Murder at the Watergate Read Online Free PDF Page B

his wife and children could spend the day enjoying American fast food and shopping for American sneakers, CDs of American pop stars, and designer jeans.
    Garza had done his various jobs well, and had caught the eye of the federation’s president, who brought him into the larger, umbrella organization, where his authority was expanded, and by extension his ability to demand expressions of gratitude from a wider variety of union members—streetcar washers, photographers belonging to the Union of Five-Minute Photographers, or the larger Union of Photographers of Church, Social and Official Ceremonies, and the more than three thousand members of the Mexican Union of Mariachis. No longerwas Morin Garza responsible for recruiting new members. That took care of itself—if you wanted to work.
    Now he found himself involved in the more important and germane task of ensuring that each member of every union paid appropriate homage to the PRI. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose political grip on Mexico went back to 1929, had outlasted other one-party states—the Fascists, the Nazis, and the Bolsheviks—with ease and impunity, controlling everything and everybody, including millions of union members. To belong to a union was to belong to the PRI; the shoe shiners wore blue uniforms provided by the union but sporting the PRI logo.
    “Sir?”
    “What?” Garza spun around at the sound of the voice.
    “Can I help you with anything?” the uniformed airline employee asked.
    “No.
Gracias
. No.”
    He had stopped, daydreaming. He looked left and right and behind as he walked hurriedly across the terminal, through the doors and to the sidewalk, where taxis and buses and cars jockeyed for position. You couldn’t be too careful, even this far away from the trouble.
    He scanned the handwritten signs held up by limousine drivers. For a moment, the name didn’t register. ORTIZ . That was it. The name they would use.
    Unlike other limo drivers, this one did not wear the requisite white shirt and black tie, nor was his car long and black. He was an American man in his thirties, with thin, golden hair the consistency of silk, a pale complexion, and watery blue eyes. He wore a tan raincoat over a suit; his vehicle was a nondescript green sedan.
    “Mr. Ortiz?” he said.
    “Sí.”
    “Please.”
    Garza climbed into the rear. The driver came around after closing the door, deftly navigated a break in the traffc flow, and headed for Washington.
    An hour later, the green car turned off New Hampshire Avenue and down into the entrance to the underground parking lot beneath the Watergate’s 600 Office Building, across from the Kennedy Center, where Placido Domingo was sipping hot tea with honey in preparation for his concert.
    The driver parked near a door leading into the office building, turned, said, “Wait here. Someone will be down to get you.” He walked away, disappearing in the direction of the adjoining garage beneath the east building.
    Morin Garza clutched his small black carry-on bag on his lap, drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and thought of Cecilia.

7
The 600 Office Building—the Watergate
    The Aprile for President campaign headquarters in 600 New Hampshire Avenue, one of two office buildings in the Watergate complex, had been open for more than a month. It was two floors above the Mexican-American Trade Alliance.
    As preparations for Christmas had been starting earlier each year, the same phenomenon had been occurring with politics, particularly on the national level. Of course, as some had observed, each new campaign began on the same day that the previous campaign ended, or earlier. Already, two other Democratic presidential aspirants, one a liberal senator from Wisconsin, the other a fence-straddling member of the House from California, had begun traveling the country making speeches to influential groups of Democrats, initiating the tortuous process of raising money, and had started their sniping at VP