But he, Vicente Mondragon, was evanescent. He would be forgotten. He was desaparecido -disappeared-his self raided and stolen from him, his existence removed from him in strips of flesh, in strands of muscle, in shards of cartilage.
Mondragon drew close to one of the faces in its clear acrylic cube and put his raw head close to it, closer to it than he could have done if he had had a nose. His lips breathed a wavering ghost on the acrylic. His eyeballs, no lids, no lashes, nearly touched the cube. It was a woman’s face, one of his favorites, for she was Asian, and he had grown to love the clean lines of the Asian race. This woman, Chinese.
As he stared at her, his vision caressing her graceful contours as intimately as if he had been touching her with his fingers, Mondragon began to weep, keening softly so that his servants wouldn’t hear.
Chapter 29
Someone in the crowd took his arm even as Susana was still talking, and he turned around and saw a man his own age staring at him, still holding his arm.
“Please, you need to come with us, Judas,” he said. He raised his eyebrow coaxingly, and his expression was not threatening.
Bern turned to Susana, who was looking at him, too, and saw a man holding her arm, as well. Everyone exchanged looks, and then the man leaned close to Bern’s ear and said, “Mazen Sabella.”
Bern caught Susana’s eye again and she nodded, or he thought she nodded, and then without anyone saying anything else, the four of them began moving slowly through the crowd.
Pushing through a clutch of people standing at the edge of the dance floor and against the wall adjacent to the orchestra, the man holding Susana’s arm opened a door and they stepped into a narrow, musty hallway stacked with cases of empty liquor bottles and worn-out brooms and mops. At that moment, another door opened just ahead of them, blocking their way, and a woman stepped out of the rest room with her hands under the raised skirt of her dress as she finished adjusting her underwear. Surprised, she dropped her skirt, gave them a quick sheepish smile, and then with a “So what?” flick of her head, she squeezed past them in the tiny hallway.
“Did you say Mazen Sabella?” Bern asked, to let Susana know where they were going.
“Yes,” the man said curtly.
They turned a corner and were at the back door of the club. The man with Susana opened the door, but then he let go of her arm and held his own arm out, blocking her.
“Alone,” the man with Bern said.
“Hey, wait a second.” Bern shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” the man said. “You must be alone.”
In a tense moment, everyone assessed the situation. Then the second man held both hands up in a placating gesture.
“It’s better for her if she doesn’t come,” he said.
“It’s okay.” Susana reached out and touched Bern’s chest with the flat of her hand, as if to convey the sincerity of her words. “It’s okay. You heard what I said?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“You remember it?”
“Yeah?”
“No problem, then, okay?”
He was adjusting, reading between the lines of every gesture, imagining the communication in every tick of her expression.
She looked at the man with Bern. “I’ll see him later, right?”
“Yeah, sure, no problem.”
“It’s okay, then,” she said to Bern, and she backed away slowly. They waited until she turned around and disappeared around the corner, heading back the way they had come.
He sat alone in the backseat of the car, a Lincoln, like the many sitios in the city. There was no effort to conceal their route, and his grim first thought was that he wouldn’t be coming back, so it didn’t matter. But he pushed it aside. Maybe Sabella was only going to be at this location for this one meeting. Or maybe at some point along the way, he would be blindfolded, maybe switched to another vehicle.
For a while, he stared out the windows, letting the image of Susana walking away play across his mind. God, how final that seemed now. At that moment, he was very close to accepting the fact that he simply couldn’t do this. Very close. The fact was, he just didn’t have the kind of guts that this was going to take. The best he could do was just fake it. Hell, he could fake it; he could do that. Play an audacious con game, a grand charade. At least until something unraveled that he couldn’t control.
They entered the dark wood of Chapultepec Park, the headlights of the cars searching through the mist and fog that enshrouded the dense forest of giant ahuehuetes. The traffic was heavy, and people waited for transit connections along the broad sidewalks flanking the boulevard.
Staying on Paseo de la Reforma, they continued into the elegant neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec, moving higher into the hills, until the streets grew smaller and became serpentine. This was Bosques de las Lomas, a rarefied part of the city, where business magnates and wealthy politicians with dubious connections lived. It was also where most of the foreign ambassadors in the city had their homes.
They entered a section of ascending turns, the narrow street doubling back on itself again and again. Even on such a foggy night, he could make out the phenomenon for which this area was famous. Here the hills were so steep and close upon one another that girded pillars of concrete rose three, four, five stories up the hillsides in order to support plush gardens for the expensive homes that perched on the ridges. Trees and sprawling gardens, tennis courts and swimming pools-all were suspended above the city on superstructures massive enough to support whole buildings.
The mist grew heavier and the car took a sharp turn into a steep incline, passing through two wrought-iron gates. They turned yet again, the car’s tires spinning in jerks on a pavement slick with the moist breath of fog. The headlights picked up a sheer cliff very close on the right, covered with hanging vines. On the other side, the hillside fell away and the coppery night sky of the city spread out across the valley far below.
They stopped in the circular courtyard of a two-story Spanish Colonial home. A window here and there glowed with amber light, but the exterior of the home was visible only because of the coppery glow from the valley.
As he got out of the car, Bern saw the dark silhouettes of palmettos against the building’s facade, and now, too, the armed guards were visible, milling about the courtyard. Looking through a porte cochere that led into a second walled courtyard, he could see other cars and men carrying armloads of boxes out of the house and putting them into the cars.
He was escorted through the front door and into an unfurnished entry hall where voices echoed off the stucco walls and marble floors, making it impossible to tell the direction they were coming from.
They ascended a wide staircase, his two escorts having to move to one side as three men started down with armloads of laptops. Armed guards appeared in the empty entry below, speaking occasionally into wire mikes dangling from earpieces. Bern noticed that the painted plaster walls were peeling.
Turning into a barrel-vaulted hallway, they followed it to double wooden doors on the left, which swung open just as they approached. They entered a long room that looked as if it might have been a grand sala at one time. Here, too, men were busily working, breaking down electronic equipment and loading it into boxes that were then being carted away. French doors opened off the opposite long wall, revealing a terrace.
He was quickly marched through the room and out onto the terrace, where a waiting bodyguard motioned to Bern, who followed him to a trellis-covered alcove. Three men were sitting in patio chairs in the gloamy light, and as Bern approached, one of them stood and walked out of the arbor, heading in the opposite direction.
“Judas.” One of the remaining figures stood, came around the table, and extended his hand, his face now visible out of the arbor’s shadow. Bern recognized Mazen Sabella from Jude’s sketches. “ Bienvenidas, ” Sabella said. He was unremarkable in either size or height, maybe thinner than Jude’s drawing had led him to expect. He wore a dress shirt, sleeves rolled nearly to the elbow. He needed a shave.
