David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

Then Bern saw him, hanging close to the statue, a well-dressed young man, perhaps in his late twenties. His hair was carefully barbered, and he had the comfortable good looks of a sophisticated capitalino, a man who understood the mysteries of the city where he had lived all of his life. Seemingly unconcerned about having to wait, he leaned a shoulder against the hard thigh of the nude statue and watched the women coming and going through the doors of Club Cuica. Bern liked him immediately.

Without hesitating further, Bern cut through the crowd and approached the young man. He instantly saw the recognition in the young man’s eyes.

“Hey, Judas,” Mingo said, straightening up as they shook hands. He threw a look around with a half shrug. “This is a strange way to do it, huh?”

“A little,” Bern said. He could see Mingo looking at him closely.

“What’s the deal?” Mingo asked. “What happened to you?”

“I was hurt a little,” Bern said. “I’ve been recuperating.”

Mingo’s eyes opened in surprise. “No shit? They shot you?”

“Look,” Bern said, “what’s the story here?”

“Yeah, okay, you want to go somewhere so we can talk?”

“Got to do it right here.”

Mingo’s eyes flickered, and Bern could see him trying to figure out the logic of it, why Jude would want that. But then he nodded, accepting it. He glanced around and hunched his shoulders a little in an unconscious gesture of confidentiality, then moved closer to Bern.

He was wearing an expensive suit without a tie. He had a very precise coal black mustache, which complemented his handsome features. Just behind his head, one of the naked breasts of the luscious samba dancer shone brightly, its dark patina worn away to a clean brassy shine by the nightly caresses of randy young men.

Mingo raised his eyebrows with a knowing look. He shifted his weight and leaned in closer. Close enough for Bern to catch a whiff of cologne.

“I did what you said to do,” Mingo rasped. “ Tuvimos cuidado, Judas. Ver-ry careful, okay?”

Bern nodded.

“It took us a while,” Mingo went on, “but my capitalinas, they are very clever girls, very light, like moths. They went where you said to go; they did the things you said to do. And, of course, they were very inventive, too.”

The shoe-shine boys appeared in front of them and one said something in Spanish to Mingo, who nodded casually and kept talking as he ruffled the kid’s hair affectionately and put an already-polished shoe up on one of the little wooden stands. Bern shook his head at the other boy.

“I have found a woman who has the thing you want,” Mingo said. He waited for a response from Bern.

Bern’s heart fluttered. “Oh?”

Mingo reacted subtly. Something in Bern’s reaction. Mingo had expected something different? Something more?

“And?” Bern asked.

Mingo carefully handed him a piece of paper. Taking his cue from Mingo’s caution, Bern surreptitiously unfolded it, read what was there, and then looked at Mingo. He needed to react. Mingo was anticipating something, as if the information was momentous.

But Bern wasn’t quick enough. Mingo’s eyes scrambled quickly over Bern’s face, sensing that something wasn’t right. The shoe-shine boy tapped his foot, and Mingo looked down, adjusting his foot on the stand.

The second boy very casually went around his kneeling partner, working on Mingo’s shoe, and stared at the statue behind Mingo. The boy on his knees opened the side of his box to take out a tin of polish as the second boy reached up and took Mingo’s arm.

Mingo looked around to see who it was just as the kneeling boy came up with a glistening chrome pistol the size of the boy’s head. Holding the huge gun with both small hands, he heaved it up, his arms straight out, pointed it at Mingo, and fired. The recoil was so powerful that the boy’s thin little arms flew up over his head, almost out of control, and the sound of the report was as deafening as a cannon blast.

Bern watched, frozen, as the little boy with the gun then brought the pistol down again and jammed it into Mingo’s stomach while the second boy, holding his arm, kept the stunned young man from lunging away. The second and third shots were loud, but muffled, and drove Mingo into the naked embrace of the samba dancer. The fourth, fifth, and sixth shots, all buried in the depths of Mingo’s torso, blew blood and viscera twenty feet away.

It all happened before Bern could even draw a breath of astonishment.

Women screamed and people scattered from the samba dancer. The music in Club Cuica pounded away, but in an instant, there was no one there to hear it. The two shoe-shine boys ran as if they had thrown a ball and broken a window, leaving behind the bloody chrome gun at the dancer’s bare feet.

Mingo had been thrown back into the palmettos by the force of the rapid blasts, and only his well-shined shoes and expensive trousers protruded from the bed of ivy.

Then Bern ran, too. He was the last to run, and he headed for the darkest streets in Mexico City.

Kevern’s tech had patched Susana into their audio surveillance, and she listened on her new cell phone as she sat on the edge of the sofa in Jude’s studio. When the first shot was fired, she sprang to her feet. She pressed the cell phone to her ear, unconsciously raising her free hand in defensive shock as she listened to the sporadic distribution of subsequent shots, flinching with each one, not knowing who was on the receiving end of the blasts.

Then silence.

She didn’t even think. She grabbed her shoulder bag and flew down the stairs, through the apartment, down the building’s stairwell, out onto Avenida Mexico, and into the park. Dialing furiously, she sought the darkest part of the park, then stopped in the middle of one of the wide paths to listen.

The rings were too long. Endless. Each one a toll announcing Bern’s death. She couldn’t believe it. God.

“Yes! Yes!” His voice was frantic.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” He was still running. She could hear him huffing. “God, it was kids, just kids, just a couple of kids.”

She could hear the wild dismay in his voice.

“Listen to me,” she said, every nerve in her body focused on a plan. “Are you alone?”

“Yeah-” He was still running.

“Listen to me: The place I told you about where Jude used to sketch the dancers-don’t say the name-do you remember it?”

Don’t say the name? Oh Jesus. Remember. Remember. The pages in Jude’s file flew through his mind, swirling like litter scattered in a storm.

“Yeah! I got it. Yes.”

“Get a taxi. Go there. Okay? You have that?”

“Yeah, good. I… I’ve got it.”

“Now, get rid of the phone!” Susana snapped. “Throw it away right now. Drop it. Now! Go, get away from it!”

She ran through the dark edges of the park. When she got to Avenida Sonora, she flagged a taxi.

He threw the damn cell phone against a building, shattering it, unable to get rid of it fast enough, and kept running. He ran for another block without thinking, just getting farther away from the shooting, from the phone, from the images in his head. Finally, he had to stop to catch his breath. He fell back against a building, bent over, and grabbed great desperate gulps of Mexico City’s thin, resinous air.

In the darkness his mind cast up images of the shooting. He saw the shoe-shine boy’s little hunched shoulders as he burrowed the muzzle of the huge handgun into Mingo’s stomach, each blast digging deeper into him. He saw Mingo’s astonished face: shock, pain, realization, dismay, horror. Every explosion from the hands of the child assassin reflecting in his face as he spun deeper and deeper into his vanishing mortality.