To The Lions - 02

by Chuck Driskell

  Justina listened to this, struggling not to appear amused. She cleared her throat and resumed her storytelling. After relaying their rather innocuous first night, she gleefully told the story of their day at the beach, and Gage’s taking a most unusual job for a large sum of money. She told her about Berga Prison, pausing when it looked like Señora Moreno was going to say something, but continuing when Señora Moreno, rapt, twirled her hand impatiently. And, of course, she detailed the few romantic encounters she’d enjoyed with Gage, watching as Señora Moreno appeared breathless, hanging on every detail.

  Finished with her story, Justina watched her landlady cross herself again, kissing her rosary and whispering a litany of thanks. Then she said, “My dear, that was beautiful. Absolutely breathtaking and, despite your wonderful imageries, I gather there are more details.”

  “Well,” Justina said, drawing it out and shrugging.

  “Have you plans tonight?”

  “No, señora.”

  “Splendid. Please finish planting your flowers—don’t press the soil down too hard…leave it loose—then go and get cleaned up. Be at my house at eight, where you and I will do something I rarely get to do any more.”

  “And that is?”

  “We’ll drink fine wine and cook a feast just for the both of us. While we cook and drink, I want to treat you to the music of my favorite classical pianists, Valentina Lisitsa and Yuja Wang, both of them as spectacular as that story you just told me. Afterward, we will retell your story of Gage, with additional backstory on you and more detail about this prison…as well as the, well, the steamy areas of the story.”

  “It’s a date.”

  Señora Moreno clasped her hands, placing them under her chin as if she were a child, eagerly awaiting Christmas morning.

  After finishing her flowers, Justina craved a cigarette. So she wrote Gage a letter.

  * * *

  The following day, after morning chow, a very sore Gage trudged back to his cell while Salvador “attended to some business.” Feeling feverish and in a state of torpor, Gage lay on his bunk with a wet towel over his head. In his sickly state, he worried that he might be a tantalizingly easy target for someone. Well, there’s nothing I can do about it right now, he reasoned, closing his eyes, hoping that there was some manly prison code that frowned upon inmates taking out a wounded duck.

  Around mid-morning, he heard the casual shuffle of sandals scraping into the cell. Blinking sleep from his eyes, Gage realized he had dozed off. When his eyes cleared, he saw Cesar Navarro standing in his cell.

  Gage sat up, wincing from the stab of pain. He’d been shown dozens of pictures of Cesar Navarro at the meeting with his father and Cortez Redon. But he was taken aback at the way prison had affected Cesar’s appearance.

  Roughly five-and-a-half feet tall, Cesar probably weighed 150 pounds. He and Salvador, in regard to size, were close matches. In the pictures Gage had seen, Cesar had once had wavy sandy hair, worn down to his shoulders like that of a soccer player. Now, his hair was buzzed to his scalp, showing only perhaps a week’s worth of growth. Cesar’s thin arms were covered in sleeves of tattoos. Large bags drooped under his eyes, far too heavy and dark for a man who of only thirty-four years of age. His prominent nose that seemed to fit his face so well in the pictures now looked oversized and cartoonish and, when he spoke, Gage noticed a broken tooth.

  “My father sent you,” Cesar said in a soft voice.

  Gage carefully lowered himself from the top bunk, holding the bedframe as the blood rushed away from his head. “Did your father tell you that?”

  Cesar shook his head, a sneer on his face. “I can always tell.”

  “Perdón?”

  “I said, I can always tell.”

  “Always?”

  “Yeah, you deaf?”

  Alarms. Loud, cacophonous klaxons clanged in Gage’s mind.

  “What do you mean you can always tell?”

  “Not one of you has fit in here,” Cesar growled, the tendons in his neck showing with his strain. “It’s obvious as shit and if I wasn’t smart it would get me killed. I don’t need you looking after me, pelotudo.”

  Gage’s chest tightened from the sudden onset of stress brought about by Cesar’s words. “Cesar, please tell me exactly what you’re talking about. Are there others, here to protect you, besides me? Because, if so, I need to know that.”

  Navarro’s only son cocked his head. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “That devious old bastard. He thinks if he tells someone like you the real truth they’ll cut and run.”

  “And what is the real truth?”

  “Here I am, papa, doing your dirty work again,” Cesar spoke to the concrete ceiling before his eyes came back down. “There’ve been three men before you, all sent here with the mission of protecting papa’s little boy.” Cesar studied Gage enigmatically, then showed his broken tooth in a wicked smile. “Each man, mi amigo, now lives with the maggots.”

  Wanting to respond, wanting to grab the diminutive Cesar by his sneering head and judo flip him out of the cell, Gage instead shut his eyes and regulated his breathing.

  “I can see you’re upset,” Cesar remarked, crossing the cell. He leaned against the wall, removing one of Salvador’s books, thumbing through it before dropping it to the floor, holding his fingers open as if he’d been handling a soiled diaper. “Understand this, gabacho, I do not want, or need, your help.”

  Gage didn’t respond.

  “So you do me a favor, faggot…you stay the hell away from me.”

  “Cesar…”

  “Don’t say my name again, puta.”

  Backing away, Cesar made double hand pistols before firing them at Gage. Then, when he grinned, Gage realized his tooth wasn’t broken—it was capped in gold, along with several others. Outside the cell, when Cesar turned and walked away, several prisoners greeted him, slapping hands before they descended the stairs together. The other prisoners wore the distinctive neck tattoo of a gang: a long barreled revolver, canted upward with smoke trailing from its barrel. There was an “L” emblazoned on the grip of the pistol.

  He’d seen many others with the same tattoo.

  The gang, as Gage had read before coming here, was called Los Leones. It was the largest gang in Berga and the fastest growing crime syndicate in all of Spain.

  Wide awake now, Gage shuffled from his cell, noticing a few nearby inmates back away. He crossed the concourse to the mesh fencing, staring downward as Cesar waded into a large group of prisoners. A dangerous-looking bunch, they seemed to welcome him, laughing and making gestures common to gangs the world over.

  A half-hour later, when Salvador returned, Gage played dumb and asked him about the pistol tattoo with an “L” on the grip.

  Salvador snorted, picking up his fallen book, staring at it a moment, then placing it back on the shelf.

  “What about the tattoo?”

  Head whipping around, Salvador said, “Come on, man. Don’t act like you don’t know.”

  “I don’t. Tell me.”

  Glancing outside the cell, Salvador walked to Gage and stood very close, lowering his voice to a whisper. “That’s the mark of Los Leones. My banda, Los Sementales, are less than fifteen men,” he said, holding his hands close together before opening his arms wide. “Los Leones number in the hundreds. If you see anyone with that tattoo, turn and walk the other way.”

  “They’re the biggest gang here?”

  Again Salvador checked the entry to the cell. He turned back, saying, “The biggest here and in every Catalonian prison. But now they’re in and out, growing everywhere.” He cocked his head. “And if you were pinched for murder, I would think you would have known that.”

  “I was convicted in Melilla.”

  “Where?”

  “Melilla, it’s a Spanish territory in Morocco.”

  “Morocco? In Africa?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is Spain in Africa?”


  Gage shook his head. “It’s just a territory of Spain. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Why you asking?”

  “A few men came by while you were gone. They had the Leones tattoo.”

  Salvador straightened. “What did they say? Did they mention my name?”

  “No, Salvador. They were here to see me.”

  “What did they say to you?”

  “Not much.”

  “But they were here to see you?”

  “Yes.”

  Salvador closed his eyes for a moment, his hand going to his forehead. “What did they want?”

  Gage sat down on Salvador’s bed. “They gave me a warning.”

  “A warning about what?”

  “They just told me to watch my step.”

  His chin tilting upward, Salvador closed his eyes, crossing himself praying aloud. He prayed for Gage’s salvation.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In Berga, down a locked hallway from the main bay, next to the laundry, was a storage room. Teeming with linens, blankets, and towels at the front, the rear of the room was constructed of unpainted cinderblock. The back of the storage room doubled as an office. On a table was a small television, numerous packs of playing cards and several bottles of liquor. Situated in the middle of the rear space was a card table with four folding chairs. And sitting at the table was the most powerful prisoner in all of Berga, a man named Sancho Molina. Though his name was Sancho, no one dared call him that. He went by his nickname of El Toro, a moniker given to him for his powerful build as well as his bullish nature. To match his name, El Toro wore a gold ring, pierced between his nostrils. It was one of his many trademarks in Berga.

  In front of El Toro was a bottle of Portuguese ginja and a shot glass. Standing before him was Cesar Navarro and one of the Berga guards. Cesar stood there looking every bit the part of a man on trial, waiting while El Toro took shots. The guard, despite being on the payroll of Los Leones, was a proud man and, though he didn’t come out and say it, refused to stand before El Toro. He’d moved off to the side and was twirling his baton, smoking a cigarette.

  El Toro poured a third shot of the reddish-gold berry liqueur, gunning it and baring his teeth afterward. He’d listened to what Cesar had said and ingested his shots while he considered it.

  “How many days ago was this?”

  “About a week.”

  “You’re sure this is the man your father hired?” El Toro asked. He’d been personally told by Xavier Zambrano that there was an American coming to aid Cesar, but had no way of being absolutely sure Gregory Harris was the man. There had been Americans in Berga before, and a mix-up was certainly possible.

  “Yes, El Toro,” Cesar breathed with reverence. “This is him. He essentially came out and admitted it.”

  Turning his eyes to the guard, El Toro said, “And you?”

  “His cell is clean. I checked his shit when he arrived.”

  “Did he plug one on the way in?” El Toro asked, tugging on his nose ring.

  “He was X-rayed and the doc did a cavity search,” the guard said with a trace of irritation, dropping the cigarette to the floor and grinding it under his boot. “I told you, he doesn’t have a phone.”

  “Have you tossed his cell since?”

  “No,” the guard snapped.

  “You giving me an attitude?”

  “No.”

  El Toro eyed the guard from the corners of his eyes. “Your name is Pendulo…you got hired about a year ago.”

  “Yeah,” the guard answered, maintaining his superior air.

  “You live in Avià, don’t you?”

  The question visibly shook Pendulo. “Why do you ask…and how did you know where I live?”

  El Toro straightened. “Do not ever question me.”

  “Yes, jefe. I am sorry.”

  “Now, answer my question.”

  The guard licked his lips. “Yes, I live in Avià.”

  “And you have a wife and a young child, if my memory serves me? A boy?”

  “Yes, he’s two.”

  “I’ve seen a picture of your wife.” El Toro divined her by staring at the ceiling. “A tiny lady, if I remember correctly. A peasant paleta for sure, but young and firm and attractive.”

  The only sound for fifteen seconds was the washers and dryers tumbling in the adjacent room.

  El Toro poured another shot, guzzling it in a flash. “Either you get on board with me, Pendulo, or I will have your little wife brought to me, kicking and screaming, while some of my friends look after your son.” He cocked his eyebrow. “Get it?”

  There was an obvious battle of emotions on the guard’s face.

  El Toro hitched his head in a dismissive gesture. “Now, get the hell out of here.”

  When the guard was gone, El Toro turned to Cesar. “So you told the American about the others? Was he surprised?”

  “Shellshocked.”

  “He needs that phone,” El Toro whispered to himself.

  “Yes, he does. He didn’t know about the others before me, and he didn’t know my position with Los Leones.”

  “We will need to watch him closely, but we don’t want to intervene. He must get that phone.” El Toro nodded at Cesar. “You’ve done well.”

  “Thank you, jefe,” Cesar breathed with reverence. “What do I do now?”

  “If you see the American, tell him you won’t protect him much longer. Tell him you are a Lion, and protected by Lions. Tell him that by being here, he is inviting death. That will get him moving.”

  “I will do as you say.”

  El Toro politely dismissed Cesar. As soon as Cesar walked down the hall to the main bay, El Toro removed his mobile phone from his pants and called his local lieutenant. The lieutenant, also in Los Leones, was situated in the town of Berga to handle items outside the prison walls, mainly the importation of drugs. But occasionally he handled other items.

  Such as this.

  “Do you know anything about a satellite phone coming in to an American?” El Toro asked.

  “Yeah. That’s in this week’s shipment, from Xavier himself,” the lieutenant said. “I would have rushed it but Xavier said it was important that it come in as normal, so that no one would be suspicious.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Perfecto.”

  “You need anything else?”

  El Toro was about to hang up, but was struck by an inspiration. “Yeah. There’s a young guard here named Pendulo. He’s a hick and not very smart, but he’s too proud. Go to his wife and quietly offer her money to come and visit me in the wood shop. Tell her I’m the top Lion here and we will see that her husband is occupied during the visit.” El Toro smiled. “Tell her I’m in love with her and I want to start a sultry, passionate affair with her and give her all my seed.”

  “Okay, jefe,” the lieutenant chuckled. “When would you like her?”

  “As soon as possible.” El Toro thumbed the phone off, pouring another shot and leaning back with it. His first thoughts were with the American, and his association with Ernesto Navarro. Xavier had been most pointed, dangerous even, when he’d told El Toro that the American had to call Navarro by the satellite phone.

  Then, setting those thoughts aside, El Toro thought of the guard’s young wife. Though he always reviewed the backgrounds of everyone who was on the take, he’d quickly dismissed the wife until today, when Pendulo tried to be a man. Well, now he would pay for that.

  El Toro grasped himself, warm with the thought of a new affair, despite the fact that the wife was nothing more than a rural peasant. “She’ll come,” he whispered before taking a sip of the liqueur.

  “She’ll come again and again.”

  Life was good.

  * * *

  Over the balance of the previous week, Gage had grown accustomed to the Berga routine. As with nearly every major injury he’d ever sustained, the stab wounds had reached their worst point on the third day after the incident.
Now, though they still burned and appeared semi-wet when he viewed them in the mirror, some healing seemed to have taken place as the redness around the wounds had turned a healthier pink. Relieving Gage the most was the fact that there had been no more fever.

  All in all, he felt much better.

  An elderly prisoner shuffled by, dropping two letters on the ground at the entrance to the cell. Salvador retrieved them, handing one to Gage. Gage eyed the return address, a made-up post office box in Barcelona. The letter was postmarked Sabadell, which Gage knew to be just north of Barcelona.

  Good girl.

  He tore into the envelope.

  Dear Gregory,

  Every tick of the clock brings me a second closer to you. I will never forget our last night, our glistening bodies joined together as one, hearing your breath in my ears. It was heaven, and we will experience it again.

  We will.

  Be strong. Worry about your situation there and don’t trouble your mind worrying about me. I am fine and have made a wonderful new friend in our landlady. I remind her of her daughter and find her amazing to be around. Maybe I can learn from her and, when you return, I can become a real estate queen like she is. Ha!

  This may sound improper, Gregory, but it’s the truth. Every night when I lie down in bed, I will think of you in the most intimate way. It’s my connection with you and, I want you to know, I would wait for you until the end of my life if need be.

  You saved me. And that was the first building block of my love for you.

  I do love you.

  In sweet love,

  Justina

  P.S. My English has improved but I did use the online thesaurus for this note. Ha again!

  While Salvador lounged on his bunk with his letter, occasionally laughing to himself, Gage reread the letter before tucking it away in his personal things. Feeling a large measure of stubble on his face, Gage decided to shave. He removed his shaving tackle from his container, immediately noticing how heavy the shaving cream felt. Deftly, Gage unscrewed the bottom just a fraction, pleased that his satellite phone had arrived. He could now make plans to call Navarro.