Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  Carver pulled the car over. “Stay here,” he said. He had his phone out and reached in the console for his wallet. “It’ll be okay.” He got out of the car, held a palm up, and walked over to two soldiers who were standing on the side of the road.

  He talked to the soldiers for a while, showing them documents or some such, she couldn’t see what. After a while two other men came over, in uniform, not battle gear, and they walked with Carver to a kind of guard station. Another group of soldiers in black tactical gear and balaclavas were on the other side of the street, all their hidden faces turned to the car, watching. She held up a hand to them. The masked soldiers didn’t respond or move and her foolishness washed over her and she looked straight ahead, her palms flat on her thighs. Carver was inside the booth for a very long time. So long that she closed her eyes and fought with herself to keep them closed so she wouldn’t see anything and couldn’t think about anything she saw.

  Finally she heard the driver’s door open and Carver sit down.

  She opened her eyes when he turned the ignition.

  “Is it okay?” she asked. She could smell her own flop sweat, and closed her arms tighter around her body.

  “I said it would be.”

  “You did.”

  He put the car into gear and pulled forward. They passed the soldiers and then the crossbar went up and they were through, and the car was past and they were on open road again.

  She didn’t ask him what he’d done or how they’d gotten through. She just sat in the passenger seat, embarrassed of the wave, her tenuous grip on her own composure.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I have to get some things.”

  “Where?”

  Rather than answer he just scanned the rearview.

  “What’s going on with the plane?” she asked.

  “We’re off book now, Diane.”

  She rested her hand on her chin, smelled the odor from her fingers. Powder.

  “I’ve been off book since I left LA,” she said. There was no explaining this much chaos to Dufresne, the DEA. Maybe she’d been off book since the beginning. Since Oscar. Before Oscar. Sacramento. Before Sacramento? Was there a beginning? She could feel him looking over at her. Maybe trying to understand how one woman could be at the center of so much trouble. She wondered if she could explain it to anyone.

  “Those two just started blasting at each other,” she said abruptly. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  Carver held up his hand for her to stop.

  “It’s okay. I need to think.”

  She went silent, but soon began willing him to look over. He passed a few cars by curbing up onto the median, then swept back into traffic. The way ahead opened up a little bit. At last he looked over again.

  “Gustavo was gonna go to the States,” she said. “I’d talked him into it.”

  He sighed, nodded.

  “You done good,” he said.

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “Alive is pretty good.” He reached over and decided to just pat her forearm. She slid his hand down into hers and squeezed them together and he held on for a minute and they both studied the road before them, the flashing brake lights, the buses, the tiny cabs. Then he took the wheel in both hands and swept up onto the median again.

  They pushed through stop-and-start traffic for what felt like hours, small pickups and delivery trucks that couldn’t be gotten around, and then edged through foot traffic around the plaza. He pulled into an alley, blocked it parking there, and got out heedless of traffic norms. Like he’d never see Moman’s car again. Walking into the throng of people on the street, he put Tomás’s gun in his belt in view of everyone and no one, and hurried her across the street and into the Hotel Sevilla.

  They met a disordered line at the front desk, baggage on an unattended cart. Under cover of the small dickering and bickering at the counter he helped himself to bags she knew were not his own. She followed him past the elevator toward a door, nonchalantly outpacing him to open it. They entered a stairwell that smelled of the cigarette someone had just smoked there, and he peeked up the next flight of stairs at every landing. He nodded at the door to his destination floor and she held it open for him and he strode briskly toward a room, setting down the bags to open the door with a small device that seemed designed for opening all such doors. He held it wide for her and put the bags inside and drew the door closed as if the hallway were a nursery ward.

  “See if you can find something to wear,” he said, throwing the bags on the bed.

  He took a canvas coat off the rack in the closet. He took Tomás’s .40 from his belt and dropped it into one of the large pockets of the coat and snapped it closed.

  She just looked at him.

  “I’m in deep shit,” she said.

  She meant in particular the patrons she’d threatened at the bar. She meant that even now the police were probably in possession of a sketch of her likeness. But she kept it to herself.

  “This is nothing,” he said.

  A knock at the door startled her, but he walked backward to answer it, throwing wide his arms and smiling.

  “Nothing at all.”

  He cracked the door, and she peeked around him to see who was there. Someone very broad. A black leather jacket, a voice so deep that it sounded like a series of heavily accented growls, none of which she could fashion into words. Carver again closed the door in silence, this time turning around with a manila envelope.

  “Who’s the ogre?” she asked.

  “A trusted colleague.”

  He tore open the envelope. Several credit cards. A rubber-banded roll of pesos. Passports. A set of keys. He pocketed everything in his pants or the coat on the bed according to some prearrangement. He then bent and pulled out a shoulder holster and a Beretta M9. He started to put it on. Then he stopped.

  “Diane. Please.” His eyes darted to the bags on the bed. “You need to change.”

  She’d stowed a promising sundress as well as sandals and T-shirts in a tote bag but had decided to disguise herself in a pair of baggy rolled-up jeans and a men’s sweatshirt and let down her hair around a pair of huge sunglasses.

  They took the stairs, exited through a service door onto the noisy street. A stack of caged birds for sale. They crossed to the plaza where men smoked cigars and had their shoes polished as they read magazines or just watched the jet-black squirrels dance in the trees. Some kind of fair or demonstration crowded around the large gazebo in the center of the plaza. It seemed like every couple she saw was holding hands. Pigeons parted in spasms and ripples as Carver strode through them. She jogged to keep up and then took his hand.

  No one took notice of them the ten minutes they were walking god knows where. She had a fleeting thought of Frida and Trotsky, but didn’t much muse on them as Carver spotted and rigidly strode to a red-and-white 1980s Ford Bronco angled a touch conspicuously at an intersection. Like someone had abandoned it there—which someone had—keys over the visor—which they were.

  She and Carver climbed in. The Bronco smelled like it hadn’t been driven for a while, it smelled like fresh grease. Her father used to refurb jalopies. She knew the smell of boosted vehicles. They smelled like hornets had nested in them, they smelled like missing pieces, of rust. This Ford, it was like that. She touched the quilted seat cover, the dusty CB radio. Carver looked at her as he turned the key. The engine roared to life. He closed his eyes and grinned as he revved the engine, and then he opened them and they motored away.

  Harbaugh fell asleep against the door frame. The Ford’s engine bellowed over the countryside through the open winding, waking her whenever it ricocheted back at them from village walls that dotted the little two-lane highway. The sun shone on a dark storm front moving off the Gulf and over land toward them, gray and consuming, as they sped north. Then she nodded off again in the Ford’s rumble, the stir of warm wind. She was so damn tired.

  Carver slowed for an overturned semi trailer sometime around suns
et. The doom-colored sky to the east hung in a state of suspension, as though it kept banker’s hours. In the old cab it felt like Bonnie and Clyde, and so when she asked what he meant by “off-book”—what the hell is off-book anyway?—she meant it in a cinematic way, a performative way. But Carver was as broody as the trouble come in off the Gulf, and he looked more at the storm beyond her than at her and just said she wasn’t gonna like it.

  “Not gonna like what?” she asked, sitting up.

  “I’m uh . . . I’m crosswise of the Company now. I’m froze out. My accounts are locked. No database access. No resources.” He steered around a flare in the road. “Langley’s favorite way to deal with troublemakers is to cut them off and see who they run to.”

  “This pickup,” she said, she asked. “You got a roll of pesos. You got passports.”

  “I got partners, I got colleagues, yeah, yeah,” he said, gunning the Ford on the open road, disturbing the quietly ominous dusk. “I’m prepared for this.”

  “Partners?”

  He nodded.

  “What kind of partners?”

  He looked at her.

  “I’m still trying to decide how much to bring you in.”

  The way he withheld made her want to ask all the more. But his reticence seemed calculated to do just that. To feel her out.

  “Okay. Why are you crosswise of the CIA?” she asked.

  “Because they never do anything. They just fucking gather intel. I’m more vocal and proactive than they’d like. I’m more . . . everything than they’d like.”

  “Except specific,” she said. “Except forthcoming.”

  “I’m just procrastinating. You’re not gonna like the specifics.”

  “You’ll cope with my disapproval, I think,” she said.

  “It matters to me now,” he said, glancing over at her.

  “What does?”

  “What you think.”

  She looked at him like she didn’t believe a word of this. This blandishment. This sudden concern for her approval. She wasn’t sure she believed it.

  “I’ve seen you in action, Diane. Seen you elude a half-dozen Zetas. You clipped a sicario, maybe he bled out, maybe he’s dead, maybe that’s taken care of,” he said. “You’re not who I thought at first sight. You’re the shit.”

  He looked at her like someone about to breach a door, clear a room. Edging eye contact. He reached over the bench seat and dropped a leather messenger bag between them. Opened the flap and handed her a folder.

  “What’s this?”

  “Context. In particular, a Special Activities Division report on our work in Afghanistan. My group.”

  She flipped through the thirty-odd pages of significantly redacted text.

  “I’m supposed to read this?”

  “I want you to have read it. Just at some point. It explains . . . me. A fuckin’ miracle it even exists. But Shipley knew what he was doing. Been in Afghanistan since the eighties, fighting the Soviets, arming the mujahideen.”

  “Shipley?”

  “My commander in Afghanistan. Somehow pulled off the bureaucratic wetwork to get that on Tenet’s desk. And to Cheney and Dumbsfeld. Not that it mattered to them. But that document just proved how fundamentally game-changing our work over there was.”

  The light was poor and getting poorer. But she could make out certain things in the introduction. “Unconventional partnerships . . . coercive tactics that have, over time, mitigated the inherent risk of narcotics production . . . absent legal mechanisms of redress and conflict resolution, CIA Ground Branch teams have proven to be influential stewards for local syndicates . . .”

  “ ‘Local syndicates’? Does this mean what I think it means?”

  “The data is bulletproof. Everywhere SAD engaged local syndicates, not only did Taliban and al-Qaeda virtually vanish—”

  “You’re talking about the poppy warlords.”

  “So-called. The industry. Heroin manufacture and distribution. Yes.”

  He looked to see her reaction.

  She thumbed through the report, not really reading, not really looking at him. She touched the document with her index finger. “This says you helped them.”

  “When you read it, you’ll see we really just helped stabilize the black market, which in turn stabilized the entire region. Not just the economy—”

  “And that’s what you’re doing down here,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Not officially.”

  “Unofficially then.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Why did you want Gustavo?”

  “It was a fluid situation.”

  “Bullshit. Tell me.”

  “Okay. The truth is, I was gonna to take him back to the cartel.”

  Her heart sank. It felt like it broke.

  “What the fuck? Your partner is the cartel?”

  “No, not partner. The cartel is a client.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “The CDG isn’t a flawless operation. Nepotism’s an issue, obviously. And outsourcing their security to American-trained paramilitaries is a huge mistake. But the Gulf Cartel has quality product, good distribution, they negotiate well with the other cartels, they put money into infrastructure—”

  “Infrastructure! All along you were just trying to protect the tunnel?”

  “I didn’t know about the tunnel until you told me. All I knew was the cartel boss wanted his nephew back. That we could help them solve this problem.”

  She held up her hand for him to stop. It was completely dark outside now. Not a scrap of light out there in the scrub for miles. Half the stars blotted by the clouds to the east. She searched her feelings and realized that the surprise in all of this was how utterly unsurprising it was.

  “I knew there was something else,” she said. “I thought maybe an international angle. Terrorism. Or even you wanted to kill him for what he did to those workers.” She dropped the report on the seat. “But you’re just working for the Golfos.”

  “Negative. No, I absolutely am not.” He looked at her, but the dash lights were now too dim to see him by. He was silent. Maybe abject.

  “What exactly is the difference between you and any Zeta? You’re just another army boy turned narco.”

  “You have to get used to something,” he said, more weary than condescending.

  “I can’t wait to hear what I have to get used to.”

  “The old ways don’t work. And because of that, they cannot be justified—”

  “Was there even a plane?”

  He was silent and she repeated it.

  “There were two planes,” he admitted. “One for you. One for him.”

  She looked out the window at the vast nothing.

  “How’d you expect that to go?” she asked.

  “Not great.”

  “Are you taking me to the cartel right now? I’m the only one who knows where the tunnel is. Are you—?”

  “No. Fuck, of course not.”

  “Why should I believe you? Because of your little report?”

  She tossed the document over to him, it spilled open onto the seat.

  The engine thundered against a stand of fences, then relative quiet. The sky bleeding black.

  “Can I tell you something?” he asked.

  “Totally,” she said, “tell me something.”

  “This whole time—and I promise you this is true—I’ve been trying to keep you safe. Everything I’m doing is to really, actually, keep innocent people safe. You might not agree with how I’m doing it, but I was just thinking . . .” Carver paused, looking for the words. “I just thought maybe you’re a fellow traveler. You came into this on your own. You think for yourself. You do what needs to be done.”

  She crossed her arms. This loitering in the foyer of the fucking point. Because she could feel a certain valence in his voice, that he was ginned up to a proposal of some kind. She knew coercion when she heard it. Fuck this. Fuck him.

  But whatever w
as coming didn’t quite make it. He was blinking rapidly and looking in the rearview. He swallowed like someone suddenly frightened at the sight of something. She turned around to see. Headlights in the far distance.

  “I gotta pull over.”

  “Is someone following us?!”

  She realized she had no reason to trust him, not one.

  He let off the gas and rolled onto the rough shoulder and put the Bronco in park. She grabbed the handle, ready to bolt.

  “What the hell is going on? You tell me right now.”

  He flipped on the hazard lights and looked at her. He’d taken the gun from her. Her phone—

  “I’m about to have a seizure,” he said. He turned off the engine.

  “A what?”

  “I have a thing . . . a condition,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “A condition? Nope. Nope—”

  She opened the door.

  “Listen to me.”

  She had her foot on the running board. The old dome light didn’t work, and they sat in the dark. The tick of the hazards was the only sound. He turned his torso to her.

  “I’m going to buckle my hands into this seat belt, and I’d appreciate it if you’d pull it taut against my body. I’m gonna have a fit for about forty-five seconds or so, and when I come to, I’ll have a huge fucking migraine. You’re going to have to drive, Diane. You understand?”

  She must’ve nodded. Or blinked. Something he took for assent, because he relaxed.

  He pulled out many lengths of seat belt. Buckled it. He squinted enormously, his head cocked violently, and then he grinned.

  “Gonna be a good one.” He chuckled to himself. “Could you pull it tight?” She moved over and grabbed it, and he crossed his arms over his lap. She was few inches from his face. His eyes blinked and batted around. She thought or imagined that she could see a coming wave in them. Or rather that the water was sucking away from the shore for what was gathering and had gathered. She wondered if this was really happening. What kind of game this could be.

  She cinched him in. Her hands were not steady.

  “You’re the only one who knows where the tunnel is. And we have to assume the Golfos know that you know. They’re looking for you. We’ll get you out of here.”