Méndez raised his eyebrows. The man was pitching him a story.
“Let’s pretend for a moment that the proposal is realistic,” Méndez said. “The fact remains, I have moved on. I spend time with my family. I write my column. I direct projects. Reporters do the street work. I am safe, tranquil. Why the devil would I want to involve myself in a kamikaze crusade?”
The Secretary smiled victoriously.
“Two reasons,” he said. “First, you are spectacularly bored. You are not content in this antiseptic pseudo-paradise. These Americans—”
“Don’t presume I share your resentments and biases. This country has given me refuge. I am profoundly grateful.”
“Nonetheless, you need a true challenge. You miss the past, you miss the Diogenes Group, you miss the violent emotions of police work.”
It took a moment for Méndez to subdue his impulse to get up and leave. The reason for his indignation was simple: the Secretary was right. No sense in denying it, at least not to himself.
In a low, dry voice, Méndez asked, “And the second reason?”
“You have just been informed that our enemies are going to attain even more power. That will put them in a better position to do what they have always wanted to do: fuck you.”
The words startled Méndez. The Secretary had an aversion to obscene language. Yet he had deigned to use a classic profanity: chingar.
The Secretary crushed out his cigarette.
“And you are not the kind of fool who will sit around waiting for that to happen,” he said. “You know you have to fuck them first.”
Chapter 3
The last time they had seen each other, Leo Méndez had given Pescatore a handsome edition of The Three Musketeers.
During the phone call Sunday, Pescatore told Méndez he had liked the book, the swashbuckling and swordplay. He had a new appreciation for the nicknames of the former deputy chiefs of the Diogenes Group.
“You called him Athos because he’s so serious, right?”
“Exactly,” Méndez said. “As for Porthos, have you ever met a Mexican who looks more like a Porthos?”
“He’ll do, that’s for sure. Speaking of which…”
Pescatore said he had a job proposal for Athos and Porthos. Méndez gave him their phone numbers and promised to tell them Pescatore would be in touch. The situation reminded Méndez of Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers.
“D’Artagnan recruits his old friends for a new adventure,” Méndez said. “They are retired in the countryside, but they are bored, so they join up.”
“If I’m D’Artagnan, who are you?”
“Aramis. When he was a soldier, he dreamed of being a priest. When he became a priest, he missed being a soldier.”
“I hope I’ll have time to see you in San Diego.”
“Unfortunately, mi querido Valentine, I don’t think I will be here. I am planning a trip to the East Coast. It has come up, eh, rather suddenly.”
In a way, Pescatore was relieved. Isabel had given him strict orders to avoid discussing the case with Méndez.
Pescatore spent Monday getting ready. He talked to his boss in Buenos Aires by Skype. Facundo congratulated him on landing their first DC contract.
On Tuesday, Pescatore flew to San Diego. He rented a car and drove to a Coco’s diner off the freeway near the Mexican border.
Athos and Porthos waited at a corner table. There were big hugs all around. The three of them had seen action together years back. After an uneasy start, the adventures had ended in friendship.
The conversation was in Spanish. Athos, whose real name was Ramón Rojas, wore a baseball cap over his balding pate. His goatee had grayed. He had retired after four decades of police service. He divided his time between “your house” in Tijuana (a courtesy meaning Pescatore was always welcome) and the U.S. suburb of Chula Vista, where he had an immigrant son who worked as an engineer. Athos explained, “It’s like George Bush padre once said: I’m in the grandfather business.”
Porthos, aka Abelardo Tapia, was as affable and cheerful as Athos was laconic and somber. After the Diogenes Group, Porthos had landed a plum job as director of the security force at a factory in Tijuana.
“It’s honest money, more or less,” Porthos said, lifting a jumbo hamburger. “My wife doesn’t miss trying to raise four kids on a police salary. She says it was a vow of poverty.”
Porthos sported gold chains, fancy-toed cowboy boots, and a collarless leather jacket. In his early forties, he had a broad face and a thick neck and looked as strong and well fed as ever.
Pescatore described the assignment and pay. He said it was a confidential mission. He didn’t mention Méndez. He knew they wouldn’t tell their former chief about the case unless he asked. And Méndez wouldn’t ask. Although he had gone back to journalism, he was a man of honor.
“Any questions? If you guys need time to think about it, check your schedules, we could talk again tomorrow.”
They looked at him blankly.
“Shouldn’t we get started?” Porthos asked.
“What about your job?”
“They owe me weeks of vacation.”
“So you’re on board? Just like that?”
Porthos clapped him on the back.
“Valentine, it’s all set,” he said. “Licenciado Méndez said you need help. Sounds like it involves travel, visiting half-ugly places. We can’t let you do that all by yourself. We are at your orders.”
Pescatore smiled. If Méndez asked a favor, these two treated it like a command.
He told them he had a lead on a survivor of the massacre in Tecate, a Salvadoran or Honduran known only as Chiclet. A street-level service provider, Chiclet operated drop houses where smuggling crews stashed illegal immigrants. The overnight clerk at the motel had recognized him from past stays with groups of migrants. On the afternoon of the murders, Chiclet had rented two rooms under an alias that turned out to be the name of a dead Honduran migrant. Late that night, he had returned to the front desk, rented a third room, and bought a bottle of liquor from the clerk. Chiclet had not been among the corpses found in the first two rooms. The third room had been empty except for the half-finished bottle. That was the intelligence Isabel’s Homeland Security agents had been able to gather despite Mexican interference.
“He might’ve escaped,” Pescatore said. “Or he might’ve been a traitor working for the killers.”
“You have only a nickname?” Porthos wrote notes on a legal pad. His mug of Coke burbled as he slurped with a straw.
“Yes.”
“This massacre…” Porthos said. “A strange affair. That’s the talk in the cantinas where the cops go. Usually, as barbaric as these things are, the motive makes sense. To the criminals, at least. Who was killed, when, where, how. Who gains, who loses. It all has meaning. Like a language.”
“And this one?”
“This one seems like pure killing for the sake of killing.”
A few minutes later, Pescatore watched the two men climb into Porthos’s fully loaded GMC Sierra pickup truck. He had no doubt they would take care of business. Porthos had been a star homicide investigator before joining the Diogenes Group. Athos was more of a weapons and tactics man, but he had sources too, and an elephantine memory for names, cases, and faces.
Pescatore had booked a room in a corner hotel on India Street in Little Italy. He wanted to roam the city, visit Border Patrol stations, pick up scuttlebutt. Isabel had instructed him to stay low profile, however. He spent most of the first day in the Italian café on the ground floor of the hotel, where he set up his laptop by a window and reviewed the case file. He drank espresso, ate lunch, drank espresso. He watched the tourists, office workers, downtown hipsters, valet parkers—and a few actual old-school Italian-Americans who looked like they had mixed feelings about gentrification. He went for a run on the waterfront. San Diego was where he had first joined law enforcement, first killed a man, first fallen in love. During his years livin
g with Isabel, it had started to feel like home.
Wednesday dragged on without word from Athos and Porthos. Idleness got him thinking about Fatima Belhaj. Distracted by the assignment, he had resisted the urge to call her. She hadn’t called him either. Five days now.
After a failed attempt at a nap, he called her cell phone. Her recorded voice was throaty, confident, with the slightest percussive hint of her Moroccan origins: “Je me trouve dans la impossibilité de vous repondre…”
He remembered kidding her about that message. “I find myself in the impossibility of responding.” What kinda highfalutin nonsense is that? How about “I can’t answer the phone right now”?
He didn’t leave a message. Angry with himself, he redialed. The recording again. It was evening in Paris. Maybe she was working. Maybe she was with Karim. Drinks, dinner, a stroll. Back to his place. Or hers…
The bottle of wine Pescatore drank with dinner did not make him sleepy. Sometime after midnight, he couldn’t sit still any longer. He retrieved his rental car, an Impala as usual. A Tijuana radio station played “La Flaca,” a moody cut teaming Carlos Santana and Juanes, the Colombian singer. Pescatore cranked the volume. He sped through the amphitheater of the city beneath the stars. The elevated freeway curled south past the Coronado Bay Bridge, a ribbon of lights shimmering on the water. He had a vague plan to drive to the border and cruise through his old patrol area. After a few minutes, he realized he was near the scene of the murder-kidnapping. Surely Isabel wouldn’t mind if he took a look.
He pointed the car at the exit ramp. The convenience store appeared, an island of light in a semi-industrial area. He pulled into the space where the van had been parked during the shooting he had watched on the video at Isabel’s office. Green and red neon glowed on his windshield. The uniformed clerk, a heavyset Latina, was intermittently visible behind the counter.
The radio played banda music, wailing horns and rat-a-tat drums. He imagined the last moments of the driver of the van. Maybe he had been grooving to a song. Then, bam-bam. Two in the head. Lights out. End of story.
His phone beeped. A missed call from Fatima. He cursed. It was nine hours later in Paris. She had probably called before work. To his relief, she answered when he called back.
“Valentín.” She used the Spanish pronunciation. Café noise in the background.
He asked how she was doing.
“I am at Les Deux Palais,” she said quietly.
The century-old brasserie on the Île de la Cité was across the street from the stone sprawl of the Palace of Justice and near Paris police headquarters, which explained the “two palaces” in the name. Pescatore and Fatima had once drunk champagne at Les Deux Palais while she narrated the revolving-door menagerie: cops, prosecutors, lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, defendants, reporters, and other big shots and dirtbags.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“On the road, working a case.”
“Very late.”
He closed his eyes, concentrating. She was the chief of a counterterrorism squad. She probably had a court hearing or a meeting at the Palace of Justice.
“It’s not a good time,” he said. “But we need to have a conversation.”
“When you like.”
He frowned at his red and green reflection in the windshield.
“I gotta say, I’m kinda disappointed you didn’t call.”
“You didn’t either.”
“Yeah, but I’m not the one who dropped a bomb. I’m not the one who got all complicated. I’m the one waiting for your decision.”
“Wait.” To someone else: “Deux secondes.”
The echo of voices and china gave way to street sounds, a passing two-tone siren.
“We will talk later,” she said calmly. “But do not have expectations.”
“What does that mean?”
“You want a decision.” She said it almost like a question.
“Yeah. As far as us. If you choose him or me.”
She made an exasperated clicking noise. “I have said it already. I find this impossible. It is not like choosing between, eh, two sofas.”
“Well, you can’t…”
Motion in his side mirror distracted him. A vehicle had entered the lot, almost hidden in his blind spot, about twenty feet behind him. The same position as the killers’ vehicle before the murder. He saw it was a green and white Chevrolet Tahoe with roof lights. The Border Patrol.
“Goddamn it…”
“Valentín?”
“Fatima. Sorry, I’m in the middle of an operation. Something just happened. I gotta go.”
“Oh.” She sounded surprised. A pause. “Au revoir, then.”
He hung up. His train of thought sped toward disaster. He saw himself through the eyes of a Border Patrol agent: Male Latino, early thirties, reasonably hard-ass-looking. Talking on the phone in a parked car at one a.m. at a known smuggling location. And the scene of a recent 187. What’ve we got here? Possible alien smuggler, drug runner, stickup man, auto thief. Watch him. Run his plate, call for backup.
Pescatore kept his eyes on the mirror. The Tahoe didn’t move. Minutes later, another Border Patrol Tahoe nosed to a stop next to the first one.
Ordinarily, he would have enjoyed talking to brother PAs. The problem was that he had become a minor celebrity in the San Diego sector after the Ruiz Caballero investigation. Agents knew he had been engaged to Isabel, and that he had become a private investigator. Word would spread that he had been skulking around the scene of the rip-crew murder. That was the kind of trail Isabel didn’t want to leave. It could end up burning her secret inquiry. He cursed himself for not staying in his hotel room where he belonged.
Vehicle exhaust mixed with mist. While he watched in his mirrors, Pescatore held the phone to his ear as if still having a conversation. The PAs might decide to question him and search his car. But this wasn’t a checkpoint or a port of entry; mere suspicion wouldn’t do. If the agents didn’t articulate a good reason, he could refuse to cooperate. He could go “California asshole,” as agents called it, on them. Curse, complain, threaten to sue. ¡Pinche migra, discriminación basta ya!
Most PAs wouldn’t back down, though. The agents would call in a supervisor or request assistance from local police. Or haul his uppity ass out of the car and throw him on the hood.
He considered going into the store and buying something. His fingers closed around the door handle. He hesitated.
Another minute passed. He figured they weren’t sure what to do. They were waiting for him to make a move.
He placed the phone in his jacket pocket. He put the car in reverse. He backed up. Slowly. Smoothly. He shifted, turned left, and rolled past the Patrol vehicles toward the exit of the parking lot. He braced for lights, sirens, amplified voices.
Nothing happened. He kept the radio off. He respected the speed limit all the way back to the hotel.
He fell asleep at dawn. An hour later, Porthos called.
Twenty-four hours and two thousand miles after that, the hunt had moved to southernmost Mexico. A Chevrolet Trailblazer rolled down a jungle road in the state of Chiapas.
“Sure you know where you’re going, Comandante?” Porthos asked.
Athos allowed himself a grin behind the wheel. “I have done raids in this region, Comandante. Fugitive apprehensions. When you were in diapers.”
“You’re old, but not that old,” Porthos said.
“You wore diapers until you were fifteen, no?”
Pescatore turned up the air conditioner. Like the others, he wore a lightweight vest. The shoulder holster under it contained a Glock that the Mexicans had handed him on arrival.
Athos and Porthos had identified Chiclet thanks to contacts in the Baja police’s homicide unit and the smuggling underworld. Pescatore stared at the mug shot of the fugitive: Héctor Talavera, twenty-seven, a Honduran with a decade-long record of arrests related to smuggling. First at the Guatemalan border, then in northern Mexico. His girlfriend in Tec
ate had told police that after the massacre, Chiclet had come home to grab clothes and money. He had said he was going to Honduras. Athos and Porthos believed a more likely destination was the state of Chiapas, where he had lived in the past. Wherever he was, whether he was a survivor or an accomplice, the Mexican authorities were not looking for him.
The Trailblazer approached a bridge over the Suchiate River between Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, and Tecún Umán, Guatemala. No walls, fences, or fortifications. The border bridge disgorged Mexico-bound buses, cars, scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians in a stream of energy and color, rust and sweat. In the background, a swan fluttered up off the bridge. A shimmering apparition in the sun, the white bird flew low over piles of garbage, riverbank huts, and vending stands, over the waters dotted with rafts ferrying people and contraband in both directions. Athos turned left, cruising northeast along the international boundary demarcated by the river.
The new front line, Pescatore thought. Because of the drop in Mexican immigration and the rise in Central Americans, most U.S.-bound migrants crossed this border first. The humidity, vegetation, and tumbledown architecture made the place seem sleepy, but the smuggling industry flourished at high noon. Pescatore watched the riverine advance of a raft assembled from truck tires. It carried a family and luggage. A smuggler swam alongside in his underpants, steering the vessel. Further on, a cable stretched from the roof of a three-story Guatemalan building to a tree on the Mexican riverbank. Men clustered on the rooftop. When they stepped aside, a woman whizzed into view seated in a ski-lift-type contraption attached to the cable. The aerial chair slid down the zip line slanting across the river and landed by the tree. A man in a baseball cap and sunglasses helped the passenger dismount. He hurried her into the brush.
“I thought I’d seen every trick in the book,” Pescatore said.
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