The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  “Okay, fine. But she didn’t like this idea with Bern,” Mondragón said. “Can you be sure she’s going to stay with it?”

  He watched Kevern, knowing the question would irritate him, and knowing that Kevern didn’t like it when he stood in the darkness. He would much rather see Mondragón’s goggling eyes and his isolated lips stuck onto the hamburger that used to be his face than for Mondragón to stand hidden in the dark. Mondragón wasn’t quite sure why this bothered Kevern so much, but once he discovered that it did, he did it as often as he could.

  “You know what, Vicente? You wouldn’t understand,” Kevern said. “A guy like you.”

  Kevern was sitting forward in the leather chair, his hefty shoulders as wide as a bull’s, his forearms on his knees, the thick fingers of his big hands interlaced. Mondragón could see Kevern staring at the shadow where his head was hidden, and he sensed Kevern’s aggravation.

  “This is unfinished business for her now,” Kevern explained. “She’s feeling stuff like loyalty and determination . . . and a sense of doing the right thing. She knows damn well the risk to her and Paul Bern in a cock-up scheme like this, but she’s gonna put that out of her head. And you know why she’s gonna put that out of her head? Because she’s disciplined. And she’s loyal. And because she lies awake at night wondering what in the fuck Ghazi Baida’s going to do if he gets his hands on a safe, reliable underground connection into the States. She cares about shit like that.”

  Mondragón waited without responding. In that brief monologue, Kevern had exposed more of himself than he had ever done in the eight years of their association. It was a telltale sign of the pressure he was feeling. Kevern had never let it show before, and this brief outburst—by Kevern’s standards—was all that he was going to let show now. He fell silent.

  Mondragón waited a few beats before he said, “And what do you do now?”

  “Wait,” Kevern rasped.

  “What do you think the odds are that Baida knows who was behind the Tepito killings?”

  “Nil.”

  “Maybe he suspects something.”

  “Sure he does. People like that are suspicious. Guys like him, they never bend down to get a drink of water.”

  Mondragón wasn’t going to ask him what that meant. Kevern was full of those kind of Americanisms, mixed in with operational lingo. He used to be worse, but Mondragón had told him to stop it.

  Kevern grunted in his chair and shrugged his beefy shoulders.

  “It was a drug hit,” Kevern said, jutting his chin forward and stretching his thick neck as if his tie was too tight. Only he wasn’t wearing a tie. “I do know that’s the story that his man took back to him. I haven’t heard rumors that it was anything but a narco hit, and the street is pretty reliable about that sort of thing. If something else had been out there, something with more credence, it would’ve come around to me.”

  Mondragón turned away, walked to the glass wall, and looked out over Mexico City. He could see Kevern in the reflection of the dark glass. He spritzed his face.

  “I think it’s been too long,” he said, his voice bouncing off the glass. “He suspects something. If you lose an entire cell, you think somebody was inside. It’s been six weeks.” He shifted the focus of his eyes and picked up his own eyeballs gawking back at him. His lips floated alone, unattached.

  “He lives in a spooky world,” Kevern grunted. “He has his people, runs his traps like the rest of us. Like I said, he sent his guy up here. People disappear in his world all the time. Can’t know everything. You live that life, you live with uncertainty. You acclimate.”

  “Jude had already had three meetings with Baida when Khalil killed him. How was he going to deal with Jude’s sudden disappearance? Or Ahmad’s?”

  “Probably lay it off on somebody in Jude’s smuggling world,” Kevern said. “That’s what I’d have done. Guy like that disappears, what can you say about it? Shit, the odds caught up with him. Besides, Khalil was more afraid of Baida’s wrath if he’d found out they’d introduced him to a spy. Baida doesn’t tolerate that kind of sloppy work from anybody, especially cell leaders. That’s why Khalil killed Ahmad. Hell, they weren’t even supposed to be meeting together in one place. Khalil was running a sloppy cluster.”

  Mondragón saw Kevern jut out his chin and neck again. The man was full of quirks. What did it feel like, being pumped up like that, having your muscles swollen because of steroids? He must always feel as if he’s wearing a second skin, another layer of flesh weighted down with muscles.

  Mondragón was still facing into the glass, his focus readjusted to pick up Kevern’s reflection again.

  Kevern grunted under his breath, as if in preamble to speaking, like he first had to haul the words up from his gut. But he said nothing.

  Mondragón watched him. Kevern had handsome eyes. Good shape to his eyebrows. Mondragón wouldn’t mind having something like that when he got his new face. There was a fullness above his eyelid that almost obscured it, and it gave him a look of strength. At least it read that way to Mondragón. Strength. And it made him look as if he kept his own counsel. Which Kevern surely did. Even in this conversation, Mondragón had had to pull things out of him. The man was just made that way. It was maddening.

  Chapter 22

  The next morning, Bern was shaken awake by Susana, who was leaning over him, a towel wrapped around her, another draped over her wet head.

  “Wake up,” she said.

  When he opened his eyes, she resumed fluffing the towel through her hair. It took him a second to remember where he was, and then he rolled over and raised himself on one elbow.

  “Listen,” she said, “we’ve got to go somewhere. You need to get up.”

  He wasn’t sure about the tone of her voice, and for a second it seemed urgent. His heart lurched. But then she bent over and let her hair fall over her head as she continued to dry it, and it seemed he’d misread her. She wasn’t frantic. Bern could smell the shampoo. She straightened up quickly, flinging her hair back.

  “I’ve made some coffee in the kitchen,” she said. “While you’re showering, I’m going to run a quick errand. I’ll be back in less than an hour, and I’ll bring some pastries with me. You grab a bite and then we’ll go.”

  “Go where?”

  “I’ll explain it to you on the way.”

  “So who was that on the phone last night?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.” She picked up a comb from the foot of the bed and started combing her damp hair, tilting her head to the side.

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to go out,” he said, “until you’ve had time to bring me up to speed.”

  “Did you read last night?”

  “Yeah, until late.”

  “Then I guess you’re picking up speed.”

  She turned around and headed for the bathroom. “I’ll be out of there in five minutes.”

  Bern got out of bed and slipped on his pants. There was a chest of drawers near Jude’s closet, and he looked inside. Underwear, T-shirts, socks. This was going to be strange.

  He looked around the room. On one side of the door that led out to the studio was a wardrobe, which he hadn’t even noticed before. He heard the hair dryer going in the bathroom, so he went to the wardrobe and opened it. Susana’s clothes. Or some woman’s clothes at least. He lifted one of the blouses and smelled it. Susana’s perfume. A smaller chest on the other side contained her lingerie.

  He went back to the closet and stared at the clothes. Would he find things in the pockets, an old theater ticket, a receipt for some small purchase? The hair dryer stopped. He didn’t want Susana to find him staring blankly into Jude’s closet, so he went back to the door that led to the studio and looked out. It felt familiar. Being there one night couldn’t have done it. There was more to it than that.

  “Okay,” she said, coming out of the bathroom, “it’s all yours.”

  Her thick hair was fluffy from drying, and she was rubbing lotion on her arms. Be
rn guessed she would now go around to her side of the bed, the side near the window, and sit on the edge of the bed and rub lotion on her legs.

  She went past him and around the end of the bed. She sat down and began putting lotion on her legs, leaning over, her bare back to him.

  It was just that easy. He could fall back into the routine in less than a day. The thought of it left a hollow place in his stomach. He headed for the shower and closed the bathroom door behind him.

  He stood at the sink a long time, the towel wrapped around his waist, his hair still wet, looking at the shelves in the medicine cabinet. He looked at the tube of toothpaste, neatly rolled from the bottom. A tin of bandages. Over-the-counter antihistamines. Razor heads. Antiseptic throat spray. Advil. Midol. A packet of emery boards. Dental floss. Deodorant.

  He closed the door. The jar of shaving cream was on the marble countertop. Bern used shaving cream, too. Most people didn’t, but millions did, he guessed. There was no need to believe there was any special significance in that. He opened it and caught the scent of almonds. His own cream was almond-scented, too. But then, he figured, millions of men must use that also.

  Looking into the jar, he saw where Jude had run his fingers through the cream and scooped it out. Good God. Slowly, he put his own fingers into the same grooves of the cream and carefully pulled them through the same shallow flutes created by Jude’s fingers. He looked at the cream on his fingers and then looked into the jar. The striations of Jude’s fingertips were gone. Paul had taken the first steps of replacing him. He began to lather his face.

  The next forty minutes or so were a nearly hallucinatory experience as he slowly crawled into the minutiae of his brother’s life. He deliberately did not replace the razor head, wanting a tactile intimacy with Jude, though he didn’t stop to reason why. After shaving, he used Jude’s lotion on his face, then put Jude’s talcum under his arms.

  In the bedroom, he opened the chest of drawers and took out a pair of Jude’s shorts and put them on. He put on a T-shirt. As if in a trance, he went to the closet and chose a pair of trousers, selected a belt from a rack of them on the closet door, picked out a freshly laundered shirt. The shoes. Jesus Christ, he had forgotten about the shoes. He chose a pair, then got a pair of socks and put them on. Everything fit. Everything suited him.

  He looked at himself in the full-length mirror on Susana’s wardrobe, and it was only at that moment that it hit him how important it was for him to become Jude as deeply and as completely as humanly possible. None of this was going to work, not even for a moment, if he didn’t.

  It was something that should have hit him like a lightning bolt from the very instant that it was proposed to him by Mondragón back in Houston, but it hadn’t. He thought he had understood, but he hadn’t. Not really. Not until this intimate intercourse with the details of Jude’s small moments, not until he saw himself in Jude’s clothes and slept in the same bed with the same woman that Jude must have slept with, not until this very moment in front of Jude’s mirror, looking into Jude’s face, did the full impact of the reality of his situation actually hit him. His life depended upon the resurrection of the face in the mirror. If he wanted to live, Jude had to be reborn, whole and believable.

  He was standing at the studio windows when he heard the front door open and close. A few minutes later, Susana’s quick footsteps crossed the living room and stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Jude,” she yelled.

  Caught off guard, he felt a wash of panic, and then he immediately caught himself.

  “Yeah,” he called back.

  “I’m bringing up the pastries. You want some coffee?”

  “I just got a fresh cup,” he said, and heard her start up the stairs.

  He turned away from the windows and was halfway across the studio when she came around the top of the landing and saw him. Her quick pace halted abruptly, as if someone had yelled at her, and then she came toward him slowly. She was holding the white sack of pastries, and the look on her face was a conflation of surprise and an effort to conceal it. Her eyes were all over him, absorbing the sight of him.

  When she got to him, she reached up without hesitation and put her hand softly along the side of his face, looking at him as if she were remembering him, not seeing him, and then she dropped her hand and put it flat against his chest, feeling him breathe.

  Suddenly, she took her hand away and went around him and put the pastries on the coffee table in front of the sofa a few feet away.

  “We need to get moving,” she said, her back to him as she shrugged off her shoulder bag and began looking into it for something. “You’d better grab a bite. It’s going to take us about an hour to get there.”

  They descended to the street and stepped out into the quiet morning on Avenida México. Bern could hear the roar of the city only a few blocks away in any direction, but the park was an island of tranquility, the loudest distraction coming from the songs of birds in the high canopies of the trees.

  Susana took her secure cell phone out of her purse and made a call, which resulted in a series of exchanges and another call. Then they walked up Teotihuacán to Avenida Amsterdam, where they caught a cab and headed south on Avenida Insurgentes.

  “This is a good surveillance-detection route,” she said, turning halfway around in the seat and looking back over her shoulder through the rear window. “The traffic’s always terrible, so anyone following us will have to take some risks. Sooner or later, they’ll have to run a light, squeeze through an intersection, cut across traffic, something that’ll give them away.”

  The next half hour was spent running the surveillance-detection route. Instead of going into Coyoacán as she had told the driver, at the last minute she sent him into San Angel, up into the hilly and narrow callejones. She made phone calls to two friends whose homes shared a common garden wall in the rear, though the front of their properties opened onto different callejones. Using these private gardens, they switched taxis and headed back downtown on Insurgentes again.

  Soon they were in Roma Norte, where many of the limestone buildings from the late nineteenth century still survived, their gray stones streaked with charcoal tears from a century of pollution. They got out of the taxi on a small cross street and walked until they arrived at a leafy little park called Plaza Rio de Janeiro.

  Susana stopped and made another phone call while keeping her eyes on an old neoclassical building through the trees. When a man stepped out of the foyer of the building and lighted a cigarette, they crossed into the park and angled toward the opposite corner, passing a replica of Michelangelo’s David rising above the mists of an encircling fountain in the center of the park. On the other side, they crossed the street, walked past the man with the cigarette, who ignored them, and entered the building. Ascending an old marble staircase, they circled the landing and walked into one of the three doorways around the stairwell.

  Two women, a strawberry blonde and a Mexican, looked up from laptop computers that were sitting on folding tables. They were obviously expecting Susana and Bern, but their eyes went to Bern, and he could see the marvel in them. Cell phones lay around on the tables, along with grease-stained take-out sacks, empty plastic water bottles, and take-out coffee cups. Both women were wearing sidearms.

  “Yeah,” the blonde said. She stood, looking at Susana, and then with no further greeting, she snapped her head to the side and said, “He’s in there.”

  “Come on,” Susana said to Bern, and they crossed the room, which had no other furniture in it besides the two tables and chairs, and opened the door into a second room.

  Chapter 23

  A big man with hefty shoulders and a thick neck looked up from where he was squatting on the floor over a banker’s box full of manila file folders.

  “Susana,” he said as he stood, his expression softening as he stepped over to her. They hugged a little awkwardly, and Bern remembered that she had told him that it had been over a year since either she or Jude had
seen anyone from the operation in person.

  Immediately, the man’s eyes turned to Bern, and he extended his hand and said, “Paul, Lex Kevern.”

  They shook hands as Kevern’s eyes took him in, assessing, Bern felt, how well his prime bait was going to play with Ghazi Baida.

  “We got here okay?” Susana asked.

  “Yeah, we didn’t pick up anyone on you.” His eyes went back to Bern. “I appreciate this. It’s got to be rough on you.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s happening pretty fast,” Bern said.

  “You’re in good hands,” Kevern said. “You’ll be all right. She’ll get you where you need to be.”

  “Let’s get right to business,” said Susana, cutting in.

  Despite having said she would, she hadn’t told Bern where they were going or why. Kevern, Bern gathered from his behavior, didn’t know what this was about, either. It seemed to Bern that Susana was pushing something here.

  “You wanted the meeting,” Kevern said. “Go ahead.”

  Susana began pacing. Kevern, glancing at Bern, crossed his arms and sat on the edge of his desk, waiting for her to get on with it. With one hand flat against the small of her back, her head down, Susana made a couple of passes in front of Kevern’s desk, between him and Bern, who stood near the open window overlooking the street. Then she stopped abruptly.

  “Lex, I need to know what you’re not telling me here,” she said.

  He gave her a puzzled look.

  “Somebody’s already spotted Bern,” she said. She told him about the telephone call at 3:30 that morning.

  “Mingo?” Kevern asked.

  “Yeah.” Susana was watching Kevern closely, but it seemed to Bern that his face conveyed nothing.

  “When they call on that phone,” she elaborated, “I should know who they are, Lex. That was Jude’s secure phone. And this guy knew Paul was there.” She paused. “Something else is going on here. The people who have that number think Jude was killed six weeks ago in the drug raid. But that number has rung eight times since that night, as you know. Four of those times, we think, were Baida. Just checking. Four other times, it was traced back to another encrypted phone.”