Méndez and Athos left. They glanced through the thin rectangular window in the door of the second interview room. The state police detective who had been caught harboring the illegal immigrants slumped in his chair, a caricature of dejection. Abelardo Tapia, the second deputy chief of the Diogenes Group, sat across from the prisoner. He was scribbling industriously on a legal pad. The bearded Tapia was all shoulders and belly and-despite his reputation as a bone-crusher-good cheer. So Méndez called him Porthos.
“Who is the state policeman?” Méndez asked.
“De Rosa,” Athos answered. “One of Mauro’s protégés in the homicide squad. Fat and sleazy. This monkey always liked making money. He owns the safe house.”
As they watched through the window, De Rosa leaned forward over the legal pad, which his interrogator turned at an angle so the prisoner could read it. De Rosa nodded morosely and scribbled on the pad with his right hand. His left hand was chained to the leg of the table. Porthos beamed and wrote, chatting all the while.
“What is Porthos doing with the pad?” Méndez asked.
“De Rosa is terrified that we are wired for sound,” Athos muttered. “But they go way back from when Porthos worked on the homicide unit. Porthos convinced him to give us information off the record. They are writing down the real questions and answers while they talk about trivialities. They’ve been at it for a while.”
The headquarters of the Diogenes Group was a prime eavesdropping target for other Mexican police forces, intelligence agencies and drug mafias. After the discovery of phone taps, Isabel Puente, an American federal agent who worked with Méndez, had recommended a San Diego private investigation firm that did contract work for her government. The Americans did periodic electronic sweeps free of charge. If anyone was bugging the Diogenes Group, it was with the help of the gringos.
“What will De Rosa want for his cooperation?” Méndez asked.
“I think the fat slob would like to avoid the state penitentiary.”
“Alright. Put him in the Eighth Street Jail instead. Special federal custody.”
Méndez went into the adjoining house and upstairs to his office, which had once been the master bedroom. The walls held a portrait of the current president of Mexico, a portrait of former president Lázaro Cárdenas, a crucifix, diplomas, a poster of Salvador Allende, and a poster from a concert by Carlos Santana at the seaside bullring in Playas de Tijuana. The bookshelves contained a mix of English and Spanish titles about organized crime, law enforcement, politics and sociology, as well as literature: Arriaga, Benedetti, Borges, García Márquez, Paz, Poniatowska, Vargas Llosa, Volpi. There was a row of books about the border. There were caps, mugs, plaques and other trinkets from U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agencies. And a matchstick sculpture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
The bay window behind Méndez’s desk offered a view of Mexican territory just south of the port of entry: an epic convergence of legal and illegal commerce and migration. Vendors hawked ceramic Bart Simpsons and Porky Pigs and Virgins of Guadalupe. Buses loaded up with legal crossers bound for California’s far-flung Mexican-American strongholds. Armed with binoculars and cell phones, smuggling lookouts posted on the multicolored pedestrian bridge spanning the crowded car lanes scanned the U.S. inspectors in their booths to see whom they could outwit-or which of their paid-off yanqui allies was on the job today.
Méndez turned from the window and picked up the phone. His secretary told him the state attorney general’s office wanted to discuss the arrest of the state police detective as soon as possible. There was also a message to call Araceli Aguirre, the state human rights commissioner.
Méndez went into the bathroom and washed his face. He looked tired; the lines slanting from the base of his nose to the corners of his mouth seemed especially pronounced. Back at his desk, he took a breath and dialed the number of the apartment in Berkeley, California, where his wife and five-year-old son now lived. As the phone rang, he remembered the last conversation: the long silences with his wife, his son’s distractedness. He thought back to the grim good-bye at the airport. He hung up without waiting to see if anyone answered.
For the next hour or so, he made phone calls, read reports and scanned newspapers. He listened to the group Molotov and Silvio Rodríguez, the Cuban singer-composer, on his computer’s compact disc player. At eleven-thirty, two American journalists arrived for an interview.
Their visit was the idea of a friend at City Hall who had worked with Méndez at a newspaper long ago. The friend wanted the Americans to meet Méndez, to learn about a group of police in Tijuana who were fighting the good fight. Contacts in the U.S. press could be helpful, a shield for Méndez and his officers. On the other hand, they could also cause him grief.
Here’s a yanqui who is going to waste my time, Méndez grumbled to himself as he welcomed a television reporter with a Captain America jaw, a beefy frame in a tan sport coat, and a silver helmet of hair that looked labor-intensive. The newspaper reporter, a bright-eyed young woman with frizzy blond hair, wore a shaggy sweater, jeans and hiking boots. She greeted him in confident Spanish, then stayed quiet and watchful while the TV guy made small talk. Her name was Steinberg. Méndez’s friend at City Hall had said that she was not the typical American reporter who talked instead of listening and confused being aggressive with being obnoxious.
His secretary served coffee. The TV reporter, whose first or last name was Dennis, appraised the diplomas on the wall.
“I see you went to Michigan,” he said in an Olympian broadcast voice.
“Just a year. Graduate studies in Latin American literature. I did the work in Spanish, fortunately or no, so my English is not so good. In reality, it was exile: I had political problems here at those times.”
“Go, Blue,” Dennis said, pumping a genial fist at him. “Primo football up there, right?”
Méndez’s smile wavered. He wondered if the man really thought he had ever attended a football game. For Méndez, Michigan had been an icy wasteland full of fraternity-house brutes, spoiled suburbanites and addled drug users who united on fall Saturdays for a fascistic spectacle.
Méndez told the reporters the history of the Diogenes Group. How it had formed a year earlier because of pressure from Mexico City and Washington to do something about lawlessness in Mexico in general and in Tijuana in particular. How big shots in Mexico City had surprised Méndez by asking him to resign as state human rights commissioner and lead the new unit. How Méndez had resisted because of his aversion to the country’s new ruling coalition, which he had derisively called “Jurassic Park” in public statements. How he had reluctantly accepted because of his respect for the Secretary, the high-ranking security official who had proposed the anticorruption initiative with him in mind. The unit consisted of thirty carefully selected officers from the federal, state and city forces, as well as investigators from his human rights commission. U.S. federal agents had helped screen and train the officers.
“As you know, in Mexico the journalists and people of human rights often do the job that should be of the police and prosecutors. So we are not newcomers.”
Dennis asked the predictable question about the unit’s name.
“Our formal name is the Unidad Especial Contra Corrupción Pública y Crimen Organizado. A horrible acronym. The Special Unit Against Public Corruption and Organized Crime. When we presented ourselves to the press, a reporter said: ‘Listen, Licenciado, let’s speak clearly: Your mission is to hunt bad policemen, correct?’ And I said the first thing that occurred to me. I said that in this city, unfortunately, I look at it another way: We are like Diogenes. We are hunting for honest policemen. We hope to help them, encourage them. And while we do that, since honest ones are hard to find, we will arrest as many dishonest ones as we can. There was a lot of complaints about my declarations. But everybody calls us the Diogenes Group.”