Miguel's Gift Page 4

  Connie was so quiet and efficient that she was seldom noticed amid the noise and bustle of the restaurant. She kept her dull, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, wore no makeup, and had a pudgy figure that was virtually devoid of feminine curves. Connie was not pretty and had never thought of herself as pretty, but she was a superb waitress, driven by fear of a complaint or a look of disapproval—the lingering effect of a demanding and temperamental father. She didn’t live so much as react, meekly following the path of least resistance. Aside from a perfunctory nod or greeting as they passed in the kitchen, Marcos paid no attention to her.

  One day Marcos was unloading dishes into a basin of hot water, steam rising all around, when he looked up to find Connie standing at the far end of the kitchen staring at him.

  “Is first time I see you without stack of plates,” said Marcos, flashing a big smile. He spoke English clearly but with an accent. “You are always busy, no?”

  Connie froze. She nervously pushed away strands of hair that had fallen across her eyes. “Oh, yes. It is very busy,” she mumbled.

  “Come see me if you get break. Is lonely back here,” said Marcos, instantly recognizing the possibilities. Though ostensibly a Catholic, he saw his faith less as a deterrent to committing sinful acts than as a means for absolving them.

  “Yes, well . . . I better get back to work,” said Connie with a shaky smile, grateful she’d been able to speak at all.

  Two days later Marcos asked her to go out with him. Connie was so surprised that she lost her grip on a plate of chicken mole and it crashed noisily on the kitchen floor. Omar Garcia, the restaurant owner, rushed back from the cash register.

  “I’m so sorry, Señor Garcia,” Connie said, dropping to the floor to clean up the mess.

  “Hey, you,” Garcia shouted angrily at Marcos, “get back to your dishes and don’t be bothering the waitresses.”

  When the dust settled, Connie was smiling and conversing with customers as though a new person had been born.

  Connie lived with her parents in a small bungalow in the Pilsen neighborhood. Her father, Ray Salinas, who had worked for twenty-three years at an auto repair shop on Ashland Avenue, had forbidden her to date until she was eighteen, and then only if he approved. He saw all men as predatory by nature and was therefore fiercely protective. Ray was a short, stocky man with massive forearms and hands that had grown incredibly strong from his work at the shop. Over the years, he’d been arrested many times for instigating liquor-fueled brawls at the local bar. Though Connie was now nineteen, she knew her father would be suspicious of Marcos, so she told her parents that she was going out with “a friend from work.”

  They had dinner at an unpretentious little restaurant on Damen Avenue. Marcos chose a table in a quiet corner and ordered a bottle of inexpensive wine to go with their steak burritos. He said little, listened respectfully to everything Connie said, and treated her with great courtesy. She felt comfortable talking with him and thought this was quite remarkable—an indication of a special relationship.

  Marcos provided Connie with few details of his past, but that was how her father was, and apparently the way most men were. He was too shy, she thought, to kiss her on their first date or the next one. But on the evening of their third date, as they were standing outside a movie theater on Cermak Road, Marcos placed his hands gently on her shoulders and looked at her very seriously.

  “Connie, would you do me honor of being my wife?”

  Shocked but overjoyed, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Marcos smiled down at her as one smiles when giving a child a birthday present.

  “Of course I’ll marry you! We’ll have the most beautiful wedding!”

  “But not yet, my dear. That cost money, and I no want to go to your father until I have better job. I hear about your father. We go to city hall to get married first. Later I tell your parents, and we plan big wedding. We no live together or say anything now. Is important we no say nothing.” She, too, feared her father’s reaction to the news, so agreed to keep it a secret for the moment.

  Connie and Marcos applied for a license and were married at city hall by a judge who absently muttered the vows. It wasn’t the wedding she’d dreamed of, but there was something romantic about doing it secretly, and she consoled herself with thoughts of the real wedding to come. In lieu of a honeymoon, they went out to lunch at a greasy spoon, where Marcos told her they should say nothing to Omar or anybody else at the restaurant for fear word would get back to her parents. He again stated that he didn’t want to present himself to her father as a mere dishwasher and that her parents would be hurt and angry for not having been invited to the marriage ceremony.

  The surprising news emerged at the end of their meal. “I almost forget,” Marcos said. “We must go to immigration office. I no can go to your father unless I have green card.”

  Connie was momentarily speechless. She’d assumed he was a legal immigrant. He spoke English so well and carried himself with ease and confidence, unlike the other illegal Mexicans at the restaurant, who rarely spoke and were almost invisible.

  “Why didn’t you say anything about that?” she asked softly.

  “I thought you know this—from others at restaurant.” He paused. “I no do this for the papers. You must no think this, my dear.”

  “No, of course not,” she said with a nervous smile.

  “We have wedding in church in few months,” he declared. “I save money so we have nice apartment.”

  As Marcos talked enthusiastically about their plans, Connie felt somewhat reassured, though it was now even more important that her father not learn of the relationship until her husband had secured his immigration papers.

  Two days later they submitted a petition at the INS office and were told they would be called in for an interview. In the weeks that followed, Connie’s life resumed its old rhythm—as if she weren’t married at all. Marcos had made it clear that he took his Catholic faith seriously, and they could not consummate the marriage or live together until it was sanctified by a church ceremony. She would continue to live with her parents and Marcos with his uncle. Connie, like Marcos, had been raised Catholic and, though she was burning with sexual passion, was grateful that her husband was a man of faith. They would wait for everything to be right in the eyes of God.

  Connie had begun to run out of patience when, eight weeks after they married, Marcos told her that he had good news. “I get new job at tortilla factory. I will be foreman and make more money. And we have interview at immigration office next week and if goes well, I get green card.”

  On a cold December morning they appeared at the INS office and were interviewed by a young man wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Since Marcos claimed to have entered the country on a temporary visa at a border crossing, he was eligible to obtain permanent status without returning to Mexico. The examiner asked a few questions about how they met and seemed impressed with the couple’s apparent happiness about being newly married. With numerous other couples waiting to be interviewed, the officer stamped the application APPROVED and informed Marcos he would receive his green card in the mail within a month or so. He was now a legal resident and was given a piece of paper emblazoned with a stamp to prove it. When they left the building, Marcos was so pleased that he kissed Connie with a passion he’d not shown before.

  “I start at tortilla factory day after tomorrow,” said Marcos. “Then we tell your parents our plans. No say anything now. We surprise them together. Tomorrow will be last day at restaurant.”

  But Connie’s elation over this news was short lived as Marcos did not show up at the restaurant the next day. She repeatedly called his uncle’s house, but there was no answer. That evening, after distractedly eating dinner with her parents, she hurried through the dark streets to the uncle’s house, about a mile away. But the lights weren’t on, there was no response when she rang the doorbell, and Marcos’s car was nowhere to be seen in the neighborhood. She returned home but was barely a
ble to sleep that night.

  At the restaurant the next morning, she found that Marcos had been replaced by a short Mexican who blended seamlessly into the background. After her shift, she took the bus to Twenty-Sixth Street to inquire at the tortilla factory. Encouraged to see Marcos’s car parked outside, she went into the office and asked to speak to her husband. The receptionist looked at her curiously and said the workers could not be disturbed during working hours, but agreed to deliver a message. Connie scratched out a note saying she was worried about him and asking him to call her.

  But Marcos did not call, and the cold reality began to set in. She had been duped—abandoned by her husband before they had even spent a minute together in the same house. There was no question in her mind that this had been his intention from the beginning. He had used her and discarded her like a piece of trash. That night, tears welled up in Connie’s eyes as she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, embarrassed and ashamed for having been so easily taken advantage of. After she’d had a long cry, she began to feel something unfamiliar: a deep-seated loathing of another human being.

  A few days later she went back to the INS office to tell them of Marcos’s misdeeds and was referred to the same man who had conducted their interview. She immediately informed him that she wanted to withdraw the petition she had filed for her husband.

  “No, it’s too late for that,” he said, explaining that the petition had already been approved—that Marcos had been accorded legal status. He listened gloomily as Connie told him of Marcos’s deception.

  “Well, even if I can’t withdraw the petition, you can deport him, can’t you?”

  “No, it’s not that simple.”

  “After what he did, you can’t deport him?” She’d been rather calm up to that moment but now felt a surge of anger. “Why not?”

  “We would have to revoke his legal status first. It’s a very difficult process, and the courts have ruled that living together or consummating the relationship is not really required. Once he receives permanent status, the burden of proof shifts dramatically. You two dated before getting married, so there was a relationship of some kind. It is highly unlikely we could prove that from the beginning he only married you to get his card. He’ll just say you had a fight and realized you weren’t right for each other.”

  Connie stared at him in disbelief.

  “It’s what we call a one-sided fraud,” he offered feebly. “They’re very hard to prove, and we have limited resources.”

  Before leaving the building, Connie took a seat in the reception area and tried to gather herself. The realization that Marcos had deceived her had already been emotionally devastating. Now the shock set in that he was going to get away with it. She looked around at couples waiting to be interviewed and wondered how many of the women were being victimized, their worlds about to fall apart. After a few minutes she staggered out and made her way down State Street.

  Though the temperature was below freezing, the city was adorned with brilliant sunlight. It was the week before Christmas, and crowds of people bustled happily past Salvation Army bell-ringers and colorful decorations. But Connie found the gaiety intolerable. She trudged heavily down the steps into the darkness of the subway.

  As she arrived at the platform a train was pulling away, its red lights growing smaller as it disappeared in the tunnel. Alone in the cold, dimly lit station, Connie waited for the next train home.

  * * *

  Marcos, bored and distracted, watched his crew of illegal Mexicans bag warm tortillas on the line, mulling the risks and rewards of his latest idea. Aside from the tedium and endless paperwork of his job, he knew it would never provide him with the financial independence he desired. The only way to make serious money, he’d concluded, was to run his own business—something he could manage without giving up the steady income and respectability of his job.

  When a newly hired worker walked by, Marcos reached out and playfully spun him around by the shoulder. “Let me see that card of yours, my friend—the one I made a copy of this morning,” said Marcos in Spanish. When the young man looked up suspiciously, Marcos quickly reassured him. “I know they’re all phony. Do you think I give a damn?”

  The man fumbled through his wallet, removed the laminated card, and handed it to Marcos.

  “How much you pay for this?” inquired Marcos.

  “Two hundred fifty, for that and the social security,” said the man, looking around nervously. Hair-netted Mexican workers were watching tortillas coming at them along a perforated stainless steel assembly line. Several of them turned to look but couldn’t hear the exchange because of the drone of the machinery.

  “You got it from one of those cholos at a bar?”

  The man nodded and looked away. Marcos pulled his own card from his wallet, the good one given to him for marrying Connie Salinas, and examined them both. The man’s card looked bad by comparison, the printing not as sharp, but it was good enough to serve its purpose.

  “OK, get back to work,” Marcos said, returning the card and patting the man on the shoulder. Marcos headed to his office in a state of building excitement. For the love of God, why hadn’t he thought of it earlier?

  Marcos always made a great show of cooperating when INS agents arrived to check the workforce at the tortilla plant. One of the lead agents, a funny, bald-headed man named Willis, even seemed to view him as a partner in weeding out illegals. During his last visit, Willis had commented about the problem of counterfeit documents.

  “Nobody is working those cases. Not a high-enough priority with the front office or the clowns at headquarters,” Willis had said casually, after finding almost all of the workers at the tortilla factory in possession of counterfeits. “I can’t remember the last time anybody got busted for selling phony documents. It’s a damn outrage. I’m not even allowed to tell you how to detect one.”

  “Yes, it is shame, Mr. Willis,” Marcos had replied sympathetically. “I not know they were bad cards. What can I do? They all look good to me.”

  A week later, Marcos talked it over with Sixto Montoya, a truck driver who made regular deliveries of flour to the tortilla plant. Like Marcos, Sixto had secured legal status through a sham marriage to an unsuspecting woman. The two men had become friends, Sixto often lingering in Marcos’s dusty little office over coffee and donuts. Physically, they were a study in contrasts. Sixto, thin and wiry, had sharp features and a permanently serious facial expression.

  The men spoke in their native Spanish. “We are sitting on top of a gold mine, my friend,” said Marcos with a coy grin.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let me show you something.” Marcos opened his desk drawer and pulled out a manila folder. He removed a single sheet of paper on which an image of a green card had been copied. He pushed the copy across his desk.

  Sixto surveyed the page. “Yes, I’ve seen plenty of these. What about it?” He spoke quickly, spitting the words out as if they were bitter in his mouth.

  “I’ve got forty of those in this folder from just the past two weeks. I always have to make a copy to prove we checked documents before hiring to comply with the new law. But they are all phony. And we don’t even have to check them through the government to see if they’re good.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about it,” said Sixto. “There’s no need to show a good document, so they all want the fake ones. It’s a joke.”

  “Yes, a joke with a big payoff! Look at those who sell the documents—drunks, drug users, and lowlifes who hang around the bars. They get arrested, go on binges. Whoever brings order to it will make a lot of money.”

  Sixto was looking past Marcos, thinking it through. His eyes shifted back to Marcos. “What do you have in mind?”

  “The key is buying in quantity and selling at a reasonable price. We could drive the small operators out of business in a very short time. I can get some money from my uncle. The blank cards can be purchased cheaply across the border in Tijuana. That’s where the p
rinting presses are. My uncle even has a contact there. The Mexican cops let them operate freely because of bribes. I’m taking a trip down there. When I get back I’ll need somebody to take control of things in your area on the North Side. I’ll take care of things on the South Side. I thought you might be interested.”

  “Of course I’m interested,” said Sixto, who lived in an area thick with immigrants of every nationality. He pulled a cigarette from the open pack in his shirt pocket and held it between his fingers. “What sort of profit could we expect?”

  “The blank documents can be purchased for very little, a few dollars per document—green cards and social securities. They can be sold easily on the street for at least a hundred fifty for a set. The equipment needed to put the cards together is very cheap. We can be the wholesalers and sell to the guys who will work the street and make the cards. The more vendors we have, the more we make. We’ll have them do business quietly, behind the scenes. I’ll give you a good price on the blanks, and you’ll be free to distribute them as you see fit.”

  Sixto lit his cigarette and dropped the match to the cement floor. “This is risky, no? What about the feds?”

  “That’s the beauty of it. I have spoken with an immigration official. He tells me they don’t have the manpower to go after the counterfeiters. They’re leaving it wide open.”

  Sixto blew out a long cloud of smoke before speaking. “I’m sure I could find people to help us on the North Side. It should not be difficult.”

  “I’m leaving for Tijuana on Friday. Just be careful who you talk to about this.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Sixto.