“Italiano-Argentino-Mexicano, eh? And you end up with the Migra. Check that out.”
Junior’s eyes stared out of puffy purplish circles. He made strange noises when he breathed, as if he had excess phlegm or saliva in his nose and throat. Whatever the problem was, it made him snort and spit a lot. He had developed an ugly cough too.
Buffalo, sitting on an armchair near Pescatore, passed the joint without sampling it. Buffalo had barely said a word.
“Yeah, I didn’t fit in with those good ol’ boys and Tejanos and everything, I’ll tell you that,” Pescatore said.
“Uh-huh.” Apparently losing interest, Junior coughed and pawed around on the carpet for his drink.
Through the tall windows, Pescatore saw Moze on the dock with a machine pistol over his shoulder, a lean silhouette against the dusk. The day before, the team of Paraguayan cops guarding the hotel had pulled out without explanation. Moze and Tchai had intensified their vigilance. And Junior hadn’t stopped all day: phone calls to Mexico City, e-mails, couriers, conferences with Abbas, more phone calls. Abbas had taken them to visit a warehouse Junior had invested in, a depot for contraband software, videos and compact discs: boxes of swag as far as the eye could see. Khalid had been supposed to come along, but he had canceled at the last minute. As far as Pescatore could tell, the vibes between Junior and Khalid were getting worse.
Junior flipped through two Arabic-language channels: a guy in desert headgear reading news, a dark-eyed woman ululating to a disco beat in front of minarets. A Brazilian news program showed a prison riot: Buffed convicts on a cell-block rooftop waved clubs and shanks, shirts furled over their heads for masks. A police helicopter banked through a column of smoke. Bare-chested inmates, hands behind their heads, filed through a gauntlet of helmeted storm troopers.
“Valentín,” Buffalo said.
Pescatore turned in slow motion, realizing that Junior had produced a paper from somewhere and was poking it at him. Like a camera zooming in for close-up, Pescatore focused: It was a photo of Isabel Puente.
The photo was posed, face front. It looked like a Department of Homeland Security personnel photo, which was theoretically not an easy thing to get your hands on if you weren’t in the government. Puente’s hair was up, making her seem stern and vulnerable at the same time, Pescatore thought fleetingly, as fear smothered him. What was this about?
Junior propped himself on an elbow. His casual tone wasn’t altogether convincing. The paper trembled in his hand. “You know who that is, gabacho?”
Pescatore took the photo, actually a computer printout of a photo, and glanced rapidly at Buffalo. The big man looked ominously sad.
“Sure,” Pescatore said. “That’s Isabel Puente, from OIG. Inspector General. It’s like internal affairs.”
Buffalo turned to Junior with satisfaction, the gesture saying: See, my boy tells it straight up, he’s got nothing to hide.
“That’s right,” Junior said slowly. “We been doin’ some research. This is the boss of the operation against us. With Méndez. La muy puta. She’s fucking Méndez too, did you know that?”
Isabel and Méndez. It made sense. It confirmed Pescatore’s worst suspicions. Junior hawked and spat in the direction of an ashtray.
“No,” Pescatore said. “How’m I supposed to know that?”
“Well, you were fucking her too, right?”
Pescatore fought down panic. “Jeez. That’s a real personal question, you know?”
Buffalo slapped him without getting up. He simply reached out and slammed a planklike hand across Pescatore’s face.
Pescatore had been leaning forward. The impact knocked him clean out of the chair. He found himself facedown on the coffee table.
Junior giggled and rumpled Pescatore’s hair. He let his hand linger in the curls. The caress terrified Pescatore more than the slap. Images spattered his brain, memories of every war story, intelligence report and newspaper article he had ever seen or heard about what the Mexican cartels did to traitors before granting their most heartfelt wish: letting them die.
Buffalo stood over him. His voice was hoarse.
“Next thing comes outta your mouth better be yes or no, and it better be the truth. Otherwise I take a lamp and I rip out the wires and I light you up like a fucking Christmas tree. Understand, youngster?”
Pescatore hauled himself back into the chair, an ocean roaring in his head.
“Were you fucking her?” Buffalo said.
“Just one night I did,” Pescatore muttered.
“What was going on between you two?”
“Why didn’t you say nothing, canijo?” Junior was sitting up now. “We got sources everywhere. You gamin’ us?”
“Hell no. You never asked me, right?” Pescatore gathered himself, put on his best head-busting, mob-defying PA face. And plunged over a cliff. “Garrison knew all about it. I figured you guys did too.”
“Garrison knew?” Buffalo asked.
“That’s right.” Pescatore told them about the Pulpo episode, being summoned to the Inspector General’s office, Isabel’s recruiting pitch. Good lies build on the truth, he thought desperately. “So I told Garrison she was snooping around, cuddling up to me and whatnot. He said go ahead and play along. Find out what the task force was up to, you know.”
“And you got yourself some leg on the side,” Buffalo said.
“Garrison didn’t tell you about it?” Pescatore demanded.
Junior’s greenish-gold eyes flickered wetly in the light of the television. Pescatore thought about his empty shoulder holster under his jacket, which he had put on to withstand the air-conditioning that Junior had cranked into arctic overdrive. Pescatore’s gun was on a table somewhere behind him. Or maybe on a shelf.
“Look, man, you guys are treating me like some kinda rat. It ain’t fair.” Pescatore’s indignation felt surprisingly genuine. “Back in Tijuana, I brought you Garrison, Buffalo said that was totally clutch. And—”
“Ya basta, Valentín,” Buffalo snapped. But then he gave Junior a reproachful look that made Pescatore want to hug him, in spite of the throbbing left side of his face. “Junior knows you got heart. You been earning your keep. But this is serious business, cabrón.”
Junior took a gulp of rum and a hit off the joint. He raised his chin petulantly and kept it there, his voice shrill with rage.
“Méndez and that Cuban bitch think they can sweat me. Me. Te imaginas? And you worked for them. Pinche spy.”
“No way, man,” Pescatore exclaimed. “I got nothing to do with Méndez. He’s a scumbag. He hates my fucking guts. You know that, they were hunting me all over Baja for shooting that cop.”
Junior crushed the joint into an ashtray.
“Now I am going to ask you another question,” he said, his voice getting louder and slower. “And remember this: If you give me the wrong answer, I’m gonna have Buffalo cut off your ears and make you eat them. So listen carefully: When was the last time you talked to Isabel Puente?”
It was the make-or-break question. The rest had been a warm-up. Buffalo was too close and too fast—going for the gun would be suicide. Buffalo seemed to be sticking up for him, which made Pescatore think that Junior could be swayed. Either they knew the truth or they didn’t. Either they had decided to waste him or they hadn’t.
In a way, he was relieved. The waiting and cringing were over. He had expected this moment ever since he had started this masquerade. The biggest, and probably the last, masquerade of his short and confused life.
24
THAT’S WHAT I CALL A FIRST-CLASS ERRAND BOY,” Méndez said.
Albino Losada, until recently the deputy attorney general of the state of Baja California, sat in a room on the other side of the glass that separated him and his interrogators from Méndez, Puente, Porthos and Facundo.
Losada sweated profusely. His side-combed haircut was mussed, his mustache wilted in the heat. He was manacled to his chair. Although Losada was a long way from home, he contemp
lated his dimly lit surroundings with a mute horror bred by familiarity. As a prosecutor in Tijuana, he had seen and done things—memorable, unspeakable things—in rooms like this. But he had never seen this kind of room through the eyes of a prisoner contemplating a prosecutor: a bald, bull-shouldered Paraguayan with rolled-up sleeves. An ornery Paraguayan who did not seem inclined to go easy on a member of the Latin American judicial fraternity.
“A Mexican success story,” Méndez continued, leaning closer to the glass. “From attorney general to bagman. And the chilango bootlicker for a sidekick.”
Manacled in the chair next to Losada sat Senator Ruiz Caballero’s pudgy private secretary, whom Méndez had last encountered on the tarmac at the Tijuana airport. His name was Rogelio Aragón. He looked as if he wished he had never been born.
The prosecutor and a Paraguayan military intelligence agent in fatigues and cowboy boots stalked back and forth in front of the prisoners, barking questions. Another military man with a towel around his neck recorded the answers on a dinosaur typewriter, flailing at keys that echoed like rifle shots.
There was a computer, dusty with disuse, on a table next to the typist. The table also held a suitcase that had been confiscated when Puente, the Mexicans and Paraguayan intelligence agents, acting on information from a wiretap, had arrested Losada and Aragón. The capture had taken place on a highway from the Asunción airport to Ciudad del Este. The Mexican functionaries had flown in from Mexico City with two bodyguards, off-duty Baja State police detectives who had resisted arrest and were now in the hospital.
The suitcase contained a million dollars.
“What a haul, Leo,” said Isabel Puente. She paced in time with the interrogators beyond the glass. She turned to Facundo, who was reclined on a couch, a forest of black and gray chest hair blossoming out of his tropical shirt. “You think we can use some of that money to buy more enemies for Junior?”
“Oh, I think so, Miss Puente,” Facundo said, fueling himself from his mate gourd. He lowered his voice with a nod at the interrogation room. “Once we subtract the prosecutor’s, eh, expenses. In any case, we are chipping away. My men report that the police platoon has been removed from guard duty at the El Naútico Resort. The police don’t like Junior’s antics.”
“Good.” Méndez took a sip of foul coffee. He was pushing Junior in the right direction. He wanted to keep up the momentum. He picked up a notebook confiscated from Losada that contained a number for a satellite phone Méndez believed to be Junior’s. “I think the time has come to harass Junior more directly.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” Isabel asked, warily, in English.
“As the great Tijuana journalist Fernando Romero once said, ‘When in Rome, ponte cabrón.’ ”
Minutes later, Losada and the Senator’s secretary had been transferred from the interrogation room. They sat on the couch, looking a bit less miserable. Porthos handed the phone to Aragón.
“Have you got it?” Porthos growled. “Tell him what happened: You are in custody. Then hand the phone to the Licenciado. Is that clear?”
The prisoners nodded.
“And stop cringing like little girls. Nobody has laid a finger on you. Yet.”
Isabel leaned against a wall, thumbs hooked in the belt of her jeans. Méndez gave her a conspiratorial wink as Aragón babbled something into the phone about bad news and heartfelt apologies. He held out the phone to Méndez.
“Hello? Aragón you idiot, hello?” Junior’s mouth was too close to the phone. His voice sounded like it had during the recorded phone call: distorted, dazed, sick.
“This is Méndez.”
Silence. He was starting to think Junior had hung up when he heard a cough.
“Méndez,” Junior said.
“That’s right.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed?” Junior’s tone was whiny and mocking. His breathing was noisy. “You expect me to piss myself?”
“Not unless you do that routinely.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to stop prolonging the inevitable. Surrender. Turn yourself in.”
Méndez saw Porthos flash a surreptitious thumbs-up at Isabel.
“Very funny. Stop fucking around. Send me Aragón with my money. You’ve got nothing on him.”
“Oh yes I do. I want to see the look on your uncle’s face when he hears.”
“Aragón is an employee of the Mexican Senate. You can’t hold him.”
“Watch me. This is going to make a stink in the D.F.”
“No one would print it. No one cares what happens in Paraguay. You’re dreaming.”
“In any case, say good-bye to Aragón and his suitcase. Say good-bye to your Paraguayan police escort. You are losing friends fast.”
Another silence. Méndez thought he heard the clink of ice cubes in a glass.
“Fine. Keep him. Keep the fucking money.”
“I think I can find a worthy purpose for it.”
“Fucking Diogenes. Nobody likes your attitude. Nobody will come to your funeral.”
“Calm down. Take a Valium. I’ve got a proposition. If you want Aragón, I’ll consider a trade.”
“Trade?”
“Give me Buffalo Mendoza. And Pescatore, the yanqui. The cop-killer.”
Isabel bounced off the wall and gestured incredulously at Méndez. He turned away.
“You think you have real big balls, talking to me like that,” Junior said.
“I’m serious. It will buy you time with your uncle. He’s had about enough of you. Give me those two, something to show the Americans. Enjoy your last vacation a bit longer.”
A snort. “Listen, Méndez, it’s been an immense pleasure, but that’s about enough.”
“Think about my offer.”
After he hung up, Isabel pulled him aside. Her eyes flashed. “What in God’s name were you thinking about with that offer for Valentine?”
“Perhaps it is a way to get him back, which I assume is what you want. At the least, it sows dissent, keeps them guessing.”
“Or they could decide it’s not worth sheltering a cop-killer, which he’s not, by the way, and get rid of him.”
“Isabel,” Méndez said gently, “I think it’s time you accepted that Pescatore has gone over to the other side.”
“You don’t know that. He’s undercover, trying to survive.”
“It may be too late. That comment the Senator made about housecleaning makes me think they have found out on their own that he worked as an informant for you, even if his heart was not in it. And the point of this whole complicated exercise, I am afraid to tell you, is not to rescue Valentine Pescatore.”
25
ON THE LOOSE AT LAST, Pescatore headed straight for the border.
He bought a chocolate bar and a Chicago Bulls cap from a street vendor. He wolfed down the chocolate bar without really tasting it.
The cap was a pirated imitation. The bull looked more like a goat. He pulled the brim low. He walked fast.
The sidewalk was a tunnel formed by shops on his left, vending stalls on his right. He threaded through a manic crowd. He flinched every time someone jostled him. He imagined spies and pursuers everywhere, braced himself every time he saw a cop or a security guard. He got spooked by the drivers cursing in the congealed traffic, by eruptions of metal against metal as merchants yanked down burglar gates over storefronts. Ciudad del Este started closing early, no doubt for good reason.
The street dipped. The human current pushed him faster. The street emptied into a road that ran along the riverbank. Pescatore turned left toward the border crossing.
He heard an amplified guitar echoing among buildings, probably from one of the high-rise shopping galleries. Carlos Santana playing “Europa.” The sweet sustained wail tugged at him. He knew that guitar solo note by note, like the words of a song. A wave of melancholy and nostalgia made him close his eyes momentarily. But then the music was swallowed up by a guttural symphony of motors, car horns and radi
os. And the sounds of another protest at the bridge: chants, a siren, an amplified voice. A tear-gas gun thudded; smoke billowed in the afternoon sunlight.
Pescatore zigzagged across the road into the weeds of the riverbank. He came to a kind of lean-to with a wood roof and an open front. It faced onto the border canyon and the torpid waters of the Paraná River below.
The structure resembled a bus-stop shelter, but three times as long. It was a way station, a loading depot for smugglers. And it was packed. An assembly line of shirtless men removed cigarette cartons from crates and wrapped them into bales. They sealed the bales with black tape and attached straps for backpack-style carrying. They helped smugglers hoist the prepared bales onto their backs. Once outfitted, however, the smugglers didn’t go anywhere. They removed the packs and fiddled with them. They smoked cigarettes in the shade. They surveyed the Paraguayan riot police at the bridge and the Brazilian soldiers patrolling the opposite riverbank. They dozed.
Pescatore made his way into the shelter. He felt invisible. The smugglers all but averted their eyes as he passed. He assumed they were reacting to his vest: In the fashion code of the Triple Border, the vest labeled him as a Man with a Gun.
Pescatore found a spot next to a group of diminutive backpackers with straight black hair. They wore long-sleeved shirts despite the heat. He nodded and got polite nods in return. He wasn’t an expert, but they looked to him like Bolivians. He had a flashback to that night in San Diego when Vince Esparza had complained about having to process “Bo-livians.” If Pescatore could have rewound his life back to that moment, he would have made some different choices. Definitely different.
Crouching, he saw the wooden wall was smothered with graffiti. Knives and pens had scrawled profanities and boasts. But there was also political philosophy in multicolored spray paint: “Viva El Jinete y los generales.” “Muerte al Jinete y los generales.” “Viva la democracia.” “El Jinete, los generales y la democracia son todos la misma mierda.”
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