Cari Mora

by Thomas Harris

  On the living room wall was an attractive poster for a concert in Tel Aviv in l958, in the hall a photograph of Julieta in a bikini, being crowned Miss Hawaiian Tropic.

  From the back bedroom Julieta called to Cari over the crying of the infant. “Cari, would you warm a bottle?”

  Cari’s cell phone rang. She had to dry her hands on her apron to fish it out of her purse. Antonio was calling.

  He was in his truck. “Cari, listen to me. How would you like to make four hundred bucks today?” He held the phone away from his ear for a second. “Excuse me? I beg your pardon, señorita, this is not monkey business. Negocio legítimo, totalmente. Tu sabes que soy un hombre de mi palabra. I need you to help me, Cari. Late this afternoon I’m going to look under—you know, I’m just going to take a look. Come help me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  With the prospect of gainful employment in the afternoon, Cari splurged; instead of riding the bus she took an UberX to North Miami Beach, paying $9.21.

  The house was near the Snake Creek Canal in a neighborhood of small neat homes hard-won by their owners. Most families managed to have in their gardens a mango tree and a papaya, a Meyer lemon maybe.

  This was the only house in disrepair, a repo entangled with the bank, its owner dragged out by ICE and deported in the middle of the night. It had been vacant for five years. Each side in the estate dispute enjoined the other from fixing it up. It had its own mango tree in the backyard, but the tree was struggling and badly in need of pruning and feed.

  Cari had spotted the house months before and copied the information off the sign in the front yard. Her first visit had been conducted by a disinterested bank underling. The man let her into the house and waited in the car, drinking a TruMoo and drumming his pale soft fingers on the wheel. He had already told his supervisor that Cari “didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting a mortgage.” He honked to hurry her along.

  This time Cari came to the house alone.

  She brought some Vigoro fruit tree fertilizer from Home Depot. The gate to the side yard had sagged on its hinges and was not locked. She pushed it open.

  Cari sat on a plastic milk crate in the overgrown back garden of the vacant house and looked at the mango tree. She put her hand on the tree. The breeze touched Cari’s hair and whispered in the mango. She applied the fertilizer, careful not to get any on the trunk. Mangoes do not like fertilizer on their trunks.

  The woman who lived next door, hearing the creaking gate, watched Cari through a low hole in the fence. When she saw Cari feed the mango tree her face relaxed. The woman came over and offered Cari her ladder if she wanted to look into the attic. Cari went inside the house.

  The sun shone through a hole in the roof into the bedroom. The second bedroom was half painted, the paint complete on one wall and petering out on a second wall, winding down to a stiff paintbrush left on the floor, where the painter had finished drinking his bottle of weak-knee. The empty bottle lay beside the paintbrush on the matted and curling carpet. The house had good tile floors.

  There was a little vandalism—OGALVY CAN KISS MY BUT​ was written on an inner wall at a child’s eye level along with a rude drawing, presumably Ogalvy with jackass ears, but there were no crack vials on the floor or food wrappers. The smell of mold came from behind the rain-streaked wallboard. The commode rocked on its base.

  Cari thought the house was wonderful.

  Bad news in the attic. Some trusses rotting. A nest woven from grass and insulation was in the corner of the attic over the kitchen. Cari knelt on the beams and looked at the abandoned nest. Rat? Nope, a possum—no doubt about it. The nest bag had the hallmark emergency exit on the side in addition to the formal entrance. Cari had in her time made possum soup when the grub ran out. She had been taught in the jungle to make field rat soup as a specific against whooping cough, but found the recipe tasted about the same using possums, and was equally ineffective as medicine. Cari knew how to do many things. She had no experience at replacing roofing trusses and setting roofing tiles. She knew she could learn.

  A sun shower came, pelting hard on the house, drumming and crackling on the roof close over her head as she knelt on the beams. The rain came in the hole in the roof and was a glittering column down through the house in the bright sunshine. She put her hand in the rain as though she could keep it out of the house. The shower was over in minutes. Cari came outside onto the steaming ground, hoping for a rainbow. There was one.

  The neighbor was tiny and very wrinkled. Her name was Teresa and she was old when she came to America from La Gomera in the Spanish Canaries. She saved cell phone minutes by communicating with her sister two blocks away with Silbo Gomero whistle talk. Teresa offered Cari two mangoes off her own tree. She put them in a bright orange bag from Sabor Tropical.

  Among the neighbors, Teresa explained without prompting, the Prieto mango was most popular with households of Cuban origin, such as the Vargases, whose son was in dental school. The Madame Francis mango was favored among those from Haiti, like the Toussaints on the corner, whose daughter was starting law school. The Neelam mango was preferred by the Vidyapatis, a Hindu family of pari-mutuel clerks from India at the end of the street, whose son was a medical student at U of M, she went on. The Jamaicans were extremely opinionated and scoffed at all this in favor of the Julie mango. They were the Higginses, whose daughter was a pharmacist now. The Chinese were divided in their opinions and used all types of mango mixed with lychee in their Café Canton on 163rd Street. Their son Weldon Wing had been regarded by the elders as a nincompoop because he went around singing all the time and performed at open-mic nights as the rapper “Love-Jones.” But Weldon, or Love-Jones, rose swiftly in his family’s regard when he got his own fried-chicken franchise from Popeyes, which the neighbor gave the Miami pronunciation of “Po-payez.”

  They heard a whistle, thin and clear, from far away. It went on for several seconds, up and down.

  “Excuse me,” the neighbor said. “Do I have any vacuum cleaner bags indeed!”

  She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled a phrase so loudly Cari had to step back.

  “I guess I told her,” the tiny woman said. “She is forever borrowing my vacuum cleaner bags. I suggested she go to Walmart, where they have them for sale. You want this house? I will pray for you. I can squirt water on the mango through the peephole in the fence.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  A half hour before sunset Antonio’s pool service truck pulled into a driveway a block and a half from the Escobar mansion. Cari Mora was driving.

  “I do the pool for these people every week,” Antonio said. “They won’t be back in Miami Beach until the end of September.”

  He got out and punched in the gate code.

  The gate swung very slowly, Cari thought. She wanted to ask Antonio the code in case she had to open it without him. She didn’t want to ask.

  He saw it in her face. “From the inside it opens when you drive close to it.” He waved her in. She turned the truck around in the courtyard until it faced the gate.

  “Wait here until you see me, or I call you.”

  She got out of the truck and stood with him. “What if you get a problem? I can help you,” she said. “I can swim with you. We can put the pistol in the ziplock bag and I can cover you from under the dock next door. I could keep them off the seawall if they see you.”

  “Nope,” Antonio said. “Thank you, Cari, I invited you to help me—we do this my way, okay?”

  “Antonio, it’s better if I cover you.”

  “You want to do this my way, Cari, or do you want to go home? Just think about your business, I’ll think about my business. Stay with the truck. Listen to me—if I have to come out of the water down the street, I’ll call you.” He held up a cell phone in a ziplock bag. “If there are guys in the street with me, come fast. Stop with the bed of the truck beside me. I’ll jump in the back. You haul ass and get us out of there. Don’t worry. I’ll be right back here in thirty
minutes at the most.”

  He took his scuba gear out of the back of the truck.

  Antonio looked at Cari and saw some color in her cheeks. He reached in the glove box and got out an envelope.

  “These are the tickets to see Juanes at the Hard Rock. If you won’t go with Wicked Old Antonio, take your cousin.” He winked at her and walked around the house and out of sight without looking back.

  Antonio put on his tank and mask under cover of a hedge. In the distance he could see the honeymoon ships making smoke in Government Cut. Being with Cari had Antonio a little steamed up and he thought probably the honeymoon ships’ engines weren’t even running and the smoke came off the bedrooms.

  The sky was bright orange in the west, the light off the water swarming on the underside of the sea grape trees in patches the size of his hand.

  Antonio went down the ladder from the dock of the vacant house and slid into the water. He spit in his mask and rubbed it around. His camera was strapped to his wrist.

  He swam 150 yards along the seawall, going under the docks, staying about six feet under the surface. He came up under the dock next door to the Escobar house. Reflections from the lowering sun shivered light under the dock. He had to be careful of nails sticking down through the boards. A spiderweb caught in his hair. He submerged for a moment in case the spider was on his head. Rafts of grass littered with foam cups and plastic water bottles slid by on the tide with a bobbing palm frond as long as an alligator. The lid of a cooler floated past him, shielding several small fish from the sky.

  They were grinding in the basement of the Escobar house. Mateo and the crew were peeling plaster and cement off the basement wall. It was hard going. They had an air hammer, chisels, pry bars and a Sawzall. Dust was thick in the air.

  Hans-Peter Schneider watched from the stairs, wiping his pale skull with an embroidered handkerchief.

  They had started at the top and in half a day they had peeled down far enough to reveal first a halo, then the countenance of a holy figure, a woman painted on the landward face of the cube. The figure looked at them over the cracked plaster and cement. Mateo recognized her. He crossed himself. “Nuestra Señora de Caridad del Cobre,” he said.

  In the waterside garden of the Escobar house Bobby Joe could not look westward over the water without shielding his eyes from the setting sun. Flocks of ibises passed over, heading home to the rookery on Bird Key. Bobby Joe shot at the flocks a few times with an air rifle, hoping to break a wing and have a bird to play with, but did not hit anything. Up on the second-floor terrace Umberto sat in a chair with his forearms on the railing, his AR-l5 beside him.

  The setting sun made the house glow orange, and the clouds were beginning to light up.

  Bobby Joe tried to shoot a fish with his crossbow, but it ducked under the raft of grass. Bobby Joe cursed the blinding sun.

  Under the raft of floating grass Antonio approached the Escobar seawall, staying in the patch of gloom that moved over the rough bottom of riprap and silt. He was about six feet down. A school of mullet passed him, dark silver under the shadows and bright silver again as they went out into the sun. Two cormorants passed over him, swimming hard after the fish.

  A big cruiser came down the bay about fifty yards out, moving too fast through the manatee zone, throwing a big wake. There were girls on the foredeck and one on the fantail. The girls on the foredeck were bare-breasted and wore only bikini bottoms.

  Umberto watched from the upstairs terrace. He focused his binoculars on the girls with one hand and with the other rubbed his private parts.

  He whistled to Bobby Joe on the ground.

  Underwater, Antonio heard the thrumming of the boat. He hugged the shelving bottom. The wake came over and he was tumbled. The raft of grass rose and fell like a beaten carpet and one of Antonio’s fins broke the surface, sticking up through the grass.

  Umberto saw the fin and whistled again through two fingers to Bobby Joe and pointed. Umberto spoke into a walkie-talkie. He grabbed his assault rifle and ran for the stairs.

  Bobby Joe was peeing off the seawall, hoping the girls would see him. He jumped to the ground fumbling with his fly.

  Underwater, Antonio approached the hole beneath the seawall. He could see the hole. Silt and sand were lifted by the current as water pulsed back and forth through the hole and the seagrass near it waved. The hole was big all right, wider than it was high, black inside. An orange sponge grew in front of it. Antonio took a couple of pictures.

  Then he saw bullet tracks down through the water, whizzing by close.

  Umberto and Bobby Joe were standing on the seawall. They fired several bursts into the raft of grass, fans of bullet tracks hissing through the water, the actions of the guns clacking louder than the muffled shots. Bobby Joe ran for his crossbow.

  Antonio was bleeding from his leg, the cloud of blood red and then gray in the water. The hole loomed before him. Bullet tracks in the water. He turned sideways to the seawall, trying to stay deep.

  Bobby Joe on the seawall saw bubbles rising through the raft of grass. Gleeful, he pointed his crossbow and fired. The line attached to the crossbow bolt tightened and water flew off it.

  Antonio’s fins stopped moving. Above him the raft of grass heaved on the swells, heaved like Antonio’s chest.

  Cari, waiting in the truck a block and a half away, had her eyes fixed on her watch.

  When forty minutes had passed, she called Antonio’s cell phone. Antonio did not answer. She called again.

  Inside the Escobar pool house a cell phone in a bloody plastic bag lay on a table beside a sticky Sawzall. The phone buzzed and moved sideways in the bag.

  Bobby Joe’s bloody hand picked up the phone. He fished it out of the bag with two fingers and raised it to talk.

  “Hello,” Bobby Joe said.

  “Antonio? Hello?” Cari said.

  “Hidee-doo. Antonio has stepped away from his desk right now,” Bobby Joe said. “He’s giving us some head. You want to leave a message?”

  Bobby Joe hung up, laughing. The men around him laughed too. Bobby Joe wiped the blood off his hands with a pool service T-shirt.

  A brief sun shower came over, with big drops spattering on Antonio’s truck, rattling on the roof. The rainbow that followed faded at once.

  In the truck, Cari.

  Her watch, ticking. Its second hand just jerking along without real ticking. The ticking was in her head. The little truck had crank windows; she cranked them down. The cool wet breeze blew through.

  She felt her eyes sting, but she did not cry. Orange jasmine grew on the wall of the compound where she waited for Antonio, and she could smell the jasmine, strong after the rain.

  It got away from her then and she saw her fiancé dead in the road with his groomsmen, all in the car and the car was burning, set on fire by the gunmen. Neighbors came to the church where she waited with jasmine in her hands. They came to tell her and she ran to them, ran to her fiancé. The red-haired boy was behind the wheel wearing a white lace guayabera and dead in the road. The windows of the car were starred with bullet holes and she knocked a hole in the jagged glass with a stone from the road and tried to pull him out. She reached through the broken window and tried to pull him out and held him. Brave people in the crowd tried to pull her away and she held on to him, they pulled and the glass cut furrows in her arms, and then the gas tank went off and lifted her off the ground. The blood dried brown on her wedding dress.

  In her fanny pack Cari had brought a couple of meat-and-cheese baleadas in case she and Antonio got hungry. She looked at the baleadas. They were still warm and their steam had frosted the inside of their ziplock bag. She dumped them out of the pack onto the floor of the truck. She reached under the seat and got the Sig Sauer .40 and put it in the fanny pack. Cari got out of the truck. She breathed deep a couple of times as if she took strength from the jasmine. She felt light-headed.

  Cari walked the block and a half to the front gate of the Escobar house. She took a
bundle of flyers and junk mail from the mailbox. She would say she had come to pick up her check.

  She punched in the code at the pedestrian gate. There was some space between the high hedge and the wall between the properties. Electrical conduit ran along the stone wall with breaker boxes for the yard lights and irrigation. She could walk between the hedge and the wall.

  Crab-spider webs spangled with rain took light from the red sky and glowed over Cari as she passed beneath, staying close to the wall.

  In the driveway Mateo was folding flat the third seat of Hans-Peter’s Escalade and lining the cargo area with big plastic bags. He did not see her.

  Cari stayed behind the hedge until she reached the waterside garden at the back of the house.

  The threshold of the lighted pool house was smeared with drag blood. Cari left her cover and crossed the open garden. She pushed open the door to the pool house. She saw legs, she saw fins. A body lay on a banquet table in the pool house. The fins were toward her. She had seen Antonio’s legs many times as he worked on the swimming pool and she had thought about them too. These were Antonio’s legs. That was Antonio’s torso. His head was missing.

  She looked on the floor for his head, but there was nothing but a pool of blood, dark and thickening at the edges.

  Her face was numb, her hands were not. She put her hand on Antonio’s back. It was not cold yet.

  Bobby Joe came into the pool house.

  He was carrying a roll of plastic sheeting, some twine, and some hedge loppers to cut off Antonio’s fingers. He had to untangle his load from the screen door and he did not see Cari for a second.

  Bobby Joe was bloody down his front. When he saw Cari he dropped the plastic and grinned at her. His yellow eyes were full of her, held her entire. If he could keep her from screaming he could fuck her a couple of times before the others found out and Hans-Peter would insist on killing her. Yes, there was time to stun her for a quickie or so while she was good and warm and the rest of them could spit on their dicks and fuck her dead if they wanted to.