The First Edition

The pressroom basement vibrated beneath their boot soles.

You entered down the loading ramp on Calle Enrico Martínez, ducking past two-ton rolls of newsprint that smelled of wet pine and sour cellulose. Below, twelve feet under street level, the heat was suffocating: a heavy broth of burnt kerosene, gear grease, and the metallic vapor of melting pots where the linotypes reduced lead ingots to fluid alloy at five hundred degrees. Fifty pressmen wearing folded paper printer's caps and leather aprons worked against the clock under the rhythmic roar of drive pistons.

Castro and Ruiz slipped into the photolith cubicle, their clothes plastered to their backs.

Don Lupe, the dean of master pressmen, was assembling the final-page negative flats on an etched glass light table. He was seventy years old, his knuckles stained purple by ferricyanide salts, nursing a filterless Delicados stub between his yellowed teeth while scrutinizing dot patterns through a jeweler's loupe.

"You're running late, kid," the old man grunted without lifting the glass. "Front page form is already locked. Upstairs sent down a stamped directive from headquarters ordering Sandoval's official obituary ran across two columns boxed in black."

"Take a look at this before you cast the zinc plate, Lupe," Castro said.

Castro laid the strip of thirty-five-millimeter contact prints flat across the glowing glass. Beside it, he set down the undeveloped roll with the fresh shots of the gouged Cuauhtémoc pillar, the lateral drag furrows, and the wrecker's amber lens.

Don Lupe lowered his loupe over the emulsion. He looked for fifteen unbroken seconds. The stub between his lips didn't quiver, but his weathered eyelids flared wide.

"Precinct cruisers," the printer muttered, recognizing the numbers painted on the roofs of the cars. "Those bastards have no shame."

"If we burn a four-column zinc plate for the splash, it catches the first run," Castro said, his throat tight as leather.

"Hot lead has only one virtue: once it bites into paper, no one can buy silence back."

Don Lupe spat his cigarette to the concrete floor, crushed it with steel-toed boot, and seized the negative strip with plastic tongs. He vanished into the darkroom like greased lightning.

Three minutes later, the warning bell on the spiral iron staircase began to clang.

Down the metal steps rushed Saldaña, the interim graveyard editor, wearing a rumpled linen suit drenched in cold sweat. Behind him stepped two broad-shouldered men in dark overcoats, hands shoved deep into their pockets—the very same pair that had stepped out of the Crown Victoria in Colonia Doctores.

"Halt that makeup table!" Saldaña shouted in a cracking voice. "Nobody touches the rotaries! Direct instruction from the Ministry of the Interior: this edition runs clean or nobody draws payroll this fortnight."

The linotype operators froze over their keyboards. The clatter in the shop fell dead, heavy, broken only by the rhythmic drip of acid bath into the tin troughs.

Ruiz took two measured paces forward and planted himself at the foot of the iron stairs.

The veteran cop didn't draw his revolver. He simply rested his left elbow across the handrail and unbuttoned the second hook of his mackintosh, laying bare the checkered walnut grip of his .38 Special and the tarnished shield pinned to his vest since 1968.

"Only union pressmen give orders down here, Saldaña," Ruiz said, his voice so dry and raspy it seemed to spark against the iron risers. "Your two friends carry zero federal jurisdiction on this floor. One more step toward the rotary and we'll be drafting a ballistics brief before the morning coffee gets poured."

The two shooters locked eyes on Ruiz. They took in the swollen knuckles, the unblinking stare of a man who had made his peace with the Potter's field, and the scarred index finger resting steady against the holster leather. Neither moved an inch.

From the rear gallery, a brass bell clanged twice: the lockup signal.

Don Lupe swung out of the casting bay carrying the curved semicylindrical zinc plate bearing the four-column splash of the wrecked chassis, the bold gothic headline, and Julián Castro's byline etched beneath the cut. With a single practiced thrust, he slotted it home onto the master cylinder of Goss Press Number Three, tightened the locking dogs with a half-inch box wrench, and threw the master drive lever.

The forty-horsepower motors howled.

The massive steel cylinders bit into the newsprint at top speed with the deafening thunder of a freight train. Fifty thousand printed sheets began to climb the overhead conveyors, folding, slitting, and bundling into steaming bales that reeked of fresh ink, hot lead, and defiance.

Saldaña backed slowly up the iron stairs, biting his lips in stony silence, as the first delivery vans outside on Bucareli flicked on their headlights to flood the city streets.

Castro climbed the delivery ramp into the open air.

The sky over Avenida Juárez was beginning to break in cold, slate-gray hues, and through the morning mist drifted the unmistakable scent of fresh morning papers that no blank check on earth could recall.