Days of the Dead Read online

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘No, but it’s not that different either. We can’t afford to leave our garrison on the Falklands for ever, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a Labour government doesn’t bring it home sooner rather than later. A force of highly motivated mercenaries would be hard to dislodge with what’s there now, and who knows? – if Bazua picks his moment the government in Buenos Aires may find it easier to back him up than wash their hands of him. The man has to be stopped.’

  Salewicz raised both hands in surrender. ‘OK, I get it – he’s one of the bad guys. But what can we actually do – invade Colombia?’

  ‘You’ve used special forces against the drug labs on the mainland.’

  ‘Maybe, but not against a prison.’

  ‘It’s not a prison – it’s a luxury fortress. And if your people don’t do something, then I’m afraid we shall have to.’

  ‘All that beef’s gone to your head,’ Salewicz said jokingly, but he could see that Hanson wasn’t amused. The English were certainly in a kick-ass mood these days, what with beef and their goddam football tournament. Even the reference to Cuba had probably been deliberate – all the Europeans were pissed off about Washington trying to tell them who to trade with. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just hold your horses for a few days. I’ll let Langley know how strong your feelings are on this one, OK? I can’t promise anything, but…’ He raised his hands again.

  Hanson smiled at him. ‘That would be most useful,’ he said.

  I doubt it, Salewicz thought, taking another sip of port. But maybe he’d find out what his own people’s aversion to taking on Bazua was based on, and then convince the Brits accordingly. He certainly couldn’t see Washington giving the Brits a green light to go rampaging in the Caribbean.

  Docherty woke up feeling good, without any real idea why. Don’t fight it, he told himself, and after winning a long battle with a recalcitrant shower, he felt even better. A café a few doors down supplied a Mexican egg sandwich – complete with avocados, onions and peppers – a papaya shake and coffee, and for the first time in several years he had a hankering for a cigarette. It was the city, he decided. It remembered that he used to smoke.

  The streets were a lot fuller than the night before, and not only with milling pedestrians and honking traffic – goods for sale now seemed to cover most of the pavements. He walked back to the hotel intending to call one of the car-hire firms, but decided to ask the receptionist instead. And yes, of course he could get their English guest a car, especially if cash or traveller’s cheques were involved. A short phone call to a relative confirmed as much – a brand-new VW Golf would be there in half an hour.

  Docherty then spent a couple of minutes with the hotel’s city directory, which confirmed the two numbers Gustavo Macías had given him. Toscono’s business address was on Balderas, a street running south from the Paseo de la Reforma; his home was in the rich man’s suburb of Las Lomas de Chapultepec. Docherty returned the directory to the receptionist, walked out to the bank of public phones he had noticed on his way back from breakfast, and called the home address.

  A woman answered, which surprised him. ‘Can I speak to Señor Toscono?’ he asked.

  ‘He is not here,’ she said, and if the tone of her voice was any clue she didn’t seem too upset by the fact. ‘Who is this?’ she asked, as if she’d suddenly remembered the correct procedure.

  Docherty hung up and walked back across the street to the hotel. By the time he’d returned from his room the hire car was waiting for him. ‘Brand-new’ was perhaps something of an exaggeration but at least it started, and the furry breasts hanging alongside the Virgin Mary seemed a typically local touch. He drove west until he reached the Paseo, then turned south down the wide boulevard with its towering palms, over-the-top monuments and modern skyscrapers. One new building which caught his eye looked like a giant Stanley knife, the tip of its blade poised to scratch the low-hanging smog.

  In 1977 it had nearly always been possible to see Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, the two volcanoes which loomed over the city, but Docherty sensed that such clarity was gone for ever. ‘Progress,’ he murmured to himself.

  He followed the Paseo as it swung west along the northern edge of the vast Chapultepec Park, and five minutes later he was entering the suburb from which the park derived its name. ‘Hill of the locust’ was the translation, he remembered, and the name seemed appropriate enough – the people who lived around here probably hadn’t noticed Mexico’s economic crisis, much less suffered from it.

  Las Lomas de Chapultepec, a few kilometres further out, seemed even richer, and its shady avenues seemed depressingly free of traffic. He was going to stick out like a sore thumb, Docherty thought, not least because nearly every car he saw seemed to be a BMW or a Mercedes.

  He found Toscono’s house without difficulty and immediately noticed the coils of razor wire interwoven with the tumbling bougainvillea. Driving on up the hill, he found a small park, and from this relatively innocent vantage-point he was able to get a good idea of the compound’s layout and take a sneak shot with his Polaroid. The camera’s definition might not be that good, but it was quick, and there was no need to involve a processing firm.

  The place didn’t look any more inviting on the way down. He had seen no sign of dogs but that didn’t mean much; the wire was crossable but the neighbourhood was far too quiet, and probably well watched – in countries like Mexico the police had a clearer idea of who paid their wages. There had to be better ways of getting to Toscono than over that wall.

  Docherty drove thoughtfully back into the centre of the city, trying to ignore the rattling noise somewhere beneath him. On the edge of the Zona Rosa he found an outdoor café which put together a passable chicken torta, and then sat in La Ciudadela square for an hour or more by way of a siesta. At about three he walked up Balderas to Toscono’s office address, which turned out to be a ten-storey glass tower. He waited outside until the lobby receptionist was busy with someone else’s query, then walked in and examined the plaques on the wall behind him. As far as he could tell, Malvinas Import-Export was the sole occupant of the fifth floor.

  He walked back outside and circled the building, noting the entrance to the underground car park. A car was just going in, and it seemed that the only entry requirement was money. Docherty strolled down Balderas, collected the Golf and drove back to the office building. The man in the booth at the entrance to the underground park took his pesos without even looking up from his newspaper, and he was in.

  There were two levels and he examined them both before parking on the upper, along one of the side walls with a good view of the lift doors. Then he settled down to wait, wishing he’d had the sense to bring a magazine or book with them. The car’s radio worked after a fashion, but there seemed to be only an unrelenting diet of Latino pop on offer, and he would rather have listened to country music. Well, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration.

  Between four-thirty and five the car park began to empty, and Docherty became worried that only his and Toscono’s cars would be left, always assuming that the Argentinian was in his office. After all, he could be at the races, at a casino, or even, to judge from the tone of the woman on the telephone, in the arms of a mistress.

  And then there he was – the slightly plump, slightly balding, impeccably dressed man from Gustavo’s photograph. The man with him looked and acted like a bodyguard, and as they walked straight towards the Golf, Docherty slowly lowered his head below the level of the dashboard.

  He didn’t lift it again until he heard the sound of a car starting up. It was the big white BMW about twenty metres to his left, and Toscono himself was in the driving seat, looking pleased with himself. The other man, who was almost a head taller, seemed to be scowling at the world. It was probably something he had picked up at bodyguard school.

  Carmen was a few minutes late arriving at the restaurant, but Detective Peña had phoned to say he would be later still. The table he had book
ed was beside a window, and she sat there with a glass of chilled white wine, thinking about him. In other circumstances, she thought, it was possible that something might have happened between them. Possible but not probable; he might be attracted to her but he was also happily enough married not to act on the attraction.

  She had visited Victoria four times now, and each time it had been painful for both of them. Victoria might seem the less affected on the surface, but the fact that she was still hiding in the fiction of dreams suggested a degree of psychological damage which Carmen found almost as distressing as the story which was emerging between the lines of those dreams.

  No real names had emerged, either of the people concerned or the place of the girls’ imprisonment. ‘He’ was the ‘Angel of Death’, the men were ‘his men’, the island was just that. The details that emerged – the squelch of a water-bed, the stuttering fan, birdsong through a window – seemed rooted in evasion; they were like a condemned man’s musings on the beauty of rope.

  And yet sometimes there was clarity. ‘We all used to play cards in our room,’ Victoria suddenly said in one of their sessions. ‘I can remember Marysa making a joke about him and we all laughed so much…’

  Obviously not every moment had been nightmarish, but then they never were. Marysa had always made good jokes, Carmen thought, and found a tear rolling down her own cheek. Seeing Detective Peña zigzagging through the table towards her, she quickly dabbed it away.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got good news. The charges against Victoria are going to be dropped.’

  ‘That’s wonderful!’ Carmen said.

  ‘She’ll be deported – just formally,’ he added, seeing Carmen’s eyes turn angry – ‘and your government’s already agreed to pick up the tab for everything. You can take her home to Cartagena. That’s good news, isn’t it?’ he asked, noticing that the smile hadn’t returned to her face.

  She tried to give him one. ‘Yes, yes, it has to be. I’m just afraid that my country will not be able to give her the sort of help she needs. I don’t know…’

  The waiter arrived to take their order. ‘On expenses,’ he said, but she had the feeling he intended paying out of his own pocket. She ordered one of the set lunches – she had never had Vietnamese food before – and another glass of white wine.

  ‘It will take time,’ he said, resuming the conversation.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What will you do next? About your sister and the others, I mean.’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I can do. What is happening here? Is no one interested in what Victoria has told me?’

  ‘Everything she told you is being passed on to the DEA. But if you’re right, and the island she talks about is the one you think it is…’ It was his turn to shrug. ‘It’s foreign soil – no US agency could intervene physically. The best they could do would be to make representations to the Colombian government.’

  ‘I understand that,’ she said. ‘But it’s not foreign soil to me,’ she added simply.

  He almost dropped his chopsticks. ‘You’re not thinking of going there?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you understand what life is like in my country – it is not like here – I can’t go to the police and expect that they will prove trustworthy.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, forgetting her food for the moment, ‘if I tell the police in Cartagena that I think my sister is a prisoner on Providencia, what will happen? First they will look for reasons not to believe me, and they will say I have only the word of a sick person. If they do believe me and are honest enough to do something about it, I expect there will be queries to Bogotá and the police on Providencia itself. If by some miracle there are honest policemen on the island the only result will be that the kidnappers will have to kill Marysa and the others to hide their crime.’

  Peña looked at her with new respect. ‘You’ve thought this through,’ he murmured.

  ‘It is not difficult,’ she replied, resuming her eating.

  ‘You said your father and the Cartagena police chief are on good terms, so they at least could talk the matter through in private.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she agreed. So far she had just passed on the bare outlines of Victoria’s story to her parents – giving them the unexpurgated version was going to be a nightmare.

  ‘How big is this island?’ Peña asked.

  ‘About twelve kilometres long and six wide.’

  ‘That’s a lot of ground to search. And even if you found the place…’

  ‘I might be able to take a photograph, get some evidence that no one could talk their way out of.’

  She might be right, he thought, but he shuddered to think of her being caught by whoever it was had broken Victoria Marín. ‘Talk to your father first,’ he urged her.

  ‘I will. But if nothing happens, I can’t just leave it. Could you, if it was your brother?’

  ‘No, I suppose I couldn’t. But getting myself killed or caught wouldn’t help him,’ he added.

  She smiled ruefully. ‘I know.’ They looked at each other. ‘And thank you for all your help,’ she said.

  ‘It’s been a pleasure,’ he replied, and meant it.

  5

  Lazaro Toscono left for the city centre shortly before eight o’clock in the morning. As on the previous evening, he was driving himself, the tall bodyguard in the seat beside him. Docherty, who had watched their departure from the small park above the villa, didn’t bother to tail the BMW, but simply followed at the snail’s pace allowed by the rush-hour traffic. At ten to nine he found a parking space a few blocks from the office building on Balderas, and went in search of somewhere to drink coffee and think through his approach to Toscono. He soon found a pleasant café, its pavement tables shaded from the already bright sun by the branches of a tall eucalyptus.

  For a while he sat enjoying his coffee, watching the office latecomers hurrying by. He found it fascinating but not surprising that Toscono worked a nine-to-five day – these days the pull of convention was obviously just as strong for drug traffickers as it was for insurance salesmen. He remembered reading an article about how the Colombian drug lords were all sending their children to the best schools and colleges, then giving themselves up to the government in return for the legalization of their fortunes, which their well-educated children could then use to become legitimate business leaders.

  It was all a bit pathetic, somehow.

  Docherty had never lost much sleep over the drug trade. As long as there was a demand there would be suppliers – a point so transparently obvious that only the politicians could have missed it. But of course they hadn’t really – it was just a lot easier to demonize the suppliers than to work out why the demand kept rising. Drugs had been in use in one form or another for almost as long as fire, from the Native Americans’ use of peyote in their ceremonies to Celtic fans’ use of lager in theirs, and Docherty, who at times in his life had slipped perilously close to alcoholism, was less inclined than most to see their use as an aberration. People needed to let off steam, relax their own inhibitions, simply have a good time, and there was no doubt that some drugs did the job.

  Even so, drugs like heroin didn’t do much for the gaiety of nations, and others, like crack and methamphetamine, tended to turn a good proportion of their users into decidedly unpleasant, often dangerous, neighbours. All of which begged the question: why did people want such drugs in the first place? No doubt a hundred people could come up with a hundred different reasons, but as far as Docherty was concerned they all came back to one – this was a world which, for all its surface excitement and technological wizardry, offered less and less to the human heart, and drugs were one of the easiest ways of sidestepping that reality.

  Since this process was unlikely to be reversed, and since there seemed little prospect of legalizing soft drugs, Docherty had no problem with locking up the dealers of hard drugs. He just didn’t fee
l that ridding the world of their presence should be a moral crusade – they were crooks, not devils, and in their pursuit of money and influence they probably caused far fewer casualties than their legitimate brethren in the arms trade.

  Lazaro Toscono, though, was a different matter. He was not just a drug dealer – he was also a soldier responsible for several thousand civilian deaths. According to conventional wisdom it took two sides to make a ‘dirty war’, but from what Docherty had read – and what his admittedly biased wife had told him – this had not been the case in Argentina. The military there had not been under any real attack, but had gone about the business of setting up a network of torturers with enthusiasm – child bullies might pull the wings off insects, but these men pulled the limbs off people. And then, unable to accept any responsibility for their actions, they had disposed of the evidence in unmarked graves or the South Atlantic, and left thousands of families like the Macíases in the agony of not knowing what had happened to their siblings and children.

  How people lived with themselves after being part of something like that was beyond Docherty’s comprehension. He had killed people when his own or a comrade’s life was at stake, and he knew what it felt like to be angry enough to want to really hurt someone, but he couldn’t begin to understand how a man could countenance the infliction of pain on people he had never met, day in and day out, for years on end.

  All of which, he realized, probably put him at something of a disadvantage when it came to dealing with scum like Toscono. What was there to appeal to? Guilt? Making the career move from death squad to drug trafficker hardly suggested a working conscience. Much the same could be said of an appeal to the kindness of Toscono’s heart – if he had one, it was presumably available for use only by his nearest and dearest.

  The man’s sense of honour, perhaps, for military men everywhere, and Latin Americans in particular, often had an exaggerated respect for such notions. If he combined such an appeal with a convincing promise that any revelations would be for the ears of the Macías family only, then maybe Toscono would talk. Docherty doubted it – what was there in it for the drug dealer? – but the only other options were bribery and threats, and despite his desperate desire to know the truth of Guillermo’s fate, Gustavo Macías had refused to countenance any payment to those who had taken his son. Docherty had already decided that he would try to scare the shit out of Toscono only when all else had failed.