David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

That was it. Kevern broke the connection. Mondragon dialed his encrypted phone and told Quito that he was to check with him first about whatever they found at Mingo’s.

Outside his windows the fog that was moving in was melting the city’s lights, creating a coppery glow, which was quickly enveloping the entire valley of lights.

Mondragon fought depression. Having no face was a living hell. He turned his back to the windows and looked into the half-light of his room of floating faces, everything bathed in rose-gold luster.

God, God, God, how he wanted a face.

The Nahuatl poets-the Mexica philosophers-believed that the human face was the most intimate manifestation of the intrinsic nature of each individual. It was the physical representation of the spiritual self. The personality. Without a face, a man vanished. He was nothing.

I cause sorrow to your face, to your heart.

If he had a thousand lives to live, he would forfeit them all in exchange for just one with a face.

A lover of darkness and corners… he takes things… a sorcerer, destroyer of faces, he causes others to lose their faces.

If he had a thousand lives to live, he would hunt Ghazi Baida in all of them and destroy him over and over without ceasing.

He stared with his never-closing eyes at the floating faces in the clear boxes. Even detached from their bodies, even separate from their selves, they were more than he was. Here was a man. Here was a woman. You see their faces, you see their lives. Here is the woman who is no more, gone to paradise. Here is the man who is no more, gone to hell.

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.

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.