A murder ignored

This issue of Bungalow is dedicated to my friend and mentor John Burns, who died at 81 last week.

He spent 40 years covering the hardest places on Earth — Communist China and Russia, apartheid South Africa, Iraq under Saddam, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sarajevo under siege.

When we began to work together in 2010, I thought he'd teach me how to write in the magical, lyrical way that he did. Stories like this, or this, which matched the poetry of the only two books he recommended to reporters: the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Instead he taught me how to think about what we did. How to pursue true stories with the kind of dignity and fairness that forms a counterweight to the political certainties that he — and I — felt lay behind the worst evils man perpetrates against man.

I could fill a book with just the stories he told me. The time he surreptitiously measured Deng Xiaoping's height at a party. His flight from Baghdad, chased by one of Saddam's death squads, with a wad of cash and a stock of M&Ms and Earl Grey tea. The decorated war correspondent who shoved his wife aside to hide behind a rock when the gunfire started.

So could each of the many writers working today who found their start, and a north star, working with John. But that's for another day. So I'll leave you with his favorite piece of music, and say farewell to him with a slight amendment to its lyrics.

May the wind be gentle,
and the waves be calm,
and may every element
benignly answer
to his wishes

MEXICO CITY. JANUARY 9, 2011. Linda saw the white car come cruising past at about 8:45 p.m., when the sun had set and the air had turned cool and clear. It drove slowly. There was a sense it was looking for something. Someone.

She was with her boyfriend, and a group of others — six or seven, all between 18 and 26 — at Tal Iván, a convenience store with a large Corona ad painted on the front, in the middle of Santa Martha Acatitla Norte, a neighborhood of low-rise industrial buildings that is part of the Iztapalapa district.

They were sitting just inside, on crates of Victoria beer under bright fluorescent lights, looking out of the large roll-up door onto a strip of low sidewalk, a line of weeds at its edge, and a pitted four-lane street beyond. The men drank as the sun set and the air turned cool outside. Linda was pregnant, so she didn't.

Officially there were no cartels operating in Mexico City — it would be too inconvenient for the government if there were. But there were narcomenudeos, or small drug-dealing gangs, connected to larger cartels, most commonly the Beltran-Leyva cartel.

They were also involved in car thefts and other crimes and were omnipresent. Everyone knew which auto repair shops to go to if you wanted to find them. That same night there were two shootings nearby.

Linda knew that there were not too many steps between her boyfriend and his friends and that world. But it seemed distant enough not to worry about. Until the white car.

Before she or anyone else could react, the shooting started. Explosions and small clinks as spent 9 mm shells hit the concrete, over and over until it seemed like it would never stop, and then screaming and scrambling as they all tried to get away. They fled outside, but there were tall, graffiti-covered walls in both directions. Nowhere to hide. The car just stopped and picked them off.

The bullet hit Linda in the chest and punctured her lung. It felt like getting kicked and burned at the same time. It narrowly missed her vena cava, one of the main blood vessels in the body. She heard the white car drive away. She saw one of her friends laid out under the racks of snacks, his head on a red plastic crate next to the pinball machine, his arm partly inside an empty Victoria beer box. He died there.

Then there was a swirl of faces, voices and flashing lights as she and four others were taken by ambulance to Hospital General Regional No. 25, a brutalist concrete cube with a grid of blank windows.

She was wheeled through the crowd at the emergency entrance, lit by eerie floodlights, and into the operating room. She underwent a thoracotomy, a highly invasive surgery in which the ribs are split and mechanically spread to allow a surgeon to operate in the chest cavity. Her child appeared unharmed, and both began an arduous recovery in the intensive care unit.

As she lay unconscious, and her unborn child blindly attempted to process the trauma, her friends began to succumb one by one to their wounds elsewhere in the hospital. In the end, six died. Linda was alone.

The next morning, Sunday, Jan. 10, Dr. Jose Luis Mosso-Vasquez, an emergency surgeon then in his 40s with jet-black hair, arrived for a shift at the hospital.

He was known as Dr. Mosso. He was handsome and friendly, with twinkling eyes. His deftness hid a fervor born of his upbringing in a shamanic family and a passionate belief in Catholicism, which led him to conduct research at the Catholic college Universidad Panamericana.

He felt the frustration of his own limitations, and those of the Mexican medical system, very keenly. He wanted to make things better. To save the world, or at least his little piece of it. And he had made a start. He had pioneered the use of virtual reality as a cost-effective anesthetic, and the use of cellphones as inexpensive monitors for surgical cameras.

Gang violence, and the horrors it visited nightly on the hospital, were part of Dr. Mosso's job. He had once been operating on a minor criminal who had been shot in a gang dispute. A grave-looking official came in and told him the hospital had been notified that a man was on his way to the operating room to finish the job on the patient, and to kill Dr. Mosso and the medical team for daring to try and save him.

He knew others had faced the same situation. The protocol was to kneel, hands in the air, and let it happen. But he kept working and prepared himself for death. The gunman was arrested in the corridor outside the operating room.

That Sunday, he scrubbed in and began work on his first case of the day. He had just opened the patient, his rubber gloves bloody and his attention focused on the task ahead, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Linda had awoken. She had moved awkwardly in her confusion and had started to bleed internally. It could be her vena cava. If so, she had minutes to live before she bled out.

Dr. Mosso left the other patient open and rushed to work on Linda. He stabilized her and checked that her baby was OK, then left them to recover — hopefully for good this time — under a forest of tubes and catheters.

Her case stayed with him more than most. He asked after her every few days, as his shifts allowed. The news was as good as it could be for a young pregnant woman recovering from a gunshot wound. She was stable and recovering.

Two weeks later, on a Monday morning, when he asked again, the tone changed. Linda and her baby, he was told, were dead.

It defied medical plausibility. She had survived for too long. The baby had survived for too long. They were beyond the worst of the risk. He demanded to know how this could have happened. Someone pulled him aside.

The phone at the intensive care department had rung the previous night, he was told. It was the gang that had shot up Tal Iván, or the cartel it was affiliated with. The message was simple: If Linda was not disconnected from the machines keeping her alive immediately, they would come to the department and kill every patient there.

They had no choice. The Hippocratic oath would not protect them, and would certainly not help the dozens of critically ill people whose lives they had to balance. They had done it.

The police did not know, and never would. They were focused on two detainees, connected with both auto thefts and gang territory disputes, who they believed were connected to the attack. The investigation, like most of them, went nowhere. The records appear to be missing from the archives. But it stayed forever with Dr. Mosso.

He became preoccupied with evil — like Monseñor Cabrero, Cardinal Sandoval and the exorcists, but with a scientific twist. He wanted to know its nature. What it looked like. What it felt like. How to vanquish it for good.

In that way, Linda lived on in the scientific experiment he embarked on in 2017 to watch God defeat the devil in real time, and the vertiginous curse it unleashed on all of its participants. ⸭