by John Donohue
And the appalled, fearful expression of the desert guide Xochi as he saw the copies of Eliot Westmann’s most recent journal spill out of my bags as I headed for the airport.
“You gonna use that terminal?” a voice asked. I opened my eyes, momentarily startled. He was just a college kid: lean and bearded with the intense eyes and shapeless suit jacket of a graduate student. I never even heard him approach.
Nice work, Burke. An army of psychopaths is after you and you’re napping in a public place.
The kid had a copy of Spengler’s Decline of the West under his arm. Oh boy. Danger is all around.
“No,” I told him. “Knock yourself out. I’m done.”
When I had returned from Tucson and before the attack at the house had knocked me off balance, I wondered about Xochi’s concern about the copy of the Westmann manuscript. Lori Westmann’s agent hadn’t even mentioned it when I had visited, so it couldn’t have meant something to her. I wondered again whether Xochi had kept its existence secret. Something about it must have caught his attention.
He was a desert guide and advocate for traditional Southwest culture. It was clear to me that Elliot Westmann had been milking Xochi for all kinds of information. The author’s notes gave a pretty clear sense of the old faker collecting odds and ends of cultural minutiae that could be used to dress up a new book. Westmann was working on some kind of Eco-Indian-New Age scheme. It was structurally similar to what he had done with his earlier Tales of a Warrior Mystic, but designed to be sold in a different era to a different clientele. There’s a sucker born every generation.
It was, I thought, pretty transparent. When I had originally scanned Westmann’s notes, I made a rough allocation of elements to different categories—local color, religion, ritual, ecology. But there were also chunks of material that combined hiking narrative with odd little numerical references in the margins—Paired strings of five digits. Westmann did not strike me as a numbers guy, so they stuck out in my mind.
But then Los Gemenos came calling and there were other things to worry about. Yet now I wondered again about the numbers and what they could tell me.
The university has a nice map room, with expansive blocks of document cases in natural wood. Clusters of soft chairs were spread here and there, with the occasional napping students sprawled in them, but it was mostly deserted. No skulking hit men, students of German intellectualism or other dangerous types. A young, gum chewing reference librarian showed me how to access the relevant data files at yet another bank of computer terminals.
I yearned for the musty card catalogues of my youth. But it was not to be. The room was cool and angular and high tech. The only real maps immediately apparent were behind Plexiglas and mounted on the wall like archaeological exhibits from a bygone age. The librarian, however, fit right in with the contemporary decor. She had short spiky hair that was dyed black. A small jewel of some sort was set in her nose. Her skirt was short and her long, thin legs were encased in nubby tights. The only makeup she wore was an odd maroon lip gloss. It created an unfortunate contrast with the purple of the laminated ID card she wore on a lanyard around her neck.
“How do you feel about the ideas of Oswald Spengler?” I asked on a hunch. She looked at me dismissively. “This,” she said, “is the map room. Crackpot philosophy is on the first floor.”
“OK, so we’re safe,” I replied. She tilted her head and looked at me. I could see the wheels turning as she wondered whether to call security. I waved a sheet of paper at her. “I’m an adjunct in the history department and I’m doing some freelance research,” I explained. I put on my most pathetic face. “I’m looking to see what these coordinates can tell me. Got a globe?”
She rolled her eyes, sat down on a wheeled chair, and bumped me away from the keyboard. “Just numbers?” she said, “no indications of direction?”
“Is that a problem?”
She shrugged. “Nah. Just a process of elimination. You’ve got some idea of the general location, right? Please?”
“Surprise me,” I told her and showed her the numbers.
“Ah,” she said, “a test.” She closed her eyes and pulled data directly from the cartographic fissures of her librarian’s brain. “East latitude, north longitude puts you… in south-central China. South longitude somewhere in the Pacific Ocean east of Australia.”
“You can do this from memory?” I asked.
Her eyes opened. “This,” she repeated with some emphasis, “is the map room.”
“Of course. And it’s impressive, but not what I’m looking for.”
“Flip the latitude and you’re south of the Tropic of Capricorn, again in the ocean.” She eyed me for a reaction.
“Nope.”
“OK. Last variant is west latitude and north longitude. Somewhere in the American southwest?”
“Bingo,” I said.
She fired up a software program and began plugging in the string of numbers that I had copied from Westmann’s journal.
She typed and thought and frowned. “You copied these down sequentially, right?”
“Uh, yeah, they’re samples from a document I’m working on.” She looked at me as if wondering who in their right mind would let me work on something like this unaided.
“OK,” she said and blew a slow, steady stream of air out as she backtracked and adjusted her entries.
“What?”
“They didn’t make sense at first, but I can see now… these are multiple readings in more than one series and you just ran them all together…”
“Almost as if I didn’t know what I was doing.” She looked at me. “Hard to believe, but true,” I suggested.
Again the testy exhale, but I thought I saw a suppressed smile. Her pale fingers clacked across the keyboard. She moved a mouse with the smooth precision of long practice. The nails of her fingers were cut short, but carefully colored to match her maroon lipstick. Finally, she was done. She rolled the chair back and stood up. “I’m running a printout from the office laser,” she told me. “It’s got better resolution and you won’t get charged for the printout.”
She came back with a fistful of papers: a record of the data entered and maps of various scales showing the plotted courses suggested by the coordinates. I shuffled through them.
“Interesting stuff,” she said.
“Why so?”
She spread the sheets out on a table and started pointing things out. “Notice the routes being suggested. I overlaid them on maps with both terrain and manmade features.”
“Lots of terrain,” I said. “Not many roads.”
“Not much of anything,” she said. “Except this little feature.” All the routes were, at one point or another, bisected by a dashed line. “You know what this is?” She asked.
“The border between Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora,” I said, proud of at least that much knowledge.
“Yes. All of these routes cross the border. At locations far from anything, including, I assume, anything remotely resembling a Customs inspection.”
“I wonder,” I said innocently, “what that’s all about?”
She looked then as if she suspected new and unpleasant things about me. Life in the library was probably pretty tidy. I was not. Then the momentary suspicion faded, routine reasserted itself and she shrugged. “We supply directions, not motivations.”
“Of course,” I agreed, “this is, after all, the map room.”
17 Flight
The mean streets of the old Red Hook have changed. Gentrification has arrived in the form of small bistros, coffee bars, and microbreweries. The stolid nineteenth century warehouses are being rehabbed into apartments with big windows and open floor plans. It’s all very civilized, but not always pleasant.
“Don’t even open your mouth, you asshole,” the voice said with a venom that was potent. We sat in the dim recesses of a microbrewery, the brick walls arching over our heads. It should have felt safe and comforting; vaguely old world. Instead, I f
elt like I was sitting in a vault where they store gunpowder.
My brother Micky was about as angry as I had ever seen him, and that was saying a great deal. His partner Art sat next to him, facing me across the dark wooden plank table. He’s usually the affable one, a man naturally disposed to play the Good Cop in the same way that my brother emerged from the womb fully formed as the consummate Bad Cop. Today, Art’s face was a tight mask; he watched me with eyes that were remote and uncaring. It wasn’t like him, but I seemed to be getting this reaction from him a lot in the last few days
I opened and closed my mouth, and then opted for the smart move and just sat there.
“You are so deep into this wormhole, Connor… I can’t even begin to…” Micky’s anger seemed to briefly choke off his ability to speak.
“Bad enough you run afoul of TM-7,” Art said. “And, by the way, we’re still waiting for you to come clean about that.”
“I can explain…” I began, but Art held up a stern hand.
“Little late in the game for confidences. Let me finish.” He looked like he would rather finish me. “We go from bad to worse. You manage to get Los Gemenos on your case. And we warned you about Osorio…”
My brother found his voice. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
The waitress came over with our beers. I didn’t answer Micky’s question, just watched mutely as she set the pint glasses down in front of us. When she left, I shrugged. “We needed some sort of ‘in’ to the Hispanic underworld.”
Art made a deep harrumphing noise. “Hispanic underworld. You been watching too many movies.”
Micky picked up the thought. “Osorio’s a jackal, Connor. He may like to pretend he’s Ricardo Montalban, but in the end he’s just another thug.”
I couldn’t object to the characterization. Osorio was the one who’d told me that Martín was gone. Maybe he was mistaken. But maybe he’d decided to do someone a favor and set me up. Time would tell. It was yet another complication that I decided not to think about right now. I hefted the glass of beer, taking small comfort in the familiar smooth curve of the glass in my hand. I lifted it to my lips and let the aroma of the hops wash over my face.
Neither of the two men sitting opposite me touched their glasses. They watched me with an unblinking patience, waiting for me to crack.
“Look,” I finally said, “I don’t have all the pieces put together yet. And I was trying not to get you guys involved.”
My brother snorted. “A little late for that.”
“Connor,” Art said with real pain, “you are in way over your fucking head.”
Micky sat back and glared at me. “This has nothing to do with you wanting to protect us, Connor. I know you. When are you gonna realize that this is not about you and some fucking test of skill? It’s not about measuring up to Yamashita or some assholic warrior code. This is the real deal.”
“I know that,” I protested. “But I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the kind of thing that you can afford to be involved with. I may have to do some things…”
“Things?” Art said.
I nodded. “They might arrest me before it’s all over.”
“Arrest you,” my brother demanded. “Arrest you?” He started to rise from his seat, but Art held him down. “I’m gonna fucking kill you if you don’t level with me and tell us what’s going on!”
So I did. The odd job for Lori Westmann and the manuscript copy I made. The suspicious fire at the Westmann estate that destroyed the original. The notes and coordinates in the manuscript copy that detailed a host of clandestine trails for border crossings.
After my story we all sat for a moment, saying nothing. Micky ordered a Jameson. Art and I joined him.
“When did you finally fit the pieces together?’ Micky said. “After the attack?”
I shook my head. “No. I wasn’t really focused on the manuscript then. But once you got the information about TM-7, I started thinking about that guy Xochi in Tucson and the expression on his face when he saw me with a copy of the manuscript. Then, when I ran the GPS coordinates, it began to dawn on me.”
“You coulda brought us in, Connor,” Art chided.
I sipped at the gold and smoke of the Irish whiskey. “Art. You guys aren’t cops anymore. But you still have to play by the rules.” Micky started to say something, but I held up a hand. “Yeah, I know, not all the rules all the time. But the big ones? Please. It’s what you do…”
The two cops sat in grudging agreement, looking into the whiskey for answers it couldn’t provide.
Micky grimaced. “Here’s your problem. TM-7 is like some beast with multiple heads. Someone in the organization wants you taken out. You blew away a few of them and Martín has disappeared for the time being. It gives you some breathing room, but they’re just gonna send someone else.“
I swallowed and asked the big question. “Now what?”
The eyed each other, sending silent signals back and forth, an ocular cop semaphore. My brother seemed uncomfortable. Art leaned forward, his big hands resting on the table.
“The rumble over the networks is that something big is going down on the border. The various cartels are jockeying for control over smuggling routes. TM-7 is just one of the players. They want what you have and are not gonna stop ‘til they get it.”
“So what do I do?”
Micky shrugged. “The good news is that these guys are busy and that if you can find whoever is really pissed at you and placate him, the organization itself will move on.”
“Bigger fish to fry,” Art observed.
“So?” I prompted.
“So you give it to them.”
“Huh?”
“Hear me out,” my brother said. “Someone wants what you have. They also want you in case you know what you have. For them it’s a two-part problem. They want the info on the smuggling routes, and they don’t want anyone else to have it.
“Why not just ask that guy Xochi?”
Art waved a hand. “They may already have him.”
“They could ask him, of course,” Micky mused. “And it’s our experience that people like this are terrible liars.”
“There are, of course, more vigorous ways to question someone,” Art added. “But there are issues…”
“Such as?”
Art smiled smugly. “Contrary to whatever wet dream some politicians have had, torture doesn’t yield such great information. Besides, even if they got the info, they tend to—get rid of the source. Makes things much tidier. Although not a great deal for your pal Xochi. That still leaves the problem of you having a copy of the coordinates.”
“So the manuscript is important to them,” Micky said. “They want it back.”
“Of course, you have also read it,” Art added. “Bad news for them, since now there’s another loose wheel in their little scheme.”
“Even worse news for you personally,” my brother added with a perverse tone of satisfaction. “’Cause now they have to eliminate you.”
Art leaned back and smiled broadly. “Of course, we have made a career out of seeing the silver lining in black clouds. This problem is no exception”
“I’m overjoyed,” I told them.
They looked at each other and leaned in over the table simultaneously, the wheels in their heads spinning. I waited, openmouthed.
“Simple, really,” Micky said. “We provide the bait—in this case you and the manuscript. It would be really surprising if whoever is in charge down there, the guy funding the hit on you, doesn’t surface.”
“And then?”
“The details need a little fleshing out,” Art admitted.
“But the big picture is simple,” Micky said. “You find whoever is behind this…”
“And have him arrested?” I asked hopefully.
Art looked guilty. “Well, no…”
“Guy like this is gonna be able to put a hit on you whether he’s in jail or out,” Micky said.
“Which means?”
I had known where they were going, of course. But part of me hoped that they had an alternative. This was crossing a line for all of us. I wanted to find another solution. We all did. But life is what you get, not what you wish for.
I sighed. “So we go down there?”
“Well, technically, no… you go down there,” Art said with a half smile. “The two of us are still under something of a cloud.”
“They’re not gonna let us anywhere near the border anytime soon,” Micky explained.
“You’re going to send me alone?”
“Who better?” Art shrugged. “You’re already up to your eyeballs in this thing.”
I stared at Micky. “You two just finished telling me I was in over my head!”
He smiled tightly. “Yeah. But at least now you know it. Besides, we can pull some strings and get you some backup.”
Art took a letter-size manila envelope out of his jacket and slid it over to me. “Four thousand in cash. It’s all we could come up with. Plus a plane ticket to Tucson.”
“You got a few good days,” Micky instructed. “You get down there and find who’s after you…”
“How’m I gonna do that?” I protested.
“We know a guy out there. Former INS inspector named Steve Daley. He owes me. He’ll meet you at the plane.”
“Keep a low profile, Connor,” Art said. “Stay off the grid. No credit cards, nothing that will leave a trace.”He looked at his watch. “Clock’s ticking. TM-7 will be back. They’ll be looking for you, so you gotta move quick.”
