Savages

No time for hot dogs or s’mores, though.

Instead, Doc hooks Chon up with some ampoules of morphine and a few syringes and wishes him

Godspeed.

235

Driving back to the OC, Chon is all, like, what did you expect?

He’s blase.

(Yeah, the morphine helps.)

Six dead Mexicans is a light day in, uhhh, Mexico, and the fact that they’re lying on this side of the border is less than nada to him.

Borders are a state of mind, and he’s accustomed to a certain mental flexibility when it comes to national borders, like the alleged line between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were both just Stans in his mind, and if the Taliban didn’t care, he sure as hell didn’t. Then there was that border between Syria and Iraq, which was a little nebulous (good word, nebulous) for a while until a few people in Syria went for the long walk.

Ben is too aware that borders are a state of mind.

There are mental borders and there are moral borders and you cross the first you can maybe make the round trip but if you cross the second you’re not ever coming back. Your return ticket is canceled.

Go Ask Alex.

“Don’t do it,” Chon says.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t waste your energy feeling guilty about these guys,” Chon says, “or Alex or any of them.”

May I remind you that these are the guys who—

—beheaded people

—tortured kids

and

—kidnapped O.

“They had it coming?” Ben asks.

“Yeah.”

Keep it simple.

“Collective punishment.”

“You don’t need to put labels to everything, B,” Chon says.

The world isn’t a moral supermarket.

Cleanup on aisle three.

236

Chon has read a lot of history.

The Romans used to send their legions out to the fringes of the empire to kill barbarians. That’s what they did for hundreds of years, but then they stopped doing it. Because they were too distracted, too busy fucking, drinking, gorging themselves. So busy squabbling over power they forgot who they were, forgot their culture, forgot to defend it.

The barbarians came in.

And it was over.

“So let’s pay them off,” he says to Ben now, “get O back, and get the fuck out of here.”

It’s over.

237

Elena can’t hear a thing, only the loud incessant throb in her ears and she doesn’t know what happened at first, she only realizes it was a bomb when she looks out the car window and sees the man, one of her men, grip his shredded arm, and then the car surges forward, speeding through the streets of Tijuana’s Rio Colonia, running through traffic lights and then through the gate which is open but closes right behind her and then one of the sicarios opens the car door, pulls her out, and trots her into the house and it’s several minutes later, quite a few actually, when she realizes that they tried to kill her.

“The children?!” she shouts as she gets into the house.

Her new head of security, Beltran, answers, “They’re fine. We checked it out. We have them.”

Thank God, thank God, thank God, Elena thinks. She asks, “Magda?”

“We’re on her. She’s fine.”

She’s at Starbucks near campus, sitting at her laptop, apparently writing a paper. Lado has two men across the street.

“I want to talk with her.”

“She doesn’t know anything about—”

“Get her on her cell.”

A few moments later she hears Magda’s slightly irritated voice. “Hello, Mama.”

“Hello, darling. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Magda lets a small silence intrude to let her mother know that she’s interrupting something substantial for sentimental maternal nonsense and then says, “Well, this is my voice, Mama.”

“Are you well?”

“I’m busy.”

Meaning she’s well.

“I’ll let you go, then,” Elena says, a small quiver of relief in her voice.

“I’ll call you this weekend.”

“I’ll look forward to that.” Elena takes a real breath.

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she tells her men.

It’s silly, but what she wants is a bath and she rings Carmelita to get it ready but the men won’t let Carmelita or anyone else up to the second floor, so, annoyed, she draws it herself.

The hot water feels good on her skin, she feels the muscles in her lower back loosen, hadn’t realized that they were so tight. She sits up to open the hot water tap again and then realizes that she can now hear the water running and couldn’t before and she lets herself lie in the tub for ten more minutes before she gets out, gets dressed, and takes charge again.

Queen Elena.

This is my life now.

She puts on a severe black sweater over jeans and goes downstairs.

The men are waiting in the dining room.

“We think it was El Azul,” Salazar says. A colonel of the state police, he is unimaginative but reliable as long as the money holds out.

“Of course it was him,” Elena snaps. “The question is how did his men get so close?”

“It was an IED,” says Beltran, twice removed from the much-missed Lado. The man who held the job in between was El Azul.

“Explain?”

“Improvised explosive device,” Beltran says. “Basically a bomb planted near your route, detonated by remote control.”

Elena shakes her head. “How many killed?”