anyway.”
“When did it happen?”
“A couple of years ago. Maybe a little more.”
“Here in Mexico City?”
“Who knows.” Susana pulled her legs up, her feet flat on the bed, the skirt of her dress pooling into her lap. She rammed the fingers of both hands into the front of her thick hair and held them there as she leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. She stared into the mirror on the armoire.
Bern couldn’t tell if she was staring at herself or at him, but in the blue haze he could see the white crotch of her panties between her raised thighs.
“It was Jude,” she said, “who was supposed to kill Ghazi Baida.”
There it was, baldly stated. What Bern had suspected all along, but had never been told, was now laid out in front of him like a corpse on a slab. No more euphemism of silence. No more implication. There it was, without apology.
For the past few days, Bern had been unable to escape the slightly out-of-focus feeling that he was constantly accompanied by a doppleganger. Jude was always there-in front of him, behind him, looking over his shoulder. Everyone he met spoke to him from within a context occupied by his double. Bern was constantly at a loss, struggling to read the hidden meanings, the implications, and the nuances in their remarks. But now, the doppleganger-his brother-acquired an altogether different dimension.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, “Jude was… he-” He stopped himself. He wanted to get it straight. “He’d done this before?” he asked.
Now Bern was sure that she was looking at him in the gloomy reflection of the old speckled mirror, using it as an intermediary, as if it would make the truth less shocking, or maybe make it somehow more comprehensible.
“Yes,” she said simply.
“That was… that was what he did?”
“He had done it before,” she said; “that’s all I know.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes.”
Bern was stunned, and he knew that she could sense that, even in the gloomy obscurity of the rainy light. He knew that she was well aware that suddenly he was nearly overcome with questions.
Still staring at him from between the wrists of her hands planted in her hair, she said, “Look, I know you’ve got to be… just… boiling over with questions, but we don’t have the time to do that right now.” She took her hands out of her hair and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I want you to understand the situation here, the situation Jude was in. It’ll help you understand what we’re up against. Just… just bear with me here. I promise you we’ll talk about it all you want later. I’ll tell you everything I know. But not now.”
Bern couldn’t bring himself to say a word. He nodded. It was all he could do.
“Okay,” she said.
He heard her take a little breath before going on.
“But this job, Baida, it couldn’t be, you know, a targeted killing,” she said. “No bomb, no booby trap, no missile from a chopper. It couldn’t be seen to be a political assassination. Remember the clandestine aspect to this. Jude had to make it look like a drug hit. Plant a false ID on him. Better yet, just make him disappear. Baida lived in secrecy; he would die in secrecy. As if it never happened. Jude knew it wasn’t going to be an easy thing to do.”
Bern tried to concentrate on the logistics of it. He tried to ignore what was really making him light-headed- the genetic factor: What were the implications here for him?
“He couldn’t do it down in Ciudad del Este,” she went on, still using the mirror as an intermediary. “It would’ve been suicidal. Baida was well protected down there. By this time we had pretty good intelligence that he was moving into Mexico, and we thought it would be easier to do here, where our resources were better.
“And then Jude was killed. The assassination was shifted to Mondragon, and you were recruited to set up Baida.”
She hesitated, then said, “Before we get on with this, I want you to know something else.” Hesitation again. “Your first meeting with Baida tonight-we didn’t know what he might’ve learned during that month or so after the killings in Tepito. There was no way we could know. Jude was our man inside. There was no other access. If Baida had
… somehow learned the truth, that Jude had in fact been killed in Tepito… they would’ve killed you tonight.”
She was as still as the curtains.
“That’s the part that Mondragon-that none of us told you. There was always that little bit of possibility-well, that’s not right, because we didn’t know, had no idea, what the degree of possibility was-that you wouldn’t make it back from your first meeting with Baida.”
Bern looked at her dark eyes in the mirror, and suddenly Susana was transformed into an absolute stranger. In an instant, her nearness to him on the bed was turned into a proximity filled with danger, as if he were lying next to a woman who had walked in off the street. Her manner, her glance, even her pauses and silences emanated a sense that, with her, anything could happen. The next moment with her could bring anything from the ordinary to the fantastic, and all were equally likely. She simply did not distinguish between these vastly different contexts. He had no idea who she was. He knew nothing about her, could not imagine what her life had been like a moment before she walked into the room.
“Remember,” she asked, “how upset I was about… finding out that Jude had been working with Mingo behind my back?” Her voice took on a reflective tone. “You could tell, I know, that that hurt me.”
She hesitated. When she went on, she spoke more slowly, and more softly, as if she was afraid to touch the subject.
“The thing about working with a single partner undercover… it’s more complex than you might imagine. It’s a cliche, I know, but we were close in a special way. No one can ever understand just how that is unless they experience it for themselves. And precious few people qualify for that.”
The sound of the rain lent a sense of consecration to the moment. She had lowered her head a little, her chin nearly resting on top of her knees. Her eyes glinted in the mirror, fixed on him from beneath her parted dark hair.
“What Jude and I needed from each other… and gave to each other during this last year, was as special in its own way as any personal sacrifice could ever be. We learned to turn loose of all the lifelines that people cling to, and we submitted to a kind of… free fall. Against all of our instincts, we… committed to the idea that the other person would always be waiting at the end of our fall. We were faithful unto death.”
She cleared her throat, still looking at Bern.
“But that kind of trust doesn’t come without a price. It changes you, a piece of you, forever.”
The rain came hard now, no breeze, just straight down, slapping the leaves of the laurel trees below the window, thundering in the street.
He heard her clear her throat again.
“I needed you to know this,” she said. “I told you that you could trust me, and then…”
Her voice trailed off. Uncharacteristically, she couldn’t bring herself to come right out and say it.
“I wouldn’t have done that to Jude,” she said. “Ever. I couldn’t have. And I shouldn’t have done it to you, either.”
She was very still, and Bern felt as if he were being lifted off the bed by the sound of the pounding rain.
“I’m… I’m telling you this,” she said, abandoning their reflections in the mirror and turning to look directly at him, “because… this is only going to get rougher. I want you to know. .. that I’ll give you the same kind of loyalty that I gave to Jude. I’m willing to go against my instincts… to be waiting at the end of the free fall.”
She was still looking at him, close enough for him to reach out and touch her face. He didn’t know what to say. She had just told him that she had been willing to risk letting him be killed to see if he could pass as Jude. And then almost within the same breath she had pledged a loyalty to him that superseded her loyalty to the ideas that had enabled her to betray him. The first revelation had been shocking; the second one seemed reckless in its promise.
