Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  Tomás let the book fall in his lap, Sam’s blather now of interest.

  “Go on.”

  “Silverlake, man. Hood’s blowing up.”

  “Nah. This the wrong side of the 101, compa.”

  Sam snorted. “You don’t see all the hipsters down here eating tacos and buying cobijas? I been to cool-as-fuck house parties down here. Shit’s on Cobrasnake. It’s 2007, dude. I got partners already scoping business-zoned spots for the dispensary.”

  Tomás looked around as though taking in the house for the first time.

  “I did see somebody the other day, walking around. Somebody famous.”

  “Who?”

  Tomás shrugged. “Dunno. The chica who crashed her car. But I seen her on TV or billboard or something before.”

  Sam nodded. “A million dollars. At least. Knock out that wall, open-floor-plan this casa, put a patio out back? It’d be dope.” He laced his hands behind his head. “Hell, just throwing out this wizard shit would add five K to the place.”

  “It’s all junkies on Sunset,” Tomás said. “And chickens and used cars here in the hills.” The rooster called out on cue. “See? No está chido, güey.”

  “Dude, there’s tons of gays out here already. Pretty soon be lines for brunch.”

  “What you mean? Like breakfast?”

  “Benedicts, bro. That’s when you know there’s beaucoup cash to be made.”

  It was hard to tell if the Glencoe kid, so far from the big green lawns of the Chicago exurb where he’d grown up, was right about the LA housing market. Zetas like Tomás were all ex-military, and working for the Golfos, Tomás didn’t learn shit about distro or logistics, let alone real estate. Zetas got paid to kill. What Zeta understood real estate? But maybe Sam did. The kid had made a good wad growing medicinal weed. How the fuck did he know when and how to do that? Some kind of gabacho superpower that let him see into the beating American heart of these things?

  Maybe that’s what had been eating Tomás. That he didn’t know a damn thing about business or the real world, besides deleting people who existed in it. Books and killing, that’s all he knew. And what kind of shadow life was that? You set down your book and escort people out the door.

  “How shitty’s that novel?” Sam asked.

  “Enough, cabrón.”

  “Jesus, man. You actually grok it. You’re killing me.”

  Keep talking, Tomás thought, and I might.

  Sam scoffed, leaped up, went over to the fridge. Even after smoking the whole joint and quasi-napping, he was still anxious, wasn’t calming down. What was taking El Rabioso so long to call? Tomás and the Glencoe kid would come to blows before this was over.

  The kissing sound of the fridge opening, jars ringing against one another on the door. The kid’s voice redounded out of the empty fridge. “El Codo don’t even have no beer. What kind of person has no beer?”

  The kid didn’t have no superpower, he was just an audacious brat. Always needing to have something in his hand, something in his mouth. Like a baby, pacifying himself. Pinche mamón. What was so bad about Sam’s life that he had to get all fucked up? White. American. Young. Knows how to run a grow. Money. Could drop out of this business and go to college, get a straight job. Could get into real estate tomorrow. The kid was made of options. These gabachos, they never knew how good they had it. Most guys like Tomás had to get pedo all the time—mota, coke, roches y pildoros, crystal—just to cope. Their lives were too much the things they had to do for the bosses. The blood and bodies, the screams. But Sam, Sam had it pretty—

  The cell phone in Tomás’s pocket buzzed. It was El Rabioso, Tomás’s direct superior in the Golfos, the plaza boss of Reynosa. Tomás went into the kitchen with it vibrating in his hand.

  Sam shut the fridge. “Who is it?” he asked, excited.

  Tomás shooed Sam out with his chin. He was about to answer but glanced out the kitchen window at the dying pomegranate tree, the dirt yard. Thinking, a person could cut down that tree and then put in a little grass. Be a nice view. The reservoir, the houses on the opposite hillside. He could picture a patio, too. Saltillo tile. A chimenea, a fountain or pond, maybe. That’d look good. More like somebody’s home.

  “¿Bueno?”

  “¿Estás en Califas, no?”

  Tomás told him yes, he was still in California.

  “El mero patrón te necesita en Tampico.” The man’s voice was raspy, impatient. Like he’d been up all night on the phone. “Ándale pues.”

  Tampico? He’d never been there, never heard of any cartel business there. He was going to ask what for, but El Rabioso was already telling him to round up an estaca and go there. El Esquimal, the boss, wanted Tomás specifically to take care of this. There was an impatience in El Rabioso’s voice, like someone was watching him make the call or a meeting was held up for it. And he hadn’t said anything about this LA job.

  “¿Y que hago con el asunto de Los Angeles?” Tomás asked.

  Now El Rabioso sounded pissed to be answering questions, barking “Sí sí sí, finish the thing in LA and then get down to Tampico.” Finish it how? Tomás wondered, but El Rabioso was on about Miramar, near the refineries. La Plataforma y Válvula Petrolífera. Una compañía owned by an American, name of Travis Moman. He wrote it down.

  When Tomás asked what was so urgent, El Rabisio hesitated, and his voice dropped.

  “Gustavo,” he said, as though a single name was sufficient to explain it. Tomás flipped through a mugbook of Gustavos in his mind. Most of them dead. “¿Gustavo El Chuco?”

  No, El Rabioso told him, not that Gustavo. The boss’s nephew Gustavo. The one who builds the things. Gustavo El Capataz, Gustavo the Foreman, Gustavo the Nephew. That Gustavo. A major dude, higher even than a plaza boss, right there one rung down from the big boss in the flowchart. The one who built stash houses with safe rooms and secret passages in all El Esquimal’s places in Mexico. Gangster real estate with getaways and torture chambers and lairs and all kinds of shit.

  Sounded like now he was making his own getaway. Tomás wondered what he’d done and what they wanted done to him.

  “Digáme,” Tomás said. “¿Quiere torturarlo?”

  He wasn’t really asking if he should torture him, he was probing to see why he was running, what the trouble was, what was the scope of the damn thing.

  “No, cabrón,” El Rabioso growled. “Si él muere, tú mueres.”

  Fuck. They wanted him alive. Which meant he’d need guys. A whole other level of complication. Wresting a man from place against his will would take force. Shit like this always went sideways. And Tomás could tell he wasn’t being told everything, and with El Rabioso it was pointless to ask. Pointless to ask why the boss’s nephew was on the run. Pointless to ask who he was running to. Pointless to ask what kind of trouble this put everyone in. The whole thing was such a setup to fail.

  “¿Entiendes, Tomás?” El Rabiso shouted. “Es muy importante. No lo mates.”

  He’d been quiet. Fretting too long.

  “¿Comprendes, soldado?”

  “Sí,” Tomás said, thinking, No, I don’t comprendo. “Claro.”

  “¿De verdad?” El Rabioso was pissed at the little sigh Tomás let slip, and he started going off, asking him did he have nothing else to say, was Tomás the one gives the orders now, was he the boss, was that how it was, did he want to share his thoughts about that.

  “Nada más, señor,” Tomás said.

  El Rabioso hung up. Before he could get clear on the Sur 13 and the Glencoe kid. Who was now lingering in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Who was that?” he asked.

  Tomás didn’t say. He just looked at the kid.

  “What?” Sam asked.

  “You ever kill someone?”

  “We’ve fucked some fuckers up. Humboldt County’s no joke. People try to run up on the crop all the time.” Sam bit his lip, nodded at a fake memory. “I’ve beaten some dudes down. And we might’ve killed one guy once.”r />
  “Okay.”

  “We probably did.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know how the game goes, what I’m saying. You need pros for a problem like this. That’s why I called the big guys in to take care of Sur 13.”

  Tomás felt suddenly, profoundly dry inside.

  Like his heart and lungs would blow away in a strong wind.

  Like he was a papel-maché piñata stuffed with dead grass.

  Like you could maybe just poke your finger through him.

  A spell had been put on him, and he didn’t know when.

  Tomás turned around away from the kid and pulled a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water and looked out the window into the backyard. Badly laid paving stones churned up by the growing palm. Holes in the dirt dug by some animal. Weeds and dead grass. Fixing a sad yard was a problem he didn’t know how to solve. It was okay that it looked sorta budget. It reminded him of Monclova, in a way.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Whaddya mean? I just said I need pros. At least you and me. Where you gotta go?”

  Tomás looked at him. This kid. Did he even know how stupid it was, asking a guy like Tomás his business? Huevos, man. No, he was just dumb. Either way, he decided to tell him. What the fuck, the sun wasn’t about to set or nothing. There was some day left.

  “First, Sam, I must go get some men from a prison.”

  “What? Like break ’em out?”

  “I would call it more like borrowing.”

  “In Mexico?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cool. Borrowing.” Sam nodded his approval. “To fuck up these Sur bitches?”

  “The nephew of the cartel’s boss is hiding in Tampico.”

  “Tampico? Where the fuck is that?”

  “On the Gulf.”

  “Shit. Why’s he hiding?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s probably turned snitch on the jefe, right? Like gone to the federales.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “So you gotta smoke him. Tight. I get it.”

  He gripped his own gun a little too much like a toy.

  “No, I have to bring him back alive. Which makes it difficult.”

  “No doubt. Way harder to make a dude go somewhere than off him.”

  Tomás sighed. He looked at the kitchen window. Maybe he could do something about that yard. But for now, there was work to do.

  “That is why you must handle things here yourself.”

  “By myself? I never—”

  “Look, güey, you wanna be in business with CDG, you gotta pull your weight.”

  Tomás pulled from his pocket a bag of coke and a knife. He opened the bag and scooped a bump onto the blade.

  “This’ll help,” he said.

  Sam took the hit and did one more, and then Tomás did two.

  “You want more?” he asked.

  Sam shook his head no. Tomás shrugged, snorted another two himself.

  Sam took the pistol out and took a deep breath and gripped the thing.

  He leaned against the sink.

  “You just wait in here. Those steps out front are steep. He always comes in here for a glass of water.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You follow your target, Sam. It’s a hunt. You learn about the prey.”

  “All right. I can do this. All right.” He bobbed his head to some private hype-music, a soundtrack in his head.

  “You stand over there, near the pantry. When he turns around, he’ll see you pointing your pistol at him. You come into the middle of the kitchen, like this. He’ll move over this way in front of the door behind you. Open it.”

  “This door?”

  “Yes.”

  “That a basement down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I shoot him from where you’re standing. Then he falls down here?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “All right. Pretty slick.” Sam was impressed. “What’s all this plastic up in the doorway?”

  “To keep all your blood from spraying onto my wall.”

  “My blood?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t want blood on the walls, Sam. This house gonna be worth something someday. Even with all my shitty books in it.”

  Tomás fired and Sam spun and he fired again and the kid fell backward. He tangled in the clear sheeting and was sucked down the stairs, plastic and all. He’d fallen in exactly the way Tomás said he would. Which was good.

  He went downstairs to finish up. He was relieved to see the Glencoe kid’s bewilderment still intact in his dead eyes. Tomás didn’t like it when they were scared. He hardly ever had anything against them. Even the ones who talked shit about his books.

  Chapter Eight

  Tampico

  Even after Harbaugh looked up the World Factbook basics on Tampico (Mexican Navy shipyard, “sundry” pipelines, Pemex refineries, et blah cetera blah), she still couldn’t put her finger on why she felt like she’d been there before.

  This vague sense of foreknowing vexed her all the way from her apartment to LAX, then through the red-eye flight. She finally quit trying to figure it out in the back of the Tampico cab. She had to concentrate on her Spanish, and even then it came out stuttering and stupid as she told the driver to go to La Plataforma y Válvula Petrolífera in Miramar, just south of the refineries. It seemed like the driver understood, though.

  As soon as he put the cab in gear, she realized she hadn’t asked him anything about price. “Wait,” she said. “How much?”

  He looked at her in the rearview mirror and tilted his head to the side.

  “Oh, lo siento,” she said. “Perdón, perdón. Pero, uh, ¿cuánto cuesta?”

  The driver kept looking at her silently. There were three wristwatches clipped around the mirror, two digital, one a dial. As if so many watches gave him more time.

  “Cuarenta,” he said finally.

  She had no idea whether or not forty pesos was a fair price, but she nodded and said gracias.

  The cabbie nodded back, picked up a T-shirt from where it lay on the passenger seat, and began tucking it into the driver’s-side window against the sun. Though it had rained earlier and low areas were swamped with standing water, the sun was out and hot. When the cabbie situated himself, he took off with a honk, and Harbaugh leaned back in her seat to watch the city go by. They passed boxy, flat-roofed buildings, pink and lime green and orange and purple, exteriors alternatingly weathered and fresh. And so many trees, palms and lemons and mangoes and figs and others she didn’t know, trees all along the roads and twisting through the gates and spilling out of courtyards and springing from every edifice.

  The answer to why she felt like she’d been here before arrived with a visceral force that shuddered her upright: Frida. Of course. Harbaugh had written about Tampico in a college paper on Frida Kahlo. Honors English at Santa Clara University.

  Or was it honors history?

  Maybe both. She was honors everything back then. She could still remember the Tampico passage she gussied up for the paper, something about these baby blues and sea greens, the wrought-iron balconies and galleried facades designed to imitate Spanish lace. Even then she wanted . . . well, what? Not recognition, not that exactly. To be worldly. To possess cosmopolitan urbanity. Something.

  Whatever the reason, Kahlo had been Harbaugh’s go-to topic for the better part of undergrad, at all the debate tournaments and the dorm hangs with earnest, stoned dorks. How on-and-on she’d go about Frida’s folk-art anticolonialism, her magical realism, her undaunted self-promotion in an art world that couldn’t harbor a single woman genius. Her polio, her car accident, her lifetime of pain. Diego Rivera, seriously fuck Diego Rivera. The Mexicayotl movement, socialism, communism, Trotskyism—

  Trotsky.

  Frida’s affair with Trotsky.

  Riding out in a government cutter from Tampico to meet the Russian revolutionary, beckoning him to safe haven, she was a vision, no dou
bt: tight ornate braids haloing her face, earrings of dangling jade. As exotic to the Russian as agave spikes or cactus flowers. Trotsky’s plain Russian wife, Natalia, didn’t have a chance.

  Their affair, it started right here, in Tampico.

  Well, not here, stopped in traffic on the way to the Zona Industrial under a web of power lines, idling next to a yellow-and-red Oxxo.

  No, the Tampico where Frida had introduced the Trotskys to Mexico was a few miles back, at the Catedral de Tampico, the fluted Corinthian columns and cantera stone, the clock chimes lifting the pigeons en masse like a palm. It was weird to remember this place in such a contrived way, and to be here now, doing some clandestine shit, and in that, to feel like she knew the revolutionaries. Frida on a trajectory to international fame. Trotsky faring worse by a Stalinist’s ice axe. But their brief affair. Back in college, Harbaugh kinda had a thing for a Trotsky.

  Dufresne resembled Trotsky now, just a touch, come to think of it. That goatee he grew a few years ago, his caffeinated mushroom cloud of hair.

  All she did was straighten his collar after he pulled on his coat. And she looked at him. He paused in her tipsy gaze. Everything moved slower and with an intentional heft. He didn’t say anything, and neither did she. He leaned in and she leaned back into the coats and laughed and he pulled them aside to get her or get to her and she looked at him come here already give us a kiss. He began to or seemed to begin to . . . Then the fast voices outside broke the spell. He helped her out of the rack and both of them emerged from the coat check. The only suspect thing with his wife was that he had the wrong coat, Harbaugh’s instead of hers. Or both coats, she couldn’t remember. She more or less bolted.

  That was the end of it, any inkling of a work crush, older men in general. And the moment itself, it was nothing. How many dozens of passes made at her, stone sober. Guys on her own team. Urlacher every other day. The coat check was nothing, so stop rehashing it. It was nothing.

  A nothing so big I’m down here in Mexico?

  Something like that.

  And that’s gonna get me back in Dufresne’s good graces, like Childs was saying at the races?