by Layton Green
Weary but brimming with life, he stumbled into Mexico City, stunned by its sophistication and the crush of humanity. It was at a party in the Colonia Roma where he met the man who would change the course of his life.
Through one of his connections, the man once known as John Wolverton ended up at a mansion full of fashion models, wealthy businessmen, and film stars. One of the attendees, Adolfo Constanzo, was known to him. Adolfo was a Cuban-American drug dealer from Miami who was making inroads into the burgeoning Mexican-American pipeline.
Adolfo was lounging on a sofa with his arm draped around two women, though his gaze lingered on the men in the room. John Wolverton knew him at once. The striking good looks, the confidence held loose in his broad shoulders, the infectious laughter, the gravity of his eyes that seemed to suck in the entire room.
Adolfo was someone just like him.
John Wolverton watched him throughout the evening, and knew that he in turn was being watched. He pictured himself through Adolfo’s eyes: a man with a leonine head and midnight-blue eyes, skin tinged beige from his mixed Latino heritage, wearing white slacks and a black V-neck shirt and wire-framed glasses, his fierce intelligence coexisting with a raw physical competency. A man who looked as comfortable in jungle fatigues as in the boardroom.
At the end of the night, Adolfo approached him, and John Wolverton assumed an identity Adolfo would recognize, that of a prosperous Caribbean smuggler.
They spent the next week dissecting the city together, an endless string of parties and society events. Eventually the time for business came, and they discussed the convenience of the Cold War to the drug trade, as well as their mutual connections inside the CIA.
Both men knew the friendship wouldn’t last, for two people of such towering ego and personal magnetism can never exist in the same space for long. At the end of the week, perhaps still trying to sway the man who had fended off his sexual advances, Adolfo told him there was someone he wanted him to meet.
“Do you know what Palo Mayombe is?” Adolfo asked.
John Wolverton did not.
Adolfo described the religion, and asked him if he would like to attend a ceremony.
“Why not?” John Wolverton said, intrigued.
“It’s a special ceremony,” Adolfo confided. “I’m a palero myself—a sorcerer—and the real reason I’ve come to Mexico City is not for the parties, but to train under someone, a palero much stronger even than I. Do you believe in sorcery?”
“I believe in the power of many things.”
“This palero, you’ve got to meet him, man. You can feel his power radiating off him. I’ve seen a lot and I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s a Pied Piper of the dead. The whole city’s afraid of him.”
“Interesting,” John Wolverton said. “I’d indeed like to meet him. What’s his name?”
Adolfo’s grin implied a gift both secret and delicious. “Tata Menga.”
“He’s in the business?”
“Oh yeah,” Adolfo said. “Doesn’t deal himself or anything. He provides spiritual protection to the cartels in exchange for a cut of the profits. I’ve adopted the model myself. Works like a charm. The cartels are believers, man. They’re all former Catholics who can’t shake it off. Might as well embrace the dark side and seek its protection, right?”
The gears in John Wolverton’s mind whirred furiously, alive with the possibilities, connecting the past to the present.
“That’s right,” he murmured.
DER HEILIGKEIT DES LUFT SANATORIUM
PRESENT DAY
Viktor stood at the edge of the lookout, arms folded, peering into the layers of fog that swirled like restless phantoms above the chasm. It was nearly dusk. He was alone.
The altitude was high enough to warrant a coat, but Viktor preferred the chill pressing through his sweater, the cleansing briskness of the mountain air. It was liberating.
Shuffling forward until he felt empty space beneath his toes, the fog made him feel as if he were drifting in midair, lost in a white abyss. What lay below, he wondered, in the realm of mist and death? Heaven? Hell? Nothing? Everything? If he were to take another step, he would know.
He stepped back, his smile quick and fierce. Suicide had never tempted him.
Those kinds of answers he would discover in time, as would we all. What Viktor desired, the object of his lifelong search, was to circumvent the wait. To know the unknowable, to crack open the door of doors, to see beyond the veil before it fluttered and settled over his corpse, separating the two realms forever.
Perhaps, just perhaps, to learn something that might affect the outcome.
His thoughts drifted to the case. To Palo Mayombe. Though aware of the religion for years, the last time he had encountered it during the course of an investigation was in Matamoros, Mexico. It had not been a pleasant experience.
“Cult” and “religion” were terms of art whose definitions depended on the user. To Viktor, religion was simply veneration of a person, ideal, or thing. Thus, all cults could be considered religions.
Oh, Viktor could hear the proponents of the major faiths clamoring for supremacy, and it was true that the weight of history lent a movement a certain gravitas. Still, since no one could actually prove the validity of any religion based on the concept of the divine, there was no real barometer.
Moreover, no one within a cult actually thought of themselves as belonging to a cult—to them, whatever belief system they were engaged in was as valid as any other. More so.
But if there was ever a case for the vernacular, Western definition of a cult, that of deviation from the religious and societal norm, then it would be the crime scene Viktor had been called to examine in Matamoros.
The year was 1989. The call from Interpol was frantic. Mexican authorities had uncovered a horrific crime scene just south of the Texas border, and one of the victims, Mark Kilroy, was an American pre-med student on spring break. DEA needed help piecing together the puzzle before the public went berserk.
When Viktor arrived at the scene, a ranch in the Mexican desert twenty miles outside Matamoros, law enforcement officials with eyes that looked ready to slip out of their sockets led him to the unearthed remains of fifteen bodies, clearly victims of ritual sacrifice. Beheaded corpses, digits missing, organs excised, spines and brains removed.
On the property they found drugs, guns, votive candles, wax skulls, and a plethora of homemade religious icons. And in a wooden shed hidden behind a corral, they found cigar butts, torture implements, discarded rum and tequila bottles, a rotting turtle—and a cast-iron cauldron filled with human and animal body parts stewing inside. The Mexican federales brought in a curandero—a Mexican folk healer—to exorcise the contents of the shed before they would continue the investigation.
The property was Rancho Santa Elena, and it belonged to the Hernandez drug family. A man named Adolfo Constanzo, a Cuban-American from Miami and a known practitioner of Palo and Santeria, had convinced the Hernandez Cartel that his sorcery could protect their illegal enterprise. A group of disciples lived at the ranch with Constanzo, and they had tortured and sacrificed dozens of victims.
The eeriest thing of all about the case, and the most interesting from a professional standpoint to Viktor, was that when interrogated, all of the cartel members they had rounded up, right up to the leaders, admitted the slayings had been human sacrifices carried out to protect the cartel. They also told the authorities that Constanzo’s powers could render them bulletproof and invisible, and nothing the police could do would harm them.
In short, they were utterly convinced that they were, even while sitting in jail, under the protection of the sorcery of Adolfo Constanzo.
Viktor shook his head at the memory. He would never cease to be amazed at the ability of ultra-charismatic individuals to coax a sliver of evil out of otherwise normal human beings and expand it to grotesque proportions, like winding a tapeworm around a stick.
As with most of the criminal factions w
ith which Viktor dealt, Adolfo Constanzo’s cult was a derivation, a perversion of traditional religion. Whether or not Constanzo could actually do what he claimed to do . . . well, that had not been within the sphere of Viktor’s professional ambit. What mattered was that Constanzo’s followers believed he could.
Viktor sighed and rubbed his arms against the Alpine chill. None of the law enforcement officials at Matamoros had understood Palo Mayombe. Viktor understood the Western aversion, since Palo was so closely aligned with the realm of the dead, but he also appreciated the Congolese theology. While Viktor claimed no religion, he did believe in the concept of life force or bodily energy or the soul—he had witnessed too many affirmative demonstrations to come to any other conclusion.
And if science was to be believed and matter could not be destroyed, only transmuted into other forms, then the life force of the living had to go somewhere after death.
Turning to walk back to the sanatorium, he bumped into a large man standing inches behind him. The contact made Viktor scramble to right himself, almost causing him to plummet off the cliff. The person behind him was someone he had never seen before, and Viktor hadn’t heard him approach.
Someone dressed in white scrubs and standing inches from Viktor’s face, staring at him with a blank expression, a push away from sending him off the edge of the chasm.
As the plane flew over the Gulf of Mexico, Grey pored over Lana’s file on the General. It didn’t take long.
The report was a dry description of a dozen busted drug transactions from several government agencies over the last thirty years. In each case, one or more suspects had mentioned the General during interrogation—or at least had mentioned a faceless entity fitting the description. The evidence was all hearsay, as not a single witness claimed to have dealt with the crime lord himself. Some of the witnesses thought he was based somewhere in Colombia. Some said Peru. Others said Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama. One claimed he lived on a yacht in Antarctica.
As Lana had intimated, the report was vanilla, whitewashed, and unhelpful. Nothing new on Guiñol. Not a word about Palo Mayombe. The five known victims of the blue lady were mentioned, each of them a former member of a different criminal organization.
Could it be, Grey thought, that Palo Mayombe was the key? Did the General control the cartels through the cult? Through fear of torture, human sacrifice, and supernatural reprisal?
Grey had seen firsthand the power of charismatic cult leaders, from his mother’s death to his string of cases with Viktor that illustrated, in graphic detail, just how far a human being could be persuaded to go. But could Palo Mayombe be that widespread, touching all corners of the Americas? The thought chilled him. At first he found it unbelievable, but then he thought of the conviction in Elias Monte’s eyes, and of Hector Fortuna’s disciples standing around an iron cauldron after stuffing a dead DEA agent in the closet.
Yet how did the blue lady fit? Her appearance seemed unrelated to the cult. And surely at least one of the suspects in the file would have mentioned the General’s involvement in Palo Mayombe, if they had been brave or foolhardy enough to name him in the first place.
Grey sighed. Mexico was the right call. He closed the file and saw Fred watching him.
“I’ve seen IKEA instructions with more substance,” Fred said, flicking his eyes to the file.
Grey relaxed the seat rest and crossed his arms. “Yeah.”
“So you know what you’re getting into down there?”
“I suppose it’s a bunch of extremely ruthless men making stacks of money pushing drugs across the border to willing consumers.”
“You’re right about that.” Fred cracked his knuckles with a vengeance. “Look, I get it. Americans want drugs, a young dealer in the ghetto will risk a dime in prison versus a lifetime of poverty, and an illiterate Mexican peasant is going to do whatever it takes to feed his family. It all sucks. Both countries need to get their shit together. But still. I don’t care what’s happened in your life—you do not deal drugs to kids. You don’t ruin someone else’s family. If we ever find this General, I’ll shove a kilo down his throat myself and watch his heart explode.”
By the time he finished his off-topic rant, Fred’s face had flushed, his voice had risen almost to a shout, and Grey saw the same dangerous look in his eye he had seen at Hector Fortuna’s house.
Fred swallowed and worked his jaw back and forth, his voice lowering. “Anyway, the system isn’t our concern. The cartels it spawned are.”
“And the Mexicans are particularly ruthless.”
“The Mexican cartels are country clubs who only admit psychopaths. The Colombians are smarter and have the coca fields, but the Mexicans will do anything it takes. And I do mean anything. You don’t even want to hear the stories.”
“Let’s bring it down to eye level,” Grey said. “What’s the hierarchy of a cartel like the Alianza, and how does it all relate to this stage of the investigation?”
“Cartels are like pyramid schemes. At the bottom are the foot soldiers, the kids dealing crack on the corners. A step up are the local retailers—the Manny Lopezes of the world. There’re usually a few levels of retailers under the domestic distributors, which is where the serious money starts to flow. Then you have the stateside kingpins, the international smugglers with the overseas connections. These guys are often inducted into the parent cartel.”
“Vertical control of distribution,” Grey said.
“That’s right. But even the L.A. and Miami kingpins are small fry compared to the fat cats south of the border. Those guys mint money. Production is everything, and that’s why the Mexicans are gaining ground. Cocaine is still king, but our friendly neighbors are funneling homegrown weed and meth and heroin and prescription drugs into the States like grain pouring into a harvester.”
“And the General?”
“A new level, if he’s real. Someone working behind the scenes but who has some weird hold on the organizations he deals with. A shadow cartel.” He reached up to crank the air conditioner above his seat and said, “You really think this cult is involved at that level? It just seems so . . . I don’t know, surreal. Grown men stirring bones in a pot? Robbing graves?”
Grey stared at the seat back in front of him as the pilot announced the initial descent into Cancun. “I’ve seen some things while working with Professor Radek that . . . well, you wouldn’t believe me, unless you’d seen them yourself. I’m not sure what I think about it all yet, but there’s one thing I know for sure: never underestimate the power of the mind, especially the ability of a master manipulator to influence and control. Think of the world’s major religious figures, its cultural icons, its politicians. Think of the power they wield. Think of that applied to a criminal organization. Think of Adolf Hitler.”
Fred was staring out the window, where the coral reefs created shadow patterns along the bottom of the sea. “So it’s not like you’re telling me there’s anything to this Palo Mayombe insanity, just that our guy’s maybe using it to stay in control.”
When Grey didn’t respond right away, Fred turned his head and said, “You don’t actually believe any of that crap, right? I didn’t take you for that kind of guy.”
“No,” Grey murmured, his voice drowned by the sound of the plane hitting the runway, “I suppose I’m not.”
DER HEILIGKEIT DES LUFT SANATORIUM
His heart a set of fists hammering against a speed bag inside his chest, Viktor settled the weight of his seven-foot frame into his heels, rooting himself to the ground. He could feel the wind from the thousand-foot chasm behind him, whisking across his back. The best he could do, if pushed by the mental patient standing inches from his face, would be to take them down together.
The man’s hands were hidden behind his back, as if concealing something. He hadn’t moved, but kept staring at Viktor with a vacant, almost bovine expression. There was an asylum for the criminally insane on the property, lower down the mountain, though none of th
e inmates should be out alone.
Viktor edged sideways, debating rushing forward to drive them both away from the cliff. The man made no movement, and when Viktor moved far enough away to feel safe, he stepped rapidly away from the drop-off and over the guardrail, his heart pumping so fast it felt like a bellows in the hands of a grinning Hephaestus.
After backing well away from the cliff, his eyes never leaving the face of the man in white scrubs, Viktor subconsciously reached for his kris, the asymmetrical dagger he normally carried at all times. He never dreamed he would need it at the sanatorium.
The man looked about Viktor’s age, and though not nearly as tall, he was thick, with hunched shoulders that sloped to a bloated neck. His face was shaped like a watermelon and sported facial features so small they looked etched. Splotched in the upper third of his forehead, below the receding hairline, was a purple birthmark.
Security was fierce on the mountain. Even Viktor’s building, which housed voluntary patients, was controlled by key card access and patrolled by the finest guards money could buy. The only road was watched by CCTV and secured by three different gatehouses. The Swiss treated this sanatorium like they treated their banks: catering to the wealthy, clandestine, and unassailable.
“Do I know you?” Viktor asked in German.
The man looked startled that Viktor had spoken. Viktor repeated the question in French, and then English.
Some of the glaze lifted from the man’s eyes. “I don’t think so,” he answered in German.
Viktor grimaced. “Then why were you standing right behind me at the edge of the cliff?”
“Was I?” The man smiled, though the thinness of his lips made the smile look too narrow, as if half-formed.
“What’s your name?” Viktor asked, as if addressing a student.
“Glen. And yours?”
“Professor Viktor Radek.”
