Dance with the Dragon (8 page)

The woman came with his beer. McGarvey thanked her, went back to the table, and sat down. Shahrzad was to be pitied. But she wore the diamond ring that Baranov had given her as a mark of accomplishment, not a brand of shame. And it was she who had sought out Louis Updegraf; it was she who had willingly agreed to be his whore and seduce General Liu. At least on the surface just about everything she’d told them so far seemed to be a lie. And yet there was something there, something in her eyes and in her mannerisms, that McGarvey couldn’t quite get a handle on.

“Tell me about your contact procedures with Updegraf,” McGarvey said. “You were dealing with a high-ranking ministry officer, so I assume you were told to be careful.”

“The general was the new generation. A real modern guy, according to Louis. So we were going to use
old-fashioned
tradecraft.”

McGarvey’s anger spiked. The girl knew the terminology. He had to wonder if it had been her father who’d taught her how to be a spy, or if it had been Updegraf. He could not fathom such men. Yet his own daughter had followed in his footsteps, though not at his urging.

“There was a telephone kiosk two blocks from my apartment in Zona Rosa that I had to pass by whenever I went to the market for groceries. Louis gave me two pieces of chalk, one white, one black. If I had something for him, I was to make a white mark, and he would meet me in the park across the street from my building. I sometimes went there to run.”

“The black was if you were in trouble,” McGarvey said.

She nodded. “If I used the black chalk I was to wait for him at the market and he would come for me right away.”

“Did you ever have to use the black chalk?”

“Once,” she said softly. “Everything was out of control by then. I mean totally out of control, and I was frightened. I wanted out.”

“Did he come for you?”

“No.”

“By then Louis was dead,” Perry said. “Shot to death.”

Shahrzad lowered her head, tears coming to her wide, dark eyes again. “I didn’t know yet. I thought he’d just abandoned me. I waited for three days and nights in a hotel, hoping that I was wrong about him and that he would come for me. But he never did. So I went to the U.S. embassy.”

Through all of her telling, including her tears, she had continued to wolf down her lunch as if it were her first meal in a week. As sad as the memory was of her assassinated lover, her appetite had not been affected. McGarvey didn’t know what it meant, except that perhaps there was something even worse she hadn’t come to yet.

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” McGarvey said. “Louis sets you up at the club where you catch General Liu’s eye. After the first week he invites you over to his table for some champagne, and finally he takes you to his bed.”

She put down her spoon and dabbed the cloth napkin to her lips, a sudden wild, even insane expression coming into her eyes, as if she’d just remembered something that was so surreal she didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

“It took ten days,” she began. “I did as Louis told me, and let the general seduce me. He would have expected the honey trap otherwise. I was supposed to play hard to get.” She shrugged. “And it worked. He was the perfect gentleman, at first.”

“Did he know who your father was?” McGarvey asked.

“There was no reason for him to know. But I tell you that I was plenty scared at first.”

“You did wind up in his bed after all,” Perry said.

Shahrzad looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Yes,” she said. “At first I just sat with him, drank champagne, and watched the shows. Then sometimes we would dance. And it was great, he really knew what he was doing.”

“Were the other women with him at the club?” McGarvey asked.

She nodded. “At first, but one night he came alone, and he never brought them back.”

“Did you ever see them again?” Perry asked. “Could you identify them?”

“Sure. They were part of his crowd at the house. And at the compound.”

“We’ll get to that,” McGarvey said. “You had sex with the general. Was it at the club? Did he pay you?”

“We went to one of the rooms in back and I danced for him. This time he asked me to do the
raqs sharqi.”

“That’s the traditional belly dance,” Perry interrupted unnecessarily.

McGarvey let it go.

Shahrzad nodded. “When I was finished he took my costume off and laid me down on the cushions.” She was looking inward, the almost maniacal expression on her face again. “It was hot in that place, but I was shivering. I didn’t know what to expect.”

“Oh I think you did—” Perry said, but this time McGarvey cut him off.

“Shut up.”

Perry was startled, but he held his silence.

“He got undressed then, and I almost laughed at him.” Shahrzad was blushing. “He wasn’t a man … down there. He was just a boy. He couldn’t get it up, and I didn’t know what to do.” She looked up at McGarvey, willing him to understand her predicament. “He had seen me completely naked onstage before, I had just done
the dance,
and I was lying on the cushions waiting for him.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Continue.”

“That was all,” she said.

“You didn’t have sex with him?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean?” Perry blurted.

Shahrzad turned to him, acutely embarrassed that she needed to practically draw him a picture. “He lay on top of me, did a couple of bumps, and came on my thigh.”

Perry looked away, embarrassed. “Oh,” he said in a small voice.

“What was Liu’s attitude afterward?” McGarvey asked. “Was he embarrassed?”

“That was the scary part,” Shahrzad said. “He was mad as hell for a couple of minutes, maybe less. I don’t know for sure. But I do know that I thought he was going to kill me.”

“Did he hit you?” McGarvey said.

“No. In fact when he calmed down he made some little jokes while I was cleaning up and getting dressed. And before I left he gave me five hundred dollars, which he said I could keep for myself, he would take care of the Doll. And he said that he was busy tomorrow, but that he would see me on Friday.”

“The next day you went to the market, left a white chalk mark by the telephone, and met Louis in the park,” McGarvey said. “Did you tell him about the money?”

“That wasn’t important—”

“It must have given you some satisfaction,” Perry suggested. “Here it was, two men paying you, with one of them promising to get you to the States. You were on the fast track to get everything you’d wanted.”

“The general was crazy in the head. Some of the other girls heard there were rumors that he’d killed a girl in New York. He liked to strangle them during sex. They were only rumors, Louis told me, but I was just about out of my mind. I wanted to quit. All the money in the world wasn’t worth the risk I was taking.”

“But you went back,” McGarvey said.

“You don’t understand what it’s like to be in love,” Shahrzad said, her voice rising. “Of course I went back, and about a week and a half later the general invited me to move out to his house, and Louis agreed.”

“Let me explain about General Liu’s house,” Perry cut in. “It’s really a palace with its own lake and floating gardens down in Xochimilco, about fifteen miles south of the city. Apparently he holds big parties for all the heavy hitters, most of them high-ranking Mexican politicians and military officers.”

“Were reports made to Langley?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, finally,” Perry said. “As soon as Ms. Shadmand walked in and gave us a few bits and pieces that we could verify. I sent two of my best people out there on a surveillance operation and we hit pay dirt the very first night.”

“That was just a few days ago?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Perry admitted.

“Nobody down here was given the heads-up,” Rencke said. “It was Dick’s call. He wanted a little more information before we mounted any sort of an operation.”

Perry perked up. “Here, what are you talking about?” he demanded. “Heads-up about what? Were you aware of General Liu’s presence in Mexico City?”

“We caught him in a couple of satellite shots,” Rencke said.

“Why wasn’t I informed?”

“We’ll discuss it later,” McGarvey promised.

Perry wanted to say something, but he thought better of it, and slumped back.

“Roaz was out there most of the time,” Shahrzad said. “Sometimes before things heated up downtown, everyone would come down to the general’s house and we’d all go to the club together. And almost every night, after the clubs closed, there’d be a crowd until dawn. There were a lot of drugs that Roaz was supplying. And everything was free.”

“But there was a price,” McGarvey suggested. “For you especially.”

“Isn’t there always?” she asked.

THIRTEEN

LONGBOAT KEY

A couple of Roaz’s people from the club helped load up Shahrzad’s apartment and take it down to “the House,” as everyone called General Liu’s place. She didn’t have much, but as soon as she was settled, the general insisted that she return to her dancing job. There was a very good reason, he told her. All she had to do was trust him, and whatever she wanted would be hers.

“Which was just as well,” Shahrzad continued her story. “Louis had been worried about our contact procedures, but with me in town four nights a week he arranged for a drop box with one of the taxi men.”

“Not cabbies,” Perry explained. “Parking is impossible downtown. So a taxi man, actually they’re entrepreneurs, stakes out a half dozen parking spots on the street that he mans twelve, sometimes eighteen hours a day. No one parks without paying him first, unless you want to come back and find that your car has been totally trashed, and there were no witnesses. Everybody’s happy. Customers find a safe place to park, the taxi men make a living, and the bribes help the cops to survive on lousy pay.”

“It took nearly a week before I could make an excuse to get out of the club for a couple of minutes,” Shahrzad said. “I was smoking pretty heavily by then, so sometimes I would got out the back door and grab some air. Roaz didn’t care, and there were some nights that the general sent his driver to take me to the club early, and he wouldn’t get there with his crowd until much later, usually after midnight.

“My contact was an old man with long white hair and only one good eye; the other was milky and horrible looking. Anyway, he walked up to me and handed me a pack of Marlboros and a small gold Zippo lighter. ‘From an admirer,’ he told me. I gave him a few pesos, and back in my dressing room I found out that the lighter worked, but it was also a miniature digital camera. Before I’d moved out, Louis had told me that once I was in at the house he would get the camera to me. I was supposed to take pictures of everything and everybody. The camera could hold up to one hundred pictures, but no matter how many I had taken I was to exchange it every Wednesday and Saturday with the taxi man for a fresh one.”

“Weren’t you worried about getting caught?” Perry asked.

“Petrified,” Shahrzad admitted. “But every time I lit a cigarette I’d use the Zippo and take a couple pictures. After the first few times right in front of the general when nothing happened, I relaxed a little.” She gave McGarvey a wistful look. “By then I don’t think he was really seeing me. We had sex only the one time, and after that I was just another one of the women he always surrounded himself with.”

“But you were doing this for Louis, so you didn’t mind,” McGarvey suggested.

“Exactly,” she said. “Anyway, I was afraid of the general.” She looked away. “Sooner or later everybody became afraid of him.”

“Was Louis happy with your snapshots?”

She smiled. “After the first week he was over the moon.”

“How in heaven’s name could you possibly know that?” Perry asked. “You didn’t pass love notes via your taxi man, did you?”

“One night Louis was in one of the parking places. We kissed through the open window and he told me that I was doing fabulous work. ‘Won’t be long now and we’ll be able to write our own ticket,’ he said. His own words. I was to keep taking pictures, but now he wanted me to find the general’s desk and his computer and take pictures of whatever I could. It was going to be a lot riskier, he said, but rock-solid necessary.”

“Well, if he was getting such
rock-solid
product he wasn’t sharing it with me,” Perry complained bitterly. “This is the first that I’ve heard about any of this.”

“He kept repeating that this was going to be the big score,” Shahrzad said. “But I told him that I was scared out of my skull. He looked into my eyes and promised that when it was over, not only was he going to get me up to the States, but he was going to divorce his wife and we would be together.”

Perry started to snicker, but Shahrzad turned on him.

“You don’t understand how it was with us. I believed him. I believed
in
him.”

“We understand,” Rencke assured her. “Ya know we’re just trying to do our jobs here. We want to find out why your Louis was killed. Maybe we can figure out what went wrong, what Liu’s been up to. Maybe stop this from happening to someone else.”

Shahrzad closed her eyes for a few moments, as if she were collecting her thoughts. “A couple weeks after I moved down to the House, the parties started in earnest. Every weekend there’d be a huge crowd out there, live music, every kind of food and booze you could imagine. Champagne, oysters, and truffles flown over from France, caviar from my country, lobsters from Maine, you name it, and of course Roaz with his stash. They were called ‘hospitality bowls,’ and they were filled with coke. Practically everywhere you looked someone was dipping into one of them.”

“You too?” McGarvey asked.

“It would have looked pretty odd if I hadn’t,” she said.

“This also is news to me,” Perry said petulantly. “Did you know these people? Can you identify them for us?”

“I knew some of them from the newspapers. Senator Trinidad Lopez showed up at least once a week, usually with Carlos Huerta, whom I was told was assistant chief of police for Mexico City.”

“Jesus,” Perry said softly. “Were you able to take pictures of them?”