Fate agrees to accompany Guadalupe Roncal to interview a prison suspect

Fate agrees to accompany Guadalupe Roncal to interview the imprisoned chief suspect in the killings of women in Santa Teresa, turning a conversation about fear and journalistic danger into a concrete appointment. The decision gives Roncal a companion for a high-stakes reporting trip, but Fate’s later plan to leave the city casts doubt on whether he will follow through.

Roncal’s Assignment and Fear

Roncal tells Fate that she works for a major Mexico City newspaper and is staying at her hotel because she is afraid. The killings have made her fear assault, kidnapping, and torture. She has been assigned to investigate them only within the past week: the subject was not previously hers, and she had neither written about it nor developed expertise before the file arrived on her desk. She describes herself as an inexperienced reporter suddenly responsible for a dangerous investigation.

Roncal says the assignment fell to her because she is a woman and women cannot refuse assignments. The danger is not abstract. Her predecessor, who had spent seven years gaining a general understanding of the case, was killed in Mexico City after getting too deeply involved. According to the account Roncal found, he was lured into a taxi, robbed at cash machines, and stabbed on the outskirts of the city. His death makes the interview she is preparing for part of a wider pattern of risks facing journalists who investigate the killings.

The predecessor’s papers also led Roncal to two other reporters who had investigated the same crimes: a woman radio correspondent who was kidnapped in Mexico City, and a Chicano journalist working for the Arizona paper La Raza who disappeared. Roncal had known the correspondent from journalism school, though they were not friends. She understands the assignment through these earlier cases, but says she is not an expert and has no experience comparable to the predecessor’s. The gap between what she has learned from the file and what she has lived through shapes her request for help.

The Prison Visit and Bargain

Roncal tells Fate that she must visit the chief suspect, an American who has been in prison for years. Fate questions how someone already imprisoned can remain the chief suspect if the killings are continuing. Roncal offers no resolution to that contradiction, calling it a mystery of Mexico. The conversation leaves the suspect’s status uncertain even as the planned interview becomes more urgent.

Roncal asks Fate to accompany her. She admits that she would feel safer with a man, though this conflicts with her feminist beliefs, and reflects on how difficult it is for a middle-class Mexican woman to sustain feminism as she grows older. Her request is therefore practical and uneasy at once: the protection she seeks rests on the very gendered expectation she recognizes and questions.

Fate initially argues that prison should protect her, at least in theory, since prisoners cannot harm people outside and mainly harm one another. Roncal counters that he has never seen a photograph of the suspect. She has: among her predecessor’s papers were three prison photographs. In two, the suspect sits facing the camera; in the third, he stands and looks to one side. Roncal describes him as exceptionally tall and thin, with very blond hair, very blue eyes, and a face that suggests a dreamer. What unsettles her is not visible agitation: he does not appear uncomfortable, calm, relaxed, or angry. She imagines his dreams moving far ahead of those of other people, and says that this frightens her. The photographs make the prison visit feel less like a routine interview than an encounter whose risk she cannot confidently measure.

Fate says he does not understand what frightens her, but promises to go with her. Roncal proposes a direct exchange: she will offer him the chance to meet the chief suspect, and he will provide company and protection. Fate agrees that the arrangement is fair and kind. They set the appointment for ten in the morning, at the hotel entrance, two days later. Roncal shakes his hand and walks away unsteadily, a small physical detail that leaves the meeting weighted with apprehension even after the agreement is settled.

Fate’s Reversal and the Uncertain Outcome

The agreement does not immediately become action. The next day, Fate wakes at two in the afternoon after having felt sick the night before. He considers his plans: after that night’s boxing match, he expects to return to Tucson and try to catch a red-eye flight to New York. Because he believes he cannot write about the prison interview, he decides he will not keep his appointment with Roncal. His reasoning makes the promise conditional on the professional value of the visit, while Roncal had framed it as a matter of safety and access.

Fate thinks about arranging his travel from the motel, then postpones the decision until he can use a telephone at the Arena del Norte or the Sonora Resort. He checks out but leaves his suitcase in the car after the clerk offers to keep the room available until midnight for the same price. These practical details show that departure is already taking shape, though it has not yet been completed. When the clerk asks who will win the fight, Fate answers like a sportswriter that anything could happen. The conversation keeps him oriented toward the boxing assignment even as the promised interview with Roncal recedes.

Narrative Significance

The episode sets two kinds of uncertainty beside each other: the unresolved status of an imprisoned suspect in an ongoing series of killings, and Fate’s uncertainty about whether the interview is worth pursuing if he cannot publish it. Roncal has inherited a case from reporters who were killed or disappeared; her request for a male companion exposes the personal precautions she must weigh against her political convictions. Fate accepts those stakes in the conversation, then privately begins arranging to leave.

The appointment thus remains both an agreement and a threatened one. Roncal has a time and meeting place, and Fate has promised to appear, but his decision the following day points in the opposite direction. The evidence here establishes his intention not to keep the appointment, not the eventual outcome of the proposed prison visit. That open gap preserves the episode’s central tension: an investigation can demand companionship and courage, while the reporter asked to join it measures the trip against the limits of what he can report.