Chapter Fifteen
The year before Sebastián’s murder, Mexico was the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist, no safer than an active war zone.
No safer even than Syria or Iraq. Journalists were being murdered in cities all across the country.
Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. And yet, because Los Jardineros didn’t specifically target reporters the way most cartels did, Sebastián hadn’t received an official cartel death threat for almost two years.
So it’s not quite accurate to say that Sebastián and Lydia felt a false sense of security; no one in Acapulco felt secure.
The free press was a critically endangered species in Mexico.
But in the aftermath of their discovery that Lydia’s friend was La Lechuza, the absence of an explicit warning from him, combined with the fact of her fraught but genuine attachment to Javier, functioned as a sort of short-term analgesic for the worst of their personal fears.
Sebastián continued to take the usual precautions: he avoided adhering too closely to a daily routine, he limited driving his recognizable orange Beetle to crime scenes, and whenever he wrote a particularly risky piece, he used the anonymous byline STAFF WRITER to conceal his identity.
In those cases, the paper also sprang for a hotel room in the tourist district.
He’d take Lydia and Luca and they’d hunker down for a few days out of sight.
When it appeared that retaliation was not forthcoming, they’d reemerge and continue with their lives.
But those safeguards were largely illusory.
Sebastián knew that any research he conducted, any crime he investigated, any source he contacted, was a potential land mine.
He was as careful as a truth-telling Mexican journalist can be.
For her part, Lydia became hypervigilant for any signs of danger.
Javier continued to visit her in the bookstore almost weekly, and the torment she’d felt the first night she’d discovered the truth about him slowly gave way to something else.
She still sat with him, served him coffee, spoke with him about a range of subjects.
She listened twice more when he read her poems from his Moleskine notebook.
She even smiled authentically at him, and despite a sickening feeling of culpability and a reluctance to admit it, she was still charmed by him.
His intellect, his warmth, his vulnerability and sense of humor—none of it had changed.
Yet, when there was news of a fresh murder, which happened more infrequently than before but not infrequently enough, Lydia experienced a sort of exaggerated emotional flinch, and she knew that her careful retreat from him was not only necessary but also inevitable.
Her behavior need only follow what her heart had already accomplished.
“What if we tell him?” Lydia said to Sebastián the week before Yénifer’s quinceanera.
They’d dropped Luca at her sister, Yemi’s, house earlier for a sleepover with Adrián.
“Tell who what?”
“Tell Javier about the article. Before it comes out.”
Sebastián closed his leather menu and set it down on his plate.
“?Estás loca, mujer?”
She was buttering a warm roll from the covered basket, and didn’t look up at him. “Yes. But I think I’m serious, too.” She pressed the butter into the bread and waited for it to soften.
Sebastián looked away from her, out over the water.
The restaurant was on a hilltop above the bay and it was dusk, and he could see lights winking through the valley below, their ghost-lights glimmering echoes in the water.
He didn’t want to consider the idea. He wanted to consider the view and the menu and his beautiful wife.
After years of narco journalism he’d become good at compartmentalizing, at putting all the ugliness away.
Sebastián was skilled at enjoying himself.
But he respected Lydia and didn’t want to be dismissive.
“If we talk about this for two minutes, do you promise then that we can not talk about it for the rest of the night?” he asked.
“Yes.” She smiled and bit into her bread.
“Okay,” he said. “Why would we tell him? What’s the benefit of doing that?”
She took a sip of water. “To gauge his response ahead of time, to know what we’re up against.” Sebastián sat very still while he listened. “Maybe he’d even meet with you. You could get him to go on the record.”
“Do you think he’d do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe? I mean, we know how smart he is. Maybe he’d see it as an opportunity to try and control the message. Get some good PR, get out ahead of the curve.”
“Every narco has a Robin Hood complex.”
“Right, so you appeal to that. Maybe he’d even like it.”
“But that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I can’t be beholden to him.”
“No, I know.”
“But he might not know. He might think this means I’m his new PR guy. I’m on his payroll after this.”
“Ay.” Lydia grimaced.
“It’s too risky,” Sebastián said, opening his menu. “What are you going to eat?”
Lydia read the article on Monday evening, the night before it went to press.
She and Sebastián had to calculate the level of risk, to determine their safest course of action for the coming days.
The paper had offered to put them up in a hotel again, to get them out of sight.
The piece would not be published under his name, but it would be easy enough to figure out who’d written it.
Any one of his sources could reveal him to Javier. They already may have.
Sebastián paced behind her while she read at the kitchen table from his laptop: LA LECHUZA REVEALED: PORTRAIT OF A DRUG LORD.
The story was accompanied by several photographs.
Sebastián and his editor had selected a flattering picture of Javier, sitting elegantly with his legs crossed at the knee, one arm draped across the back of a velvet couch.
He wore dark jeans and a tweed blazer, and looked every inch the bookish professor, his eyes warm behind the thick glasses, his face smiling but not smug.
Lydia thought again of the first morning he’d come into the shop, how deeply his friendship, his vulnerability, had affected her in the months before she understood who he was.
She still felt reluctant to learn more unpleasant things about him.
She still felt a memory of fondness for him, which unnerved her.
She pressed her eyes closed and took a deep breath before she began.
She was amazed by Sebastián’s familiarity with his subject—he clearly knew a very different Javier than she did, and yet the account was both objective and compassionate.
In her husband’s words, she recognized her friend’s intensity, but she also discovered for the first time the gruesome details of Javier’s capacity for cruelty.
The beheadings were only the beginning. Los Jardineros were also known to dismember their victims and rearrange their body parts into horror show tableaux.
According to Sebastián’s report, during Los Jardineros’ war with the previous cartel, Javier was rumored to have shot the two-year-old son of a rival while the boy’s father watched.
He’d painted the man’s face with the blood of his murdered child.
Those details had been mythologized, of course; there was no proof of that brutality, but when she read that, Lydia closed her eyes for nearly three minutes before she could continue.
The article also highlighted the grisly statistics of Javier’s ascension: during the transition of power, Acapulco’s murder rate was the highest in Mexico and one of the highest in the world.
The city hemorrhaged tourism, investment, young people, and that kind of bleeding was difficult to stanch even after the violence tapered off.
It was also true that, though the bloodshed had become less visible to the average citizen in recent months, there were still a dozen or more murders in the city each week.
In addition to those numbers, countless more had silently disappeared.
The very essence of Acapulco had changed; its people were permanently altered.
Entire neighborhoods were abandoned as people fled the rubble of their lives and headed north.
For those who left, el norte was the only destination.
If a tourist mecca like Acapulco could fall, then nowhere in Mexico was safe.
The profile drew a bright line between Javier’s ascent and the truth of the city’s ruin.
It was a brutal new cosmopolis, and its ugliness was underscored by the memory of Acapulco’s glorious past. Sebastián’s account was heartbreaking, unvarnished, and utterly convincing.
It also credited Javier with the dawning peace, commended the control he exercised over his men, and appealed to him for continued restraint.
It ended with a psychological profile of the man himself, and as Lydia read it, she knew it to be exactly true.
Unlike his contemporaries and predecessors, La Lechuza was not flashy, gregarious, or even particularly charismatic.
He seemed enlightened. But like every drug lord who’s ever risen to such a rank, he was also shrewd, merciless, and ultimately delusional.
He was a vicious mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman.
A thug who fancied himself a poet. The article ended with the inclusion of a poem written by Javier himself, and Lydia’s mouth dropped clean open when she saw it there in print.
She knew this poem. The first one he’d ever shared with her.
“How in God’s name did you get this?” she whispered.
Sebastián stopped pacing long enough to lean over her shoulder. Lydia read the poem again, even more terrible printed there on-screen than it had been when Javier had entrusted it to her.