by James Lepore
When Lazaro received his daily DIWA report for Monday, December 20 and saw Jay Cassio’s name on it, he picked up his private line and called his brother Herman and arranged for them to meet for dinner at Las Vacas Gordas, a steak house on nearby Avenida Madera, at nine p.m. that night. The next morning, Herman was having breakfast on the balcony of his twenty-fifth floor penthouse on Avenida Cinqo de Mayo, when his bodyguard brought Edgar and Jose Feria out to join him. The brothers had arrived in Mexico by private jet on Saturday morning, three days prior, and immediately reported the highlights of their recent trip to Miami to Herman. He had not spoken with them since. In recent years he rarely met with them personally, but, given the information he had received from his brother the night before, he thought it necessary to chat face-to-face with his young killers. Below him La Ciudad de Mexico, vast and dense, spread to the horizon in all directions, while the morning sun struggled to penetrate the smog that covered the city like a shroud.
“Sit. Would you like coffee?” said Herman, pointing to the silver service and china cups on the table between them. “Help yourself. Leave us, Stefan.”
The bodyguard stepped back into the apartment, leaving Herman and the Ferias to their coffee and their dazzling view. Herman eyed the brothers, knowing they were waiting for him to speak first. One of Gary Shaw’s bullets had grazed Jose’s temple. The wound was not serious but it had bled profusely, and Jose was still wearing a bright white bandage over his partially shaved scalp. This he fingered while his brother poured coffee.
“An inch to the left and you would be dead,” said Herman.
“Leaving my brother to avenge me,” Jose replied.
“The black was a cop,” said Herman, “so it was good that you left quickly.”
The brothers, uninterested in the occupation of the people they killed, nodded and waited for their employer to continue. Herman, sixty-two, his body florid and bloated from years of unrestrained indulgence in rich food and the best wine and champagne the world had to offer, marveled at his luck at having two such killing machines at his disposal. His panthers, he had befriended them as cubs, and they had been utterly devoted to him ever since. Stony-eyed, supremely confidant, unhurried—he often thought they would have made excellent bankers—they would calmly set out to assassinate the Pope if he ordered them to.
“You will have to stay out of the States for a while,” Herman continued, “but there is work for you here. Senor Cassio landed in Cancun on Saturday. The US Justice Department wants him picked up. We are checking the car rental agencies and the hotels. The Yucatán and Campeche police have a bulletin on him. If they find him we will send you up there to take care of him.”
“And the woman?” said Edgardo.
“She has not been seen at the restaurant in Miami. As I have said, she can bring me down, and if that happens my dear brother and Senor de Leon are concerned that I will have no choice but to bring them down. I tell them not to worry, but they are terrified. There is no trust among us thieves. Therefore we must find Isabel, and take care of her. I have located two of the sisters from her days in the convent. One is in Mexico City, the other is in Guadalahara. They may know where Isabel would go to hide. Do not frighten them. You are looking for your sister, so that she can receive her inheritance from her long lost father.”
“We will leave today.”
“Yes, pronto. And come back pronto. I want her head to give to Lazaro and Rafael as a Christmas present.”
Herman liked to give the impression that he was careless, that he knew only vaguely what was going on in his legal and illegal organizations, and that he did not know precisely how big his empire was or how much money he had. But that was artifice, designed to lull both friend and foe. He had over two hundred million dollars in Russian and Philippine bank accounts, and holdings worth another two hundred million. He liked being in the thick of the fray, not above it; when he was young, he had done his share of violence in order to clear the way for Lazaro and Rafael, and of course himself.
Lazaro would never let him down, and neither would his panthers, but Rafael had shown signs of weakness lately, and fear. He would naturally consider the possibility of the Santaria brothers turning on him. De Leon, a man sixty-five years of age who still liked to fuck fourteen-year-old girls. Perhaps it was time to show him the photographs that Herman had been accumulating over the years, to discourage him from pursuing the foolish idea of a preemptive strike. It would be nice to see the arrogant mandamas frozen in amber, to be dealt with at Herman’s leisure.
“Here are the names and addresses of the good sisters,” Herman continued, sliding a piece of notepaper across the snowy white tablecloth to Edgardo. “Bring me a trophy. When you return there may be more interesting and more difficult game than an innocent young whore.”
42.
10:00 AM, December 20, 2004, Puerto Angel, Mexico
“I have never had to be a nurse before,” Isabel said.
“You don’t have to be one now,” Jay replied.
“You were truly sick.”
“This rash. I thought I was getting better.”
“It is a good sign. It means it is dengue fever, and not something worse.”
They had woke on the beach outside Sabancuy at dawn, driven all day, covering some five hundred miles in twelve hours, most of it through the sweltering, sterile scrubland of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and arrived exhausted at Puerto Angel, where Jay was almost immediately flattened by a blinding headache and a fever that reached one hundred four degrees in an hour. After a night of this, along with vomiting and severe joint pain, a rash had appeared on his chest and spread to his arms and legs. Until the rash appeared this morning, Isabel thought it very possible that Jay would die. Cholera and typhoid fever were not unknown in Mexico, and although they had been very careful about what they ate and drank, a small amount of the swallowed water of Campeche Bay would be enough to give Jay any number of deadly diseases.
“How do you know about dengue fever?” Jay asked.
“The sisters taught us,” Isabel answered. “We were going to be missionaries. It only takes the bite of one mosquito.”
They were staying in a house owned by the Mexican Provincialate of the Congregation of Dominican Sisters. The house, a one-story affair made of local stone and timber, was situated on a hill overlooking Puerto Angel Bay, which lay sparkling some three hundred feet below. They were on a veranda shaded by a once-dark blue canvas awning, tattered now, and faded to dishwater gray by years of exposure to the relentless sun of southern Mexico.
With the appearance of the rash, the fever and nausea had subsided, and Jay was able to drag himself to a chaise. He was weak, but with the fever broken, Isabel could see his spirits rise as he sat in the fresh breeze watching the morning sun play on the bay.
“Are the papers here?” he asked.
“Yes, everything is where I left it. Are you hungry?”
“No. Is there water?”
“Yes. I went out this morning. I’ll get you some.”
Isabel brought the bottled water and handed it to Jay, who sipped it cautiously. He had put on his khaki shorts and a fresh T-shirt while she was gone, and had moved to the veranda by the time she returned. She could see the telltale dengue rash, red and blotchy, on his forearms and extending down his thighs past his knees.
“Thank you,” said Jay.
“De nada.”
“What day is it?”
“We have only been here one day. You should sleep. When you awake, we will eat, and make our plans.”
“I can’t eat.”
“The fever has broken. You will be hungry. Hector will bring us something. He asks about you.”
“Who is Hector?’
“A childhood friend. He is the handyman at Vista del Mar, the restaurant below us on the hill.”
“Have I met him?”
“No,” said Isabel, smiling.
“You have a beautiful smile.”
Isabel did not answ
er. She had not meant to smile. Smiles are invitations. But perhaps he was not asking for one. He was disoriented, exhausted. Still, his simple compliment gratified her. They had made the long drive from Sabancuy in near silence, a silence Isabel had attributed to hatred on Jay’s part.
“Was it a dream?” Jay asked. “Or did you tell me? About Danny.”
“I told you, on the beach near Sabancuy. Do you remember ?”
“I remember,” he answered. “You were going to make him immortal.”
Jay laid his head back on the chaise’s ratty old pillow. Within a few minutes he was asleep, breathing softly. Isabel, who was sitting next to him on a wicker ottoman, stared at his face for a moment. Then her mind drifted to the night before.
“Who are you?” Jay had asked once, sitting up abruptly in the sweat-soaked bed.
“I am Isabel.”
“I’m hot, Isabel.”
“You have a fever.”
“I’m hot.”
She had reached into the bucket of ice that Hector had brought up, and filled a small towel with the rapidly melting chips, pressing it against Jay’s chest, pushing him onto his back, then rubbing the wet coldness onto his nipples and stomach and back up to his neck and face. Then down onto his abdomen and thighs and his genitals. Then the chest again, and the neck and face. He slept, but not for long.
Isabel rose, and went to the waist-high stone wall that separated the veranda from a drop of some one hundred feet to a grassy ravine below. She stood and gazed out at the bay and, beyond it, to the vast, green expanse of the Pacific. She had had only two emotionally charged love affairs in her life. One of them had been with Bryce Powers. After he died, and she aborted his child, men were the last thing on her mind. Her plan to flee would go forward. What other options did she have? Staring down at the sad little town of Puerto Angel, she recalled the time she had spent at this house as a girl, going through puberty, the last days of her innocence. And then she let her mind drift to Isla La Roqueta, in 1996, to her other love.
“First I will show you the house, and then you can land the plane.”
“Land the plane? Are you sure?” She was sitting in the passenger seat of Patricio Castronovo’s Cessna 150, cruising at fifteen hundred feet on a cloudless fall day on the last leg of the short flight from Mexico City to Castronovo’s parents’ home on Isla La Roqueta, the lushly forested island that guards Acapulco Bay on the west. She had been dating Patricio, on Herman’s orders, for two months. During the short trip in the two-seat, single prop aircraft, Isabel had allowed herself a brief daydream of what it might be like to marry Patricio, have his children, share his ambitions. His last remark had awakened her from this reverie.
For an answer Patricio reached over to caress Isabel’s knee and thigh, and smiled the handsome, self-assured smile that had broken through defenses that at the age of nineteen she took for granted were impermeable but obviously were not.
“If you do that,” she said, “I will not be able to concentrate.” Her return smile was real, not fake, like the ones in the beginning, when she first started taking flying lessons from him, a contrivance that had worked perfectly until she fell in love.
“You can do it,” Patricio said, squeezing her knee a last time, then returning his hand to the yoke and maneuvering the plane into a banking descent before leveling it at five hundred feet.
“It will be to your right,” he said, “the yellow house with the swimming pool in the courtyard.” They were flying along the island’s northern coast, the side that faced the mainland, where moments earlier Isabel had seen old-town Acapulco nestled on a hillside, its zocalo, central fountain, and strolling tourists clearly visible from the plane.
“There,” she said. “I see it. It’s beautiful.” More than beautiful, breathtaking, the pool a sapphire blue, the bougainvillea trained on the courtyard walls a mass of velvety red and purple and green.
“Do you see the landing strip?”
“Yes, I see it. There is no tower. Who runs it?”
“We do, the families on the island. I will take us up.”
The day before, in the same plane, Patricio had practiced touch-and-goes for two hours at Puebla Airport to the east of Mexico City, with Isabel in the passenger seat. He had let her handle a few, which were bumpy. His were feathery, dreamy, the touch incredibly light, a kiss of the runway, the go a commanding, confident surge and then an ascending bank and turn to get into position to do it again. This is how you make love, she had said to him and he had smiled.
The next morning, Isabel had awakened early. Leaving Patricio soundly asleep, she made coffee and brought it to the veranda outside his bedroom. The house faced a small bay that gleamed emerald green as it caught the slanting rays of the rising sun. The water was still and calm, the mild morning breeze riffling almost imperceptibly across its sparkling surface. As she sipped her coffee she saw what at first she thought was a fleet of toy boats enter the bay. Standing, puzzled, shading her eyes with her free hand, she saw that the boats were dolphins, dozens of them if not more, swimming lazily, some breaking the surface in twos and threes in small, arcing leaps. Leaving her coffee, she went down to the beach, stripped off her nightgown, and joined them.
How long was she there? She could not tell. Some circled her, drawing nearer with each circuit, some swam to her and brushed her with their long, smooth flanks as they passed, others nudged her hands with their snouts. She dove under and played with them, twisting and turning and stroking them until she had to surface for air. The last time she surfaced, Patricio was standing on the beach holding two cups of coffee and smiling broadly, his teeth white and perfect, his dark eyes happy, like a child’s.
She stood naked with him and drank her coffee, which he had reheated for her, then they rushed upstairs to make love.
“They are there most mornings this time of year,” he said when they were lying in bed afterward.
“I could not resist,” she said. “They were calling me.”
“They usually swim away if someone enters. My mother says they choose only the unhappy to swim with.”
Isabel could not remember what her answer was, only the dreamy feeling of security she felt in Patricio’s arms, in his bed, in his life.
Love does not come alone. It brings a host of other feelings with it, feelings that, long neglected, assert themselves with a startlingly persistent energy: demons, it might be said, who will have their day in the sun. Perhaps it is to confront these demons that we fall in love in the first place. Perhaps facing them squarely is the price we pay for love. If so, that price would be heavy for Isabel, who stood now, the sea breeze drying the tears running down her face, aware—more sharply than she had been in many years—of the river of anger and shame and sadness running through her heart.
43.
5:00 PM, December 23, 2004, Miami
It took Matt Ramirez four days undercover in Little Havana to learn that a woman fitting Isabel Perez’s description had until quite recently been waitressing at El Pulpo. It took a call from the US Attorney in New Jersey to the US Attorney in Manhattan to New York’s chief of police to get the city’s human resource people to search their records, but it was eventually learned that Angelo Perna and Frank Dunn were partners in a patrol car in Bensonhurst from 1964 to 1967. Perna was therefore linked to Isabel, Shaw, Cassio, and Dunn. Shaw was sticking to his story, and Dunn was still among the missing.
Phil Gatti’s request to have US agents directly involved in the search for Jay Cassio in Mexico had been denied by Attorney General Santaria. Gatti had assigned two Mexican-American DEA agents, without the knowledge or consent of the Mexican government, to look for the Feria brothers in Mexico City. Luckily they had spotted them exiting Herman Santaria’s apartment building on Tuesday morning and, according to Gatti, who was monitoring their activities from a hotel room in the capital, the agents had followed the Ferias to residences in Mexico City and Guadalajara that turned out to be communal homes for retired nuns. They had see
n no sign of Isabel, and were now trailing the Ferias along Mexico’s southern Pacific coast.
Chris Markey was acutely aware that his investigation was stalling. His instincts told him that Lazaro Santaria had spotted the Cassio warrant request and would hunt the young lawyer down and execute him on a back road somewhere, ending Cassio’s usefulness as a decoy or anything else. And why were the Ferias in Guadalajara? If they were chasing Isabel, Gatti’s agents would have a hard time getting to her before the killers did, and arrests on Mexican soil were out of the question. If they were there on other business, then following them was a waste of time.
Most disturbing of all, a story had appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger that questioned the motive behind the article Markey had planted in the Miami Herald identifying Cassio and revealing the name of his hotel in Miami Beach; the reporter, Linda Marshall, suggested that an attempt had been made by the FBI to use Cassio as an unwitting decoy in a mysterious investigation involving murders in New Jersey and Florida. Marshall was awaiting a ruling by a federal judge in Newark as to whether or not she should be held in contempt for refusing to reveal her sources in her previous articles on these murders, and was presumed, at this point in her career, to be no friend of big government.
