that’s-my-till-you’re-stealing-from expression on his face.
“You’re right, Mr. Marconi,” Barnes said in a calm, dry voice, eyes never veering from O’Brien. “We don’t know ‘squat,’ as you put it, about Mexico and its recent wave of drug-related atrocities, other than what’s reported in the papers. So there’s no use pretending we do.” He turned to me. “But we do know this about Monterrey Prison.” He reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out two neatly folded sheets of 8½-by-ll paper, which he then smoothed out on his lap.
Tony sat up in his chair.
Barnes handed over the article to Tony, who perused it quickly but then handed it to me directly across his desk.
I glanced at the headline on the first page: IN MEXICAN PRISONS, HOPE IS QUICKLY ABANDONED!
“All we had to do,” Barnes said, “was Google the subject of ‘Mexican Jails’ and voilà.” He made quotation marks with his fingers when he said, “voila.”
“I did a little more research than that,” O’Brien insisted.
“You know, you’re absolutely right, Donald,” Barnes said, lifting the paperback off my lap. “You also took a little trip to the bookstore. Now, there’s an excursion I’m going to insist you bill me double for.”
O’Brien’s lower jaw seemed as though it were hanging off his belt buckle. “I did spend a night in the library, Richard. My wife had to miss her bridge — ”
“Oh shut up,” Barnes said.
Chapter 7
Tony suggested we all calm down and take what he referred to, among men, as a “piss break.” Barnes retrieved a cell phone from his briefcase. He said he needed a few minutes to check up on some of his clients anyway. That left me alone to read the Internet article which, I noticed, had been penned originally for the New York Post.
A man making his way past the iron bars and concrete walls in the half light and foul stench of Monterrey Prison emerges upon a nightmare of humanity: dozens of tranquilized men and women packed together like sardines in six separate holding cells .
I stopped there and read the paragraph again.
First off, I was trying to comprehend co-gender incarceration. Then I was trying to imagine dozens of inmates packed into a few narrow holding cells where finding enough space to sit down would be a major problem. Even for a man who had spent most of his life in some of the most crowded prisons in New York, I couldn’t fathom how a prisoner would be expected to eat, sleep, and clean up in that kind of environment, let along survive from one day to the next.
Maybe that was the point.
I read on.
If the prisoners behaved themselves they might have the “opportunity” to move into a four-person cell after only a couple of months. A cell-block delegate who had agreed to be interviewed stated proudly that he’d been able to maintain five inmates to a ten-foot cell while a total of 344 men and women in his block managed to share three toilets.
Señor and Señorita , welcome to your worst nightmare.
The more I read, the more I realized it wasn’t the lack of personal space or proper sanitation that posed the greatest threat to Renata. According to one Amnesty International official named in the report, from January 1993 to April 1998 more than one thousand inmates had suffered violent deaths inside Monterrey Prison, not only at the hands of other inmates but also at the hands of the guards. It was even suspected that the prison warden himself (a suspected member of the Contreras Brothers crime family) partook in the death party from time to time. The stats, if they were accurate, astounded even me. Last year alone, Monterrey experienced 232 homicides, over one hundred attempted intentional body-damage incidents, eighty or so rapes, fifty-two inmate-to-inmate robberies, and over eighty drug-related, nonviolent crimes.
Because the prison’s total population stood at around four thousand and change, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Renata had about
“You’re right, Mr. Marconi,” Barnes said in a calm, dry voice, eyes never veering from O’Brien. “We don’t know ‘squat,’ as you put it, about Mexico and its recent wave of drug-related atrocities, other than what’s reported in the papers. So there’s no use pretending we do.” He turned to me. “But we do know this about Monterrey Prison.” He reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out two neatly folded sheets of 8½-by-ll paper, which he then smoothed out on his lap.
Tony sat up in his chair.
Barnes handed over the article to Tony, who perused it quickly but then handed it to me directly across his desk.
I glanced at the headline on the first page: IN MEXICAN PRISONS, HOPE IS QUICKLY ABANDONED!
“All we had to do,” Barnes said, “was Google the subject of ‘Mexican Jails’ and voilà.” He made quotation marks with his fingers when he said, “voila.”
“I did a little more research than that,” O’Brien insisted.
“You know, you’re absolutely right, Donald,” Barnes said, lifting the paperback off my lap. “You also took a little trip to the bookstore. Now, there’s an excursion I’m going to insist you bill me double for.”
O’Brien’s lower jaw seemed as though it were hanging off his belt buckle. “I did spend a night in the library, Richard. My wife had to miss her bridge — ”
“Oh shut up,” Barnes said.
Chapter 7
Tony suggested we all calm down and take what he referred to, among men, as a “piss break.” Barnes retrieved a cell phone from his briefcase. He said he needed a few minutes to check up on some of his clients anyway. That left me alone to read the Internet article which, I noticed, had been penned originally for the New York Post.
A man making his way past the iron bars and concrete walls in the half light and foul stench of Monterrey Prison emerges upon a nightmare of humanity: dozens of tranquilized men and women packed together like sardines in six separate holding cells .
I stopped there and read the paragraph again.
First off, I was trying to comprehend co-gender incarceration. Then I was trying to imagine dozens of inmates packed into a few narrow holding cells where finding enough space to sit down would be a major problem. Even for a man who had spent most of his life in some of the most crowded prisons in New York, I couldn’t fathom how a prisoner would be expected to eat, sleep, and clean up in that kind of environment, let along survive from one day to the next.
Maybe that was the point.
I read on.
If the prisoners behaved themselves they might have the “opportunity” to move into a four-person cell after only a couple of months. A cell-block delegate who had agreed to be interviewed stated proudly that he’d been able to maintain five inmates to a ten-foot cell while a total of 344 men and women in his block managed to share three toilets.
Señor and Señorita , welcome to your worst nightmare.
The more I read, the more I realized it wasn’t the lack of personal space or proper sanitation that posed the greatest threat to Renata. According to one Amnesty International official named in the report, from January 1993 to April 1998 more than one thousand inmates had suffered violent deaths inside Monterrey Prison, not only at the hands of other inmates but also at the hands of the guards. It was even suspected that the prison warden himself (a suspected member of the Contreras Brothers crime family) partook in the death party from time to time. The stats, if they were accurate, astounded even me. Last year alone, Monterrey experienced 232 homicides, over one hundred attempted intentional body-damage incidents, eighty or so rapes, fifty-two inmate-to-inmate robberies, and over eighty drug-related, nonviolent crimes.
Because the prison’s total population stood at around four thousand and change, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Renata had about
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