David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

The driver pulled to the curb and cut the engine. He rolled down his window, and they waited. Bern looked at his watch. Five minutes passed. Ten. He rolled down his window also. Twenty. Twenty-five. The driver’s cell phone rang. He opened it and listened.

“ Bueno, ” he said. He snapped the phone closed, started the car, and then drove away.

The driver dropped him off at one of the Sanborn’s stores on the Paseo de la Reforma, just around the corner from the Four Seasons Hotel. He walked around to the hotel, went into the men’s room, and washed his face with cold water. When he came back out, he went to one of the sitios, which could always be found outside hotels.

For the next half hour, he went through a series of cab switches, using major hotels as his changing points because they provided ample opportunity for him to exit the hotel unseen. Finally, he gained a little confidence in his execution of a highly difficult technique, and he made his last stop. He got out of the sitio and started walking into the darker streets.

Now he was standing under a laurel tree in front of a pasteleria that was still open. About fifty yards away, this quiet, small street merged with a larger one that was brighter and much busier. He was on Calle Pasado.

He turned to look across the street. Cars were parked on either side of the lane, and about four cars down, almost obscured behind the laurel trees, was a small hotel in a narrow building several stories high. The pale blue neon sign that hung unobtrusively over the sidewalk could just be glimpsed through the trees: Hotel Palomari, the words Susana had whispered to him in the Beso Azul. Bern crossed the street and entered the hotel.

The elderly man who sat behind a reception desk of heavy dark wood topped with green marble seemed startled to see him walk into his tiny foyer. The name Palomari was set in blue tile in the center of the white tile floor. The desk clerk, whose complexion seemed to have been deprived of sunlight for several decades, had heavy swags of flesh under his watery eyes, and a too-black pencil-thin mustache sliced across his long upper lip. While Bern signed an alias in the ancient registration book, the clerk wriggled subtly with pleasure, flicking nervous smiles at him. From somewhere Bern caught a disconcerting whiff of gardenia.

He had asked for room 202, which was on the second floor, up a winding narrow staircase that groaned miserably as he ascended. The Palomari was only three rooms wide, and his was the center one in the short hallway. But he didn’t go to his room. Instead, he stopped in the gloomy hallway and tapped softly on room 201.

Silence. Nothing. Maybe it was only a few seconds-he didn’t know, as time had become a wildly elastic thing in the past few hours-but however long it was, it was time enough for his mind to seize upon every disastrous possibility: He had heard the name wrong. Something had happened. It was a trap. She was dead.

Susana opened the door.

“God,” he said, and she stepped back to let him in.

She had not turned on the lights in the room, but she had thrown open the two panels of the room’s window, which let in the faint glimmer of the hotel sign below, and the glow from the pasteleria across the street. It was a ghostly light, but bright enough.

Susana said nothing as she turned and walked over to the window. They looked at each other. A sluggish breeze stirred the gauzy curtains on either side of the window, just once, like a desultory breath.

He glanced around: a bed, one nightstand and one chair on either side of the bed, an old armoire with a mirrored front sitting against the wall across from the foot of the bed. The door to the bathroom was open, and an old-fashioned white porcelain bidet stood alone, framed in the doorway.

Susana’s reticence was strange, but he was so wrapped up in himself, in his fear, his confusion, his relief at seeing her, that he didn’t realize how unusual the moment really was, nor, again, how long it had lasted. It could’ve been only seconds.

“Paul,” she said-the first time she had called him by his name, he realized-“are you all right?”

Maybe he was the one behaving strangely, not her. Yes, that must be it.

“Yeah,” he said. No, he wasn’t, but what would it matter if he had said otherwise?

There was a second, only that, or maybe two, when he thought that if he walked over and embraced her, as he wanted desperately to do, that she would understand, that, in fact, she wanted him to do it. He was as sure of that as he had been of anything since all of this had begun. And then, instantly, he was hit by the reality of how absurd that would be to her, how utterly unexpected and inappropriate… and out of control.

“God,” he said again. He felt weak suddenly. He went over to the bed and sat down. “Damn,” he said.

“Did you talk to him?” she asked. A perfectly logical question, it cut through the instability of his emotional fantasies.

Bern pulled off his suit coat-Jude’s suit coat-and tossed it over the chair on his side of the bed.

“Yeah, I did. And no, I don’t think he had a clue that he wasn’t talking to Jude.”

“Incredible,” she said.

He told her everything that had happened, all that had been done and said from the moment he left her at the Beso Azul to the time he knocked on her door at the Palomari. Susana remained silent. She didn’t interrupt him to ask questions or to ask him to expand on a particular point, or to ask for clarification.

At first, she stayed by the window, but then she began pacing, arms folded. Finally, she returned to the window again and looked down at the street, her profile cast against the glow. When he finally finished, she turned toward him again.

“Holy Christ,” she said. She remained still, her forearms crossed low above her waist in the way women do. She was studying him, the faint light from behind her allowing her to get a good look at his face. “Look, I want you to know that I think you’ve done a magnificent job. But I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t think you’d be able to pull this off. I’m sorry, but I didn’t. And especially after the shooting-”

She stopped herself for no apparent reason.

“No, I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, either. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just get on with it.”

“Okay,” she said. Uncrossing her arms, she went over and sat on the foot of the bed. “Okay, now listen. You need to tell me quickly what happened before the shooting. I heard everything that was said, but I want to know everything that was happening. Was Mingo buying you being Jude? How was he reacting?”

Bern turned, one leg resting on the bed, the other on the floor. It took him a moment to get his mind around something that now seemed so long ago.

In the half-light of the aging hotel room, its furnishings giving off the odors of decades of transient living, its walls embracing the secrets of countless biographies, he told Susana everything he could remember-and he concentrated in order to remember every detail-while she sat on the bed and listened.

He was unnerved by how much detail he could recall, how vividly he could relive the shock and fear and panic. Not only did he recall the facts in detail but he also experienced every emotion that had accompanied those facts. To call it a debriefing hardly did justice to the experience.

When he finished, she waited a little before she asked her first question. She waited long enough for him to be aware of the sounds of the street rising to the window, long enough for him to be aware that it had begun to rain, softly, quietly.

“It seemed to me,” she said, “that near the end, just before he was shot, something happened. Mingo said that he had found a woman that had the thing Jude wanted. You said, ‘Oh?’ And there was a bit of a pause and then you said, ‘And?’ And there was more silence… and then the shots.”