The House of Wolfe

by James Carlos Blake

  Jessie had long been aware of the arms smuggling partnership between the two sides of the family, but it wasn’t until her visit to Mexico City last year that she learned of Rayo’s recent entry into the family’s Jaguaro organization, though she also still works in film. Because Jessie has had nothing to do with the family’s illicit dealings, Rayo had thought of not mentioning her own role in them, but as she explained it, “There has to be somebody I don’t keep secrets from, and you’re it, kid.” Jessie was less shocked by the revelation of Rayo’s membership in the Jaguaros than she was worried about the dangers of it. Rayo said she wished there was some danger to be concerned about, something to make the work more exciting, but she was never assigned to do anything riskier than keep an eye on somebody or serve as a diversion. “Mostly I’m the girl,” she said. “You know, the go-to whenever they a need a nice ass to distract some guy’s attention.” She was willing to tell Jessie anything she might want to know about it, but said it was basically boring stuff and she herself would rather talk about other things. Jessie said she would too, and they hadn’t spoken of the Jaguaros since.

  “Ooh, there he is, míralo,” Rayo says. “Over by the bandstand. Cigarette, Caesar hairstyle. Gregorio something-or-other. Goes to school in California. His father owns mines or something. Longtime friends of the Belmontes. Son muy ricos.”

  “Everybody here’s real rich except you and me,” Jessie says. She gives Rayo a mock knowing look. “Hunting for a well-heeled hubby, are we?”

  “Oh, please.” Rayo says. “Not well-heeled or any other kind, thank you. It’s just this guy’s got the look, you know? Like he can reeeally do it.”

  Jessie laughs. “You are such a slut. You’ll never change.”

  “God, I hope not.”

  Jessie studies Gregorio—who looks like he can’t be more than nineteen or twenty—standing with his hands in his pockets and addressing a group of young people at a table near the bandstand. Handsome devil. His smile and body language exuding great satisfaction with himself and the table’s attention. He says something that prompts everyone’s laughter, then looks over and smiles at Jessie and winks at Rayo. Who raises her glass slightly to him and winks back.

  “I don’t believe you,” Jessie says.

  Rayo affects a look of blank innocence.

  Gregorio excuses himself from the group and comes over to the Wolfe women, smiling wide.

  Good evening, ladies. I am Gregorio Marcosas Alemán.

  Rayo introduces herself and then Jessie. Jessie says she’s pleased to meet him and proffers a handshake. He kisses her hand and says, “Encantado, señorita,” and asks her pardon for his lack of English. Then turns to Rayo and asks if he might have the honor of a dance.

  Rayo says he may. She hands her drink to Jessie and accepts Gregorio’s arm.

  “I’m off in a minute,” Jessie says. “Have fun and don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”

  “Contradicting yourself again,” Rayo says as Gregorio squires her away. “First one back to my place is a hopeless skank.”

  Aldo returns with a glass of wine and with Jessie’s shawl from the checkroom. He hands her the shawl and nods at her drink. “What’s that? You wanted white.”

  “Try it,” she says, and trades drinks with him. He tastes the absinthe and frowns.

  “Good stuff, huh?” She smiles and sips at the wine.

  “We gotta go,” he says. “Trio just told me. Everybody’s meeting at the front door.” He takes the wine from her and puts both drinks on the tray of a passing waiter.

  She lets him lead her by the hand and they wend their way through the throng, cutting through the dance floor, begging the pardons of persons they jostle. Then she sees the front doors up ahead and the waiting bridal party entourage.

  Both bride and groom are from families of means. Francisco Belmonte, father of the groom, Demetrio—called Trio by friends and family—owns interests in heavy equipment and food canning and a major share in a television network, but his most gainful venture is Fuentes de Oro, a company that manufactures platforms for offshore oil drilling and has a number of international clients. His American wife is the daughter of a Hollywood film producer of good critical reputation. Oscar Sosa, father of Luz, the bride, heads a corporate entity that builds and manages luxury resorts in many parts of Mexico and Central America. He also owns a number of real estate companies specializing in the sales and leases of mountain retreats and seaside villas. It is common knowledge among the capital’s social elite that Luz’s mother descends from the Xavier-Morales family, whose lineage extends from the viceroy era. Both mothers are lean and lovely exemplars of social grace, the fathers tall handsome men, trim by way of gym regimens, their naturally dusky complexions darkened the more from golfing, sailing, big-game fishing.

  Neither family, however, is given to ostentatious display of its wealth, and the wedding has been a relatively modest affair. One of the few excesses in the original wedding plan had been to have a dozen bridesmaids and groomsmen in the bridal party. But the bridal couple—sweethearts since they were seventeen-year-old classmates at a Cuernavaca ­academy—have a great many friends, and they feared offending those who couldn’t be included in a bridal party even that large. So they decided on just three bridesmaids and groomsmen and all of them relatives except for Jessie, whom Luz Sosa insisted on including.

  She and Jessie had met in a freshmen English course at the University of Texas at Austin. Luz was delighted to learn that Jessie had relatives living in Mexico City, though to this day the only Mexican Wolfe she has ever met is Rayo. Their friendship was rooted in their mutual writing ­ambitions—Jessie in journalism, Luz in fiction—and in their love of modern dance, and they took several writing and dance classes together. In their last two years in Austin they were roommates in an off-campus apartment. Luz’s first book, a trio of novellas published in Mexico a year ago to uniformly good reviews and currently being translated for paperback publication in the United States, includes an acknowledgment of Jessica Juliet Wolfe’s “invaluable critique” of the manuscript. Trio and his older brother Aldo, serving as his best man, and Luz’s younger sister and matron of honor Linda, also earned their degrees from the University of Texas. Trio was at UT for the same four years as Luz and Jessie and majored in petroleum engineering, as did Aldo, who graduated a year ahead of them, and the two brothers are now managers in the engineering division of their father’s oil-rig company. Linda, a year younger than Luz, graduated a year after the other four. She studied fashion design and today owns a studio in the Zona Rosa. During the three years all five of them were together at UT, they called themselves the Mighty Handful.

  It was near the end of Jessie’s junior year that she and Aldo had their “thing,” as she calls it. They had agreed to be weekend sex buddies, but the arrangement had been in effect for only a month before he started pressing her for weeknight trysts, as well. She steadfastly refused, her weeknights strictly reserved for coursework, and his pouts, which at first amused her, soon began to grow tiresome. When she had to beg off one weekend because of the need to finish an important paper due on Monday, he angrily demanded to know if she was fucking somebody else. She wasn’t, but didn’t say so, telling him only that it was none of his business. But he persisted in his accusations and so she put an end to their thing then and there. For about three weeks afterward he made such a point of ignoring her whenever the Mighty Handful got together that Luz barred him from the apartment until, as she put it, “you pull your head out of your ass.” Which he finally did just a few weeks before the end of the semester, telling Jessie he was sorry and admitting he’d been an asshole and asking her to forgive him and please come to his graduation ceremony. She did both. In the five years since, they have exchanged Christmas cards every season and a few e-mails of chitchat, but they hadn’t seen each other again—not even on Jessie’s previous visits to Rayo, when they each time got together wit
h Luz and Trio—until the wedding rehearsal.

  Francisco Belmonte sees Aldo and Jessie coming through the crowd and says, “Hay están,” and Oscar Sosa says, Good, that’s everybody. Make our good-bye.

  A post-reception after party at the Sosa residence has been arranged for the bridal group, but first comes a formal farewell to the guests. Mr. Belmonte mounts a dais fronted by a microphone and thanks everyone for the great honor of their attendance on this happy affair. He wishes everyone good health and prosperity, reminds them that his house is their house, and invites them to stay and enjoy themselves for as long as they like. Some will take his invitation at face value and linger for a good while yet, but most will adhere to customary decorum and take their leave soon after their hosts.

  Laughing and jabbering, the bridal party exits into the chill night and descends the verandah steps to the open doors of the waiting Town Cars, and the four parents are ushered to the one at the head of the line. Jessie notes how cleverly Aldo has positioned her and himself at the tail end of the group to ensure they will be riding in the same car, the last one. Their driver, a blond young man with a pleasant smile, stands between the open front and back doors.

  Take the front seat, my captain, Aldo tells José Belmonte, his fifteen-year-old brother and a groomsman, and the boy happily complies. Aldo extends his arm toward the back door and says, Ladies. Jessie gets in and slides over to the window, expecting Susi—a bridesmaid and Luz’s younger sister—to get in next, but Aldo cuts ahead of her and snugs up to Jessie, pressing his thigh to hers.

  Susi says, Oh, thank you very much, Sir Galahad! and gets in.

  The driver shuts both doors, goes around the car and slides in behind the wheel. The heater is on, the temperature cozy.

  The small caravan gets rolling. The gate attendant waves as they exit to the street, both sides of which are lined for blocks with the attended cars of reception guests, and the Town Cars bear away into the deeper night.

  3 — CHATO AND CHINO

  Bound, blindfolded, gagged, alert to every ambient sound, the five agents of Angeles de Guarda lying in the back of the van feel the road passing fast beneath them.

  The easy glide of the van suggests they’re on a main highway. The radio is turned up loud, but the rocking rhythms of Chikita Violenta don’t fully mute the sidelong rumblings of large trucks, the blares of car horns. At times they’re jounced by a tap of the brakes and the driver curses somebody for an asshole who shouldn’t be permitted to drive or a shithead who should be shot. In one instance, the other man laughs and says, Hey, Chino, pull up beside him and I’ll hold the wheel while you shoot him.

  After a time the van slows down and the men in back feel a mild lean and infer they’re leaving the highway on a curving off-ramp. The road onto which they exit is also well paved. Soon afterward they feel a stronger pull as the van executes a tighter turn, and now the tires are reverberating over a rougher road face, perhaps of tar and gravel.

  The radio begins to sputter with static. The tuner starts moving over a series of stations in a staccato of speech and music, and the driver, the man called Chino, says, What the fuck, Chato, I like that station. Put it back.

  The Chato one says he’s tired of that stupid rock noise and anyway can’t stand the static. He settles on a corrido station.

  Peon crap, the Chino one says. But the tuner stays where it is.

  When the van slows almost to a stop and makes a careful turn and proceeds slowly over rugged rising ground, weaving widely left and right, the men in back cannot say whether they’ve been riding for forty minutes or for two hours. They proceed at this slower pace for a long while before the van stops and the motor shuts off.

  The front doors open and close. The back door slides open and the one named Chino says, All right, boys, here we are.

  The men in the van smell a horrific stench mingled with acrid smoke, and they know where they are—at one of the massive garbage pits all about the periphery of the city. Where a daily fleet of huge trucks brings its garbage for disposal, much of it by fire.

  Peee-yoo, huh? Chino says. As you guys can tell, the house is right next to a dump.

  The caustic stink loosens mucus from their noses and a couple of them begin snorting wetly, puffing hard through the little mouth hole in the gag.

  Christ, man, Chino says. Let’s get the gags off them before they choke to death.

  As the tape comes off their mouths, each captive breathes in gasps, fighting for air and grimacing at the foulness of it.

  Sorry about that, fellas, Chino says. But don’t worry, you won’t have to smell it for long. Tomorrow night, you’re out of here. Right now we’ll just line you up and take you over to the house and get those blindfolds and cuffs off you.

  Bullshit! one of the men says in anger. I know what this is. He coughs and spits on the floor.

  Chino disregards him. One of the others begins praying in low voice.

  Chino helps the man nearest the door to get out and guides him away a short distance before saying, Right here, stay right here. He then retrieves the angry man and stands him at the side of the first man and goes back to the van for the next man.

  You fuckers, the angry man says. You stinking shits!

  What can we tell anybody? the first man in line says. We don’t know anything.

  We know what they look like, the angry man says. We know Huerta knows them. They can’t trust us. Fuck them. Fuck their mothers.

  The Chato one says, Man, I wouldn’t want you for my lawyer.

  Fuck what you want, the angry man says. Fuck your father. I hope your sister gets fucked to death by burros.

  The Chato one laughs and says, Burros! Damn, man.

  Chino sets the third man beside the angry one, then fetches the one who was praying and who now starts to cry.

  Easy, man, Chino says, patting the man’s shoulder gently as he stands him at the end of the line. I know the smell’s bad. But it’ll be all right soon, you’ll see. You don’t have to put up with it for long.

  The angry man says, Stop sniveling, you cunt coward.

  The smoky reek burns their throats. The blindfolded men cannot know they are within three feet of the edge of a bluff overlooking the vast excavation spread before them like a black smoke-hazed sea scattered with large and small islands of fire. A dozen feet below them is the apex of a large smoldering scree of noxious refuse reduced to bright orange embers. It is any man’s guess how deep the pits are under the fires, under the accruals of ash and coal and dissolved organic matter of every sort. Popular belief holds that the pits have no bottom but in hell. Through the cold air, the men feel the wafts of heat.

  The big man is the last to be brought out. His wounded arm is in grievous pain and bleeding through his makeshift bandage. Chino holds him by the elbow of his good arm and takes him over to the others. The man feels the strength in Chino’s hands, but can tell, too, that he’s shorter than average. He supposes that, as befits their nicknames, Chino truly looks Chinese and the one called Chato is in fact broad nosed. He is aware that he will never know. When he’s positioned at the end of the line, he bumps against the crying man and says, Excuse me, and the man begins to sob more loudly.

  You cocksuckers, the angry man says. I hope you die of AIDS. I hope your mothers drown in shit. I hope your sister chokes to death on a nigger dick.

  The Chato one laughs. Jesus, man, you’re a poet.

  He and Chino confer in lowered voices.

  The big man envisions one of them standing aside with a gun and ready to shoot anybody who might in desperate fear whirl and run, even blindfolded, preferring to be shot while trying to stay alive than just stand there and take it. He can picture the other one stepping up behind the first man in line and raising the muzzle to his head. He inhales deeply of the malodorous air, feeling his lungs swell wonderfully. His name is Salvador Martín Obrero and he now
recalls a Sunday morning more than thirty years ago, his mother telling him as they leave for mass to comb his hair, for the love of God, it looks like a bird’s nest.

  He flinches at the blast of a gunshot and then come three more in quick succession . . . bam . . . bam . . . bam . . . approaching him and—

  Chato and Chino watch the big man’s body tumble down the slope to join the others in the fuming mound, vanishing into it in a geyser of scarlet sparks.

  They return to the van and start back to the city.

  4 — JESSIE

  They no sooner head out for the Sosa estate than Aldo places a hand on Jessie’s thigh.

  “Stop,” she says, pushing his hand away.

  “Ho, ho, ze Americain girl, she wanz to play, how you say, har to get, eh?” he says in the terrible French accent of the Pepé Le Pew impersonations he used to do in college. He walks his fingers slowly down his leg to his knee and then hops them over on hers and begins walking them backward up her thigh.

  “I said quit!” she hisses, and jabs a thumbnail into the back of his hand.

  He pulls his hand away and tries to examine it in the bad light. “I think you drew blood, you she-devil.” She sees his grin in the glow of a passing streetlamp.

  “For Pete’s sake, Aldo,” Susi says. “She doesn’t want to be pawed, so just stop pawing her, why don’t you?” Susi is seventeen years old and in her final year of high school. In the front seat, young José Belmonte snickers.

  Switching to Spanish, Aldo says, You kids mind your own business. This is a matter between grown-ups.

  The only grown-up in this car besides JJ is the driver, Susi says, raising another chuckle from José and even from the driver.

  They follow the other Town Cars to the brightly lighted thoroughfare of Paseo de la Reforma and meld into the northbound traffic, the four cars holding close to each other to prevent other vehicles from getting between them. Now they turn off onto the Periférico, the city’s outer beltway, and bear south. Having been to the Sosa residence, Jessie knows it’s on the south side of the posh Pedregales area.