have her number. Just this copy of her itinerary. It’s very confusing. Perhaps you could provide a number for her?”
“Juárez? What is her first name?”
I fumbled for some common name with C. “Carmen,” I tried. “No Carmen. Only a Corazón.”
“Yes! How stupid of me. She goes by Corazón now.”
“The ticket was picked up and paid for in cash. There’s really no record. I wouldn’t worry. She’ll contact you, I’m sure.”
Another dead end. As for contacts, I needed to renew speaking contact with Emi and Buzz, but Emi’s cellphone still drew a blank, and I’d paged Buzz three times already. No answer. I needed Emi to help me fill in the blanks on my homeless conductor angle on the freeway crisis, and I never did get an answer about my package. If I could get the word, pin down the contents: kidney, heart, liver, whatever. As it was, it was somewhere out there playing limbo. If I got lucky, it might just limbo under my next deadline.
It was still daylight, and I still had to check out a lead on the poison oranges. The customs slips I’d taken from Doña Maria’s indicated an address in El Segundo. I took a couple of freeway offs over to a legitimate brokerage, but no records could be produced to track the product. “Oranges from Brazil via Honduras. Is that the normal route?” I queried.
“Well, say Brazil’s quota for oranges is exhausted, then Brazil exports to Honduras. Honduras to Guatemala, Guatemala to México, and México to the United States. Then it’s cool even though everyone knows the orange harvest is dead in México in June. Keeps everyone in business.”
So even the legal papers would have been bogus. As it was, I had a bunch of bureaucratic papers to make transactions look legal, to make the connections fuzzy. Anyone could fill them out. And no one had ever heard of the broker who signed the documents. The invisibility of those who fingered the threads mocked my every move. I said I’d be back with more information. It was going to take more time. I wasn’t going to get this story right away, but I’d get it eventually. After all, it was my story.
I called Doña Maria’s number and got Lupe on the phone. “How is Rafaela?” I asked.
“Sleeping. Always sleeping.”
I heaved a sigh of relief, then asked, “Where’s the X now?”
“Grapevine?” she asked. “El Tejón,” she said with more confidence. “Where is that?”
“Good job,” I encouraged her.
“What about the other channels?” Lupe queried.
“Other channels?”
“Two hundred channels. Coming to the dish invisibly from the sky. I have been thinking about this. The sky is wide and endless.”
“Yes, yes. Keep watching.”
“But,” she insisted, “I’ve been looking. There are more maps than just one. More than just one X. Maybe another nine or ten. What does this mean?”
I groaned. More maps? Lupe was looping through channel after channel. She had trouble with the coordinates. She could be describing any of a hundred urban centers. I had to see it myself. International crime cartels with access to satellite tracking devices. Tracking illegal merchandise in dozens of cities. How do crime cartels get their own satellites? If a dish on the Tropic of Cancer could pick it up like Direct TV or GPS, why not any other? Lupe was right; the sky was wide and endless.
But where were the villains and what were they up to? Selling body parts from third world children for transplants? Smuggling drugs in oranges? Conceivably, there was a villain at the beginning and end of every signal. Multiple uplinks and downlinks to a constellation of satellites. But who was tracking all this? The commerce was on the ground; the threads pulling them around were in the air. Which conspiracy theory was this one? The cartel, if that was what it was, was a big invisible net. If I had a strategy, it would be to get in there and snarl the net without entangling myself.
As for entanglements, I was getting used to carrying on my relationship with Emi over the net. Maybe she was right. It was a lifestyle I had to accept. If things continued the way they were going, what with the jetsetting and newstime on a kind of dedicated speed, I was never going to be home. I was never going to be in one place for very long. My life had become frantic but constantly satisfying. Maybe that was because I had no time to think about it, but considering my mistake with Rafaela, it was probably just as well. Maybe I had finally lost my romantic notions; I’d become truly noir, a neuromancer in dark space.
Talking to Emi over the net was oddly satisfying. There was no voice inflection to imply anything, yet everything could be inferred from everything. Maybe some irony was indicated by ;-), but when talking to Emi, ironic notation was redundant. And it was quite a bit more private, if you considered the ears hanging on your phone conversations. It was a new dimension in communicating. Let your fingers do the talking. Digital connections. Digital manipulations. And she was right. It was incredible how sexy text could be. Well, I had always been a text man. As Emi liked to complain, I got my cheap thrills from black and white. But I could also deliver. Emi was always moaning it over the net; my descriptive powers really made her ache. And then there was the rest of the net; it was a big borderless soup and I was cooking. There were miles and miles of text stacking up at my address; I couldn’t be alone ever again. Maybe the net was the ultimate noir.
I found a hookup for my notebook computer and zipped out a few lines to her mailbox: Angel, you’re gonna be proud of me. I’m finally getting the hang of hypertext.
Bunches of her old messages popped up. I hadn’t had the time to read them. I took a moment to scan a few: So, Gabe, you’ve finally decided to write your own book. You certainly have read (or seen) enough of them. Is it going to be an L.A. Chicano private dick thing? Of course, I’m in it. I mean, I’m the private dick’s thing, am I not? (kiss) If she only knew.
I typed in my budgets, storylines that spun a net of loose threads: coked oranges traced to Brazil/Amazon via a Colombia shipment through Honduras, and since poison can be carried by the seemingly innocuous fruit fly, consequences could prove grave; international infant organs conspiracy—tip of the iceberg; voices in the valley of the homeless raised in choral symphony: What’s LAPD gonna do? Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!
Maybe it was a net of loose threads, but I was onto it. For every budget, I set up a newsgroup over the net. For example: alt.soc.med.transplants .farming.infants was one; another hot topic was alt.soc.drugs.oranges (oranges continued to be scarce, worth their weight in gold, and floated invisibly through some parallel world). Almost instantaneously these groups were cluttered with commentary, hearsay, and even legitimate info. I waded through everything, ferreting out the good stuff and double-checking the sources. It was amazing what people out there knew or thought they knew and what they’d offer up for public scrutiny. On the spiked orange issue, I got a tip on an actual location for a lab somewhere outside Manaus, Brazil, doing the chemistry mix with medicinal rare plants and venoms provided by local aborigines. A coroner’s list of the dead turned up. Another source even broke down the components; scary thing was it was not only scholarly, it looked like a damned recipe. Someone commented that if this was what it took to save the rain forest, so be it.
My infant organ farming newsgroup quickly self-divided into subtopics: Procedures. Ethics. Updates. Out of the blue, a chat group of people claiming to have received illegally farmed organs got scheduled. The chat here seemed driven by a combination of guilt-ridden angst and vicious survival types. The chat typically went like this:
—If I thought for one moment that I was a recipient of an illegal organ, I would rip my heart out right now.
—So I say all transplanted organs are illegal. Rip it out now!
—We are all living on borrowed time. God bless the man on death row who willed me his kidney.
—This chat is about “farmed” organs, not “willed” organs.
—Death row’s not close enough?
—I was a baby when this occurred. My folks were trying to save my life. How do I go on living, knowing what I know?
This was all very well, but as a reporter I needed some facts. What do you know? I queried back. Do you know the source of your organ? Who was the doctor who performed the transplant?
Much of it was vague or not forthcoming. I waded through massive amounts of drivel to no avail, but I wasn’t giving up. I was going to close in on the culprits. I wanted my link to the creeps who battered Rafaela. As soon as I had the goods on them, the entire story would be on every major mailing list on the net and e-mailed and faxed to the desk of every politician, every publication, and every public and private organization with an axe to grind.
Emi’s old e-mail slipped back in. She never left me alone, even in the past tense. I been thinking, Gabe. This L.A. net of crime theme you want to pursue: Isn’t it a little dated? Gambling and racketeering condoned by the police: really now. Even the CIA/Contra arms-for-crack scheme is passé. I mean, have you seen some of the new chat menus online? For example, I accidentally discovered this newsgroup which is basically about human organ farming. El bizarro! It’s crude I know, but check out the subtopic on “sales.” It’s buying and selling time. Baby hearts are going for a mere $30 thou. Sounds like a down payment on a Mercedes.
Damn. I couldn’t sleep on this. Look away, and I’d lose my lead. I rushed back into my newsgroup, but not before scanning a few more of Emi’s Es. Of course I’m assuming you’re going to turn this newsprint of yours into a screenplay. If I were to direct it (smile), I’d be faithful to the black-and-white vision of course. Do something visually exciting: sunlight so blazing hot, it’s casting those dark & dirty shadows. Remember, sweetheart, if L.A. hates it, N.Y.’s gonna love it! Emi was rambling again. By the way, I’m thinking of getting you a dog for company. Not a real dog. A fuzzy software dog. It’s so cute! It lives in your computer in the corner of your monitor. Of course you have to feed it and clean up after it just like any other dog . . . There was stuff here for days. It could wait.
I started to check out for the moment, but typed in: I’m gonna be tied up, stuck to the desk here for the next few days. No time to chat. Keep me posted. Luvya Angel.
I looked at the time, a digital reminder in the corner of my notebook. It was no longer daylight, but it didn’t matter. I heightened the contrast on the screen, the harsh LCD light exposing a web of evil. In previous days, I would have even gone for a cold cup of pewter-colored coffee, but news itself had become my constant high. With the chaos of events, anything I put into the system got snorted up. Editors were going through the stuff with sieves, and what was sifted out went like toner, directly to print or the net. As soon as you had a lead, you had a deadline. It was now or never. I was tapping the very veins of news and shooting the stuff back into the system. I felt strangely powerful. Buzz and I were gonna share that Pulitzer yet.
I no longer looked for a resolution to the loose threads hanging off my storylines. If I had begun to understand anything, I now knew they were simply the warp and woof of a fraying net of conspiracies in an expanding universe where the holes only seemed to get larger and larger. It was like Emi with her multiple monitors, channel surfing, or reading a slew of books simultaneously. The picture got larger and larger. I could follow a story or I could abandon it, but I could not stop.