Steve Martini - The Arraignment

Through the windshield I see Fittipaldi sitting behind the driver in the backseat. Next to him is a woman, blond hair and dark glasses, snuggled up to him. It seems Dana has found the time to vacation in Mexico.

By ten-thirty I am back at the hotel where I find Adam in the restaurant having breakfast.

“Where were you? I called your room, but there was no answer.”

“I decided to take a walk, get a little exercise.”

“How was it?”

“Good.”

“Listen, I’ve thought about our schedule here. We don’t have a lot of time,” he says. “Unless you want to hold over and take a commercial jet back.”

I have to be back in the office on Monday, I tell him.

“Then I think it might be best if we use today to scout out the brothers down on the coast. What do you think?”

“I thought we would talk to the father.”

Herman and Julio are at a table far enough away so we can talk and not be overheard. The cabana, restaurant, and bar by the pool are empty. Adam is wearing a pair of heavy tan pants and boots with a light nylon slipover shirt.

“I thought it might be wise to wait until Friday before talking to Pablo Ibarra. I had my office call his and tell him I was coming down on business. I told them to keep it vague. He knows I’m with the same firm as Nick was. We have a tentative appointment for tomorrow evening. Now, if you want to change it, I can.”

“No. That’s fine.”

“I suspect that the answers ultimately lie with the old man,” he says. “But I am also afraid that if we hit him dead on, not knowing more, that Pablo Ibarra will stonewall us. He has nothing to gain by talking to us, unless he thinks we know more than we do.”

“How do we do that?”

“You read his letter to Nick,” he says. “What do you think he was trying to say?”

“He was telling Nick to back off.”

“Right. To leave his sons alone. Nick had something on the sons or they were doing something that the father didn’t like. We have to make Pablo Ibarra suspect that we know what that was.”

“I’m listening.”

“We need to take a look at their operation. At least have some clue as to what they’re doing.”

Adam’s plan seems to make sense.

“I had Julio’s people scout the location down on the coast.”

“When?”

“When I called and told them I needed them to meet us here. I was trying to figure how to use what little time we had the best way we could. Two of his people took one of the cars yesterday, went down the coast, and checked the place out. They found it.”

“Then why don’t we go?”

“That’s what I thought.”

An hour later we’re headed down the coast, back past the airport.

In the sunlight the terrain looks different. The resorts are like alabaster palaces set against the turquoise waters of the Caribbean.

The water is so clear I am told that divers swear they are peering through air. Through breaks of jungle and rises in the highway, I can see rolling waves, white beaches, the shoreline dotted with coral inlets and reefs of basalt.

Traffic on the road moves at a clip, in places narrowing to two lanes, then opening again for passing. There are very few vehicles, just an occasional tourist bus, mostly empty, and a chartered van for scuba divers on their way to a remote beach.

Overhead the sky is clear and bright. But in the distance above the jungle to the south, it is leaden. Every few seconds I can see tiny threads of fire as lightning strikes the jungle floor fifty or sixty miles ahead of us.

Large land crabs scurry across the road, moving like giant spiders from jungle to jungle, across the strip of pavement separating them from the sea.

Adam fills me in on the two Ibarra brothers, Arturo and Jaime. He has a thin file compiled by Julio’s firm, pulled together and faxed from the home office in Mexico City this morning.

“Took a quick look at it this morning when I got up,” he says.

“Three years apart in age,” he says. “Arturo is the mover, shaker, the businessman, if you want to call it that. Jaime is muscle, all the way to the area between the ears. He has a bad reputation for temper. He killed a man in a fight four years ago in a private club and got off on a theory of self-defense. He has a few minor convictions, but an extensive arrest record.” What Adam is saying is, “What you would expect for the wayward son of a wealthy man?”

“It starts as a juvenile with auto theft, graduates two years ago with attempted murder. It seems the old man’s money has been able to keep him out of the slammer thus far. Though that may not work much longer if what we hear is true, that there’s a falling-out between father and sons.”

“Any narcotics?” I ask.

“Eight years ago,” says Adam. “Let’s see.” He licks his thumb and turns a page. “Here it is. Both of the sons were arrested. It was dismissed for lack of evidence. Federal Judicial Police believed they were into cocaine, growing it out in the jungles down in the area we’re going to today.”

“Anything in the states?”

He looks, peruses the record in the file for several seconds, and turns some pages. “Doesn’t look like it. There is a credit report. It shows they have bank accounts in several foreign countries, Belize and the Caymans, nothing huge, but continuous activity.”

“So they’re making money doing something,” I say.

“It would appear,” says Adam. “They applied for a loan about four months ago, listed assets including the last major deposit. That was about eight months ago, just shy of three hundred thousand dollars, U.S. So they’ve got something going.” Adam takes a deep breath, closes the file, and we settle in for the ride.

An hour on and we see large signs along the road for something called Xcaret. Julio explains that this is a water theme park built around Mayan ruins. Families come for the day. For a fee they can swim in the natural lagoon or play in the artificial waterways constructed by the developers with the blessings of the government.

The Mayan Riviera has its moments, incredible natural beauty and undisturbed jungle, with pockets of tourist wealth. We pass a number of these. Most of the resorts are closed off behind iron gates, with armed guards in kiosks out in front.

From what I can see, the tourists who stay in the resorts pass along the road in air-conditioned comfort, only coming and going.

Real life is out here. Traveling at seventy miles an hour, we come upon periodic migrations along the shoulder of the highway. Groups of men walking along the road dressed in shirts and jeans four sizes too large for them.

“There must be a town,” I tell Julio.

“Ah, villages. All over,” he says, “in the jungle.”

“Where are they going?”

“They look for work,” he says.

Every few miles there’s another band, trudging along the sandy roadside in cast-off athletic shoes, some of them trailing wives and children, little kids, scrubbed and carried by their mothers, with their older brothers and sisters walking along in the dust. Like their parents, looking for a way to feed themselves for another day. I cannot help but think of Sarah at home, and what she would think, looking at kids her age unable to go to school, having to scratch the soil to eat.

Adam leans over and says: “Even for this, the natural forces of the economy have an answer.” I begin to think he can read my mind.

“And what’s that?”

“It’s why it didn’t make any sense that the Ibarras would be talking to Metz, trying to bring heavy equipment down here. There’s your answer.” He points off in the distance, a mile or so ahead, a bald part of the landscape where something has hacked away at the jungle. As we draw closer I recognize it: a construction site.