Mexico Way, page 13
The remark would have sounded banal to any eavesdropper, but it stung the President. He flung his wet towel at Raúl. "Damn you!"
He turned on his heel, then thought better of it. "Damn you to hell! I want you to hear this, Raúl! I'm not going to go to war in Mexico for the sake of a country that doesn't even exist! This whole secession idea is crackpot! I'm the President of the United States, for Chrissake. Have you forgotten that the United States fought a war to stop a secession?"
"We read American history together," Raúl said evenly. "I think you've forgotten what side Texas was on."
"That may be clever talk, but I don't buy it. I won't back Safari unless I find a reason I can believe in."
"You'll have your reasons, Harry."
NINE
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1
When Kreeger got back to the Station, one of the first people through his door was Eddie O'Brien. Eddie had trawled about up north in the guise of an anthropologist looking for Tarahumara artifacts. He was still sporting part of his kit—snakeskin belt, bush shirt, Indian head-band—when he came into Kreeger's office.
He showed his boss a series of pictures, shot through a telephoto lens, pictures showing columns of Mexicans dressed in desert fatigues, training on the Carvajal ranch and at several other points in the same area.
"Looks like they're loaded for bear," Kreeger commented, after inspecting photos that showed jeeps mounted with heavy machine guns and a couple of men toting portable rocket-launchers. "Do they know how to use that stuff?"
"Maybe better than the Mexican army. They have professional trainers. The usual suspects. A couple of Green Berets who used to be with the Contras in Honduras. I heard something about an Israeli, an ex-Mossad type, who was kicking around Panama a few years back."
"So what's the agenda?"
"Hard to read. Carvajal's building a private army. He's also got his finger into half a dozen independent political operations. The League for Decency, set up in Texas, is the one that's getting the news, but there's another one called the Division of the North, set up in the northern section of Mexico. That one hugs the shadows. They're putting out a lot of crap. Bumper stickers. T-shirts. I saw "Liberate the North' on a few fenders. 'Death to Chilangos' is another slogan."
"So there's a regional twist."
"Yeah. But Raúl seems to have his lines out to Mexico City as well. I ran into an old bush flier—he did a few jobs for the Agency, out of the Florida Keys. He told me he was hired to fly a couple of Mexican army generals up to the Carvajal ranch."
Kreeger shook his head, an expression of doubt on his face.
"I think my source was reliable," Eddie protested.
"It's not that. I just find it hard to believe that there's anything here our friend Fausto doesn't know already. You have any feel for that?"
"My guess is that SIN has got this crowd under round-the-clock surveillance. I bet Raúl doesn't make a phone call that isn't monitored at the telephone exchange."
"Exactly. So why is Fausto letting it run?"
"I remember, when I was a boy on Long Island, we would find wasps' nests about the place in the summer. My dad told us never to disturb them. If we left the nest where it was, then we knew where the wasps were. We got rid of them when the cold set in."
"Could be." Kreeger followed the analogy. It did not satisfy him, however. He felt there was something missing. "Did you get anything Fausto doesn't know?"
"I may have found us an inside source."
He produced the last photograph, the one he had been holding in his lap.
Kreeger glanced at it. He saw an antique Bentley convertible, painted cream and midnight blue. A uniformed chauffeur was holding the door open for a quite stunning blond woman wearing a rather revealing dress. She reminded Kreeger of Kathleen Turner.
"What do you think?" Eddie asked eagerly.
"It's hard to tell, with all the high-ticket props. Who is she?"
“She's Raúl Carvajal's mistress. I guess she gives good value. She has her own place in Colonia del Valle, a villa in fact. Raúl keeps her wrapped up pretty tight, but I got a look at her mail. There was a letter from San Diego addressed to a Shelley Hayes."
Kreeger jotted down the name.
"We could pitch her," Eddie suggested.
"Where?"
"She travels a lot. Houston, New York, Rio. Even to Paris. She seems to be something of an art collector."
"Does she ever get to Mexico City?"
"Raúl keeps a penthouse at the Presidente Chapultepec. Apparently she has been known to use it now and then."
"Shopping trips?"
"I guess."
Kreeger wondered what the other women in his life would make of Shelley Hayes. Maybe Karla would admire her, for exacting her pound of flesh.
He filled out a routine request for a background check on a Ms. Shelley Hayes, birth date unknown, stating that he required information for "development prior to recruitment." The clerks at Langley fielded tens of thousands of such requests every year. The low priority meant it could take weeks before the Station heard anything back on Shelley's employment, Social Security, and criminal records. There were faster ways of working things, but that would risk setting off alarm bells higher up. Kreeger wanted to avoid that until he had worked out just what kind of safari Art Colgate—and maybe Director Wagoner—were on.
2
"Miliano! Miliano!"
Emiliano Rojas—Miliano to thousands he had never met—sighed and rubbed his son's back. He was holding the two-month-old baby across his shoulder, supporting its head with his left hand.
The calls from the street seemed to grow louder. Out there was the sun's anvil. Between the cries, Miliano could almost hear it beat against the hard-baked earth of the dirt road, rutted like a dry arroyo.
"Miliano." His wife, Elena, moved, shy and graceful as a doe, through the obstacle course presented by their cluttered parlor, which was also their nursery and Miliano's study. "Give him to me. They're calling for you."
"Yes."
With loving care, he plucked the baby from his shoulder and delivered it into the arms of his wife.
He opened the door. The harsh sunlight fell into the room behind him.
In this village, he was known as the man who could talk, but in fact, Miliano spoke few words that were not called for.
"Don Miliano."
He did not like to be called that. "Don"—it stank of the old ways, of the man on horseback, raising a whip to the men of the fields. But these were simple men looking up at him, wishing only to show respect. He must be patient. His country was a lesson in patience.
"Sí."
"Don Miliano—he is coming. All the way from the south. He is coming on the train to Torreón! He is coming here, to Aguilas Negras!"
It was Huerta, the spokesman for the ejido—the collective farm down the road—who spoke.
"Who is coming?" Miliano said, with the patience he had struggled to master.
"Why, Moctezuma Morelos." Old Huerta scratched his stubbly thatch.
"Batman!" squealed a bare-footed urchin.
"Moctezuma Morelos is coming here?" Miliano said dully.
"He has heard of us! He knows we exist!"
"Batman viene!"
Elena was pressing Miliano's black suit with a flat iron.
"What are you doing?" he demanded.
"You must look your best."
"I belong to the people. I will wear what they wear." He glanced down at his flapping white trousers, his open sandals.
"Miliano." She tilted the iron to the vertical plane, and inspected him with her almond eyes. "You are their lawyer, their licenciado. The one who went to university. They are proud of you. They want to show you off, to these big men who are coming to Aguilas Negras. They want you to appear as what you are. You do not have to playact, like a chilango from the capital."
Elena was right, of course. She so often was. The people of Aguilas Negras called her La Profesora, because she read books and taught school with more passion than anyone could recall.
She said, "Moctezuma Morelos is coming because he needs you. And because he wants to use you."
Miliano was shocked, both by the importance his wife attributed to him and by her disrespect for the leader of the opposition front, the man who was the rightful President of Mexico.
"There are a thousand Milianos," he objected. "There is only one Moctezuma Morelos."
"It is just the other way. Any child in the street can play Batman. Your Moctezuma Morelos played the games of the PRI for long enough, didn't he? He sat there in the capital, fattening himself on bribes like the rest of those thieves. When he knew they would never make him President, he joined the opposition. The people are nothing to him. Nothing! That is why he fears you. And why he needs you."
"I don't understand what you're talking about."
"Because somewhere—in between cocktail parties —Morelos has heard that in Mexico, revolutions begin in the north! Because you are one of those holy idiots who means what he says! Because you won't be scared off! Because, Miliano, you don't begin to understand what you mean to our people, do you? Do you understand why unarmed men—women with babies in their arms— face machine guns with your name on their lips? Do you?"
"No." Miliano stood abashed.
"God save us all!"
Elena was shaking violently. Miliano put his arms about her. He rocked her gently, as he had rocked the baby.
"If it were just a question of us—of the children—" she began.
"It is. You are my life. You know I would die for you."
"But it isn't just us, Miliano," she responded fiercely. Her breath came in dragging rasps. "If every good man says that—that all that matters is his family— then what hope is there for the downtrodden of this earth?"
Her intensity scared him a little.
"You will fight," she told him. "I will send you into battle. But you will fight on your own ground."
And for that moment, they both believed that he really might make a difference.
* * * * *
The town of Aguilas Negras straggled along Route 47, in the state of Chihuahua, sixty miles from Torreón. It was hard country, friendly only to Spanish bayonet, the murderous, spiked espadas that slit boot-leather and flesh to touch the bone, and the white scorpion, whose sting is usually fatal. To a driver lead-pedaling down from Ciudad Juárez, on the border, Miliano's town passed in a forgettable blur of low shacks along the highway—a couple of vulcanizadoras, or retread shops, a shabby restaurant whose sign read El Rey de Cabrito, a motel that hadn't seen a paying customer since Humphrey Bogart walked the Sierra Madre. Off the main drag was a scruffy-town plaza with the church on one side and the Centro Comunal, with its pool tables, on the other. Six blocks from the plaza, where Miliano's two-bedroom house stood, the streets were unpaved, and street lights were few and far between. It was an old-fashioned town. Mothers and black-shrouded duenas, or chaperones, kept a chilly watch over the Saturday night paseos in the plaza when the boys circled one way and the girls the other, signaling with their eyes. The government had never done much for Aguilas Negras. The PRI had never won a II clean election there.
This was Pancho Villa country, and Miliano was reared on romantic tales of Villa and the Division del Norte. The stories came firsthand, from Miliano's grandfather; everyone in the town called him Colonel, a title that must have been handed out by the bushel when Villa ruled the north. Drunk, the old colonel croaked the ballads of the f revolutionary army. Sober, the colonel talked of battles and troop deployments. He talked wildly of burning out landowners, of capturing Mexico City. And of murder ; and treachery, promises betrayed. Then his face would i darken, and he would lean in toward young Miliano.
Between the gusts of hot breath, his counsel was always the same: "No floje! Don't quit!"
Revolution was in Miliano's blood.
3
"I have something you really ought to see." It was Chuck Freeling, Kreeger's Mexico analyst, on the house phone. "Can you give me ten minutes, in my office?"
Freeling had a home video of a rally that had taken place a few days earlier, in the hippodrome outside the northern city of San Luís Potosí. The film was out of focus, and what looked like a dust-devil swirling around the race track didn't help the visibility.
Kreeger saw a huge banner advertising the Mexican-American League for Decency. Beneath it, the standards of a dozen or more political organizations and labor unions. They covered the spectrum from the radical left to the free-market right. On the platform, well-fed ranchers and lawyers sat beside sleek, cynical union bosses and wild-eyed student leaders.
"Nice operation," Kreeger remarked. In normal times, the men on the platform would be trying to cut each other's throats.
"That's the guy to watch." The camera zoomed in on a slight, sinewy Mexican with longish black hair and a droopy mustache who was taking the microphone. He was dressed in the white, baggy clothes of a farm laborer. To look at, he was nothing special. But as he spoke, the crowd grew unnaturally still, then erupted into a kind of religious frenzy when he said something that struck a nerve.
Through the roar of the crowd, the voice from the microphone was deep and compelling. The force of barely controlled emotion ran through it on high voltage wires.
"He's good." Kreeger conceded. "He doesn't say como this and como that, like your typical Mexican politician. He cuts to the chase."
"Watch the crowd. He's playing them like a stringed instrument."
"Who is he?"
"Emiliano Rojas. They call him Miliano. As in Zapata."
"What have we got on him?"
"Comes from a little town called Aguilas Negras, in the Laguna district. His granddaddy was an illiterate muleteer who fought with Pancho Villa. Miliano is the first member of his family who got any real education. He got a scholarship to UNAM. I guess those Marxist professors got to him. But he's an idealist, not an ideologue. He worked in the Ministry of Agrarian Reform for a while, until they sent him back home to screw the peasants. He's got a feud going with the local boss up in Chihuahua, name of Lobo Terrazzas. A few years back, the government decided to show it was democratic by allowing opposition people to capture a few municipalities.. Miliano ran for mayor of his town, as an independent, and he won by a landslide. The electoral tribunal had1 orders to respect the voters' decision, but Lobo Terrazzas ; didn't like it. When Miliano started defending peasants' rights, Lobo sent pistoleros to shoot him out of the town1: hall. I hear this Lobo also raped Miliano's sister."
The story contained many tragedies, but in Mexico, that was almost commonplace. The man in the videotape was not. He had a presence—a charisma, even—that was rarely seen in national politics.
"Who owns him?" Kreeger demanded.
"Nobody owns him, so far as we know. He's also clean. Lives very modestly, sells his legal services for a chicken or the promise of one. His backing is mostly from the left, but this rally could mean he's reaching for a broader base."
"Or somebody's reaching for him. Okay, you got my attention. Let's keep an eye on Miliano."
Today, Miliano did what his wife told him. He wore his black suit and a black tie as well, a statement that he was in mourning for the campesinos machine-gunned in Hidalgo, and for a people cheated of its rightful leadership. Today, however, there would be no video cameras.
The plaza of Aguilas Negras was full of Miliano's neighbors and supporters. A few heavies who worked for Lobo Terrazzas, the local boss for the ruling party, lolled in the shade of the cantina. Some angry men—peasants whose land (or women) had been stolen—moved toward them, and the thugs retreated inside.
Miliano's attention was diverted by a gap-toothed kid who ran across the square screaming, "Batman! Batman! Ya viene!"
He was followed in short order by a truckload of straw-hatted men from the Campesinos for Moctezuma organization, who appeared to be posing for a bronze monument. Next came a lead car, full of bodyguards in dark glasses. Then the big car, with the white-red banner of the National Renovation fluttering over its prow.
Cabrón, Miliano swore inside his head. It was a Mercedes station wagon. The kids were more impressed by the fancy wheels than by the tall, loose-boned man in the back.
"Batman!"
Moctezuma Morelos waved his hand.
The crowd parted. The Mercedes nosed forward, to the very edge of the podium.
He was coming. As Moctezuma Morelos got out of the car, Miliano advanced to greet him. He nodded pleasantly at Miliano, and handed him his hat and his stick. Miliano stared at them in blank amazement as the rightful President of Mexico ascended the podium. He had been treated like a footman.
It is nothing, he reminded himself. Personal feelings are nothing. Great men are forgiven almost everything. This is our great man. This is our hope.
The kids were yelling: "Batman! Batman!"
The amplifiers were not working properly, and Moctezuma Morelos was having trouble raising the microphone to his mouth. He was very tall, and whiter than Miliano had expected. A real gachupín. How come he carried the name of an Aztec emperor? Miliano wondered.
No! Miliano rebuked himself. He must not think such things. The leader was talking. His leader. The speakers crackled and failed. Three rows back, the crowd could not hear him. Miliano walked briskly to one of the speakers. The wires at the back had been neatly severed.
He was calling to Fabio, who ran a retread shop and would know how to fix such things, when he heard the shots. Actually, he did not so much hear them as feel them, a sense of movement in the air, like a taut string released. He sensed, before he saw, Moctezuma Morelos grabbing at his throat, at his collarbone. He turned to see the chosen one arch up and then fall over backward.
Miliano's shouts were lost in the tide of voices.
He waded through them, up onto the podium. He held the lost leader in his arms. He saw, indistinctly, Moctezuma's bodyguards with their guns out, ranging the plaza for targets. Some of his own people had already raced into the cantina. Inside, there was gunplay. More men were dying.
