Chapter Sixteen
Doc chose Calle Matamoros to walk over to Hidalgo, mostly because it took them behind Vallarta’s picturesque church, the drab brick walls exalted by the steeple’s unique open ironwork crown supported by a ring of iron angels. He led Primo a half block out of the way, up a public stairway graced by lion head fountains, to show him the site where he’d taken a shot of the church that had run full page in Conde Nast’s “Traveller”.
Just from the way he approached things and pointed them out, Primo was beginning to see that Doc sought out optimal vistas, carefully prepared outlooks. Ideally he’d want a rare flower framing the foreground, the entire Western Hemisphere in back, and a clear field of fire from high ground, Primo thought. Knowing this made a lot more sense of the way Doc walked around, crossing streets needlessly, curving precisely across plazas.
“Perfect framing of the coast, the steeple and the river mouth,” Doc pointed out, “You can even see the arches at Mismaloya in the daytime. And all those hibiscus and jacaranda down over that guy’s fence. You almost never see any scenics from the back of the steeple like this.”
“I’ve heard of this church,” Primo said.
“It’s pretty famous. In pictures anyway. I suppose I’ve shot it from fifty different angles and still haven’t gotten the one hot shot.”
“No, not that,” Primo was eyeing the church, “I heard…Can we go in and look?”
“I don’t think they need any new altar boys.”
“Well, thank God for that.”
The late mass was over, but the church was still open. The steps in front were empty of tract and miracle sellers, but a lone Mixteca woman still worked her backstrap loom, turning out colorful belts and purses like those that hung on the church wall above her. They swung around a rough-looking young bravo, humbled for the moment as he crossed himself to the Virgin of Guadalupe, finishing the ritual with the uniquely Mexican gesture of kissing his thumbnail, sighting over it as though aiming his pleas right into the pure heart of God’s stainless mother.
He looked closely at the few kneeling petitioners as they walked towards the sacristy. He found churches a continual source of interesting faces and was not disappointed. He spotted despair and rapture mingling in tears dragging down the face of a blocky young peasant, then an old granny whose wrinkles seemed to distill her sorrows over a hundred generations of children poured out to die on the hostile Jalisco soil. Barehanded, Doc tripped his inner shutter at them both, framing them among the candles and gilt and statuary.
Primo was staring up towards the almost impossibly tortured savior, streaked in sweat and blood. When you bring Mexicans a religion that requires people to be impressed by someone else’s suffering, you’d better have a fine talent for depictions of pathos. It wasn’t the cross that was holding his intense gaze, though, but the two painted triangles where the vaults supported the dome. Doc glanced at them, remembering that one showed an Aztec priest cutting a heart out of sacrificial victim, the other stylized Indians kneeling on a beach before a monk with a cross. And a few galleons of armed Spaniards.
“There it is, can you read it?” he asked Doc quietly.
“Yeah, my vision seems to be hanging in there despite my advancing years,” Doc replied, “Must be all the photography or something, but I can still somehow make out nine inch lettering.” He already knew what it was. A pious congratulation to the native peoples that the church fathers had arrived on these shores to deliver them from their violent, bloodthirsty religion.
Primo indicated the bleeding crucifix with a languid hand, and alluded with a shrug to the trail of the Church through Mexico, the millions of dead Indians, the missions built on the blood of slaves. “What would we ever have done if they hadn’t rescued us from that bloody religion?” he asked.
“You’re not a Catholic, you say?” Doc asked.
Primo said, “I am a Marxist, remember?”
“Well, that’s almost as quaint,” Doc nodded, “You get your dogma and guilt there, too–it’s just not as tasty as Church guilt. How old are you, chico?”
“I’ve got twenty years, almost twenty one.”
“Ever heard of George Bernard Shaw? English playwright. I’ll get you a copy of ‘Arms and the Man’ sometime. He once said that if a man is not a Marxist by the age of nineteen there’s something wrong with his heart. And if he’s still a Marxist at age twenty five there’s something wrong with his head.”
“Well, it’s certainly exciting to think I’ll change as I mature.”
“Really? Changing your mind and intellectual growth aren’t very compatible with the Marxist concept.
“Well, I’ve also noticed that journalists frequently fail to grow up.”
“I’ve noticed that, myself.”
“What about hired pistoleros?”
“Strictly Never Never Land. Unfortunately, I’m a photographer now. Development is everything. How’d you hear about that damn painting in the church, by the way?”
“I’m a journalist. Information is my living.”
Primo swiveled his head as they walked up the stone steps and through the elaborate wrought iron and glass doors of Les Artistes. The interior was all white; marble floors, molded stucco walls, enameled furniture. The walls were covered with large, bright paintings in the manner of the French impressionists, colors blazing under the track lights. To the left as they stepped inside was a long white bar with white leather stools. Tanned men and beautiful women filled the place; diamonds dangled from smooth throats, moist cleavage revealed itself and dropped hints, rich fabrics draped in artless elegance. In the far corner a very fat Mexican in a white dinner jacket tinkled Dvorak on a white baby grand. To Primo, just stepping through the floral stained glass foyer was a trip to Europe, time travel to a mythical 1912 Paris, quantum squat tag to Monaco or Morocco. Somewhere that very definitely was not Mexico. He glanced at Doc and said, “Disneylandia.”
“Yep,” Doc said, “And heeeere’s Mickey.”
A very slim man in vested white dinner jacket was leaning an elbow on the bar in a perfect “Casablanca” take. He had petulant lips and tasseled gray-blond curls around a wide brow. He held a thin white glass in one hand, his trim, body and lazy gesture recalling David Niven, his face a spoiled, pouting Bacchus.
He pushed off the bar in a smooth, almost foppish gesture and strode over to them. A radiantly beautiful young Mexican girl in elaborate white satin and lace quickly moved to his side, carrying menus. Six feet from Doc, he pushed his hands into his trouser pockets, thumbs out and pointing down the seams like a model, and rocked back on his heels like someone looking at a used car. “So sorry,” he said, in an affected British accent, “There’s already a Doctor in the house.”
“A proctologist, I imagine,” Doc said, “How you feeling, Harve?”
Harvey Recht turned slightly to one side, the snowy jacket falling open as he spread his hands, with one finger up and one down, in a minimal gesture that converted his costume from “Casablanca” to “Saturday Night Fever” so broadly that even Primo couldn’t mistake it. He said, “You know. Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”
To Primo this costumed actor running a routine on the glittering set of Les Artistes was not that unexpected–the world had obviously decided to devote the night to gaudy theatrics for his personal benefit. He was starting to understand why gringos don’t feel the need for peyote. Harve stepped forward and shook Doc’s hand, giving Primo the pre-warmed smile of a professional flesh-presser. He shook off the girl in the baptism dress and, in perfect Spanish with an urban Argentine accent that sounded even more snotty and stuck-up than his public school British, said, “Well met, gentlemen. Let’s step over to my private boudoir.”
He steered them lightly into a corner booth with high polished hardwood sides, white leather upholstery and white marble tabletop. A glance at the bar brought a waiter almost at a run as Harve leaned over the table and blandly asked, “So who can I do for you?”
Doc first met Harve in Columbia in 1974 when a “Newsweek” editor who had been buying a lot of his shots out of South America and Afghanistan had sent him to Bogotá. They wanted his general look-around, some stock shots for drug and street gang stories…and maybe he could keep an eye open for the vanished Mack Brennan, a young writer Doc had worked with in Chile and taken a strong liking to.
In the country he was quickly inveigled into a group of “cover-story” wire-service people and overt DEA agents, and realized that Brennan’s whereabouts were no big mystery at all. It only required a little infiltration and raid to spring him from some crazed drug thugs with a surrealistic political orientation. But by then Doc had been hot on Brennan’s scent and gone ahead despite his misgivings. His camera and “Newsweek” reputation had suckered a cocky, publicity-hungry teniente enough to create an opening, but when Doc went in seven other guys went right behind him.
Brennan ended up dead, incidental to a massacre of the entire gang. Doc knew he’d been had, and had sworn off government work. He’d also given the DEA head in Bogotá a savage beating. The “Newsweek” editor had been shocked, told him that the guy might never walk right again. Doc told him that Brennan would never breathe again and that he held the editor partially responsible.
He even told his story to some major columnists, including one of Jack Anderson’s interviewers, but despite the hostile press climate towards spooks at the time, the story of journalistic complicity in government dirty tricks somehow went unpublished. And he noticed a rude halt in his sales to “Newsweek” and certain other political magazines. As it turned out, it didn’t matter all that much. He’d gone back to Columbia for six more months of beach-bumming and sold a color spread to “Penthouse” called, unoriginally enough, “The Girls of Columbia”. Six thousand bucks and a whole new kind of meal ticket. Harve had been extremely helpful in locating models. One of the best shots had been of a Columbian-Italian girl swathed in emeralds that ended up going out of Gumps, in somewhat more refined settings, for over a quarter of a million dollars.
He’d met Harve in the bar of the El Prado Hotel and been no end of impressed when Harve, after about fifteen minutes of idle chat, had made him for DEA entanglements, knew who he was interested in finding, and made some shrewd suggestions on how to go about it without getting killed. “This is a jungle and everything that moves rustles some grass or vine, amigo,” Harve had told him. “I live here, so to me you shine like steel. Just the look of you, what hotel you’re in, what you know and don’t know about the place…these are bird calls around you. And I’m not the only one listening.”
The real genius of Harve’s scam in Columbia was posing as a coke importer himself. The role explained a lot of eccentric behavior on his part and therefore let him move more freely and safely. He had never, but never, kept emeralds on his person. The coke runners knew what he was doing, and thought he was crazy to run anything other than coke, especially since the Columbian government, which didn’t much care if everyone in the world took a Columbian toot or two, took an extremely dim view of emerald trafficking. To the tune of thirty years in a local hell-hole if they caught you at it. Harve’s “cover story” kept the Columbians off his back but drew a lot of DEA attention, which he always described as “protection”, as though he’d hired them.
Harve cultivated Doc and helped him out, both with the photo story and his mission, possibly even helped him to indefinitely delay getting his ass blown off. It was a comraderie that hinged heavily on his hunch that Doc’s camera bags would be whisked safely away unearthed by his pro-tem employers. In fact, he steered Doc into selling his camera gear at twice their stateside value and sending empty cases to the airport. Of course the next time Doc saw them they weren’t empty, but since they were in a San Francisco hotel room by that time nobody much cared that they were full of a decent grade of emeralds. They would have cared about the duty, of course.
Harve looked suitably sober after Doc told him the tale. “Ever thought of taking on somebody your own size?” He asked Doc, “Instead of always shooting it out with the CIA or FBI or half of Africa or something? You got any idea who this guy is?”
“An idea.”
“Well, I’ll give you an even better idea. Pass.”