The Execution (19 page)

CHAPTER 50

F
isk sat there looking at Garza’s half-empty glass, finishing his own, and trying to find the server so he could get the hell out of there. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Okay,” said Garza, her hand leaving his shoulder as she settled back into her chair. “I’ll tell you how it really happened.”

It was impossible to say what the difference was, but the woman sitting across from him now barely resembled the woman who had left. She seemed younger, softer, less certain. It was still Cecilia Garza, still the same slim neck, the same high cheekbones, the same glossy black hair. But there seemed nothing of the comandante left in her.

Fisk shook his head. “How what happened?”

She drank another sip of wine. “My father was a very stern, practical man. He indulged me in certain ways, the way rich men do when they have a daughter. He was proud, but that pride came out in such a way that I believe he wanted a daughter who was . . . what? . . . an ornament? I don’t want to be cruel. But that was what was expected of the girls I knew back then. Grow up and be respectable, pretty, marry a guy whose dad owns a bank or a telecom company. Have multiple children. Put on nice parties.”

She shrugged, as though gesturing,
Here I am
.

“I never quite fit the mold. I tried to please him at first. I was a good student, didn’t drop out of school and smoke pot with American dopers or anything. But I started getting in trouble because I wouldn’t shut my mouth, drinking, staying out too late, jumping in the swimming pool naked.”

“Really,” said Fisk.

“Believe it or not. My father had a place in the country, and when we would go out there I would ride dirt bikes and shoot guns and climb rocks, or steal the Jeep and ride off-road. I broke my leg once. I was always smashing something I wasn’t supposed to or generally scaring the hell out of my parents. I was acting out, I suppose. I was an adrenaline junkie. Still am.

“Anyway, I felt like I spent my entire childhood trying to fight my way out of this correct little box that my mother and father had built for me. I always enjoyed drawing. So when I went to university, I thought I would be a painter. You know, I read all the books about Frida Kahlo and I thought I’d be this rebel artist genius fighting the conventions of society and . . .”

She sighed.

“As I said, I loved the ideal of the artist. The life! Sitting around in cafés, running counter to the prevailing culture, nobody to tell you how to live or how to dress or what to do. But that’s not reality. Reality is, you have to paint pictures. You have to make something profound and beautiful, not just nice and interesting. And after a few years of painting pictures, I could see in the eyes of my teachers . . . that they were not
excited
by my work. They weren’t even very stimulated. My goal was to set the world on fire with my art, not be a mere candle on a cake.

“I still wanted to crash cars and ride dirt bikes and shoot guns. So I went into this sort of funk. I knew that I wasn’t going to finish the art degree. So if I wasn’t that cool artsy girl, smoking filterless cigarettes in the café, who was I?”

Fisk smiled. “You were young and no longer idealistic.”

“In Mexico you study law as an undergrad. It’s not just a graduate degree like it is here. So I took a class with Umberto Vargas. He was the big star teacher on campus. All the girls thought he was so great, so brilliant, so handsome . . . and he was. Made quite an impression. But he made practicing law come alive. There was a flavor of art to it, at least the way he taught it. Of ideals, of protecting interests rather than exploiting them. Typical lefty rich girl, I was going to take on the vested interests, all the big rich jerks like my father, change the system, make the world better . . . all the naive things any girl in law school should think she’s going to do.”

She finished her first glass and slid it toward him to be refilled.

“Now, my father was deliriously happy when I switched to law, and yet whenever I came home we would argue. He, too, had originally trained to be a lawyer, so we argued stupid abstruse points of the law. But really it was about the same old thing. Was I going to be the conventional little ornament to my father? Or was I ever going to be my own person?”

She shrugged sadly.

“Over time we just stopped talking. Then one day I got a phone call. It was my father. I knew something bad had happened because . . . he never called me. My mother had a minor heart condition—I thought maybe she had suffered a heart attack. But that wasn’t it.”

He slid her refilled glass back to her, but now she just looked at it.

“You read about the cartels and you think that crime in Mexico is just drug gangs blasting away at each other. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There is also, as you may or may not know, a terrible epidemic of kidnapping.”

Fisk nodded, hanging on her words now.

“My father called . . . and all he said was, ‘It’s your mother. And your sister.’ ”

“My god,” said Fisk.

She shook her head once, violently, as though trying to expel the memory from her brain.

“I drove straight home. My little sister and I . . . we never had much in common. Seven years between us, and she was a sort of flighty girl. Pliable. Indulged. Whatever her friends did, whatever my mother and father said, whatever the teachers said—she went along with it.” She closed her eyes. “Anyway. I drove so fast that I almost wrecked my car. I arrived at the house, and my father was absolutely beside himself. Underneath his sternness, he was a very emotional man. And he loved my mother just unimaginably. So he didn’t care about the money, didn’t care about anything. He just wanted my mother back. And of course my sister.

“But a kidnapping is a process. It’s a kind of game. And my father, he thought he understood the game. So he played the game the way you have to play it. Certain brokers are hired. Certain corrupt police who play both sides of the street are called. There’s this theater that’s played out where you pretend that you’re negotiating with people at a distance through honorable intermediaries. But in truth, the intermediaries are working for the bad guys. Or sometimes they are the actual ringleaders and the kidnappers are simply working for the cops. You never really know which is the tail and which is the dog.” She smiled sourly. “You just have to trust in the goddamn process.”

She was silent for a moment, staring at Fisk.

Finally she continued. “In a perfect world you go back and forth, there’s a certain amount of shouting and screaming on the phone . . . all to scare you. A few false alarms to squeeze the maximum figure out of you. But these guys are businessmen. They just want the money and they are rational creatures. That’s what everyone hopes, at any rate.

“So eventually there’s a handoff that’s shepherded by the crooked cops. It’s the one place where the cops are of value, you see—because their credibility in this process is predicated on their ability to reliably assure the safety of kidnap victims. If a cop gets a reputation as a man who can’t control the crazy assholes who actually do the kidnappings, then word will get around. People won’t trust him. They want this to work.

“Funny thing. I was at my father’s side the entire time. And you know what? We never argued, there was never a harsh word between us. Normally we argued constantly. But when the chips were down . . .”

For a moment her eyes welled up, and she fought back tears.

“The only time in our lives—before or since—that we got along, was while the most horrible thing was happening to us. If my father and I could have spent our lives fighting a horrible, grueling, vicious war, we might have been great friends.”

She blew out a long breath, centered herself.

“Eventually it all fell apart. As time went on we could feel the negotiations going wrong. The go-between cop was a fool, incompetent. Too stupid even to be properly corrupt. At the very end, we were supposed to make the swap. When you do these things, you hire a man to carry the money. We paid. My father paid something like six hundred thousand U.S. dollars. An incredible amount. And we never saw them or the money again.”

Fisk said, “Never?”

She shook her head. “Not alive. They were identified two years later, after their deaths. Drug addicted, infected with hepatitis, bodies covered in sores. They had been sold as sex workers and held captive in a city eighty miles south of Mexico City. They had been kept inside security houses known as a
calcuilchil,
or “houses of ass.” Mirrored glass for windows, so outsiders cannot see who is living inside. They were both shot in the head. Perhaps trying to escape, perhaps . . . I’ll never know.”

She was nodding slightly to mask her trembling.

Fisk said, “I don’t know what to say . . .”

“Or what to think, I know. It’s my hell. Each of us, we’ve been through something, we’ve been marked, scarred, changed. I tried to go on, maybe like you are now. I took a job at the Ministry of Justice, filing papers, doing all the things junior prosecutors do. But I was insane inside, crazy. Doing reckless things. I was not cut out for the work. I may have had an appetite for the mission. But not for the job itself.

“Then, as I said earlier, one day I arranged to go out with the PF . . . something I had been thinking about for some time . . . and everything fell into place. I was no more built to be a lawyer than I was an artist. Not for the girl who used to wreck dirt bikes in the country. So I joined the PF and you know the rest of the story, the one I told you earlier.”

Fisk was processing this. “Please tell me this doesn’t link up somehow to Chuparosa.”

She looked puzzled. “No. I know who took my mother and sister. Who sold them like drugs to men who treated them like nothing.”

“Who?”

“Ochoa. Do you know the name?”

Fisk did. It was a moment coming to him. “Vaguely.”

“German Ochoa. He ran the Guerrero Cartel. Guerrero is close to Central America, and he was tapped into Colombian cocaine. But that wasn’t enough, of course, and his crimes extended into human trafficking, among other things. But soon after the kidnapping of my mother and sister—perpetrated not by him directly, of course, but by his men, operating under his protection and control—his empire began to crumble. He was fantastically rich, of course. You realize that the goal of these cartel leaders is not to sell drugs. It is to make money and remain free to spend and enjoy it. That is why he essentially bought the former iteration of Mexican Intelligence. He was worth billions.”

Fisk got it. “He’s the plastic surgery guy.”

She nodded. “He underwent extensive surgery, including a full facial reconstruction, liposuction, everything. And died on the operating table. Heart attack, or anesthesia overdose—it’s not known. Your DEA identified the body using DNA recovered from his house. Six weeks later his doctors were discovered in barrels encased in concrete, their corpses showing evidence of torture. ‘Uncle Ochoa.’ Disgusting.”

“And the Guerrero Cartel?”

“The cartel names are fluid. One disappears, another rises immediately to take its place. So no . . . my revenge has no direct outlet. But Chuparosa, above all others, reminds me of the brutality of Ochoa, who died before I could do anything about it.”

Fisk sat there, not knowing what to say. He wanted to refill his glass, and yet he had lost his taste for the wine.

Garza said, “You will look at me differently now, you will think of me differently. But here is the thing. It could have been me. If I wasn’t away at school . . . it would have been me. That is my reality. Ochoa would have served me up just like he did my mother and my sister—who were not rag dolls, by the way. They were not fighters as I am now . . . as I have made myself to be . . . but they must have fought, as much as they could. They were brutalized. They were victimized. And here I stand on the other side. A woman of the law, who looks out for the victims now. Who acts for those who cannot.”

“And your father?”

“He suffered, too. And then he moved away from Mexico City, to California. Remarried.”

Fisk said, “You resent that.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I envy him.” She leaned closer, speaking so that no one else could ever hear. “You faced down the man who murdered your lover. You saw your revenge.”

Fisk said, “I arrested him.”

“You faced him and you stopped him. You won. There was an ending. For me, there is no ending.”

Fisk sat back. She had touched something deep inside him, and he wanted to express this correctly.

He said, “All I can tell you is that it is never the victory you think it will be.” Fisk was remembering Jenssen’s words to him in that prison room, about America’s tolerant system of justice. Its weakness for the rule of law. “We have to be better than those we hunt. It is the very thing that defines us. We lose that . . . then we are lost ourselves. This cycle of murder and retribution, be it personal or international . . . it sickens us a little, just being exposed to it. Like radiation poisoning. There is no end. There is no cure.”

Garza listened, but it seemed to Fisk she was trying to understand how these words related to him—rather than giving any thought to how they related to herself.

“Aren’t you glad you asked?” she said. “About me?”

“Yes,” Fisk said, and meant it. “I want to know more about you.”

Her eyes narrowed a bit, shadowed by the candle flame. “You know the worst, and still you want to know more?”

Fisk nodded. “I think I want to know everything.”

She looked confused for a moment. Almost amazed. Then—as always—she pulled back. “Maybe we are too much alike. Maybe we have found our counterpart and simply want to ask it questions. Maybe we are a two-person support group.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the Malbec.”

“Maybe. And exhaustion. And overload.” He conceded all those points. “And maybe it’s more than all that.”

She smiled as though he might be right. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I won’t be distracted. I cannot be distracted. Not until . . . after tomorrow.”

“After tomorrow,” Fisk said.