The Right Eye of God

by Bacon Thorn

  Nuños could not believe his eyes. It could not be true that she was the same woman he had seen only once, briefly, at the ranch in Duelos. Surely, she could not be the frightened woman who had been taken captive with Thomas Navarre and sent with him into the desert to disappear. What was her name? Nuños frowned, irritated that he could not remember, except that it was a strange name. Frustrated, he turned quickly, pressed a hundred-peso note into the hand of the doorman, and informed him that he had changed his mind about the taxi. The uniformed man smiled and turned his attention quickly to the famous torero as he and his party of seven pushed through the glass doors, heading for the long black limousine which was parked by the curb to take them away.

  For less than five seconds, as Cid Camaro and his party swept by him, Nuños saw up close the profile of the woman with the tanned complexion, tawny gold hair, and lips painted the color of tangerines. His certainty of recognition swelled as her name popped into his head with a high note of triumph: Yuma Haynes. And even as she was handed into the back seat of the limousine by Camaro, a cunning plan was forming quickly in Nuños’s mind of how to set a trap for Navarre. If his thinking was correct, when Navarre learned of her kidnapping, he would rush to her rescue, and the trap would be sprung on him. With them both dead, the last incriminating links to him would be gone. At the very least, their deaths would divert Peñas from total concentration on the question of how the assassination would happen. With his confidence renewed, he strode quickly to the bank of pay phones on the other side of the lobby and placed a quick, urgent call to the same number he had reached earlier. He talked rapidly when he made the connection, keeping his voice low, though he was brimming with rising certainty that victory on Sunday was now ordained. When he retraced his steps to the front door, he pressed another hundred-peso note into the hand of the doorman and climbed into the taxi that responded to the man’s sharp whistle.

  As he was driven to the international airport, Nuños pondered on the quirk of fate that had placed him in the hotel lobby at exactly the same time Cid Camaro was making his exit, accompanied by the woman who should have been dead. How incredible it was, he thought, that she would return to Mexico, risking all the deadly consequences. He knew, of course, that Navarre and the woman had escaped by air from the mission at Sisiqichuc and landed in El Paso. But she was not with the American in the limousine carrying Lazlo Peñas and his agents who had evaded the trap set for them. His spies had told him that. There was only one conclusion that made sense: after she and Navarre were met by Lazlo Peñas, she had come back to Mexico on her own. But what colossal stupidity! By what faulty logic had she decided that she was safe from harm just because she was not in the company of Navarre? As Nuños sought an answer to his question, he marveled anew at his remarkable good fortune. The woman was his for the taking, a sign from the fatemaker himself that proved the killing on Sunday would go forward as planned.

  His thoughts refocused on the riddle of Yuma Haynes’s bold presence at the El Presidente. As the picture of her dressed elegantly in the silver gown rose in his mind, memories of other women, certainly no less glamorous and desirable, crowded in for recognition. He thought about them and realized that the one trait common to all of them was inconsistency, particularly if they were strongly attracted to a man. It dawned on him with sudden clarity that Navarre and his companion, desperate fugitives alone together in the desert for four days, would have certainly sought comfort and closeness in each other’s arms. And he knew there was no more fertile ground for sexual attraction to occur than one of fear and the threat of death. Of course, it was clear as glass: Yuma Haynes, feeling discarded, had thrown caution to the wind and returned to Mexico to be with a man whose status as a national hero would center attention on her in his spotlight. Navarre could not fail to react if he cared about her. Her folly would make her a hostage, Nuños vowed, that would lead Navarre to his own destruction and eliminate both of them as a threat to him personally and to his plans for the Day of the Dead.

  The thought of her with Navarre was inflammatory, and he felt the sudden rush of heat in his loins and the matching urgency like liquid fire that ran through his veins and always took his breath away. He glanced quickly into the rearview mirror to make certain the bushy-haired taxi driver had not noticed the change in his face from the radiation of desire flooding into his eyes. Of course, he couldn’t see anything in the dark, with only the dull glow of the panel lights and the gaudy reflections on the window from the beams of oncoming cars. But he couldn’t erase from his mind the idea of Yuma Haynes lying naked, expectant in the moonlight on a bed of soft white sand, her hair wild like a flared fan, lean, long legs marbled in the soft glow, nipples erect on breasts, pale and rounded from their own weight. He could imagine her rising breathing, her heart beating slowly and firmly, soon to hasten with the blood-tingling drumbeat of lust, as ancient and compelling as life.

  He swallowed dryly and thought of the first woman who had belonged to Navarre. Well, he had taken her where he found her, sprawled in a small, clear moon of sand, obviously thrown from the torn Mercedes, which had been squashed on its left side against the tough roots of a large hackberry bush. He had known she was seriously injured, for she lay very still with one arm flung outward, as if in a gesture of futile appeal, with her fingers touching the crumpled front passenger door of the car. There was no blood on her dress, but she breathed softly in shallow, ragged intakes. Internal injuries, he had thought to himself. She must have fallen through the door or been ejected when the door flew open after the impact with the truck.

  He remembered as if it were yesterday how white and lovely her skin was in the glare of the headlamp, which threw a shaft of radiance over the top of the bulking hackberry bush. Softly, pressing his weight into the sand with careful steps, as if he might wake her if he were careless, he had stood over her sprawled body, then peered into the night owlishly. At two thirty in the morning, Highway 45 was almost deserted; occasionally, a long-haul trucker traveling the lonely road would come along in the wee hours, but even these sleepless drivers usually shunned the uninhabited stretches of the road at night in case of breakdown.

  He was safe and alone, he decided, as he reached under the woman’s dress and pulled her panties down over her knees in one quick, smooth motion. He watched as she stirred, moaned, and waved one hand against her mouth as if brushing away a fly. When he was on his knees, as he lifted her buttocks in his hands, positioned to thrust inside her, her eyes popped open suddenly, staring at him in confusion, pain, and fright, and she breathed hoarsely, gulping air. When he realized she was conscious, her eyes wide with horror and disbelief, he was furious with his disappointment and her treachery. Quickly, he covered her eyes and mouth with one large hand. He pinched her nose shut with the other hand. As she struggled and heaved, a small bird beating its fragile wings helplessly, he felt a rapturous stirring in his loins, then a soft, steady, marvelous release of pressure.

  He lifted his hands from her face when she stopped moving, then he heard a sound which made him turn quickly. Incredibly, the driver of the car, pulling himself forward on his elbows in the sand, almost blinded by the blood running into his eyebrows and eyes, was crawling toward his wife.

  He recalled that the struggling, incoherent husband trying in a daze to rescue his wife was like an accusation. Swiftly for a man so big and bearlike, he had risen to his feet, zipped up his front, and in three swift steps reached the crawling figure. Without hesitation, he lifted his booted right foot and kicked the man above his left eye. Fresh blood spurted from the existing wound in his forehead as the toe of his boot struck bone. The man collapsed, dripping blood into the sand. He quivered, and then fell silent.

  It only required a moment for him to grasp the still woman by her shoulders and drag her to a torn fender skirt of the Mercedes, which had accumulated a small pool of oil. Lifting her by her chin, he pressed her nose and face into the black, warm liquid.

  Before he climbed into his cruiser, he
smashed the glaring headlamps of the Mercedes with a rock, then surveyed the subdued crash scene and was satisfied. The bright silver moon bathed their bodies with a creamy effervescence. He later learned that as he departed, he failed to hear or see a farmer with a horse and cart who stood stricken and frightened in the desert brush about two hundred feet from the shattered Mercedes. He had been patrolling the highway, as he often did on moonlit nights, for discarded pop bottles thrown from passing cars by careless tourists. They were easy to spot along the sides of the highway, reflecting light from the moon. The elimination later of the farmer, Tato Hernandez, who had saved Navarre’s life, had been carefully planned to prevent any suspicion of murder.

  Nuños’s recollection of the desert night seemed to portend that he would take the blond woman after she played the role he planned for her in the assassination. She would become another trophy to number among the ones he had taken on his restless nocturnal expeditions in his official car. He loved the excitement and risk when he hunted at night, pretending devotion to vigilance that awed the men who worked for him on the police force. It was a strange thing, he thought, that the women who excited him the most, almost to a frenzy, were those who appeared aloof, most unobtainable, most selective about the men they favored with their gifts.

  He let his memory of Navarre’s wife fade from his mind and relaxed into the leather cushion of his seat. As a result of the phone call he had made, he had changed his destination. After leaving the taxi he was in at the airport, he would not return by a circuitous route to his secret haven. Instead, in another cab, still disguised as Don Ortiz Arrango, he would meet with Flavio Ruiz, the deadly killer who had failed to stop Peñas’s limousine. He did not fault the man for that. The ambush at the barricade had been arranged on his orders at the last minute when he had learned that Navarre and Peñas would land at the Querétaro Airport. It had been a mistake, organized too late, without enough planning to assure its success. If it had succeeded, he would have been surprised. He had chided himself for giving in to his impulse to strike at the two men who could thwart the assassination. But not now, not with Yuma Haynes to serve as the cheese in the trap he would spring on Thomas Navarre.

  He frowned, wondering how the American woman knew Cid Campeador y Camaro and why the famous bullfighter had made public his preference for her over the hundreds of beautiful women who would have flown from their husbands or lovers to be chosen by him.

  The place of his meeting with Flavio Ruiz was a small apartment above the Café Los Globos in a quiet neighborhood. When he heard the discreet knock on the door, he admitted the tall, thin man with the wide mouth, bushy eyebrows, and white scar line that ran from cheek to cheek like a chalk mark crossing his upper lip.

  Motioning the man he had used in a dozen different killings and kidnapping assignments to a seat at the old-fashioned walnut table, he knew better than to engage in brief civilities. Flavio Ruiz was an intense, secret man, probably with few friends, who had mastered the cunning ability to camouflage himself so he could fade into any background despite the distinguishing scar on his face. He was quiet, with expressionless eyes, and even though Nuños had called on him for special projects over a period of six years, he had revealed nothing about his background or his personal life. The phone number by which Nuños had contacted him never remained the same. It would be disconnected when the current job he was to perform ended and he vanished. Nuños could only reach him by a complicated formula that always led to a new phone connection.

  “What is the job?” he asked abruptly when he had seated himself.

  When Nuños explained what he wanted Flavio to do, the man’s thick eyebrows lifted on his forehead and he said in a hoarse voice, “When you told me on the phone you wanted me to hit Cid Camaro’s house, I thought, my God, that’s like planning your own suicide. He’s got at least twenty men always surrounding him and his guests. Most of them are members of his cuadrilla, but at least two are his bodyguards. They are heavily armed and they live in. They are tough, absolutely loyal, related to him either as first or second cousins, and they are paid strong salaries. They’ve got no reason to betray him, so bribery is out.”

  Flavio frowned, his heavy brows coming together in concentration to form a bridge of hair and wrinkles across his forehead. He fixed his gaze on the crossbar of a telephone pole outside the kitchen window as he rehearsed the problem out loud, as if Nuños was not present.

  “The problem of kidnapping the woman is twofold: It has to be done tomorrow, and the plan has to be foolproof. The old house is built like a fortress to bar intruders and because Cid Camaro hates banks. I’ve heard he keeps a fortune in a safe buried in his bedroom wall. Also, he doesn’t trust many people, so he limits his social contacts to old friends he remembers from the days when he was a poor kid. And there’s the circle of close professionals in the bullfighting game. How to get into the house is the bitchy question. What would appeal to him? Who would he welcome because their visit would honor him?”

  Flavio’s brow cleared as he turned his sharp eyes on Nuños and drew the fingers of his right hand contemplatively across the chalky scar that bisected his lower face. “Okay, jefe, I thought about your problem after you called me and for a while I thought it was hopeless. I couldn’t figure any kind of an answer, not until I read a story in the Mexico City News. That’s where I think I found the angle. I ran it through my mind while I was waiting for you to call me. It’s risky, the riskiest thing I’ve ever done, and it depends on the money I’ll have to pay the people I’ve got to hire to make it work. And it depends on the money you’ve got to pay me, because it’s the last job I’ll be able to do in Mexico.”

  When Flavio described the subject of the news story he had read, Nuños was at first disappointed. How could the visit to Mexico of a royal princess of Spain, Princess Marguerite Estrella, a sort of remote niece of the aging king, have any relationship to the kidnapping of Yuma Haynes?

  Flavio gave Nuños one of his rare mirthless smiles and explained that the princess refused to be photographed because, as the news item of her visit tactlessly reported, she bore a large purple birthmark on her chest that extended in a solid streak up the left side of her neck and stopped under her jawline. She wore dresses with high collars, but the cruel birthmark could not be hidden completely. And that disfiguring stain, he explained, was going to be the passport for the impostor he would hire to gain entry to Cid Camaro’s house. Flavio was betting that the torero would be flattered by a faked call from the Spanish embassy on behalf of the princess. She loved the ancient sport of bullfighting and would like to meet Mexico’s famed torero in private, without the fanfare of the press, to extend a personal invitation for him to fight in Spain’s famous Plaza de Toros. Graciousness would compel him to invite her to visit him at his house. Obviously, the princess would be accompanied by her own party of faithful attendants.

  Impressed with the daring and simplicity of the plan, Nuños had but one question: “Do you really think you can pull it off?”

  “If I don’t, it’s my skin.” Flavio paused, and then added, “There’s a risk in every plan. In this case, I think the odds will be on my side, since I’ve got a contact at the Spanish embassy who can route any telephone inquiry from Cid Camaro’s people to a secure number. He will cost money, but without him, it won’t work. The dangers of this job are high. We’ll be armed—don’t forget, Cid’s bodyguards accompany him everywhere he goes, but the element of surprise will be on our side, and that’ll give us a big advantage. At the right moment, we will kill them, subdue the woman, and take her to the embassy car waiting outside.”

  Nuños nodded, and then said, “How much?”

  “For me, seven million US dollars. Another half million to cover my expenses. All up front.”

  “That’s stiff,” Nuños grunted.

  “Take it or leave it! I told you if I do this job, I’ll have to leave Mexico. Nobody is going to invade Cid Camaro’s house, kill some people, and abduct a guest without
consequences. The Mexican police will be all over every person on their suspect list like a swarm of hornets. And somebody I use on the job is bound to talk. I’ll either be dead because the plan falls apart or on the first plane out of here.”

  “How do you want to be paid?” Nuños asked.

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  Chapter XVII

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  The pensión at 32 Hippolyta Street, near the Plaza Popocatépetl, into which Refugio Virrey led Navarre, was a rambling adobe bungalow with six bedrooms, a large kitchen/sitting room dominated by an ornate, tiled fireplace, and a huge dining room. The latter had been converted to a conference and communications center and was scantily furnished with a large table and several wooden chairs; locked file cabinets flanked one wall of the room.

  Navarre was directed to a comfortable upholstered chair in front of the fireplace in the sitting room. Virrey lighted a bundle of stacked wood, and soon a cheery fire was blazing that took the chill out of the room. The young man told him where the coffee makings were located and then left the pensión, and Navarre relaxed in front of the fire.

  He realized he had fallen asleep, for when he was awakened two hours later, it was by Peñas handing him a cup of hot coffee. Stretching his muscles and yawning, he gratefully accepted the steaming brew.

  “Thanks,” he said, feeling rested, and invigorated by the strong black Mexican coffee.