Searching for Pilar, page 8
When the three men were safely out of sight, the old man asked Diego in a hoarse voice, “What are you doing here, boy? I’ve been watching you these nights when you come around.”
“Nothing, none of your business,” Diego replied hastily. He was irritated that he hadn’t gone unnoticed like he’d thought.
“Anything that goes on here is my business,” the man whispered back. “I live here. Stalking those devils could get you killed. I wouldn’t do it if I were you.”
“You live here?” Diego asked.
“Around here.” The man waved his right arm in a wide swath.
Diego looked intently at the old man. He was small and thin, not more than the size of a ten-year-old child. His hair was long and completely gray. He seems harmless. Maybe he knows something.
“I’m searching for my sister, señor. She disappeared in this neighborhood three years ago. Have you seen any suspicious activity?”
“Everything is suspicious around here.” The old man chuckled. “I am very hungry, though. I think better on a full stomach.”
“Sí, of course.” Diego pulled some pesos out of his pocket.
The man took the money and motioned Diego to come closer. Then he whispered, “Sometimes, late at night, I used to see men bringing big bundles of blankets or sheets out of these buildings. The bundles seemed very heavy. It took two men to carry some of them. Sometimes the bundles moved, made human sounds, female sounds.”
“And?”
“They rolled whatever was in the bundles into the back of a white van.”
“And?”
“Money changed hands. Sometimes there was an argument, and other times the men in the truck and the men who carried the bundles laughed and slapped each other on the back. But the van always pulled away quickly and was gone. Poof!”
Diego was intent on the old man’s every word. He felt himself grow cold as he pictured his gentle, beautiful sister smothered in a blanket and roughly dumped into a van like a sack of trash. He felt weak in the knees. After a few minutes he asked, “Where did you see these men and bundles?”
The man was expressionless as he stuck his hand out again. Obviously, he had become inured to the worst of human behavior, living on the street in the Colonia Tabacalera. Diego put more money in it, and the man smiled. “Behind the office building with the black and red graffiti on it over there,” he said, pointing to a side street. “But I didn’t tell you nothing, right?”
“Right,” Diego said, distracted.
He realized that the building the old man had described was the one with the empty office suite 435 that he had looked at and dismissed three years ago.
Mierda! Diego thought. I missed it.
• • •
It was several days later when Diego was able to get away from practice early enough to visit the building with suite 435. The entire time he couldn’t get away, he was anxious and annoyed. When he was finally able to return, he studied the graffiti on the outside of the first floor of the building. He tried to read it, but it didn’t seem to be words, just scribbles.
Entering the building, he quickly ran up to the fourth floor. He peered in the window of suite 435 to see if anything had changed from when he’d been there before. The folding chairs and desk were still there, although they were in different positions. But this time the door to the inner office was open, and he could see a bookshelf with very few books on it. He tried opening the door to the suite, but it was locked.
Diego wanted desperately to get into suite 435 and search it for clues. He took off down the staircase two steps at a time until he reached the first floor again. A young woman wearing short black hair, a black mini skirt, red high heels, and long red fingernails sat at a desk in the leasing office, flipping through the pages of a movie magazine.
She quickly sized up Diego, put down her magazine, and gave him a coy smile.
“Buenos días, señor. Are you interested in leasing space?” she asked, twisting a strand of her hair.
“Sí, I am interested in one of your suites, suite 435. A friend visited it once and told me it might suit my purposes. Would it be possible for me to see it?”
Checking a book on her desk, she said, “Sorry, suite 435 is rented.”
“I looked in at the window in the door, and it is empty.”
“Some of our tenants come and go,” she said with a shrug. “My boss says it’s just like that. We don’t pay much attention to what they do, so long as they pay their rent on time.”
“That is disappointing,” Diego said, moving closer to her. “My friend thought that suite would be perfect for my business, and I would be interested in a long-term arrangement. Could I just look at it? Your boss and the tenant wouldn’t have to know.”
He gave the girl a flirtatious smile and stood tall so she could see his muscled arms. The young woman smiled back and then rummaged in a drawer in her desk and dangled a set of master keys in front of him. “Well, I guess it would be all right if I went with you.”
Once inside suite 435, Diego looked everywhere for a clue that might indicate Pilar had been there. The inner office was sparsely furnished. One of the overstuffed chairs had been ripped on the arm, and some of the stuffing was coming through. But there was no sign of what the office was used for. A thick layer of dust covered the furniture, and the light fixture was burned out, all indicating that no one had been there for a long time. Spotting the door on the side of the interior office, he asked, “Where does that lead?”
“It’s a second office for storage or whatever. We can look at it together,” the girl said with a smile as she took Diego’s arm and gently pulled him inside.
“Ay Diós!” the girl exclaimed when she turned on the light. She stepped back.
Ropes and handcuffs lay in one corner of the room. The occupants had piled a few old blankets in another. There was what looked like dried blood stains on a blanket and in the middle of the carpet.
Damn! Diego thought, feeling sick but struggling to look composed.
“What happened here?” the girl whispered, stepping closer to Diego, scared now.
“Nothing good,” Diego answered. He noticed another door across the room. “Where does that lead?”
“It’s the back stairs leading to the service area at the base of the building. I don’t think we should be here. Let’s get out,” the girl pleaded.
“Just a minute,” Diego answered, pulling the draperies open and inspecting the windows. Someone had nailed them shut. The door to the back stairwell had a lock that required a key to open it. It was locked now.
“This room was used as a prison to keep whoever was in here from getting out,” Diego said.
The girl was pulling Diego harder, trying to get him to leave the suite.
“All right,” he said. “I’ve seen enough. We can go now.”
Back downstairs in the office, the girl was so nervous she did not flirt with Diego anymore. “I don’t think we should have done that. Please don’t tell my boss I let you in there.”
“No, of course not,” he assured her. “But I am curious. Can you tell me who rents that space?”
She hesitated, so Diego leaned over the desk toward her and twirled her hair around his finger. “I won’t tell anyone you told me,” he said, leaning even closer.
The girl looked nervous, but she slowly got up and opened a file drawer. She pulled out a file labeled “Suite 435.” She let Diego look over her shoulder to see the name of the lessee—Corazón Company.
The name “Corazón” was the same name Diego had seen in the ad in the Mexico City newspaper he’d found in Pilar’s office over two years ago in 2007. He had a flashback to the Internet café in San José where he, Alejandro, and Sergeant Montoya had frantically searched for the company and concluded it didn’t exist.
Diego now knew that Pilar had been kidnapped from this very building and that he had missed it entirely.
But where is she? he wondered. Is she even alive? Could she be all the way across the border to the north, like Lieutenant Ruiz suggested? If so, how will I ever find her?
CHAPTER 9
ACROSS THE RIO GRANDE
Pilar was sitting on the bench in front of their house, holding Concepción in her arms and watching Alejandro sketch a picture of them, as he liked to do. Concepción giggled as she played with a wooden toy José had made for her. It was a beautiful, sunny spring day. Her mother walked toward her, carrying a basket of fresh, warm tortillas.
Suddenly Pilar felt a jolt, and the dream shattered. She was awake. She tried to get oriented, but it was almost pitch black all around her. It felt like two other girls were curled up around her in a very tight space. Why does it smell awful, like body odor and something else, something disgusting? Where am I?
Then Pilar remembered being in a dank room with a concrete floor, stone walls, and pillars, with two other girls and three men who assaulted them over and over. She remembered her night with El Tigre, and it made her feel sick. Instinctively, she reached for her small silver crucifix. It was still there. It had always made her feel comforted, but now fear was more powerful.
Someone opened the door to the compartment. It was night, and she could only feel a man’s rough arms pulling her out. She stumbled when he set her on her feet. Her legs had gone to sleep. Her head pounded from the drugs Jorge had forced her to swallow before he’d pushed her into the truck, and she was groggy.
The man led her from the truck to a long, low cinderblock building in the middle of a parking lot. Another man with an automatic rifle grunted for him to put her in a room at the end of a hallway. Stained sleeping bags covered the floor, and an awful smell came from a bucket in the corner. The man who had pulled her out of the truck pushed the other two girls, still half-asleep, into the room.
“Wait here,” a man told her gruffly in bad Spanish. “Eat this.”
Pilar looked at her captor. He was a muscular white man with light hair and a beard.
He tossed some cold corn tortillas to Pilar. The tortillas were stale, but she was starving, so she ate one of them, saving the rest for the other girls.
“I’m thirsty. Can I have some water?” Pilar asked.
“That will cost you, chica. What do you have to give me for it?” the man grunted.
“I have nothing,” Pilar answered, sinking to the floor. “Please, we must have been in that truck a long time.”
“You have something I want,” he said, grabbing her arm, pulling her up, and pushing her against the wall. He unzipped his jeans. When he was done, he walked into another room, came back with a bottle of Topo Chico mineral water, and casually tossed it to her.
• • •
After two days, the light-haired man told the girls they would move on that evening. Pilar had heard a television somewhere in the building. Some of the language had been English, with which she had a basic familiarity. She’d learned a little in school and sometimes she’d had to deal with English-speaking customers in her work at the factory. But the voices on the TV had spoken quickly, so she’d been able to understand only a few words. Once, she thought she’d heard Christmas music. They are taking me farther and farther away from Concepción and Alejandro, she thought. I have to find a way back to them before I go any farther. She swallowed her pride and approached the bearded man as he was taking her to a waiting van.
“Are you going to tell me you will miss me?” he asked, and then he added with a laugh, “I’ll miss you.”
“Maybe you could let me stay behind?” Pilar forced a smile. “We could go to your house, and I could cook for you. I’m a good cook. I would be there just for you.”
Squinting, he hesitated for a minute. Then he said, “Yes, and run away when I am gone. Do you know what Sangre Negra’s men would do to me when you didn’t show up with the others?”
Pilar did not know, but she knew it was pointless to try to persuade him.
“You can kiss me goodbye,” he laughed, grabbing for her.
Pilar backed away. I can’t let them defeat me, no matter what they do to me. I must get home to my child.
• • •
Two men took the girls to a large, enclosed white-panel truck. A group of men speaking different dialects of Spanish, looking the worse for travel, were loaded in with them. They must have been in the other rooms, Pilar thought. There were no seats in the van, and the air was stifling, despite a few holes cut out of the roof of the truck.
Pilar guessed they were in the truck for about seven hours. Her legs were cramped from standing, although the girls took turns making space for one of them to sit down for a while. The driver stopped for gas several times, and she could hear conversations in Spanish, but increasingly in English, outside the truck. At one stop where there seemed to be a lot of people in the area, she cried, “Help us!” but another passenger quickly clamped his hand over her mouth.
“Don’t make any noise,” he whispered. “We are across the river. We will get good jobs in the United States and be able to send money back to our families. But if the police catch us, they will put us in prison or send us back.”
“Por favor, señor, we are good girls. These devils kidnapped us. They brutalized us in ways I cannot say. We want to go home to our families. These two girls are just children. I have a husband and baby who need me.”
“We men have families to support. We need the work in Los Estados Unidos so we can send money back to them.”
“I am the main person supporting my family, señor. My husband is ill. It is just as important for me to go home as for you to go to a strange land where you don’t speak the language and don’t know you will get a job,” Pilar heard herself argue.
“You are just women,” the man retorted, growing angry. “You don’t know what you are talking about.”
Pilar turned away and screamed, “Help us!” louder than before.
The man, who was large and strong, clamped his hand over her mouth as hard as he could. Pilar stumbled and fell against Josefina. He kept his hand over her mouth until the van had pulled back out onto the highway.
The noise from the road grew louder and more consistent. Pilar guessed they had entered a city—but which city and which state? She tried to remember the geography of the United States. Was this Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona? California would be too far. It had been a long time since she’d studied geography in school.
The truck finally stopped, and the driver opened the back door. It was night. The outside air was muggy and warm, but it felt good compared to the stifling, rancid air inside the truck. The driver ordered everyone out. Pilar saw that they were in a neighborhood with similar houses all around. She could hear dogs barking. They walked, one by one, into a one-story house with a fence around it.
“Lie down,” a guard ordered them once everyone was inside. “Don’t think of trying to leave. There are armed guards all around the yard. We will shoot anyone leaving this house. Men, take off your trousers and put them in a pile over here.”
Several of the male passengers protested this last order. “We can’t go out or go to work without our pants,” the man who had silenced Pilar objected. But when a guard leveled his gun at them, they obeyed.
Pilar looked for Josefina and Teresa. They had gotten separated. When she found them in one of the three small bedrooms, they all smiled for the first time since their ordeal began. They hugged Pilar as if they were schoolgirls separated over the summer, reuniting. “I am so relieved to see you, Pilar,” Josefina said. “Do you know where we are? I am so scared. I want to go home.”
Pilar wrapped her arms around Josefina to comfort her. She was surprised at how much she had worried about the two younger girls when she hadn’t been able to find them—how she felt responsible for them, even though she barely knew them. They are so young and scared, she thought. The girls clung to her, sensing that she was stronger than they were.
The next day, after they slept, Pilar studied the house, looking for a way to escape. But escape seemed impossible. Someone had nailed the windows shut, and groups of armed men sat and talked or drank at the front and rear of the small house. There was one bathroom and always a line to use it. At one point it backed up, and no one came to fix it. It was fall, but it was still hot outside. It was unbearably hot and smelled disgusting inside.
When they first arrived at the house, the men who had traveled in the van were happy that they had reached Houston and were about to start the good jobs they had been promised. But soon, as they realized that the armed guards were not there to protect them but to control them, they grew disgruntled. Two days after they arrived in Houston, five heavily armed Mexican men with tattoos like the ones Jorge had had on his arms arrived and gathered the men together. The apparent leader of the group told the men that they must pay the coyote who had arranged their transport an additional entrance fee to the United States. They would have to work it off by working in a factory. The coyote would take their room and board out of their wages until they completely paid off their debt. The captive men grew angry, looking for some way to vent their anger and frustration. The girls stayed together and out of sight as much as they could.
Pilar never stopped thinking about escape. One of the younger guards, who’d been recruited in the United States, liked to watch the three girls. Pilar took advantage of this to draw him into conversation: “Señor, I was wondering where we are. You seem to be an important man here. I would think you would know all about where we are in this big city?”
“This is East Houston,” he said.
“Is this a nice part of town?”
He snorted. “No, this is a very poor area. Too many Spanish people crossing the river, coming to Houston, living on top of each other like ants in an anthill. There are some good people living around here, some have papers or are citizens, but it’s still a dangerous part of the city.”
Pilar assumed they could get help from other Mexicans living nearby if they could escape their guards. She had been watching and trying to determine the most promising time to get away from them. She decided their best opportunity would be during the afternoon. The guards always nodded off in the shade of oak trees in the front and back yards after lunch. She studied the locks on the doors. She knew a little about hardware from when she’d helped her father in the store. She thought the cheap locks on the doors of the old house would be easy to pick. Their captors primarily relied on the armed men outside and the growing atmosphere of hopelessness inside to keep their prisoners from escaping.
