Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  “Yeah, it got lost in translation down here. Should be more like La Empresa. The Concern—like a business. I mean, shit, we’re not the problem, we’re the solution.”

  “To what?”

  He sighed, rubbed his eyes.

  “The bloodshed, the chaos. The cartels can’t call the cops when their shipments get ganked. They can’t sue anyone. The only measure they have is blood. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s what we showed in Afghanistan. It’s not the average Mexican’s fault that America has a bottomless appetite for narcotics. Stabilizing the black market is the moral thing for us to do.” He looked to see how that landed with her. “Look, if you don’t see it, you don’t see it. Maybe deep down, you are a cop. A lot of people live for the drug war—not just cops, but lawyers, judges, prisons. Millions of people making their living on the violence and chaos, none of them in cartels.”

  He stopped, as though he could sense he’d begun insulting her, shook his head in a way that seemed like he didn’t want to make it worse. Then he tilted his head like he was getting some advice from the ceiling.

  “Look,” he said at last. “For someone in such deep shit at work all the time, ask yourself this: why do you stay inside a system you constantly have to game?”

  He didn’t ask it like he expected an answer. He stood to go.

  But she had a question.

  “Are you gonna take me to the Golfos?”

  “What?” His shock seemed genuine. “For fucksake, no.”

  “I’m the only one who knows where the tunnel is,” she said, searching his face for the least hint of deception. “You’re telling me this . . . Concern is gonna cover their millions of lost investment?”

  He didn’t even stop shaking his head no.

  “The Golfos violated the terms of the policy,” he said. “They sent their own guys after Gustavo and completely jacked the whole thing. We don’t do business with shitty partners. I’m not taking you anywhere but America. I know I talk shit about cops, but a dead DEA agent is unacceptable.”

  He wasn’t looking at her, and then suddenly he was. She felt something big coming, she wasn’t sure what.

  “Especially if you’re that agent,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked.

  “It’s not,” she said.

  He smiled.

  “We’re hiring, Diane.”

  He left.

  She counted to one hundred and twenty and then bounded across the room and picked up the sack, pulled open the magnetic seal, half expecting it to be empty, but her phone was right there. She extracted it, turned it on. A few moments acquiring a signal. Messages. Bronwyn (2). Childs (7).

  She dialed Childs and put the phone to her ear. She listened to it ring and looked out the window at the wired rooftops sewing the pale white sky with a thin skein of black thread. She realized just before he picked up that she didn’t want him to, that she wasn’t ready to talk to him, but it was too late to hang up.

  “Jesus, Diane.”

  “Childs,” she said softly.

  “Where are you?”

  “Monterrey.”

  “California?”

  “Mexico. Some apartment.”

  “Fuck. Why? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cromer says the Mexican police are looking for you? That that American who called you was killed? Firefights, civilian casualties, what the hell is going on down there?”

  She didn’t know how to explain, what to explain. She just needed to get off the phone. She never should have called.

  “It’s okay, it’s just complicated.”

  “Complicated? The hell does that mean? Look, you gotta get out of Mexico. The State Department’s been all up in Cromer’s ass, Cromer’s been chewing out Dufresne, Dufresne’s been taking it out on his liver, asking if you ever told me about you two’s time in Sacramento. They’ve got the transcripts of Oscar’s texts, I know that. OPR’s grilled me about you. About Oscar. And now whatever you’re doing in Monterrey . . .”

  She absorbed this intelligence as if it were some other Diane he was talking about. She didn’t feel like she was in any kind of shock, but there was something dissociative inherent in this conversation. It was like hearing a recording of the wiretap, like she was calling from an alternate timeline. So much had transpired.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  She hadn’t been, not really. She was thinking that calling Childs felt like flipping a coin. How you’d sometimes flip tails, and realize you wanted heads all along. How calling him now was like that, was in fact an act of making up her mind. Of realizing that her mind was already made up, that she didn’t want or need anything from him, from Dufresne, the team, the DEA, Los Angeles.

  “Look, I’ll come down—”

  “No!” she barked. Then calmly, “Don’t.”

  “Diane. This is deep shit.”

  In deep shit all the time. Gaming the system.

  “I know I encouraged you to go, but Dufresne’s right. We gotta stay in our lane—”

  “I gotta go, Childs.”

  “It better be to an airport. Or a lawyer.”

  “Just . . . forget I called.”

  “Goddamnit, I’m your partner, Diane. Just tell me where you are, and—”

  “You need to forget I called. Those transcripts aren’t gonna look good, Russ,” she said. “I let Oscar get close to me.”

  A middling silence. Him pondering what that could mean.

  “I don’t care—”

  “It’s not just Oscar,” she said. “They’re gonna look hard at you, Russ. Because of me. I’m sorry. And they’re gonna look hard at Dufresne especially. And they’re gonna find things from Sacramento. You need to listen to me on this.”

  “Diane.”

  “Really, forget I called,” she said. And then she hung up, turned off the phone, and put it back in the bag.

  Even what things Carver possessed here withheld. A fridge racked out with bottled water. A rusted metal medicine cabinet possessed exactly five items: an old-fashioned razor, Feather blades, a toothbrush, Colgate toothpaste, and a black comb. A bar of white soap in the shower. A diminished brick of them under the cabinet. She imagined these bars had been around the world with him. He had Fruit of the Loom T-shirts. Levi’s. She already knew he wore boxer briefs. Mostly white socks. A few white dress shirts of Mexican manufacture. A pair of black loafers that looked worn exactly once. She was dying to know for what function these and the black slacks and suit coat were deployed.

  She looked in the envelope he’d gotten at the hotel. At the fake passports in there. One without a picture, for a someone named Bethany Wells. She was jealous for a moment, and then her heart sang when she realized it was meant for her.

  She filled the clawfoot tub and fell into a nap on a towel folded over the lip behind her. She’d brought in the tote and used the stranger’s Lady Bic to shave and tried on the stranger’s sundress and combed her hair with Carver’s comb.

  She peeled a mango with a knife and ate it with half a sweet roll and then drank cooled-to-lukewarm coffee at the window, watching nimble old men play soccer on the court outside. The day’s fullness quaking the air over the court like an oven. She wondered how many miles they ran in that lot. She wondered when she would run again, and what else would happen, what events she would put in motion. How many things that mattered she would do.

  He came in with a new set of keys and migraine both. He fell onto the couch with his arm over his face, so she didn’t tell him that she’d used her phone. She eventually decided to never tell him by putting the bag back where it had been. A lie of omission. This would matter later, but for now she thought he wasn’t the only one who could withhold now, was he? She was struggling with what she knew she wanted, with the fact that he’d noticed the dress and had maybe stifled a comment on it, and what all that noticing and reticence could mean.

  She went and lay down on the bed in t
he bedroom and waited him out. She was tired too, but she couldn’t sleep—she’d had too much or there was too much to make up or it was too hot. She turned on the large fan up in the high ceiling and watched it turn more than felt it.

  He startled her with his voice in the doorway.

  “What?”

  “I said are you hungry?”

  It had gotten on to evening. Time had some bend and flex to it.

  “I could eat.”

  She noticed his new pants as they waited for the boy he’d called up from an apartment downstairs to bring their dinner. An entire chicken in a plastic bag. The boy left and came back with a tureen of pozole. He departed again, and returned with ribboned cabbage in a sack with vinegar and salt. A baggie of limes. The kid reappeared a final time with another bag of beers in ice, and Carver gave him a lot of money as she finished setting a table that was scored and nearly as thick as a butcher block. They ate the chicken with their hands and ate the pozole from large cups with huge spoons for the cabbage too.

  He told her more about his grandfather when she asked, a runner of moonshine everyone called “Shakey” who completed his life building alcohol funny cars. Knuckles busted from wrenching up his shit. Said the seizures were a family curse going back to Ireland. Maybe, who knows? Whether so or not, the foreknowledge made his first one less an event than it would have been otherwise. A thing you could hide if you knew what it was.

  They took fresh beers to the rough couch, and she told him about her father. Practicing pool left-handed so he could one day run a stupid switcheroo. Doing this practice right up to his last week alive. Never won out, but still. The man was committed to the long game. His great enemy in life whatever was on the up-and-up. Taxes, girlfriends, umpires.

  Their talk wound down. He said he’d take her to the States, they just needed to get a picture for a passport he already had for her, she could fly out of Monterrey or they could drive to the border. He realized he was just dragging her into some crazy shit. She ran her finger over the lip of her beer, trying to get the smell of him, leaning a little into his air space.

  When she told him where the tunnel was, the disordered expression on his face was a fresh heaven. She climbed onto him. Feeling him beneath her, pressing herself into him, that almost did a trick on her right there, right away. She undid him and got him inside of her. She ruined her knees on that rough cauliflower couch, could feel the air on her fresh abrasions. She’d have postage-stamp scars on each for a very long time.

  BAGRAM AFB, PARWAN PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN

  MARCH 19, 2004, 21:47

  POLYGRAPHER:

  There were rumors, correct? The DEA’s Karachi office had heard things about the Ground Branch and heroin trafficking.

  CARVER:

  It came up.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  What was Shipley’s line on that?

  CARVER:

  That it was utter bullshit.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  So he lied to the DEA? Carver?

  CARVER:

  Oh, is that a real question? Of course he did.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  So what happened when DEA heard from their informants on the matter?

  CARVER:

  I don’t know that they ever did.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  Right. Because their informants in Paktika were killed. But it didn’t take long for the Karachi office to figure out who exposed them.

  CARVER:

  Like you said, there were rumors.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  It’s not a rumor if it’s true.

  CARVER:

  No, everything’s a rumor without proof.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  The special agent in charge in Karachi says all his guys in Abdul Kalali’s operation died or went missing after you learned their identities. He says you personally were very persistent in getting those names.

  CARVER:

  We closed more of their cases in three months than they did in five years. We gave them actionable intelligence. Guys they wanted for years, we brought in hog-tied and ready to process. They fucking owed us. We helped them do their job, they could help us do ours.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  Which was?

  CARVER:

  It wasn’t fighting the endless drug war, I’ll tell you that much.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  Seriously, I’d like you to tell me: what work were you doing?

  CARVER:

  Rooting out al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Stabilizing Paktika. Bringing peace and prosperity to the region.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  You sound like a believer.

  CARVER:

  In what?

  POLYGRAPHER:

  The Concern.

  CARVER:

  The Concern? Christ, I already told you. Shipley never said a word about any Special Activities Division projects.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  Shipley wasn’t supposed to deploy the pursuit teams for the kinds of things you were doing.

  CARVER:

  You say this like I put Shipley in charge.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  I say this like Shipley was going against orders. Did he tell you about the little report he slipped into Tenet’s office?

  CARVER:

  No.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  The one outlining your pursuit team’s work in particular? The one arguing for the deceptive misallocation of military and law enforcement assets—

  CARVER:

  Can you take no for an answer? Look at the needle. Am I lying? Am I fucking lying? I didn’t know about any program. Christ.

  POLYGRAPHER:

  One last question: what did you personally, ethically, think about deceiving the US military? How did you feel, thwarting the work of the DEA to put millions of dollars into the pockets of a heroin operation?

  CARVER:

  Are you asking did I sleep like a baby?

  POLYGRAPHER:

  I’m asking, did you sleep like a baby because you were getting rich? How much did you and Shipley and the Ground Branch get?

  CARVER:

  The only money I ever made was my government salary. Look at the needle. Did it move?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Run

  They kept moving about Monterrey for three days. The garden apartment was a CIA holding, and Carver said it was only a matter of time before Langley found his paperwork securing it and sent someone to look in. But they couldn’t leave the city either, he said, because they were waiting on a plane.

  “What plane?”

  They were sitting in office chairs on an empty floor in a high-rise. Monterrey notched between shark-fin mountains, city lights twinkling before them. A fingernail moon hanging like an ornament over the proceedings below.

  “Not sure yet,” he said and strode into an office with his beer and returned with long cushions. He did this a lot, little disappearances in the middle of conversations.

  “For fucksake, dude, explain,” she said.

  “Someone someday soon will buy a plane from a Mexican in Monterrey. A small plane. A private plane,” he said. “There will be a pilot who will be hired to deliver that plane.”

  He yanked curtains from the same interior office, fixed a pair of single beds. He nodded at his fast work. He would fall asleep at will. He would forecast what was coming next by just starting it. Chopping an onion. Drawing a bath. It seemed tricky for him to share a plan.

  “He’ll leave us off the manifest?” she asked.

  He nodded from the cushion, propped up on his elbows.

  “Worked a case like that in LA,” she said. “Only the plane was full of coke. A whole hangar of private planes. We had a warrant for one call number. Could have been anything in any of the others,” she said. “No TSA screeners. Nothing.”

  He yawned enormously, laced his hands behind his head. His breathing slowed, whistled out his nose. He was out.

  The next day, they picked up the conversation w
here they left off. From within an empty old cantina in the Barrio Antigua she was watching the shadows overtake the narrow old-world avenue and imagining carts, soldiers serried and marching in a small parade. Coronets. Flowers from the balconies. Clops of horseshoes.

  “Those hangars are just proof that there’s no borders, not really,” he was saying. “Anything can get anywhere. Anyone can.”

  “The ports,” she said. “You could DHL an army into San Pedro.”

  The cantina was flaky with gray grout, raw stone. She kept getting grit on her elbows where they rested on the bar.

  “Exactly. Everything’s a Trojan horse.”

  The bartender brought them two more beers, and she realized her entire life had changed. Or this was an elaborate ruse.

  “What am I gonna do?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the Concern. What’s my role?”

  The bar looked out onto the avenue, and Carver kept checking it up and down. They’d seen a small picture of her in the newspaper. “Persona de interés.” Missing DEA agent wanted for questioning. But even though her image was out there, she’d grown used to the idea of lukewarm pursuit. Even her own complacence resting in the shade of his experience with this, the tall oaks of his specific competences. She wasn’t worried. She was a little buzzed. She wanted to talk next moves. She wanted him to plan with her. She wanted him to smell like something. She worried she’d never get those things, and stared at him until he was forced to quit watching for police and answer her question.

  “I have yet to see a situation you cannot handle, Diane. You give off an air of belonging wherever you are. That’s a rare quality. Very useful.”

  “Tangible things, though. What will I do?”

  “You know the law. You know the DEA. You know things no one on our team has any idea about. And you don’t quail at gunfire. And you can drive.”