Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [65]
We sit at a round wooden table, drapes closed.
He says, “Everything I say stays in this room.”
I nod and continue making notes.
That is how it begins: Nothing is to leave the room, even though I am making notes, and he knows I will publish what he says because I tell him that. We are entering a place neither of us knows, a place where the secrets are dragged into the light of day, and yet, neither of us admits this, because it means death. I can never repeat what he tells me even though I tell him I will repeat it. Nothing must leave the room even though he watches me write his words down on sheets of paper.
I lean back and say, “No one will ever know your name or where we are meeting. I will never know your name. When we finish, I will not know how to find you again. But you will always know how to find me. I want the story of your life because you and the others like you are phantoms. I am not here to solve crimes. I am here to explain how the world works. When I publish what you tell me, no one will know your name. They will only know my name, and I will be unable to give you up, because I will not have any way to trace you.”
He nods.
He tells me to feel the triceps on his right arm. It hangs down like a tire. Now, he says, feel my left arm. There is nothing there.
He stands, puts a chokehold on me. He can snap my neck like a twig.
Then he sits down again.
I ask him how much he would charge to kill me.
He gives me a cool appraisal and says, “At most, five thousand dollars, probably less. You are powerless and you have no connections to power. No one would come after me if I killed you.”
We are ready to begin.
I ask him how he became a killer.
He smiles, and says, “My arm grew.”
I feel calm. I realize the lies will finally stop. Of the thousands of executions that I have noted in Juárez, there has never been a single arrest, much less a conviction. Instead, the city copes by floating theories about cartel wars or military actions or police actions or gang actions. At the moment, murder is the leading cause of death in Juárez, outstripping the old leader, diabetes. I have listened to endless explanations of the slaughter. Now I have made it to the killing ground.
Information has all but ceased because of people such as him. Reporters are now being issued bulletproof vests, and articles appear without bylines. One editor of a media Web site was on his way to the funeral of the reporter gunned down in front of his daughter. His cell phone rang and a voice said, “You are next.” He immediately fled to United States with his family and left behind his house, car, office, and life. Reporters zeroing in on killings get those warnings from their police radios, “If you get close, the same thing will happen to you.” A press photographer runs into a caravan of armed men, but chokes because he knows a single snap of his camera would mean death. Another photographer comes upon armed men, and he cannot tell if they are police or sicarios. He snaps shots through his windshield, then puts the memory card in his sock so that if he is killed, there will be a record. He lives, and no, they were not police. Or the press pulls into a gas station, and men are there with long guns and pistols. Six men have just been executed, but the commandos at the gas station seem unworried and unhurried.
The man sitting across the table from me has helped to create such a world.
He takes a sheet of paper, draws five vertical lines and writes in the spaces in green ink: Childhood, Police, Narco, God. The four phases of his life. Then scratches out what he has written until there is nothing but solid ink on the page.
He cannot leave tracks. He cannot quite give up the habits of a lifetime. I reach for the paper, but he snatches it back.