The Fall Line

by Mark T Sullivan

  On Friday while Jack was at work for his last day, I packed. There was a knock at the door. I listened at it and heard the baby cry. She knocked again and begged me to open. I hugged the door and told her I couldn’t. We both leaned against opposite sides of the door and cried.

  I told Jack we had a wonderful lunch.

  June 2

  I watched the men pack your room today. Still can’t bear to let it go. I am here in the empty nursery while daddy goes to get Chinese food before we go to the hotel. I know you are here, but am so afraid to say your name or write it down. Honestly I hate you for what you’ve done. So stay here, please. Stay in this room and don’t come with your things. Stay.

  Farrell shut the diary, stung and ashamed that he hadn’t taken the time to look around, to see what was happening to his wife. But once they’d arrived in San Diego, hadn’t she seemed to recover? He recalled how the day after they arrived, Lena uprooted soil in the backyard of their home in La Jolla, three blocks off Windandsea Beach, a Spanish three-bedroom house with an iron-gated driveway. She worked in the garden day and night those first few months. More than once he awoke at dawn to find her on her knees in the dirt.

  Within months after taking the job, however, he knew deep down that he’d personally made a mistake. The job at the bank in Chicago had been much more challenging than he’d realized. By coming to this tiny bank, he’d forsaken the equivalent of a mid-level job at the U.S. Embassy in Paris for the Ambassadorship of Malawi, a prestigious, boring position, far from the action. His days consisted of meetings with local Mexican-American businessmen interested in small development loans and occasional day trips to Tijuana to consult with Japanese executives who were setting up factories on the other side of the border. He joined the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanas, which made his mother laugh when he told her over the phone—“Your father never would have believed it.” He joined the Mexican-American Foundation, too, attending their luncheons, establishing ties. Gone were the days when he jetted about the hemisphere, backed by a billion dollars in capital.

  In September, Gabriel sent them Punta as a present.

  Her mother had thought dogs dirty, so Lena was unprepared for the experience of a new puppy. She called Farrell at work. “He’s whining,” she said. “What do I do?”

  “Put him out,” Farrell said. “Sounds like he has to go.”

  “Do I wash my hands afterwards?”

  “Only if you hold it for him.”

  “Bastard!”

  The dog became her baby. Farrell would arrive home and find them wrestling on the living room floor, Punta furiously trying to lick at Lena’s ears while she laughed hysterically. In late October, Farrell surprised the two of them with a little female Brittany he’d seen advertised in the newspaper. They named her Rabo, or Tail. The two dogs were referred to as Punta y Rabo. Tip to Tail. Their neighbors joked about the English hunting dogs with the Spanish names who would gambol and twist the leash in Lena’s hand, sometimes spinning her in circles when she took them for walks along the beach.

  Farrell could see that the move was good for his wife, so he kept his growing frustration to himself, taking refuge in the scuba gear and lessons Lena bought for him shortly after they arrived. Out under the sea, moving with the unseen currents, he felt some of the same thrills he’d had the first day he’d raced down the side hill on his wooden skis. Under water, he would recall how his parents had discovered his nighttime ski forays. They were furious. But seeing he would not quit the sport, they gave him the skis back. Away from their watching eyes, Farrell felt free. He took school trips to go skiing, thrilling at the way the steep Maine hillsides could make the wind whistle, at the way his spectacular crashes made him breathless.

  Despite the kicks scuba diving gave him, Farrell was going crazy by December of the first year in San Diego. There was very little to be done to keep the bank running. One day Farrell tried to pry from Rubenstein exactly how he wanted the bank to grow. Rubenstein stayed true to his nickname, saying very little other than, “You can do what you want with it. Be creative!”

  Farrell shifted in the bed in the lodge, then forced the diary under the mattress, walked down to the lobby, and took a seat in front of the floor-to-ceiling bay windows. He gazed up at the High Rustler run that dropped off the face of one of Alta’s peaks. Was it all a set up? Probably, he thought. By the time he’d left for San Diego, he and Gabriel had worked through three deals. It was long enough for Gabriel to see what turned Farrell on.

  Gabriel’s partner, Jorge Cordova, came to visit in January. Farrell knew Cordova was a big man, yet until the moment when Silent Jim knocked on the door to Farrell’s office, he’d never seen him up close. Cordova was in his late thirties, about five feet, eight inches tall, and of tremendous girth, perhaps 300 pounds, one of those interesting physical specimens, who despite being obese, are able to move remarkable agility and poise. His fingernails were as perfectly manicured as his moustache. His suit was black, European cut. His shoes Italian. Cordova’s face had an olive, almost military tint, as though he were always lit by moonlight in the forest. With his matching tie and pocket kerchief of paisley reds and blues, and his great leg-of-lamb fists, Cordova had the anonymous, threatening quality of a freshly painted tank.

  He smiled as he eased into the chair across from Farrell. His eyes slid about the office, settling briefly on the artwork the interior decorator had chosen, then the birch wainscotting, which set off the green walls and the brass frames which held pictures of Lena and the dogs and another of Farrell skiing years before.

  Cordova nodded approvingly. “Mr. Cortez will be happy to hear you’ve settled in so well.”

  “How is he?” Farrell asked.

  “Fine,” Cordova said. “He said it is almost time for you to come south again for a visit.”

  “I’d like to very much,” Farrell said, remembering the sounds of the peahens. “But I’m just getting up to speed here.”

  “You are finding the position and the city to your liking?”

  “My wife is in love with the place,” Farrell said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “She adores the fact that it is January and she can walk on the beach every morning.”

  “I usually stay at one of the resorts on Coronado or Mission Bay,” Cordova said. “I like to dine in the open air, watching the water.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “It is. Do you fish?”

  “Deep sea? I never have.”

  “One of my passions,” Cordova said. He raised his right hand, then let it fall on the arm of the chair with a heavy, loud thud. “The run here used to be quite good, but has slacked off in recent years. Marlin especially.”

  They chatted informally of Gabriel and the factory in Tijuana and the import-export business growing steadily on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. Cordova was a very still man, unlike Gabriel, who often swung his arms in wild circles while he spoke. Cordova’s only gesture was that slight raising of the right hand, followed by the weighted thud as he let it drop onto whatever object was closest.

  They decided to have lunch, driving in Cordova’s rented maroon Lincoln to his favorite restaurant in San Diego, an Italian place called Tentazione, which specialized in fish and was renowned for its harbor view. When Cordova opened the door to the restaurant, the pungent fragrance of onions and garlic and wine surrounded them. “Divine,” Cordova murmured.

  “Mr. Cordova! How good to see you!” cried the maître d’, a short, intense man, who fluttered about Cordova like a white cattle egret on the back of a bull.

  “What is the special?” Cordova inquired, bending over to the man.

  “Your favorite,” the waiter whispered conspiratorially. “Yellow-tail steaks grilled three minutes each side over an open pit flame, then plunged into a broiler pan of garlic and oregano.”

  “Heaven,” Cordova said, touching the tips of his fingers together. “I hope you have a booth, Marcello. You know how difficult a chair can be.”

  �
��Of course,” the little man said. He made a half bow before leading them across the room.

  Seated near the bay window, Cordova said: “My size, it bothers you, does it not?”

  Flustered by so direct a question, Farrell stammered: “No, of course not. Should it?”

  “For many people in your physical condition, especially here in California, the state of the body, it is a bothersome characteristic, one which they cannot seem to ignore,” Cordova said. “But I’m afraid I’m stuck with it, an addiction more psychological than physiological.”

  Cordova continued, suddenly animated, and like all great storytellers, he sent Farrell drifting into a waking dream. He spoke of a town in Sonora, dry and beautiful, lined with grain fields and Spanish oaks, of his parents’ wooden grocery store, which burned down one night—arson—leaving Cordova alone at six in an orphanage.

  Imagine a place, Cordova said, where the air was clean and the hallways always swept, but where no one smiled and meals were single slices of bread, fatty pork, and beans.

  “When you are eight, you lie awake at night and try to ignore the hollowness in your stomach and you begin to plot your escape,” Cordova said. “You force yourself to pay attention in the school, forcing yourself to be the best reader, the best in English class and in math, searching in what is given freely for a guide who will lead you away.

  “It’s funny, when you find the guide, it is not in a book on history or even in Cervantes or Neruda. No, what leads you out is a dove, a plump, white-wing dove that with its brothers and sisters flocks to the fields outside of town and draws the shooters from Mexico City and Arizona every August, shooters that pay well for a guide.”

  Cordova became a student of fields, of guns and of shooters. He was up long before dawn every day to clean the rich men’s double barrel shotguns and to prepare their baskets for the long days of hunting. He led them at first light to ditches by the fields, listening for the whistle of the birds as they raced to water, then hissing to men: “Palomas! Palomas! Señors!” The boy watched, satisfied, when the men in the crisp khakis begin their rhythmic, inevitable swings. He slapped his thigh with each crack of the gun, beating time to the death of the birds. When guns fell silent, he sprinted into the fields, looking for smudges of gray and white.

  One August morning when Cordova was eleven, a diplomat and his son, also eleven, came to shoot. Despite the dozens of birds that coursed overhead, the son never hit a one. “You could see the pain in his eyes,” Cordova recalled. “He wanted so much to impress his father.”

  In the late afternoon, while the father and the other rich men slept off the thick red wine they drank at lunch, Cordova took the boy out into the field and showed him what he had stolen over the years from the shooters: how to curl the front foot into the path of the bird, how to swing and cover the smudge with the barrel of the gun, how to follow the path of the bird even when it has fallen. “Never aim, just point and lead.”

  Cordova climbed one of the Spanish oaks with a pocket full of shards he’d gathered and sailed them across the diplomat’s son’s field of vision until, after twenty or thirty tries, the gun roared and the shards shattered into fine dust in the waning light of day.

  When the doves flew the next morning, ten fell to the diplomat’s son. This is the part Cordova never fully understood: the diplomat threw his arms first around his son, then around Cordova. From that point on, there were smiles for Cordova at the orphanage, there were new clothes and freshly bound books. And every year, a week of hunting doves with the diplomat and his son, until finally, when Cordova turned eighteen, there was an offer of escape. The diplomat, who knew Cordova was the best student in town, offered to pay for his education. Cordova obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA at the University of Houston.

  “Despite the comparative luxury of my life today, I find it impossible to shake the ghosts of my childhood,” Cordova said. “To be frank, I don’t want to. I have much money, enough to buy boats to fish. More than that, with every bite of good food, I remind myself from what hell I’ve escaped.”

  The waiter came. Cordova requested three orders of yellowtail, two for himself, and a bottle of Chardonnay.

  “But Gabriel told me you and he work together to improve orphanages and clinics and help basic industries in towns like the one you grew up in,” Farrell said.

  “Just because I’ve buried the child doesn’t mean I don’t visit his grave,” Cordova said, putting a harsh period on the sentence by dropping his hand harder than usual on his thigh.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” Farrell said.

  “Not at all,” Cordova said, his right hand suspended in the air. “In fact, you have raised one of the issues Mr. Cortez asked me to speak with you about.”

  Farrell leaned back to allow the waiter to place a salad on the table.

  “Chiapas, Mexico, you’ve been there, have you not?” Cordova asked between bites.

  “Once about two years ago to look at a hydroelectric project,” Farrell said.

  “There’s a region—the coffee-growing mountains outside of Escuintla—where the people have no running water, no health care, a rudimentary school, and little hope of getting anything better. Unless they get a paved road over which adequate supplies can run.”

  “I’ve seen these kinds of villages,” Farrell said. “But without government intervention, what are you going to do? As for me, I’m with a small bank now; we can’t get involved in public works projects.”

  Cordova agreed, leaning forward to pour Farrell a glass of wine. He pointed out that the Mexican economy was in a shambles owing to the slump in oil prices and the stagnation of other industries under corrupt state control. “This is no news to you,” Cordova said. “But as a result, the peso has been devalued several times in the past decade, prompting many Mexicans to move their money to the United States.”

  “Capital flight,” Farrell said. “We saw it coming to Chicago.”

  Cordova opened his mouth to speak again, then stopped when the waiter arrived, this time laden with plates steaming with the fresh fish. When Cordova’s double portions had been placed before him, he excused himself. “I’ve got to have just two bites, or I won’t be able to concentrate.”

  Cordova paused twice while he chewed to let his nose roam over the plate. “Ambrosia,” he said, looking up at Farrell through half-open eyes. “Sheer ambrosia.”

  When Cordova had sated himself enough to continue, he said: “As you may or may not know, Mr. Cortez and I and many of the people we work with believe the government is unable to address the needs of people living in the poorer regions of our country. Though our wealth is modest by U.S. standards, we are rich beyond the wildest imaginations of most Mexican citizens. So we try in our own small way to help with projects such as the orphanage, health care, the things you’ve mentioned.”

  He took another three bites, then looked Farrell straight in the eyes, the animation gone, replaced with a steady, undecipherable stare: “The problem we face today is extreme uncertainty on the part of many people who would ordinarily be in a position to help our cause.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “We fear the government may soon devalue the peso again, which could shatter all the work we’ve done.”

  “More wealthy Mexicans will move their money to U.S. banks?” Farrell asked, trying to leap ahead in the argument.

  “Already happening,” Cordova grunted. “Look at the development projects over on Coronado Island. Much of the cash for the high-rise condominiums there came from Mexico. It is not surprising. Such investments are sound, safe from public meddling.”

  Again Cordova bent to the yellowtail, swirling the chunks of white meat in the garlic sauce and plopping them into his mouth with his left hand, each bite accentuated by the rising and thudding of his right. Farrell wondered if Cordova heard the roar of shotguns in his mind.

  “So what can I do?” Farrell asked.


  “What we want to do is this,” Cordova said, his voice dropping. “We want to secretly move the profits out of Mexico to create a permanent source of capital that cannot be harmed by devaluations.”

  Cordova paused, wiping at his mouth with the tip of the napkin.

  “At the same time, we want to construct a way to move the money back into Mexico when we need it, but not under our names, preferably in the form of loans to our companies and projects.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Farrell said, somewhat bewildered by the proposal. “You want to move your own money to my bank and then have me loan it back to you?”

  “Or through your bank to overseas accounts which we could easily access,” Cordova said. “That’s the concept.”

  “Why not just deposit the money in one of the larger banks in San Diego, then take it out when you want?”

  “Ordinarily we would,” Cordova said. “But many of the people we represent are highly placed in Mexican social, political, and business circles. If word were to get out that these people, including Mr. Cortez, who, because of his late father is well known in Mexico City, were moving all of their money out of the country, it could quite possibly devastate the willingness of financial institutions, such as your former employer in Chicago, to work with Mexico.”

  Farrell studied Cordova, looking for signs of an ulterior motive. The explanation was plausible, but something didn’t sound right. The big man’s stoic face revealed nothing. Farrell ran his tongue along the bottom of his teeth and his right knee bounced in pleasure under the table. “How would it work?”

  Cordova said, “Our requirements would include a method to ensure our anonymity. My understanding is that this can be done by wire-transferring capital from your bank through a series of overseas accounts.

  “Some of the money would be held in investment pools under your control,” he said. “Other accounts would form a loan pool, from which the capital for our operations would come.”

  Farrell rubbed at his left eyebrow, and though he tried to control his excitement, he seemed to detach for a moment, to float above the table, looking down at himself, at Cordova’s thick fingers. This was the first time the sensation had happened to Farrell when he wasn’t facing some kind of obviously dangerous situation like a steep ski slope. The texture of risk, richer than the flesh of the yellowtail, pressed in around him. Farrell breathed deep, smiled, and asked: “How much money are we discussing?”