Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Razor wire screwed its way across the wall, catching red glimmers of dawn. Constructed in 1952 on the hardscrabble edge of the Atacama, the Región de Antofagasta penitentiary looked like something bolted to the desert floor, its towers fixing the cellblocks and grassless yard to the earth.

  “Scary damn place,” Ben observed.

  With Gabe looking over his shoulder, Ben had conducted research on the Chilean correctional system through various Spanish-language Web sites. He now knew that the penitentiary was privatized in 2004 and had since dealt with two riots, a serious kitchen fire, and a government investigation into healthcare standards stemming from questionable living conditions. The facility was designed to house eight hundred inmates and currently boiled with four times as many, a gray cauldron over a constant fire. Ben and the others had ignored Fontecilla’s counsel and left the relative safety of the motel to permit Gabe his rendezvous with the devil, one which they’d conspicuously failed to mention to the police.

  “Maximum security,” Luke said. “That’s what this is, isn’t it? Maximum security?”

  Ben sat behind the wheel of the rental car. “Evil-looking, to be sure.”

  “Like something on Mars!”

  “You think?”

  “Maybe the bad guys built it there, next to one of the valleys.”

  “An awfully impressive structure for the likes of Martian architecture, and probably not very practical.”

  “Maybe the bad guys didn’t build it. Maybe it’s the first prison on Mars.”

  From the backseat, Mira said, “How long do you think this will take?”

  “Oh, I reckon he’ll be back fairly soon. Visitors who aren’t immediate family or lawyers can stay only fifteen minutes. And when I was on the phone, I got the impression that Lepin hasn’t received any guests in quite some time. Not surprising, seeing that his countrymen consider him reprehensible for what he did. They wanted to burn him at the stake.”

  “What did he do?” Luke asked.

  “A lot of nasty things to a lot of good people.”

  “Like the Martian does?”

  “Yeah, son. Just like.” Ben stared at the prison compound. Two chain-link fences, each fifteen feet high, formed a double barrier around the wall. Between the fences lay a no-man’s-land of concertina wire. He wondered how long it would take for the settlers on Mars to bring such concepts to their new world. At what point in his interplanetary travels would man move beyond the need for locks and keys?

  “‘Stone walls do not a prison make,’” he said, mostly to himself, “‘nor iron bars a cage.’”

  “What’s that mean?” Luke asked.

  “Something old Rich Lovelace once wrote, far more profound than anything I’ve ever pushed out of my pen.”

  “But what’s it mean?”

  Mira intervened. “It means that some people’s imagination helps them to be free even when they can’t go outside.”

  “Oh.”

  “And it means the opposite,” Ben added, “that certain fools who shall remain nameless can get themselves all locked up tight in their minds, even when their bodies aren’t locked up at all.”

  “Like who?”

  “Formerly, yours truly. But like the man said, I am free at last.” He smiled and patted the notebook on the seat beside him, though the smile itself was feigned. He was worried for Gabe inside the prison, for Jonah and Donner at the police safe house—they’d arrived from ACEF this morning—and for Mira and Luke right here in the car. None of them would see it coming if the rifleman fired at them from afar. None of them had the protection that bulletproofing provided.

  “Lucky me,” Ben said, and then waited for Gabe to emerge.

  * * *

  If he were to survive the coming fray, he would have to make his heart like this soil, the stuff of ancient iron.

  Gabe recalled Luke’s words as he sat on one side of a glass-divided booth. The ceiling was cracked and painted a pale green that made him think of Victorian-era sanitariums. There were no windows. Mounted on the partition wall was an outdated Bakelite handset, reminding him of the blocky phone that used to hang in his grandmother’s parlor. Someone had used a black marker to write what appeared to be a poem on the little wall, though Gabe could make out only a few of the Spanish words. A pair of ceiling fans stirred the dull air.

  Was his heart like ancient iron? Or at least close enough?

  “Guess we’ll see,” he said, quietly enough that the guard behind him couldn’t hear.

  From deeper in the building came the subdued sounds of thousands of incarcerated men, seething in their discontent. Even from here, Gabe sensed the coiled energy of their words, as if they tipped toward critical mass and would soon lay siege from within. Somewhere in the orgy of their mounting pressure was the man Gabe had come to see, a fascist despised by his countrymen, as notorious as they came.

  When Micha Lepin suddenly sat down on the opposite side of the ballistic glass, Gabe’s first thought was Speak of the devil, and the devil appears.

  The old man’s shoulders were as broad as a wrestler’s, but one arm ended in a withered hand, a claw that was curled and spotted like something subjected to radiation. He wore a blue denim shirt, open at the throat to reveal a cuneiform of partially seen tattoos. His white hair concealed his ears, the part down the center of his scalp so true that it appeared to be a seam along the center of his skull.

  Lepin stared at him through the glass.

  Gabe stared back, wondering what the man looked like. Was he as ugly as his crimes? Or defiantly handsome in his seventy-plus years? Was his face carved with the canals of age? Hardened by prison life? Or was he smooth and beguiling?

  Gabe concentrated on keeping his hand from shaking and revealing his anxiety as he reached for the phone.

  Lepin mirrored his movements, and the two men sat there with the black receivers pressed to their ears.

  “Do you speak English?” Gabe asked. He already knew the answer to that, as Lepin’s Wikipedia entry stated that he’d attended graduate school in chemistry at Berkeley.

  The man breathed into the phone.

  “Lepin?”

  “Who are you?”

  Gabe had been expecting a geriatric rasp but instead heard the throaty snarl of a man who might have been half Lepin’s age. “My name’s Gabriel Traylin.”

  “Yankee?”

  “That’s right.” Though he’d been rehearsing this interview all morning, now that he was here in the trenches, facing the man through fingerprinted glass, his practiced lines eluded him. “I’m going to tell you something that you may or may not know, and then I’m going to ask you something in return.”

  “I don’t know you. You some kind of reporter? Some kind of piss-ant snoop? I wasn’t aware that anybody gave a rat’s ass anymore.”

  “Actually, I’m an astronomer. Or at least I was, until your son-in-law’s brother was murdered in front of me. They fired me after that.”

  This statement had its intended effect. Lepin turned his head gently to one side. Holding the receiver with his shoulder, he used his functioning hand to fish a pair of pince-nez glasses from his breast pocket. When he donned them, it gave his face a welcoming bit of dimension.

  “I guess that means you’re listening,” Gabe said.

  “I have two son-in-laws. They both despise me. I don’t ever see either one.”

  “I’m talking about Sachin Olivares.”

  “And?”

  “Sachin has a brother, Alban.”

  “So what?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Lepin lowered the phone. He tapped it on the plastic desktop, saying nothing, chewing on his thoughts. He might have been contemplating anything from Alban’s death to what he’d eaten for breakfast that morning in the prison galley. Then, with snakelike suddenness, he leaned toward the glass partition and said seven words into the phone: “Do you know what’s happening to me?”

  Though Gabe gain
ed no clues from the man’s expression, he heard the shift in his voice, from belligerent to terrified. “Uh, I’m not sure…”

  “For Christ’s sake, make him stop.”

  The change in the man’s demeanor was so extreme that Gabe lost his footing. Whatever he’d scripted for this was lost.

  “Please,” Lepin said. “Please…”

  Gabe pulled himself back to fighting form, at least as much as he could, considering his surprise at the pleading tone in the man’s voice. “Who are you talking about? Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll … I’ll do what I can.”

  Lepin was so close to the glass that his words formed as a fog. “You listen to me. You’re with him, aren’t you? You’re here to pick the goddamn skin from my bones. Fine. You can have it. Tell him that. You want me dead? I’ll pay somebody in here to open up my jugular with a fuckin’ fork, but you have to make him stop.”

  Gabe felt more helpless by the second. The game was being played with rules he didn’t understand, by players with histories he didn’t comprehend. Micha Lepin was a war criminal who’d aided a despot by torturing and eventually disposing of political dissidents and others who posed a threat to the regime. He used drugs and biological agents in his work, the stuff of nightmares, yet here he sat, begging Gabe for mercy.

  “Tell him I’ll do anything,” Lepin said.

  “I don’t work for anyone. I’m here on my own.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m alone.”

  “Then what the hell do you want?”

  “Is Nicky Lepin your grandson?”

  “One of them, yes.”

  “I found him in the desert. Or what was left of him.”

  Lepin dropped the phone. He put his head in his hand and closed his eyes, screwing his forehead against his palm.

  Gabe waited. Over Lepin’s left shoulder, a black-clad guard stood erect and watching.

  Lepin snatched up the phone. “He’ll burn in hell for this. Just like me.”

  “There was also a woman.”

  Lepin gripped the receiver so tightly that his fingers turned the color of bone.

  “Do you know who she was?” Gabe asked.

  Lepin breathed in and out, in and out.

  “Who was she?” Gabe demanded.

  “My … my daughter.”

  The sympathy that swelled in Gabe’s heart surprised him. By all accounts inhuman, Lepin was as wretched as Vlad the Impaler, but Gabe couldn’t force himself to despise the man, not now, not after seeing the woman in the wagon and hearing the grief in her father’s voice.

  “He took them both,” Lepin said. “He took them both, and … and he sends me letters.”

  Gabe bent closer to the glass, so that only centimeters separated him from the man who was rapidly dissolving on the other side. “If you want me to help you, you’re going to have to tell me everything. Do you understand? I’ve been in touch with the police—”

  “They can’t do shit.”

  “What about these letters? The cops can use them to trace him.”

  Lepin shook his head violently. He dropped the receiver long enough to wipe his eyes with his working hand, then picked it up again. “The letters are codes. They mean nothing to anyone else. Listen to me. Paulina stole my notebook, and she must have given it to him. Everything was in there. And now he’s using my own code to tell me about how he’s hurt my family, what he’s done to them…”

  “Who? Who is he? Why is he doing this?”

  “He read it in my notebook, my journal. He knows about silencio.”

  “Silencio? Silence? You mean he’s keeping quiet about something?”

  “You have to make him stop, please, if he wants me dead, tell him I’ll do it, but for the love of God, he’s got to stop before my entire family’s gone.”

  Lepin’s reaction had not gone unnoticed by the guards. He and Gabe were being scrutinized by officers on both sides of the partition. No doubt they were also listening in. Everybody knew that prison phones were party lines.

  Gabe did his best to stay in front of what was a rapidly disintegrating situation. There was no way to tell who could be trusted, which meant he had to walk the line between getting Lepin to talk and keeping his secrets from the guards. He chose the safest path he could find. “Why did he kidnap your daughter and grandson?”

  “It’s my fault. They’re dead because of me…”

  “Why?”

  “Why the fuck do you think? Revenge.”

  “Revenge for what?”

  Lepin hacked back a mouthful of snot, swallowed, and took several long breaths. He shifted even closer to the window. Then he revealed something that Gabe suspected he concealed from everyone else in the prison. He moved the fingers of his debilitated hand with perfect dexterity. He wasn’t quite as handicapped as he let on. As Gabe watched, Lepin flashed a rapid series of numbers, using his body to shield his gestures from watchful eyes: 1-3-5-4-1.

  He repeated the sequence, then said, “You’ve got to do something. I have one grandson left. He’s my older daughter’s boy, my little Nicky’s cousin. He has a good life, a good father. The same thing will happen to him unless you make it stop.”

  “I don’t know if I can…”

  “He’s all I’ve got.” Lepin cried freely now. He sobbed so forcefully that his shoulders shook. “Please, mister, find him and keep him safe, and tell him I’m sorry—okay? I’m so, so sorry…”

  The guard behind Lepin approached. Whatever he said was muffled by the glass, but Gabe figured it out. Time was up.

  “Wait!” Gabe was about to lose the one lead he had. “Not yet! I need to know who he is, why he’s doing this.” Had he been able, he would’ve reached through the phone and grabbed the weeping old man by the throat, forcing the truth from him. He flattened his hand against the window. “Give me something to go on.”

  “I already have.” He hung up.

  Gabe sat there mutely while Lepin stood up. The guard glared. Lepin wiped his nose on his sleeve. Gabe had never wanted to see someone’s face as badly as he did now.

  It wasn’t meant to be. Lepin, a sudden hunchback, turned and permitted himself to be led away. Gabe suspected he would never see him again.

  Slowly he removed his hand from the glass. A ghostly impression of his fingers remained, as if mimicking the numbers Lepin had signed.

  “One, three, five, four, one,” Gabe said to himself so as not to forget. “One, three, five, four, one.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “What’s dee-port mean?” Luke asked.

  Mira produced what felt like a smile on its last leg. Running from murderers and visiting foreign prisons had rendered that expression nearly extinct. “When someone gets deported, it means the government asks them to leave the country.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t belong. They’re a citizen of some other place.”

  “So they have to go home?”

  “Yep.”

  “Even if they don’t want to?”

  Mira and Ben had been talking about consequences. About the possibility of being forcibly returned to the States. Luke had missed a few of the finer details. “Most people who get deported don’t have a choice. And before you ask, no, we’re not getting booted out of Chile. At least not yet.” As she said it, she glanced at Ben, who was looking over the top of his notebook at her. “Isn’t that right, Ben? Nobody’s deporting us, are they?”

  “You asking for Luke’s benefit or your own?”

  “Most of the time,” she told him, “those benefits are one and the same. Twins are like that.”

  “So I’ve heard.” He lowered his notes and gazed for a time from the motel window.

  They’d returned from the prison to find the attorney and his staff from the embassy waiting for them. Gabe had been gone for over an hour since then, whisked away by the lawyers, and the rest of them were strangely nervous without him. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange. After all, he was the catalyst of this Twili
ght Zone that Mira’s life had become, so it only stood to reason that his absence would leave her a little directionless. “Any luck on those numbers?”

  Ben gave the notepad a shake. “One, three, five, four, one. Too short to be a phone number, too long to be a PIN. Could be the beginning of an address. Hell, maybe it’s the number of a bank deposit box full of stolen diamonds, incriminating photos, and purloined letters.”

  “It’s five digits long. Are there zip codes in Chile?”

  “Maybe the number of people the Martian killed,” Luke ventured. “That’s a lot!”

  “Let’s hope not,” Mira said. Her brother had spent the last half hour telling her of Tilanna and Vanchette, the grizzled astronaut who’d taught Dycar the dual arts of geophysics and gunplay. Apparently Vanchette had an idea how to infiltrate the base of the Kanyri insurgents … a base that now bore an understandable resemblance to the penitentiary they’d visited this morning.

  “You guys keep writing,” she said, getting up and heading for the bathroom. “Just remember me when it comes time for splitting up royalty checks. I play the part of the long-suffering sister.”

  “Sisters stink,” Luke said with a laugh.

  Just for grins, Mira flipped him off.

  Luke’s eyes widened so much they filled his face. He put a hand over his mouth. But behind his fingers, he was smiling.

  “Haven’t seen that in a while, have you?” She winked at him and closed the door.

  Luke clapped, amused by it all. Through the door she heard him say, “Did you see what she did, Ben?”

  “You mean the old one-fingered salute? I’ve seen that plenty of times in my day, and I’m usually on the receiving end…”

  Mira turned on the water and stared downward as it plunged into the sink. If she was Tilanna, then she could only assume that Ben was playing the part of Vanchette. Subconsciously her brother was telling their tale as it happened, transposing it to the battlegrounds of Mars. But if that was true, then what character was Luke’s?

  And what of Gabe Traylin?

  Mira bent down and cupped water to her face, enjoying its cold bite. She needed to powder her nose, as the old saying went. After the authorities had escorted them from ACEF, they’d been without their personal effects until a squad car finally delivered them. Since then, Mira couldn’t get enough of her moisturizer and her twenty-four-hour, hypoallergenic deodorant. These small things grounded her, even when the rest of her was tracking the skies like a let-go balloon, a note tied to its string reading SAVE ME.