“Thank you,” I said pleasantly. “You’ve been most helpful.” She’s no Red, I thought as I walked toward the files. But then again, Red’s no Red either—not the reference librarian she pretended to be, anyhow.
The Richard Janus file contained a thick sheaf of clippings—yellowing with age, untarnished by the recent scandal—praising him for his humanitarian service. During his flying for Air America back during the Vietnam War, several clippings reported, Janus had delivered rice to starving peasants in Laos—experiences that he consistently described as “deeply rewarding” and “the inspiration for Airlift Relief International.” None of the clippings mentioned Air America’s drops of “hard rice”—guns and ammunition—or of homemade napalm, cooked up in oil drums by the CIA and dispersed over villages thought to harbor Communist guerrillas. Had Janus napalmed villages? Had he ferried opium to fund U.S.-friendly warlords in the poppy-growing region known as the “Golden Triangle”? The press clippings shed no light on those questions.
One interesting side note I found in Janus’s file was a brief bio of his wife. As a young woman from an aristocratic family in Mexico City, Carmelita Janus had been a beauty queen, model, and honors law student, well on her way to a promising legal career. She had left Mexico in her early twenties—with Richard Janus—shortly after the murder of her father, a high-ranking judge. In light of the widespread, well-documented corruption of Mexico’s police, army, and prosecutors by narco traffickers, I couldn’t help wondering: Had her father been killed because he’d opposed drug lords like Guzmán? Or had he sold out to one drug lord, then gotten gunned down by a rival?
El Chapo’s file was far slimmer than Janus’s. It contained just three clippings, which had merited clipping and filing, as best I could tell, because each of the three quoted “knowledgeable DEA sources in San Diego.” The first story reported Guzmán’s 1994 arrest and imprisonment; the second recounted his 2001 escape; and the third—the one I recalled Red mentioning—described how DEA agents discovered an elaborate underground railroad, used to haul drugs through a tunnel beneath the U.S.-Mexico border. The drugs—tons of them, according to the “knowledgeable DEA sources”—were loaded into carts beneath a house in Tijuana, wheeled the length of the tunnel, and then unloaded. The rail line’s northern terminus, said the story, was a warehouse fifty yards north of the border, in the industrial sector of Otay Mesa. In the Quality Inn sector of Otay Mesa, I realized with a shock. It was likely that I had wandered past that very warehouse my first evening in town—The fenced building with the guard-dog sign? I wondered—before I’d ended up at the IHOP, overhearing the argument between Miles Prescott and the fat, wheezing warrior from the DEA or the CIA or whatever federal agency it was that waged war on badasses.
The pursed-lipped librarian’s clippings did not, however, shed light on the things that had been gnawing at me all afternoon and evening, ever since I’d found the bit of bone that seemed to have come from the shattered skull of Richard Janus: If Janus had in fact been murdered—if a killer had strapped Janus’s body into the cockpit, aimed the plane at the mountainside, and then parachuted to safety—a whole series of baffling questions reared their heads, clamoring for answers. Why had the killer pulled Janus’s teeth? Why had he tucked a spinal cord stimulator behind the body? Why had he told the Fox reporter and the FBI agent that tool marks could be found on the teeth? In short, why had the killer gone to such elaborate lengths to do a double fake: to start out by creating the illusion that Janus had died in the fiery crash, but then to shatter that illusion, replacing it with a second illusion—the illusion that Janus was alive and on the lam somewhere?
For years, I had preached the gospel of Occam’s razor, a rule of logic stating that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost certainly the correct explanation. This case, though, seemed to be turning Occam’s razor on its head: the more complex and bizarre the explanation, the closer it seemed to stumble toward some grotesque, distorted, funhouse-mirrored travesty of truth.
That night, in my lumpy bed in my shabby motel, I dreamed of Janus—not the American pilot Janus, but the Roman deity, the one with two faces. That Janus, the one who gazed unblinkingly at both the past and the future, had been the guardian of doorways and transitions and transformations; he’d been both the keeper of the key and the wielder of the cudgel. In my dreams, the key to the mystery remained just out of reach, my fingertips not quite touching it as first my hand, then my entire arm, plunged into the Mouth of Truth.
I knew that the key must be close at hand, though, because as I groped blindly, my motions accompanied by the soft rattlings of dry pupa cases or snake tails, I felt myself being cudgeled. Rhythmically, ceaselessly cudgeled.