by Bacon Thorn
The desert wind had erased any tracks Navarre and his female companion may have left behind. There was no telling which direction they chose when they left the scene. It was a strange feeling for Nuños to stare at the desolate wreckage and ask himself how in the name of God the Americans had eluded the dogs and armed men, then blown up a van in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do it with?
As deepening twilight chased him back to Chihuahua, Nuños had tried to be objective about the escape of the Americans. How much harm could Thomas Navarre do if he managed to get to Lazlo Peñas within the next three days? The disappearance of the pair had to be added to the complications arising out of a telephone call Nuños received from Leon Abruzza when he returned to Chihuahua. Abruzza, Nuños’s reluctant deep-cover agent, was administrative chief for Lazlo Peñas. He confirmed that none other than the archbishop of Chihuahua had called Peñas with the news that de la Garza’s body had been found and reburied by a village priest and that an American who was the dead man’s contact and who had visited with the priest was missing.
On top of the disaster in the desert, the phone call had stirred Nuños’s irascible temper. Neither event was important enough to delay the progress of the assassination, but together, they represented an alarming breach of the security he had developed to protect the secrecy of the assassination plan. The bishop’s call to the chief of the Federal Judicial Police was bad enough, but if the escaped American, Navarre, reached Lazlo Peñas, able to identify the chief of police of Chihuahua as a principal conspirator, then there was no question that Peñas would act.
As the head of the third-largest narcotic gang in Mexico and the organizer of the Ring of Gold, the alliance of the largest narco groups, Nuños knew he was powerful, yet vulnerable. His ruthless partners did not forgive mistakes. It was he who convinced them that his plan to kill Calderón would not only eliminate the threat to their criminal activities but demonstrate their power so conclusively that the government under a new president would become a silent partner. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with the day of the killing. The stakes were too high, and failure would never be tolerated by his associates in the Ring of Gold.
Nuños had spent a restless night, but at breakfast the next morning his eyes suddenly opened wide as he was struck with an inspiration. He knew where the Americans must have headed after they left the scene of the burned wreckage in the desert! Why hadn’t he figured it out sooner? They were going to trudge through the desert and seek refuge at Mission Sisiqichuc. He had to give the American credit for shrewd thinking. He would have known there was no place for him and the woman to hide or find help in the desert villages. And they dared not head back to Chihuahua. Wanted by the police, moneyless, without reassuring identification or any escape connections, they were helpless.
But if they reached the mission? That was a different story. Those spineless priests, who spent their lives whispering prayers to a deafened God, took in anybody, and they weren’t intimidated by threats from police. How far was it from the desert wreckage he’d found to the mission? Fifty miles? Seventy? On foot, without food or water, how long would it take them, assuming they could find the way? Three, four days? If he could intersect them, cut them off before they reached the mission, then the threat Navarre represented could be stopped.
He paused, chiding himself for slow thinking. His course of action was obvious: he would arrange for armed men to patrol key stretches of the desert trails that all pointed southwest to the mission a few miles from Creel. The fugitives would have to emerge from the desert at some predictable place. A strong reward for their capture would sharpen the eyes and hunting instincts of the men he hired. The Americans would be spotted and killed on sight . . . before they could reach sanctuary. Fifty or so men would be all it would take. A few thousand pesos was a cheap price to pay to eliminate a serious potential threat. But even as he put his plan into action, he realized this strategy was not foolproof. He decided that he would overfly the route of the railroad into Creel and the mission himself.
Quickly, Nuños had picked up a phone to make arrangements for the hunters and to have his helicopter ready for flight in half an hour.
When his helicopter was about three miles from Los Pinos, a rarely traveled juncture of a desolate trail that branched north to the railroad village of Creel and southeast toward the mission, Nuños had instructed his pilot to turn off the engine for silence and let the whirling, freewheeling rotor blades take them down.
Wide eyed, the man at the controls protested that such an order was dangerous; he was silenced by the threatening glower that flashed on Nuños’s face. The helicopter dropped slowly as the frightened pilot fought to manage the speed of their descent.
When Nuños spotted the lone figure of the old man in the clearing, the copter’s altitude was less than fifteen hundred feet, but the engine caught with a roar and the machine came alive with power. Even as they prepared to land, Nuños laughed to himself over his luck at finding the one man who was a walking encyclopedia of desert lore and facts about the people and strangers who lived near the mission or were passing through. He was a strange old man with secrets he kept well hidden. He would recognize him anywhere, even from a distance.
It was not in his mind to kill Maximillio when he stepped to the ground with the machine pistol in his hand. But his insolence was irritating when he stubbornly refused to answer the question if he had seen a man and woman, obviously Americans, on the trail to the mission. Anger, added to his frustration that Navarre had proved to be such a wily survivor and potential danger, had prompted him to lose his temper and flare at the old man.
“You’re a liar!” he shouted. “I know you’ve seen them. You know where they are. Tell me or I’ll kill you.”
Calmly, as if he were talking to a furious, ill-tempered child who had lost a toy, Maximillio said, “Killing is the coward’s way of winning an argument. I do not value my life over the people you seek to harm.”
“You’re calling me a coward?” Nuños shrieked, and suddenly his finger tightened on the trigger, and the blow from the bullets staggered Maximillio, and he fell to the ground.
Just as Nuños climbed back into the helicopter and reached to close the clear plastic glass door, he was shocked to hear shots fired as the aircraft lifted and he cringed from the sudden pain in his chest. It wasn’t until the helicopter had gained altitude that he discovered the two holes in the transparent door and the bleeding wound that made a groove across his chest. He canceled his plan to land at the mission airport and demand cooperation from the Jesuit priests to help him apprehend two dangerous Americans who were fleeing from crimes they’d committed. He ordered his pilot to return him quickly to Chihuahua, where he was driven to a reliable doctor who took nine stitches in his chest and told him he was lucky the bullets had not come a half inch closer. Later that same night he was flown to Mexico City, and as he sat in the darkened interior of his private plane, he was convinced that the man responsible for his wound was Thomas Navarre.
The next morning, when he reached his sanctuary in Mexico City and contacted the frightened and wavering Leon Abruzza, he learned that Lazlo Peñas had flown to El Paso at dawn to meet Thomas Navarre, who, with his woman companion, had reached safety, and the two were lodged at Biggs Air Force Base under the protection of the military. It was the worst news that Nuños could have imagined.
Now, as he sat at his desk in his safe house, he had to seriously consider whether or not to cancel the plans for the assassination of Felipe Calderón on Sunday, two days hence. He was still in a state of shock over the implications of a meeting between Navarre and Peñas. The impossible had happened, and he was deeply shaken by the terrible consequences he visualized. Why, if he couldn’t find some foolproof way to kill the American and stop his cooperation with Peñas, his whole life would unravel. His power and influence and all that they meant would be smashed, the ambitious killing of the president would fall apart, and his life would end.
; Nuños sucked three deep breaths into his chest, wincing as his lung expansion pulled the stitches in his skin. “Calm yourself,” he said out loud. “Think clearly. What do you have to do to forestall the investigation launched by Peñas?”
He fell silent and realized that what he had already decided was the only course that made sense. Thomas Navarre had to be killed. That was an incontrovertible necessity if the assassination of Calderón was to happen on schedule. The big question was how? He knew, with certainty, that if no threat to Calderón materialized, the American’s identification of him would come to nothing. After all, nothing had been disclosed to Navarre except the death of a cheap whore. And it would be difficult to prove his complicity in the murder of de la Garza or even in the attempted murder of Navarre and the woman. Even if Peñas, acting on the bishop’s information, paid a visit to Duelos, what would he find? Nada! A burned-out farm in the desert—an unfortunate event in which the owner, an eccentric veterinarian, had died in the flames.
A plan for the assassination of the president involving the respected chief of police of Chihuahua? How absurd! Who ever heard of such a thing? Without incontrovertible evidence of a crime, Peñas would be helpless to proceed. He might have grave suspicions, but without proof of a conspiracy, he could go nowhere. Yes, he was safe enough; he had been shrewd and cautious. He had allowed himself to be alarmed needlessly. Why, not even Leon Abruzza, who served as his secret pipeline to report on Peñas’s activities, knew the exact day of the killing. But, of course, he would have to be silenced.
Nuños inhaled deeply again, then expelled his inhaled breath slowly. He allowed himself to relax a little and acknowledged that certainly, the reappearance of Navarre placed a big question mark over the assassination, but to call a halt at the last minute would surely invite strong criticism from the ruling council of the Ring of Gold. Questions from the drug ministers about the escaped Americans inevitably would arise, and his explanation would be judged. He didn’t want that to happen.
The idea of losing the power of his connection to the Ring of Gold was not to be considered. So subtle and far reaching was its influence that it was almost impossible to describe the people whose lives it touched. It was like a second government in Mexico, a shadow government whose billions in resources played a factor in the rise and fall of the stock market. The secret money it owned controlled politicians, policemen, judges, and churchmen, to whom it donated large sums for redevelopment. In disguised partnerships, it invested with legitimate businessmen in banks, dams, oil wells, and hard industries, and it subsidized puppet politicians.
Nuños stretched back in his chair and sighed. Esquivel was dead, but he would not allow his carelessness with a simple killing task to jeopardize his own career. The assassination would proceed, and his respect and power in the Ring of Gold would increase. Nothing must interfere with that. To make certain, he would violate one of his own rules to always separate himself from violence by one or more levels of intervening authority. Now, he would fill the gap left by Esquivel’s death. By taking over, he would risk everything if anything went wrong, but that was all right. He knew the killing of Calderón would happen as planned.
As he made up his mind, the face of Thomas Navarre rose in his memory. It wasn’t the strained, bruised face of the man whom he had questioned in the library at the farm. It was the shocked expression of the injured man who had tried to crawl on his elbows to his dying wife in the desert night. Nuños clucked his tongue. He should have remembered the remarkable effort of the American inching forward in the sand, for his struggle that night in the desert had been an indicator of his strong determination. One tough hombre. It was fateful, ironic, he thought, that the American should return to Mexico to die. It was almost poetic.
Having made his final decision, Nuños spent the next two hours altering his appearance. When he concluded the changes on his face and body, he looked like an older, taller version of a portly, refined Mexican aristocrat. With trimming, the heavy black mustache that framed both sides of his mouth became a distinguished dark brush sprinkled with gray that widened his lips. A human-hair wig silvered his head, adding age and respectability to his features. The casual, well-tailored suit he wore was handmade for him. Alligator boots with elevator heels added to his height and stamped him with the seal of affluence. It was in this disguise that he carefully locked the door to his secluded house in Mexico City and walked several blocks before he caught a taxi to the Hotel El Presidente in downtown Mexico City. He registered as Don Ortiz Arrango, a fictitious name that matched a set of identity papers in his briefcase. He prepaid with a platinum credit card in the same name. He pocketed the key and arranged to have his suitcase taken to his suite.
At 10:00 p.m., he made two telephone calls from the hotel lobby, the first one to an unlisted number, where he left a terse message. On the second call, he arranged a meeting in another part of the city two hours later. Then he walked into the softly lighted waterfall cocktail lounge. The lounge was almost deserted of people. He took a seat in the comfortable twilight of the bar and sipped from a refreshing glass of gin and tonic. He calculated that he had about half an hour before Leon Abruzza would contact him as instructed. That gave him ample time to conduct his other business before his late-night rendezvous with Abruzza.
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Chapter XVI
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Before Pappe Nuños opened the door of his hotel suite at eleven o’clock that night to greet Leon Abruzza, he quickly discarded his false makeup and donned a light gabardine sports jacket and slacks. Untucked, his soft yellow shirt bulged from the thrust of his rounded paunch.
He had decided to be cheerful and friendly with Abruzza, the tall, thin, black-haired man whose face was drawn with worry and sleepless nights. One glance at Leon when he arrived was enough for Nuños to know that he was on the verge of collapse. Fear, terrible strain, and a hunted look in Abruzza’s dark eyes convinced Nuños—if he had ever had a doubt—that his decision to kill his informant was not only sound but would relieve the poor bastard of his burden of guilt. And his death would remove the threat he represented if he should be persuaded by Peñas to disclose what he knew about the sheriff of Chihuahua and the Ring of Gold.
“You look terrible, Leon,” he said, closing the door after the slim Mexican stepped into the room.
“Yes, I don’t feel well. I can’t sleep. My appetite is gone. I can’t even think straight. I know Peñas suspects me. Do you have a drink?”
“You want out, don’t you?”
Abruzza shrugged, the misery in his dark, sunken eyes threatening tears. “It’s probably too late for that,” he sighed. “I need enough money to run, get out of Mexico. I’ve got to disappear,” he said desperately.
Nuños opened the liquor cabinet behind a small bar and poured a miniature bottle of vodka into a glass and added ice. He handed the drink to Abruzza, who tossed it down quickly, ice clinking against his front teeth. Then, he let out his breath in a huge sigh. His resolve strengthened by the alcohol, he said fiercely to Nuños, “You’ve got to help me, Pappe. I’ve earned it. You know that.”
He walked determinedly to the bar and poured another miniature vodka into his empty glass. “This is a lifesaver,” he said, saluting Nuños with his glass upraised. He swallowed quickly, frowned, and said, “Why did you call me for a meeting? Isn’t this against your rules?”
Nuños smiled thinly. “Yes, but I knew you were troubled. I thought a meeting would help to straighten things out. Let’s sit down and talk. But first, look, there’s a bottle of fine old cognac on the top shelf. I know you like brandy. I got it for you especially.”
Abruzza’s eyebrows rose in surprise and gratitude. “I didn’t think you’d be so . . . so reasonable, Pappe. I, uh . . . Thanks.”
As Abruzza opened the polished grille door of the liquor cabinet and reached upward for the cognac, Nuños slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a soft leather sand-filled cosh shaped like a pestle used to grind c
orn. With his arm upraised, he swung the cosh in a swift arc that connected with Abruzza’s skull at the rear. The sound of the blow was no more alarming than an egg breaking.
Instantly, Abruzza’s body slumped, losing tension and posture. He twisted slightly as he fell, his loss of consciousness so rapid that his face failed to register his mental reaction to treachery and betrayal. The aged cognac remained on the shelf, untouched by Abruzza’s eager fingers.
Nuños grasped Abruzza’s prostrate body by the shoulders and dragged him over the carpet. After turning off the wall light near the ornamental balcony, he opened the door and cool, dark air poured into the room from outside.
Nuños briefly knelt and pressed his fingers against Abruzza’s right wrist, feeling for a pulse. It was faint, but regular. With a grunt of satisfaction, the sheriff of Chihuahua gauged the height of the guardrail that circled the balcony to be five feet and scanned to his right and left. Most of the windows of adjoining suites were ablaze with lights, testimony to the fact that late dinners were fashionable in Mexico and entertaining seldom ended before midnight.
Expertly, Nuños removed every article of identification from Abruzza’s body. Then he replaced them with false receipts and identification papers prepared in advance.
Next, lifting the limp Abruzza by the waist, he hoisted the man up on the guardrail with the top half of his body leaning into space. With one economical action, Nuños raised Abruzza’s legs and pushed. The body slipped over the guardrail and plunged down seventeen stories.
Even before Abruzza’s body smashed into the vacant concrete patio below, Nuños had pulled shut the drape concealing the door to the balcony and turned on the lights in his suite. Within fifteen minutes, he had reassembled his costume and makeup as Don Ortiz Arrango. Five minutes later, as the hotel doorman signaled a cab for him, a swirl of excitement in the lobby behind him made Nuños turn. There, smiling indulgently as he autographed a notebook offered by an excited fan and standing among the dozen hotel guests who suddenly surrounded him, was Cid Campeador y Camaro, the bullfighter known to millions of Mexicans as the Ghost Who Dances. Tall, slender, with arching black eyebrows, a high forehead, a gaunt face, and a wide mouth that now expressed a thin smile, Camaro, dressed in black evening wear, was the hero who would fight in the Plaza México on Sunday, two days hence. But it was not Camaro that riveted Nuños’s attention. It was the silver-gowned, deeply tanned blond woman who stood beside him.