Triple Crossing (21 page)

“What’s up?” Méndez asked Athos, who deferred with a raise of his goateed chin to the Secretary’s assistant.

Gregorio spoke in a breathy Mexico City accent full of rising
o
’s and
a
’s. “Mr. Secretary, I’m sorry but this is really peculiar. While you were upstairs, an individual who works for Senator Ruiz
Caballero presented himself. He said the Senator happened to be at the airport and heard you were here. He said the Senator
apologizes for the imposition, but he would appreciate it if you could make time for him to invite you to lunch.”

“He happened to be at the airport?” Méndez asked Athos, who had a battle gleam in his eye.

Athos’s airport sources had told him the Senator and his nephew had showed up earlier in the morning to fly to Nevada in their
private jet.

“Then they delayed the departure,” Athos said. “This monkey, eh, their people started nosing around asking when the Secretary
was expected. The Senator has been sitting in the VIP lounge waiting for you to finish. Junior drove off somewhere.”

“What do I tell the man, sir?” Gregorio asked anxiously.

The Secretary lit a cigarette with studied nonchalance. He glanced at Méndez, who shrugged. There was no doubt that the Ruiz
Caballeros knew the Secretary was meeting with Méndez. It was a typically brazen gambit. Méndez remembered what Araceli had
said the night before: The enemy weren’t taking him for granted. They were worried.

“Tell him…” The Secretary took a drag on the cigarette. “Tell him I don’t have time for lunch. I’m hurrying back to the D.F.
But with great pleasure I can say hello to the Senator on the way to my plane. If he’d like.”

Gregorio dispatched an emissary. The Secretary blew a stream of smoke from his nostrils. Méndez decided that he looked pretty
tough for a bookworm in a fancy suit from the Distrito Federal (Mexico City).

“You will accompany me to the plane,” the Secretary told Méndez.

“Very well.” Méndez wished he weren’t so grubby.

“If I say no outright, it might look like we are hiding,” the Secretary said, eyes narrow against the smoke. “Moreover, I’ve
known the Senator, on the inevitable level of government affairs, for twenty-five years. Your presence sets the right tone.”

“I leave the political nuances to you, sir,” Méndez said. He thought he detected a smile on the corners of the bloodless lips.
This wily old bastard is enjoying himself, he thought.

“Shall we, fellows?” the Secretary said.

Men in suits picked up briefcases and radios. The Secretary dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. He frowned at Athos.

“Is it necessary for the commander to carry that elephant slayer?”

Athos looked chagrined, cradling the AK-47 protectively.

“You know something, sir?” Méndez said, giving the Secretary an unintentionally broad smile. “Usually I’d be the first to
agree. But right now, I think it helps set the tone, as you put it.”

“Very well. The gangster semiotics I leave to you.”

The sun fell hard on the tarmac. The Secretary’s jet, guarded by uniformed officers of the Diogenes Group and the federal
police, was half a soccer field away from the hangar. The Ruiz Caballeros’ Learjet was to the right of the Secretary’s plane.
Beyond the planes was the fence separating the airport from the border highway and the border fence.

The group strode across the tarmac: Méndez and the Secretary accompanied by Athos, Gregorio on their heels, and a loose diamond
of bodyguards and aides around them.

Two GMC Yukons parked near the terminal came to life and glided forward. They stopped about halfway between the two planes.
Two men got out of the lead vehicle and approached briskly.

Méndez had interviewed Senator Bernardo Ruiz Caballero
several times, but he had not seen him up close for years. The Senator was in his early sixties, his face froglike and dissipated
beneath shiny, well-coiffed white hair. He looked chesty in a black linen suit with an open collar that revealed gold chains
and medallions. He walked with a horseman’s roll, elbows wide. The heels of his black boots banged the tarmac.

Méndez recognized the other man, a portly sweating flunky in a
guayabera
shirt, as the Senator’s administrative assistant.

“My dear Luis,” the Senator said. It was the first time Méndez had heard anyone call the Secretary by his first name. It reminded
Méndez that, though Senator Ruiz Caballero might come off as a crude clown, he had converted provincial power into exponentially
greater national power without losing his provincial ways. He was one of the select old hands who controlled their political
party’s ancient and arcane machinery.

Méndez watched in alarm as the Senator opened his arms for a hug. The Secretary thwarted him adroitly; he transformed the
greeting into a handshake in which their free hands patted each other’s biceps.

Disconcerted, the Senator regained composure with a volley of words. His voice was croaky and weathered by tobacco and alcohol.
“You must come to Baja more often, my friend. I was set to invite you to lunch, I dropped everything and made reservations.
Let me know next time and we’ll go to Las Leñas. We haven’t been there in years, eh?”

Senator Ruiz Caballero spent a lot of time under sunlamps. His skin was overcooked, wrinkled, mottled under the eyes with
deep horizontal dents in the forehead. He chewed a mint, his teeth gleaming white in all that brown.

“Senator, what a pleasure, I’m sorry I’m in such a rush,” the Secretary said mildly, his body turned as if he would resume
stride at any moment.

Then he paused, as if he had remembered something. He clapped Méndez on the shoulder.

“You know Licenciado Méndez of the Diogenes Group, don’t you, Senator?” the Secretary said heartily. “One of the finest public
servants in one of the finest police agencies in the country.”

The Secretary was laying it on thick. Senator Ruiz Caballero looked at Méndez reluctantly. His mouth twisted and the loose
folds of skin on his throat quivered, as if he were barely able to control his revulsion. Méndez shook the plump, ring-filled
hand as briefly and unenthusiastically as possible. The flinty eyes skittered over Méndez and quickly back to the Secretary.
Senator Ruiz Caballero told the Secretary again how good it was to see him. The Senator was on his way to Las Vegas to watch
a rookie boxer from his nephew’s stable. But he would return to Mexico City in two days and wanted urgently to get together.

Three more vehicles approached from the terminal at high speed: a convertible Mercedes with the top down, trailed by a chrome-studded
Buick Regal and a red Suburban. The trailing vehicles were full of men. Funk music boomed out of the Mercedes, organ and bass
arpeggios, raucous voices. Three women sat in the backseat of the convertible, clouds of hair streaming. The vehicles skidded
to a stop near the Ruiz Caballero jet.

Athos took two steps to position himself between Méndez and the vehicles.

“There’s the young man,” Senator Ruiz Caballero declared. “Always rushing. Junior! Come here a moment.”

Junior Ruiz Caballero was in no rush. Nor was he listening. He emerged in stages from the passenger door on the far side of
the Mercedes. The wind ruffled his hair, which had grown long. He took a couple of somnolent, stiff-shouldered steps toward
the Regal, elaborately ignoring the little crowd around the Secretary and the Senator a hundred feet away. Junior had been
doing some sunlamp time of his own. He wore a blue T-shirt with short sleeves exposing broad fleshy arms. His jeans were low-slung
and oversized in
cholo
fashion.

He looks like a wannabe gangster, Méndez thought. Except
that a wannabe with a billion dollars and a vicious disposition becomes the real thing.

“Over here for a moment, Junior,” his uncle called uneasily across the tarmac. “Look who’s here.”

Junior paid no heed. He was talking to a mustachioed man who had gotten out of the Regal, the only other passenger in the
caravan to get out. The second man was a behemoth in black. He looked lethal, his bearing almost military. Méndez recognized
him from a photo and remembered the street name: Buffalo. The heavy hitter from Los Angeles, the chief of Junior’s imported
pocho
triggermen.

The Secretary took it in impassively. There they are, Méndez wanted to say. The enemy. Look at what we are up against. You
better crush them before they crush us.

Junior rested a hand on Buffalo’s ridge of a shoulder, their heads ducked close together as they talked. Junior sneered, obviously
enjoying this bit of theater.

“Junior, please,” Senator Ruiz Caballero rasped. Méndez could not tell if he was truly embarrassed or just playing his role
in a scene for the Secretary’s benefit. “Come say hello to the Secretary… And the Licenciado.”

The shaggy head turned toward them. Buffalo looked over as well. Junior made a derisive, incredulous face. He said something
unintelligible. Buffalo smiled.

Junior Ruiz Caballero raised a fist and, by way of a sardonic greeting, pumped it in their general direction. He looked directly
at Méndez.

Méndez returned the stare with a tunnel vision that blotted out everything else. Despite the presence of Athos, the bodyguards,
his own officers, he felt utterly alone. Sweating, haggard, unsteady on his feet, he returned that stare for all he was worth.

Junior’s pudgy features grew bored again. He gave Buffalo a quick hug and walked toward his plane. Young drivers unloaded
luggage, but the other passengers remained in the vehicles.

“That boy.” Senator Ruiz Caballero got throaty with facile emotion. “But who can blame him? After what he’s been through.
All the ghosts, all the crosses this family has had to bear.”

The Secretary made a sound that might have been sympathetic. He had clearly had his fill of Tijuana fauna in the sun.

“Very well, Senator, what a pleasure to have seen you if only for a moment,” he began.

But now Senator Ruiz Caballero and every other male on the tarmac were watching the second act. A driver held open the rear
doors of the Mercedes. The women who got out were instantly recognizable: three members of Las Chicas Ringside from Multiglobo
Arena, fixtures in Junior’s entourage. During boxing matches, their job consisted of strutting around the ring in bathing
suits holding up signs that indicated the number of the next round. One was Latina, one was black, one was Anglo. They had
big hair, big sunglasses, big bodies fortified by silicone and aerobics and encased in leather and Spandex, straps and buckles.
Amazon caricatures on towering heels. Eminently aware of their audience, heads high and shoulders back, the women strode to
the plane.

“Híjole.”
The Senator leered, his teeth crunching the mint. “If I had known those three were coming along, I would have brought my
mountain boots.”

“We are leaving,” the Secretary said.

Amalia Aguirre, age three, was getting sleepy. She climbed around in Méndez’s lap making herself comfortable. She put her
round face close to his, her ringlets pulled back by a barrette. She clenched his cheeks in her hands and said, “Chubby-chubby.
Chubby-chubby.”

“Amalita, please, careful with Leo’s face,” Araceli Aguirre said, putting two glasses of orange-papaya juice on the white
patio table. Watching her daughter curl up in Méndez’s arms,
she said: “My love, why don’t you go inside and lie down? Tell Papa to tuck you in.”

“It’s alright,” Méndez said. “Let her be.”

He shifted the girl gently to his left shoulder and drank juice. Amalia was so much lighter than his son, who was five. When
they were preparing for his son’s birth, Méndez and his wife had bought a stack of parenting books at a café-bookstore in
San Diego where they liked to spend weekend mornings. The books had been moderately helpful and written in a strangely robotic
tone. Any Mexican parent could tell you how important it was to shower a child with hugs and kisses—without citing academic
studies showing the negative impact of insufficient affection later in life. Patting Amalia’s back, Méndez thought that someone
should do a reverse study to measure the negative impact on fathers deprived of contact with their children.

“So it was a grotesque episode,” Aguirre said.

“Absolutely. Psychological warfare à la Ruiz Caballero. The Secretary held his own. He treated the Senator like a shoeshine
boy.”

“And that gave you a good feeling about the Secretary,” Araceli said bleakly. “You are convinced that he’s totally behind
you.”

Méndez sighed and held Amalita a little closer. “Basically yes, Araceli. Though I’m sure you are about to explain with great
vehemence how mistaken I am.”

“With or without vehemence, I think he treated the Senator like that for your benefit. Consolation for the fact that he’s
not going to indict them next week, or next month, or ever.”

They were sitting on the patio of Aguirre’s house on a low hill in Colonia Juárez. The patio was cozy: trees, plants, a stone
fountain painted with pre-Columbian figures. The white walls had small alcoves in them containing statuettes—a Virgin of Solitude
with a high ornate crown, a sweet-faced female saint in a penitent’s habit—by Oaxacan artists whose work Aguirre collected.

Méndez felt soothed by the gurgling water, the greenery, the warmth of Amalia. The girl had fallen asleep, her curls in his
face, her breathing soft. His eyelids drooped. He did not want to have this conversation. But after the Secretary left, Méndez
had felt honor bound to visit Araceli and deliver the bad news. He found her at home preparing for lunch. When she opened
the door, she told him he looked like a zombie.

“I’m disappointed,” Méndez said, adjusting his arms to cradle the sleeping girl. “But I don’t think his position is unreasonable.
He has never let me down.”

“You give him the benefit of the doubt regarding the Colonel, then.” Aguirre’s short hair glistened, still wet from a shower.
She wore a white cotton sweater with the sleeves rolled up, her long brown forearms extended on the round table.