by Tom Wood
• Chapter 29 •
The night was warm. The rain had stopped, but the air had been left saturated with moisture. Lavandier was a big fan of Guatemala’s equatorial warmth, but he would never get used to the humidity. It ruined his hair. The sleek blond-and-silver waves became unruly spirals. He became unkempt, which was unacceptable.
Inside his brasserie, he was safe from the weather. The establishment had exceptional air-conditioning. It had been the biggest expense when converting the premises from its original use as a traditional Guatemalan eatery. Along with the brasserie, Lavandier owned an import firm that specialized in French food. The business operated at a small loss, but Lavandier kept it going because he hated beans, could only tolerate rice, and considered the tortilla an insult to bread.
He had lived in Guatemala for many years, and had been in the Americas for years before that, but he had maintained his accent and his preference for his national cuisine. At home, he dined on veal and foie gras, Camembert and Puy lentils. He sipped Bordeaux and champagne. He made a fierce tarte tatin and sometimes his own vanilla ice cream to go with it. His heart sank whenever Heloise invited him to accompany her to dinner.
He could never turn her down. He always had to act thrilled at the prospect of time in her company. Whatever his attraction to her, he dreaded going for a meal. He had mastered the art of not curling one’s lip in disgust. He was well practiced in making excuses for not finishing the food. Variations on “I’m watching what I eat” and “I’m afraid my stomach is a little delicate” were his go-to justifications. He was sure Heloise invited him to such meals simply to torture him.
He had opened his brasserie in the city’s most cosmopolitan and diverse neighborhood, where there was plenty of new money that needed to be spent, but still there was no profit. Oh, well; at least he had a pied-à-terre that could satiate his need for French finery. He had more than enough wealth to cover a loss, and some things were more important than money. He wasn’t prepared to be rich only to abandon who he was inside.
The brasserie was staffed entirely by men. Lavandier had once employed only young and attractive women, but his lingering gaze and suggestive comments were not conducive to maintaining discipline, nor keeping staff on the books. Over time he had learned that the best way to control his salacious intent was to have no temptation. Thus, all men. And, thinking one step ahead, he made sure none of them were handsome. He didn’t want them to have pretty girlfriends visiting that might test his resolve. He wanted no angry waiter to break his delicate nose.
He was enjoying a fine ensemble of truffles and snails when his personal phone rang. Unusual, because he had several phones and very few knew this number. Heloise never called him directly. He always phoned her, and then only after receiving whatever number she was using that day via SMS from a burner phone used by one of her bodyguards.
It was a necessary precaution, of course, but one that left him feeling a little expendable. He was expected to take risks that Heloise would never take herself.
So, Lavandier let it ring for a moment while he finished chewing and took a sip of wine to wash his mouth clear.
He answered with a polite, “Oui?”
Lavandier, though a longtime resident of Guatemala and fluent speaker of Spanish, liked to interject his native tongue whenever he could. It was part of both his nature and the character he played—the flamboyant Frenchman, exotic and otherworldly.
“Do you know which of Maria’s associates drives a yellow Lamborghini?”
The voice belonged to a man and spoke in English, which was rare to hear in this city. Although Lavandier did not recognize it he knew he had heard it before in a suite in Madrid.
“The Wraith, I presume.”
“Excuse me?”
“We had to call you something,” Lavandier explained. “I wasn’t sure you were even in the country yet.”
“Is the answer to my initial question a yes or no?”
Lavandier sipped some wine. “Not one for conversation, are you?”
“You’re not paying me enough to sit around chatting.”
“Touché, monsieur. Touché. Although I think you would agree your purse is staggering in its generosity.”
The Wraith said, “I’m worth every penny.”
“The answer to your question is no,” Lavandier replied. “But there isn’t much I can’t find out, as I believe was previously made clear. Is the answer pertinent to our greater objective?”
“I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”
“Then if you will allow me the munificence of time, I will endeavor to ascertain who owns such an ostentatious means of transport.” Lavandier liked to use uncommon words to make himself appear more of an intellectual. “I should know within a few days, or else I’ll never know. How might that sound?”
“I’ll call you at the end of the week.”
Lavandier said, “I’m positively thrilled at the prospect of more scintillating discourse.”
The line went dead.
Lavandier sat and thought for a while, sipping his fine wine and listening to the muted sounds of the kitchen staff cleaning up. The dining area was empty except for him, and no music played through the speakers at this late hour. Throughout the day and evening traditional French tunes would add a background ambience to the few patrons who frequented the brasserie. Almost all of whom were tourists tickled by the idea of so French an establishment in the heart of Central America.
What to do? he mused. One couldn’t come to such an answer without the lubrication only fermented grape juice could provide, so Lavandier refilled his glass to the top and took a heavy gulp.
Of course, he knew who owned the vehicle in question as he knew many things. He was far better connected than anyone realized. The question wasn’t how much he should pass on, but how much he wanted to pass on.
Lavandier had a lot to consider.
• Chapter 30 •
The roar of an engine caught Victor’s attention. It was loud and powerful, and he turned to see a yellow Lamborghini Aventador pull up outside the hotel. He watched as a valet rushed to help a woman out of the passenger’s seat and a man climbed out of the driver’s door. He was dressed in jeans, a leather jacket, and cowboy boots. The woman was young, in a tight dress and high heels. The driver shoved cash and keys into the valet’s hand but said nothing. The valet circled the car, looking nervous. Not because of handling the car and the fear of damaging it, but because he knew the driver enough to be afraid of him.
The license plate read NUMERO UNO.
“I don’t know who drives the yellow Lamborghini,” Lavandier had told Victor when he called back. “But I know how you can find him.”
There was no Lamborghini dealership in Guatemala City and no authorized sellers. Any such cars were imported, which made maintaining them difficult. There was only one mechanic who had access to parts, who was paid in cash but had reasonably organized records that Victor made use of when he broke into the auto shop. There was no name listed with entries pertaining to the Aventador, but there was a phone number for a hotel in the city center.
Victor took a seat in the lobby and asked for coffee, and paid the bill straightaway so he could leave at any moment. He drank only a little coffee—it was there for show—and checked his watch on occasion—again for show. He had been in many hotels. He had spent more time in hotel rooms than he had in houses. He understood the ecosystem of staff and guests and visitors. He knew the mistresses from the wives, the dressed-down billionaires from the convention goers. He could tell from the way they held themselves whether a night porter would let him have a room for cash off the system, whether a concierge could arrange escorts and drugs. He also knew whether a hotel was of a high class or whether it just dressed the part.
This hotel was the latter. There were chandeliers but no crystal, paintings on every wall but no originals. The uniforms wer
e smart but cheap. There were no dessert wines on the restaurant menu. Victor had no problem with pretense. His whole existence was built around it. He was a collection of surface details but no depth. Like the hotel, he needed none to survive, to profit. Depth was a luxury neither the hotel nor he could afford or wanted.
He spent twenty minutes nursing his coffee and pretending to people-watch—instead of watching for a person—and blended into the comings and goings of the lobby, unnoticed and unaffected as part of the ecosystem. If anywhere were his home, it was here.
For hotel coffee, it was pretty good. He didn’t understand why, but no one who worked in a hotel knew how to make an excellent coffee. It was one of those strange, immutable laws of the universe beyond comprehension, beyond logic. The best hotel coffee he had drunk was in Germany, which made even less sense. A man in a suit sat nearby, playing with his phone. On a wrist, he wore a plastic band with print that read “Golf is my vice.”
Checkered tiles created a hard floor, so cowboy boots striding through the lobby were loud and distinctive from some distance. He heard no high heels accompanying them.
The man who owned the Lamborghini strode past Victor, who sipped his coffee and watched him approach the concierge. They exchanged words, too far away for Victor to hear, but he could read the concierge’s lips well enough:
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir . . . I’ll take care of it . . .”
The man in the leather jacket left the hotel, shaking his head to himself and checking his phone. The concierge picked up a telephone receiver and hit a button out of Victor’s sight. After a moment, he spoke to the person on the other end of the line.
“We have a problem in the Fortune Suite. Give her a few minutes and see to it that she leaves without any fuss.”
The suite was easy enough to find. The hotel had plenty of signs. It was on the eighth floor, accessible via stairs and two banks of elevators. Victor took the stairs, because he always did. The stairwell was quiet. He didn’t remember the last time he had passed someone on a hotel staircase. People were lazier than they had ever been. The eighth floor was quiet—the suites took up at least twice the space of a normal room. It was the wrong time of the day too—after checkout but before check-in. Maybe the suite had been booked before today. Maybe the man in the leather jacket had special consideration. Maybe he didn’t need to book. Maybe they always kept a suite or two available for him or other cartel guys they didn’t want to anger.
There were no house-cleaning carts, no doors open and maids working hard who wouldn’t mind using their master key card in return for help with the rent, which was a shame. Therefore, he settled for an old-fashioned approach.
He knocked on the door to the suite.
There was no answer, so he knocked again, harder, thumping the door with the outside of his fist to create a noise loud enough that it could not be ignored. A few seconds later, he heard footsteps on the other side. Slow. Tentative.
“Who is it?” a woman asked through the door.
“Hotel management.”
The door opened.
“What do you want?” a young woman asked.
She was small and lithe and no older than twenty. Her eyes were red and she had smudged mascara on her cheeks. She looked awkward and self-conscious in a revealing dress and lots of jewelry. Victor knew enough about disguises to know when someone was trying too hard.
“Is everything okay?” Victor asked.
“Why do you care?”
He smiled. “May I come inside?”
He was already entering as he said it, which could be construed as aggressive or rude, but it was a calculated move. She already saw him as an authority figure—hotel management—so she deferred to him here before she could decide for herself whether she wanted him to come in or not.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
When the door was closed behind him, he said, “There were reports of a disturbance.”
“Yes, I’m sure there were.”
She had her arms wrapped before her, one hand on her ribs, the other on her triceps. It was as close to a hug as someone could give themselves.
There was a bucket of ice and a bottle of champagne on a sideboard, but only one glass nearby. The other was in pieces on the opposite side of the room. Wallpaper had darkened in a patch high above the broken glass, and in streaks that snaked downward.
“Do you need me to call the police for you?”
She shook her head. “No, he didn’t hit me, and they wouldn’t do anything if he had.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“You’re not from here,” she said. “You don’t know how it works for people like him.”
“And how does it work?”
“People like him think they can have anything they want. They don’t like it when someone says no to them. They think that buying you a bracelet means they own you.” She rubbed her wrist. “He took it back.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
She shook her head. “No. No way. I’m just the latest to fall for Miguel’s bullshit.”
Miguel.
“I suggest you don’t see him again.”
“He won’t waste his time with me,” she replied. “He’ll move on to the next one and forget I even existed, let alone who I am.”
“Can I call you a cab?”
She shook her head. “No, I’ll walk. I want to walk.” She paused, looking at Victor with a searching gaze. “Why are you being nice to me?”
“It’s my job,” he said.
“Then look out for the next girl he brings back here, will you? She might not know what she’s getting into.”
Victor nodded. “May I ask you a question?”
She shrugged.
“How did you meet him?”
She shook her head, but not at him, at the memory. She looked at her hands. “I was so stupid. He’d just won at cards and was celebrating. He was all smiles and compliments. I didn’t know any better. I mean, I did, but I pretended I didn’t. Now look at me.”
Victor did, with a sympathetic gaze he didn’t have to fake. “He likes to gamble?”
“That’s all he likes to do. We just came from a game. I hate it. All the pressure. All the tension. I don’t know how anyone thinks it’s fun.”
“At a casino?”
“No, in a bar. A private game. But he didn’t do so well. He wanted me to make him feel better. That’s all I am—was—to him.” Her brow furrowed and she looked up again. “Why are you asking me these questions?”
“I’m trying to understand the situation,” Victor said. “I’m trying to understand what makes a man like him tick.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “You can’t understand a pig.”
She smiled at that, and he joined her. Before he could ask anything further, there was a knock on the door. She tensed.
“It’s okay,” Victor said. “I’ll take care of it.”
She relaxed and he went to the door, checked the peephole. It was a hotel porter. A young guy with a bowl cut and jutting ears.
“Yes?” Victor asked as he opened the door.
The porter was surprised, but composed himself fast. “I . . . I’m here to see that Señor Diaz’s guest gets a cab.”
Diaz. Miguel Diaz.
“I’ll see her out,” Victor said, and reached for his wallet. “And you’ll say that you did.” He took out some cash. “Okay?”
The porter hesitated, then smiled and took the money.
The young woman had stood by the time Victor had returned. She said, “Thank you for being so nice to me. I’m going to use the bathroom before I go. I must look a state.”
“Take all the time you need,” he said. “And do you happen to know the name of the bar where he played cards?”
“Why?”
“I play c
ards too,” he explained. “I want to make sure I don’t go there.”
“I don’t remember the name, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. Take all the time you need. I’ll wait and see you out.”
“Thank you,” she said, then paused, looking back at the smashed champagne flute and the stain on the wallpaper. “I’m sorry about the mess.”
“Don’t be. Diaz will be charged for the damages.”
“Oh. Okay.” She looked relieved, then gave him a mischievous grin and knocked over the vase by the door. It smashed to pieces on the carpet.
“Whoops.”
• Chapter 31 •
The young porter with the bowl cut was delighted with the extra cash he had been given to look the other way. He did that a lot. The hotel was a hub of infidelity, drug use, prostitution, and worse, all under an exclusive veneer. In the porter’s experience, the more a hotel projected an image of class and respectability, the dirtier it was, both in guests and goings-on. So he was well used to receiving money to pretend he hadn’t seen something, to ignore white powder caked to the mustache of a police commissioner, to act as if he hadn’t seen the mayor’s wife between her bodyguards, to look the other way when a cartel guy beat up his date.
It all weighed on his soul, and if his family were not so desperate for the money, he could not live with himself. His salary was not enough to feed and clothe his young children, nor pay for their future books and schooling. He never broke the law, however. He was no thief. In the absence of greater sins, he could find peace with himself.
Peace in a town run by cartels was hard to come by, but the young porter found what he could. The cartels were the true power in the whole country and the entire continent beyond. They ruled through power and fear and unimaginable wealth. Those they could not buy, they killed. They showed no mercy and felt no pity. The porter could pretend, he could ignore, he could look the other way in any number of different circumstances, but not when that meant betraying the cartels.
The porter had no love for them. Like any decent human being, he hated the violence they wrought, but he had no intention of being on the end of that violence. He had read the newspaper articles. He had seen the viral videos. He had dreamed of chainsaws and burning tires. Such atrocities were designed to send a message, and the porter listened.