Marder stared at the door for a moment, then moved to the driver’s seat and drove down to the avenue end of the block. He got out of the car to stretch and to study the little street. A food shop stood directly to his left, filling the air with the scent of spiced meat frying, and there was a small bodega in the middle of the block, to which the lounging viejos went often, returning with beers and snacks. A gang of thuggy-looking kids roared around the corner on motorbikes. They wore the outfits they’d seen in Chicano gangster films from El Norte: baggy pants hung absurdly low on their narrow hips, expensive athletic footwear, plaid shirts worn loose over wifebeater undershirts, hairnets on a few. They bought beers in the bodega and stood around pushing one another and trading clever remarks. Some of these were directed at the gringo maricón, and Marder supposed that after a while a bunch of them would come over and try to hustle him, take his money, steal his car. He took out his Kimber and jacked the action, casually, as if he were flipping a coin or lighting a cigarette, and replaced it in his shoulder holster. After that the thugs stopped looking at him.
A dusty maroon van with the logo of a roofing company pulled into the street and parked across from the steel door to Hermanos Sing LLC. Two men in coveralls got out, removed a ladder from the roof rack, and began to set out tools, buckets, and tarpaulins on the sidewalk. They both wore sunglasses, and both of them were good-sized fleshy men. Marder thought they did not look very much like typical wiry suntanned dusty Mexican working stiffs. But perhaps these were the supervisory roofers; perhaps the actual crew was coming in another van or on another day, or maybe these guys were the estimators. Marder thought you could go crazy thinking in this way; every single person on the street would be a threat, life would become intolerable.
He got back in the car and turned on the radio, punching the seek button until he had a station that played old-fashioned ranchera music. He sat there, foregetting the roofers and the gangsters and soaking up remembered Mexicanismo and his former life, sitting in the living room with Chole reading while Lola Beltrán or Rocío Dúrcal played softly in the background.
A motion in the corner of his eye; in the rearview he could see the steel door open, he could see Skelly step out and start to walk toward the car. Marder shifted over to the passenger seat and snapped in the safety belt.
One of the roofers picked up a tarp. The other roofer pulled some kind of tool from his pocket. It took Marder a moment to realize it was a pistol.
Marder pulled out his own pistol, threw open the door, and got hung up on the seat belt. As he struggled with the faulty release, the roofer with the pistol stood in front of Skelly with his back to Marder; the other guy was coming up behind Skelly, ready to throw his tarp over Skelly’s head and hustle him into the van’s conveniently wide-open sliding side door.
Marder had barely made it out of the car when he heard a bang and saw the head of the man with the pistol burst outward in a geyser of red. Skelly had spun around to face the other man and Marder saw a flash, heard another bang, and the man with the tarpaulin fell over. Skelly trotted down the street, got into the car, and drove off.
“How in hell did you manage that?” asked Marder, as they wove through the traffic on the calzada.
“I had this in my hand all the time,” Skelly replied, flipping a tiny pistol into Marder’s lap. It was still warm when he handled it.
“It fires a .410 shotgun shell. I raised my hands like I was surrendering and begged for my life, and then I shot the bastard in the face. And the other one too. It looks like they were pros and had a following car, or two.”
“But they saw you weren’t carrying the bag. Why did they want to snatch you?”
“I don’t think it had anything to do with the money. I think it was our friend Cuello.”
“You think? In the DF?”
“It’s a matter of a phone call. And it’s Itzapalapa—kidnapping’s a cottage industry around here. No, I don’t think it was a spontaneous thing. It was planned. They probably tailed us from the airport.”
“But why you? Why not me?”
“Oh, they probably figured I was the brains behind the operation. Or the muscle.” He gave Marder a grin. “Don’t feel bad, Marder. They’ll come after you next.”
12
Marder was waiting by the plane the next morning, nervous, constantly looking at his watch, imagining the worst, when Skelly drove up in the Jetta with Statch in the front seat, followed by a truck inscribed with the name of a meatpacking firm.
“I had to pick up a few items, chief,” said Skelly. “Statch put them on her card.”
“What items? Not the stuff you bought yesterday?” Marder looked at the truck, from which four men were unloading large cartons and wheeling them over to the yawning cargo bay of the King Air.
“No, no, all that has to come via shipping container. This is just some useful electronics.”
“He bought a cell-phone tower,” said Statch.
“And cell phones, lots of cell phones,” Skelly added. “Our little community is going to be wired to the nipples.”
“I don’t understand,” said Marder. “Is it legal to have your own cell-phone tower?”
“It’s legal-ish in a Mexican kind of way. Statch will explain the technical details. My God, is that our Lourdes?”
“Yes,” said Marder, looking over at the terminal building, from which the girl had emerged. “Or Lo, as we’re now supposed to call her. She’s had the whole works, courtesy of Señora Espinoza and my credit card.”
Via a little pink Bottega Veneta suit, Blahnik heeled sandals at a hundred dollars an ounce, plus a four-hundred-dollar haircut and a long evening of training in poise and makeup and other aspects of stardom, Lourdes Almones had transformed herself from a sulky provincial teenager into a reasonable simulacrum of a telenovela star. The effect was perfectly artificial to Marder’s eyes, and he was sensible of a certain Frankensteinian horror in his breast, but the girl was glowing with happiness and, starlike, she communicated this to nearly everyone in her immediate orbit.
“I’m in love,” said Skelly.
“She’s seventeen,” said Marder.
“We’ll grow old together,” said Skelly, approaching the girl with his arms thrown wide.
* * *
In the air again, Marder sat next to his daughter, whom he had seen but briefly since the previous evening. Neither she nor Skelly had been at the dinner to celebrate Lourdes’s triumphant interview with Marcial Jura.
“We missed you last night,” he said. “You ran off with Skelly.”
“Yeah, he wanted to pump my brain about cellular systems, and then we went to this guy he knew—”
“Yet another guy of Skelly’s innumerable guys. Did this one have a name?”
“Mr. Lopez. He was in the back room of a warehouse in Tepito with a lot of what looked like shady inventory.”
“Why did you go with Skelly anyway? I thought you were coming to Televisa with us.”
“I thought my expertise would be more useful with Skelly than in getting Lourdes ready. I figured Pepa had that down—I mean the makeup and the haircut and the clothes and all. It was a little rich for me—as you know, I’m a T and shorts kind of girl. How did she do, by the way?”
“Unexpectedly great. You know, you figure a Mexican telenovela guy, a big-shot producer, he’s got to be a fat lecher with a cigar and a mustache, Zero Mostel, but no. He looks like a ballet master, like Balanchine: black shirt, short hair, slight build, heavy round glasses. We walk in there—a regular office, big video monitors, small messy desk, with couches and a coffee table, nothing fancy—me and Pepa and the girl, and after the usual greeting and small talk he ignores us. He’s totally focused on Lourdes. They talked about telenovelas. He drew her out, what she liked, what she didn’t, the actors, the plots … I was amazed at how articulate the kid became when she was talking about something she loved. Ordinarily you can’t get a word out of her.”
“I know guys who’re like that with
video games. It’s sort of pathetic.”
“Is it? I don’t know. Popular culture is hard to figure. Billions of people watch these things religiously—maybe literally religiously. I don’t think that it’s an accident that almost all telenovelas are produced by Catholic countries. Anyway, we had a screen test, we went to a studio, and he had Lourdes improvise in front of a camera—he would set up a situation and give her some lead-in lines. It was amazing. She just sort of occupied a classic character—the spurned lover, the defiant daughter. I’d never seen anything like it. Pepa was blown away.”
“Why was that?”
“Because she’d given me this line about how an indio like Lourdes would be abused, the whole casting-couch business and how she would never get real roles, only maids and servants, but apparently Jura’s moving in a new direction; he wants to develop some indio actors to become real stars. He thinks the market is ready for it. Girls first, of course.”
“Of course. Well, it’s not my thing, but I’m happy for her. Is she going to get a contract?”
“Apparently he wants her in some kind of training school for young actors they have in Defe. But there didn’t seem to be any doubt in his mind that she’d get a part when she graduated. I think she’ll do well. You saw her—blooming like a rose. I’m very pleased.”
His daughter made no response, and Marder had the thought that, though a T-shirt-and-shorts person, his daughter perhaps resented the attention he’d given to the lovely little stranger. “I’m sorry you weren’t there,” he added.
“Yes, well, as I said, it’s not my kind of thing. Anyway, I like hanging out with Skelly. He’s a laugh a minute.”
“Is he? The last time I was out with him it was only mildly amusing. He shot two men in the head.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.” He briefly related what had gone down in Itzapalapa.
“Well,” she said, “it sounds like he didn’t have much of a choice.”
“Right, but, still, terminating two human lives should make a difference—I mean outside the heat of combat, when you really don’t know what you’re doing. And he was completely unaffected by it, smiling, joking, like it was crushing out a cigarette or an insect. I still can’t believe I shot a bunch of men the other day, and whenever I think about it I get a little nauseous. It’s not normal.”
“Maybe he’s used to it. Maybe he’s a famous international hit man.”
“There’s no such thing. As far as I’m aware, no heavily protected person has ever been killed by a professional assassin. There’s no money in it. If you want someone dead, you hire a couple of teenagers who don’t give a shit. No, I think he’s in the security business just like he says. I think he protects some fairly bad people, though, and hires mercenaries and like that. What I can’t quite figure out is why he hangs out with me. I mean, what’s in it for him?”
Girlish giggling and Skelly’s booming laugh sounded from the front of the plane.
“I’m going to kill him if he hits on that girl,” said Marder.
“I don’t see why you should care,” she said. “You’re not responsible for her, and from what I’ve seen she’s perfectly capable of looking out for herself, nor is she a blushing innocent. Really, Dad—it’s not like you’re her father. In fact, if he’s bonking her, everyone will stop thinking you’re bonking her.”
Marder looked at her, amazed. “Why would they think that?”
“Oh, maybe because you took her to Mexico City in a chartered plane to buy her lots of fancy stuff and set her up with the most famous telenovela director in the country. Why would you do that unless you were pulling down her new La Perlas?”
“Wait … people in Colonia Feliz are talking about this?”
“Of course. You’re the sun around which their lives revolve. You’re the patrón. Your moods are consulted like the weather. When you frown, the clouds darken—”
“Oh, cut it out, Carmel!”
“It’s true. I thought that was the point of you coming down here, to be a big shot in Mom’s hometown.”
“Did you really think that? What possible word or deed of mine in all the time you’ve known me would give you to believe that I was that kind of man?”
“None. But I thought you’d gone crazy, remember?”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. The jury is still out. I mean, one day I’m, like, oh, my dad’s an editor in New York, and the next it’s, oh, my dad’s a feudal lord in Michoacán. It takes some getting used to.”
Another gust of laughter and high spirits from forward.
“And I agree about your boy up there. That’s the other thing I can’t figure out: What’s in it for him? Why is he hanging around and doing all this stuff?”
“Did you ask him?”
“Yeah, I did. He said he just wanted to help out a pal.”
“And…”
“Moving an apartment, lending a car, letting him sleep on your couch, is what you do to help out a pal. Not dropping your whole life and setting up a state-of-the-art security system for him and shooting people. You have no idea the kind of surveillance and commo equipment he bought last night, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth, besides that whole damn private cell-phone system. And I bet you went shopping with him when you took off yesterday morning.”
“He did. I waited in the car.”
“What did he get?”
It passed briefly through Marder’s mind to dissimulate, to get Carmel into the zone of deniability, to protect her from whatever consequences Skelly’s purchases might have, but then he dismissed the idea. Marder had never been the kind of father who treated his adult daughter like a perpetual daddy’s little girl. Sometimes he thought it was a little unnatural, but there it was.
He said, “He bought heavy weapons, military grade. It was part of the deal with the Templos, in exchange for protection.” Marder felt it was fair to leave out the China White, since he didn’t officially know about that yet.
“Do you think that’s wise? These guys seem to do enough damage with American gun-shop stuff and machetes.”
“I don’t know. Skelly’s in charge of security. And I think that in this particular situation, there’s nobody better.”
“What do you mean, situation?”
“A people occupied by an oppressive force, or forces, and wanting to resist. That’s what he trained for; it’s what he knows how to do.”
“Well, I hope it works out better than Vietnam,” she said.
When she said that, something clicked in Marder’s mind, and he understood why Skelly stuck around and why he was expending so much effort to make Colonia Feliz secure from the forces of evil. He’s making up for the failures, for the way his army and his country abandoned the Hmong forty years ago. And for the destruction of Moon River.
It came back to Marder clearly now, like the fight in the bamboo forest, the names and faces still obscured but the visceral memories arriving in waves, like the onset of a drug.
* * *
It was a day or so after the firefight. They were back in the village, the wounded had been evacuated, the dead in their dripping poncho liners had been taken away. Hayden and Lascaglia were dead; Pogo too—he’d died in the helicopter, with the medic working against the wound shock and Skelly gripping the man’s shoulder, his mouth an inch from the dying man’s ear, shouting against the chopper’s roar, demanding that he not die, that he stay with the living, stay with me, stay with me …
He’d seen Skelly’s tears clearing bright runnels in his grimy face and had wondered then (and still did) why he himself was tearless at the death of comrades. Maybe what Skelly had said was true, that his body might be here but the essential Marder was not, was a tourist, a visitor. Or perhaps, being diffident by nature, he lacked the basis for the intense comradeship he observed among the SOGs and among the Hmong soldiers. Or perhaps it was simple denial—his mind had closed off the war, shut down all feelings; I am not really here, so I can
’t die. But these considerations did not occur to him until much later. At the time he simply experienced a terrible isolating chill and felt badly about himself because of it.
Despite this, Skelly persisted in cultivating him. At the time, Marder imagined that it was because he was the sole surviving airman, the last helpless kitten in the litter, and that the SOGs regretted losing Sweathog and Pinto, but then Marder decided it was more personal than that. Skelly was interested in him.
After the firefight, Marder had little to do. The sensor system was complete and apparently operational. Occasionally they could hear and see, far off over the jungle ridges, the flash and rumble of the Arc Light strikes that the vast machinery of Igloo White had vectored in on the sounds of transit on the trail, invisible B-52s dropping hundreds of tons of explosives on truckloads of rice and ammunition. There was no radio traffic for him from Naked Fanny; the air force seemed to have forgotten him, at least temporarily, and he thought that was fine. He had no real desire to go back to Task Force Alpha. He volunteered to monitor the radio nets and made himself useful maintaining various electronic devices. The SOGs were famously unconcerned with military occupation specialties; people did whatever was necessary, and Marder learned how to call in air support from the forward air controllers during operations. The SOGs went out on missions and returned—most of them. New people arrived and were absorbed and were wounded or killed or served out their tours and variously departed, but Marder didn’t really go to the war anymore.
He spent a lot of his time in the village. He talked to the children, enticing them with PX potato chips. That was one nice thing about the SOG: it had its own air force and supply lines, and the Ponies—their private helicopter pilots—would bring in almost anything you wanted from Long Binh or Saigon. All of the SOGs were comfortable dealing with the Hmong—they had been trained to be nice to freedom-fighting natives—but none more so than Skelly. He was forever bending Marder’s ear with descriptions of the beauty of their culture, its integrity, its spirit. He thought it was how human beings were meant to live. Skelly spent whatever free time he had in Moon River, surrendering his turn to fly to Saigon and its delights in order to submerge himself ever deeper in the culture of the Hmong. He very much wanted Marder to be inducted into his tribe and clan, even volunteering to buy the buffalo required for the ceremony.
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