The Return: A Novel (29 page)

“What are you smiling about?” Skelly asked. “Did you piss yourself
again
?”

“No, and speaking about pissing myself, I was just thinking about how you dropped that Daisy Cutter on top of us.”

“Jesus! What the hell brought that to mind?”

“This last little escapade, I guess. That ride back to the base, the way the bird stank. I think half the people had messed their pants. It must’ve brought up my album of insane things Patrick Skelly has done to get out of situations he got himself into. A substantial volume, I might say.”

“It worked.”

“It always does,” said Marder. “And when it stops working, we’ll never know about it. This looks a little like south-central L.A.”

The exit had led onto Calzada Ermita Itzapalapa, the main drag of the eponymous district. The broad thoroughfare was jammed with traffic, consisting largely of the small jitney buses that poor Defeños depended upon to get around their sprawling city. Itzapalapa had been a colonial town and before that a space sacred to the Aztecs, but now it was just another swallowed area, with almost no water and more crime than any other part of the DF. Dwellings of various classes, from quite respectable homes to miserable tenements, were strung and scattered among shops and industrial sites, zoning having not been heard of in those parts, and as a result it was livelier and more democratic and filthier than an equivalent section of an American city.

Skelly pulled the car onto a narrow side street, bordered on one side by a factory yard protected by a high barbed-wire-topped cyclone fence and on the other by a row of miscellaneous dwellings, all with heavy barred gratings on their lower windows and doorways. At the end of the short street stood an incongruous clump of manzanita trees, in the shade of which a group of old people sat around on decrepit couches and lawn chairs. Skelly parked, opened the trunk, took out the nylon duffel bag with the money and gold in it, and said, “If I’m not out in three days, take the emeralds to Mombasa and sell them to Farouk.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, I know these guys. No problems with them at all. I’ve done good business with them before.”

“These are Mexicans?”

“Chinese. No, what you need to watch out for is that blue van. Move the car down to the corner—I don’t want us to get blocked in by some goddamn garbage truck or a delivery. I shouldn’t be more than half an hour.”

Skelly hoisted the bag and marched off across the street to a steel door on which painted letters announced
HERMANOS SING LLC
. He took a throwaway cell phone from his pocket, made a call. A minute later, the door swung open and Skelly disappeared.

Marder stared at the door for a moment, then moved to the driver’s seat and drove down to the avenue end of the block. He got out of the car to stretch and to study the little street. A food shop stood directly to his left, filling the air with the scent of spiced meat frying, and there was a small bodega in the middle of the block, to which the lounging
viejos
went often, returning with beers and snacks. A gang of thuggy-looking kids roared around the corner on motorbikes. They wore the outfits they’d seen in Chicano gangster films from
El Norte
: baggy pants hung absurdly low on their narrow hips, expensive athletic footwear, plaid shirts worn loose over wifebeater undershirts, hairnets on a few. They bought beers in the bodega and stood around pushing one another and trading clever remarks. Some of these were directed at the gringo
maricón,
and Marder supposed that after a while a bunch of them would come over and try to hustle him, take his money, steal his car. He took out his Kimber and jacked the action, casually, as if he were flipping a coin or lighting a cigarette, and replaced it in his shoulder holster. After that the thugs stopped looking at him.

A dusty maroon van with the logo of a roofing company pulled into the street and parked across from the steel door to Hermanos Sing LLC. Two men in coveralls got out, removed a ladder from the roof rack, and began to set out tools, buckets, and tarpaulins on the sidewalk. They both wore sunglasses, and both of them were good-sized fleshy men. Marder thought they did not look very much like typical wiry suntanned dusty Mexican working stiffs. But perhaps these were the supervisory roofers; perhaps the actual crew was coming in another van or on another day, or maybe these guys were the estimators. Marder thought you could go crazy thinking in this way; every single person on the street would be a threat, life would become intolerable.

He got back in the car and turned on the radio, punching the seek button until he had a station that played old-fashioned
ranchera
music. He sat there, foregetting the roofers and the gangsters and soaking up remembered
Mexicanismo
and his former life, sitting in the living room with Chole reading while Lola Beltrán or Rocío Dúrcal played softly in the background.

A motion in the corner of his eye; in the rearview he could see the steel door open, he could see Skelly step out and start to walk toward the car. Marder shifted over to the passenger seat and snapped in the safety belt.

One of the roofers picked up a tarp. The other roofer pulled some kind of tool from his pocket. It took Marder a moment to realize it was a pistol.

Marder pulled out his own pistol, threw open the door, and got hung up on the seat belt. As he struggled with the faulty release, the roofer with the pistol stood in front of Skelly with his back to Marder; the other guy was coming up behind Skelly, ready to throw his tarp over Skelly’s head and hustle him into the van’s conveniently wide-open sliding side door.

Marder had barely made it out of the car when he heard a bang and saw the head of the man with the pistol burst outward in a geyser of red. Skelly had spun around to face the other man and Marder saw a flash, heard another bang, and the man with the tarpaulin fell over. Skelly trotted down the street, got into the car, and drove off.

“How in hell did you manage that?” asked Marder, as they wove through the traffic on the
calzada
.

“I had this in my hand all the time,” Skelly replied, flipping a tiny pistol into Marder’s lap. It was still warm when he handled it.

“It fires a .410 shotgun shell. I raised my hands like I was surrendering and begged for my life, and then I shot the bastard in the face. And the other one too. It looks like they were pros and had a following car, or two.”

“But they saw you weren’t carrying the bag. Why did they want to snatch you?”

“I don’t think it had anything to do with the money. I think it was our friend Cuello.”

“You think? In the DF?”

“It’s a matter of a phone call. And it’s Itzapalapa—kidnapping’s a cottage industry around here. No, I don’t think it was a spontaneous thing. It was planned. They probably tailed us from the airport.”

“But why you? Why not me?”

“Oh, they probably figured I was the brains behind the operation. Or the muscle.” He gave Marder a grin. “Don’t feel bad, Marder. They’ll come after you next.”

12

Marder was waiting by the plane the next morning, nervous, constantly looking at his watch, imagining the worst, when Skelly drove up in the Jetta with Statch in the front seat, followed by a truck inscribed with the name of a meatpacking firm.

“I had to pick up a few items, chief,” said Skelly. “Statch put them on her card.”

“What items? Not the stuff you bought yesterday?” Marder looked at the truck, from which four men were unloading large cartons and wheeling them over to the yawning cargo bay of the King Air.

“No, no, all that has to come via shipping container. This is just some useful electronics.”

“He bought a cell-phone tower,” said Statch.

“And cell phones, lots of cell phones,” Skelly added. “Our little community is going to be wired to the nipples.”

“I don’t understand,” said Marder. “Is it legal to have your own cell-phone tower?”

“It’s legal-ish in a Mexican kind of way. Statch will explain the technical details. My God, is that our Lourdes?”

“Yes,” said Marder, looking over at the terminal building, from which the girl had emerged. “Or Lo, as we’re now supposed to call her. She’s had the whole works, courtesy of Señora Espinoza and my credit card.”

Via a little pink Bottega Veneta suit, Blahnik heeled sandals at a hundred dollars an ounce, plus a four-hundred-dollar haircut and a long evening of training in poise and makeup and other aspects of stardom, Lourdes Almones had transformed herself from a sulky provincial teenager into a reasonable simulacrum of a telenovela star. The effect was perfectly artificial to Marder’s eyes, and he was sensible of a certain Frankensteinian horror in his breast, but the girl was glowing with happiness and, starlike, she communicated this to nearly everyone in her immediate orbit.

“I’m in love,” said Skelly.

“She’s seventeen,” said Marder.

“We’ll grow old together,” said Skelly, approaching the girl with his arms thrown wide.

*   *   *

In the air again, Marder sat next to his daughter, whom he had seen but briefly since the previous evening. Neither she nor Skelly had been at the dinner to celebrate Lourdes’s triumphant interview with Marcial Jura.

“We missed you last night,” he said. “You ran off with Skelly.”

“Yeah, he wanted to pump my brain about cellular systems, and then we went to this guy he knew—”

“Yet another guy of Skelly’s innumerable guys. Did this one have a name?”

“Mr. Lopez. He was in the back room of a warehouse in Tepito with a lot of what looked like shady inventory.”

“Why did you go with Skelly anyway? I thought you were coming to Televisa with us.”

“I thought my expertise would be more useful with Skelly than in getting Lourdes ready. I figured Pepa had that down—I mean the makeup and the haircut and the clothes and all. It was a little rich for me—as you know, I’m a T and shorts kind of girl. How did she do, by the way?”

“Unexpectedly great. You know, you figure a Mexican telenovela guy, a big-shot producer, he’s got to be a fat lecher with a cigar and a mustache, Zero Mostel, but no. He looks like a ballet master, like Balanchine: black shirt, short hair, slight build, heavy round glasses. We walk in there—a regular office, big video monitors, small messy desk, with couches and a coffee table, nothing fancy—me and Pepa and the girl, and after the usual greeting and small talk he ignores us. He’s totally focused on Lourdes. They talked about telenovelas. He drew her out, what she liked, what she didn’t, the actors, the plots … I was amazed at how articulate the kid became when she was talking about something she loved. Ordinarily you can’t get a word out of her.”

“I know guys who’re like that with video games. It’s sort of pathetic.”

“Is it? I don’t know. Popular culture is hard to figure. Billions of people watch these things religiously—maybe literally religiously. I don’t think that it’s an accident that almost all telenovelas are produced by Catholic countries. Anyway, we had a screen test, we went to a studio, and he had Lourdes improvise in front of a camera—he would set up a situation and give her some lead-in lines. It was amazing. She just sort of occupied a classic character—the spurned lover, the defiant daughter. I’d never seen anything like it. Pepa was blown away.”

“Why was that?”

“Because she’d given me this line about how an
indio
like Lourdes would be abused, the whole casting-couch business and how she would never get real roles, only maids and servants, but apparently Jura’s moving in a new direction; he wants to develop some
indio
actors to become real stars. He thinks the market is ready for it. Girls first, of course.”

“Of course. Well, it’s not my thing, but I’m happy for her. Is she going to get a contract?”

“Apparently he wants her in some kind of training school for young actors they have in Defe. But there didn’t seem to be any doubt in his mind that she’d get a part when she graduated. I think she’ll do well. You saw her—blooming like a rose. I’m very pleased.”

His daughter made no response, and Marder had the thought that, though a T-shirt-and-shorts person, his daughter perhaps resented the attention he’d given to the lovely little stranger. “I’m sorry you weren’t there,” he added.

“Yes, well, as I said, it’s not my kind of thing. Anyway, I like hanging out with Skelly. He’s a laugh a minute.”

“Is he? The last time I was out with him it was only mildly amusing. He shot two men in the head.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was.” He briefly related what had gone down in Itzapalapa.

“Well,” she said, “it sounds like he didn’t have much of a choice.”

“Right, but, still, terminating two human lives should make a difference—I mean outside the heat of combat, when you really don’t know what you’re doing. And he was completely unaffected by it, smiling, joking, like it was crushing out a cigarette or an insect. I still can’t believe I shot a bunch of men the other day, and whenever I think about it I get a little nauseous. It’s not normal.”

“Maybe he’s used to it. Maybe he’s a famous international hit man.”

“There’s no such thing. As far as I’m aware, no heavily protected person has ever been killed by a professional assassin. There’s no money in it. If you want someone dead, you hire a couple of teenagers who don’t give a shit. No, I think he’s in the security business just like he says. I think he protects some fairly bad people, though, and hires mercenaries and like that. What I can’t quite figure out is why he hangs out with me. I mean, what’s in it for him?”

Girlish giggling and Skelly’s booming laugh sounded from the front of the plane.

“I’m going to kill him if he hits on that girl,” said Marder.

“I don’t see why you should care,” she said. “You’re not responsible for her, and from what I’ve seen she’s perfectly capable of looking out for herself, nor is she a blushing innocent. Really, Dad—it’s not like you’re her father. In fact, if he’s bonking her, everyone will stop thinking you’re bonking her.”

Marder looked at her, amazed. “Why would they think that?”