The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  “I’ll get it,” Bern said. He went over to the ebony cabinet and made the drink just as she had shown him how to do that first night. He made one for himself, too, then took Susana’s over and handed it to her.

  “If you’re right about Mingo,” he said, sipping his drink, which he held in one hand, the other hand in a pocket, “then it seems to me—”

  Jude’s cell phone rang, startling both of them. Susana put down her drink before she picked up the phone.

  “Yes.”

  Hesitation at the other end.

  Bern went over to her, and she tilted the phone so he could hear.

  “Why are you answering this phone, señora?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I need to speak to Jude.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I have to know who this is.”

  Pause. “Tell him it’s Mingo.”

  “Look,” she said, “he’s sick; tomorrow would be better.”

  “Give the phone to him,” Mingo said. “Even if he is sick. This is very important.”

  “I have to have—”

  Suddenly, Bern grabbed the phone from her. She gasped, stunned.

  “Mingo.” His instincts told him to keep his voice calm. Very calm. “This is Jude.”

  He cut his eyes at Susana. She was looking at him as if he had shot her.

  “Judas? Jesus, man, we thought you were dead. I can’t believe it. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Who thought I was dead?”

  “Everybody, man. Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” Bern said.

  There was silence on the other end. Bern imagined the other man’s face, his eyes narrowing, straining to see what was in store for him as he stared into the diminishing light of suspicion.

  Mingo said, “We thought the narcos got you.”

  “I was lucky.”

  “No shit.”

  “You said you had something important to tell me.”

  Pause. “This phone, it’s still good?”

  “Yeah, it’s clean.”

  “It’s about Baida, Judas. I need to talk to you.”

  “Okay, good—”

  “The same place, then?”

  “No. Can’t do that anymore. Look, give me fifteen minutes, then call me back.”

  “Bueno.”

  Chapter 25

  When he punched off the phone and turned around, Susana was gaping at him, breathing hard, her eyes still wide in disbelief.

  “What in the fuck was that? What are you—”

  “He said he needed to talk to me about Baida. That was his urgent message.”

  “Shit.” She stared at him. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing? You think you’re ready for this? Is that it? Is that what this is? Listen, you wouldn’t be up to this if you’d spent a goddamned decade getting ready. That”—she was so pissed that her voice had changed—“kind of stunt”—she pointed at the telephone—“will get you killed so fast that they’ll be shipping your head back to the States for someone to . . . to . . . reconstruct!”

  “Look,” he said, “I should’ve . . . I just didn’t—”

  “You didn’t! You didn’t! Hell no you didn’t! You didn’t tell me what you were going to do. You probably didn’t know what you were going to do. You didn’t give it any thought. You didn’t know enough about anything to do anything!”

  The intensity of her emotion had literally changed some of the features of her face.

  And for a moment, Bern almost believed her rant was justified. For a second, his conviction wavered, and the instantaneous clarity of the idea that had driven him to grab the phone almost slipped away from him. Almost, but it didn’t. It was still there, clear and sure, and he knew, as surely as he had known anything during the last four days, that he had done the right thing.

  He forced himself to be calm, to keep his voice level. He wanted what he was about to say to be measured and clear.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “We’ve got fifteen minutes for you to figure out how, and where, you want me to meet this guy.”

  “We don’t even know what he looks like!” she snapped.

  He pointed at her, the phone still in his hand.

  “You said something just then that’s probably true. If I had a decade, I couldn’t get ready for this thing. Hell, you were probably right, too, when we first spoke and you said that you thought this was the craziest idea you’d ever heard. Okay, so why the hell are you so insistent on being rational about this?”

  “Rational?”

  “Yeah. What were you doing stalling my meeting with Mingo for another day? Did you think we could get ready—ready by your standards—by tomorrow? Hell no. The fact is, you didn’t know what the hell you were doing, either, did you? All you knew was that you didn’t think I was ready. You were buying time, but you didn’t really know what for, did you?”

  She said nothing, too angry to respond. He wasn’t even sure she was hearing him. She stood there in front of him, rigid, still unable to believe what he’d just done.

  “Here’s the truth about what we’re doing,” he said. “Logic isn’t going to get us where we want to go. The odds of this thing being even remotely successful aren’t going to improve because you’re able to buy me another twelve hours to cram for the test.”

  He stopped, calmed himself. He wanted to be methodical, though he wasn’t really feeling methodical. But he did feel right about what he was doing. He felt sure of himself. He only hoped he wasn’t being delusional.

  “What do we want?” he asked. “We want Baida to believe that I’m Jude. For a day? Two days? A week? Two weeks? And you haven’t even told me why. When were you going to get around to that, Susana? Why were you holding back? Is this some of that ‘need to know’ shit? Well, who in God’s name would need to know more than me?”

  She didn’t answer. He didn’t know if she couldn’t or just wouldn’t. Right now, he didn’t understand anything that he saw in her face.

  “Look, this would’ve been hard enough to do if I had known Jude,” he went on. “Hard to do, even, if I’d known his friends. The only thing we have going here is that I look like him as much as any human being possibly could. That”—he hesitated, not knowing if this would sound embarrassingly absurd to her—“and the fact that we share the same DNA. Maybe . . . Mondragón was more on target to emphasize the advantages I do have than we are moaning about the disadvantage we can’t overcome. Maybe I do have instincts that’ll serve your purposes. Maybe, as you’ve said, I just naturally act like him without even knowing it, do things that he would do, small things. Things that sometimes are more telling than the things we carefully plan. Things that will say more to Mingo . . . or Baida . . . than all the imitation truth that we could accomplish in a month of dress rehearsals.”

  She swallowed. He saw it, and he saw her listening now, saw her finding a thread in what he was saying that she could hang on to.

  “That’s what we’re going to have to rely on,” he said. “That’s the best we’ve got. I’ve read all the files now. Only once, I know. And I don’t have a photographic memory. But we’ve been over and over and over the two most important elements that’ll make me convincing to Baida: knowing the details of the smuggling scheme and knowing the details of Jude’s conversations with Sabella and Baida. It’s been little more than a crash course . . . but that’s all we’ve got.”

  She stared at him in silence, and then she said, “You son of a bitch.”

  Then she reverted to an already-familiar gesture: She ran the fingers of one hand over her brow and into her thick hair and held them there, eyes fixed.

  “But you don’t know Baida’s bio well enough, not like Jude did. And you haven’t studied it the way you sh—”

  “Susana! Listen, Jude the smuggler doesn’t know Baida’s bio, either. What I don’t know about the details of his life will be no disadvantage to me in convincing him that I’m Jude.”

  She turned a
nd walked away, head down.

  Bern felt the buzz of his accelerating free fall.

  Susana suddenly turned and went across to one of the workbenches, where they had laid out maps of Mexico City for him to study as she told him of Jude’s movements, his galleries, homes of friends, favorite restaurants.

  “Come here,” she said, and she was already bending over the maps as he joined her. She spread one of the maps flat with both hands.

  “We’re here, okay?” she said, jabbing the map. She slid one finger across the streets to her upper right. “This is Zona Rosa, a kind of tacky collection of streets chockablock with restaurants and clubs and bars. Used to be an elegant district, but it’s tending to go to seed with lap dancing and prostitution now. But the tourists still come, plodding around, begging to be ripped off.

  “It’s crowded there, which is good, and it’s close to Kevern’s group. They can cover it. Jude used to meet Ahmad at a club there.” She leaned closer to the map. “Here, near Génova and Hamburgo, there’s a place called Club Cuica. It’s a samba club. Very popular. The street in front is a pedestrian walkway, with planters and flowers and palms along its center, like a promenade. The place is usually crowded with people out strolling.”

  She straightened up and sat on a stool at the table.

  “Meet him in front of the club. Don’t go inside. There’s a life-size bronze statue of a nude samba dancer in the median right in front of the club. Have him wait by that thing. It has the advantage of being hidden from the other side of the esplanade, so anyone who wants to watch him will have to do it from the same side. That’ll give Lex’s people an advantage.”

  “Mingo’s going to wonder why the hell I’m doing this.”

  She looked at him, her eyes hard.

  “And what are you going to tell him?”

  Okay. Fair enough. He hesitated only a moment.

  “I won’t have to tell him anything. He won’t be wondering, will he? He’ll know I’ll be trying to pick up surveillance.”

  “But that’s his expertise,” she said. “Don’t you think he can get there clean without you having to double-check him?”

  “I won’t give a shit what he thinks. I’m the one who nearly got killed. I’ll do what I think I have to do.”

  She looked at him. She nodded. “Okay.” She looked at her watch. “Let’s put it at eight o’clock. That’ll give us another couple of hours.”

  Before he could agree, Jude’s cell phone rang. Bern was still holding it in his hand. He looked at her.

  “You might as well go ahead,” she said.

  Bern punched the button and put it to his ear.

  Chapter 26

  For the two hours that remained before Bern had to leave, they continued to concentrate on the lengthy reports that Jude had provided on his meetings with Sabella and Baida in Ciudad del Este.

  As dusk fell, the evening rains came in on rumbles of thunder. There was no wind, and the rain fell straight down and hard, slapping the thick canopy of trees in the park as if it were popping on canvas awnings, a monsoon sound that distracted them from their desperate concentration. They stopped talking and stared out the open windows as the last of the purple light deepened into night, and the mesmerizing sounds of the rain-splashed streets evoked in each of them closely guarded memories.

  Finally, Susana broke the silence.

  “There’s no reason to think you’ll be in any danger,” she said. She had been pacing back and forth in front of the sofa as they talked, but she had stopped now to stare out at the rain. Bern was still sitting in one of the armchairs, where he had been flicking through pages on the laptop, reading from the CDs of Jude’s reports.

  “We know nothing about the guy,” she went on, “which makes people like us nervous, though there’s no real indication that we should be. Obviously, he’s been helpful to Jude, had access to the encrypted cell number. No one else had that.”

  Bern looked at his watch. He backed out of the program and then popped the CD out of the laptop. He put it in a clear plastic envelope, stood, and handed it to Susana.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” he said. “I’ll try not to screw it up.”

  Susana didn’t react to the last remark.

  “Lex’s people will be trying to pick up surveillance,” she went on, “so you need to stay right there at the statue the whole time. You get inside a club or near a street musician, it’ll play hell with our audio pickup. If this guy wants to leave, don’t. And remember, you’re going to want to do everything differently now. If he wants to talk in Spanish, say no. You don’t have to explain. If he wants to continue anything ‘the way we’ve always done—’”

  “Then I say no. I want to change it. And I don’t explain anything.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “The implication is that you’ve got your reasons, and they’re none of his business. Jude pulled that kind of shit on people all the time, and my guess is that this guy is already very familiar with it. That gives you a lot of room to maneuver.”

  Bern nodded. He was surprised at the absence of butterflies. As the two hours had dwindled, he had become increasingly focused, and with that had come an odd kind of serenity. He noticed it. Didn’t understand it. But he didn’t dwell on it, either, gratefully accepting it for what it was. He was okay. He could do this. There was so much to lose that there was no realistic way that he could shoulder the weight of it. That realization was liberating.

  He told the taxi driver to drop him at the corner of Florencia, and he began walking toward Génova along Londres. The rains had passed and the streets and sidewalks glistened in the city’s lights. He couldn’t just jump out of a taxi and go right into it. He wanted to feel the pavement first, move along the sidewalks, walk through the smells and sounds. He hadn’t even been out of Jude’s apartment in twenty-four hours, and it was beginning to feel as though he was orbiting the city rather than living in it.

  As soon as he passed Amberes, the crowds picked up and the feeling of impending carnival increased with every doorway he passed. The district’s wise guys smoked and lounged along the sidewalks, which were crowded with young clubgoers and hangers-on. A solitary woman with the lifeless expression of someone who saw it all every evening watched him pass by as she smoked a cigarette and held the leash of a mongrel who was shitting at the base of a solitary ficus growing in a circle of bare dirt.

  At Génova, the evening was in full swing. The street had long ago been closed to automobile traffic, and an island of garden plantings and palms ran down its center. Both sides were lined with outdoor cafés and restaurants, clubs, bars, hotels, and art galleries and antique shops. The crowd was roughly divided among three groups: those curious folk who came here to taste the spicier side of the city’s nightlife, those who wanted to sell them something, and those who wanted to prey on them. Like all streets of this kind in major cities the world over, none of the motives ever changed.

  As Bern moved through the crowd headed in the direction of Paseo de la Reforma, he was aware of being the watcher and of being watched. He wanted to glimpse the statue of the naked samba dancer before Mingo had the chance to see him. He wanted at least that much of an advantage.

  He heard the carnival beat of Club Cuica well before he saw its sign, and he moved closer to the rail of a sidewalk café to get a better angle on the palmy median of the esplanade. Finally, through sporadic gaps in the bobbing heads of the pedestrians, he glimpsed the bronze dancer raised on a stone pedestal a couple of feet high. Cautiously, he moved ahead, then stopped outside the door of an art gallery where two shoe-shine boys had squatted down on their boxes, taking a break from the crowd. They watched the stream of nightlife with bleary disinterest while they ate red Popsicles that dripped on the stones between their feet.

  Then Bern saw him, hanging close to the statue, a well-dressed young man, perhaps in his late twenties. His hair was carefully barbered, and he had the comfortable good looks of a sophisticated capitalino, a man who understood the my
steries of the city where he had lived all of his life. Seemingly unconcerned about having to wait, he leaned a shoulder against the hard thigh of the nude statue and watched the women coming and going through the doors of Club Cuica. Bern liked him immediately.

  Without hesitating further, Bern cut through the crowd and approached the young man. He instantly saw the recognition in the young man’s eyes.

  “Hey, Judas,” Mingo said, straightening up as they shook hands. He threw a look around with a half shrug. “This is a strange way to do it, huh?”

  “A little,” Bern said. He could see Mingo looking at him closely.

  “What’s the deal?” Mingo asked. “What happened to you?”

  “I was hurt a little,” Bern said. “I’ve been recuperating.”

  Mingo’s eyes opened in surprise. “No shit? They shot you?”

  “Look,” Bern said, “what’s the story here?”

  “Yeah, okay, you want to go somewhere so we can talk?”

  “Got to do it right here.”

  Mingo’s eyes flickered, and Bern could see him trying to figure out the logic of it, why Jude would want that. But then he nodded, accepting it. He glanced around and hunched his shoulders a little in an unconscious gesture of confidentiality, then moved closer to Bern.

  He was wearing an expensive suit without a tie. He had a very precise coal black mustache, which complemented his handsome features. Just behind his head, one of the naked breasts of the luscious samba dancer shone brightly, its dark patina worn away to a clean brassy shine by the nightly caresses of randy young men.

  Mingo raised his eyebrows with a knowing look. He shifted his weight and leaned in closer. Close enough for Bern to catch a whiff of cologne.

  “I did what you said to do,” Mingo rasped. “Tuvimos cuidado, Judas. Ver-ry careful, okay?”

  Bern nodded.

  “It took us a while,” Mingo went on, “but my capitalinas, they are very clever girls, very light, like moths. They went where you said to go; they did the things you said to do. And, of course, they were very inventive, too.”