Blood of My Brother (27 page)

Jay rose and walked to the stone wall. The moon, getting on to full, was shining bright as it hung above the sea in the night sky. Watching him standing there, his back to her, his long hair lifted at its edges by the night wind, Isabel felt something stir in her heart, something she had suppressed since the night on the beach in Sabancuy. She rose as well, took a step toward him, and then stopped, thinking of her dark secret, immobilized by its terrible weight.

“What time did you get up?” Isabel asked.

“Seven,” Jay replied.

“I thought you had left.”

“Left? You mean run off with Bryce’s papers?”

“Yes.”

“We’re not done here.”

“
Bueno.
How do you feel?”

“Better.”

They were sitting on the veranda, drinking coffee. It was eight a.m. Isabel was wearing a denim shirt and her white cotton shorts. Her hair, growing in, but still cropped to above her ears, was damp and glistening from her shower. She wore no makeup, and knew that she could be taken, from the neck up, for a pretty teenage boy—but only from the neck up. Jay was wearing his shorts and no shirt. His rash was almost gone, and it was hot.

They had been in Mexico five days. Frank Dunn had insisted on knowing where Isabel was taking Jay—“at least we can come down to pick up your body,” he had said—but Isabel had refused, knowing that the torture tactics employed by Herman and the Feria brothers had a 100 percent success rate. Jay was to place a call to Victor Ponce at El Caribe—
they agreed that it was likely that Angelo’s phones would be tapped once Markey learned that Jay, Dunn, and Isabel had vanished on the same night that Gary Shaw was gunned down in front of El Pulpo—if he needed help.

Except for Isabel’s short walks to the Vista del Mar to pick up food, they had not left their hillside retreat. Jay’s strength had not fully returned, but they could not stay much longer. Jay was the only American within a hundred miles, and Isabel did not exactly blend in with the natives, mostly impoverished Mixtec Indians. They were bound to attract attention, and there was always the possibility that a Dominican Sister would show up, requiring Isabel to do some fast talking.

“I’ll rest one more day,” said Jay. “I’ll read the documents, listen to the tapes. Tomorrow you will call Herman.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. You can take the jeep after you make the call. I’ll figure something out.”

“Would you like me to stay to help you kill the Feria brothers?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“That wasn’t our deal.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why are you not married?”

Isabel watched as Jay’s beautiful gray eyes turned inward, surprised at his reticence. He drummed his fingers on the wooden arms of his patio chair, as if giving the question more weight than she intended. Much more.

“I was married once,” he said, finally. “For a short time.”

“What happened.”

“My parents died in a plane crash.”

Isabel said nothing, not realizing, until this moment, that Jay had been a puzzle from the start. And here was a key piece of that puzzle floating in the air toward her, its contours handles she might grab and hold on to.

“When?” she asked, finally.

“Fifteen years ago.”

“And you left your wife?”

“No.”

“She left
you
? Are there children?”

Jay did not answer immediately, but neither did he look inward or drum his fingers. When he turned to face her, Isabel saw the pain in his eyes, and regretted asking her initial question.

“I was dating her. When my parents died I married her because I was afraid of being alone. She wanted children. I immediately had a vasectomy.”

“That must have hurt her very much.”

“It did. She left.”

“Did you love her?”

“No.”

“Now you have lost your friend.”

“Yes.”

“Were there other women?”

“Yes, a few.”

“Did you love any of them?”

“No.”

The whole conversation had taken on a life of its own, the reins, Isabel realized with a start, held by her heart, not her head. There was a precipice ahead, but she knew somehow that it was too late. She would not be able to wrestle the reins back in time. Perhaps she did not want to.

“What about you?” Jay asked. “Have you loved anyone, besides Bryce Powers?”

“I loved a young man once, a politician.”

“What happened?”

“The Ferias killed him. On Herman’s orders.”

Now it was Jay’s turn to stare hard at Isabel. Yes, she said to herself, there it is, a small piece of
my
puzzle.

“Is that why you want to stay and help me kill them?”

“No. It’s Herman I want to kill.”

“Is there any way we can get him here?”

“No. He will stay in Mexico City and send his panthers.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“What is it you did for Herman Santaria starting at the age of fourteen?”

Isabel gripped the arms of her chair for a second, then let go and reached into the neck of her shirt, where she found the Mary scapular that Sister Josefina had given her when she left the convent in Polanco. She had kept it with Sister’s letters all these years, but had started wearing it when she promised to help Jay and they fled to Puerto Angel. Fingering it, she remembered Sister’s words.
It is not magic. It is a sign of your commitment, of your faith. Do not lose either, no matter what the future brings.

“I will tell you tonight,” she said. “We will drink your scotch, and I will answer your question.”

“Until I was fourteen, I lived in an orphanage in Mexico City, in Polanco, run by the Dominican Sisters. They also ran a home for unwed mothers, and a clinic where they gave birth, where I was born. I was lucky. I had a relative,
Tio Hermano
, who visited me occasionally, and brought small gifts. When I was fourteen, he took me away, and trained me to be a whore.”

It was eight p.m. They had eaten dinner, and were sitting on the veranda on old wooden chairs facing each other. The scotch and a pack of cigarettes were on the small table between them. The night was very warm, and humid, and the full moon shone from behind a checkerboard of gathering clouds.

“Herman never touched me; Rafael did. He fucked me several times in the beginning. He was the first, actually. He was the governor of the State of Mexico at the time. Herman was out of government by then; he was doing other things. They were both rich, but greedy for more.”

Watching her face in the intermittent moonlight as she spoke, Jay thought something had changed, but he could not say what. Did she look younger? Or older? Sadder? Happier? What? He had a scotch over ice in his hand. The glass, a
fading Mickey Mouse juice glass, was sweating profusely in the humid night air. He put it down, and then reached over and touched the back of Isabel’s hand, and said, “Isabel, you don’t have to tell me any more.”

“I thought you wanted to know?” Isabel replied. “To see me hurt as part of your revenge for Danny.” With her mask removed, her eyes, staring straight at him, were, despite the hardness of her voice, even more beautiful, or perhaps beautiful for the first time.

Jay remained silent.

“I’m sorry,” said Isabel, “that wasn’t fair. There’s not much more.”

“How old was Rafael at the time?”

“Fifty. Around there.”

“And you were fourteen.”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“In the beginning, they used me as a reward, or to set men up—police chiefs, prosecutors, judges—so they could have protection for their activities. Sometimes they took pictures, to blackmail men into cooperating, or backing off. For ten years, I was their prize whore. I had to pretend it was fun. Sometimes it was, if I could get to know a man a little bit, but that was rare. I must have fucked a hundred men whose faces I can’t remember, whose touch repulsed me.”

Jay finished his drink and poured himself another. He had spent close to two hours that afternoon listening to conversations involving Powers, Herman Santaria, and occasionally Rafael de Leon, recorded surreptitiously by Powers between 1970 and 2004. The voices of the Mexicans—confident, mocking, contemptuous—were still echoing in his head.

“Last summer,” Isabel continued, “they sent me to the
States to work in their money laundering operation. The man that had been doing it previously had been stealing from them. The Ferias killed him. They showed me his head, which they were carrying around in a suitcase.”

“So you became the new courier.”

“Yes. And I seduced Bryce, which was Herman’s suggestion. He thought Bryce was stealing. He wanted me to confirm it, and to get close to him, to make it easy to kill him, if that became necessary.”

“But you fell in love with him.”

“Yes.”

“And you helped him steal, and were planning to run away when he was killed.”

“Yes.”

“Is that it?”

“No. There is one more thing.”

A wind had come up, which Jay hadn’t noticed until the sound of the house’s side door slamming shut startled them. Large drops of rain were beginning to fall on the awning above their heads, and on the flagstone floor of the veranda. Jay looked around. They would be dry for the time being.

“What is it?” he said.

“Bryce Powers was my father. Rafael is my grandfather.”

At first Jay was not sure he had heard right. Then he saw Isabel’s face, and he knew what the change he had puzzled over earlier was. She was a girl again, fourteen, confessing to sins she could hardly believe she had committed, stunned by their scope.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Isabel had leaned back in her chair, and was shaking her head, breathing softly, her eyes vacant. Jay poured her a drink, which she took from his hand, and sipped. The rain was beating down now, but they were oblivious.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“This house washed away,” Isabel said, “in the first year it was built. The local people rebuilt it for the Sisters. That was a hundred years ago.”

She looked around at the falling rain.

“I thought I would be a missionary, a teacher, a nurse . . . a wife, a mother . . . Until Herman took me away to a better life. My sin, I think, is that I convinced myself that it
was
a better life.”

“How could that be a sin?”

“I was proud, my heart was cold.”

Jay said nothing. He had indeed wanted to see Isabel suffer, but now, having gotten what he wanted, he was learning, perhaps for the first time in his life, how bitter was the taste of self-recrimination.

“Herman flew to Miami in August, last year,” Isabel continued. “He came to my apartment—Bryce’s condo. There was money missing, he said. Who was taking it? The local collectors? Me? Bryce Powers? He asked me if I was happy in my love affair with Bryce. He showed me my birth certificate, naming Christiana de Leon as the mother, and Bryce Powers as the father. He showed me the pictures of Bryce and Christiana. He pointed out how much I looked like my parents. He said that Bryce knew I was his daughter. He wanted me to set Bryce up to be killed, but first he wanted his money back. I was to convince Bryce to give it to me, or let me know where it was.”

“Maybe he was lying, trying to trick you with phony papers.”

“I have a birthmark on my right side, a light patch of skin in the shape of a crescent moon. Bryce had the same birthmark.”

The rain was coming through the battered awning in
spots, and the wind, stronger now, was driving it sideways at them. The two candles Jay had lit and placed on the coffee table were out. The storm had blotted out the moonlight. The darkness around them was complete. Jay poured them both more scotch, thanking God for Sam’s survival kit.

“
Did
Bryce know?” Isabel said. “I don’t think so,” she answered herself. “I met him in Aspen the following weekend and confronted him. He cried, and said he had no idea. I think his life was over then, and he knew it. When we were leaving, he said it would soon be time to use the stuff in the suitcase. He said if he called and said that his life was in danger, I should run, drop everything and run. A week later, he called, and I ran. And here I am.”

Here we both are, Jay thought. Out loud, he said, “Isabel.”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Forgive me.”

“Forgive
you
?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“For wanting to hurt you.”

“You are forgiven.”

“But who will forgive me?” Isabel said.

That question hung in the wet night air.

For an answer Jay knelt in front of Isabel’s chair and put his arms around her. He could feel her hot tears mingling with the cold raindrops on his neck and face. Fifteen years he had wasted in self-absorption and self-pity. Fifteen years.

Jay stood at the stone wall, looking down at the bay and the two small beaches that straddled the mouth of the Arroyo River. Local children were playing on one of them, while nearby a group of men were hauling in a net by a long rope that was the thickness of a man’s arm. The storm had thrashed itself out in the night, and in doing so washed away the torpid heat that had been pressing down on Mexico’s southeastern Pacific coast for the last week. The morning sun brought with it the promise of a hot but brilliantly clear day.

Up early, Jay had spent an hour drinking coffee and reading the last of Bryce Powers’s paperwork, which contained, among other things, notes of all of the bribes paid to de Leon in the seventies, and which meticulously tracked all of the drug cash that had passed through his company’s accounts over the past ten years. In addition, Powers had somehow managed to acquire copies of the contracts between Herman and Rafael and the various overseas banks, which named them, along with Lazaro Santaria, as the owners of the accounts where much of the cash ended up. If he had the contents of Bryce’s old leather suitcase, Chris Markey would not
need Isabel to put Herman, Rafael, and Lazaro in jail for many years.