Saint Death - John Milton #3 Read online

  That was what the reputation of being the most murderous place on the planet would do to a town’s attractiveness.

  The town was full of the signs of a crippled and floundering economy. Milton passed the iron girder skeleton of a building, squares of tarpaulin flapping like loose skin, construction halted long ago. There were wrecked cars along the streets, many with bullet holes studding their bodywork and their windscreens shot out. Illicit outlets––picaderos––were marked out by shoes slung over nearby telegraph wires and their shifty proprietors sold cocaine, marijuana, synthetic drugs and heroin. The legitimate marketplace at Cerrajeros was busy with custom, a broad sweep of unwanted bric-a-brac for sale: discarded furniture, soda fountains, hair curlers, Kelvinator fridges. A block of sixties’ cookers jostled for space next to a block of armchairs and another block of ancient electronics, reel-to-reel tape recorders, VHS players and cheap imported stereos. Army humvees patrolled the crowds, soldiers in their pale desert camouflage, weapons ready, safeties off. Everything sweated under the broiling desert sun.

  Milton walked on, passing into a residential district. The air sagged with dust and exhaust and the sweet stench of sewage. He looked down from the ridge of a precarious development above the sprawling colonia of Poniente. Grids of identical little houses, cheap and nasty, built to install factory workers who had previously lived in cardboard shacks. Rows upon rows of them were now vacant and ransacked, the workers unable to pay the meagre rent now that Asian labourers would accept even less than they would. Milton saw one street where an entire row had been burnt out, blackened ash rectangles marking where the walls had once stood. Others bore the painted tags of crack dens. These haphazard streets had been built on swampland, and the park that had been reserved for children was waterlogged; the remains of a set of swings rusted in the sun, piercing the muddy sod like the broken bones of a skeleton. Milton paused to survey the wide panorama: downtown El Paso just over the border; burgeoning breeze-block and cement housing slithering down into the valley to the south; and, in the barrio, dogs and children scattered among the streets, colourful washing drying on makeshift lines, radio masts whipping in the breeze, a lattice of outlaw electricity supply cables and satellite dishes fixed to the sides of metal shacks.

  He reached the church in thirty minutes. It was surrounded by a high wire fence and the gate was usually locked, necessary after thieves had broken in and made off with the collection one time too many. The sign hanging from the mesh was the same as the one Milton had seen around the world: two capitalised letter A’s within a white triangle, itself within a blue circle. His first meeting, in London, seemed a lifetime ago now. He had been worried sick then: the threat of breaching the Official Secrets Act, the fear of the unknown, and, more, the fact that he would have to admit that he had a problem he couldn’t solve on his own. He had dawdled for an hour before finding the guts to go inside, but that was more than two years ago now, and times had changed.

  He went inside. A large room to the left had been turned into a creché, where parents with jobs in the factories could abandon their children to listless games of tag, Rihanna videos on a broken-down TV and polystyrene plates divided into sections for beans, rice and a tortilla. The room where the meeting was being held was similarly basic. A table at the front, folding chairs arranged around it. Posters proclaiming the benefits of sobriety and how the twelve steps could get you there.

  It had already started.

  A dozen men sat quietly, drinking coffee from plastic mugs and listening to the speaker as he told his story. Milton took an empty seat near the back and listened. When the man had finished, the floor was opened for people to share their own stories.

  Milton waited for a pause and then said, in his excellent Spanish, “My name is John and I’m an alcoholic.”

  The others welcomed him and waited for him to speak.

  “It’s been 870 days since my last drink.”

  Applause.

  “Why can’t we drink like normal people? That’s the question. It’s guilt for me. That’s not original, I know that, but that’s why I drink. Some days, when I remember the things I used to drink to forget, it’s all I can do to keep away from the bottle. I spent ten years doing a job where I did things that I’m not proud of. Bad things. Everyone I knew then used to drink. It was part of the culture. Eventually I realised why––we all felt guilty. I was ashamed and I hated what I’d become. So I came to these rooms and I worked through the steps, like we all have, and when I got to step four, ‘make a searching and fearless moral inventory,’ that was the hardest part. I didn’t have enough paper to write down all the things that I’ve done. And then step eight, making amends to those people that you’ve harmed, and, well, that’s not always possible for me. Some of those people aren’t around for me to apologise to. So what I decided to do instead was to help people. Try and make a difference. People who get dealt a bad hand, problems they can’t take care of on their own, I thought maybe I could help them. There was this young single mother––this was back in London, before I came out here. She was struggling with her boy. He was young and headstrong and on the cusp of doing something that would ruin the rest of his life. So I tried to help and it all went wrong––I made mistakes and they paid the price for them. That messed me up even more. When the first people I tried to help end up worse than when I found them, what am I supposed to do then?”

  He paused, a catch in his throat. He hadn’t spoken about Rutherford and Sharon before. Dead and burned. He blamed himself for both of them. Who else was there to blame? And Elijah. What chance did the boy have now after what had happened to him? He was the one who had found Rutherford’s body.

  “You can’t blame yourself for everything,” one of the others said.

  Milton nodded but he wasn’t really listening. “I had to get out of the country. Get away from everything. Some people might say I’m running away from my problems. Maybe I am. I’ve been travelling. Six months, all the way through South America. I’ve helped a few people along the way. Small problems. Did my best and, by and large, I think I made a difference to them. But mostly it’s been six months to think about things. Where my life’s going. What I’m going to do with it. Do I know the answers yet? No, I don’t. But maybe I’m closer to finding out.”

  Milton rested back in his chair: done. The others thanked him for his share. Another man started with his story. The meetings were meditative, a peaceful hour where he could shut out the clamour of the world outside.

  Ignore his memories.

  The blood on his hands.

  He closed his eyes and let the words wash across him.

  * * *

  3.

  THE MAN they called El Patrón was in his early seventies, but he looked younger. There had been a lot of plastic surgery in the last decade. That pig Calderon would have paid handsomely for his capture––the bounty was ten million dollars the last time he had checked––and it had been necessary for him to change the way he looked. The first few operations had been designed to do that: his nose had been reshaped, new hair had been transplanted onto his scalp, his teeth had been straightened and bleached. The recent operations were for the sake of vanity: wrinkles were pulled tight with a facelift, bi-monthly Botox injections plumped his forehead, filler was injected into his cheeks. In a profession such as his, when Death was always so close at hand, it gave him a measure of satisfaction to be able––at least superficially––to thumb his nose at the passing of time.

  His name was Felipe González, although no-one outside of his family used it any more. He was El Patrón or, sometimes, El Padrino: the Godfather. He was of medium height, five foot eight, although he added an inch or two with Cuban heeled boots. He had a stocky, powerful build, a bequest from his father who had been a goatherd in the Sierra Madre mountains where he still maintained one of his many homes and where he had learned how to cook methamphetamine, cultivate the opium poppy crop and move cargos without detection. He had large, labourer’s
hands, small dark eyes, and hair coloured the purest black, as black as ink or a raven’s feathers.

  He opened the door to the laboratory. The work was almost done. The equipment that he had been acquiring for the better part of six months––bought carefully, with discretion, from separate vendors across the world––had all been installed. The room was two thousand square feet, finished with freshly poured concrete floors and walls, everything kept as clean as could be. The largest piece of equipment was the 1200 litre reaction vessel, a huge stainless steel vat that had been positioned in the middle of the large space. There were separate vats for the other processes and a hydraulic press to finish the product. The top-of-the-line filtration system had been purchased from a medical research company in Switzerland and had cost a quarter of a million dollars alone. There were large tanks for the constituent parts: ephedrine, red phosphorous, caustic soda, hydrogen chloride, hydrochloric acid, ammonia hydroxide, other chemicals that Felipe did not recognise nor was interested in understanding. The actual operation of the lab was not his concern. He had hired a chemist for that, a man from a blue-chip pharmaceutical company who felt that he was not receiving a salary commensurate with his talents. Felipe could assuage all doubts on that score. He would make him a millionaire.

  Felipe considered himself an expert in the tastes and preferences of his clientele and, so far as he was concerned, meth was the drug of the future. He had been a little slow in getting into it but that would all change now.

  He had seen enough and went back outside. They were high in the mountains. The lab was stuffy but the air was fresh and clean. It was a perfect spot for the operation: the only way to get to the lab was along a vertiginous road that wound its way around the face of the mountain, slowly ascending, a unguarded drop into a ravine on the right hand side as the road climbed. There were shepherds and goatherds all along the route, each of them furnished with a walkie-talkie that Felipe had provided. In the unlikely event that an unknown vehicle attempted to reach the summit, they would call it in and the sicarios who provided security for the laboratory would take to their posts and, if necessary, prevent further progress. The government made all the right noises about closing down operations like this one but Felipe was not concerned. He knew the rhetoric was necessary for the public’s consumption but there would always be the cold, hard impracticality of putting those fine words into action. They would need helicopters and hundreds of men. It wasn’t worth the effort.

  His second-in-command, Pablo, was behind him. The man was as loyal as a dog, perhaps a little too enamoured of the white powder, but very dependable.

  “It is done, El Patrón,” he said.

  “You have spoken to Adolfo?”

  “I have.”

  “It was straightforward?”

  “Apparently so. They killed them all. One of them was still alive. Adolfo cut off the man’s head and posted the footage on YouTube.”

  Felipe tutted. His son had a weakness for the grand gesture. There was a time and a place for drama––it was practically de rigeur among the younger narcos these days––but Felipe preferred a little more discretion.

  Pablo noticed his boss’ disapproval. “It will be a message for the Italians.”

  “Yes,” Felipe said shortly.

  Pinche putas. Traitors. They had it coming.

  La Frontera had been doing business with them for five years and, until recently, it had been a fruitful and mutually beneficial relationship. The Italians needed his drugs and his ability to get them over the border; he needed their distribution. In recent months, they had overestimated how much he needed them and underestimated how much they needed him. He had tried to make them understand but they were stubborn and wrong-headed and kept asking for more. In the end, he had had to withdraw from the arrangement. It had to be final and it needed to provide an idea of the consequences that would flow should they not accept his decision. For all his son’s drama, at least that had been achieved.

  “What about the gringos?”

  “It is in hand,” Pablo said. “The plane will collect them tomorrow morning. They will be in Juárez by the evening. I thought you could conclude the business with them there and then fly them here to see all this.”

  “They will be impressed, yes?”

  “Of course, El Patrón. How could they not be?”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “There is one other thing, El Patrón. Your son says that they have located the journalists.”

  “Which? Remind me.”

  “The bloggers.”

  “Ah yes.” He remembered: those irritating articles, the one that promised to cast light on their business. It had started to get noticed, at home and abroad, and that was not something that Felipe could allow to continue. “Who are they?”

  “A man and a woman. Young. We have located the man.”

  “Estupido! Take care of them, Pablo.”

  “It is in hand.”

  * * *

  4.

  CATERINA MORENA stared out into the endless desert, grit whipped into her face by the wind. It was just past dawn and she was on the outskirts of Lomas de Poleo, a shanty that was itself in the hinterland of Ciudad Juárez. She had driven past boulevards of empty shopping malls to get here, nightclubs and rooms-by-the-hour places with names like San Judas Quick Motel, then into the contaminated desert, the compounds of prefabs built to house the fodder who worked in the factories and the sprawling colonias built from scrap in wastelands ruled over by gangs. They had passed through a fence marked PRIVATE PROPERTY and out onto land that was known to have connections with La Frontera cartel. There were rumours that there was an airstrip here for the light planes that carried cocaine north into America and roads used by no-one except the traficantes.

  Caterina looked up into the crystal clear blue sky and searched for the buzzards that would be circling over a possible cadaver.

  She was standing with a group of thirty others, mostly women but a handful of men, too. They were from Voces sin Echo––Voices Without Echo––an action group that had been established to search for the bodies of the girls who were being disappeared from the streets of Juárez. She was young and pretty, with her finely-boned face and jet black hair just like her mother’s, long and lustrous. Her eyes were large and green, capable of flashing with fire when her temper was roused. Her eyes were unfocussed now; she was thinking about the story she was halfway through writing, lost deep within angles and follow-ups and consequences.

  She already had the title for the post.

  The City of Lost Girls.

  That was what some people were calling Juárez these days. It was Murder City, too, and people were dying in the drug wars every day, more than seven hundred this year already and not yet Easter. Caterina was obsessed with the drug wars, it was the bread and butter of Blog del Borderland: post after post about the dead, mutilated bodies left in plain site on the city’s waste ground, drive-by shootings with SUVs peppered with hundreds of bullets, babies boiled in drums of oil because their parents wouldn’t do what they were told, bodies strung up from bridges and lamp-posts. Grave pits were being dug up all around the city, dozens of bodies exhumed, the dead crawling out of their holes. And all the awful videos posted to YouTube and Facebook showing torture and dismemberment, warnings from one cartel to another, messages to the government and to the uncorrupted police and to the people of Mexico.

  We are in control here.

  We own this city.

  Caterina reported on all of it, three thousand posts that had slowly gathered traction and gathered pace, so much so that Blog del Borderland was attracting a hundred thousand visitors every day. She had an audience now, and she was determined to educate it.

  People had to know what was happening here.

  The City of Lost Girls.

  She kept coming back to it. The drug war was Juárez’s dominant narrative but there were other stories, too, drowned out in the static, stories within the story, and the on
e Caterina had found was the most compelling of them all. They were calling it feminicidio––femicide––the mass slaughter of women. In the last five years, three hundred women and girls––mostly girls, fifteen, sixteen years old––had been abducted as they made their way home from the maquiladoras that had sprung up like mushrooms along the southern banks of the Rio Bravo. The multi-nationals had hurried in under the auspices of one-sided trade agreements to exploit wages a fraction of what they would have to pay their workers north of the border. Sweatshops and factories, staffed by young women who came from all over the country for the chance of a regular pay check and a better life. Women were favoured over men: their fingers were nimbler and more dextrous and they could be paid even less.

  These girls were nobodies, anonymous ghosts who moved through the city, barely disturbing its black waters. The kind of women who would not be missed. Some of them were abducted from the streets. Others were taken from bars, lured to hotels and clubs and other rendezvous, promised work or money or romance or just an evening when they could forget the mind-numbing drudgery of their workaday lives.

  No-one ever saw them alive again.

  Their bodies were dumped without any attempt to hide them: on patches of waste ground, in culverts and ditches, tipped out of cars and left in the gutters. The killers did not care and made no attempt to hide their handiwork. They knew that they would not be caught. Not all of the missing were found and desperate parents glued posters to bus shelters and against walls.