The House of Wolfe (13 page)

“Unless they don't,” Charlie says. “Look, man, ease up on the fucking comfort campaign. I don't need it.”

Rigo gives him a narrow stare. “Fuck your comfort, Charlie. You wanna believe they're gonna do her, whoever they are, go ahead and believe it.
I
don't. Odds are they're not gonna hurt any of them. All I'm saying. Those are the
odds
.”

For a minute nobody says anything. Charlie stares out the window. Rigo makes a show of checking his watch, the overcast sky.

“Sorry, man,” Charlie says without looking at him.

“Skip it, cuz,” says Rigo.

We're in the central city now, in a six-lane river of nearly bumper-to-bumper traffic ranging from scads of limousines and luxury sedans to hordes of junkers trailing clouds of smoke. The Mexico City soundtrack, some call the steady blaring of car horns.

Rigo tells us his people have the groom's parents' house under surveillance from a house two blocks away. A three-story house whose top floor affords an excellent telescopic view of the Belmonte place. An associate of the Mexican Wolfes, a realtor dealing in exclusive homes, knows the owner of the house, who is vacationing in Hawaii. As a favor to the Wolfes, who told him they're doing it as a favor to a filmmaker friend of the family, the realtor was able to rent the property for two days and nights so the director could shoot a few scenes set on a sumptuous estate. A Jaguaro team went there with movie equipment and told the household staff they could take the next two days off and paid them all a sum equal to a week's wages.

We're headed for the offices of Jiménez y Asociados, a legal firm dealing mainly in customs and international trade contracts. It's only a few blocks from the Zócalo—the city's immense central plaza containing the major federal offices, the National Palace, and the Metropolitan Cathedral. Jiménez has got the top six floors of a twelve-story building whose owner of record is Grupo Azteca Mundial, SA, a Latin American conglomerate whose financial ties would be very difficult for anyone outside the firm to unravel. In fact, the conglomerate is headed by Plutarco Wolfe, Rigo's daddy, and the building belongs to the Wolfe family.

“The top floor is our operations center,” Rigo says. “It's got a suite, if you'd like to clean up, have a bite.”

“Rayo be there?” I ask.

“For sure. I figured you'd want to talk to her, since she's the one came up with the info. I've put her on this thing. Her first biggie.”

“She's a
Jaguaro
?”
I say.

He nods with a look of mock rue. “Insisted on a tryout. Wouldn't take no for an answer. Thing is, and just between us, she might actually work out.”

I grin back at him, not really that surprised by any of it.

Rigo clears his throat. “Look, guys, I know how you—”

Chuy hits the brakes and we all sling forward and hear the screech of tires behind us. A green-and-white microbus that cut in front of us from the lane to our right now cuts into the faster-moving lane on the left, squeezing in ahead of a braking taxi whose driver leans hard on his klaxon as if its squall means anything in the incessant cacophony. Then the traffic in that lane slows and we come abreast of the microbus. It looks like an oversized bread box, and I'd noticed a number of them since leaving the airport, all of them as packed with riders. Look like they can seat maybe two dozen and carry that many more standees holding to overhead rails. The driver of this one wears a red bandanna headband and looks to be in his twenties. He's obviously irked at his mistake in moving into a slowing lane and he's flicking glances at ours, looking for a break to slip back into it.

Chuy lays on his horn to attract the driver's notice and says, “Chinga tu madre,” enunciating slowly so the guy can read his lips.

The driver's eyes cut away from Chuy and go wide as he points ahead of us and mouths, Watch out!

Chuy taps his brakes as he whips his attention forward—and the microbus zips into the sudden gap in front of us.

The driver sticks his arm out and gives us the finger. Then he swerves ahead of a full-sized bus in the lane on the right, and the micro's gone.

Motherfucker, Chuy says under his breath, the deep darkness of his ears evincing his embarrassment at having been faked out.

Rigo tells us there are thousands of such micros plying the streets of Mexico City, the cheapest form of public transportation in the capital. A lot of people still call them peseros because for many years their fare was one peso. Only after they've earned a daily quota determined by the company do the drivers start to earn their own pay. It's a cutthroat competition, Rigo tells us, and hardly any wonder the drivers take such chances.

Charlie's staring out at the passing traffic, not really listening.

“Hey, cousin,” Rigo says, and Charlie turns to him.

“They didn't just take your niece,” Rigo says. “They didn't just take a
Texas
Wolfe. They took somebody from the
house
, man. Jessica's our blood, too, and we want to find her as much as you do, as fast as you do. I want to find her yesterday. But I don't know if it can happen before payoff time. All I can say is we'll probably hear something soon. We've got our spiders on this. Gave them the word without giving them specifics. They know how to do it, ask around without tipping anybody off. We don't want the perps getting wind of somebody maybe being on to them. We want them believing they're the smartest guys on the planet and this is the coolest snatch that ever was and nobody knows about it but them and the snatchees and the two sets of parents. The longer they believe that, the lower their guard and the better our chances of getting a fix on them.”

Charlie nods. Then goes back to staring out the window.

I understand why Rigo's so confident about getting a quick lead of some kind. Charlie's told me all about the “spiders” Rigo mentioned. They're the Jaguaros' information collectors. Every day, they range through an enormous web of sources that extends into every corner of the Federal District, sources from every social level—street rats, corporate staffers, shoeshine boys, political aides, cops, whores, bartenders, newspeople, you name it. The federals are wrong about the Jaguaros dealing only in guns. They also sell information. Almost exclusively to the cartels, who are always ready to pay for any report or rumor concerning anything that may affect them by way of the federal authorities and their American advisers, who are in this country in greater numbers than either the American or Mexican public knows. All the crime outfits have their own information sources, naturally, but, according to Charlie, they all know that none of them can match the network of Jaguaro connections in the capital.

The way Charlie explained it to me, the spiders are unknown to each other and don't even know who they're really working for. They relay their information to their district managers, who note its source and origin and get it keyed into computers, after which the data's encrypted and sent to one of the many depots, as the Jaguaros call them—computer dealerships and tech support shops they own all over the city under the names of dummy corporations. The depots recode the information and then transmit it to a so-called warehouse through a routing system so labyrinthine that not even the depot techies know where it ends up. According to Rigo, those warehouses are some of the research institutes the Mexican Wolfes have endowed, a research institute being a perfect cover for filtering, cataloging, and storing coded information in readiness for Jaguaro computers seeking specific kinds of data.

That information network is why we came with the hope of finding Jessie fast. If there's anything to be picked up out there that'll lead us to her, the Jaguaros will find it.

15

The first fat raindrops are spattering the windshield and there's a low roll of faraway thunder as we wheel into the building's garage and park in Rigo's reserved spot near the elevators. He uses an electronic key to activate an office elevator that takes us to the top floor.

In a spacious foyer appointed in colonial Spanish decor, a sleek young woman at the reception desk, her hair woven in a black braid extending to the small of her back, greets Rigo with warm informality. He introduces her as Ángela and she smiles and welcomes us to Jiménez y Asociados.

We go down a long hallway flanked by spacious offices and enter a storeroom whose walls are lined with ceiling-high shelves loaded with office supplies, then pass through another door and into a huge room spanning the width of the building but for one side that's lined with private offices and the suite Rigo had mentioned.

The remainder of the room is full of cubicles containing computer terminals. The screens flicker. Printers hum. Young men in shirtsleeves are moving from cubicle to cubicle, reading screens and talking with the casually dressed technicians at the terminals.

Rigo tells us the techs have put in a coded request to the storage institute's computers for all spider information gathered in the Federal District in the past three months that contains any reference, large or small, to kidnapping, as well as all information ranging from rumors to public records pertaining to Jaime Huerta or the Angeles de Guarda security company. The information has been coming in bits and pieces for the past three hours.

The techs scan it, Rigo says—speaking in Spanish for the first time since greeting us at the airport—and channel everything of related interest over to
those
computers.

He points to a table on the far side of the room where several men and one woman are seated at a long desk in front of a row of computers and focused on the monitors.

The woman looks up, and I see she's Rayo Luna.

She grins at me in recognition, then says something to a young guy standing nearby who takes her place at the terminal and she rushes over to us. She hugs me and kisses me on the cheek and then does the same to Charlie, saying how happy she is to see us.

Then her face gets serious, like she just remembered why we're here. We're going to find her, she says. “Ya lo veras.”

Charlie makes no response. I smile and resist the urge to run my hand through her pixie haircut. We've known her since her first visit to Brownsville back when she and Jessie were around sixteen and Jessie was still living with Harry Mack and Mrs. Smith. Like Jessie, she's a beaut—more of one, in my book, but then I've always preferred morenas, with their black hair and brown skin. She's also something of a free spirit and nobody's fool, I know that much, even though Jessie's always tended to monopolize her on her visits and the rest of us never have much chance to spend time with her. In one of the few private exchanges I've had with her, I remarked—God knows why—that it was interesting we were both orphans as a result of our parents having vanished in the Gulf. She'd given me a strange look and said yeah, that was real interesting, all right. Can be hard to read her sometimes. Not a man of us isn't impressed by the fact she's a stunt woman. I've seen her run partway up the trunk of a palm tree and flip backward off it and land on her feet as lightly as a bird. She was wearing a flared skirt when she did it, and the peek of her undies made the exhibition all the more memorable. Frank once observed that she's right out of Shakespeare. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” She's not really all that little, maybe five seven or eight, around Jessie's size, but she's definitely fierce. Jessie's told us about guys who were fools enough to cross her boundaries and suffered for it. The outfit she's wearing—a black T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans—holds to her so nicely it's an effort not to gawk. Plus she's got this full-lipped mouth you can't help but imagine yourself kissing . . . and yeah, yeah, yeah, she's my cousin and so what? That's never been an impediment to amorous liaisons in our family. The Mexican Wolfe patriarch, Juan Jaguaro himself, married his first cousin back when. Didn't raise more than one or two family eyebrows.

We're joined by a guy whose smile is a little awkward. Not in a way that suggests shyness but as if smiling is something he doesn't do very much. He and Charlie clutch in an abrazo and say it's good to see each other. Rigo introduces him to me as his younger brother, Mateo Genaro Wolfe. He's clean-shaven like I am, and built about the same. Quick-eyed. We embrace and smack each other on the back.

Though we haven't met before, I know a lot about him by way of Charlie. He's only a few years younger than Charlie and is in charge of a crew of guys called Los Chamacos—the Kids—who are the equivalent of us fixers, only there's more of them than us, Charlie told me. When the Jaguaros come up against a problem they can't settle in standard business fashion, they turn it over to Mateo and his Chamacos to right the matter. The word on him is that he's very damn good at his work—and capable of a fury belying his reserved manner. The family tales about him are legion, but the one that's always stuck with me is the one Charlie told about Mateo's first assignment as a Chamaco, when he was hardly more than an actual kid. He was sent to collect the outstanding difference, plus interest penalty, on an underpayment for an arms shipment. The debtor was the chief of a Toluca street gang and not much older than Mateo. When Mateo tracked him down at a plush house just outside of Toluca and told him to pay up, the kid told him to fuck himself and had four of his guys jump him. They gave him a pretty good going-over, breaking his nose and blacking his eyes, then stripped him of his gun and wallet and took him out in a car and dumped him on a four-lane highway full of midday traffic. The way Mateo told it to Charlie, he went bouncing over the pavement for what seemed like forever with tires screeching and cars swerving and whipping by him, and he was sure he was going to get splattered. When he stopped rolling he was just a few feet from the shoulder and still in one piece and he crawled to it as fast as he could as an 18-wheeler sped by within a foot of him, its blow-by knocking him rolling. It was God's almighty wonder he wasn't killed or didn't break anything more than the pinky of his left hand. His clothes were torn, his elbows and knees gashed, his head knotty with bloody bruises, and he was going to be sore from head to foot for a month. But he was intact and could walk. The only vehicle that pulled over to see about him was a large truck full of field workers. They gave him a ride into town and he practically had to force them to accept the money he pressed on them. He called the capital from a pay phone and waited on a park bench until a quartet of Jaguaros came for him and took him to a clinic where he was sewn up and bandaged and given injections. That evening, he and the four Jaguaros overpowered the outside guards at the gang chief's house and slipped inside and took care of another three guys without much fuss or noise. They searched the house as quiet as cats until they found the young boss in a bedroom, asleep with a girl on either side of him, everybody bare-assed. The kid woke to Mateo's pistol muzzle on his mouth. Surprise of the fucker's life, Mateo told Charlie. The kid was made to produce every last peso and dollar in the house, which amounted to twice as much as his debt to the Jaguaros. Mateo even got his gun and wallet back. He thanked the kid very much for his cooperation and then took him, still naked, down to his car and out on the same highway and had him kicked out of the speeding vehicle. There wasn't as much traffic at that late hour as earlier in the day, but the kid wasn't nearly as lucky as Mateo had been. In the brief moment before they lost sight of him, he was repeatedly struck and dragged and dispossessed of body parts. “You could say in complete truth,” Mateo had told Charlie in English, “that he paid more than an arm and a leg for his mistake.”