“That sounds dreadful,” she complained. “And I don’t appreciate having my dinner ordered for me.”
“There are three thousand things on their menu. We want to be at Mariachi Caliente before ten. I’m just helping the process along. Have another nacho.” That was a sacrifice on my part. I love them too. They’ve got nacho ingredients, but somehow they’re different. Like they bake them or something. And they’re all the same shape, instead of a bunch of tostados piled on a plate with refried beans, cheese, and jalapeno peppers dumped over them. I guess you’d say they’re a real canapé.
She ate the last one and then dug into her avocado soup, saying stuff like, “Ummmm.” Guessing at what was in the soup. Glaring when I warned her off asking for recipes. “
The New York Times Cookbook
has recipes for avocado soup,” I said, “so knock it off.”
“I’ll bet you don’t even own a
New York Times Cookbook,
” she retorted, scooping up the last crouton with the last drops of soup.
“Don’t be a snob, Carolyn. Man, is that a prissy name.”
“All right. Call me Caro. Jason does. What do I call you?”
“How about Vallejo?” I suggested. “My friends do. Not that I’m saying we’re—”
“Ha! This is the jicama, isn’t it?” She had been turning over leaves in her salad when she spotted it and took a bite. “It’s delicious. So crispy. And juicy. Where can you buy it?”
“Your supermarket,” I replied. “Look for a blobby mutant potato, extra dirty.”
Over our steaks, I prepped her for the second leg of our journey. I wasn’t telling her about the third, if I decided on one. “This guy, Barrientos, thinks he’s got a great voice. You ever heard mariachis?” She had—on the car radio. “He’s not bad, actually, but when I get him over to the table, you act like he’s got a great voice, operatic quality. Lay it on thick. He’ll believe you. We want him to stay at our table for drinks so we can tell him he knows a friend of ours, Gubenko. Bring up the gambling. Like that. I know you’re new to all this stuff. You just follow my lead, okay?”
“Actually,” she said in that snippy voice, “I happen to know my way around a murder investigation.”
“Uh huh.”
“No, I really do,” she insisted. “Let’s order another pitcher.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not sure I should let you drive as it is.”
“It’s
my
car.”
Walking along Juarez Avenue after dinner, I had a hard time because she wanted to look in windows. She thought she’d buy some stone bookends. I discouraged it. Then she saw the tequila in the window of a liquor store. “Can you believe that price?” she exclaimed. “I have to buy some. I want to experiment with margarita recipes. That’s what we drank at the après-opera party, you know. Margaritas. A few people drank the champagne, but it was awful.”
I tried to dissuade her from buying tequila, but she was adamant. Why pay so much in El Paso when she could get it cheap here? What was the best brand in my opinion?
“Why don’t you get a bottle of mezcal,” I suggested when I couldn’t talk her out of tequila. “It’s sort of tequila with a worm in it. The real fancy mezcal has a scorpion in it.”
Carolyn turned away from the window and gave me a look. “That’s disgusting. A scorpion? However, the worms from the agave were very popular with the Aztecs. They ate them with guacamole. In fact, I think people still eat them. Not that I would. And I don’t want a bottle with a nasty creature in it. How many bottles can I bring back?”
When I told her one, she said I could bring one back too, and she’d pay me for it. I refused. She squinted at me and went in to buy her bottle. That whole deal took about twenty minutes because she had to ask about every brand she saw.
Then she wanted to know why there were so many dentists’ offices in a tourist area. “You can’t get your teeth fixed,” I said. “We don’t have time.”
Finally, on the back streets, heading for the car, she tripped twice, but the sidewalks and streets are all broken up, so I couldn’t be sure whether it was the tequila she’d drunk or the unrepaired public paving of Ciudad Juarez that was causing her problems. She damn near dropped her bottle of tequila. Then she insisted on driving. Just to prove she was sober, I suppose. Maybe bringing her along had been a bad idea.
26
Mariachi Caliente
Carolyn
I
t had truly
been a delicious dinner, and I felt uncomfortably stuffed. I should have saved some of my steak for Smack, as Luz suggested. I just couldn’t call her by her last name, as if we were two males in a locker room. And Smack probably wouldn’t have liked the shellfish stuffing in the steak.
“Now listen, Carolyn, you have to knock off all this history crap when we get to the mariachi place. Barrientos will think you’re some kind of nut.”
“I don’t see why,” I protested. “What am I supposed to talk to him about? I don’t know anything about the drug trade, but if he’s a smuggler, I know some very interesting smuggling stories. For instance, during Prohibition when illegal alcohol was coming across the river from Mexico, there was a young woman who pushed a baby carriage along the levee every day, picked up a package containing bottles of mezcal, and slipped the package under her baby. Can you imagine putting smuggled goods under a baby? That’s terrible.”
“I can’t imagine having a baby,” Luz replied, “and that is absolutely your last historical anecdote until we get back across the border.”
I suppose it seemed very silly to her that I kept telling her about the history of her own area, but I was so nervous. I tend to do that when I’m nervous. And I suppose she thought I was drunk and shouldn’t be driving, but I did just fine. We arrived at the nightclub with no problems whatever, except that she had to park the car. Maybe I
should
learn to parallel park.
On the other hand, what were the chances that I’d be driving over here again? I read the papers. Every time a car pulled up beside us at a light or corner, I kept my eye on the passengers. People are shot in their own cars in Juarez. By mistake. Of course some are drug dealers, shot by rival drug dealers. Still, I was ready to shout, “Down!” if I saw a gun in a car window. She was lucky to have a driver as alert as I was.
She
just slouched in the seat and gave directions occasionally.
Mariachi Caliente looked rather run down, but then the whole city did. No wonder Jason seldom brought me over here. The sidewalks were in terrible shape. A long, vertical neon sign announced our destination, but enough letters had burned out that I’d never have known if Luz hadn’t said that we’d arrived. I asked if she was sure the dog would be safe in the car in this neighborhood, and she said Smack would be safer than the car or us because she had big teeth. Fortunately, I was feeling much more relaxed and didn’t take that too seriously. Really, driving in Juarez, now that I was used to it, wasn’t that bad.
Inside, the place was dark and smoky, reminding me of a flamenco club I’d visited in Barcelona, not to mention several less reputable places in that city. I asked if they had flamenco here, but Luz said only if I felt like getting up and dancing. We walked down the long bar, lined with stools and customers, some of them in cowboy hats. I asked her if they were really cowboys, but she didn’t know—or didn’t care. On the other side were tables full of people drinking, mostly beer, busty women in low-cut blouses and men in ranch attire, some with those string ties.
We found a table by the wall at the end of the bar with an obstructed view of a small stage where men in tight suits with gaudy trimming down the trouser sides and jacket sleeves strummed a variety of stringed instruments and sang. Just as I was taking my seat, two trumpets blasted into the song and frightened me half to death. Beyond us were more tables filling the back of the club. I was quite interested and wished that I’d brought my camera along.
Luz ordered cans of Tecate with salt and cut limes and instructed me on sprinkling the can tops with the salt and squeezing lime juice over that. The next time we ordered, I intended to ask for club soda. We must have sat there an hour, nursing our drinks and listening to the music, which was very lively and
very
loud, especially those trumpets. She explained that the word
mariachi
referred to the marriage bands that serenaded lovers and newlyweds in the Mexican reign of Maximilian and Carlota. I nodded and said their costumes reminded me of a description of bridegroom’s clothing at hacienda weddings. Then I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to provide her or anyone with historical tidbits.
So there we sat—silent. She didn’t say anything more until she sat up, alert, and hissed, “Here we go. Check out the guy talking to the leader. See, he’s handing him money.”
I resisted the urge to comment on her confusing pronoun usage—two masculine pronouns referring, presumably, to two different people with antecedents in the previous sentence.
“That’s Barrientos. See if you can stay awake long enough to listen. You’ll need to say something about his singing.”
I resented the implication that I’d been falling asleep. I’d been thinking about Adela Mariscal and what would happen when the toxicology tests arrived in the hands of Sergeant Guevara.
The object of our trip was a broad man, rather short for his weight but not fat at all. He had on tight jeans held up by a belt and a huge silver belt buckle decorated with a gold scorpion, fancy tooled cowboy boots, a cowboy shirt with gold scorpion studs and embroidery, and a cowboy hat, which, when removed, revealed the telltale bleached streak in his black hair. I thought he’d have looked much better without the streak, but then what did I know about drug-dealer fashion? Obviously it involved a lot of gold—and scorpions. He was also wearing a heavy gold cross on a chain, a gold watch that looked like a Rolex, and several large gold rings. Good grief! Didn’t he realize that so much gold jewelry was in poor taste? As he began to sing, I slipped a notebook and pen out of my handbag.
“What are you doing?” Luz hissed.
“I’m going to take notes. You said I’d need to critique his—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Put that stuff away. You’re supposed to be here enjoying the music, not writing a damned newspaper column. I’m convincing you that opera isn’t the only game in town. Remember? Now will you act like a normal person?”
“I am a normal person,” I protested. “And that man has a good voice. Not well trained, but powerful, nice tone, even some vibrato.”
“Great. Save it for him. He’s singing ‘Granada’ now. It’s a big favorite. That’s the one you should really listen to.”
“I’ve already heard Placido Domingo sing it. Mr. Barrientos isn’t as good by any means.”
“Shit, Carolyn. We’re running a scam here. You need to get with it. Now, this song is about a burro.”
“Really. Why would a bride want to hear a song about a burro?” I asked.
“How the hell do I know?”
We listened to that song and then a third that had people smirking at each other and shouting encouragement. “Scumbag,” Luz muttered under her breath.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered. “This one is very dramatic.”
“Right,” she snarled. “It’s a
corrida.
About some scumbag drug dealer who supposedly helped the poor and the Church and was shot up by the badass
federales
. Robin Hood in the coke trade.”
Her expression was really ferocious, and I could only hope that Mr. Barrientos didn’t notice her reaction to his singing. If he did, he certainly wouldn’t want to join us. In fact, he might tell someone to shoot us, or do it himself. Then suddenly she was smiling and clapping.
“Here we go,” she said to me, and waved the waiter over as Mr. Barrientos finished what was evidently to be his last number. He bowed to enthusiastic applause, in which I joined since I was supposed to be a new fan. My partner, if you could call her that, was telling the waiter we’d like to buy the singer a drink. But what were we to do if he refused? I wondered. He looked our way, stared rather too closely at my hair, and strode through the tables in our direction. “What did I tell you? The blonde hair did it,” Luz murmured.
Suddenly a thought occurred to me. “Are we traveling incognito?” I asked in a whisper.
She snapped, “Just shut up. Follow my lead, and we’ll be fine.”
“Hey, Salvador,” she greeted him. “Long time no see. What can we order for you?”
He stared at her and then frowned. “
Jesus i Maria!
Vallejo? Aren’t you a narc? What are
you
doin’ here?”
”I was in Vice,” she replied, “not narcotics, but I’m retired. Meet Carolyn Blue. She’s a friend of mine who likes opera. I told her she hasn’t heard real music till she’s heard a good mariachi singer. Right, Caro?”
Now I was Caro. “Right, Luz. Won’t you sit down?” I smiled at Mr. Barrientos. He certainly was muscular, but he didn’t look exactly like “muscle” in the violent sense. The way that bouncer at Brazen Babes had looked.
“Caro, meet Salvador Barrientos. We’re lucky he was here tonight. Wasn’t the singing as good as I told you?”
Mr. Barrientos was smiling back at me, taking a seat, ordering a straight shot of tequila evidently, since that’s what the waiter brought him. Well, it was my turn now. “You do, indeed, have an excellent voice, Mr. Barrientos.”
“Yeah?
Gracias, senora.
” He actually made a sweeping motion with his hat, like someone in the movies. Old movies.
“Yes, I’ve heard Placido Domino sing ‘Granada,’ and I wasn’t a bit more moved by him than by your rendition. Your voice has extraordinary power.”
“Yeah? Real loud, huh?” He moved his chair closer.
I scooted to the other side of mine and buried my nose over my beer can.
“Hey, lemme fix that for you,” he said and went into the salt-sprinkling, lime-squeezing routine. “I can tell you’re a classy Anglo lady who don’t know much about Tecate. How come you got her drinkin’ that horse piss, Lieutenant? Yeah, I remember you. Lieutenant. Vice.” He turned back to me. “How about a shot of this?” He held up his tequila. Luz shook her head ever so slightly.