The man shrugged. “It’s a big port.”
They made their turns and saw a white five-ton Volvo truck with the logo of a beer company—HERNANDEZ Y CIA, CERVEZAS Y MAS—painted on the side, featuring a picture of a frosty Carta Blanca.
Marder pointed to the vehicle and said, “I thought Hernandez was a La Familia outfit.”
“Yes, we’ve borrowed it for this thing,” said the man, and laughed. “They won’t bother it when we drive through the city.”
Marder got out of the SUV and then, in the glare from an overhead lamp, he could see that there was also a small van parked alongside the beer truck and a group of about half a dozen men standing around, among whom were Reyes and Skelly.
Skelly and Reyes were deep in conversation, Marder observed, but when Skelly saw him he waved and walked over.
“I hear you took care of our problem with that guy.”
“I did. The man turned out to be open to reason.”
“Yeah, El Gordo was impressed. He had the sense that Alsop was using Cuello as a friendly to get the other cartels. Don’t you love when they do that?”
“It makes me proud to be an American. What’s going on here?”
“We’ve been reading serial numbers. It’s that orange one on the bottom level. We are about to have the grand opening, as soon as Reyes’s boy can get a bolt cutter out of his van.”
Here Skelly gripped Marder’s arm in a manner that focused his attention. Skelly was looking him straight in the eye as he said, “Now, in the most casual way you can, I want you to lean against the hood of the car you came in, and when they open the door of that container, I want you to sort of slide down so that the engine block is between you and the door of the container. Can you do that without asking a single fucking question and keep smiling because we’re just a couple of buddies meeting up after a worrisome interval?”
Skelly gave him a little pat on the arm and walked back to the door of the orange container. The Templos all gathered around, like children before the piñata, as Reyes cut the lock and lifted the handle that released the door latch. No one was watching Marder, so he, the good soldier, did as he was told and slid off the hood of the SUV.
He heard the metallic creak of the container door opening and he crouched as ordered. Then came a peculiar clattering sound that reminded him of a Linotype in operation, followed by shouts and agonized cries and a scatter of pistol shots, more clattering, and silence. He waited, then risked a peek over the hood. All the Templos lay on the ground, glistening with blood. Skelly was down too, cursing, and leaning over him were three Asian men, all small and well knit, dressed only in underwear shorts, and carrying MP5 submachine guns equipped with long black suppressors.
Marder stepped out into the pool of light. Instantly the muzzles of the submachine guns came up, until Skelly yelled something that Marder recalled was the Hmong language, and the guns dropped again. He knelt by Skelly.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just shot. One of those fuckers got off a few rounds.”
“What’s going on, Skelly? Who are these guys?”
“Oh, some associates from our old stomping grounds. Njaang, Kroong, and Baan, this is Marder.”
The three men looked at Marder with the blank faces of seals.
Skelly said, “Marder, we’ve got a lot of stuff to unload. You’d better get busy before someone shows up.”
“I don’t understand,” said Marder.
“I’ll explain later, chief. Meanwhile, I’m bleeding here.”
Marder examined Skelly’s wound, a hole in the center of a platter-sized bloodstain just above the beltline on the extreme left. “You’re gutshot, man,” he said. “We need to get you to a hospital.”
“I’m not gutshot. It’s a through-and-through—you can take me later,” said Skelly. “Just help the boys load the truck.”
A grin split his pale face, and his teeth shone startlingly in the sodium light.
“This is like old times,” he said. “But without the fucking air force.”
Marder didn’t think it was like old times at all. Skelly was still talking, but more weakly, and Marder had to lean closer to his mouth. “The boys will take the truck to the casa. Rafael knows to expect them. Did they do the sandbags?”
“Yes. You planned this whole thing?”
“Of course I planned it. You didn’t really think I was going to let that fat asshole get his hands on heavy weapons, did you? They’d have you out of there so fast you wouldn’t have time to put on shoes. No, they’re ours, and we’re going to keep them. Oh, and there’s a big suitcase you need to keep your eyes on.”
“What’s in it?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Skelly, and closed his eyes.
16
“I feel like shit, but you look like shit, Marder,” said Skelly from his hospital bed in Cárdenas General. “You’re out of shape. I’ve been telling you that for years.”
Marder looked at his hands, which were torn and blistered. “I’ll take your word for it, but in fairness, I feel like shit too. I’m at the age where a man of means expects others to do the heavy lifting. Your guys were amazing, I have to say. It was like watching an old-time movie, the way they moved. Little guys, but they could heave crates up on their shoulders that I could barely budge. Who are they, anyway?”
“Just some tough Hmong I work with when I’m back with the Shans. They’ll be useful in the coming days.”
“You think we’re going to be attacked.”
“I don’t know, you talked to El Gordo—what do you think?”
“Well, it’s hard to tell over the phone. He didn’t actually accuse me of ripping him off. I think the fact you were shot meant something. He asked how you were.”
“Did you tell him I was here?”
“Well, yeah. He asked, and I thought I was on sketchy ground already without making up an easily checked lie.”
Skelly was quiet for a moment, a look of concentration on his face. “He’ll be a little slowed down because he doesn’t have Reyes anymore, but I have to get out of here.”
He pushed a button, and in a shorter time than Marder would have expected, a nurse appeared. Skelly asked her to send Dr. Rodriguez along and she departed.
“You seem to have them well trained.”
“My winning personality or bribes, you choose. Ah, here’s my personal physician.”
A youngish man in a white coat walked into the room. He seemed happy to see Skelly but looked doubtfully at Marder, as if he were carrying staph.
Skelly said, “If you’ll excuse us, Marder, Dr. Rodriguez is going to practice the healing arts.”
Marder walked down the halls, glancing in the rooms he passed. Around nearly every bedside was the Mexican Family, almost always the mother, often spooning food into the patients, since everyone knew the hospitals fed you trash. Marder thought they weren’t feeding Skelly trash, and he doubted that these others got the kind of service he received.
He passed Dr. Rodriguez in the hall and paused to address him, but the man rushed by and did not meet his eye. A busy man, it seemed, or perhaps he was still unaccustomed to bribery and was ashamed.
Skelly was getting dressed. As he’d predicted, the slug had torn up the muscles of his flank but had done no intestinal damage. Another noble scar for Skelly.
They drove back to the casa in the SUV Marder had left in just a few hours ago. Everyone was glad to see Marder, again, and some were just as glad to see Skelly, including Rafael and his band of militia—and Lourdes. Skelly was conferring with his men in the front driveway; they were telling him how los chinos had arrived, how they were already setting up strongpoints with the powerful new weapons, how everyone was doing as they asked although they could speak no Spanish and barely any English. Marder was about to move off and inspect these wonders, when the beauty came racing up from the servants’ house and flung herself at Skelly, hanging on his neck and covering his face with kisses.
Sk
elly clutched the delicious body to him, grinning, and over her head passed Marder a satyric look and a wink. Marder turned away into a chaster embrace: his daughter.
“You’re back again,” she said, “miraculously preserved. When those guys came in with the guns, we didn’t know what to think, and they’re not very communicative. What language is that they’re speaking?”
“Hmong. They came over from China in the shipping container with the weapons, and when the container was opened, they came out and massacred all the Templos. How long has that been going on?” He gestured to where Skelly was walking away with his minions, Lourdes glued to his side.
“Poor Daddy—the patrón is the last to know what his peasants are up to.”
“He’s sleeping with her?”
“I’ve always liked that euphemism. My room adjoins Skelly’s, and I can assure you, sleep is not involved in their connection.”
“That bastard!”
“I don’t see what your objection is. If she’s Skelly’s girl, it’ll suppress the other guys’ fighting over her. No one will challenge the big kahuna.”
“For God’s sake, Carmel, she’s sixteen.”
“She’ll be seventeen next month, which I believe was approximately my mother’s age when you took her out of here.”
“I was twenty-four. He’s sixty-something.”
“And sexy as hell. I’m sorry, but I don’t see what the big deal is. Girls fall for older men all the time. It’s a trade-off. They get a leg up in life, financially and career-wise, and the old guys get to feast on young flesh. And Skelly’s not going to slash her face or treat her like shit.”
Marder didn’t know what the big deal was either—not rationally at any rate—but, viscerally, thinking about them together made him want to kill his friend. Insane, insane, but there was burning in his belly, as if he’d eaten a spoonful of habaneros.
“Unless you’re envious…,” his daughter ventured.
“Oh, don’t be stupid! I have no sexual interest in that little girl.”
Statch studied her father for a moment, then said, “I believe you. I think your current sexual interest is sitting in your office.”
“What?”
“La Espinoza showed up a couple of hours ago. She’s going to do a story about us. I told her she could use your office. She was very concerned about your fate, perhaps a little more than journalistic interest would suggest.”
“Why are you always fantasizing sexual imbroglios for me? First Lourdes, now Pepa. It’s unseemly.”
Statch held a finger next to her nose and put on a knowing grin. “I call ’em like I see ’em, Dad. If you’ll excuse me, Skelly wanted me to check out the sandbagging on the diesel tank and take a look at the machine-gun nests that los chinos are supposed to be setting up.”
“Do you actually know anything about that kind of stuff?”
“Oh, I skipped the course on field fortifications, but we MIT engineers are pretty flexible.” She waved and tripped off, whistling. The song was “La Adelita,” the famous corrido of the 1910 revolution. She had learned it at her mother’s knee, as had Marder, a ballad of love and death, like every other Mexican corrido.
He entered his house and found it transformed. All the furniture in the living room had been pushed to the walls and stacked there, and men from the colonia swarmed about, heaving up walls of sandbags to cover the windows, cutting off the light from the sea, and changing the place into something more like a cavern or an immense bunker. The dining room had been lined with rows of pallets, and the dining table had been draped with cloths; the cabinets where the dishes had been kept now showed various sorts of medical apparatuses. A woman in pink scrubs, whom Marder had never seen before, was arranging supplies. She smiled at him but did not introduce herself. Proceeding to Amparo’s small office, in search of some explanation for the metamorphosis, he found twelve-year-old Epifania sitting at her mother’s desk. This had been cleared of everything but a couple of dozen cell phones, set in small groups and bearing labels neatly printed on masking tape. Epifania had a Bluetooth rig in her ear, and as Marder came in, she was talking, apparently, to thin air: “Copy that, alpha two-five. Feliz one out.”
“What are you doing, Epifania?” he asked, and she swung around in the swivel chair, startled. “Oh, hi, Don Ricardo. I’m doing a comm check. Don Eskelly said we had to have a comm check four times a day. This is our comm center, and I’m in charge from after school until my bedtime.” She smiled and rummaged through a drawer in the desk, retrieved a cell phone. “This is yours. All the command points and some of the actuals are preprogrammed into it.”
Marder took the phone. It was a “Nokla” made in China, and it had his name in marker on the back.
“Actuals,” he repeated.
“Yes, people in the chain of command. Don Eskelly explained it to us. Like if you wanted to talk to the alpha platoon leader or if he was on the line—”
“Yes, dear, I know what ‘actual’ means in this context. I just haven’t heard it used that way in a long time. I see we have a nurse.”
“Hilda Salinas, yes. She’s from the clinic in El Cielo. She’s a cousin of Chiquita Ferrar and she volunteered. Lots of people from El Cielo would like to come, but there’s not enough room for them. And some of them are afraid of los otros.”
But you’re not, thought Marder as he left, and he recalled the terrified child he had met on his arrival at Casa Feliz. He passed the kitchen with just a glance. It was crammed ridiculously full of large women chopping and chattering among steaming pots of what smelled like rice and beans, obviously a communal kitchen for the whole estate. He waved to the women, received their smiles, and went to his office.
Pepa Espinoza was at his desk, tapping at a laptop computer, and did not look up when he came in and sat on a couch. The room was growing dim as the men built up the sandbag barricades outside the windows. He rose and switched on the overhead lighting and sat down again. She finished what she was doing, closed her laptop, and looked up at him.
“So, Marder,” she said, “are you ready for your close-up?” She reached down and brought up a Sony HDR digital camcorder, then switched it on.
“You want to interview me?”
“I am interviewing you. My first question is, what do you hope to accomplish by turning your house and grounds into a fortress?”
“I don’t understand, I thought you were bringing a crew. I thought we’d sit on a couch like they do on TV. I always wondered how they got the logo in the corner of the screen to stay up there.”
She put the camera down on the desk and frowned. “There’s no crew because my producer turned me down. He doesn’t think you’re newsworthy.”
“Gosh, that’s a disappointment. I was hoping for the canonical fifteen minutes. And I’m surprised. An inside look at the newest chapter in the narco wars: ‘Campesinos beat back La Familia; American ex-Special Forces trooper trains militia to fight malosos.’ Probably the biggest story of the year, if not the decade. Did he say why not?”
“Oh, he got the canonical envelope in the mail—a photograph of his wife and children outside their school with black crosses drawn on their faces. I can’t say I blame him. On the other hand, I have no children and no one’s life I care much about saving. I’m here as a freelancer, recording for YouTube and posterity. And you’re right: it’s going to be gigantic.”
The door flew open and a group of dusty men appeared. The foremost said, “Oh, sorry, Señor, I thought no one was here; we have to make holes.” He indicated the walls generally.
“Let’s let these men have the room,” said Marder. “We’ll go up on the roof.”
Espinoza shoved her laptop and camera into a large red canvas bag and followed him out. “What are the holes for?” she asked as they climbed the stairs.
“Well, when they defend a building in the movies, they shoot out of the windows, but in real life they barricade the windows and shoot out of loopholes.”
“You planned
all of this? That the narcos would attack you here?”
“Skelly did. I told you, I just came down here to retire in the sun, but that doesn’t seem to be possible at present. Given the situation that we would not be allowed to live in peace, Skelly decided that a showdown was inevitable at some point, and he arranged for us to have heavy weapons to defend ourselves.”
“And stealing these weapons from the Templos made it inevitable that your place would be attacked. Very neat.”
“You’re well informed, I see.”
“It’s my métier. But what I don’t quite get is why you think you can get away with defying the narcos. El Gordo must have four hundred men under arms, trained killers, completely merciless. They’re not going to have much trouble with a hundred or so campesinos.”
“That’s an odd statement coming from a Mexican patriot. Zapata and Villa did pretty well with just that kind of people.”
“And they failed.”
“Well, yes, but maybe we won’t.”
“They have tanks. Did you know that? Huge armored trucks with machine guns.”
“Mercy me! I guess we should surrender, then. But on the other hand, you’re here. You must not be that worried about your own safety. There’s a contract out on you. Don’t you think that one of your merciless killers will collect on it?”
“Perhaps. This is where I shrug fatalistically like a good Mexican and say, Everyone has to die.”
“Or it might not come to that,” said Marder. He pointed to where groups of men were constructing positions for the two huge Soviet DShK 12.7-mm machine guns, one commanding the road and the other the shoreline. “They might see that we’re well defended and look for easier prey. That’s why people keep dogs, you know. The kid who’s looking to smash a window and grab the computer would rather not deal with a dog, so he moves on to the quiet house down the street.”
“But El Gordo is not a street punk, and if he lets you off, people will see him as a punk, and he’ll be finished. His own people will take him out.”
“Then let them do their worst,” said Marder.
“You’re not concerned that you’re risking the lives of all these people?”
The Return: A Novel Page 31
