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.