“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.”