The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

BOOK THREE

Circus Californianus




I would take up wickedness again … And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again …





—Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn





16




Araceli refused to speak for the first two hours she spent in custody. She did not complain after being covered with dust by the police officer’s clumsy collision tackle, or offer a retort to the taunt of the second officer, who said, “Back to Meh-hee-coe for you, buh-bye,” as he escorted her to the patrol car. She said nothing as they walked past the cluster of residents who repeated in whispers the accusation they had heard on their Spanish-talking televisions: la secuestradora. She resisted the temptation to sling back a riposte when one of the more ignorant members of the crowd spat at her in English, “What did you do to those kids, bitch?” She merely squinted up into the midday glare and the fleet of circling television helicop fers, which had joined the police helicopters in an aerial hyena prowl, and then at the crowd, recognizing a face or two from the lynch mob that had gathered outside the Luján residence the night before: they were looking at her with the same mixture of morbid fascination and inch-deep pity with which a chilango crowd greeted a corpse on the sidewalk, and she thought of all the sarcastic things she might say if she had the nerve. Look, and look closely, because any one of you might be next. But of course she said nothing, and she kept to her mute act as another set of officers took her fingerprints and escorted her to a holding cell at the Huntington Park Police Station. Nor did she speak as a third set of officers drove her across many suburbs and freeways and interchanges, through city air heavy and opaque with the gray haze and smoky aroma spewed by a distant and massive brush fire. When she arrived at another holding cell, at the South County Operations station, she told herself she would remain silent until they escorted her across the border, or until she landed at the airport in Mexico City. Obviously, I would prefer to take the plane back. She’d watch the route she took to this country pass beneath her feet, backward: the American highways, the desert passes, the Sonoran cities, the toll roads through arid landscapes dotted with oak trees and adobe walls painted with the slogans of presidential candidates, and finally the mouse-maze sprawl of that last metropolis she had once called home and would call home again soon, that city of museums and galleries and monuments that Griselda wanted to visit, but could not.

They brought her to an interrogation room and told her to sit down and she began to think about what she would say to her mother when they saw each other, and how much time would pass before she found herself working in that cramped kitchen next to the old woman again. She wondered if there might still be a way to get to that money she had in the bank in Santa Ana. Saving that money had been a “bad girl” thing to do, but now it might emancipate her from her mother’s kitchen and open the path to a new, radical Mexican self. There were rebellious things a woman could do in Mexico if she didn’t care what people said, bohemian gathering spots that awaited the free spirit: Huatulco and the hippies on the Oaxacan coast, Palenque and incense-burning shamans of Veracruz.

Now three men entered the room: a police officer in a stiff wool uniform and a brass badge; a green-eyed police detective of about fifty in gray blended slacks, emitting an air of slovenly boredom; and a smartly dressed man of about thirty-five, with a narrow face that sprouted like a tree stump from his stiff collar, and blond hair that swooshed across the top of his head like a golden wave frozen at midcrest. Alone among these three, the last man was not perspiring, and he took a seat at the table where Araceli was sitting, the older police detective squeezing next to him, and after an elbow collision or two it was clear the room was too small to accommodate them all. The room was about the size of the walk-in closet off the master bedroom in Paseo Linda Bonita, and the three men bumped chests and shoulders as they tried to sit down at once on the empty chairs, until the officer in uniform finally stood up and took a place in the open doorway.

“Damn. Couldn’t we get something bigger?” the younger man in the suit said.

“Budgets,” said the man with the gray slacks. “We asked for more rooms. So they took the ones we had and split ‘em in half.” Settling into his chair, he now introduced himself as Detective Mike Blake, and said the younger man in the suit was Assistant District Attorney Ian Goller.

“And your name, according to this card we have here, is Araceli N. Ramirez,” the police detective said, speaking with a weary congeniality that caught Araceli by surprise. He placed a manila envelope on the table, removed her Mexican election card, and studied it, as if he were trying to discern the meaning of the words Instituto Mexicano Electoral, which circled an eagle clutching a serpent. “Interesting. I guess you need this to vote in Mexico.”

Araceli remained silent, remembering the little speech given by the officer who’d put her in the patrol car, reading in Spanish from a card that he drew from his back pocket: Usted tiene el derecho a guardar silencio. That’s another thing I really like about this country, she thought. The right to keep your lips pursed together like a chaste nun in a convent is enshrined in their Constitution, and there is no officer or judge who can force you to open your mouth.

“Had lunch yet?” Detective Blake asked. “Because I can get you something to eat. But I need you to start talking to me.”

“Or we can send you back down to that little cell without lunch,” Goller said.

“Look, I’m sure it was just some misunderstanding, right?” Detective Blake said. “Explain it to us.”

Araceli looked firmly into their English-speaking eyes and wondered if she should trust them.

“Listen, we know you speak English perfectly well,” the representative of the district attorney’s office said brusquely. Ian Goller had received this essential bit of information from Maureen back at Paseo Linda Bonita, and he now believed that Araceli was deliberately pretending not to understand, which only added to his frustration. He had seen this behavior many times before: criminal suspects from foreign countries who believed their non-English-speaking tongues gave them additional immunity from speaking the truth. “So why did you run away?”

Araceli almost replied to this question, because of its transparent stupidity. Why does the rabbit run from the fox? she wanted to say. Why does the hen run from the woman with the knife in her hand? Instead, she narrowed her eyes and glared back in approximate imitation of an irritated Mexican schoolteacher.

“Wanna go back to the cell?” Goller barked. “We’ll send you back now. Without lunch. Or you can just tell us what you were up to. Why would you take those two boys on a little jaunt? To what purpose? Where did you go?” It had been ages since Ian Goller found himself sitting across a table from an uncharged criminal suspect—he was, almost exclusively, an administrator now—and he was quickly falling back to a bad habit from his early days as a prosecutor: losing his professional detachment. “Here’s what I see. You took these children without permission to a dangerous corner of the city. You left two good parents worried sick inside the house, without a clue to where you might be.” The detective sitting next to him was looking irritated, but Goller didn’t notice and wouldn’t have cared if he did. “You never expressed any interest in the welfare of these boys and suddenly, when you’re alone with them, you go off. Why?”

The assistant district attorney did not fully appreciate the bewilderment that had suddenly taken hold of Araceli’s face, though the detective did. Detective Blake decided he should try and take back control of the interrogation. But before he could, Goller blurted out, “What did you think? That you were their mother? Or was it money you were after? Because, obviously, you weren’t being paid enough for all the work you did. Right? So you wanted more money.”

Araceli took a few seconds to digest the insinuations and to study the man making them. She was struck by the embittered outrage with which the assistant district attorney embraced his vision of her. He seemed to believe that she lacked basic human morality and intelligence; at the same time, he thought her capable of great criminal cunning. Certain backward men in Mexico looked at all women this way and Araceli was momentarily reminded of a few ugly encounters in her past. “You just couldn’t stand working for this family,” Ian Goller continued, and fell back in his chair with a satisfied lean, as if he had figured it all out, striking the flimsy wall of the interrogation room as he did so and causing the tiny room to shake. “They trust you with their kids and you want to make them suffer? I don’t get it. Or are you just incredibly irresponsible?” Araceli tried to see the events of the past week as this excellently dressed and coiffed gentleman imagined them. She formed a mental picture of herself taking Brandon and Keenan to a bank, exchanging them for their weight in gold; or to some mustachioed broker of stolen children, for a stack of pesos. In the prosecutor’s vision, Araceli was doing those things, while Maureen and Scott were two parents who dutifully entrusted Brandon and Keenan to her, maybe even kissing them goodbye as they left them in her care. These absurd thoughts, and the prosecutor’s look of deepening revulsion, caused her mouth to explode suddenly with a loud and sustained guffaw, what Spanish speakers call a carcajada, an onomatopoeia that suggests a cackling bird. Araceli’s laugh, however, was a deeper mammalian sound, born below the esophagus, a laugh she associated in her youth with certain mean-spirited street vendors in Nezahualcóyotl, and with her own hidalguense grandmother. She laughed and felt the lifting of the day’s sum of tension, a release that gave her mirth its own momentum, and she leaned forward in her chair with a true burst of joyfulness that showed the three men in the room the grinning teeth that had seduced Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian so long ago. She kept on laughing as her eyes caught those of the detective and the police officer, who were both raising their lips in subtle smiles that suggested they got the joke too. Her laughter pinged off the steel table and the glass of the two-way mirror that dominated the room, for thirty seconds in all, until she finally stopped and let out a satisfied half sigh.

The detective thought, That’s definitely not a perp laugh.

The police officer lifted the Kevlar shell underneath his uniform and concluded, Naw, this lady ain’t a kidnapper. Too bad we gotta hand her over to the immigration people.

The assistant district attorney had precisely the opposite reaction: All but an admission of guilt. With her aggressive laughter she mocks and challenges us.

“I was taking them to their grandfather!” Araceli said suddenly at the top of her voice in English. “Because those people you put on the TV, that mother and father, los responsables, left me with Brandon y Keenan for four days! ¡Sola! Since Saturday morning! I had no more food to give them.”

“They told us they were gone for two days,” the detective said.

“¡Mentira!”

“That means ‘lie,’ in Spanish,” said the police officer in the doorway, whose name tag identified him as CASTILLO.

“By the grandfather, you mean who?”

“El abuelo Torres.”

“John Torres?”

“Yes.”

“Is that who this is?” the police detective asked, producing the black-and-white photograph of el abuelo Torres that Araceli had left in her backpack.

“Sí. I mean, yes. That is him.”

In short order the police detective established Araceli’s story, which began with the fight between Maureen and Scott and the broken table, and led to her own, ill-advised journey to the center of Los Angeles, and finally to Huntington Park, and her flight after seeing herself on television. “I see the television say I am a kidnapper. What am I thinking?” she said. “That is why I run. As fast as I can, which is not very fast, I am sorry.” Goller remained silent, seemingly disoriented by the detective’s sudden burst of questions and Araceli’s unhesitating answers.

“I did not wanna see Brandon and Keenan in Faster Care,” Araceli said.

“What?” the detective said.

“In Faster Care. Porque no estaban sus padres. Because they no had parents! I didn’t want them to go.”

“To go where?”

“To Faster Care.”

“She means Foster Care,” Officer Castillo interjected from the doorway. “Not ‘Faster Care,’ “ he added with a roll of his eyes. “Foster Care.”

Detective Blake studied the old photograph and the address scrawled on the back and slumped in his chair, feeling exasperated by the small comedy he had been drawn into. After a month in which he had crossed paths with a Taiwanese child-smuggling ring and a meth-addict grandmother whose idea of discipline was a lighted cigarette, and after three trips with preschoolers to emergency rooms for examinations and photograph sessions for that grim and perverse task known as evidence collection, he was more annoyed than relieved by the harmless stupidity of this case. There was no crime here to investigate, but there were others awaiting him. Serious shit follows bullshit—it always works that way. A few seconds later, he rose to his feet and left the interrogation room, with the assistant district attorney following behind him, and they began an argument that continued during the twenty minutes it took them to drive back to Paseo Linda Bonita.

Deputy Castillo escorted Araceli to the holding cell, where she had three hours alone to study the art on the walls, which consisted of five representations of a unicorn with bulbous legs, three crucifixes tipped with arrowheads, and an exquisite rosebud, all drawn in pencil lines that had faded into ghost images in a fog of glossy, waterproof yellow paint. She thought she might ask one of the guards to lend her a writing instrument, because once they did set her free her time would be her own again, forever, and why not use this time to get started? Perhaps she would add a Picasso bull or an El Greco horse to the gallery.

“Sir, a pencil, please, is it possible?” she asked Deputy Castillo when he returned. Unexpectedly, he unlocked the door and held it open.


The news-aggregator website kept a flashing police-car light on its home page, along with a series of rapidly rewritten headlines, as the news of Brandon and Keenan’s alleged kidnapping and rescue unfolded, scoring three-point-four million “hits” over the course of the first three hours, with the traffic doubling for the next two hours, when the site linked to footage obtained by an ABC news affiliate: forty-five seconds of Araceli running and being tackled by a police officer, as captured by the film crew in Huntington Park, and sold by the director for one thousand dollars—worth two days of on-location catering, the director would later tell his friends. Soon the footage began circulating on national cable shows, and by midafternoon assignment editors and managing editors across Southern California were dispatching a battalion of wise-ass reporters to stake out the south county sheriff’s station and Paseo Linda Bonita.

At the front gate of the Laguna Rancho Estates, the guards let through anyone carrying the Day-Glo-green rectangle of a laminated plastic press card issued by the sheriff’s department. Outside the Paseo Linda Bonita home the reporters pestered the sheriff’s department patrolmen and lower-l evel public information officials on the perimeter for details of the boys’ “drama,” and set up tripods and light reflectors on the lawn. A second media cluster laid siege to the Luján family home in Huntington Park, where the councilman had sealed all the doors and windows, leaving the reporters to hound the neighbors for some throw-away speculation about possible kidnappings and flights to the border.

“Police sources say that Councilman Sal Luján is not a suspect in the case,” went the report on KFWB all-news radio, delivered by a baritone-voiced veteran of riots, celebrity trials, and airplane crashes, big and small, a macho reporter-gumshoe who was on a first-name basis with mid- and high-ranking police officials in most of the dozens of jurisdictions in Los Angeles and Orange counties. “Seems he’s just a Good Samaritan who got caught up in the drama of the two boys. But authorities say they’re still trying to figure out what this lady Araceli No-eh-my Ramirez was up to. But, once again, the children she absconded with are said to be safe … Reporting from Huntington Park, this is Pete …”

The case was a “troubling mystery,” said the NBC television affiliate reporter, a portrait of gray-haired youthfulness well known to Southern Californians for the calm urgency of his reporting on the edge of brush fires, mudslides, and assorted gangland crime scenes. “We really don’t know what shape those boys are in or what they went through. We don’t know if this Mexican nanny will be charged with anything. We don’t know what, exactly, her intentions were,” the reporter said, summarizing all he didn’t know when his affiliate patched him into the network’s national cable feed. For several hours the repeated transmissions of Araceli’s blurred backyard photograph were juxtaposed with the footage of the searches and lines at the border, and of Araceli being tackled, and of the gleaming white home in a neighborhood most often described with the adjectives “exclusive,” “hillside,” and “gated.” As interest in the story deepened in the early Eastern Daylight Time evening on national cable news, the class of professional tragedy-pundits chimed in. They were former prosecutors and defense attorneys who specialized in taking small bites of nebulous information and chewing them until they became opinions and insights based on “what my gut tells me” and “what we know and what we don’t know.” Some opined, why not, on what they believed they knew about Mexican women and the well-off families that could afford to place their children in the care of foreigners. These comments intermingled with those of faceless callers to nationwide toll-free lines, for whom Araceli grew into a figure of menace and dread, while Maureen and Scott became objects of pity splashed with a touch of envy and populist scorn. “There’s a good reason to stay at home and be a mom, and not leave your kids with a Mexican girl, even if you can get one for ten bucks a day,” a caller opined in Gaith-ersburg, Maryland, speaking to the woman of the flaring nostrils, who nodded gravely.

In those American homes where Mexican, Guatemalan, and Peruvian women actually worked, mothers and fathers digested the news, and looked across their freshly dusted living rooms and tautly made beds and gave their hired help a closer look. They asked themselves questions that they usually suppressed, because the answers were, in practice, unknowable. Where is this woman from, and how much do I really know about her? Many of them were familiar with the superficial details of their employees’ lives. The most empathetic among them had studied the photographs that arrived in the mail from places south, little faraway images with KODAK imprinted anachronistically on the back, of wrinkled parents in village gardens of prickly pear cacti and drought-bleached corn, of children in used American clothing celebrating exotic holidays involving the burning of incense and parades with religious icons. The knowledge of that distant poverty provoked feelings of admiration, guilt, and mild revulsion in varying degrees, and also a sense of confusion. How can we live in such a big world, where hooded sweatshirts and baby ballerina dresses circulate from north to south, from new to old, from those who pay retail to those who pay for their clothes by the pound? Now toss into this mystery a villain, and the possibility of hidden peccadilloes and secret motives of revenge, and the result was a slight but noticeable uptick in the volume of phone calls in the greater Southern California region, as mothers in cubicles, mothers leaving yoga sessions, mothers leaving staff meetings, mothers at the Getty and the Huntington, at the Beverly Center and the Sherman Oaks Galleria, looked away from their monitors and turned off their car radios, and picked up office phones and cell phones and called home, just to check, just to listen to the accented voices of their hired help, to see if they might hear an intonation suggesting deception, the verbal slip of the schemer. “Everything okay? ¿Todo bien? Sí? Yes? Okay, then.” When they returned home they counted the items in their jewelry boxes and some examined the arms and necks of their children for bruises, and a very few even asked their toddlers, for the first time in weeks, if Lupe and María and Soledad were really “nice” or if they were ever “mean,” to which the most common responses were, “What?” and “¿Qué, Mommy?”