The Return: A Novel (35 page)

“We know who you are, Señor,” said Gil, glancing without much interest at the passport. “Perhaps you can explain what happened here, how the young man came to be shot.”

Then Marder told his convenient lie to a pair of blank faces. They asked no questions, nor did they seem interested in talking to anyone else. Marder thought this was a bad sign. When Marder had finished, Gil said, “This is a serious crime—you’ll have to come with us.”

“Can’t it wait until morning? I own this property. Do you think I’m going to flee because I shot a trespasser who was trying to kill one of my servants?”

“Your girlfriend,” said Varela, and the two of them moved closer.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” said Marder, but they had already grabbed his arms, cuffed his wrists, and forced him into the back of their SUV.

14

For as long as Marder could recall, his singular horror was being tied up, confined, or physically helpless. When he was a small boy, a pair of older cousins—sadists in the usual way of older cousins—liked to play cowboys and Indians with him, the climax of this game being little Rick bound and gagged in a dark closet in the basement of their Brooklyn home. He would become hysterical and wet himself when they did this, which only added to the fun. During his time in Vietnam, Marder’s chief fear was not death or maiming but being captured by the enemy, trussed up, stuck in a tiny cage. He’d resolved that he’d never surrender, he’d fight to the death. This resolve had been tested back then: after what happened in Moon River, Marder had not, in fact, surrendered.

Now, handcuffed in the back of a car, in the custody of men who, if not actual sadists, certainly meant him no good, Marder felt the beginnings of that hysteria pluck at his vitals. He took deep breaths and wished he had paid attention to the YouTube clips on how to escape from handcuffs in fifteen seconds.

Quite aside from this particular neurosis, Marder was conscious of something wrong about the current situation. He had never been arrested before, but, like every American, he’d seen fictional representations of thousands of arrests, and he’d edited several true-crime books, and these officers were not acting like any officers he’d ever learned about, fictional or real. Perhaps they weren’t officers at all. He braked this morbid speculation with a conscious effort. There was something wrong, but it was more complicated than a simple assassination. What, for example, were the federal drug police doing investigating a crime of passion? And if they were corrupt, why hadn’t they suggested a bribe?

The car drove along for what seemed like hours to Marder, but he knew that was an illusion. The windows had been darkened so heavily that he could not see where they were headed, but the sounds that penetrated had changed from rural to urban. They must be somewhere in Cárdenas. The car slowed, turned sharply, and halted.

Gil opened the door and pulled Marder out. They were in what appeared to be a parking space under a building. Marder did not ask where they were or what was happening, because he knew they wouldn’t answer and that he would lose dignity by being ignored. The two
federales
(if they were) led him up a few steps onto a landing, through an unmarked steel door, then up two flights of concrete steps and through a glass door marked “213.” The light in the office was bright enough to make Marder squint, and it was uninhabited by office workers or policemen so far as he could observe. They frisked him efficiently, removing his cell phone and wallet and popping both into a plastic bag. He was relieved to see them do this, because if they had pulled the cash and dumped the rest, it would have been a different kind of Mexican arrest and not good news. Then they placed him in a small room containing the canonical table and three chairs and left him alone there, sitting in the chair with the wall at his back, still with his hands cuffed behind him.

The room was small, stuffy, and windowless, but it did not look like an official interrogation venue. For one thing, it lacked the expected and useful one-way mirror. Also, neither the chairs nor the table were fixed to the floor. Time passed, and after a while Marder allowed himself to be amused. Mr. Thing had rendered him helpless, and he had thrust himself into a life-changing action to regain control; now here he was helpless again. In any case, he was not particularly fearful, and the experience seemed to have finally scotched his childhood trauma. Rudy and Stan were the cousins, and he recalled the schadenfreude he had felt on learning their adult fate, which in both cases consisted of dull and unremunerative jobs in the nearer suburbs of New York. He still got an annual Christmas card from Stan, picturing him smiling stiffly out of his fat, together with a hefty wife and a number of unusually unattractive children. Marder had run into Rudy on the street in the city about fifteen years ago; Rudy had been effusive, wanted to go for drinks, renew the family connection and so on, but Marder had begged off, hoping he had kept the disgust from his face.

As Marder drifted throught this litter-and-graffiti section of memory lane, a man with the soft, pleasant, and neutral face of a suburban pedophile walked through the door and sat down at the table opposite, followed by Varela, who closed the door behind him and took up a position against the wall just out of Marder’s sight. The man opened a folder and read it for a minute, turning pages in silence. Then he looked up at Marder and said, “Well, Richard—or do you prefer Dick? Ricky?” He was speaking English, with a flat midwestern accent.

“I prefer Mr. Marder. Who are you?”

The man shifted his gaze to a point behind Marder, and Varela hit Marder behind the ear with something solid enough to rock his head and make his ear ring but not hard enough to knock him off his chair or, apparently, to wake Mr. Thing up from his slumber.

“That’s what happens when you ask questions, Ricky. You need to let me ask the questions. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then. First question: What are you doing in Mexico?”

“I’m a retiree. I was a book editor in New York, and I used my savings to buy a house and some land in Playa Diamante as a retirement home.”

Varela hit him again. It was not a devastating blow but nicely gauged to be painful and humiliating, and Marder understood that the man was prepared to keep it up all night. After a while, as with the boxers and football players you heard about, there might be some brain damage. In his own case, there was probably less “might” involved.

Marder said, “I think you should know that one reason I moved here is that I was recently diagnosed with an inoperable brain aneurysm. If your man keeps slugging me like that, it’s going to pop and I’ll die. You may not care about that, but there are people who will, including Pepa Espinoza. She might wonder why an offfical of—I’m guessing here—the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was presiding over the torture of an American citizen that resulted in his death.”

The man’s glance flipped up past Marder’s head and he must have received a signal from Varela, because he smiled again and said, “No one is torturing anyone. You haven’t got a mark on you. Let’s go on. Maybe you can tell me why a retiree would go into business with Servando Gomez, a known drug trafficker.”

“I’m not in business with Servando Gomez. It’s a protection racket. He’s shaking me down for five grand a month. I thought it was worth it because the previous owner was murdered.”

“Really? Then why haven’t you gone to the police?”

“That’s an excellent idea,” said Marder, and twisting his neck around, added, “Señor Varela, I am being extorted by the criminal Servando Gomez. Please make him stop.”

Varela hit him again, but not quite as hard.

“Nobody likes a wiseass, Ricky. So you’re a poor extorted retiree. Who just happened to bring a heavily armed gunslinger with him. Why don’t you tell me a little about Patrick Skelly.”

“He’s a friend of mine. He’s in the security business, and when he heard I was coming to Michoacán, he insisted on coming with me to provide security.”

“A security consultant, eh? That’s a job description that covers a multitude of sins. Who’re his other clients?”

“I have no idea. We don’t discuss his other business. In fact, I believe confidentiality is an important consideration in that field.”

“Even extending to entering Mexico under false pretenses?”

Marder said nothing to that, and after a pause, the man continued. “And I’m sure you don’t know that Patrick Skelly, under several aliases, has been deeply involved with the Khun Sa cartel in Asia and with gunrunning out of China. He deals with terrorists and drug smugglers and human traffickers, the worst of the worst. It surprises me that you should have a friend like that. Book editors don’t usually have international criminals as pals.”

“We were in the Vietnam War together. He saved my life.”

Marder had noticed this before, what happened when he mentioned that he’d been in combat in Vietnam to American men who hadn’t been there and were trying to act tough. A small deflation appeared in their faces, certainly involuntary. And, as now, they acted even tougher in compensation.

“Okay, Ricky, let me tell you what’s really going on. Your pal is setting up an operation here, maybe for some U.S. outfit, maybe for the Asians. The situation with the cartels is fluid, and this section of the coast is up for grabs. He’s using you as cover, you and your retirement and this stupid crafts bullshit you’re involved in. Crafts my ass! He’s training a private army to defend his drug operation, and I’ll bet my next three paychecks he’s got some kind of arms delivery on the way. Now, I don’t know how you feature in his plans, and I don’t care, but let me say this, and you can take it to the bank. From now on we are going to be all
over
your case. We are going to know who you meet and what comes in and out of that place. We’re going to be closer to you than that little
chica
you’re fucking, and you’re not going to get rid of us like you got rid of the bitch’s ex tonight. You’re dirty, Ricky, and I’m going to bring you down. You’re going to spend your retirement in a super-max cell with the other wiseguys.” He tore a piece of paper from his notebook, wrote on it, and stuck it in Marder’s shirt pocket. “There’s my direct number. If you ever want to stop your bullshit and stay out of jail, you’ll give me a ring.” He picked up his folder, said, “Hasta la vista, asshole,” and walked out.

Varela bent over and unlocked the handcuffs. He went over to the door and held it open and Marder walked through. Down the lit hallway again, Varela leading. He stopped at an unmarked door, knocked.

Gil opened it and they exchanged some words, speaking too softly for Marder to understand. Then Gil left the doorway, and for a moment Marder could see that he was not alone in the room. There was a young man in there, wearing a silky pale-tan suit over a white turtleneck with a gold-chain pendant. It was a memorable face, and Marder had seen it before: through the excellent optics of his rifle scope. It was the face of the man who had run out of one of the cars that Skelly had disabled when La Familia had attacked the house, the man who seemed to be in charge.

Gil returned and handed Marder the plastic bag with his wallet and cell phone. When Marder opened it, a burned smell floated free. He looked at the cell phone, sniffed it. He imagined that someone had popped it into a microwave for thirty seconds, turning it into a desk ornament.

Varela said, “You’re free to go.”

“How am I supposed to get back home?”

The policeman shrugged. “You could call a cab. Use your cell phone.”

“It’s dead.”

“Find a pay phone, then. There’s one at the end of the street. Just get out of here.” He made a shooing motion with his hand.

Marder left the office and walked down the concrete steps until he reached the small landing that led to the parking area. He switched the landing light off, opened the steel door a crack, crouched down, and peered out. The vehicle he had arrived in was still parked there. He dropped to the floor, shoved the door outward very slowly, just enough to pass his body through, and closed it as silently as he could. The click it made as the latch engaged sounded like a gunshot as he low-crawled down from the little platform in front of the door and squatted in its shadow, sheltered by the bulk of the SUV.

He chanced a look around the curve of its front fender. There were two cars parked at the curb, a dark van and a large sedan of some kind. They should have been illuminated by a nearby streetlamp, but the bulb had conveniently gone out. All he could see from his present location was the red spark of the cigarette being smoked by someone leaning against the side of the van. The plan was obviously to snatch him as he walked unwarily out of the building to look for the supposed pay phone, as he would certainly have done had he not spotted the La Familia honcho in the office with Gil.

Marder received something of an illumination at this point. He thought he had come to terms with death, or at least with Mr. Thing, but he now found that he really, really did not want to be dismembered alive by the butchers of La Familia and his torso left in the plaza with an illiterate scrawl as his epitaph. It offended his editorial taste, for one thing, and he thought it would hurt his daughter and the community that had formed around Casa Feliz. I have a reason to live, he thought, surprising himself, or at least a reason to avoid dying in that particular way, which at present amounted to the same thing.

He heard scuffling sounds and a quick curse, and then the door behind him opened and a man came through. He must have stumbled on the darkened landing; Marder could not see who it was, but it had to be the man who’d been with Gil. He must be coming out all confident that Marder had already been grabbed and packaged by the men lying in wait over by the van. Marder watched him disappear into the dark and then heard someone being yelled at.

Marder made his move, hoping that the current distraction would cover any noise. Bent over low, he slid along the wall of the building until he reached its end. To his left was a blind alley that led to what appeared to be a delivery entrance; to his right was the street, the only way to go. If he was lucky, they wouldn’t be looking his way. The cars were pointed in the other direction, and to pursue him with the vehicles they would have to back and fill a couple of times on the narrow street. If he could cross unobserved, he could hide in the shadows of the buildings opposite and cut right down the first side street he came to. Then eventually he might come across a non-imaginary pay phone or a twenty-four-hour business.