“Probably he thinks that.”
“I’d enjoy wiping that smile off his face.”
“Me too, and how,” Porthos said, polishing off another drink.
“Abuse his human rights for a while.”
“That would be something, Licenciado.”
They looked at one another.
“In fact, I’m tempted to go pay him a visit right now,” Méndez said. He knew when he said it that it was going to happen.
Athos wiped a hand thoughtfully across his lips. He put on his cap. Porthos gave a soft whoop. Méndez resisted an urge to laugh out loud.
He was surprised to find that he felt steady on his feet. Steady, warmth rushing through him, ready for combat. D’Artagnan goes out hunting for his nemesis, Rochefort, the Man of Meung, the Cardinal’s ace swordsman.
“Very good,” Méndez said. “Let’s get going, then.”
Café Bumpy was a diner off Boulevard Agua Caliente. In recent years it had lost clients to the new coffee-shop franchises in town that offered glossy menus, big parking lots and gleaming interiors. El Bumpy was older, ricketier, greasier. But it survived thanks to cops, journalists, government officials and other old-school clients of dubious repute.
Porthos circled the block once. They spotted Fernández Rochetti’s Suburban in the gravel parking lot. They saw the homicide commander at his usual window table with his cowboy-hatted bodyguard, Chancho.
The three men had barely spoken during the ride over. The odds were bad. The Musketeers pick a fight with the Cardinal’s Guards, the Musketeers challenge a regiment, an army. Look at me, Méndez thought: an amateur cop to the end. A second-rate writer with a gun, reeking of tequila.
Porthos stopped in the alley behind the diner. Méndez and Athos got out of the car, slipped through a gap in a wooden fence and crossed a patio containing Dumpsters. As Athos opened the back door to the kitchen, he gave Méndez a fierce grin over his shoulder.
“Total suicide, Licenciado.”
“Absolutely.”
“What do we do after?”
“One thing at a time.”
Athos told Porthos over the radio that they were inside.
They stalked through the restaurant kitchen. The cooks froze at the sight of the guns. At the swinging doors to the dining room stood an assistant manager who knew Athos and Méndez. She was heavyset in a green uniform, her hair arranged with ribbons. She blinked rapidly, dismayed, and said, “Oh no, Comandante, please, what?”
Athos put a finger to his lips.
Past the swinging doors, Méndez took the lead. He stormed down a narrow aisle between crowded booths, turning a corner, his jacket knocking over a ketchup bottle on a table. Méndez homed in on Fernández Rochetti in his booth: natty in a blue blazer and red tie, intent on his breakfast. Fernández Rochetti’s bushy eyebrows were raised in concentration as he cut steak, holding the knife and fork with his hands close together.
Méndez had the arrest warrant in his left hand and the gun in his right. He had intended to announce the arrest with by-the-book language. But all the rage and liquor bubbled up in his throat; he managed to roar Fernández Rochetti’s name before slamming the warrant onto the table. The homicide chief reared back, sputtering in surprise.
Méndez grabbed the tie and yanked Fernández Rochetti out of the booth. He clubbed him once across the head with the gun barrel. He was aware of Athos pointing his rifle at Chancho’s chest, exclamations from nearby tables, Porthos’s voice booming from the front entrance: “Police, stay down, nobody move or I blow your heads off.”
Méndez clung to Fernández Rochetti’s tie. He hauled him along the row of booths. Fernández Rochetti staggered and choked. Méndez gave him another swat with the gun, the metal thunking against the back of his skull. Méndez wondered if the gun would go off by mistake. Dragging Fernández Rochetti toward the front entrance. Giving the tie a savage twist and yank. Fernández Rochetti on one knee, gagging.
So this is the real way to arrest someone, Méndez thought. This is what I’ve come to, Mauro, right down to your level.
Mendez realized that the warrant had remained on the table, a discarded facade of legality. At the front door, Athos covered the room with the rifle. Porthos grabbed the prisoner, pawed inside his blazer, and relieved him of his gun. They stumbled down steps into the parking lot, where Porthos shoved Fernández Rochetti face-first onto the hood of the Crown Victoria and handcuffed him.
“I’ll kill you all, sons of bitches,” Fernández Rochetti gasped as they crammed him into the backseat, Porthos hustling around to the driver’s side.
“Shut up, asshole,” Méndez growled, hearing the shriek of brakes.
A blue Dodge Charger skidded into the parking lot, clearly a state police car. Perhaps the detectives inside the car had seen the commotion as they approached; perhaps they had been called from the restaurant. Méndez scrambled back out of the car and started to take aim over the roof.
Athos was way ahead of him. He had been backpedaling toward the Crown Victoria in rearguard mode, his rifle aimed at the diner. Now he pivoted smoothly toward the new threat. Two officers emerged from the Dodge Charger, drawing pistols.
Athos did not wait for them to announce their intentions: He opened fire. He raked the rifle back and forth, bullet holes spattering a long X across the windshield, splintering glass, shredding metal: the bodies jerked and shuddered.
One detective toppled facedown in the gravel, his pistol clattering beside him. The other detective staggered on the far side of the car, wounded but still on his feet, trying to return fire. Athos sprinted forward, his cap flying off. He veered left, shooting on the move, shooting from a crouch, shooting down into the body of the second detective.
“Let’s go let’s go let’s go,” Porthos bellowed from behind the wheel. Somebody was coming out of the front entrance of Café Bumpy and Méndez hunched, anticipating fire from that direction. He jammed his gun into the base of Mauro’s skull to keep him on the floor. Athos swung into the front seat. The Crown Victoria lurched and roared, spraying gravel, fishtailing into Boulevard Agua Caliente. Porthos snarled behind the wheel and tromped the accelerator, in the clear.
Athos turned up the volume of the police radio on the dashboard. A report was coming in already on the state police frequency: Shots fired. Officers down. Commander Fernández Rochetti abducted by assailants.
“Where to, Licenciado, our headquarters?” Porthos bellowed.
“The Line,” Méndez said, dialing Isabel Puente’s number on his phone. He felt a rush of euphoria and disbelief.
“Forgive me, Licenciado, The Line?” Athos asked.
Although Athos’s thinning hair was disheveled, his goateed face was like stone. He just killed two men and he isn’t even breathing hard, Méndez thought. Nonetheless, the old cop looked like he would prefer a faceful of bullets to running to San Diego.
“I don’t have any other ideas,” Méndez exclaimed, strange half-choked laughter welling up in him. “Do you propose we barricade ourselves in the headquarters? Who’s going to help us?”
“Yes, but…”
Athos was making the same calculation: There was nowhere else to go. Certainly nowhere Athos would be safe after killing two state police detectives.
They headed east past the Cultural Center and City Hall and turned north. They stopped on a side street long enough to gag the semiconscious Fernández Rochetti with a rag and stuff him into the trunk. Fernández Rochetti’s eyes had the dull glow of a dying animal’s. He was silent.
Méndez told Puente over the phone that he had an urgent package for her. He asked her if her friends in blue at San Ysidro could help him make the delivery before the competition caught up. She told him she would handle it.
The traffic in the twenty-four-lane northbound approach to the San Ysidro border crossing was backed up for a good half-mile, a sea of vehicles, exhaust fumes, vendors and pedestrians. Porthos followed ramps and bridges to a separate Mexican-run lane for VIPs e
ast of the port of entry. A Mexican immigration officer sat outside a guard shack by a gate like those at railroad crossings.
Athos concealed the rifle. Porthos nodded at the approaching green-uniformed figure.
“Run him over if necessary,” Méndez whispered, forcing a smile.
But the officer recognized them, saluted and raised the gate. The VIP lane descended a gentle incline and curved left, emptying out at a spot that was still in Mexican territory but put them near the front of the lines waiting to enter the U.S. inspection lanes.
“Go to Lane One, Leo,” Isabel told Méndez over the phone. “They know you’re coming.”
Porthos sped toward the first three lanes, which were empty because the inspection booths were closed. The Crown Victoria crossed over a yellow line into U.S territory, which began several hundred yards south of the inspection stations.
On his left, Méndez saw four U.S Customs and Border Protection inspectors hurrying toward them through the sea of cars. One inspector held a lunging German shepherd on a leash. They were one of the roving teams that walked the vehicle lanes sniffing out drugs and illegal immigrants. They were jogging, hands on their blue caps.
“Here come your dogs, Isabel,” Méndez said into the phone.
“You’re OK. Just hurry up and get across before we have another diplomatic incident.”
The inspectors encircled the car and escorted it on foot, glancing south.
“Say so long to our lovely and beloved Mexico for a while,” Méndez told his men, sinking back in the seat. “This mess will take a while to clean up.”
In the shadow of the port of entry, Méndez remembered an article he had once read about a Mexican performance artist who portrayed different characters of the border: a lowrider, a Tijuana yuppie, an indigenous shaman. The artist “baptized” each character by dressing in full costume and crossing through the U.S. border station on foot to see how the inspectors reacted. Every crossing is like a rebirth, the artist had said, a transformation of the individual and of the world he enters.
Méndez thought to himself that the idea of birth was only half-right. Crossing was also a kind of death.
Part Four
TRIPLE BORDER
17
THE PLANE DESCENDED OUT of fields of clouds over the jungle.
The treetops were dense and unreal and interminable, a green reflection of the clouds above. The plane descended and descended and there was no break in the sea of vegetation. Just as the plane seemed about to scrape its belly on the trees, the jungle gave way to a landing strip.
It was a tiny airport. A low control tower, a deserted shed of a terminal. But the runway was long enough to accommodate a 747.
Wet heat washed over Pescatore as he stepped stiff-legged from the plane. The force of it made him blink. The worst heat he had ever experienced had been when he worked a detail at the Border Patrol station in El Centro. The Imperial Valley desert was like a furnace. You felt permanently singed, even at night.
This was worse. This was brutal: a swamp of humidity that smothered motion and thought. Pescatore started to take off his jacket, but remembered his shoulder holster. He wiped at the sweat blossoming on his unshaven upper lip. He noticed a hangar near the tree line where a barbed-wire fence enclosed the airstrip. There were KEEP OUT signs in Portuguese. The hangar was freshly painted in camouflage colors. The doors were padlocked.
A Brazilian doper airport, Pescatore concluded. Probably guns too. Plus the occasional VIP fugitive.
Moze and Tchai waited by the runway with a crew of thuggish Brazilians attired like them: black lightweight vests with multiple pockets over their guns, wrists and chests heavy with gold chains. Moze and Tchai exchanged hugs with Abbas and handshakes with Junior, who looked queasy.
Pescatore ended up with Momo in the far backseat of a sport utility vehicle. Junior and Buffalo were in the middle, Abbas by the driver. The road led out of the jungle into the outskirts of a city.
“That is the Syrian-Lebanese club, you remember we took lunch there with Khalid,” Abbas told Junior, indicating the arched wall of a country club on the roadside. “He would like to give you that stallion you fancied.”
Junior grunted. He reclined behind big bug-eye sunglasses, a bronzed arm draped over the top of the seat. His cologne blended with the smells of upholstery and air-conditioning.
They entered the city. The buildings were taller and more modern than Pescatore had expected: high walls, barbed wire, guardhouses fronting condominium complexes. The people were a spectrum of colors and races. Palm trees shaded the business district. A sign bore the words FOZ DO IGUAÇU. Pescatore remembered a map Isabel had showed him: Foz was the Brazilian city at the Triple Border.
Although Junior had been here before, Abbas kept up a tour-guide banter. Abbas enjoyed the cultured inflections of his own voice. “That department store is new… splendid growth in construction and investment… City Hall over here… do you see the mosque, the minaret there? Khalid is a very generous benefactor.”
Past downtown, open-fronted luncheonettes and flophouse hotels mixed with automotive shops, truck depots, storage yards. Traffic thickened. Trucks, buses, minivans, columns of pedestrians. The road curved along a canyon. Flags fluttered over a bridge.
“That, gentlemen, is the Paraná River. Ciudad del Este on the other side.”
Abbas put some ceremony into the announcement, but Junior did not react. Junior had fallen asleep. His chins nested on his chest, his lips puckered. Pescatore saw an R-shaped diamond in his left ear.
Abbas examined Junior. He continued mechanically. “The Paraná River. Could we call it the river of dreams?”
The muddy stagnant waters at the bottom of the canyon did not look like a river of dreams. But Pescatore realized he was seeing an international border: the line between Brazil and Paraguay. All his Border Patrol instincts kicked in.
The pedestrians swarming off the bridge from Paraguay carried bags and backpacks. Two youths trotted by: dark-skinned with blond-streaked nappy hair, sinewy in shorts, T-shirts and thongs. Strapped on their backs were colossal cardboard boxes swathed in black duct tape. The youths covered ground with the stamina of marathon runners, drenched in sweat, bent beneath their loads.
“Tripped out,” Pescatore whispered to Buffalo. “What’s in the boxes?”
“Contraband,” Abbas said. “Mostly cigarettes.”
“Cigarettes?”
“For the Brazilian black market. Paraguay imports enough cigarettes for every man, woman and child to smoke a pack a day. We call the smugglers formigas: ants.”
Pescatore was aghast and amused. His fingers cupped an invisible radio. He wanted to call it in: Hey, Brazilian Border Patrol, there’s like five hundred smugglers coming across. You slugs gonna respond or what?
It was ridiculous. No one made a move to check the vehicles entering and departing the jam-packed two-lane bridge. At the Brazilian customs station, a green flag depicted a yellow diamond enclosing a blue globe. Sturdy mustachioed cops in gray uniforms and laced boots stood around a lone truck in the inspection area, arms folded, just watching the parade.
Reaching the bridge, Pescatore felt the vertigo he always got at The Line in San Diego: simultaneous fascination and apprehension. Amplified now by a brand-new border and the craziness that had brought him here.
A group of smugglers crouched on the walkway of the bridge. They raised hands to shield against the sun, scouting the Brazilian cops. The smugglers started forward, retreated a few yards. They removed the boxes from their backs and hefted them to a large, jagged hole in the chain-link fence.
“What’s up?” Pescatore said. “They’re tossing their stuff in the river.”
“It is quite organized, believe me.” Abbas yawned. “Their people down there will retrieve everything.”
Figures at the riverbank below waded knee-deep toward floating boxes. Near them, another line of backpackers climbed a steep path toward Foz, unmolested.
The br
idge had only one lane going in each direction. Like the roads on the riverbanks, it was woefully out of date for all the vehicles and pedestrians. Traffic crawled, stopped, lurched. A line of armored trucks passed in the opposite direction, yellow beasts with elongated snouts and slitted rectangular eyes. Pescatore counted six.
“We prefer cash in these parts,” Abbas chuckled. “That lot is freshly washed. On its way back to the politicians and gambling barons of Brazil.”
Halfway across the bridge, two policemen had a smuggler backed against the fence. The Paraguayan cops wore Foreign Legion–style caps and oversized fatigues. The cops were practically teenagers, closely shorn with prominent noses, scrawnier and shabbier than the Brazilians. The smuggler’s ponytail sprouted beneath an Orlando Magic cap, his duffel bag stuffed to the bursting point. He yelled at the cops, jaw to jaw. Other smugglers trudged by, ignoring the confrontation, probably figuring it had pushed the odds a bit more in their favor.
One of the officers set himself with a lazy wriggle of his shoulders. He gripped his nightstick with both hands. Pescatore flinched; the cop whacked the man in the knee. The blow, combined with the weight of the duffel bag, toppled the smuggler. As the other cop raised his stick, traffic obscured the scene.
Ouch, Pescatore thought. Real professional. Thumping tonks in broad daylight.
The bridge reminded him of training films of the border in El Paso. Except it was much smaller and it crawled with these backpack smugglers instead of illegal aliens.
Craning forward, Pescatore said: “Uh, excuse me, Mr. Abbas? I thought they called it the Triple Border. These are just two countries here, right? How come the Triple Border?”
He was aware of Buffalo’s eyes on him, no apparent disapproval. Pescatore felt emboldened: just another gangster, making conversation.
“The border of Argentina is nearby. There is a point where all three borders come together. And our business community mixes together all three countries.”
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