The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  An awning made of wrought iron and inset with square glass blocks hung over the front doors, the frames of which were made of a deep amber wood. Bern put the key in the lock and went into a small entry with a tessellated floor of black-and-white tiles. There was another frosted-glass door in front of him, and to his left the stone stairs ascended sharply in a turn to the second floor.

  He started up the stairs, his shoes scraping softly on the stones. For some reason, he counted them, but when he reached the top, he didn’t even remember how many there had been. The landing was small, illuminated by the soft glow from a globed light over the door. A window looked out on Parque México. There was a portrait, a pencil drawing, on the wall next to the doorbell. It depicted a young man whose hairstyle and clothes seemed to place him in the 1930s. No signature.

  Bern put the second key in the door, unlocked it, and pushed the door open. He stood there a moment, looking into the darkness. The anxiety he felt had nothing to do with fear. It was the anticipation of walking into a paradox, the life and world of a stranger he knew intimately. Already he could smell the rooms in the darkness in front of him, and they reminded him of the apartments in Paris that he had lived in, the odors of old wood and paints and canvas and cigarettes . . . and, yes, of the faint presence of women.

  He fumbled along the wall and found the light switch. He was in a small entry hall, which had glass panels above the wood wainscoting. There was mail scattered all over the floor. But not enough to be six weeks’ worth. Someone had been picking it up every few days, he guessed.

  He closed the door behind him, stepped over the mail, and went into the front room. Comfortable furniture, the walls covered with framed pictures—drawings, oil paintings, pastels, along with some black-and-white photographs. He went straight to the artworks. They seemed to be of every age and era, but a few contemporary ones bore the signature of Jude Teller. Eagerly, he looked closely at these. Jude had been good, as Mondragón had said. His classical training was indeed evident in the portraits, and even in the few nudes. His eye was fresh, and his style was sure and confident.

  Art magazines were scattered about the room, and a few small sculptures stood here and there. One bust. Bern went over to it. Bronze. This, too, bore Jude’s signature, a woman’s head, as well as her neck and the tops of her breasts. As he bent down and studied the work closely, he was surprised by the admiration, and maybe even a twinge of envy, that he felt. Jude had been very good indeed, and Bern doubted if he could have accomplished the quality of animation that this bust exhibited. Jesus.

  He turned away and scanned the rest of the room. Every wall bore some kind of artwork. The room was also divided by wainscoting with glass above. On one side, a stairwell ascended, turning to the right. A short, wide corridor led past a dining room, a bathroom across the hall, and then to a large kitchen that looked out over an inner courtyard on the ground floor.

  Bern returned to the front room and went up the stairs, turning on lights as he went. The stairs opened into a spacious third-floor studio scattered about with the paraphernalia of an artist’s craft and smelling of wood and resins and oil paints. A row of windows looked out over the treetops of Parque México.

  There was a bedroom off the far side of the studio; it was a long one, with windows on the street end that had the same view of the park as the windows in the studio. The other end of the room opened onto a rooftop terrace. This was Jude’s bedroom. His clothes were in the closets. Bern checked the sizes in the suits and the shirts. Same as his. The styles and colors would suit his own tastes exactly, and they could easily have been found in his own closet.

  He went to the bathroom and stood at the sink. Jude’s razor was there on the marble countertop in a green glass bowl, just the right shape for it. There was a tall, cylindrical black-and-gold tin of talcum powder. An amber bottle of cologne. Bern picked it up and swept it under his nose. It was the saddest fragrance he could imagine.

  The place was instantly saturated with familiarity, as if he were in his own home after his own death, longing to be alive again, and sad beyond expression to have left so much behind.

  Suddenly, he thought he heard the door downstairs. Startled, he held his breath and touched the sink to ground himself, to steady a slight dizziness.

  “Jude?” A woman’s voice. “Hey,” she called, “when did you get in?”

  He heard the door close and her footsteps crossing the wooden floors of the rooms. She started up the stairs.

  Chapter 19

  Bern froze, looking at himself in the mirror as he listened to her footsteps ascending the stairs and growing nearer. What the hell should he do? Her footsteps hit the landing in the studio.

  “Jude? Why did you just step right over your mail?”

  He heard her starting across the studio, having seen the light on in the bedroom, he supposed. Turning away from the sink, he hurried out of the bathroom and across the bedroom, reaching the door to the studio while she was still a few feet away.

  “Hey,” she said, breaking into a huge smile as he stepped out of the bedroom. She came up to him and kissed him with unexpected gentleness and then embraced him tightly, nuzzling his neck.

  He put his arms around her, her shape new and strange to him. He was tense, half-expecting her to recoil at any moment, realizing he wasn’t Jude. But she didn’t.

  “It’s been too long,” she whispered, her face still against his neck. He could smell her hair, and he felt the softness of her breasts against him. He recognized her face from the bronze bust, and from two of the nude studies among the drawings downstairs.

  There was a moment’s hesitation before she pulled away and looked at him quizzically, her arms still around him, her face just inches from his.

  “Are you okay?”

  She was Mexican, in her early thirties. Her shoulder-length black hair was thick, parted casually in the center, and framed a noticeably asymmetrical face. Her eyes were large and black, the pigment of the surrounding flesh subtly shaded. Her lips were full and evenly proportioned, with a distinctive philtrum in the upper one that was immediately appealing. There was a very slight upturn at the outside corners of her mouth that did not suggest a smile.

  All of this he captured in the brief moment that she had her arms around him, her face so close to his that his first instinct was to bend and kiss her.

  “Just tired,” he managed to say, again expecting to see in her eyes a startled reaction to the sound of his voice. But there was none.

  “Well, let’s have a drink,” she said, letting her arms slide down along the sides of his body, as though she couldn’t get enough of touching him. “Let’s catch up on what’s been happening.” Her voice was in the lower registers, not husky, but mellow.

  She walked across the studio. She was high-hipped and wore a knee-length charcoal skirt and a white blouse.

  “I was at Claudio’s all afternoon,” she said wearily as she opened a wooden cabinet near the windows and took out a green bottle of gin. Next to it was a small refrigerator, from which she took ice and then dropped a few cubes into each glass as she closed the door with her hip.

  “How was your trip?” she asked, sloshing some gin into each glass. She opened a small paper bag that she must have brought with her and took out a lime, which she sliced. She squeezed the two wedges simultaneously, one with each hand, into the glasses.

  She turned around and held out a glass for him, shaking her dark hair out of her face. They looked at each other.

  “What,” she said, “is something the matter?”

  This felt impossible to him, but he managed to make himself go over to her and take the glass. Who the hell was this? Did she live with Jude? He hadn’t thought to check for women’s clothes in Jude’s bedroom. Why hadn’t Mondragón at least mentioned that Jude was living with someone?

  He had to say something, for God’s sake.

  “And what were you doing at Claudio’s?” he asked. He was so self-conscious that he thought hi
s voice had changed. He was afraid he would start sweating.

  She gave him a strange look. “What was I doing?”

  Shit.

  Silence. He sipped the gin. What the hell was he going to do? Where was the person who was supposed to be here to prevent this sort of thing from happening until he’d been briefed?

  She was studying him.

  “The usual,” she said, sipping her gin and looking at him over the rim of the glass, her dark eyes full of suspicion now, alert with caution.

  “Tell me about it,” he said, moving to the windows to look out, hoping to cover his discomfort.

  Silence. The park was dark except for the glint of lamps visible here and there through the dense canopies of the trees. He could see the tall silhouettes of palms against the city light. Still she hadn’t spoken. He turned around.

  She had put down her glass and was pulling out the tail of her blouse, began unbuttoning it, saying nothing as she started toward him.

  Bern couldn’t think fast enough.

  She slipped off the blouse and, without looking, lay it with gentle unconcern over the corner of a tilted drawing board as she went by, her arm reaching across her bare stomach as she began unbuttoning her skirt. Just as she was about to push it down over her hips, he stopped her.

  “Wait a second,” he said softly, but she was already over to him, close enough for him to have leaned down and kissed the soft tops of her breasts.

  She stopped.

  “Look,” he said, “I . . .”

  But her face was already changing even as they were looking at each other. The anticipation in her eyes grew cold, and her hazy expression of seduction faded into a weary look of impatience.

  She turned and stepped over to the drawing board and picked up her blouse, but she didn’t put it on immediately. Instead, she went back her glass of gin and took a drink, holding the blouse down at her side as she swallowed the first sip, looking at him, and then took another.

  Bern scrambled for a way to finish his sentence, but nothing came to him.

  “You didn’t handle that well at all,” she said. The coy mistress was gone, and an irritable woman had replaced her. “When you came to the bedroom door, you were visibly confused, right from the very first moment. You held me awkwardly. You were speechless. Jude, whatever his other faults, was never speechless.”

  Bern was flustered.

  She put the glass down again, ran the fingers of one hand through her thick hair, and sighed heavily. Then she slipped on the blouse but didn’t button it.

  “Just for the record,” she said, “I told them this was the worst idea I’d ever heard in my life. I tried to stop it.”

  Bern had whiplash. He was relieved, and in the same instant, he was pissed, really furious.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “Susana Mejía. I was working this thing with Jude. I’m supposed to make you . . . passable.”

  “By making me feel stupid.”

  “That’s how it’s going to feel,” she said. “Even after you’ve had hours and hours of briefing. Every moment of being Jude, you’re going to feel exactly the way you felt just now. You’re inexperienced, and no matter how much you’ve been briefed, you’re still going to feel stupid, and anxious. You’re always going to be afraid that the very next thing someone says will expose you.”

  They stared at each other. She was smoldering, not at all happy with what she had been assigned to do. She sipped her gin, eyes on him, studying him. She began to shake her head slowly.

  “God,” she said, “you really were identical twins.”

  “That’s the only reason I’m here,” he said.

  “That’s the reason they wanted you here. But what’s the reason you are here?”

  He was evasive. “It’s not complicated,” he said, feeling that it was so complicated, he wasn’t sure he would ever sort it out. “Four days ago, I thought I was an only child. Then a woman brought me a skull in a box. Two days later, I found out that the skull was that of my identical twin.” He hesitated a beat. “Now I don’t know, but I’m guessing that’s probably more reason than you have for being here.”

  Susana Mejía sipped her gin and turned to look out the windows at the park. Neither of them said anything for a moment, and then she looked down at her glass, thinking. When she turned back to him, the tension she was working under showed in her face and in her posture.

  “I’ve read your file,” she said. “You’re an intelligent man, so I’m betting you’re smarter than to have walked into this on your own.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t volunteer,” he said. About the smart part, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

  She stepped out of her shoes and rubbed one stockinged foot on top of the other as if her feet were aching. She ran the fingers of one hand into the thick hair above her forehead and held it there, thinking.

  “Look,” she said finally, “neither of us wants to be doing this. Me, because I think the risks are astronomical. You, I don’t know, maybe you just think you can’t do it. But whatever our reasons are, they don’t cancel out the reality that this is a damned important thing, and regardless of what our reservations are, it’s got to be done. And regardless of what our reservations are, we’re going to do it.”

  This time, Susana drank her gin as if it were a glass of water, three big gulps and then it was gone. She paused, looking at him.

  “Right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “I’m going to be blunt with you,” she went on; “there’s no time for games between us. You don’t know this yet, but you can trust me. You need to grab hold of that fact as quickly as you can. It’ll save you a lot of anxiety. You can trust me. I want to get this job done, but I don’t want to lose your life doing it. And, more important to me, I don’t want to lose my life, either.”

  She rattled the ice in her glass.

  “How much do you know?” she asked.

  He told her what Mondragón had told him.

  “Shit,” she said, looking away. “Shit.” Silence ensued while she seemed to try to control herself, though he guessed she really wanted to throw the glass of ice across the room.

  “Look,” she said, turning to him, “essentially, Jude and I were on our own. In fact, until Jude was killed, we hadn’t met face-to-face with anyone connected to this operation in over a year. Communication was constant, encrypted, and always to Lex Kevern.” She stopped. “You don’t know Kevern.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Quick overview: This operation originated somewhere in the rarefied air of Washington’s national security and intelligence circles. It’s a clandestine operation, rather than a covert operation. In a covert operation, the objective, the act that’s performed, might become known, but the country responsible for that act remains unknown. In a clandestine operation, the act itself remains unknown. It never happened. A guy named Richard Gordon was brought in to put it together. Gordon’s an old CIA hand, a good guy. But he’s Langley. He called in Lex Kevern to be the case officer. Kevern’s also an old hand, but in-country. Does dirty work. Deals with the contract people. Runs agents. Takes risks.

  “Gordon picked me and Jude to be the operations officers, the people who actually do the work. We’d met before, but we’d never worked together. But at separate times, we’d both worked with Gordon in other Latin American postings, and he trusted us. Jude had special qualifications. He knew Ghazi Baida inside out. And he went to the same university as Baida: the University of Texas.”

  She sighed heavily.

  “Where did he grow up?” Bern asked. “Jude, I mean.”

  She looked at him, and he could see that she had some inkling what this must be like for him, that he must be in near shock.

  “Austin.”

  Jesus Christ. Of all the places he could have chosen to live, he had ended up in Jude’s hometown. But by the time he got there, Jude was gone for good.

 
; “His parents still live there?”

  “Only his mother,” she said. “His father, a doctor, died a few years ago.”

  Susana turned and walked across the room and stood in the doorway of Jude’s bedroom, looking in, her body turned three-quarters away from Bern. From that angle, he couldn’t really see the expression on her face, but her posture said a lot. Even the baggy shirttail hanging over her skirt didn’t hide the shape of the woman in Jude’s drawings.

  “The truth was,” she said, her back still to him, “Jude was more likable when he was pretending to be someone else than he was when he wasn’t.” She turned around. “When he was Jude Lerner, he was very, very complicated. Lerner seemed to require a certain kind of complexity in order to operate, a complexity that Jude carried around with him like a sack of rocks.

  “But when he was Jude Teller—Teller was his cover name—he was so busy funneling his psychology and energy into being that other man—and it was a hell of a job—that he was actually . . . endearing. Jude was very graceful in deceit. It suited him perfectly.”

  Bern was suddenly alert. Now she was sounding like a woman instead of an intelligence officer. But she didn’t allow herself to go too far with that. The discipline was intact. She shook her head wearily.

  “Come on,” she said. “I need to show you something.”

  Chapter 20

  He followed her into the bedroom and then into the bathroom. She gathered her skirt and got down on her knees in front of the sink.

  “Come on. Get down here,” she said.

  Bern dropped to his knees and watched as she got down on her elbows and moved under the sink. He did the same. She pointed to the four-inch-high baseboard on the wall.

  “These two nail heads here,” she said. “Press them simultaneously with one hand while you lift here with the other.”

  A two-foot section of the baseboard folded up on hidden hinges, revealing a compartment and two handles. She pulled on one of the handles and a metal tray slid out revealing four CDs lying flat and layered back at angles so that the front edges of all four CDs were visible. She retrieved two CDs and then pushed in the drawer and closed the hinged baseboard.