slowly shoved it across the table until it touched Kevern’s beefy hand, and left it there.
“By wiping out Khalil’s cell, you may have kept Baida from finding out that Jude was a spy, but it seems to me you’ve also created a big problem for yourself. How the hell are you going to find out who exposed Jude in the first place?”
He thought he saw a beat of hesitation in Kevern’s eyes, but then maybe he only imagined it. Maybe he had wanted to see it just so he’d know that the guy had something left in him that could still be scared.
“We’re working on that,” Kevern said.
Chapter 14
The windows of the large Mercedes were dark-tinted, so Bern couldn’t see where they were going. The driver, efficient, polite, and clearly also a bodyguard, explained that it was for Mr. Mondragon’s security, and he even apologized for it, as if it were an impolite inconvenience for Bern.
As best as Bern could tell, they drove roughly in the direction of the posh River Oaks section of West Houston, and after about ten to fifteen minutes stopped at what seemed to be a security gate, and then went down a slope into what must have been an underground garage. They descended several floors, then entered an elevator and ascended thirty-four floors, where the elevator doors opened into a private entry hall. Mondragon had the whole floor, wherever they were.
The lighting was subtle here, and the furnishings were uncluttered, sleek, and elegant, with a predominant color scheme that seemed to favor dun and deep chocolate. A young Mexican woman who wore a simple black cocktail dress and was just as sleek as the decor ushered Bern into a living room situated on the corner of the building. Houston spilled out before him, glittering into the distant darkness.
The woman offered to get him something to drink, but Bern declined. She said Mr. Mondragon would be with him in a moment, and then she left.
Bern’s attention was at first pulled to the dazzling view of the city laid out against the night as if for an exhibition, the lights shimmering in a single iridescent color spectrum of white and aquamarine and powder blue and beryl. But very quickly, his eyes caught sight of something more fascinating. Scattered about in the twilit room were a dozen or so clear acrylic cubes sitting on glistening black pedestals about chest-high. The cubes were slightly more illuminated than the rest of the room, so that they seemed to hover and float in the dusk. Displayed in each cube was a human face.
More fascinated than startled, Bern moved toward the first face and leaned in close to the acrylic case. The face, which appeared to be that of a man in his mid-twenties and of Chinese descent, stood on a pedestal of its own inside the box. The face was complete up to the hairline, including the ears, but the back half of the head was replaced by a smooth, black, and slightly concave surface upon which the face was mounted. It looked rather like the theatrical masks of Comedy and Tragedy.
But the reality of detail was extraordinary, and the face was the most lifelike creation Bern had ever seen. He could even see the pores in the flesh, and moisture in the caruncula lacrimalis, the pinkish tissue in the corners of the eyes. This was striking and gave Bern an uneasy feeling. The reality was… shocking. How in the hell could the artist have done this?
He moved to another face. A young woman, a Mayan Indian, he thought. A stunning creation. The subtle colors and texture of the tissue as it changed from one part of the face to the other, from cheek to lip to eyelid, were exceptional.
He moved to a third, a blond woman, of German descent perhaps. The same subtle changes in flesh tissue were far superior to any sculpture he had ever seen.
“A marvelous thing, isn’t it?” a voice behind him said, and Bern turned, to find a tall, thin man standing in a web of shadows about twenty feet away. His face was hidden, but Bern recognized the sophisticated voice and its odd impediment. Mondragon was dressed in a dark, elegantly cut suit. He wore a crisp white shirt that luminesced in the low, warm light of the room. His silk tie was a deep amethyst color.
“Yes,” Bern said. “Someone has an extraordinary talent.”
“Indeed.” Mondragon paused. And then as he took another step toward Bern, he said, “Mr. Bern, I should have prepared you. As I move into the light, you will see that unlike these unfortunate people you see here”-he indicated the display cases with a gentle sweep of his arm-“who have a face but no body”-he took another step, which slowly brought him out of the shadows-“I suffer just the opposite misfortune
… of having a body but no face.”
Mondragon stepped into the pool of light between them, and Bern almost staggered. Nearly all of the epidermis had been removed from Mondragon’s face, as well as much of the muscle tissue and cartilage. The place where his face had been was a nearly flat, raw, glistening plane. His eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets, an illusion due to the absence of eyelids and surrounding tissue. His nose was gone and the triangular nasal aperture that remained was covered with a translucent film that allowed a visual hint of the nasal spine. His cheeks were missing and much of the jaw tissue. His lips remained, but the cartilage where his chin had been was gone, so that the sharp lines of the jawbone immediately presented the framework of the skull.
He was standing directly under one of the hidden lights, and Bern could not make himself turn his gaze away from the truly hideous sight.
In comparison to his stripped-away face, Mondragon’s lips appeared abnormally protuberant, though this, too, was an illusion, resulting from the absence of so much facial tissue. The reality was that Mondragon had no features except eyeballs and lips. Without these, Bern would not have known that this raw, glistening mass that he was looking at was the remains of a man’s face.
“Get a good look, Mr. Bern. Accept your curiosity for what it is and satisfy yourself. I have accepted the fact that I am a spectacle, and the sooner you accept it, too, the sooner we can talk about far more important things.”
Mondragon moved closer to Bern, who resisted an impulse to step back. Mondragon raised his hand and spritzed his face with a small mister he carried in his palm. The beads of moisture glittered momentarily in the shaft of light before dissipating.
“You can hardly see it,” Mondragon said, “but my… facade”-his tone shifted to sarcastic irony-“is covered by a sheer, transparent membrane. A marvel of modern medicine. It’s an antiseptic barrier. But it breathes and requires moisture. The spray also contains a necessarily potent analgesic.”
He turned his head slightly, allowing Bern to get a look at him from a different angle. His naked eyes seemed to be operated by remote control. The facial flaying ran just below his hairline, in front of each ear, and dipped down just in front of his throat.
Bern could see that his lips had been carved around and isolated from the rest of the mess in a very precise way. A bit of the philtrum remained in the upper lip, as well as a bit of the mentolabial furrow in the lower. But the surrounding flesh had been peeled away up to the corners of the mouth, causing it to seem to float, almost unattached, just above the surrounding raw tissue. Obviously, Mondragon had suffered extensive nerve and muscle damage in this area, and he must have gone through a great deal of therapy to be able to speak with only this small degree of impediment.
“I am only weeks away from beginning a lifetime of surgeries and skin grafts,” Mondragon’s mouth said. He turned his walleyed stare toward Bern again. “I’ll never have anything that you could call a proper face, but I will have a… sheath of sorts, to dampen the repulsion that others feel at seeing… this.”
Bern didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t repulsed, but his fascination did make him self-conscious. Still, he stared. In some places, the excising had been deep, gouging into the subcutaneous tissue and well into the muscle itself. Without skin or features, it was impossible to convey an expression.
“Do you have any questions about… this?” Mondragon asked. He behaved almost as if he were in an anatomy class and the body in question had nothing to do with him at all. Except it did, which made his detachment seem abnormally cold, and his pretense that his flayed face was something they could get past in just a few moments of intense observation seemed, in itself, pathological.
Bern said nothing.
“Then we’re through with the anatomy lesson?” Mondragon stared at him and spritzed his face again. “Good.
