The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  The shoe-shine boys appeared in front of them and one said something in Spanish to Mingo, who nodded casually and kept talking as he ruffled the kid’s hair affectionately and put an already-polished shoe up on one of the little wooden stands. Bern shook his head at the other boy.

  “I have found a woman who has the thing you want,” Mingo said. He waited for a response from Bern.

  Bern’s heart fluttered. “Oh?”

  Mingo reacted subtly. Something in Bern’s reaction. Mingo had expected something different? Something more?

  “And?” Bern asked.

  Mingo carefully handed him a piece of paper. Taking his cue from Mingo’s caution, Bern surreptitiously unfolded it, read what was there, and then looked at Mingo. He needed to react. Mingo was anticipating something, as if the information was momentous.

  But Bern wasn’t quick enough. Mingo’s eyes scrambled quickly over Bern’s face, sensing that something wasn’t right. The shoe-shine boy tapped his foot, and Mingo looked down, adjusting his foot on the stand.

  The second boy very casually went around his kneeling partner, working on Mingo’s shoe, and stared at the statue behind Mingo. The boy on his knees opened the side of his box to take out a tin of polish as the second boy reached up and took Mingo’s arm.

  Mingo looked around to see who it was just as the kneeling boy came up with a glistening chrome pistol the size of the boy’s head. Holding the huge gun with both small hands, he heaved it up, his arms straight out, pointed it at Mingo, and fired. The recoil was so powerful that the boy’s thin little arms flew up over his head, almost out of control, and the sound of the report was as deafening as a cannon blast.

  Bern watched, frozen, as the little boy with the gun then brought the pistol down again and jammed it into Mingo’s stomach while the second boy, holding his arm, kept the stunned young man from lunging away. The second and third shots were loud, but muffled, and drove Mingo into the naked embrace of the samba dancer. The fourth, fifth, and sixth shots, all buried in the depths of Mingo’s torso, blew blood and viscera twenty feet away.

  It all happened before Bern could even draw a breath of astonishment.

  Women screamed and people scattered from the samba dancer. The music in Club Cuica pounded away, but in an instant, there was no one there to hear it. The two shoe-shine boys ran as if they had thrown a ball and broken a window, leaving behind the bloody chrome gun at the dancer’s bare feet.

  Mingo had been thrown back into the palmettos by the force of the rapid blasts, and only his well-shined shoes and expensive trousers protruded from the bed of ivy.

  Then Bern ran, too. He was the last to run, and he headed for the darkest streets in Mexico City.

  Chapter 27

  Kevern’s tech had patched Susana into their audio surveillance, and she listened on her new cell phone as she sat on the edge of the sofa in Jude’s studio. When the first shot was fired, she sprang to her feet. She pressed the cell phone to her ear, unconsciously raising her free hand in defensive shock as she listened to the sporadic distribution of subsequent shots, flinching with each one, not knowing who was on the receiving end of the blasts.

  Then silence.

  She didn’t even think. She grabbed her shoulder bag and flew down the stairs, through the apartment, down the building’s stairwell, out onto Avenida México, and into the park. Dialing furiously, she sought the darkest part of the park, then stopped in the middle of one of the wide paths to listen.

  The rings were too long. Endless. Each one a toll announcing Bern’s death. She couldn’t believe it. God.

  “Yes! Yes!” His voice was frantic.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” He was still running. She could hear him huffing. “God, it was kids, just kids, just a couple of kids.”

  She could hear the wild dismay in his voice.

  “Listen to me,” she said, every nerve in her body focused on a plan. “Are you alone?”

  “Yeah—” He was still running.

  “Listen to me: The place I told you about where Jude used to sketch the dancers—don’t say the name—do you remember it?”

  Don’t say the name? Oh Jesus. Remember. Remember. The pages in Jude’s file flew through his mind, swirling like litter scattered in a storm.

  “Yeah! I got it. Yes.”

  “Get a taxi. Go there. Okay? You have that?”

  “Yeah, good. I . . . I’ve got it.”

  “Now, get rid of the phone!” Susana snapped. “Throw it away right now. Drop it. Now! Go, get away from it!”

  She ran through the dark edges of the park. When she got to Avenida Sonora, she flagged a taxi.

  He threw the damn cell phone against a building, shattering it, unable to get rid of it fast enough, and kept running. He ran for another block without thinking, just getting farther away from the shooting, from the phone, from the images in his head. Finally, he had to stop to catch his breath. He fell back against a building, bent over, and grabbed great desperate gulps of Mexico City’s thin, resinous air.

  In the darkness his mind cast up images of the shooting. He saw the shoe-shine boy’s little hunched shoulders as he burrowed the muzzle of the huge handgun into Mingo’s stomach, each blast digging deeper into him. He saw Mingo’s astonished face: shock, pain, realization, dismay, horror. Every explosion from the hands of the child assassin reflecting in his face as he spun deeper and deeper into his vanishing mortality.

  Horrible.

  He began running again, but it couldn’t have been more than just another block before he had to stop once more. Jesus. The altitude. Where was he? Shit. He was hopelessly disoriented by his mad dash into nowhere. Though he couldn’t have gone all that far, the streets were narrow and murky, the doorways were hollows descending to unknown horrors, and the few people he encountered under the trees hurried past without looking, wanting nothing to do with a marked man, wanting nothing to do, even, with the night air that moved around him.

  To his left, across the street and near the middle of the next tree-lined block, he saw light spilling onto the sidewalk from a doorway, a few people milling in the glow inside. He forced himself to walk slowly, to control his breath, not wanting to approach them gasping for air.

  It was a small hotel, its lobby door thrown open to the cool night. Pausing in the low wattage of the foyer, he saw a young woman standing behind an old curved registration desk, an older woman mopping the terrazzo floor, and a young man with no apparent purpose other than to talk to the young woman. They turned their eyes on him.

  He asked the girl if she would call a sitio for a taxi. It was dangerous to flag a taxi off the street, especially the little green Volkswagen cabs. These innocuous-looking little vehicles had a brutal history of collusion with armed robbers and kidnappers, and not a few people had lost their lives after stepping inside one of them.

  The girl did as he asked, and he thanked her, moving out of the spill of light to wait alone at the curb. Immediately, he heard sirens. He looked back at the small foyer and saw that all three pale faces were turned to him. But their expressions were unreadable. It was a learned trait in a city of secrets. No one knew anything. And no one, no one, was curious.

  The night shadows are impatient in Mexico City. They stick close to you when you turn off a major street, crowd you as you walk, and overtake you by the time you’ve gone only a few yards. So Bern stood surrounded by them, his back flat against a stone wall a few feet from where the taxi had left him.

  He was in a neighborhood on the edge of Colonia Roma, not all that far from Condesa—a fact that made Susana’s choice wildly reckless to him. Across the street and a little farther down, Beso Azul—the Blue Kiss—stood on the corner under a old jacaranda that fractured the light falling onto the sidewalk from a nearby streetlamp. The club’s entrance was on the angle of the corner, and through the dappled haze in front of its opened doors, a languorous music floated out into the darkness.

  Should he go inside, then?
Wasn’t that implied? He didn’t know what the hell was implied. The words stood alone, stubbornly without implication. “Go there” was all she had said.

  It seemed rash to leave the shadows. Jesus Christ. To show his face anywhere seemed insanity. Suddenly, he was aware of his legs trembling. She had said, “You don’t know this yet, but you can trust me. You need to grab hold of that fact as quickly as you can.”

  He stepped out of the shadows and crossed the street.

  Once inside, his eyes began to adjust to the gloam. He saw immediately that the Beso Azul was not de moda, was not de ambiente. This was not the gathering place of the chic young crowds that frequented the stylish and trendy clubs in Condesa and Polanco. There were no cell phones here, no sunglasses, no pounding electronic storm.

  Though the decor was an unintentional faded memory of the Art Deco era of the late 1920s, the crowd was, in fact, a mixture of the middle-aged and young. Here, in a blue haze, the dancers embraced closely, exuding a poignant sexual melancholy as they glided about the dance floor in the fluid slow-quick-quick, slow-quick-quick rhythm of the graceful Cuban danzón, a sweet and romantic music played by a cello, a couple of violins, an old piano, and a flute.

  “Aaaah, Judas.” The purring woman’s voice caught him by surprise. He turned to see her as she was passing by with her partner, a woman his own age, the bare tops of her breasts swollen by her partner’s tight embrace. Turning her head to follow him with her eyes as she danced, she smiled, her white teeth iridescent. Her swarthy partner jerked his head in a serious greeting without speaking, and they slowly danced away.

  He was on the edge of the dance floor moving among the tables along its perimeter, moving to nowhere.

  “Judaaaas.” A middle-aged man smiled and lifted his chin at Bern from a tiny table, cigarette smoke streaming from his nostrils, his woman leaning on him, smiling at Bern, too.

  Jesus Christ. He thought he spoke to them; he thought he smiled at them; he thought he seemed at ease.

  Someone hissed through the danzón, and he turned and saw a woman smiling from a table farther away. Another man nodded his head soberly in greeting.

  This was surreal. Enveloped in a smoky sapphire glow, surrounded by the languid music and dancers who seemed to belong to another era, Bern began to feel a weird disconnect from the heart-hammering velocity of his flight. The tacky Club Cuica, the blast of the child’s gun, the blown blood and viscera—all of it seemed to recede, as if it had never been anything but a memory anyway, as if it were being absorbed, even obliterated, by this reanimation of a scene from an old movie.

  Inexplicably, he even began to feel as if he were remembering this place, the Blue Kiss in Roma, as if he were returning to an old retreat, returning to these strangers, old friends forgotten. He felt that he understood these people, that he knew why they came here, seeking one another’s company in this melancholy place with its sweet, heartbreaking music. Instinctively, he knew exactly why Jude had come here to sketch the somber faces of these lovelorn men and the coy smiles of their women.

  Gently, she took his arm from behind, and when he turned, she was as close to him as the embracing dancers, as close as when she had kissed him the very first moment that they met. She pulled his face to her, not for a kiss this time, but to whisper. His lips were at her neck, in the shallow of her collarbone, and he smelled her skin. And he smelled fear.

  Chapter 28

  Kevern’s small team of four, including himself, was well versed in electronics, but for the more complex ops they depended on Mondragón’s techs, who were all ex-Mexican military or intelligence officers. But there hadn’t been time for them to put together video surveillance, though they did have a good audio feed.

  Mondragón’s security goons were there, blending in with the crowd, though they were there only as observers this time and had no real responsibilities beyond providing more eyes and ears. Everyone half-expected Baida to have people there also, if he was indeed looking for an opportunity to contact Bern, and Kevern hoped someone would be able to pick up on some of his people. A good percentage of the crowd on Calle Génova belonged to a surveillance entity of one kind or another.

  At the sound of the first shot, Kevern’s team bailed out of their car, which was double parked near the French embassy on Calle Niza. But by the time they had all hit the pavement, the last shot was being fired, and by the time they had reached the corner of Calle Hamburgo, they slammed into a tide of screaming Zonistas fleeing in the opposite direction.

  When they finally fought their way upstream, the samba dancer was dancing alone, though some people in the crowd were already slowing down and turning around to glance back from a safer distance. Kevern dived into the palmettos, getting bloody up to his elbows as he deftly retrieved Mingo’s wallet.

  Then they were gone, leaving the Policia Judicial to discover the body for themselves and to sort it all out on their own, which they weren’t going to be able to do.

  Moments later, after they had returned to the car, Kevern discovered that Susana wasn’t answering either her surveillance cell or her regular encrypted cell. But the tracking equipment had picked up her encrypted call to Bern’s phone.

  Kevern’s officers immediately began homing in on the GPS signals from the two phones. Bern’s was stationary.

  Kevern began going through the possibilities of why Bern’s signal wasn’t moving as their car eased through the streets, sneaking away from the chaos in the Zona Rosa. He had been killed. Or he had been kidnapped and his phone discarded. Whatever Susana’s reasons were for not answering, he just had to trust her.

  He hunched over in his seat and concentrated on listening to the playback of Bern’s conversation with Mingo, listening to it again and again. “They went where you said to go; they did the things you said to do.” Kevern replayed it once more and then looked at the agent sitting across from him in the backseat. “I have found a woman who has the thing you want.”

  “What the hell’s he saying?” Kevern grunted.

  Jack Petersen said nothing. He had worked undercover in Latin America for thirteen years. Buenos Aires, Iguaçú Falls, Bogotá, São Paulo. He had last worked with Kevern in Colombia. He put his head down and listened, shaking his head.

  “Shit,” Kevern said. He fast-forwarded to Bern’s response. “Oh?” Again. “Oh?” Again. “Oh?” Then: “And?” Again. “And?”

  Then the recording fell silent, except for the samba music that was being picked up in the background. Samba music. Samba music.

  Then the first blast. Screams. And then the other blasts following rapidly.

  Kevern didn’t replay the shots.

  They followed the GPS signal from Bern’s cell phone, approaching carefully, reading the traffic on the sidewalks. As they neared the signal on the dark street, pedestrians disappeared altogether. Finally, a dozen blocks from the Zona Rosa, they found Bern’s cell phone scattered all over the sidewalk.

  Using his cell phone, Petersen finally reached Quito Lopez, Mondragón’s main ops guy, but Lopez said it all happened so fast, they didn’t even get a chance to cover the crowd. The truth was, nobody was expecting a hit, not in a meeting between partners, and the shooting caught everyone off guard. “By the way,” Quito said, “Mingo passed something to Bern, a piece of paper. Bern read it and put it in his pocket.”

  Kevern stood on the dark sidewalk, listening to Petersen’s report and putting Susana’s actions through his mental analysis mill. The car sat idling in the street, its rear doors open. Lupe Nervo, one of Kevern’s two female team members, had gotten out to gather up the pieces of the cell phone, and now she was fiddling with them as if she could put the phone back together again. As if it mattered.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kevern grunted.

  Petersen was lighting a cigarette. “This guy was still looking into something, even though he thought Jude was dead? I think he confirmed something Jude had suspected. Probably what was written on the piece of paper.”

  “That�
��s what it sounds like.” Kevern was pissed. He wasn’t sure what was going on here.

  “It’d be a mistake to assume too much here,” Petersen said, mostly talking to himself as he worked it out. “The hit doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what Mingo was telling Bern. Could’ve been totally unrelated.”

  A light breeze moved down the narrow street, bringing heavy moisture. The early-evening rains had not moved out entirely, as was their habit, and a fog was beginning to settle in. Kevern could feel it on his face and could see it gathering around the few streetlamps that stretched far down the diminishing street.

  “Lex,” said Mattie Sellers, the second female team member, who was sitting in the car with her door open, watching the signal from Susana’s phone on her GPS monitor, “she’s not far away. Southern edge of Colonia Roma.”

  Lupe had gotten back into the car to get out of the mist, which was growing heavier.

  Petersen hunched his shoulders, turned up the collar of his shirt, dropped his cigarette butt—he never smoked a whole one anymore—and put his foot on it.

  “I trust her,” Kevern said, as if Petersen had asked him if he did. He was still staring into the distance. “She’ll do what has to be done.” He didn’t move his eyes off the street, which seemed to be receding into the soup of dark and mist. “Let’s get back into the car and see where she’s going.”

  Vicente Mondragón was finding it hard to breathe. Sometimes the membrane covering his nasal cavities was affected by the peculiar atmosphere in Mexico City. The high altitude made the air very dry, even in the rainy season, and then the pollution added to the ineffectiveness of the membrane’s porosity. Sometimes the whole raw front of his head, where his face used to be, ached, despite the analgesic spray. To help dampen the pain, he continuously consumed a farrago of mixed drinks.

  The events in front of the samba dancer had been narrated to him by Quito Lopez, who was reporting from his position on the dark roof of Club Cuica, where Quito’s technicians were broadcasting to Kevern a live feed of the conversation that they were picking up with a parabolic microphone. He was waiting for the phone call he knew he would be getting soon from Kevern. Quito had seen Kevern retrieve Mingo’s wallet, and soon Kevern would want Mondragón’s men to find out where he lived and to strip the place for information.