David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“Susana! Listen, Jude the smuggler doesn’t know Baida’s bio, either. What I don’t know about the details of his life will be no disadvantage to me in convincing him that I’m Jude.”

She turned and walked away, head down.

Bern felt the buzz of his accelerating free fall.

Susana suddenly turned and went across to one of the workbenches, where they had laid out maps of Mexico City for him to study as she told him of Jude’s movements, his galleries, homes of friends, favorite restaurants.

“Come here,” she said, and she was already bending over the maps as he joined her. She spread one of the maps flat with both hands.

“We’re here, okay?” she said, jabbing the map. She slid one finger across the streets to her upper right. “This is Zona Rosa, a kind of tacky collection of streets chockablock with restaurants and clubs and bars. Used to be an elegant district, but it’s tending to go to seed with lap dancing and prostitution now. But the tourists still come, plodding around, begging to be ripped off.

“It’s crowded there, which is good, and it’s close to Kevern’s group. They can cover it. Jude used to meet Ahmad at a club there.” She leaned closer to the map. “Here, near Genova and Hamburgo, there’s a place called Club Cuica. It’s a samba club. Very popular. The street in front is a pedestrian walkway, with planters and flowers and palms along its center, like a promenade. The place is usually crowded with people out strolling.”

She straightened up and sat on a stool at the table.

“Meet him in front of the club. Don’t go inside. There’s a life-size bronze statue of a nude samba dancer in the median right in front of the club. Have him wait by that thing. It has the advantage of being hidden from the other side of the esplanade, so anyone who wants to watch him will have to do it from the same side. That’ll give Lex’s people an advantage.”

“Mingo’s going to wonder why the hell I’m doing this.”

She looked at him, her eyes hard.

“And what are you going to tell him?”

Okay. Fair enough. He hesitated only a moment.

“I won’t have to tell him anything. He won’t be wondering, will he? He’ll know I’ll be trying to pick up surveillance.”

“But that’s his expertise,” she said. “Don’t you think he can get there clean without you having to double-check him?”

“I won’t give a shit what he thinks. I’m the one who nearly got killed. I’ll do what I think I have to do.”

She looked at him. She nodded. “Okay.” She looked at her watch. “Let’s put it at eight o’clock. That’ll give us another couple of hours.”

Before he could agree, Jude’s cell phone rang. Bern was still holding it in his hand. He looked at her.

“You might as well go ahead,” she said.

Bern punched the button and put it to his ear.

For the two hours that remained before Bern had to leave, they continued to concentrate on the lengthy reports that Jude had provided on his meetings with Sabella and Baida in Ciudad del Este.

As dusk fell, the evening rains came in on rumbles of thunder. There was no wind, and the rain fell straight down and hard, slapping the thick canopy of trees in the park as if it were popping on canvas awnings, a monsoon sound that distracted them from their desperate concentration. They stopped talking and stared out the open windows as the last of the purple light deepened into night, and the mesmerizing sounds of the rain-splashed streets evoked in each of them closely guarded memories.

Finally, Susana broke the silence.

“There’s no reason to think you’ll be in any danger,” she said. She had been pacing back and forth in front of the sofa as they talked, but she had stopped now to stare out at the rain. Bern was still sitting in one of the armchairs, where he had been flicking through pages on the laptop, reading from the CDs of Jude’s reports.

“We know nothing about the guy,” she went on, “which makes people like us nervous, though there’s no real indication that we should be. Obviously, he’s been helpful to Jude, had access to the encrypted cell number. No one else had that.”

Bern looked at his watch. He backed out of the program and then popped the CD out of the laptop. He put it in a clear plastic envelope, stood, and handed it to Susana.

“I’ll do the best I can,” he said. “I’ll try not to screw it up.”

Susana didn’t react to the last remark.

“Lex’s people will be trying to pick up surveillance,” she went on, “so you need to stay right there at the statue the whole time. You get inside a club or near a street musician, it’ll play hell with our audio pickup. If this guy wants to leave, don’t. And remember, you’re going to want to do everything differently now. If he wants to talk in Spanish, say no. You don’t have to explain. If he wants to continue anything ‘the way we’ve always done-’”

“Then I say no. I want to change it. And I don’t explain anything.”

“Exactly,” she said. “The implication is that you’ve got your reasons, and they’re none of his business. Jude pulled that kind of shit on people all the time, and my guess is that this guy is already very familiar with it. That gives you a lot of room to maneuver.”

Bern nodded. He was surprised at the absence of butterflies. As the two hours had dwindled, he had become increasingly focused, and with that had come an odd kind of serenity. He noticed it. Didn’t understand it. But he didn’t dwell on it, either, gratefully accepting it for what it was. He was okay. He could do this. There was so much to lose that there was no realistic way that he could shoulder the weight of it. That realization was liberating.

He told the taxi driver to drop him at the corner of Florencia, and he began walking toward Genova along Londres. The rains had passed and the streets and sidewalks glistened in the city’s lights. He couldn’t just jump out of a taxi and go right into it. He wanted to feel the pavement first, move along the sidewalks, walk through the smells and sounds. He hadn’t even been out of Jude’s apartment in twenty-four hours, and it was beginning to feel as though he was orbiting the city rather than living in it.

As soon as he passed Amberes, the crowds picked up and the feeling of impending carnival increased with every doorway he passed. The district’s wise guys smoked and lounged along the sidewalks, which were crowded with young clubgoers and hangers-on. A solitary woman with the lifeless expression of someone who saw it all every evening watched him pass by as she smoked a cigarette and held the leash of a mongrel who was shitting at the base of a solitary ficus growing in a circle of bare dirt.

At Genova, the evening was in full swing. The street had long ago been closed to automobile traffic, and an island of garden plantings and palms ran down its center. Both sides were lined with outdoor cafes and restaurants, clubs, bars, hotels, and art galleries and antique shops. The crowd was roughly divided among three groups: those curious folk who came here to taste the spicier side of the city’s nightlife, those who wanted to sell them something, and those who wanted to prey on them. Like all streets of this kind in major cities the world over, none of the motives ever changed.

As Bern moved through the crowd headed in the direction of Paseo de la Reforma, he was aware of being the watcher and of being watched. He wanted to glimpse the statue of the naked samba dancer before Mingo had the chance to see him. He wanted at least that much of an advantage.

He heard the carnival beat of Club Cuica well before he saw its sign, and he moved closer to the rail of a sidewalk cafe to get a better angle on the palmy median of the esplanade. Finally, through sporadic gaps in the bobbing heads of the pedestrians, he glimpsed the bronze dancer raised on a stone pedestal a couple of feet high. Cautiously, he moved ahead, then stopped outside the door of an art gallery where two shoe-shine boys had squatted down on their boxes, taking a break from the crowd. They watched the stream of nightlife with bleary disinterest while they ate red Popsicles that dripped on the stones between their feet.