by Dick Wolf
Fisk’s eyebrows shot up at the gory image. Garza winced.
“Sorry,” she said. “What about you?”
“About me? You can look me up on Wikipedia.”
“Yes?” She smiled. “Is it accurate?”
“No.” His turn to smile. “What about you?”
“Am I on Wikipedia?” she asked.
“I don’t know. We could check.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“So?”
She squirmed a little.
“You don’t like talking about yourself. I imagine there’s quite a story in there. How you ended up doing this kind of work,” he said.
Her eyes darkened. She actually looked pained.
“I’m not putting the thumbscrews on you,” he said. “We’re just making conversation. I think.”
She seemed to be trying to maintain her formidable front. But cracks were forming, as though she was getting tired of the strain.
After a moment she said, “Okay. Yes. There is a story.”
Then she clammed up again.
“Waiting.” Fisk let a hint of a smile appear on his lips.
She seemed to be considering whether she wanted to open up to him or not. Before she could make up her mind whether to answer him, the server arrived and showed Garza the label, unscrewed the cork from the bottle of San Felipe, poured a bit, let her taste. She smiled and nodded, and he completed her pour, and Fisk’s. He asked about food, but they demurred. He came with a bowl of glorified Chex mix and left them talking over a hissing candle.
Fisk watched Garza drink. She appreciated the vintage, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, there was the barest gleam showing.
“Your English is very good,” said Fisk, trying to start her off. “Schooling?”
“My father went to graduate school here. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So he sent me to the American school in Mexico City.”
Fisk took another sip of wine and then set the glass aside so he could focus on her. “It must be hard, though. There can’t be many people like you in the Mexican police.”
“Like me?”
“Female. Incorruptible. At your level.”
She shrugged, tossing that away.
“I get it,” said Fisk. “I’ll stop. I’m not in the habit of talking about myself much either. That counselor I mentioned, the therapist. Like pulling teeth with pliers. Something about it. As though once I start talking about myself, I’ll overindulge and that will be all I talk about.”
“It’s lonely.”
“Therapy?”
“No. The job. For me. You asked.”
“Lonely, yeah.” He nodded. “It’s lonely as hell sometimes.”
“You found someone on the force you could confide in.”
Fisk nodded, trying not to look forlorn. The candlelight, the red wine, the lounge chatter around them.
“I envy that very much,” she said. “I have never found such a person.”
“Never?”
“I’ve dated. A few men in Mexico City over the years. But they were always lawyers, dentists. Once a political functionary—never again.” A brief smile. “Somehow they all seemed like boys—smooth, soft, talky—but when it came right down to it, barely competent to cross a street safely. You can say what you will about the men in my unit, the ones I surround myself with . . . but they are men.”
“None for you?” he said.
She shook her head strenuously. “I cannot. It is hard enough maintaining my position. To do that would weaken me irreparably. Once they see me as anything other than their boss, I will lose command. That is my trap.”
“Trap? That sounds harsh.”
“I may look like a born cop, but . . .” She shook her head, her hair shifting around the sides of her face. “When I was at university, I was going to be an artist. Until I realized I had no talent. I shouldn’t say that. There was talent. But there was no talent. I had a bit of a crisis. Who am I? Why am I here? Difficult questions, even at that ridiculously young age.”
“True,” he said.
“I switched to law. I finished my degree, all the while knowing that I would never be happy as a lawyer. But I had gone too far down the road by that time. I worked briefly in the Justice Ministry. One day I went out with the Policía Federal on a raid. The first time I went out, I thought: This is it! I quit my job that day and signed up for the police academy.”
“Really?” said Fisk. Her story seemed to take some abrupt turns. “How was that?”
“Honestly? Awful. It wasn’t being a woman that was the worst. You are operating under a misconception there. There are actually quite a few women in the PF.”
“Then what was it?”
“In the United States, you maintain the fiction that there are no class divisions in your country. But in Mexico, there’s no fiction, no papering over the fact that some people are rich and some are dirt poor. Working people are very happy to hate the rich down there. My father is an affluent man. I suppose you could even call him rich. He was in the electronics assembly business. Owned a couple of maquiladora factories up by the border. Circuit boards for refrigerators and toasters and things like that. Eventually he sold out to a big Korean company.” For a moment she looked sad. “We are not close. He’s getting on in years now, but he’s on his second marriage. Has a couple of young kids. His wife is younger than me. We speak . . . but only occasionally.
“Anyway, to return to my story—the other girls in the Policía Federal, they all hated me. Constant hazing. One time they held me down at night and beat me up a little and shaved my head. That sort of thing. I got my revenge by beating them at everything. I shot straighter, I trained harder, I studied more diligently. And once I was out of the academy and on duty, I was the first one into every room, the first one to grab a perpetrator, the first into the line of fire. I was like a tiger.” She looked grimly at the bottles on the other side of the bar. “I progressed very quickly through the ranks. But I never let my guard down. Not with anyone. Not ever.”
Fisk studied her carefully. He couldn’t quite figure it out—but it seemed to him that some facts had gone AWOL here. There was some part of the story that she wasn’t telling him. It was the interrogator in him. He wanted to push, but could not.
“Eventually they started calling me the Ice Queen. They don’t say it to my face, of course. At first it was an insult. But I think that over time they have come to have a certain fondness for me. I hope so, anyway.” Her eyes were hooded. “It’s so hard to maintain your integrity in Mexico. The corruption among the police is unimaginable. But men have a hunger for purity, for goodness. It preys on their souls to take money, to do things for evil men. So I think—I hope—that they are able to look at her, their Ice Queen, and say, ‘If she can do it, if she can remain pure . . . then so can I.’ ”
“Her,” Fisk said. “You referred to yourself as ‘her.’ ”
She frowned, looking at her half-empty glass as though blaming it. “Yes. Well, in a manner of speaking, she is a character I invented.” Her frown went away and she smiled, but without warmth. “If you had known me fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have recognized me. I was . . . she was . . .” Cecilia Garza looked at Fisk sharply. A sudden change had come over her, a stiffness, a defensiveness, like the armor was suddenly clanking into place again. “I don’t like this conversation.”
Fisk could see what it was that angered her. There were two versions of this woman hiding inside one body. She and Fisk might have shared similarly unusual cop biographies. But they weren’t the same. Fisk had never really felt the way she obviously did. Had he avoided certain topics of conversation once he joined the force? Had he concealed the fact that his father had left him a trust fund—however modest it was? Had he been slow to parade his ability to speak five languages in front of other cops? Sure. There were things he didn’t talk about when he went out for a drink with the guys. He skipped the stories about vacations in the south of Fran
ce when he was a kid. But he’d never felt like Jeremy Fisk was an invented character. Quite the reverse. In a lot of ways he felt like he’d only discovered the true Jeremy Fisk when he’d left the world of Ivy Leaguers and jet-setters.
It must have been very difficult to be Cecilia Garza.
She drew herself up very straight in her chair. Suddenly she seemed distant. “Look, perhaps this was a mistake, Detective. Virgilio is gone, and . . . here I am, drinking wine. With you.”
Fisk said, “That doesn’t seem like a bad thing, necessarily. We’re not going out dancing.”
Garza shook her head, as though to say, This is not what I do. “Again, I want to apologize for my rudeness earlier. It was uncalled for.”
Not only had her words gone formal, her voice had gotten hard. Even her accent had gotten stronger, as though her entire being were drifting back toward Mexico.
She pushed back her chair and stood.
“It’s getting late, Detective.”
Fisk extended his hand, motioning for her to stop. He almost pulled it back again, once he realized that . . . he did not want her to go.
“Don’t rush off,” he said. “Finish your wine, at least.”
She dug into her handbag, pulling out a twenty-dollar bill.
Fisk said, “You better not leave that here.”
She started to, then put it back inside her bag.
He said, “I think you’re running away, not walking.”
Her face grew masklike. “Is that therapy talk?”
“It’s real talk.”
“Good night.”
CHAPTER 49
Cecilia Garza was so angry, she was trembling.
Standing there, waiting for the elevator, not even remembering what floor her room was on. Tasting the Malbec on her tongue.
For a moment there, she’d thought that he was different. For a moment, she’d thought that they shared something. Two cops. Two people with similar burdens. Two people on opposite sides of the same border.
And then there had been the expression in his eyes. It was as though he was looking through the surface of her skin, like her face was made of glass and he was seeing right through it, seeing deeper, seeing the real Cecilia Garza.
She was no fool. She knew how men looked at her—how they had always looked. Women, too. The thing that made men gravitate toward her, she had found a way to make it useful. To counteract their hunger with starvation. To give them nothing and make them accept it.
One of the great reliefs of being in the PF was that once you were geared up—vest, helmet, mask, gun, boots—everyone looked the same. Inside the helmet and the mask, she was just a cop.
So she never took it off.
Not even when she saw Virgilio’s body floating facedown in that wretched cemetery pond.
She felt a tear reach the corner of her eye. She pushed the elevator button frantically.
Virgilio was dead. The man in the New York Yankees cap, the one on the cell phone: it was Chuparosa. He was near. She was close.
The elevator car arrived and she darted inside, waiting for the doors to close again. As soon as they did, she let out all her breath, trying to remember which floor number to press.
What had gotten into her with Fisk? Normally she did not allow herself the luxury of regretting that she had offended people. She never cared.
And now she felt she had offended him again.
Those dark, intent eyes . . . listening, actually listening, to every word she said. For years she had told herself that she was looking for a man who could look past her face, who could see the real Cecilia Garza. Not the Ice Queen. Not the cop. Not the beautiful woman. Past all of that.
And here he was. He’d looked past all of that, probed down into something underneath. And what had she done?
Thrown dirt in his face. Squandered it. Sabotaged herself.
Maybe the sad truth was that she truly did not want anyone looking into her soul. Maybe it was too late.
CHAPTER 50
Fisk sat there looking at Garza’s half-empty glass, finishing his own, and trying to find the server so he could get the hell out of there. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Okay,” said Garza, her hand leaving his shoulder as she settled back into her chair. “I’ll tell you how it really happened.”
It was impossible to say what the difference was, but the woman sitting across from him now barely resembled the woman who had left. She seemed younger, softer, less certain. It was still Cecilia Garza, still the same slim neck, the same high cheekbones, the same glossy black hair. But there seemed nothing of the comandante left in her.
Fisk shook his head. “How what happened?”
She drank another sip of wine. “My father was a very stern, practical man. He indulged me in certain ways, the way rich men do when they have a daughter. He was proud, but that pride came out in such a way that I believe he wanted a daughter who was . . . what? . . . an ornament? I don’t want to be cruel. But that was what was expected of the girls I knew back then. Grow up and be respectable, pretty, marry a guy whose dad owns a bank or a telecom company. Have multiple children. Put on nice parties.”
She shrugged, as though gesturing, Here I am.
“I never quite fit the mold. I tried to please him at first. I was a good student, didn’t drop out of school and smoke pot with American dopers or anything. But I started getting in trouble because I wouldn’t shut my mouth, drinking, staying out too late, jumping in the swimming pool naked.”
“Really,” said Fisk.
“Believe it or not. My father had a place in the country, and when we would go out there I would ride dirt bikes and shoot guns and climb rocks, or steal the Jeep and ride off-road. I broke my leg once. I was always smashing something I wasn’t supposed to or generally scaring the hell out of my parents. I was acting out, I suppose. I was an adrenaline junkie. Still am.
“Anyway, I felt like I spent my entire childhood trying to fight my way out of this correct little box that my mother and father had built for me. I always enjoyed drawing. So when I went to university, I thought I would be a painter. You know, I read all the books about Frida Kahlo and I thought I’d be this rebel artist genius fighting the conventions of society and . . .”
She sighed.
“As I said, I loved the ideal of the artist. The life! Sitting around in cafés, running counter to the prevailing culture, nobody to tell you how to live or how to dress or what to do. But that’s not reality. Reality is, you have to paint pictures. You have to make something profound and beautiful, not just nice and interesting. And after a few years of painting pictures, I could see in the eyes of my teachers . . . that they were not excited by my work. They weren’t even very stimulated. My goal was to set the world on fire with my art, not be a mere candle on a cake.
“I still wanted to crash cars and ride dirt bikes and shoot guns. So I went into this sort of funk. I knew that I wasn’t going to finish the art degree. So if I wasn’t that cool artsy girl, smoking filterless cigarettes in the café, who was I?”
Fisk smiled. “You were young and no longer idealistic.”
“In Mexico you study law as an undergrad. It’s not just a graduate degree like it is here. So I took a class with Umberto Vargas. He was the big star teacher on campus. All the girls thought he was so great, so brilliant, so handsome . . . and he was. Made quite an impression. But he made practicing law come alive. There was a flavor of art to it, at least the way he taught it. Of ideals, of protecting interests rather than exploiting them. Typical lefty rich girl, I was going to take on the vested interests, all the big rich jerks like my father, change the system, make the world better . . . all the naive things any girl in law school should think she’s going to do.”
She finished her first glass and slid it toward him to be refilled.
“Now, my father was deliriously happy when I switched to law, and yet whenever I came home we would argue. He, too, had originally trained to be a lawyer, so we arg
ued stupid abstruse points of the law. But really it was about the same old thing. Was I going to be the conventional little ornament to my father? Or was I ever going to be my own person?”
She shrugged sadly.
“Over time we just stopped talking. Then one day I got a phone call. It was my father. I knew something bad had happened because . . . he never called me. My mother had a minor heart condition—I thought maybe she had suffered a heart attack. But that wasn’t it.”
He slid her refilled glass back to her, but now she just looked at it.
“You read about the cartels and you think that crime in Mexico is just drug gangs blasting away at each other. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There is also, as you may or may not know, a terrible epidemic of kidnapping.”
Fisk nodded, hanging on her words now.
“My father called . . . and all he said was, ‘It’s your mother. And your sister.’ ”
“My god,” said Fisk.
She shook her head once, violently, as though trying to expel the memory from her brain.
“I drove straight home. My little sister and I . . . we never had much in common. Seven years between us, and she was a sort of flighty girl. Pliable. Indulged. Whatever her friends did, whatever my mother and father said, whatever the teachers said—she went along with it.” She closed her eyes. “Anyway. I drove so fast that I almost wrecked my car. I arrived at the house, and my father was absolutely beside himself. Underneath his sternness, he was a very emotional man. And he loved my mother just unimaginably. So he didn’t care about the money, didn’t care about anything. He just wanted my mother back. And of course my sister.
“But a kidnapping is a process. It’s a kind of game. And my father, he thought he understood the game. So he played the game the way you have to play it. Certain brokers are hired. Certain corrupt police who play both sides of the street are called. There’s this theater that’s played out where you pretend that you’re negotiating with people at a distance through honorable intermediaries. But in truth, the intermediaries are working for the bad guys. Or sometimes they are the actual ringleaders and the kidnappers are simply working for the cops. You never really know which is the tail and which is the dog.” She smiled sourly. “You just have to trust in the goddamn process.”
