The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Bern couldn’t tell if she was staring at herself or at him, but in the blue haze he could see the white crotch of her panties between her raised thighs.

  “It was Jude,” she said, “who was supposed to kill Ghazi Baida.”

  There it was, baldly stated. What Bern had suspected all along, but had never been told, was now laid out in front of him like a corpse on a slab. No more euphemism of silence. No more implication. There it was, without apology.

  For the past few days, Bern had been unable to escape the slightly out-of-focus feeling that he was constantly accompanied by a dopplegänger. Jude was always there—in front of him, behind him, looking over his shoulder. Everyone he met spoke to him from within a context occupied by his double. Bern was constantly at a loss, struggling to read the hidden meanings, the implications, and the nuances in their remarks. But now, the dopplegänger—his brother—acquired an altogether different dimension.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, “Jude was . . . he—” He stopped himself. He wanted to get it straight. “He’d done this before?” he asked.

  Now Bern was sure that she was looking at him in the gloomy reflection of the old speckled mirror, using it as an intermediary, as if it would make the truth less shocking, or maybe make it somehow more comprehensible.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “That was . . . that was what he did?”

  “He had done it before,” she said; “that’s all I know.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  Bern was stunned, and he knew that she could sense that, even in the gloomy obscurity of the rainy light. He knew that she was well aware that suddenly he was nearly overcome with questions.

  Still staring at him from between the wrists of her hands planted in her hair, she said, “Look, I know you’ve got to be . . . just . . . boiling over with questions, but we don’t have the time to do that right now.” She took her hands out of her hair and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I want you to understand the situation here, the situation Jude was in. It’ll help you understand what we’re up against. Just . . . just bear with me here. I promise you we’ll talk about it all you want later. I’ll tell you everything I know. But not now.”

  Bern couldn’t bring himself to say a word. He nodded. It was all he could do.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He heard her take a little breath before going on.

  “But this job, Baida, it couldn’t be, you know, a targeted killing,” she said. “No bomb, no booby trap, no missile from a chopper. It couldn’t be seen to be a political assassination. Remember the clandestine aspect to this. Jude had to make it look like a drug hit. Plant a false ID on him. Better yet, just make him disappear. Baida lived in secrecy; he would die in secrecy. As if it never happened. Jude knew it wasn’t going to be an easy thing to do.”

  Bern tried to concentrate on the logistics of it. He tried to ignore what was really making him light-headed—the genetic factor: What were the implications here for him?

  “He couldn’t do it down in Ciudad del Este,” she went on, still using the mirror as an intermediary. “It would’ve been suicidal. Baida was well protected down there. By this time we had pretty good intelligence that he was moving into Mexico, and we thought it would be easier to do here, where our resources were better.

  “And then Jude was killed. The assassination was shifted to Mondragón, and you were recruited to set up Baida.”

  She hesitated, then said, “Before we get on with this, I want you to know something else.” Hesitation again. “Your first meeting with Baida tonight—we didn’t know what he might’ve learned during that month or so after the killings in Tepito. There was no way we could know. Jude was our man inside. There was no other access. If Baida had . . . somehow learned the truth, that Jude had in fact been killed in Tepito . . . they would’ve killed you tonight.”

  She was as still as the curtains.

  “That’s the part that Mondragón—that none of us told you. There was always that little bit of possibility—well, that’s not right, because we didn’t know, had no idea, what the degree of possibility was—that you wouldn’t make it back from your first meeting with Baida.”

  Bern looked at her dark eyes in the mirror, and suddenly Susana was transformed into an absolute stranger. In an instant, her nearness to him on the bed was turned into a proximity filled with danger, as if he were lying next to a woman who had walked in off the street. Her manner, her glance, even her pauses and silences emanated a sense that, with her, anything could happen. The next moment with her could bring anything from the ordinary to the fantastic, and all were equally likely. She simply did not distinguish between these vastly different contexts. He had no idea who she was. He knew nothing about her, could not imagine what her life had been like a moment before she walked into the room.

  “Remember,” she asked, “how upset I was about . . . finding out that Jude had been working with Mingo behind my back?” Her voice took on a reflective tone. “You could tell, I know, that that hurt me.”

  She hesitated. When she went on, she spoke more slowly, and more softly, as if she was afraid to touch the subject.

  “The thing about working with a single partner undercover . . . it’s more complex than you might imagine. It’s a cliché, I know, but we were close in a special way. No one can ever understand just how that is unless they experience it for themselves. And precious few people qualify for that.”

  The sound of the rain lent a sense of consecration to the moment. She had lowered her head a little, her chin nearly resting on top of her knees. Her eyes glinted in the mirror, fixed on him from beneath her parted dark hair.

  “What Jude and I needed from each other . . . and gave to each other during this last year, was as special in its own way as any personal sacrifice could ever be. We learned to turn loose of all the lifelines that people cling to, and we submitted to a kind of . . . free fall. Against all of our instincts, we . . . committed to the idea that the other person would always be waiting at the end of our fall. We were faithful unto death.”

  She cleared her throat, still looking at Bern.

  “But that kind of trust doesn’t come without a price. It changes you, a piece of you, forever.”

  The rain came hard now, no breeze, just straight down, slapping the leaves of the laurel trees below the window, thundering in the street.

  He heard her clear her throat again.

  “I needed you to know this,” she said. “I told you that you could trust me, and then . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. Uncharacteristically, she couldn’t bring herself to come right out and say it.

  “I wouldn’t have done that to Jude,” she said. “Ever. I couldn’t have. And I shouldn’t have done it to you, either.”

  She was very still, and Bern felt as if he were being lifted off the bed by the sound of the pounding rain.

  “I’m . . . I’m telling you this,” she said, abandoning their reflections in the mirror and turning to look directly at him, “because . . . this is only going to get rougher. I want you to know . . . that I’ll give you the same kind of loyalty that I gave to Jude. I’m willing to go against my instincts . . . to be waiting at the end of the free fall.”

  She was still looking at him, close enough for him to reach out and touch her face. He didn’t know what to say. She had just told him that she had been willing to risk letting him be killed to see if he could pass as Jude. And then almost within the same breath she had pledged a loyalty to him that superseded her loyalty to the ideas that had enabled her to betray him. The first revelation had been shocking; the second one seemed reckless in its promise.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the downpour stopped. Silence. And then dripping, like far-off whispers, a world of whispers.

  “What in God’s name do you expect me to say to something like that?” he asked. Oddly, he wasn’t furious; he was simply at a loss for framing a response. Despite himself, he believed
her. He believed the betrayal, and he believed the pledge of loyalty. It was the staggering simultaneity of them that confused him, and made her seem wildly unstable.

  She let go of her knees, leaned away from him, and got off the bed. She stood a moment with her back to him, and then she sat down in the chair near the nightstand, her legs apart, her hands sunk into the skirt gathered between her thighs, the front of her dress still unbuttoned. She was looking toward the window, her profile powder blue in the wet light.

  The city had vanished, and the universe was nothing but a dripping darkness as far as the mind could imagine.

  Chapter 34

  Sleep was impossible, so Mondragón had reverted to what was becoming a way of life for him—cruising the city’s streets in the dead hours of the night. As he stared through darkened windows, his thoughts often drifted into the familiar doldrums of self-pity, and at other times they were sucked into the superheated whirlwind of his loathing. Regardless, it all led to the same theme of his constant meditation: his hatred for Ghazi Baida. It was an ulcerated wound, one that was never allowed to heal.

  He was halfway across the city when he got the call from Quito that they had picked up one of Domingo’s girls, and immediately he instructed his driver to head toward the colonias near Benito Juarez International. Then on the way, he got the second call about Estele de León Pheres, a name that gave him great hope the moment he heard it. He knew that name, and he knew the possibilities it implied.

  Mondragón spritzed his head. He sipped straight scotch from a glass. Tonight, his raw skin was throbbing. Stress. That’s what it was. For some insane reason, stress made it worse.

  The front of his head was on fire. He spritzed it again. He wanted to close his eyes and wait for the cooling effect of the analgesic. But he couldn’t. He sat there in the half-light of the sedan, his eyes goggling at everything, seeing, seeing, seeing, taking in everything. His eyeballs fanned around like searchlights that couldn’t be extinguished.

  He took another shot of scotch. He was on the edge here. A few more sips and he wouldn’t be able to think straight. He would be in that zone, that strata of exquisite self-deception where he’d assume he was thinking straight, even though he wasn’t, like a pilot flying too high without oxygen, slipping into a nether zone of absolutely believable delusion. This was his fate since his face had been sloughed away—to endure by balance, to linger at the edge of delusion but not to step over, to be constantly tempted by relief but never able to taste deliverance.

  Mondragón turned the front of his head to the window again. Just a slight shift in focus made the city rush away at warp speed, and then his own reflection was staring back at him: eyeballs and lips . . . a fucking horror show.

  Then he picked up a wafer-thin translucent mask. Molded into the shape of a face, it was made of special materials that would fend off the infectious grit-laden smog of the city’s night air. He carefully placed it over his face, attaching it to the back of his head with two Velcro straps. He took a moment to adjust the gel and membrane inner surface of the mask to the front of his head, making it as comfortable as possible. He could wear it only a couple of hours before he would have to remove it. But it would give him a little time to maneuver outside his car.

  He looked out the window of the car and thought of the people inside the buildings he was going by. He thought of the millions of people in the city. In the whole universe, only one life meant anything to him at all. The others were nothing. They were mere bits of debris, blown and whipped about in the eddies of history, spinning out their stupid and irrelevant hours and days in meaningless insignificance.

  But not Ghazi Baida. Not his old friend. Not that one certain soul. He deserved a special place in the scheme of things.

  He poured a bit of scotch into a glass and carefully sipped it through the mask. He had to keep the buzz going, especially while he was in the killing house. The buzz would help him focus his thoughts on the events of the coming hours.

  He thought of the faces of the people who were about to die, and he thought of all the people who died every day—how many? tens of millions?—who no longer needed their face. God threw away a city of faces every day, so many faces assigned to fire and decay every day, wasted every day, that if you had them all in one place, you could shove them around with a bulldozer. You could push them into piles; you could build mountains with them. Every beggar and pustule on the globe had a face, and it was as nothing to him, no more important to him than his own ass, which he never saw. But he saw his face every day, and no one, no one, appreciated the significance of what he saw staring back at him from a mirror, or a bucket of water, or a puddle, or a window along the street.

  Mondragón thought of the ubiquity of the human face, billions of them throughout the earth. A vast sea of faces. Mountains of faces pushed into the sea of faces, and every day they kept coming, gargantuan piles of faces, a face for every birth, a face for every death. Mondragón was haunted by the idea of dying without a face.

  Chapter 35

  They both heard a faint tickling at the door handle, but neither of them had a chance to react before the door was pushed open and two men stepped inside, automatic weapons ready, although not pointing at them. As Susana gathered the front of her dress and started buttoning it, one of the men raised his hand for them to be calm.

  Mazen Sabella came through the door between the two men.

  “My apologies for coming in this way. Sorry.”

  He was holding a paper bag.

  One of Sabella’s guards went into the bathroom and then came out again.

  “I have some coffee,” Sabella said, holding the bag up to them. “And a few pastries.” He was wearing the same clothes he had worn when Bern met with him. They were a little more wrinkled now.

  The same guard went to the armoire and opened it. Then he got down on his knees and checked under the bed.

  “What’s going on?” Bern asked.

  “You and I have to talk,” Sabella said. “You’ve done a very good job of cleaning yourselves. The street is clean.” He addressed Susana. “Your cell phone, please.”

  She reached for her purse, retrieved the phone, and gave it to Sabella, who gave it to the second guard. The man left the room with it.

  “You’ll get it back,” Sabella said. “We just don’t want to be overheard.” He looked around the room. “So we’ll talk here.” Then he spoke to Susana again. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to talk alone. My men will take you across the street for a bite to eat. We’ll be able to see you from the window.”

  Silence.

  “Now?” Susana asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  Giving Bern a level look that told him nothing, she stepped into her shoes as she picked up her purse, then left the room with the two men. Bern and Sabella were alone now.

  Sabella walked around the bed and sat in the chair where Susana’s bag had been. He opened the sack and put one of the paper cups of coffee on the nightstand, then placed a hard pan dulce beside it. He took the other coffee for himself.

  Bern came around the end of the bed, too, and glanced down at the street, where Susana was crossing Calle Pasado to the pastelería. The lights inside the pastelería gave it a cheerful glow. Susana went to the glass display cases to order while one man sat at a table and the other one waited outside, where a light fog moved along the street.

  Bern went over and sat down on the bed, picked up the pan dulce and the coffee, and bit into the bread, which was sweet and crumbly. His stomach was churning. What in God’s name was going to happen now?

  Sabella sipped his coffee and looked at Bern with large dark eyes that sagged at the outside corners. They were bloodshot, the irises deep brown, melting into the pupils. Bern tried to swallow the bite of pan dulce, but it was too dry and hung in his throat. He sipped the coffee. This was Sabella’s show. He would have to handle the opening scene himself.

  “We are completely alone,” Sabella said. “No one listening.
Only the two of us. My people aren’t listening. Your people aren’t listening.” He gestured at Bern with his coffee. “You and I are alone.”

  Bern stared at him, still trying to make the bread go down. Sabella stared back.

  What did a man like Sabella think about in such a moment? Was he thinking strategically, trying to foresee how Jude would react to what he was about to say, and then trying to decide what his own reaction should be in response to that? This moment of hesitation, was it a moment of doubt? What could he be thinking as he sipped his coffee and watched Bern trying to hide the fact that he was nearly choking on a chunk of sugared bread, trying to hide the fact that he was petrified that his outrageous lie had been discovered by these violent people who had seen and used every imaginable trick to kill and to survive.

  “Jude the smuggler,” Sabella said pensively. He sat in the straight-backed chair as if it were a throne, occupying it with confidence and shrewdness. His legs parted in a posture of stolid resolution. His back was straight, and wiry black hair showed through the open front of his shirt, while on his wrist, as on Baida’s, a black military watch counted down the diminishing hours.

  “We talked about so many things, didn’t we, Judas, in Ciudad del Este?”

  Bern nodded. He wanted to appear . . . Jude-ish. Wiser than Bern. With more guts than Bern. With a view of the world that made him unflappable, and with a cynicism that Bern would never be able to understand.

  “Do you know what I think, Judas?” Sabella’s eyes were alert, but his face was benumbed by the gravity of his game, by the high stakes involved. “I think you know . . . precisely . . . who Ghazi Baida is.” He paused, letting the surprise do its work in silence. Then: “He’s not just some guy who wants to move twenty kilos of something in a box. And you’re not just a smuggler who doesn’t care what it is, who will move anything but dope. You’re not just some guy who’s trying to save his ass, who wants a bundle of money.”