Chapter Eight
“La Opinión de Los Cabos” mostly exists merely because nobody really cares. It’s a slipshod, fuzzy little muck sheet with almost no advertising and a whimsical publication schedule in a town with more glossy magazines, slick English language papers, and colorful guides to nightlife than any place in Mexico twice its size.
The slick publications are full of ads for time shares and other less transparent real estate scams, with articles and editorial slant appropriate to people who line up to pay twenty years of apartment rent in advance or purchase land that doesn’t belong to the person selling it, but “La Opinion” is only available in the dusty shanty towns sprawling out around the glitzy tourist developments by the beaches and harbor and its readership is barely worth advertising to.
Most of the muck it rakes is common knowledge: the use of Fonatur funds to feather the beds of landlords and speculators, the rip-off of public beaches to sell condominiums whose profits accrue mostly to foreign investors and English speaking salespeople, forced taxation to build “co-operative” road projects that by-pass the businesses coerced into sponsoring them, the intricate payoff systems of local prostitutes, pimps, disco impresarios and cops. But seeing such things in print always makes them seem more real, especially if done with the right blend of tasty name-calling and righteous outrage.
Oddly, true press censorship in Mexico is rare, other than bumping off an odd journalist now and again, which only makes the profession about as dangerous as presidential candidacy. It’s easier just to put papers who say the right things about the right people get put on the government payroll and allow brash little rags to fulminate until they starve out, because nobody cares. Not even Oswaldo Vargas, the publisher; a chain-smoking, womanizing brute with bulging glasses and a fake University ring, ever really cared about “La Opinion’s” opinions. He just wanted to flog the populist dog long enough to build up a circulation and credibility worth buying off.
But Primitivo Garza cared. He’d worked for “La Opinion” since he was fourteen; walking thorough the dusty, baking streets, pedaling his runcible bicycle around from shop to restaurant to junkyard, collecting copy, selling ads, circulating issues, gathering gossip and obsequios. Without prior experience, he had applied himself to Vargas’ battered Argus until he was the paper’s photographer of choice. He wrote many of the exposes and a wicked pseudonymous gossip column that was the paper’s most popular feature. He knew how to run the jury-rigged AB Dick press and how to interview the mayor. He was, in many ways, the only real journalist in town. He was twenty years old and starting to think about his next career move.
Nobody actually called him Primitivo. The few Americans who met him took his nickname name in the Hawaiian surfer sense, but primo means “cousin” in Spanish, and in Mexico is more vividly used as a synonym for “sucker” or “chump”. Doc had commented on that when the two first met and Primo had given him his turned-down smile and said, “I think of it as a pen name in the tradition of Candide.”
Doc spent several hours roaming the little taco stands in the main colonia before seeing Primo’s junkyard bike in front of Tacos Tumbras, an A-frame of corrugated metal where young guys with jobs hung out to drink beer and play video games. Doc grabbed a cold Fanta from the refrigerator, rubbed the cold bottle on his sweaty face, then sat down at one of the rickety tables. Primo slid away from the group of young waiters and cabbies he’d been talking to and joined him. Which surprised them, since Primo spoke no English and did not generally like Americans.
He and Doc had met five years earlier at a photo exhibition for charity and Primo owed a lot of his photo know-how to the crash course Doc had given him. Doc thought of Primo as the chief supply of reliable information about Los Cabos. And Primo didn’t disappoint him. In fact, he blew his doors off.
As soon as Doc mentioned the disappearance, he nodded and said it was hot topic of gossip, as the woman herself had been. He had been poking around, trying to find out more about her, a story to run under her picture in La Opinion. Gorgeous blondes in bikinis are always newsworthy in Mexican papers. He’d interviewed Roberto about her after the tennis match, but got little he could print. Now, with the kidnapping an open secret, he’d gotten more inquisitive. It had the smell of big scoop about it, possibly big enough to get him a shot at “Alarma” or one of the other big tabloids, get him some recognition.
“So you already know about the kidnapping,” Doc asked. “It hasn’t been publicized or released.”
“Oh, everyone knows she’s been sequestered,” Primo deadpanned. “The discussion now is over where she’s been taken.”
“I suppose you have some theories on the subject?”
“It seems that I do. She was most likely flown from Los Cabos to Mazatlán the night after the tennis match.”
Doc was as much amused as surprised by the understated pronouncement, “How the hell could you know that, Primo?”
“I’m a journalist.”
“Yeah, and I’m a photographer. But I don’t happen to have recent pictures of Elvis if anyone just happens to fall by and inquire.”
“Putting something on a plane is not like tossing it into your car. The airport is full of people looking at things. I talk to those people.”
“She walked on a plane of her own free will?”
“No, she was probably carried on wrapped in a blanket. If it was her.”
“Carried on in a blanket? What the hell airline was this?”
“It was a private plane.”
“Ah, so. A private plane which filed a flight plan for Mazatlán, because you checked with some cuates you just happen to know in the tower.”
“Correct. Airports are frequently rich sources of news, you know.”
The kid was enjoying this too damn much, there was a lot more.
“And you checked the registration of the plane?”
“The registration numbers were false, and the plane is probably owned by a complicated linkage of corporations.”
“Probably?”
“Well, I would assume so. Seeing who it seems to belong to.”
“Come on, Primo. If you were that good, you’d be working for a real paper, not this “Opinion” rag.”
“That might be right around the corner. The plane is a Gulfstream G-4 that almost certainly belongs to Armando Lios Leyva.”
“Holy Guacamole. What makes you think that?”
“It’s been a hot rumor for a week, ever since the plane came in. The whole landing and hanger setup was so hush-hush that notoriety was inevitable. These guys are hilarious. They go to such lengths to be anonymous, but they’re flying personal aircraft and traipsing around in Ferraris with bodyguards.”
“So we’re talking rumors among security guards and maintenance crews.”
“Primarily. But I’m most convinced because of what I saw on the plane myself.”
“Get outta here, Primo.”
“The cleaning crew allowed me to come on their ladders and look through the windows at some length. I noticed that everything, including the blankets and towels, was embroidered with a stylized eagle with wings formed from two L’s.”
“An eagle.”
“Sound like Lios? You’ve heard the song, right? “The Nayarit Eagle?”
Doc nodded and the kid went on, “Then too, the provisioning concession washed a load of dishes from the plane, including a matte black coffee cup with a metallic silver feather on one side and a large initial “A” in silver on the other. They also restocked the galley and bar. Six fifths of Orendain Tequila. Ollitas Reposada. Lios Leyva’s favorite brand if you believe folklore.”
Folklore was a good name for it. Lios Leyva was like Robin Hood in Mexico. “The Nayarit Eagle” had been one of the early narco-corridos, the old folk/cowboy ballads of betrayal, border badness and death, now twisted around to modern realities. A classic right up there with the Tigres del Norte’s, “Ballad of a Squealer,” or “Pedro Navaja”, the Mexican version of “Mack the Knife”.
“The Grey Pickup” was one corrido that even got made into a movie, a film like “Massacre in Matamoros” and all the others about wetbacks with drugs and guns crashing the border to waste mafiosos and migras, fuck blonde gringas, and return rich and triumphant to Mexico. Doc had once tried to explain the concept of “The American Dream” to his cellmate in a Mexican prison, then asked him if there was an equivalent Mexican Dream. Sure, the guy had said, to go to America.
Well, Armando Lios Leyva was another form of Mexican Dream and there had been talk of making a movie of his corrido, too: an exultation in the drugs, women, and power of a local boy gone bad and made good. But the project never made it to the big screen, even with a dozen popular actors, including Vicente Fernadez, lobbying for the role.
“Okay. Sounds like he’s the guy. But you’re saying you were interested in the woman herself.” Doc probed for more, knowing he’d have to drag every inch out of the smug paperboy.
“Everyone was. She’s something entirely else. And it’s more than her body and face. She just looks famous. I was trying to get a line on who she was, especially after I heard she humiliated Roberto. But by then…”
“She was grabbed up and flown out of here unconscious on the private plane of one the country’s biggest drug kingpins. Wonderful.”
“I thought it was a rare stroke of luck. I have pictures of the plane and the woman. I plan on doubling our usual print run. I’m talking Vargas into raising the cover price of the issue.”
“Glad it makes YOUR job nicer.”
“But not yours?”
“Not really. I’m supposed to find out where she ended up.”
“Ah, that might be difficult. And dangerous, of course.”
“But since Lios is one of the most famous men in the country and everyone knew he was here, you probably have his whole itinerary, right?”
“Well, no. The thing is, nobody really knows what he looks like. He’s not too publicity-minded, you know. There have been pictures of him published. Maybe. But very old, grainy, and fuzzy. People who sing about him and talk about him and think he should buy us enough good players to win the World Cup wouldn’t know him if he sat down beside them on the train.”
“But he must be seen occasionally. Like here, for instance.”
“Not much. And only in a group of bodyguards. Any one of them could be him. For awhile a photographer from ‘Ocho Columnas’ in Guadalajara thought he had him identified, but it turned out to be an old-time assassin from Mexico City named Jaime Ramos Hurtado, one of Lios Leyva’s top men. A lot of people saw the pictures, though, and would identify Ramos as Lios Leyva.”
“Great. So we have a bigtime kidnapping. Unless she just took off with Lios for kicks.”
“Unlikely. The room was broken up, furniture smashed, blood found in several places. The local tourism bosses don’t like people hearing about things like that, which is why the police are keeping it quiet.” Primo gave another of his inverted smiles, “But the maids aren’t.”
“But they don’t mind having you print it?”
“Actually, they came by especially to remind me not to. You know Captain Espinosa?”
“Espinosa Huerta, with the state police? A pretty tough customer.”
“Oh, he was subtle enough. But he made himself pretty clear. So I haven’t decided how long to hold it.”
“One of these days you’re going to get in a lot of ugly trouble for the stuff you write.”
“Well, I hope so. It’s the only way you get any respect.”
“Let’s talk about your immediate future.”