by Sam Hawken
“Americans,” Madrigal said. Suddenly he put the glass of juice to his mouth and drained it in one gulp. His face turned from the bitterness. “I won’t say they’re useless because their dollars paid for all of this, but sometimes I think they’re a blight. It was one of Gabriel’s American cousins who first introduced him to cocaína. Little weasel. From my wife’s side of the family.”
As quickly as the mood turned dark, there was sunshine again. Sevilla saw the lamplight come on in Madrigal’s eyes. The man straightened in his seat. “I’m going to change, Juan, and then we’ll play. How many strokes would you like me to give you?”
“Whatever you feel comfortable giving up. You’re my host. I don’t want to make demands of you.”
“You see?” said Madrigal, and he pointed a finger at Sevilla. “That is what I mean. Manners. Men like you and me, we know what is polite and what is not. And we try to teach our children, but to no avail. I will return.”
With that Madrigal left Sevilla with the table of food still spread before him. Sevilla put a piece of toast down and pushed the plate away from him. Arturo and two maids in uniforms came to clear up. “Señor Madrigal asks that you wait for him outside,” Arturo told Sevilla. “He will only be a few minutes.”
Double French doors opened out of the sunroom onto the striped green lawn. Sevilla’s shoes sank deeply into the grass. He smelled water and saw droplets still suspended here and there among the blades. A sharper, chlorinated odor rose from the pool as Sevilla came nearer.
He didn’t hear Sebastián approach. He saw the younger Madrigal’s reflection in the pool. “You surprised me,” Sevilla said.
“It’ll be a little longer,” Sebastián said by way of reply. The sun was higher now and lanced across the lawn. Sebastián took sunglasses from a case attached to his belt and put them on. He was dressed for the game in shorts and a collared pullover. His arms were lean and muscled so that the individual cords in his forearm stood out when he moved his fingers.
They stood together without talking for a while. Finally, Sevilla said, “I hope you know I don’t take seriously the things your father says.”
“Take them seriously if you like. It makes no difference to me.”
“I only mean it’s none of my business.”
“No,” Sebastián said, “it isn’t any of your business. But my father doesn’t have any problem insulting his own son to strangers.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“You don’t need to explain anything,” Sebastián interrupted. “You are my father’s guest and I’ll treat you the way I’m expected to treat you. And then you can go.”
Sevilla tried to read Sebastián’s face, but the man’s eyes were well hidden behind dark lenses. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Do I seem offended?”
“Frankly? Yes.”
“Then perhaps I am. But as I say, it makes no difference. You’ll play your round, my father will invite you to swim and stay for lunch and then you’ll go back to wherever it is you come from.”
“Ciudad de México.”
Sebastián looked at Sevilla. His sunglasses made his face a hollow-eyed skull. “Like I say: wherever you come from.”
NINE
THEY PLAYED AND SEVILLA LOST. HE was paired with a friend of Madrigal’s, an older gentleman who also made his home in Los Campos. As Sebastián predicted there was swimming and drinks and a lunch as lavish as breakfast. The elder Madrigal held forth on the drug wars and the business of the maquiladoras and a dozen other subjects, but not once did he speak of the dead women of Juárez. Neither did he make mention of his dead son.
“When you return to Ciudad Júarez, you must visit again,” Madrigal told Sevilla when they parted. “And if I find myself in Mexico City anytime soon, I may call on you.”
“Yes, you must,” Sevilla lied. “You have been too kind to me, Rafa.”
“It was nothing, Juan. Adiós.”
Sebastían did not bid Sevilla farewell. He vanished after the golf game and did not reappear even for lunch. His father made no comment on his son’s absence and it was just as well; the episode of the morning was still fresh in Sevilla’s mind and he was glad not to have a repeat.
He felt tension slipping away from him with each mile he put between himself and Los Campos. He opened the window to let the clean country air in. Soon he would be in the thick of Juárez where the air was not as dirty as somewhere like Juan Villalobos’ Mexico City, but bad enough. Enterprising youngsters and businessmen didn’t ply the lanes at stoplights offering hits of pure oxygen to drivers mired in traffic, but as the city grew the promise of those days drew closer.
By the time he saw the Hotel Lucerna rising out of the buildings ahead Sevilla felt almost like himself. The golf game had been terrible, but at least he’d known the difference between one club and the next. The swim was cool and relaxing, the drinks not enough to sate a thirst built over several days. Lunch left him feeling bloated and overfull. Madrigal offered a shady place for post-meal rest, but then and now Sevilla could think only of the queen-sized bed in his suite.
He returned the car, paying the bill in cash, and arranged for someone to bring up the golf clubs. He went up on the elevator alone and emerged into a quiet hallway likewise deserted. The suite door had an electronic lock opened with a card key. When the LED above the handle showed green, Sevilla pushed his way inside.
The man yanked him through the door before it was fully open. It banged wide and then slammed shut on pressurized hinges. Sevilla felt his feet leave the floor. He fell hard then and his knee screamed with pain.
When he reached for his gun it wasn’t there, but it hadn’t been there for days. Sevilla was dizzily aware of two men before one kicked him in the head and opened a broad gash over his eye. He went over onto his back as if dead. The suite’s front room went from light to dark and back again.
Someone grabbed a fistful of Sevilla’s hair and lifted his head clear of the parquet floor in the entryway. The picture of Ana and Ofelia was shoved in his face. The glass in the frame was broken, the frame itself twisted out of true. He saw Ana smiling at him through blood.
“Who is this, old man? Your wife? Your kid?”
“Probably his whore,” someone else said, and there was laughter. There were three of them, not two. Sevilla heard the crash of something breaking in the bedroom. All the furniture in the front room was overturned and the stuffing torn out. Even the area rugs had been flipped upside down.
“I—” Sevilla began.
The man smashed Sevilla in the face with the picture glass-first. Bits stung him on the cheek and lip. He was kicked in the side, in the stomach. Lunch roiled up out of him. Sevilla could see only the men’s feet as they moved back and forth; he was not strong enough to look up at their faces.
“Find another family to grift,” said one of the men. He stepped on Sevilla’s hand.
One left. Another rummaged in the bedroom and the bathroom until it was destroyed. The third stood over Sevilla and stomped him whenever the pain tried to pass.
“Stay down there, old man,” he said, and Sevilla did what he was told.
The last two conferred, but Sevilla’s ears were ringing. They took turns kicking him then until there was no part of him that didn’t hurt and no way to see through the curtain of red that obscured his eyes. He was barely aware of them leaving and then was aware of nothing for a long time.
TEN
HE WOKE. “KELLY,” HE BREATHED. His teeth felt loose and he tasted salt and copper.
“It’s Enrique.”
Sevilla was on the flipsided rug. He saw only the ceiling, but the light had changed and he knew it was evening. His body throbbed and his kidneys ached badly enough that he knew he would piss blood when the time came. Enrique touched his face with something cold and wet and smelling of strong liquor.
“There’s no alcohol in the medicine cabinet,” Enrique said.
“Don’t tell… the hotel,” Sevilla re
plied.
“I haven’t. You’ve been asleep for hours. I almost called an ambulance.”
“Don’t call them, either.”
“What happened?”
The cut over Sevilla’s eye was swollen and his vision reduced to a slash. He ran his tongue thickly over his teeth. They were all there. When he flexed his hands he knew his arms weren’t broken but his knee was a white-hot coal of agony. He would have to stand to know whether he could even walk.
“Give me something to drink,” Sevilla managed.
Ice jingled and whisky was poured. Sevilla knew it by scent before it touched his lips. The drink was hot and healing in his stomach and reached out for his other pains to smother them in coils of soothing warmth. He swallowed more and finished the tumbler and then sucked an ice cube until it, too, was gone.
He was ready to sit up. Enrique helped Sevilla prop himself against the ruins of a gutted sofa. Stuffing was scattered everywhere in tufts and gobbets. A slowly turning ceiling fan stirred the mess.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“Have you seen the place?” Sevilla asked.
“Yes. It’s all like this.”
“Then it’s done.”
“What do you mean?”
Sevilla wanted to close his eyes and sleep again. Just the act of sitting upright drained him. But the bed would be stripped and broken, too, and sometime the housekeeper would want access and everything would be revealed. In his mind Sevilla was packing already, planning his retreat.
“The picture.”
“It’s here,” Enrique said. He pressed it into Sevilla’s hand. It was out of the frame completely now and flecked with blood Sevilla knew was his own. Tears threatened to well up. His eyes burned.
“More whisky.”
“Not until we talk.”
“Goddammit, Enrique, what is there to talk about? It’s over. They know.”
“How could they know? What happened today?”
Sevilla shook his head. The gesture made his spine hurt at the base of his skull. “I thought I had them fooled, but I must not have. It was Sebastían. He let his father keep me busy while he…”
A wave of the hand encompassed the suite. Everything was broken, even the pots of the plants, their dirt scattered.
“How could he possibly know?”
“Maybe I ate with the wrong fork,” Sevilla said. He didn’t laugh at his own joke and Enrique only frowned. “Damn me, I’m a fool.”
Enrique let Sevilla have the bottle of single-malt whisky. He stalked the shattered rooms while Sevilla drowned the rest of his pain in spirits. Outside, the sun was going down. At the pool all the mothers and children would be out playing in the cool evening air before dinner. The windows were too far to drag himself.
“There’s no way they could have known,” Enrique said at last. “There’s nothing here.”
“Exactly,” Sevilla agreed. “There’s nothing here. No backstory, no paper trail, no nothing. I thought I could convince them with my word. There was no way. It was stupid.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” Enrique returned. “You had no way to know.”
“I knew I was too old for this kind of game,” Sevilla said. “It should have been you. Sebastían might have trusted someone closer to his own age. But I thought… I don’t know what I was thinking. That they would confess to me? ‘Yes, I had Paloma Salazar killed. I ordered the death of her brother, her lover. I did it all.’”
The whisky was fully in Sevilla’s brain now, soaking up his thoughts and pushing away worry. In a way he was clearer than before. His body was almost numb. If he drank more he would be entirely numb and unconscious on the floor. It took all his will to set the bottle aside.
“If they knew you were a policeman, why do this?”
“They didn’t know; they mistook me for a confidence man. In a way, I suppose I’m lucky.”
If there was anything else to say, Sevilla couldn’t think of what it might be, so he merely sat and waited for the minutes to pass. It was easier with the whisky in him. How many times had he done the same thing on his own, sitting in his car with the bottle between his legs, drifting on the currents of his own languid thoughts?
“I did what you asked,” Enrique said at long last. “I followed Ortíz all day. I know where he’ll be on Friday: at the palenque with his birds. We could lean on him. He’s the connection, like you said. He’ll tell us what we want to know.”
“He’ll tell us nothing.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because… I don’t know.”
Enrique helped Sevilla to his feet and into the bedroom. The men had torn the bed practically in half and gouged deep wounds in the mattress. Enrique wrestled the mattress back into place and put Sevilla there to rest. He began to pack. “Tell me everything,” he instructed Sevilla. “Leave nothing out.”
Sevilla did as he was told. He held the picture of Ana and Ofelia tightly, but he never crumpled it. There was no other copy. He was more grateful for this than he was for his life. The men from Madrigal could have taken both from him.
“Now I’ll take you home.”
ELEVEN
SEVILLA RESTED IN HIS OWN BED for a day of nearly unbroken sleep. When he woke the swelling in his eye had subsided and the pain in his knee was bearable. He was in his pajamas, though he didn’t recall changing into them. Enrique put coffee on his bedstand. The man looked alien standing in his bedroom. He seemed bursting to speak; Sevilla saw it all over him.
“How long have you been here?” Sevilla asked.
“A few hours.”
“Get out of my bedroom.”
Looking at himself in the mirror was as shocking as Sevilla expected. A butterfly bandage held the cut over his eye closed, but his face was blotched with deep bruises. A scrape on his nostril was livid.
His body was no better, and when he urinated he did see blood. Washing himself took a long time, but four aspirin taken from a bottle in the medicine cabinet brought the worst aches under control. When he brushed his teeth, his mouth no longer tasted like blood.
Enrique was in the kitchen with coffee of his own. He had buttered toast and half a grapefruit set aside for Sevilla. They ate in silence.
“Marco Rojas, he’s the cousin Madrigal spoke of?” Enrique asked at last.
“I don’t know. Is he?”
“A maternal cousin, yes,” Enrique said.
“How did you find that out?”
“Computers,” Enrique replied. “I checked the records overnight. Gabriel Madrigal and his cousin, Marco Rojas, were both convicted of drug charges and rape in New Mexico. Madrigal overdosed on contraband heroin after three months in prison. Rojas is still there.”
Sevilla put down his spoon. “Rape?”
“Yes,” Enrique said. His eyes gleamed. Sevilla understood.
“You know where Marco Rojas is?”
“A place called Hiatt. A state prison. North of El Paso.”
“You’re already going to go,” Sevilla said.
This was the thing Enrique had been waiting to say. He leaned across the table and the words came quickly: “The government has been trying to bring Rojas back for four years but his lawyers in America have been fighting for him to stay in a Texas prison. I looked, I know that the Rojas family is as wealthy as the Madrigals. If Marco Rojas came back to Chihuahua he would be turned loose in months, maybe weeks. It makes no sense!”
“No, it doesn’t. Unless he fears Madrigal’s wrath. Then there would be no release. He’d die like Estéban Salazar… or end up like Kelly.”
“I can drive there in a day,” Enrique continued. “No one will have to know. I arranged for two weeks of sick leave. Even Garcia won’t be able to check up on me. I’ll find out what’s happening.”
“You think the Americans will just let you visit one of their prisoners?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason you thought you could get close to
the Madrigals.”
Sevilla shook his head, but the gesture didn’t bring pain. He was grateful for that. “I failed. Maybe they didn’t know who I was or where I came from, but they knew I wasn’t one of them. These are police. They’ll ask questions.”
“Then I’ll answer them.”
“You’ll lie.”
Enrique was steadfast. “I will.”
“As if I could stop you,” Sevilla said. He sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. Each drink made the cut on his lip burn afresh. He made no effort to protect it.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Enrique said. He got up from the table. Sevilla didn’t watch him go.
TWELVE
FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE SEVILLA had not seriously contemplated the inevitability of old age. When he was in his twenties old age was an impossibility. Surely he would be dead by then, he thought, but death was itself an abstraction not worthy of real thought. Even his thirties were much the same until forty loomed and his older heroes began to pass away with greater and greater frequency.
He was always surrounded by death, especially the more time he spent working against the narcotraficantes. In the 1980s the narcos suddenly discovered that killing was a powerful tool, but not so powerful that it could be deployed in every circumstance to solve every problem. Where there had been only bushels of marijuana or stacks of packaged cocaine and heroin there were piles of spent bullet casings and blood and bodies. Car bombs were rare, for which Sevilla was thankful, because the carnage of such things was almost too much for him to withstand.
With his forties behind him he faced death each time he looked in a mirror at sagging flesh and fading muscles. Even his skin took on a different quality. The wrinkles he expected, but not the strange texture of roughness and looseness that began on the back of his hands and slowly spread elsewhere.
Now he was old, unquestionably old. All the things he knew were coming were here, from the thinning hair to the beard that was now more white than anything else. His vision was going, though he still refused glasses. When he wasn’t drinking his hands were steady, but this was only one small thing to be proud of in a sea of other failures. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had an erection.
