The Arraignment

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A few minutes before nine in the morning, the lobby of the Casa Turquesa is empty except for a girl at the small desk by the door.

“Buenos dias.” She smiles and asks me if I want to take breakfast at the restaurant out by the pool deck.

Instead I order a cab.

Twenty minutes later, the driver drops me off in an area of old Cancun, on a street called Tankah Calle. Here the shops are not as glitzy as out near the beaches in the hotel zone. The buildings are mostly two and three stories, dingy.

Cancun is now a city of a million people and has the feel of a quiet, rustic town that may have grown a little too fast. There are modern shops jammed in between stucco buildings that look as if they date to the forties. The streets are crowded with cars, most of them honking horns, the Mexican equivalent of brakes.

I look for an address along the sidewalk and then realize the number I’m looking for is on the other side of the street. I hustle between cars and take a few honks crossing over, and then I walk half a block.

I see the name on a sign hanging out over the sidewalk before I see the number. ANTIQUITIES BIBLIOTECA.

Nick had misspelled it in his little handheld. I had gotten up early and checked the Cancun phone book this morning, suspecting that I would probably find it. The telephone number in the book matched the one in the memo pad of Nick’s device, if you ignored the international code for Mexico.

From out on the sidewalk I see an “open” sign hanging on the glass door, so I head for it. I can see a woman inside at the counter talking to a gentleman, his back to me.

My hand is nearly to the doorknob when he turns to give me a profile.

I pull my hand back in and walk quickly past the door and continue on until I find a newspaper rack three shops down. I drop a few Mexican coins in the slot and grab an edition of a Cancun paper I can’t read. I sit down on a bench and open it.

Six minutes pass before Nathan Fittipaldi comes out of the front door of the antiquities shop. He comes this way, so I hold the paper up in front of my face until he passes, crosses the street, and then I follow him.

Two blocks down, he enters a parking garage, walking down the ramp and disappearing into the shadows. I stand across the street from the exit with the newspaper and keep an eye. A minute or so later, a large Lincoln Town Car rolls up the ramp with a driver in the front seat. The back windows are tinted, but the driver has to stop to pay the charges at the exit booth.

Through the windshield I see Fittipaldi sitting behind the driver in the backseat. Next to him is a woman, blond hair and dark glasses, snuggled up to him. It seems Dana has found the time to vacation in Mexico.

By ten-thirty I am back at the hotel where I find Adam in the restaurant having breakfast.

“Where were you? I called your room, but there was no answer.”

“I decided to take a walk, get a little exercise.”

“How was it?”

“Good.”

“Listen, I’ve thought about our schedule here. We don’t have a lot of time,” he says. “Unless you want to hold over and take a commercial jet back.”

I have to be back in the office on Monday, I tell him.

“Then I think it might be best if we use today to scout out the brothers down on the coast. What do you think?”

“I thought we would talk to the father.”

Herman and Julio are at a table far enough away so we can talk and not be overheard. The cabana, restaurant, and bar by the pool are empty. Adam is wearing a pair of heavy tan pants and boots with a light nylon slipover shirt.

“I thought it might be wise to wait until Friday before talking to Pablo Ibarra. I had my office call his and tell him I was coming down on business. I told them to keep it vague. He knows I’m with the same firm as Nick was. We have a tentative appointment for tomorrow evening. Now, if you want to change it, I can.”

“No. That’s fine.”

“I suspect that the answers ultimately lie with the old man,” he says. “But I am also afraid that if we hit him dead on, not knowing more, that Pablo Ibarra will stonewall us. He has nothing to gain by talking to us, unless he thinks we know more than we do.”

“How do we do that?”

“You read his letter to Nick,” he says. “What do you think he was trying to say?”

“He was telling Nick to back off.”

“Right. To leave his sons alone. Nick had something on the sons or they were doing something that the father didn’t like. We have to make Pablo Ibarra suspect that we know what that was.”

“I’m listening.”

“We need to take a look at their operation. At least have some clue as to what they’re doing.”

Adam’s plan seems to make sense.

“I had Julio’s people scout the location down on the coast.”

“When?”

“When I called and told them I needed them to meet us here. I was trying to figure how to use what little time we had the best way we could. Two of his people took one of the cars yesterday, went down the coast, and checked the place out. They found it.”

“Then why don’t we go?”

“That’s what I thought.”

An hour later we’re headed down the coast, back past the airport.

In the sunlight the terrain looks different. The resorts are like alabaster palaces set against the turquoise waters of the Caribbean.

The water is so clear I am told that divers swear they are peering through air. Through breaks of jungle and rises in the highway, I can see rolling waves, white beaches, the shoreline dotted with coral inlets and reefs of basalt.

Traffic on the road moves at a clip, in places narrowing to two lanes, then opening again for passing. There are very few vehicles, just an occasional tourist bus, mostly empty, and a chartered van for scuba divers on their way to a remote beach.

Overhead the sky is clear and bright. But in the distance above the jungle to the south, it is leaden. Every few seconds I can see tiny threads of fire as lightning strikes the jungle floor fifty or sixty miles ahead of us.

Large land crabs scurry across the road, moving like giant spiders from jungle to jungle, across the strip of pavement separating them from the sea.

Adam fills me in on the two Ibarra brothers, Arturo and Jaime. He has a thin file compiled by Julio’s firm, pulled together and faxed from the home office in Mexico City this morning.

“Took a quick look at it this morning when I got up,” he says.

“Three years apart in age,” he says. “Arturo is the mover, shaker, the businessman, if you want to call it that. Jaime is muscle, all the way to the area between the ears. He has a bad reputation for temper. He killed a man in a fight four years ago in a private club and got off on a theory of self-defense. He has a few minor convictions, but an extensive arrest record.” What Adam is saying is, “What you would expect for the wayward son of a wealthy man?”

“It starts as a juvenile with auto theft, graduates two years ago with attempted murder. It seems the old man’s money has been able to keep him out of the slammer thus far. Though that may not work much longer if what we hear is true, that there’s a falling-out between father and sons.”

“Any narcotics?” I ask.

“Eight years ago,” says Adam. “Let’s see.” He licks his thumb and turns a page. “Here it is. Both of the sons were arrested. It was dismissed for lack of evidence. Federal Judicial Police believed they were into cocaine, growing it out in the jungles down in the area we’re going to today.”

“Anything in the states?”

He looks, peruses the record in the file for several seconds, and turns some pages. “Doesn’t look like it. There is a credit report. It shows they have bank accounts in several foreign countries, Belize and the Caymans, nothing huge, but continuous activity.”

“So they’re making money doing something,” I say.

“It would appear,” says Adam. “They applied for a loan about four months ago, listed assets including the last major deposit. That was about eight months ago, just shy of three hundred thousand dollars, U.S. So they’ve got something going.” Adam takes a deep breath, closes the file, and we settle in for the ride.

An hour on and we see large signs along the road for something called Xcaret. Julio explains that this is a water theme park built around Mayan ruins. Families come for the day. For a fee they can swim in the natural lagoon or play in the artificial waterways constructed by the developers with the blessings of the government.

The Mayan Riviera has its moments, incredible natural beauty and undisturbed jungle, with pockets of tourist wealth. We pass a number of these. Most of the resorts are closed off behind iron gates, with armed guards in kiosks out in front.

From what I can see, the tourists who stay in the resorts pass along the road in air-conditioned comfort, only coming and going.

Real life is out here. Traveling at seventy miles an hour, we come upon periodic migrations along the shoulder of the highway. Groups of men walking along the road dressed in shirts and jeans four sizes too large for them.

“There must be a town,” I tell Julio.

“Ah, villages. All over,” he says, “in the jungle.”

“Where are they going?”

“They look for work,” he says.

Every few miles there’s another band, trudging along the sandy roadside in cast-off athletic shoes, some of them trailing wives and children, little kids, scrubbed and carried by their mothers, with their older brothers and sisters walking along in the dust. Like their parents, looking for a way to feed themselves for another day. I cannot help but think of Sarah at home, and what she would think, looking at kids her age unable to go to school, having to scratch the soil to eat.

Adam leans over and says: “Even for this, the natural forces of the economy have an answer.” I begin to think he can read my mind.

“And what’s that?”

“It’s why it didn’t make any sense that the Ibarras would be talking to Metz, trying to bring heavy equipment down here. There’s your answer.” He points off in the distance, a mile or so ahead, a bald part of the landscape where something has hacked away at the jungle. As we draw closer I recognize it: a construction site.

“That’s where they’re all going,” he says.

The place looks like an Egyptian tomb-building scene out of the The Ten Commandments. A vast anthill of men, too many to count, wielding shovels and pushing wheelbarrows, not a single piece of heavy equipment anywhere in sight. Even concrete is being mixed in a series of large tumblers on location, no modern cement trucks.

“It’s what didn’t make any sense when you told me about the story Metz gave you. When labor is plentiful and cheap, why would you bring bulldozers and backhoes?” says Adam. “Besides, the government down here doesn’t favor it. You don’t get to depreciate your equipment in Mexico. You’re expected to hire your countrymen. Give them jobs. Did you notice the hotel staff last night?”

“What about them?”

“Veritable army,” says Adam. “It took three of them to lead each of us to our rooms, one to lead the way, one to carry our luggage, and one to follow along, I suppose to make sure we weren’t ambushed from behind. Mexico is learning how to avoid revolutions,” he says. “You have to admire them for the effort.”

“You sound like you travel down here regularly.”

“Enough. I like the people. Friendly. What you see is what you get.”

“Then why all the security?” I ask.

“I’m a humanitarian,” says Adam, “not a fool.” Something catches his eye. He leans forward and talks into Julio’s ear over the seat in front.

When he settles back, he looks at me and points off to our left. “That’s Puerto Adventuras up ahead there. It’s a resort. Has a fleet of good fishing boats. Have you ever done any deep-sea sport fishing?”

“No. I’ve had clients that are into it, though.”

“You should try it sometime. We’re going to stop there on the way back for dinner. We may spend the night, depending on how late it is.”

“I didn’t bring a change of clothes, toothbrush, or anything else.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll go native,” he says. “Besides, anything we need we can find there.”

We pass several signs with the word Cenote, each of these listing kilometers. I ask Julio about these.

He tells me that the Mayans considered them sacred watering holes. They worshiped at these caverns in the limestone under the jungle where large quantities of fresh water gathered, sometimes running in underground rivers.

“There are many of them in the jungle down here. Some of the Indians take their water from them even today. You want to be careful, though,” he says. “Watch out for ah… how do you say? Caiman.”

“Gators. Big ones,” says Herman. “What he’s tellin’ you is, you get off the road, you wanna watch where you take a drink.”

I make a mental note, not that I’m planning on drinking anything that doesn’t come out of a sealed bottle.

A few minutes farther up the road, and Julio is looking at a map spread open on his lap. He’s talking in Spanish into the handheld wireless again. “Aqui. No, no, no, no, aqui.”

The lead car throws on its brakes and suddenly turns left across the highway without a signal. The car doing at least forty. We all follow, a Mexican intersection.

We bounce along on a sand-strewn road into the strip of jungle between the highway and the coast, my body bucking in the seat belt. We travel for a few miles.

As we approach a rise in the road, Julio issues orders for the cars to slow down. Finally we stop. He marks the place on the map with his finger and confers with Herman, who seems to agree. Then Julio gets out of the car and runs up to the lead vehicle. The man in the passenger seat of that car gets out, and the two of them take off up the road, on foot.

They are gone for about five minutes, when I see Julio coming back toward us, a few steps and a skip as he hustles down the road. He finally reaches the car. Adam pushes the button, rolling down his window.

“This es the place.” Julio is out of breath, perspiration running down his forehead and cheeks, dripping from his chin. “You will want to take a look.”

Adam closes the window and gets out. He tells the driver to keep the motor running and the air-conditioning on.

I climb out on the other side while Julio opens the back of the car and fishes around for something. He comes up with a bottle of water, takes a long drink. “Senor?” He offers it to me.

I pass.

Then he finds two pairs of field glasses, large Bausch amp; Lomb’s, twelve power, fifty millimeters. He hands one to me and the other to Adam, then leads us back up the road.

It takes three or four minutes uphill and around a bend before we reach the crest where Julio’s helper is still standing, looking toward the sea in the distance. As we approach, he’s crouching, blending into some low jungle foliage at the side of the road.

He speaks to Julio in Spanish and holds up two fingers. He points off in the distance. “Dos hombres fuera de la casa.”

Adam and I settle in next to them. I can see that from this point the jungle declines gently toward a cove and some rocky bluffs on the coast about a mile away. A little to the north, perhaps a half mile from where we stand, is a sizable clearing in the jungle, red clay and naked limestone scraped clean, like a bald spot in a sea of green. I would guess it is several acres in size. Parked on it is an assortment of trash, wrecked-out vehicles and abandoned tires, some larger trucks, old Fords and Chevys, one with a rusted crane on the back that looks like it could be an antique.

The ground is spotted with empty fifty-gallon drums corroding in the sun, some of them dented and tipped on their sides. Splotches of darkness spread from the yawning open ends of these into the soil, the last contents leaking out onto the ground.

On the far side, closest to the bluffs and the sea is a construction trailer, white sides and a flat metal roof with an air conditioner on it, ripples of heat rising from this.

Out in front of the trailer, a few large truck tires laid on their sides with pieces of plywood thrown over them form a crude wooden deck in front of the door that faces this way.

Julio finishes talking to his assistant, then swivels around on his haunches to translate for Adam and me.

“This es a road they don’t use,” he says. “Otra. Over there.” He points. “The other road. They use.”

I lift the field glasses to my eyes and adjust them. On the other side, farther to the north, a winding stretch of brownish red soil wends its way back into the jungle and disappears around a curve.

“My man says two of them are outside the house. The trailer. They are armed.”

I bring the glasses back to my eyes and check it out. I see nothing moving around the trailer. The cars parked closest to it appear to be empty. With the sun now behind us, anyone outside is likely to be around in back of the trailer, in the shade, where we can’t see them.

“We’ll stay here for a few minutes,” says Adam. “It’s getting hot.” He takes off his hat, one of those floppy safari things with a broad canvas brim, then crunches it up and uses it to wipe his forehead.

Julio hands him a bottle of water. Adam uncaps it, takes a drink, and immediately spits it out. “It’s hot,” he says.

Julio shrugs as if to say, “That’s all I’ve got.”

Adam pours the rest over the back of his head and lets it drip down onto the jungle vegetation at his feet, then opens the hat up and puts it back on his head.

“There.”

When I look, Julio is back over my shoulder.

I bring the glasses back to my eyes and train them at the trailer. From the back side a man walks this way, what looks like a short assault rifle of some kind slung from one shoulder, muzzle pointed at the ground. Just as he rounds the corner on the front side of the trailer, the door opens and another man steps out onto the plywood step in front.

I squint into the glasses to make him out. He turns his body away from me just as I focus, awkwardly closing the door with one hand. I notice there is no arm coming out of the other sleeve of his shirt.

When he turns around again I realize why. His arm is bandaged up against his body, shoring up the broken ribs I gave Hector Saldado when I hit him with the tire iron.