The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

“Who else, then?”

  Bern glanced at Baida, who remained quiet, watching him, then back to Sabella.

  “What the hell’s going on here? What’s the matter?”

  “After you disappeared,” Sabella said, “Domingo began looking around in places where he shouldn’t have been looking.”

  “Shouldn’t have been?”

  “What was he talking about tonight when he said that he had done what you had said for him to do? That he had found a woman who ‘has the thing you want’?”

  Bern felt a warm flush envelope him. This was insanely beyond him. He wouldn’t be able to sustain this.

  “I have a client looking for a certain kind of pre-Columbian figurine. I had heard of a woman here who might have such a thing. That’s what I thought he was referring to.”

  “What is the woman’s name?”

  “No, I can’t do that. I don’t mention your name to other people. I don’t mention her name to other people. That’s how I do it. That’s the way I stay in business. People know they can trust that.”

  “Where does she live?”

  Bern shook his head. “No.”

  Sabella didn’t respond. Both men sat in the coppery half-light and looked at him. They didn’t glance at each other or communicate in any way that Bern could detect, and yet it seemed to him that they were both weighing his response on the same scale, using the same criteria for finding him worthy . . . or not.

  The slip of paper in his pocket burned into his groin like an ember.

  “Are you sure that’s what he was referring to?” Baida asked.

  “I said I thought that’s what he was referring to. I didn’t have any reason to believe otherwise. He didn’t live long enough for me to be sure.”

  They said nothing, watching him in silence. Bern was scared. Suddenly, what little bravery he had been able to screw together was slipping away. This is a smuggling deal, he reminded himself. A smuggling deal. Just a smuggling deal. Terrorism is not on the table.

  “Look,” he said. “If this isn’t what you want anymore, then fine. I’m not exactly comfortable being on the edge of your fucked-up drug deals, either. Just remember, your people came to me. It wasn’t the other way around. I’m not pushing my way into your business here. I can walk away. Easy.”

  Bern could hear more running.

  He waited for Baida’s reaction, but the other man sat there like a sphinx, a handsome sphinx, a sphinx with blood on its breath, with dead souls hanging around its neck like a necklace strung with withered lives. Bern thought of the paragraphs Jude had written about him, a kind of free verse about a man who was entirely likable, a man unworthy of his own personality.

  “How long has it been since you were in Austin?” Baida asked.

  Bern was staggered by the question. Jesus Christ. He suddenly felt nauseated. He knew. Baida knew. Bern was not going to walk out of here alive. And then just as suddenly, he remembered: Austin was Jude’s home, too, and Baida’s city of fondest memories, his halcyon university days, before the world turned cruel for him.

  Jude had written that Baida loved to reminisce about it, about little things he remembered, a lane, a hilltop view (was it still the same?), a bar (was it still there?), a coffee shop, a bookstore. Details. The minutiae of memory, the small things that one missed and longed for, which grew larger and larger as time pushed them further and further away.

  “Three months, maybe,” Bern said.

  “April,” Baida said, his voice actually softening. “That’s a good time.” Another pause, then he said, “I had a friend whose family owned a home on the lake. Lake Austin.”

  Bern felt faint. What was this? Did he know after all, then? Was Baida toying with him?

  “I used to go to this guy’s house all the time. Beautiful place. Idyllic, really. We swam off the dock and watched the people skiing up and down the lake. Those wooded cliffs. They’re still there, aren’t they?”

  “Still there.”

  “This guy’s name was—what was it—Holbrooke. You know any Holbrookes?”

  “No.”

  Baida nodded, as if understanding that it would have been a fluke. He kept his eyes on Bern, but Bern had the feeling that Baida was reading his mind, that every time he elicited a response from Bern, the red needle on his bullshit detector registered a “This is not Jude” response.

  Alice popped into Bern’s mind. She would be laughing her head off at his counterfeit performance. She would be making fun of him, mocking him in her Wonderland language and striking eye-rolling poses that made no bones about what she thought of his dismal imitation of a man he’d never met.

  Baida fell silent. Maybe he was thinking of April in Austin, or the lake, or the wooded cliffs, or the Holbrookes. He thought about it so long that Bern began to wonder what the hell was going on.

  “We want you to get a package to Houston for us.”

  This time, it was Sabella who spoke. Baida continued looking at Bern. Was that it, then? Had he passed some kind of test? Had Baida mysteriously communicated to Sabella his decision that Bern was clean enough to work with them after all? What the hell was going on here?

  Bern knew only one thing: His job was to reestablish contact with Baida, using Jude’s bogus smuggling route as a lure. This was the first sign in this whole damn nightmare that maybe he was going to have the chance to actually do that. He just wanted to get it over with. He just wanted the hell out of this situation.

  “How big’s the package?” Bern asked.

  “About a cubic meter,” Sabella said. “Maybe twenty kilos.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Soon meaning?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Where do my people pick it up? Guatemala?”

  “No. It’s here,” Sabella said. “Mexico City.”

  Bern gave it some more thought. “I’ll have to check with my people, set things up, make some arrangements.”

  “There’s not a lot of flexibility here,” Baida interjected. “Practically none.”

  Bern got the picture.

  Sabella looked at his watch. “As soon as you have final plans,” he said, “let us know. If we don’t hear from you by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, we’ll be forced to do it some other way.”

  “Fine. How do I get in touch with you?”

  “Call the American British Cowdray Hospital,” Sabella said, “any hour, at exactly a quarter before or a quarter past the hour. Ask for the pharmacy. Ask for Flor. When she asks, tell her you are Luis. She will tell you what to do.”

  As if on cue, they could hear people entering the sala, the loud voices echoing in the vast empty room. They fell silent as someone rapidly crossed the room and then came out onto the terrace and approached them.

  “Take him wherever he wants to go,” Sabella said in English to the man who waited at the edge of the arbor. Then the three of them stood, and Bern saw that Ghazi Baida was not a big man, but he was powerfully built. Baida casually put his hands in his pockets.

  “Ten o’clock tomorrow,” Sabella said.

  “Yeah,” Bern said, and that was that.

  Bern sat in silence, alone in the backseat of the car. Most of the architectural monotony in Mexico City was created in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the millions who flooded into the metropolis from the impoverished countryside strangled its lakebed plains and its foothills and ravines with a metastasizing blight of squatters’ shanties. Fleeing the destitution of their small villages, where even industrious Death could hardly stir the energy to take them, they sought hope among strangers and created a new kind of misery for the masses.

  The car entered one of these vast spiritless colonias of two-story cinder-block buildings, where every structure had started to deteriorate the moment its crude construction began. The streets were narrow, straight, endless, and full of potholes, and the few low-wattage streetlights that worked glowed sullenly. Despite the fog and closed windows, the car filled with the od
or of dust. The whole surreal scene was a physical representation of Bern’s mental state: stark and alien and menacing.

  The driver pulled to the curb and cut the engine. He rolled down his window, and they waited. Bern looked at his watch. Five minutes passed. Ten. He rolled down his window also. Twenty. Twenty-five. The driver’s cell phone rang. He opened it and listened.

  “Bueno,” he said. He snapped the phone closed, started the car, and then drove away.

  Chapter 31

  The driver dropped him off at one of the Sanborn’s stores on the Paseo de la Reforma, just around the corner from the Four Seasons Hotel. He walked around to the hotel, went into the men’s room, and washed his face with cold water. When he came back out, he went to one of the sitios, which could always be found outside hotels.

  For the next half hour, he went through a series of cab switches, using major hotels as his changing points because they provided ample opportunity for him to exit the hotel unseen. Finally, he gained a little confidence in his execution of a highly difficult technique, and he made his last stop. He got out of the sitio and started walking into the darker streets.

  Now he was standing under a laurel tree in front of a pastelería that was still open. About fifty yards away, this quiet, small street merged with a larger one that was brighter and much busier. He was on Calle Pasado.

  He turned to look across the street. Cars were parked on either side of the lane, and about four cars down, almost obscured behind the laurel trees, was a small hotel in a narrow building several stories high. The pale blue neon sign that hung unobtrusively over the sidewalk could just be glimpsed through the trees: Hotel Palomari, the words Susana had whispered to him in the Beso Azul. Bern crossed the street and entered the hotel.

  The elderly man who sat behind a reception desk of heavy dark wood topped with green marble seemed startled to see him walk into his tiny foyer. The name Palomari was set in blue tile in the center of the white tile floor. The desk clerk, whose complexion seemed to have been deprived of sunlight for several decades, had heavy swags of flesh under his watery eyes, and a too-black pencil-thin mustache sliced across his long upper lip. While Bern signed an alias in the ancient registration book, the clerk wriggled subtly with pleasure, flicking nervous smiles at him. From somewhere Bern caught a disconcerting whiff of gardenia.

  He had asked for room 202, which was on the second floor, up a winding narrow staircase that groaned miserably as he ascended. The Palomari was only three rooms wide, and his was the center one in the short hallway. But he didn’t go to his room. Instead, he stopped in the gloomy hallway and tapped softly on room 201.

  Silence. Nothing. Maybe it was only a few seconds—he didn’t know, as time had become a wildly elastic thing in the past few hours—but however long it was, it was time enough for his mind to seize upon every disastrous possibility: He had heard the name wrong. Something had happened. It was a trap. She was dead.

  Susana opened the door.

  “God,” he said, and she stepped back to let him in.

  She had not turned on the lights in the room, but she had thrown open the two panels of the room’s window, which let in the faint glimmer of the hotel sign below, and the glow from the pastelería across the street. It was a ghostly light, but bright enough.

  Susana said nothing as she turned and walked over to the window. They looked at each other. A sluggish breeze stirred the gauzy curtains on either side of the window, just once, like a desultory breath.

  He glanced around: a bed, one nightstand and one chair on either side of the bed, an old armoire with a mirrored front sitting against the wall across from the foot of the bed. The door to the bathroom was open, and an old-fashioned white porcelain bidet stood alone, framed in the doorway.

  Susana’s reticence was strange, but he was so wrapped up in himself, in his fear, his confusion, his relief at seeing her, that he didn’t realize how unusual the moment really was, nor, again, how long it had lasted. It could’ve been only seconds.

  “Paul,” she said—the first time she had called him by his name, he realized—“are you all right?”

  Maybe he was the one behaving strangely, not her. Yes, that must be it.

  “Yeah,” he said. No, he wasn’t, but what would it matter if he had said otherwise?

  There was a second, only that, or maybe two, when he thought that if he walked over and embraced her, as he wanted desperately to do, that she would understand, that, in fact, she wanted him to do it. He was as sure of that as he had been of anything since all of this had begun. And then, instantly, he was hit by the reality of how absurd that would be to her, how utterly unexpected and inappropriate . . . and out of control.

  “God,” he said again. He felt weak suddenly. He went over to the bed and sat down. “Damn,” he said.

  “Did you talk to him?” she asked. A perfectly logical question, it cut through the instability of his emotional fantasies.

  Bern pulled off his suit coat—Jude’s suit coat—and tossed it over the chair on his side of the bed.

  “Yeah, I did. And no, I don’t think he had a clue that he wasn’t talking to Jude.”

  “Incredible,” she said.

  He told her everything that had happened, all that had been done and said from the moment he left her at the Beso Azul to the time he knocked on her door at the Palomari. Susana remained silent. She didn’t interrupt him to ask questions or to ask him to expand on a particular point, or to ask for clarification.

  At first, she stayed by the window, but then she began pacing, arms folded. Finally, she returned to the window again and looked down at the street, her profile cast against the glow. When he finally finished, she turned toward him again.

  “Holy Christ,” she said. She remained still, her forearms crossed low above her waist in the way women do. She was studying him, the faint light from behind her allowing her to get a good look at his face. “Look, I want you to know that I think you’ve done a magnificent job. But I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t think you’d be able to pull this off. I’m sorry, but I didn’t. And especially after the shooting—”

  She stopped herself for no apparent reason.

  “No, I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, either. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just get on with it.”

  “Okay,” she said. Uncrossing her arms, she went over and sat on the foot of the bed. “Okay, now listen. You need to tell me quickly what happened before the shooting. I heard everything that was said, but I want to know everything that was happening. Was Mingo buying you being Jude? How was he reacting?”

  Bern turned, one leg resting on the bed, the other on the floor. It took him a moment to get his mind around something that now seemed so long ago.

  In the half-light of the aging hotel room, its furnishings giving off the odors of decades of transient living, its walls embracing the secrets of countless biographies, he told Susana everything he could remember—and he concentrated in order to remember every detail—while she sat on the bed and listened.

  He was unnerved by how much detail he could recall, how vividly he could relive the shock and fear and panic. Not only did he recall the facts in detail but he also experienced every emotion that had accompanied those facts. To call it a debriefing hardly did justice to the experience.

  When he finished, she waited a little before she asked her first question. She waited long enough for him to be aware of the sounds of the street rising to the window, long enough for him to be aware that it had begun to rain, softly, quietly.

  “It seemed to me,” she said, “that near the end, just before he was shot, something happened. Mingo said that he had found a woman that had the thing Jude wanted. You said, ‘Oh?’ And there was a bit of a pause and then you said, ‘And?’ And there was more silence . . . and then the shots.”

  Bern went back to that moment, recalling the seconds before the little boy stood up with the pistol.

  “Oh shit,” he said, and he leaned back against the headboard a
nd rammed his hand down into his pocket. He felt the piece of paper and pulled it out.

  “This,” he said, “he gave me this.”

  Before he could even react, she snatched the piece of paper from his hand and was turning on the lamp on her nightstand. She stooped over the paper, her head up under the light.

  “It’s a woman’s name,” she said, reaching up and turning off the lamp, plunging the room into the pale glow again. “Estele de León Pheres. Her maiden name is Lebanese. I guess it’s the woman he was talking about.”

  She stood, half-turned away from him, and stopped, staring out the window to the street. Looking through the limp curtains, Bern could see the pale light glittering off the rain.

  Every silence like this was excruciating for him now. He never lost his awareness of time’s flight, of it sweeping through the dark hours, hurling him toward his next encounter with Ghazi Baida.

  “Look,” he said. “Baida’s waiting for me to get back to him.”

  “I know that,” she almost snapped. She returned to the window, then moved back a little and leaned a hip and shoulder against the wall. All Bern could see of her now was her face in the icy light. She was staring down to the pastelería across the street.

  “I’m going to call Kevern again,” she said, turning to him. “They got Mingo’s ID, and he’s sent Mondragón’s people to search his place. I need to give him this name, too, turn Mondragón’s people loose on it.”

  “So what’s the deal with Mondragón?” Bern asked. “He’s Kevern’s pit bull, is that it?”

  “Essentially, yeah, but he’s a hell of a lot more than that. Vicente used to be a major force, a section chief, in CISEN, the Center for Investigations and National Security. At the time, it was Mexico’s superintelligence agency, the FBI and the CIA all rolled into one. Only thing is, it was totally a tool of the PRI, the political party that had been the sole power in Mexico for over seventy years. That is, until Vicente Fox was elected president. CISEN collected dossiers on the PRI’s political enemies, on powerful corporate executives, the wealthy and influential in Mexico. Bugged everybody. Spied on everybody. Had more stuff on individual citizens than the old East German Stassi.