Spiral (21 page)

"Good enough," Waite said, congenially stepping to the car window and leaning on the door in a neighborly fashion. "Ya'll tell your people if they ever need anythang else, look us up. We're purty good folks to do business with."

Bias started the car and put it in gear as Waite stepped back to let him pull away.

"Ya'll have a bang-up time." Waite grinned and saluted them with his beer can.

Rubio didn't put the Mac-10 on safety until they had once again passed under the Sherman Bridge and turned onto Broadway.

Chapter 21

S
HE
lived on a small side street just off Canal in one of five bungalows that faced onto a common courtyard. The compound was partially shielded from the street by a row of filmy-leafed castor bean trees. A sidewalk ran from the street, under the trees, to the center of the courtyard, and then radiated into five separate walks, one leading to each of the cottages. The pie-shaped interstices between the sidewalks were planted with a well-tended but seemingly random mixture of flowers and vegetables: orange and red zinnias with okra, mauve petunias and tomatoes, yellow squash and lantana, cantaloupe and narcissus, beans and hibiscus. The evening air was rich with the smell of dampened plants.

All the cottages were open to the coming night. A couple of them were dark; the front room of another flickered with the pastel reflections of a color television. On the far side, several people sat behind the railing of their front porch. Haydon chose the center sidewalk that led to cottage number three. He caught the dinner smells of hot corn tortillas and onions as he stepped up on the small cement porch. The porch and its railing of patterned cement blocks were painted a faded salmon, and were crowded with terra-cotta pots of begonias whose tiny blossoms persistently retained their pink hue in the waning light. Spaced occasionally among these were heavy clay pots shaped in pre-Columbian motifs, and in them he was surprised to see the brilliant efflorescence of bromeliads: Guzmanias, Neore-gelias, and Tillandsias.

Haydon was bending over one of these when he sensed a movement behind the screen door. He did not turn around, but continued examining the scarlet flower in a fountain of long, languid leaves. He let her watch him from the protection of her anonymity, as if he were allowing a suspicious animal to observe his benign intentions to disarm its fears. She remained silent as he moved to another flower, and after a moment he began to wonder why she hadn't spoken. Then he had the unsettling feeling that she knew that he was aware of her standing there, and was herself wondering at his reasons for deliberately choosing not to acknowledge her.

When he turned around, he was surprised to see, through the softening filter of the screen, a woman who appeared much younger than the forty-five years he knew her to be.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm Stuart Haydon."

"Yes." She opened the screen door and stepped out on the porch, extending her hand in a way that conveyed a simple, innate dignity. "I am Renata Islas."

She was a head shorter than Haydon's six feet, and stood before him with the straight back of self-discipline. She wore a simple black cotton dress that reached nearly to her bare feet and fit at the waist in a way that made it quite clear she had not given in to the plumpness of middle age. Her black hair was shot through with gray, though on her it seemed premature. It was long, and fell over her shoulders, yet Haydon had the impression she usually wore it up and had just combed it out.

"I hope you don't mind sitting out here," she said, gesturing to two old-fashioned wooden porch chairs. "I have no air conditioning inside." She smiled, her large dark eyes fixed on him with greater interest than was implied by the casual manner in which she spoke.

"That's fine," Haydon said, waiting for her to sit down first. "I was admiring your bromeliads."

"They remind me of home," she said, gathering her dress as she chose the nearest chair. "To be alive is to be colorful. They know no other way." She wore no makeup, but her coloring was elegant, with the subtle variety of shading that he often saw in the cinnamon complexions of Latin women.

"They remind you of Jalisco?"

"No, not Jalisco. The home of my girlhood, Acala in Chiapas, near the Grijalva River. They grow wild there."

They sat for a moment in the bruised lavender light that preceded dusk, in that hour of day during Houston summers when it seemed as if time had ceased, and night would be held forever in abeyance.

"You want to talk about the
tecos ." She spoke with the unflinching directness of one who had decided not to be intimidated by misfortune.

"That's right," he said.

"He told you how I know them?" she asked, referring to Garner.

"Only that there had been a personal tragedy."

" 'A personal tragedy.' " She repeated the phrase as if it were a reference to someone else. "How much do you know about them?"

She listened quietly as he told her. She didn't look at him as he talked, but stared straight ahead almost as if she were trying to ignore him, or what he was saying.

When he finished she said, "I saw the news last night and tonight, about the attack on the limousine. This is what you are investigating?"

"Yes."

Laying her head against the white boards that formed the high back of the old chair, she gazed out to the darkening courtyard. She seemed to be trying to calm the noticeable rise and fall of her breasts, a sign of emotion she apparently could not control as easily as the placid expression on her face.

Using the thumb and middle finger of her right hand like a comb, she ran her hand from her brow to the back of her head, clearing the wandering strands away from her dark eyes. She said something to herself in Spanish, and then, "What do you want from me?"

"Anything you can tell me about the tecos."

"They are madness," she said. "Madness. That is what you should know first of all. They are blind in one side of their brain, and in the other side they have a fire. God's favorite sons, defenders of all that is right and holy." She looked at Haydon. "Do you know... God could save His world immeasurable agony if He would allow all His favorite sons to be stillborn. Then the rest of us, the less loved, would not have to cry so much for mercy in this life, as well as in the next.

"Mr. Garner told me the policeman who was killed last night was your good friend. I am sorry for you. It is the only reason I agreed to talk to you. I don't know your heart, Mr. Haydon, but I hope you are a man capable of hating. If you had not had . . .'a personal tragedy,' I would not have seen you. I do not want to be around dispassion. If you hate, even in a small way, I want to help you. Perhaps you will learn to have a great hate, as I have."

She turned away, swallowed, and ran her tongue lightly over her lips as she stared at her lap. Then she looked up again, in control, and said, "If you think you are dealing with the tecos , then you will be dealing with a particular element of the tecos. Los tecos de choque, the shock troops, the truly secret part of the Brigade.

"The owl was chosen as a symbol of the Anticommunist Brigade of the Autonomous University of Guadalajara because this bird's eyes are always open, vigilant. The 'anticommunist bastion in Mexico,' they call themselves. Their detractors interpret that symbol quite differently. They say it was chosen because they do their filthy work under cover of darkness."

She shrugged, and shook her head wearily. "The simple fact is, they are the death squads. Who do they kill? Communists. How do they know when someone is a communist? After all, the Communist Party is legal in Mexico, just as it is here. Do they kill those communists in the Communist Party? No. The tecos make their own list. And since the tecos are an extreme-right-wing entity ..." She left the sentence hanging.

"Can you tell me anything about their method of operation?" he asked.

"The attack on the limousine was typical," she said. "Mexicans, all Latin American killers, have always favored the gun. The terrorists in the Middle East have been using bombs for over a decade, but the Latin Americans? No, for them it is still the guns. And they like the motorcycle. Aside from its obvious advantages of mobility, it suits the image of machismo. Cowboys. The bombs are too . . . impersonal. Latins like to be personally involved with the people they kill. It's more visceral.
Mario a manol "But that could be changing," she added. "In March two Chilean government security men were killed by a bomb in a hotel room in Conception. They were lured to it by an illegal radio broadcast. In June a car bomb exploded outside the presidential palace in Lima. It was attributed to the Shining Path group of leftists. I think there will be more and more of this kind of thing, the bomb."

"Do you have any names?"

"I have rumors of names. In Mexico there are mutual support groups, parents and family of the desaparecidos ." She looked over at him. "Do you know that word? In translation it has a hauntingly passive sense to it: 'the disappeared.' One suddenly becomes nonexistent. Lost."

She paused, as if contemplating the meaning again for herself, as if she were counting a rosary with a single bead.

"We meet regularly and compare notes," she continued. "To coordinate ways of protesting to the government, initiating efforts to find our missing. It is a frustrating task. Mostly fruitless. However, over a period of time we have compiled considerable information. Some of it is from eyewitness accounts. Some of it is circumstantial, placing persons at certain places when certain things occurred. Some of it is speculation. Most of it would not hold up in a court of law, perhaps. But we are parents and husbands and wives, not federal prosecutors, and we do what we can do. It is not a sin that one's efforts amount to so little; the sin is to do nothing."

"Do you have access to this information?" Haydon asked.

She nodded. "The reason I am in Houston is to try to organize support for our work on this side of the border. There are families here who could help us. There are legal pressures that can be brought to bear in some cases. People need to know."

"What can you give me?"

She was quiet, looking past the salmon cinder blocks that had faded even more, everything going pastel, colors washing away in the thin, warm summer light.

Without speaking, she rose from the deep seat of the old wooden chair. As quietly as she had come onto the porch, she disappeared through the screen door into the darkness of the house. Haydon waited, and after a few moments heard the sharp click of a lamp switch. Through the gauzy screen of the open window next to his chair, he saw a doorway beyond the front room, a sallow light falling across the back of an open door like an old painting yellowing with aging lacquer. He saw her bending shadow against the paneled door. The light went out. He imagined her bare feet beneath the hem of her long dress as she moved through the darkened room.

Another lamp came on, this time in the living room. Haydon looked through the window again and saw her sitting in an old armchair in a cone of dull light, a thick expanding folder in her lap. She was going through it, flipping through papers, pulling a scrap out, looking at it, putting it back, going through others. Finally she paused, holding what appeared to be an envelope. She was holding it lengthwise, reading something from it, as if a note had been jotted there. Reaching down to a low table by the chair, she picked up a pencil and wrote something on another piece of paper she had also gotten from the table, then continued looking through the file,

Haydon waited.

After a while the light clicked out in the living room and she emerged once again from behind the screen door. She walked over to Haydon and handed him a piece of paper, though it was too dark for him to read it. She did not sit down again, but stepped to the edge of the porch and picked one of the flowers from a begonia, toying with it as she looked out to the dying light in the courtyard. Crickets filled the quiet, throbbing in their familiar, alien language. Her simple dress and long, unstyled hair transformed her into the indio woman she might have been. In the graceful pitch of her hip, darkly outlined against the deepening evening, Haydon saw a woman of the Grijalva.

After a moment she said, "Only occasionally do we come across any connection to the States. Usually it has to do with someone who has fled from the teco fear in Mexico, and come up here to live with relatives or friends. Even though they cross as illegals, we help them when we can. We don't think of international relations, or of immigration quotas, or of going through the process of requesting political asylum. As you know, that doesn't seem to be working for the Latin Americans right now anyway."

She was referring to a painful truth. A person was far more likely to be granted political asylum if he was coming from Poland or Iran than if he was coming from Guatemala. A refugee had to be fleeing from the "right" evil government.

"However, this man—this Rubio Arizpe—whose name I have written on that piece of paper has on two occasions pursued his victims into Texas. He killed one in San Antonio, one here in Houston."

"You're sure about this?"

"The same way I'm sure about the rest of the information.
We are sure. I couldn't prove it in court."