The Mongolian Conspiracy

by Bernal, Rafael

  Laski and García placed themselves on either side of the door to the apartment. But first, García removed the newspapers covering the dead woman. Graves remained at the dining table, in the dark. All three had their guns drawn.

  A few minutes later the door opened and one man, then another, entered.

  “Don’t move,” García said.

  Laski turned on the light and slammed the door shut. Their two visitors were Chinese, one who they’d seen in Café Canton. They looked around slowly and saw the three cops, guns drawn. Their faces showed no emotion. Graves stepped forward and frisked them. One was carrying a gun and the other a knife.

  “That’s all,” Graves said.

  He placed the weapons on the dining table. The two men, their hands raised, had not moved. Graves said:

  “We’ve got to bring in the guy in the car.”

  He left quickly. Laski said:

  “Sit in those two chairs, against the wall.”

  One of the Chinamen said something in Cantonese. García smashed him across the mouth with the butt of his gun. His lip split open and blood gushed out.

  “Shut up, and if you do speak, make sure it’s in a Christian language.”

  “I understand Cantonese” Laski said.

  “That’s why it’s better if we all speak Spanish. Sit down.”

  The two Chinamen sat down.

  “He was telling his friend not to talk.”

  “Let him say it in Spanish. And you, too, Ivan Mikhailovich, if you’ve got something to say, say it in Spanish.”

  The Chinamen sat absolutely still in their chairs, like two ancient emperors on their thrones. Graves opened the door and entered, pushing ahead of him another Chinaman, his face covered in blood.

  “He didn’t want to come,” he said.

  They sat the third Chinaman down. Graves pointed at Anabella’s corpse.

  “Why did you kill her?”

  “She is of no importance,” said the Chinaman who had spoken Cantonese. His Spanish was perfect.

  “Why did you kill her?” García asked in turn.

  “She wanted money.”

  “Why?”

  “She is of no importance.”

  “That’s why you killed her?”

  “How much money do you want? We can give you money, a lot of money. More than any Mexican policeman has ever seen in his life.”

  “How much money?”

  “A thousand dollars, American dollars.”

  García slapped him across the face. The Chinaman almost fell off his chair. He got up and wiped off the blood that was dripping from his mouth.

  “Five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars, in cash, for each of you.”

  “In cash?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fifty-dollar bills?”

  “If you want.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  “Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?”

  “I want to see the money.”

  “We’ll give it to you.”

  “Now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come on.”

  “I have to go get it.”

  “Sonofabitch Chink. You think we’re going to let you go?”

  “I promise you, we have the money.”

  “Where?”

  “We have it. One goes. Two stay here.”

  “Why don’t you call someone and tell them to bring it?”

  The Chinamen thought for a moment. This is the one who gives the orders, at least to these two others. He doesn’t even consult them. And I think he’s Cuban, the way he drops his s’s. Now things really are complicated, now that Cubans are mixed up in it.

  The Chinaman said:

  “I’ll make a call.”

  “There it is, on the table, next to your girlfriend.”

  The Chinaman got up and walked over to the telephone. To reach it, he had to move one of Anabella’s legs out of the way. He dialed the number. Laski stood next to him. All three watched him dial. 3-5-9-9-0-8. When someone picked up, the Chinaman spoke quickly in Cantonese. He did not beg. It sounded like he was giving orders. He hung up abruptly and returned to his chair.

  “He’ll be here in twenty minutes,” he said.

  “What did he say, Ivan Mikhailovich?”

  “He spoke to someone named Feng. He told him to bring fifteen thousand dollars.”

  “Did he specifically say it should be in fifty-dollar bills?”

  “No. And there was one part I didn’t understand. Sounded like a code.”

  “I gave him the address of the house,” the Chinaman said.

  García turned to Graves.

  “Tie them up, Graves. They say that you FBI agents take special classes in how to tie people up.”

  Graves went into the bedroom and returned with two sheets. He tore them into strips and quickly tied up the three Chinamen. Now they looked like half-wrapped mummies. Graves smiled as he reviewed his handiwork.

  “It’s easy,” he said, “especially if you tie them to a chair. The position itself prevents them from struggling. And if they do, they fall over and are rendered completely helpless.”

  “Very interesting,” Laski said, “but I think one of us should go out and watch for the new arrival. Just in case he decides to bring along some friends.”

  “He’s coming alone,” the Chinaman said.

  Laski was holding his Luger like it was something that disgusted him.

  “I think Mr. Graves should go.”

  “Why not you, Laski?” Graves asked. “I went last time.”

  “But I understand Cantonese and someone who understands Cantonese should stay here. The honor of watching the street is yours, Graves, my friend.”

  “I can watch from the window,” Graves said.

  He positioned himself where he could see the street without being seen from outside. Without taking his eyes off the street, he said:

  “I’m interested in hearing the conversation here.”

  “Fine,” said Laski. “Interrogate them, Filiberto.”

  Now that stinking rat’s tail is starting to show. I sure as hell hope my two colleagues don’t kick up a fuss about the money. Maybe they didn’t even notice the number the Chinaman dialed. 3-5-9-9-0-8. That’s where the dough must be, the ten thousand fifty-dollar bills. Fucking bills!

  The Chinaman said:

  “You aren’t with the Mexican police.”

  “What job was Roque Villegas doing?”

  The Chinaman was quiet.

  “Look, Chink, no matter what, you’re going to talk. You might as well make it easy on yourself.”

  “We’re going to give you money.”

  “The money that came from Hong Kong?”

  “Why do you care where it came from? It’s good money.”

  “Did it come from Hong Kong?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did they send it to you?”

  “For business.”

  “With that amount of money, you could open five hundred restaurants. Why did they send it?”

  “Are you going to take the money Mr. Feng is bringing?”

  “We’ve got to know where it came from. What business did they send the money for?”

  “If you let us go, we’ll give you more when this business is over.”

  “What business?”

  The Chinaman was silent. García grabbed his earlobe and started twisting it. A few drops of blood oozed out.

  “What business?”

  “You already know. I know you. You’re with the narcotics police . . . And the other two are probably from across the border. It won’t be the first time we arrange things with money, here and on the other side.”

  García let go of his ear. The Chinaman’s face was still expressionless.

  “Opium?”

  “Morphine and heroine. We’re buying it here to take to the States. Villegas was one of our contacts.”

  “How big?”

  “Big. But Villegas told t
his woman everything and when you killed him last night, she wanted in, in exchange for keeping quiet.”

  “So you had her killed.”

  “That’s how this sort of person is usually dealt with.”

  “True. And the money was sent to you from Hong Kong?”

  “Yes.”

  Graves, next to the window, spoke:

  “Why did they bring the money from Hong Kong? The Mafia has enough money . . .”

  “We aren’t with the Mafia in the States. We’re working against them,” the Chinaman said.

  “Your colleagues, have they got names?” Graves asked

  “One of your poets asked: ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ Our colleagues, no matter what their names, would stink just as bad, Mr. Policeman.”

  Graves spoke without taking his eyes off the street:

  “It’s unusual to find a drug trafficker who quotes Shakespeare.”

  “Yes, Mr. Policeman. You people are used to dealing with coarse, uneducated men, men from the unions and the Mafia.”

  “The money comes from Peking?” Laski suddenly asked.

  The Chinaman smiled, surprised:

  “Yes, we’ve dropped several hints that this money might have come from Mr. Mao. It would be inconvenient if the authorities in Hong Kong and Macao were alerted, or the Mafia.”

  “All this money, it’s for opium?” Graves asked.

  “That money and a whole lot more. The opium business, and a lot of other ones.”

  “Like the assassination business,” García threw out.

  The Chinaman looked at him scornfully:

  “That kind of business, Mr. García, can be carried out with local money and local talent. You should know that better than anybody.”

  The Chinaman smiled. Fucking Chink. Cheeky bastard. Trying to tell me that all this mess is just about drugs being moved across the border. Could be yes, could be no, the only sure thing is, we don’t know. And we just keep investigating.

  Graves said:

  “I think Mr. García is talking about a different kind of assassination, one of greater magnitude, we could say.”

  “If you’re talking about members of the Mafia, when they have to be dealt with, we arrange things in the States. It’s not expensive to kill there.”

  “He was talking about something else,” Graves said.

  “You see, Mr. Policeman, we’re going to take over the Mafia’s entire business. And to do that, we need that money, and a whole lot more.”

  “My colleague here was talking about much more important targets than Mafia capos,” Laski said. “Among your various projects, might there be one to assassinate the president of the United States?”

  The Chinaman burst out laughing.

  “What an odd notion. What would we gain from the death of the president of the United States? No, gentleman, no. We’ve always left that kind of business in the hands of the Americans. Or maybe you think we planned the attack in Dallas? No, no. Mr. García has worked before in cases of drug trafficking across the border.”

  “I’m from the FBI,” Graves said. “Not from the Bureau of Narcotics. And this gentleman is from the Soviet secret service. As you can see, this is much more serious than you think.”

  The Chinaman sat in silence. He looked surprised.

  “Now I understand,” he said finally. “That’s why we’ve been feeling so much pushback. Who told you that we were planning to assassinate the president?”

  “You did,” García said. “I’d just been given my assignment, and you sent someone to my house.”

  “I won’t deny we hired Villegas to watch you, Mr. García. You came to Café Canton last night and were watching us. We know you’ve worked with drugs and the conclusion was obvious, and we thought it wise to watch you. Unfortunately, Villegas was clumsy, very clumsy And he has paid for it with his life. We had to employ local talent, quite inadequate, because there was nobody else available, and because, forgive me for saying so, Mr. García, we didn’t consider you very important. It looked to us like a quite routine problem.”

  “Have your operations in the United States already begun?” Graves asked.

  The Chinaman turned to look at him and smiled:

  “Mr. Policeman, we are going to give you money so that you won’t talk about this ever again, about this business that is so terribly unimportant compared to what you are investigating . . .” Suddenly, he became very serious, as if he had understood something. “But now I think that you are not going to accept our money, and that this is a trap. If you are investigating something so important . . .”

  “Someone’s coming. He’s entered the building,” Graves said.

  García quickly gagged the Chinamen and stood next to the door, his gun in his hand. Laski stood on the other side. Graves hid behind the dining table. The three Chinamen remained sitting in front of the door. What am I going to do with the dough this Chink is bringing? Who knows what these fellows are up to, but they must like dough. Five thousand bucks wouldn’t be bad. And then they can continue their investigations. And the bad part is that I think this guy is telling the truth, at least part of the truth. That was too much money for an assassination. Fucking Russians! Fucking Outer Mongolia!

  The door swung open and a round of machine gun fire exploded into the room. It looked like the three Chinamen leapt up, chairs and all, then landed in a pile next to the window. Then the man entered, machine gun in hand, looking around. Graves, from the dining room, fired one shot. The man tottered, then fell to his knees as he was trying to lift the machine gun to fire again. García stepped forward and smashed him over the head with the butt of his gun. The man fell to the floor. García turned him over with his foot.

  “He’s not Chinese,” he said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Graves said.

  He took off running, followed by Laski and García. Pandemonium had broken out in the building: people shouted out to call the police, doors opened then slammed shut. García, Graves, and Laski ran down the stairs. One man tried to stop them, but when he saw them all with their guns drawn, he immediately backed off. They got to the street. Someone shot at them. They piled into Graves’s car and sped off.

  “We need a telephone,” Graves said.

  “At Sanborns,” García said.

  When they got there, they each went to a separate phone.

  “Sorry for waking you, Colonel.”

  “You didn’t. Someone else did a few minutes ago with a report of a shootout on Guerrero Street, 208, apartment 9.”

  “Yes, Colonel. There are five dead.”

  “I told you I wanted that woman alive.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “I wanted to talk to that woman.”

  “She was already dead when I arrived. And there’s something else . . .”

  “More dead?”

  “No. Something important.”

  “What?”

  “I think we’re pissing outside the pot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those Chinamen are in a different business.”

  “What business?”

  “Drugs. For the States.”

  “What, they have nothing to do with the other business?”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Do you know or not?”

  “Some things don’t line up, Colonel.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, for example: who is Luciano Manrique, the guy who was stabbed?”

  “Didn’t you tell me he was Villegas’s partner?”

  “Maybe not, Colonel.”

  “By the look of it, you’re only sure about the people you kill. Maybe that’s why you like to kill them. I’m going to look at the file. Hold on.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  He held on. Fucking colonel! Telling me I’m only sure of the ones I kill. And him there all nice and cozy in his house, sleeping in his silk pajamas. And Marta sleepin
g in my bed and me here acting like a chump. And they killed that Chinaman right under my nose. And Marta? And who’s keeping the Chinamen informed? Fucking Chinamen!

  “García.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Call me in fifteen minutes. The gentleman we’ve been dealing with wants to be briefed.”

  “Okay.”

  The colonel hung up. It was almost five in the morning and there were very few people in the restaurant. Laski was sitting alone, drinking a glass of milk. He didn’t do much reporting. Maybe he doesn’t have to report to anybody. And me with the colonel and that fucking del Valle.

  He walked over to Laski’s table:

  “Our colleague Graves had to go write up a report, or something like that.”

  García realized that he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since noon.

  “You want to have something to eat?”

  “No, just my glass of milk. That beer upset my stomach.”

  García ordered a steak and fries and sat down.

  “Now, Ivan Mikhailovich, what do you say about your conspiracy?”

  “I don’t know. From the beginning, we said they were only rumors.”

  “The police are searching Wang’s warehouses and Café Canton. If they find a large quantity of drugs, that’ll settle it.”

  “We can’t be sure of anything,” Laski repeated.

  “Even so, it’s damn strange that a rumor would have reached Outer Mongolia about a gang of drug traffickers on the Mexican border. Don’t you think?”

  “I do. In any case, my government believed that the rumors were persistent enough to alert your government.”

  “And the Americans?”

  “It was their president, or so it seemed, who was in danger.”

  “Do they produce opium in Outer Mongolia?”

  “Not as far as I know. It’s mostly desert. And very cold.”

  “How do you think the rumor got out there?”

  “I don’t know. Rumors get around.”

  “The one with the machine gun wasn’t Chinese. I think he was Cuban.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, Cuban. Those two-toned shoes, only Cubans wear those anymore.”

  They brought his dish. Laski sipped his milk in silence and with a certain amount of peevishness. García cut into his steak. It was too raw. I don’t like to cut my meat and have blood squirt out. I’m not a lion. Fucking meat!

  He called over the waiter and asked him to cook it longer. Then he excused himself from Laski and returned to the telephone.