…and there’s worse coming…
The scarred man’s bright blue eyes watched me awhile then faded into oblivion, the sounds of pouring rain and distant thunder swallowed by the heat, the voices, the cars and music in the street below.
I wondered if Janine was by herself somewhere too, uncertain and afraid like I was. Our night together replayed in my mind for about the eighth time since I’d awakened to find her gone. I held the pictures there as long as I could and let them rock me, gently, like a long-ago lullaby forgotten until just then.
By the time night had fallen I’d let her go, finished off the beers and changed into a fresh shirt. I stood in front of a grimy little mirror over a table on the inside wall and ran a comb through the remains of my receding and sweaty hair. I puffed up my chest, tried a different stance in the hopes I might look tougher or in better shape than I was, and then rehearsed a couple lines I thought I might try later. I flexed my hand a little. It seemed completely healed since the other night when I’d bloodied it on the mirror at home. Who knows, I thought, I might need it. The temperature had dropped somewhat but it was still warm, so I decided to leave my jacket behind. I pushed my suitcase under the bed and hoped nobody would break in and steal anything while I was out. I lit a butt and stared at the mirror awhile, the writer-cogs turning again without my consent, committing all of this to memory, recording it and constructing narratives I might later need. Still sweating profusely and working on limited sleep, I guess I could’ve looked worse, but rather than dwell on it I forced myself out the door and down to the sidewalks of Tijuana after dark.
* * *
The streets were narrow, dirty and noisy in this neighborhood. I stopped just outside the hotel, smoked my cigarette awhile and took it all in. Like most places, Tijuana became entirely different at night.
An overweight and destitute-looking woman shuffled by carrying an enormous canvas bag of laundry. I watched her continue on into the Laundromat then I stepped off the curb and began moving along the street with a purposeful stride, pretending I had some idea as to where I was headed. The traffic had picked up, more cars clogged the avenue and those parked on either side made passage even more delicate. I also noticed a greater number of people out and about, most of them locals drinking or congregated on the sidewalks in front of various establishments or gathered around trucks playing music from dashboard stereos. There was also a sudden abundance of American college kids all over the place, loud and boisterous, most of them drunk or stoned or both. Like all cities, there was a constant buzz here, a continual flow of people and things, a pulse, alive and sustained by the energy and electricity of people and machines in constant motion. The smells, the noise, the feel in the air, the faces of the people as I walked past, all came together to form a palpable aura that was revitalizing and taxing all at once.
I turned the corner and crossed an open-air market where huge displays of carpets were on sale. Many were imprinted with flamboyant renditions of Catholic icons, and a salesman on a bad microphone attached to an even worse speaker system barked enthusiastically in Spanish about his wares to passersby and a handful of tourists that had stopped to listen to his pitch.
Two blocks over an ambulance rushed by, siren blaring. Most on the street seemed not to notice. I spent the next half hour or so aimlessly wandering about and stopping in at several bars and restaurants in the hopes of running into someone who might be in a position to help me locate Rudy Bosco, an American, a local guide—anybody—but kept coming up empty. I dropped his name with a few locals but they either shrugged and didn’t understand or ignored me entirely. One young kid who tried to sell me some fruit he was carrying around in a bag spoke English reasonably well and offered to take me on a tour of the city for a set price, but I waved him away.
At the end of a short side street, a grinning woman who looked eighty if she was a day, tried to lure me into her shop, speaking rapidly in a fusion of Spanish and broken English while pointing excitedly at hideous touristy trinkets and cheap knockoff handbags hanging in the front window. Without comment I moved on, turned the corner and stopped in front of a small bar. The interior red lighting bled out into the street through its open door, and I could hear traditional music playing from what was probably a jukebox.
I noticed a man loitering out front that looked American or possibly European, but this was no tourist. Older, maybe early seventies, he was frumpy and unkempt. But for a horseshoe of silver hair around the lower half of his head, he was bald, and his face sported several days’ growth of salt-and-pepper stubble and an intensely sullen expression. His skin was bronze and heavily lined—the marks of someone who spent much of his time outdoors—and he was dressed in a wrinkled and filthy old gray suit that looked like he’d slept in it for months. He fidgeted about nervously, looking up and down the street like he was in a bad way. I recognized his need. He was the type who had probably been in the city a long time, the kind of lost and battered soul who rarely had money, and when he did he drank it away in one sitting then returned to the streets and parks and tried to survive until his next break came along. What bothered me most was that I wasn’t so far from him in some ways. All it would take was a few more bad breaks, or for my drinking to get even a little worse, and there I’d be.
“You an American?” I asked him.
He hadn’t noticed me right in front of him and was clearly startled, but once my question sunk in he smiled and nodded, nervously straightening his lapels, as if this might somehow make a difference. “Why yes, sir. Yes I am. Been here since eighty-three, consider Tijuana my home now, but I am an American, indeed, indeed.”
I noticed a faint southern drawl. There wasn’t much of it left, but every third or fourth word it’d kick in. “Me too,” I told him. “Need some information.”
“Hardy Brunner,” he said, standing straight and extending his hand. “How may I be of assistance, Mister....?”
“Moretti,” I said, tentatively shaking his hand.
Brunner gave a quick and formal bow of his head and came up just short of clicking his heels. He was like something out of a Graham Greene novel. “It is my distinct pleasure and honor to make your acquaintance, sir.”
“I’m looking for Rudy Bosco.”
His glassy eyes narrowed into a tight squint. “Bosco, you say?”
“Yeah, you know him?”
“The thing is, my memory—it—it’s just not what it used to be.” He twitched and scratched at his side. “And I’m so parched, but—but sometimes if I can relieve my thirst it does wonders for my memory, sir.”
I thought about it. If he was hustling me the worst it would cost me was a quick drink. “All right,” I agreed. “Come on.”
Inside there were numerous billiard tables, a long bar and a few tables and chairs scattered about the back. The red lighting was more intense inside, had something of a purple tint, and cast everything in a magenta glow. Only one of the pool tables was in use and the bar was sparsely populated. The jukebox was much louder once you stepped inside, so we slid onto two stools at the far end of the bar where we might have a chance of hearing each other.
I lit a cigarette and saw how Brunner stared at it longingly, so I shook another free of the pack and offered it to him.
“Thank you,” he said quickly. “Thank you most kindly.”
I lit it for him then motioned to the bartender and ordered four shots of tequila. He lined them up on the bar before us and was gone. I gave Brunner a nod and he eagerly scooped one up and threw it back.
“Starting to remember anything?” I asked.
“Indeed I am, sir.” He wiped his mouth and let out a slow sigh of relief. “Mr. Bosco and I are not what I would call personal friends, you understand, but we do know each other. Tijuana has changed over the years, of course, but in the end it’s still an intimate border town to longstanding expatriates like us, and we tend to know—or are at a minimum aware of—one another in one capacity or another. Not that I’m comparing myself
to Mr. Bosco, you understand. We’re entirely different animals, as it were, but suffice to say we’ve both been here a very long while.” He reached for another shot but hesitated until I gave him the go-ahead, then he snatched it off the bar and swallowed it down. “I can take you to him. There’s a place not far from here. If he’s not presently on a job, he’ll be there. He’s there near every night.”
I took one of the shots for myself and slid the other over to him. It was gone before I’d finished mine. Once we’d both returned the glasses to the bar I leaned in to him. At close range he not only looked like he needed a bath, he smelled like it. “You better not be working me, Hardy. I’m trying to be cool with you here, but if you fuck with me you’ll get hurt. You understand?”
The old man’s face fell as if I’d mortally wounded him, and I instantly felt like a shit. “There’s no need to—I assure you, I—I certainly would do nothing of the kind to an upstanding gentleman such as yourself. You have my word, and my word is beyond reproach, sir, beyond—”
“All right, all right,” I said with a chuckle. “Let’s go.”
* * *
I followed Hardy Brunner through the congested streets, past a donkey on the corner hitched to a small but colorful cart, its owner charging people to have their photographs taken either standing next to or sitting atop the weary animal. Car horns blared now and then above the din of music and crowd noise, but Brunner moved along by rote and as if wholly unaware of everything around him. I could tell he knew each street and alley by heart, but after we’d been walking a few minutes I began to grow suspicious of him. Just as I was about to question him he led me across a small plaza, where several stands sold T-shirts, cheap sunglasses, Mexican blankets, novelty sombreros and the like. We crossed behind the vendors onto another street, and a block later Brunner stopped just outside the entrance to a restaurant. It looked like something out of the 1950s. Bolted to the floor along the worn counter was a row of cheap and dated vinyl chairs with half-backs. Behind the counter were numerous silver appliances that would’ve been considered antiques in the U.S., and an open grill where a sweaty short-order cook in whites wielded a huge spatula, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Above him, a bug-light buzzed every few seconds, electrocuting flies as music played through the tinny speaker of an old transistor radio nearby.
There were a few locals at the counter, dark, tired-looking men in jeans and grimy, sweat-soaked T-shirts, mesh-back baseball caps and straw hats. The booths were empty, but at one lone table near the back of the diner, beneath an old Coca-Cola sign on the wall, a man sat in a chair reading a newspaper.
Even before Brunner pointed him out, I knew it was Rudy Bosco. Dressed in black jeans and a white sleeveless shirt that he’d left unbuttoned to his stomach, he stood out from the others. Yet had I not been looking for him, he’d have probably gone unnoticed. His feet were up on the table and housed in a pair of worn and filthy black boots, and the hair sticking out from beneath the scruffy and faded cowboy hat on his head was dark but streaked with gray. Both ears sported earrings—two small gold hoops in one and a dangling gold cross in the other—and his skin was tanned and rugged, covered at the moment in a five o’clock shadow and the glow of perspiration. Though he appeared to be in phenomenal shape physically, Bosco looked older than I’d expected. Well into his fifties, I guessed. Sitting next to him was a younger Mexican man of perhaps thirty who’d already made us. Short but wiry, with bad skin and beady dark eyes, his black hair was pulled back and braided into a thick and tightly-woven ponytail that ran to the center of his back.
“That’s Bosco on the left,” Brunner said. “The smaller individual with him is his partner. Nasty little fellow, you’ll want to stay on his good side, assuming you can find it.”
I pulled a scrap of paper from my pocket onto which I’d earlier transcribed the address and name of the massage parlor and bar Janine had given me as the place most likely to find Jamie. “One more thing,” I said, showing him the paper. “You know this place?”
“Zorro Rosa—the—the Pink Fox?” Brunner cleared his throat and nervously straightened a tie that wasn’t there. “I do.”
“I’m looking for another guy, this one by the name of Wheeler. He’s an American, an ex-priest. Do you know him?”
“Never heard of him, I’m afraid.”
I believed him. “He’s been in town for awhile now, maybe a year.”
“If he’s in Tijuana I can find him.”
“He’s known to frequent this place.”
“I can take you there, but I confess all this walking has made me so very thirsty, sir, that I must again rely on your kindness and generosity to—”
“All right, look,” I said, subtly removing a twenty from my pocket and handing it to him. “Go get yourself a drink and something to eat. Meet me back here in fifteen minutes. I’m not planning to be long. You get me there and help me find Wheeler and there’s another fifty in it for you, deal?”
The old man’s eyes sparkled like he’d just pulled the winning combination on a one-armed bandit. He pulled back the sleeve on his suit jacket and checked a battered watch that looked as if it hadn’t worked in years. “Rest assured, sir, I will be here no later than fifteen minutes from this exact moment to escort you to the Pink Fox!”
He was still thanking me and babbling when I crossed into the eatery and approached the table where Rudy Bosco and his associate were sitting.
I was a few feet away when the Mexican slowly stood up and blocked my path to the table. He stared at me, saying nothing.
“I need to speak with Mr. Bosco,” I said.
Bosco looked at me over the top of his newspaper. “What do you want?”
“Rudy Bosco?” I asked.
“The one and only.”
“My name’s Moretti. I need to talk business.”
“What kinda business, boss?”
“Hiring you business.”
“Hiring me for what?”
“Can I sit down?”
Bosco folded the paper and tossed it aside but remained sitting back, his feet on the table. He motioned to a chair opposite him, already bored.
Once his partner had moved out of the way I sat down.
“American?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Me too. From right outside Philly, myself. Haven’t been back over the border in a long time, though. Had some difficulties, know what I mean?”
I nodded. “It’s my understanding you specialize in escorting people throughout Mexico, and in providing security.”
“I’ve been known to help a traveler now and then,” he said coyly. His voice had a soft and raspy quality to it, and though he looked like he could’ve used a shower, his brawny good looks and confident demeanor resulted in a strong and somewhat disarming presence. “The good news for you is it just so happens I’m available at the moment. What’s the job?”
“A few months ago a private detective came here to hire you,” I said.
There was a subtle though unmistakable change in Bosco’s expression, but he offered no other response.
“A woman named Connie Joseph,” I added.
“Who?”
“Cut the bullshit. I’m here to finish the job she started.”
He seemed amused. “OK, tough guy, I remember her. So what? She wanted me to take her down The Corridor to find some…guy.”
“Well now I want to hire you to take me. Word is you’re the only one who’ll take the job, the only one who can do it.”
“That’s probably true. Would’ve taken the broad but she changed her mind right before we were ready to leave. Heard she ran into some bad mierda. Could’ve protected her once we got out on the road but we never got that far.”
“What did she need protection from?”
“This is a dangerous city, haven’t you heard?”
“But Martin’s not in the city. Is he?”
“Martin?”
“I understand they call him Papá now.”
Bosco watched me awhile. “No,” he finally said, wiping some sweat from his face with the back of his hand. “He’s not here. Far as I know—if he even exists at all—he’s nowhere near the city. We’re talking about a three-day drive. But then, he doesn’t have to be here. Guy’s got a heavy rep. There’s been whisperings about him and his group for a long time now. He’s getting to be legendary in these parts with some. Thing is, nobody I know—and I know fucking everybody—has ever seen him. Word is he never leaves that camp they got out there. But I hear a few of his followers make their way into town now and then for one reason or another. They’re always gone again real quick, though, and back to whatever the hell it is they’re doing out there. Not a whole lot of people have seen them either. And those that have don’t usually stick around. If it weren’t for them a lot of folks wouldn’t even believe in him. A lot still don’t. But there’s plenty who do. He’s like a ghost, you know? A crazy gringo devil, a scary story to keep the natives in line and going to church or a bedtime spook to make sure the kiddies say their prayers, right? Supposedly he’s got some powerful negro brujeria. Black witchcraft, baby. Lots of people believe that shit down here, and not just the yokels. I’m talking business people, politicians, movie stars, even the police. Lots of them believe in protection through cleansings and all kinds of magic rituals. Whole lot of boogiemen in Mexico, boss, it’s a fucking industry in these parts. But this motherfucker, they’re talking about him like he’s the real deal. The police want nothing to do with it. Not even the federales. They all just look the other way. Way they see it he’s out in the middle of nowhere doing his thing and they don’t want no part of it. Unless they go way out there looking for him he’ll leave them alone, so they let it ride. People still fear the Devil here, Moretti. Besides, they got their hands full staying alive with all the drug wars going on up and down the border right now. They ain’t gonna fuck with no black magic hechicera.”
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