At first he rang up Kashkin’s office. But he was away in D.C. on Foster’s own business, and couldn’t be reached there. So he rang up Kashkin on his cell: in D.C. He did not answer. He tried again later. There was no answer. He tried the following day, multiple times. There was no reply. He tried the D.C. region office: he’d been there, presumably on Foster’s business, but should be back in St. Louis by now. When there was still no answer after the turn of the year, his next calls were of a different nature.
August was the recommendation of a dealer Foster had used in D.C.; he was a utility player; a finder, a fixer, a persuasive collector. But best of all for Foster, he worked in many circles but belonged to none: he was safely beyond the fold—he wasn’t in the trade. And considering Foster’s current bind, that was perhaps the best mark of all. “So, where is he now?” asked Foster.
“You bring any bread?” asked August. He’d noticed a quartet of Mallard ducks put down in a far corner of the basin. “I’d bet they’d feed,” he said. “Good word is Mexico: cleared Juarez by car some few days back,” he said.
“Who says this?”
“The people who notice comings and goings,” said August.
Foster smiled a wry, frustrated smile. “And where would he be crossing to? What’s he doing in Mexico—going to Acapulco? I suppose he’s taking vacation? Is he running?”
“If he wasn’t before, seems it now. Seems likely,” said August. “There wasn’t anything of use on that machine?” he asked.
“No. And now I have to break it down and dispose of it just the same.”
“So, it wasn’t him, then who was it?” asked August.
“According to the paper,” said Foster striking the doubled newsprint in his lap with the back of his hand, “it was Stanley Burk—real estate attorney.”
“Paper say what he was doing in the office?” asked August. “‘Cause I’m a curious sort.”
“Yes,” said Foster. “Yes it does. It says his office was under renovation: says it was being painted. It says his office was being painted.” Foster lay back again and worked his brow with his fingertips.
“Bad luck,” said August.
“That’s right. August. Bad luck.”
The piece in the paper wasn’t so much a story as a composite: real estate attorney Stanley Burk is working late in the offices of his Clayton law firm. His office is clad in painter’s tape and plastic sheeting; thick with dust and paint fumes. He takes his computer down the hall to another office: a contemporary is away on business. His wife is entertaining at home; she hasn’t missed him for dinner yet. It’s a dark seven o’clock when a janitor coming in for trash and a vacuum finds a fat man collapsed over the desk. He’s unresponsive: the janitor panics—she calls 911. The police arrive and find nothing special. The paramedics put it up to a heart attack and roll him off to the coolers at the county morgue. It’s not until later when the coroner peeks at him and notices the .22 caliber bite mark behind his ear, and an X-ray shows the little slug rattling around in his cranium like a maraca bean, that anyone happens to think differently.
But, if it wasn’t Burk’s office—the paper continues—whose office was he using? Oh, some fellow name of Pavel Kashkin—an attorney for the firm away on business—maybe supposed to be back, but definitely and perhaps strangely unreachable. The rest, it seems, is mystery; one whose solution, August penetratingly resolved as—bad luck.
“There were no other drives? Portable drives; jump drives?” asked Foster again, in reconfirmation.
“No.”
“You checked the drawers?”
“There were no other drives,” said August. “We brought you the computer.”
“And I’m still counting my luck for that,” said Foster.
“That’s all there was.”
“Your crew wouldn’t have held on to anything?”
“That’s right, man; we’re all getting fat on a side trade in scalped computer parts. Now, I’d say that’s not polite. You know what a value proposition is?”
Foster furrowed indifferently and touched his nose again with his thumb, but he did not answer.
“Well, that’s not mine,” said August.
“Is laying out an alarming string of collateral damage like a handy bread-crumb trail part of your value proposition, too?”
August set again to worrying the knit cap between his hands.
“What’s next for us, August? Is there something like a solution you can work out of that cap?” asked Foster.
“We make another appointment to see him—if you want my view on it.”
“And what makes us think it will turn out better this time?” asked Foster.
“The presence of management,” said August with a gesture toward his chin. “I plan to meet him in the living image.”
“And where do you plan to do this?”
“Well, he may be running, but my mortician’s intuition says he’s not bound for the South Pole. You’re an educated man—you probably thought of it too. Why go south by car—huh? It’s not stylish and it’s not pretty. You’d fly. For sure, you’d fly. If you’re running, the only purpose to drive there is not to fly from here. Which leads me to thinking he means to fly from there.”
“Mexico isn’t just the worm—it’s the bottle too. There must be countless airstrips,” said Foster.
“Commercial, man: you’re thinking with your top hat. If you were roading in to Mexico for a commercial flight out, where would you go?”
“Mexico City.”
“See, that wasn’t so hard. Mexico City. You’d have the butcher’s choice for international flights. And even if somebody came calling after the fact, that’s a lot of tape to sit through for a gray-headed Russian with a flash drive,” said August.
“International flights,” mumbled Foster to himself.
“Mexico City,” said August.
Foster peered through a sparse wood opposite them beyond the basin and turned from it toward August. “International flights,” he repeated. “You’re going to Mexico City?”
“Yeah, man,” said August.
“You’re going to ‘meet’ him in Mexico City?”
“Yeah, man.”
“When are you leaving?” asked Foster.
“Probably morning. Tomorrow morning.”
Foster shook his head. “No,” he said. “Now. You’re leaving now.”
7.
Charles Foster sat in the first booth before the wait station and opposite the bar. His keys rest on the table before him where he arranged and rearranged their blades with the idle wag of summing abacus knots on their rung. He faced the door and, by an elusive geometry, a glint of afternoon sun. Fetched out beside the keys was a bit of paper flotsam marked in pen—‘Sachs 2:00 Wednesday’—as the artifactual confirmation they’d spoken. By his watch, or the light of his phone which he repeatedly checked, it was either 2:56 or 2:58, but in either case the 2:00 of record had slipped into the past; and what remained of the wheat beers he’d ordered in the high-sprinted certainty of relief, now set warm, and in the case of his own, heavily, if reluctantly, nursed.
On the phone Foster had baited him with the check—of course—and there was a problem with the drive or something: if Sachs still had a clean copy on hand—oh, he did—well then bring that along and we’ll be sure to get all settled up. The peculiar satisfaction of jerking the line had drained, and however disagreeable, Foster knew now that a reprise from Sachs wasn’t so much an investment as lottery winnings.
For the first half-hour Foster paid little attention to the spring-recoil groan of the door. But in this last, he watched its every motion with care. And as he tipped into the third measure of his waiting, with each disquieting whelp of the hinge, that middle-January breath that spilled the threshold and slapped his ankles stiff as frigid surf began to collect as the cool millilite
rs of a doubt.
For another fifteen minutes he turned his keys on their ring, expecting at any moment Sachs would emerge in a flourish of urgent conciliation, an anecdote of delay, and that sly, self-deprecating, but utterly oblivious grin. He would send the warm beer away, or drink it as tea and order another, and jam his hands into the pockets of his rumpled pea coat until there was warmth in them, and he would offer Foster the drive on the lip of a hopeful expression, and Foster would carve out the check with a languid reluctance, and at the end of it they would both be relieved—but Foster would be relieved to the center. The thought was abstract and oddly weightless: a restoration which could be so oblique, so remote—and yet so material and absolute. ‘Sustained,’ thought Foster wryly, was the word.
But that is not what happened. Instead, impatient and exhausted of waiting, Foster relented at last, and called Sachs. It was simple—he had to know; whatever the matter, Sachs had to come—to appear; and he had—in unconditional terms—to deliver the replacement drive. But the phone rang out, and through to voicemail, and he did not answer. And it was then, by an uncanny harmony of timing, when Foster ended the call, that he noticed the man at the bar. Foster could not make out his face from this angle, but he sat on a stool with his feet up on the bar’s brass rail; his hair was short; he wore a leather coat with a heavy patina of wear; and with his elbow propped against the ledge, he held a phone out before him and considered its illuminated screen intently. Only several moments after the light was out did he delicately fold the phone and discard it within the volume of his coat pocket.
Foster tried Sachs’ number several more times before he left, but neither did he answer, nor did the man at the bar retrieve the phone. And Charles Foster never laid eyes on Jeffrey Sachs again.
V.
Hoyt Gamlin landed at Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juarez on an overcast day in the first week of January. The plane slipped sideways along the mountains and through the low feather of cloud and down into the bowl of Mexico City where it spread in every direction the color of ground crockery shard. The flight was four hours from Los Angeles on short notice—unshaven, in a field jacket he’d rolled over his t-shirt like a sock for the benefit of pockets, and all while coursing with an irritated suspense which hung in his throat as though something he were trying perpetually to swallow.
Hoyt Gamlin was thick and broad, a Briton with a uniform stain of freckles; deep creases that held his mouth in a parenthesis of inscrutability; a wispy, blond, and heavily thinning hair; swollen, muscular limbs employed to good effect in the Sheffield rugby clubs of his youth, and subsequently in the Special Air Service when he failed to make league. He’d served a full term, he was retired, he was in his early fifties, and by way of a chance encounter while providing executive security consultation in Los Angeles, he’d found himself—and his flexible world view—in the employ of the Ministry of State Security, Counterintelligence, People’s Republic of China.
Pavel Kashkin on the other hand, was another matter. He was not Gamlin’s own recruit, but rather an operative he’d inherited along the way. To Gamlin’s thinking Kashkin was peculiar, but clever; and when Gamlin was tasked with putting someone on the curious movements of a Howard Charles Foster, PhD—whom the boys in Hubei suspected of working Chinese tradeshows for converts—Kashkin was the only situationally practical asset.
It seemed lean pickings for a time. Kashkin had settled in for the long slog of shadowing what to all appearances was a first-rate B-lister looking increasingly to have been shelved for storage—when he had a fortunate turn. Gamlin thought it was an improbable turn—Foster taking him as counsel—and warned Kashkin he may have been made, but Kashkin persisted. It helped, Gamlin mused, that Kashkin ran a near constant twenty per cent by volume: it didn’t make one quick, but it made one steady, and steady was good for business.
Kashkin’s message, it seemed to Gamlin, had come roaring in, cryptic, and against expectation: “Windfall! Or the lads will know. On the road. Pitchforks and torches to rear. Will follow-up.” That had been the initial text from Kashkin of almost two weeks ago. A follow-up had only arrived last night. Kashkin offered his room number at the Hilton, Mexico City International Airport; and wanted a rolling handoff in the terminal, an immediate overseas launch—preferably Moscow—and someplace to foxhole for a bit. The plan was swift and simple—Gamlin would be back in Los Angeles by evening—and he was eager to grasp how anything so urgent could have come running from Foster’s taps. He’d told Kashkin to stay in his room until he was on the ground. But the wheels were still crying under the brakes at touchdown and already the plan was moving sideways. Gamlin’s phone had just powered up and there was a message waiting from Kashkin: “May have picked up some shit on my shoe. Would like to have a smell. Maybe pin a tail on a donkey, too. Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe—direct. See you there.”
It was a frustrating and, Gamlin presumed, pointless change that would drag him away from the lazy convenience of haunting the airport five hours; and into the corrosive noise, blaring visual stink, and flaking decrepitude of Mexico City—that set on the landscape with briny contagion. It crept along the power lines, Gamlin thought. It was Los Angeles five years left to Castro. And Gamlin hated it; every smog-farted busway and lard-tinged corner of it. Its only virtue—if in fact it had one for Gamlin—was that, in the short term at least, with the correct conversation and the correct denomination in U.S. currency, anything could be accomplished. Or, that is to say, anything could be attempted: success, as always, rest as a percentage of critical skill. In Latin America, where that ratio flagged, one simply applied the brut force of exchange value to buy in bulk. But as the plane parked up and the engines switched off and the ventilation went too, and quickly the fug of impatient quiet humid breathing filled the space in anticipation of the final stroke of the bolt in the cabin door—this small virtue was not in Gamlin’s thoughts.
Gamlin strode out along the high corridor of Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juarez, with its roof of imbricated white armadillo plate, its file of industrial gray piers; its length of cramped shop cubicles under glass—contrived as a zoological display of incidental capitalism; and its sweeping floor which rutted and rippled with the character of the heaving cobbled avenues of home, rather than the plumb of a first world concrete pour. Outside on the narrow ledge of sidewalk he stood and watched the carnival of traffic which coursed six lanes in one direction of turbulent eddies of horns, jolting taxis, and narrows of police battalions triple parked and loitering in their tall caps and decorous uniforms: beat cops dandied-up as generals and preening against their new patrol cruisers in a demonstrative ostentation against crime. A red and gold taxi was first to stop: a Volkswagen Beetle which pealed in with a welch of tires and the sputtering rasp of a windup toy. The driver called to him: “No baggage, señior?”
“No baggage, señior,” he replied and crawled in to the frantic summoning of the driver. “Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe,” said Gamlin, “direct.”
“Si, si, si,” replied the driver when he’d already swerved back into traffic. He wore red flannel, a wiry mustache and a tousle of uncombed hair, and a crucifix which swung round his neck, and he chatted happily at Gamlin in quick and largely incomprehensible bursts of Spanish until he’d slowed to collect another fare and Gamlin angrily thumped the windshield with the end of his finger: “Oi! Señior asshole! Where you gon’ta put him? Clip’em to the lid? Go on!” he said. From then on the driver watched Gamlin with a baleful sidelong glance and they drove in silence.
The Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was twenty-five minutes in a traffic which alternately sagged and surged and the driver worked daringly to chase down gaps whose advantage he invariably lacked power to take. The air sagged with sixty-degree cloud and the yellow curbs and railings glistened with a rain which never fell. The driver smoked and ashed through the vent wing, and Gamlin rode with the window down and missing the cr
ank, and the oily scent of the flat-four and cigarillo cloud issued out under his nose, and when at last he was deposited within the makeshift cordons of a taxi lane, and the driver fixed his fee with a malicious smile, he happily quit the tiny cab for the gauntlet of peddlers working the entrance to the basilica.
The Plaza Mariana opened out as a vast granite terrace between the new and old basilica, the Capilla del Pocito, Capilla del Cerrito, and a campus of other shrines and chapels and amendments to holy suffrage. Bits of detritus still lay strewn along the damp stone, pilgrims still milled about nursing the spirit of their new year resurrections, and a small crew of workmen slowly tugged apart the joints of a nativity and tree scaffolding for which they seemed to have lost all intuition.
The old basilica was a fairly standard Roman Catholic affair—two hundred years in the making, and all with Spanish hands. The new basilica, however, Gamlin thought was unquestionably the spaceship of Christ. Built over two years in the seventies, with polished floors, an elaborate arrangement of organ plumbing, and to Gamlin’s sensibilities, the interior aesthetic of a honeycomb in a wicker basket—it was a fifty-thousand seat stadium wrapped in the vestments of copper cladding and stain glass, built to watch the Trinity perform live. But there was no performance now, merely the residual adoration of shuffling pilgrims, and Gamlin strolled in through an open pair of the oversize doors which rounded half the façade and found an aisle seat near the back from which to digest the quiescent spectacle and watch for the appearance of Kashkin.
But Kashkin did not appear. There was no sign of him on the plaza, and his prickly silver head was nowhere to be seen among the camera shutters and shawls and satin black hair of the faithful. Nor did he reply to a text from Gamlin, nor a subsequent message thirty minutes later. Gamlin had sat uneasily a quarter hour when the pews began to fill and the motions of an impending service put him irritatedly back out on the plaza where there seemed no more sign of Kashkin than before. He had taken Kashkin’s note on a tail for drama, a paranoid occlusion, a brief spell of the tremens—but now Gamlin slowly came to wonder if it could be the object of the delay: if it had proved real and the path of Kashkin’s convolutions were holding him up. For a while longer Gamlin paced in the plaza, casting along the damp stones in hope for Kashkin, but when he’d pulled back his sleeve after a further quarter-hour by the hands of his Luminor, he left in haste.
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