Make Them Cry

by Smith Henderson

  “Quail? Who even says that?”

  “I do,” he said, physically shifting away, just so, as though he’d brook no discussion of his words, where they came from, his past.

  She thought about asking anyway, but he changed the subject.

  “The tunnel, for instance,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “You are solely in possession of a state-of-the-art tunnel from Mexico into the United States. What should we do with it? I’m sure you have notions.”

  “Don’t give it back to the CDG,” she said immediately.

  “Because?”

  “Because they killed everyone who built it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because fuck them.”

  “Very much fuck them.”

  “You can’t give it to Sinaloa or the Beltran Leyva cartel, either.”

  “Because?”

  “Same reason, different specifics,” she said. “The cartels—not as constituted.”

  “Meaning a change in leadership?”

  She nodded.

  “Again, I feel like you have notions.”

  She did. A few lieutenants. “I might. Can you still get into TILLER?”

  “A database we cannot access does not exist.”

  “I can think of a few names in the Sinaloa cartel might be worth looking into.”

  “See?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You’re already doing your job.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  He’d bent himself out over the bar so he could see up the narrow street.

  “Nine times out of ten, I’m looking for a black SUV.” He pulled himself back in and situated the stool to see the street better. He appraised her there, wiping his hands of grit. “But you. For a woman on the run, you’re quite at ease.”

  “Oh, I’m fucked,” she said. “Totally painted myself into a corner.”

  “You don’t act like it.”

  “What do I act like?”

  “Like you’re right at home.”

  She never felt at home. No place was ever quite right. Sacramento. District attorney’s office. Los Angeles. The DEA. Always moving, always running.

  She reached for her beer. When she missed and the bottle smashed on the floor, they seemed to both realize that she was kind of drunk. Maybe too at home.

  Carver stood. She mirrored him, standing too. As though a sober part of her was present to chaperone the drunken part. Always ready to run. This is why she wasn’t worried that anyone would spot them. On some fundamental level, she knew she could outrun anyone, anything at all.

  He shuffled her out of the cantina in a hurry and then the Barrio Antigua altogether. When she asked, he said that cleaning up their glasses, the bartender had taken a long look at them, maybe trying to place them. Anyway, it was better they left the old neighborhood hideout.

  He made calls and drove. She read the Spanish signage in degrees of incomprehension. She had notions of what these going concerns were, these businesses and institutions. She imagined this is what it would be like. Strangenesses such as these. Speaking broken Spanish, Portuguese, French. How she’d express herself in bent idioms. That she’d always been foreign in some way deeper than language. She watched Carver talk in swift Spanish and hang up and write down an address in the Obrera neighborhood on his palm. It was so weird. She was nowhere. She’d never before felt so at home.

  In the Obrera hideout, he woke her up to show her a piece of paper he’d printed out. The new place was actually furnished, and for a minute on the canopied four-poster she was certain that this was the setting of an odd dream. Then Carver’s face came into focus and her last memory was smashing a beer on the floor, the cantina grit.

  She peered at the paper, squinting at the light gushing in from the windows. New memories rushing in along with it, taking shape like an emulsifying image. The night before. Smoking cigarettes and listening to records on the stereo, a slew of Mexican artists, and polishing off all the red wine in the little hours. Cigarettes, ugh, why.

  Specks and motes flashed in the air between her unfocused eyes and the paper in his hand. When she managed to read “Close and Continuing Relationship Form,” she got mad at her own confusion.

  “What is this bullshit?”

  “Gotta fill that out if you wanna keep drinking and fucking all night.”

  He left, and when he came back he was smiling in the doorway. A powder-blue T-shirt, a little too short, his hip bones. The doorframe was dark teak or something, but the walls were as white and radiant as pain.

  “It’s way too bright in here,” she said.

  He crawled into bed with her, where she squinted against the sun, his arrival. “If we were on-book, there’d actually be paperwork. Can you fucking believe that?”

  “Hilarious.” She put a hand over her face. “Shades? Curtains? Anything?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You made me smoke.”

  “I had one. You inhaled the pack.”

  “Why’d you let me if—” She stopped to retrieve the phrase from the impossibly radiant white paper. “If this is a ‘close and continuing relationship’?”

  “Is it?”

  “You’re the one brought paperwork!” She buried her face in the slippery pillows. Satin sheets on this thing. A steel magnate’s fuck pad, he’d said. The guy in Spain for a month.

  “The paperwork is a joke,” Carver said. “Early on, the thought had occurred to me that Langley deployed you to catch me out. That you’re made of wiretaps and extraditions. But then you shot that guy. So yeah, I guess ours is close and continuing now.”

  She sighed. In principle, she loved the banter, but she wanted desperately for him to fuck off and set the sun.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you trust me?” he asked.

  “Jesus.” She turned over to look at him. The sunlight was a kind of witchcraft in cauldrons of her eyewells. “Yes, I trust you.”

  “It’s pretty life-or-death around here. And not looking to get easier. This thing I’m trying to do, it’s complex. But I’m for real. I want you in.”

  She moaned.

  “We all get hangovers, by the way.”

  “You make sense now,” she eventually said into his clavicle.

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s stupid, the way things are. I put kids away as a DA. Oscar shot himself . . . I hate the things I’m supposed to do, and when I do the things that need to be done, I’m not supposed to do them . . . I can’t make a thought into a sentence. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no smell in his neck. Just his warmth. “Do you trust me?” She looked up at him.

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ll come back.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Diane.”

  “You’ve got to go check out the tunnel.”

  “We’ll—”

  “Before we leave. The federales are looking for me. I have to stay here. You need to check it out before we leave. There’s a key in that bag I took from the hotel. Gustavo gave it to me.”

  He breathed there next to her. She started to fall asleep. Dreamed she was cleaning a gun. Dreamed of crocodiles. Dreamed the moon exploded in rainbow explosions.

  Woke when he stirred, again to him humming “Pancho and Lefty,” all the federales say they could’ve had her any day, they only let her slip away out of kindness I suppose, and then him going on about don’t leave the apartment, don’t use the phone unless it’s an emergency.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “You be careful. Don’t drink so much.”

  “I keep questionable company.”

  “That’s clear.”

  “But I picked my pony.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I put all my chips in? I got nothing left.”

  “You got me.”

  “You better not say shit you don’t mean.”

  “If anything happens, I’ll ge
t you.”

  “I’ll get you, if you leave me high and dry.”

  “I’d break you out of Fort Knox.”

  “Don’t let me get got,” she growled.

  “Harbaugh,” he said.

  “Vamoose.”

  She slept for what felt like days. Then the actual days elongated and spread like spilt ink. Everything to read in the apartment was in Spanish, everything on television was in Spanish, and she practically learned the language in those four days, but felt as wholly isolated and cabin-feverish as she was. She kept noticing the sack with her phone in it. As she peeled an orange, as she refilled the ice tray. She had the sack open and was turning it on before she’d really decided to do it. She immediately shut it off, before her messages downloaded, but still. It boarded the network, she saw the bars, imagined she could hear it ping the cell towers. She set it on the counter. Watched the malevolent blank screen, half expecting a ring.

  He’d been gone for four enormous days. She was going stir-crazy.

  She went for a run. Yes, she was wanted for questioning by the Mexican police. But she just had to. She had to move.

  At this point in her life, she’d come to the conclusion that all running was either flight or pursuit. Or both. Running to the Michigan cabin, toward Bronwyn and his stew and abs and sex—she’d actually been in flight from a twitchy informant, a murder. True, she didn’t know at the time that Oscar was going to murder himself, not her, but the salient thing was this: if you weren’t careful, running to something or someone could deafen you to the footfalls on your heels. You had to be careful, you had to listen.

  And so now, jogging the streets of Monterrey, Harbaugh kept looking behind her and around at the foot traffic, up on the landings of the second stories of lime-green and clay-red residences, into the open corner doors of markets and auto shops, feeling a tingle at the nape of her neck, like the nip of a herd dog or a laser pointer or maybe just a blink and twitch in the eyes in the back of her head. She traced the paranoid feeling of being chased back to her suicidal informant. She saw blurs of Oscar in windows, passing cars, in doorways slightly ajar.

  She’d decided to do just a couple blocks to get a sweat going, but she kept on, sprinted until her heart raced, found herself panting in a park. When she jogged the way she’d come, everything in this direction looked altered and wrong, and she slowed to a walk, scanning for landmarks. That’s when she heard it. Footsteps. Tires. Engines behind her. It was so foolish to be out. She looked around, checked that she still had the key, and started to run in the direction of the steel magnate’s secret apartment.

  Then she saw the black SUV slow at the intersection ahead.

  A hot tingle when it lurched forward and crossed out of sight. She ran to the corner and looked, but it was gone.

  When it or one just like it reappeared a few blocks behind her, she took off at a sprint, swerving around loiterers and old women, a passel of schoolchildren let out for the day and clotting the sidewalk in groups of colorful backpacks.

  She heard turning tires chirp somewhere behind and to her left, and she had no idea how far away the apartment was or whether it would be safe anymore and she ducked into an archway that let onto a paved and abandoned courtyard. A pair of metal benches. Offices. What looked like a dentistry. A hair salon. Everything as quiet as scissors.

  She waited on a bench for nothing in particular, nothing she could place exactly, maybe just the passage of her fear, of time, and when she stood, a woman’s figure stepped out from under the archway. A man in tow. The woman small, beautiful. The man behind her, black, older than them both. Americans.

  “Diane Harbaugh,” the woman said.

  “I’m sorry,” Harbaugh said. “No.”

  “Yes. Please.” The woman gestured at the seat.

  Harbaugh did as requested. The phone, you idiot. They tracked your phone signal—

  “My name’s Samantha Carlisle. Central Intelligence Agency. That’s Dennis Bowden. Also CIA.”

  The woman set a manila folder next to Harbaugh on the bench and then took the bench opposite, a distance almost too far for conversation, arranged, it seemed, to discourage this kind of crosstalk, though Carlisle did not raise her voice when she said they didn’t do this, didn’t talk to DEA agents like this.

  The man, Bowden, stood against the wall of the archway, as though to prevent Harbaugh’s escape. But he wasn’t muscle, he had the affect of someone senior and not usually in field, not anymore. Carlisle was young and small like a dancer from Juilliard, her hair pulled back. She folded her hands on her lap.

  “What’s this?” Harbaugh gestured to the folder.

  “Transcripts.”

  “Of?”

  “Conversations Ian Carver and I have had. Take a look.”

  “You’re the polygrapher.”

  “One of them.”

  Harbaugh opened the folder. Read quickly. Carver recounting his time in Afghanistan. The pursuit team. Working in redacted places for a redacted warlord. But he’d explained this, she’d heard from his lips—

  “You’ll note his treatment of your colleagues in Karachi,” Carlisle said. “He’s all too happy to use other agencies’ assets—like yourself—for his own ends.”

  She read about the dead informants, and could feel her face flush in hot shame. Maybe for the first time. Being caught out like this, confronted, insulted, diminished. Trapped.

  “What ends would those be?” Harbaugh managed to ask.

  “The usual ones. Dollars. Pesos. Euros.”

  Carlisle made a succinct grin that disrupted her aloof beauty. A thing she’d learned young, Harbaugh guessed. A severity practiced and honed.

  Harbaugh wanted to look around for a place to flee, but resisted the urge and kept her eyes fixed in the middle distance. She breathed. When she felt like she could do so with poise, she set the folder aside, tucked her hair behind her ears, and composed her hands onto her lap like the CIA woman had done.

  “I’d never blame a woman for believing a man’s lies,” Carlisle said, leaning back and hooking her wrists over the back of the bench. “But what you should be embarrassed about is that you came all the way down here to meet with a cartel lieutenant only to get him killed. Along with an American businessman and about a dozen escaped convicts. Quite a spectacle.”

  “I didn’t kill him. I almost saved him.”

  “You really should take this as an opportunity,” Carlisle said in a therapeutic tone designed to needle and provoke, “to explore humility. Your mistakes were profound and many. No jurisdictional authority. No local backup. Was there a single protocol you followed? But now”—she bit her lip and raised an eyebrow—“look at you. Alone. Abandoned in Monterrey.”

  The idea that he wasn’t coming back had been sitting on its haunches in the back of her mind, and now it wouldn’t stop barking. Abandoned. Of course. He got you drunk for a few days and bounced.

  “So am I under arrest?”

  “You didn’t do anything illegal, did you? Not that it matters. We don’t arrest people. Whatever you did is Mexico’s problem. The DEA’s problem. Maybe State’s, I dunno. Not our problem, certainly.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “He has a long history with narcos. When Carver dragged Quincey to Tampico, we had to put eyes on him. And then after the bloodbath down there, Langley decided to pull his clearances and left him to his own resources. He’ll come crawling back, eventually.” Carlisle unhooked her hands and pressed her hands to her knees to stand. “But I’m talking to you out of professional courtesy. Warning you that he’s busted. And that this ends in the inevitable way for you.”

  “What way?”

  “I don’t know what he told you he’s doing, but he’s gone. If he contacts you, it’ll be when he’s out of options. He can’t stay in Mexico—he’s worthless to the cartels without Company assets. Though he probably has some resources salted away. Offshore accounts and such.”

  Harbaugh pointed at the transcript. �
�He says in here that he didn’t take any money—”

  “Jesus Christ, you are a dumb bitch. Let me guess—he shared Shipley’s little report with you? Their fantastic project in Afghanistan? They were ordered to shut it down, but it was just too lucrative. Whatever he said is bullshit. This is a grift. We let him play in Mexico for a bit to see what would happen. And you got all mixed up in it.”

  The man, Bowden, stepped out of the archway. “He’ll get you killed,” he said.

  He said it plainly, softly, and in a manner that was so sadly certain that she felt pitied. The shame flashed afresh in her chest and probably now dappled her neck. It happened almost like he’d simply pushed a button.

  She clocked Carlisle looking down and over at Bowden’s feet, annoyed that he’d intervened. Acting almost like she’d been scolded. Like there was a deeper disagreement about what they were after now. Or perhaps Bowden was just stepping on her toes.

  “Maybe we can help you,” he said. Again so soft you had to strain to hear him.

  “Help me what?”

  “Out,” he said. “Help you get out of . . . this.”

  Weirdly vague. Like he didn’t want to say too much.

  She suddenly realized what was happening. How many times had “Maybe I can help you” passed her lips? That glorious utterance. This man was a good spy maybe, good at running spies maybe, but he was no Midwife. No one ever says “Maybe I can help you” when they don’t need something in return. They weren’t here to warn her. Carver was lost—maybe she’d lost him too—but there was power in knowing this, power in knowing other things—

  The tunnel.

  They want the tunnel. And they don’t even know to want it.

  “I’m fine,” Harbaugh said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Don’t act like you bring something to the table,” Carlisle said.

  “I’ve been called a lot of things,” Harbaugh said, grinning like she had a secret. “But the only person who’s ever called me a dumb bitch in my entire life,” she said, dropping the transcript into a trash can, “is you.”

  “Then you’ve been underserved by everyone you’ve ever met,” Carlisle shot back, but Bowden hissed and she quit.