David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

The room was silent, save for the sound of the rain. Everyone waited.

Mondragon reached up and carefully removed his mask and stood before Baida, looking down at him, the mask dangling from his hand. Baida’s eyes showed nothing, not fear, not defiance, not shock. Nothing.

Mondragon turned to Quito. “Drag the woman over here.”

Quito raised his chin at the other two men, and they went over behind the sofa and pulled Cochi off the woman. Then they grabbed her feet and pulled her around, dragging her through her own blood. Her dress came up as they dragged her, and her bare flesh squeaked on the polished wood floor. They left her between Bern and Baida, off to the side a little, nearer the doorway.

“Get out,” Mondragon said to the men. They glanced at Quito, who nodded at them, and they headed for a bedroom. “No, outside,” Mondragon said. Again they got a nod from Quito. “You, too,” Mondragon said to Quito.

Quito turned and followed them out and closed the door.

Mondragon stepped over to the woman and looked at her. Her dress was bunched up around her waist now. Mondragon turned back to Baida. “No underwear? You know, I spoke with her sister Estele just a few hours ago. She would be surprised by this.” He looked at her again. “Carleta. It would be difficult to tell, with not much of a face to speak of.” He hissed. “Not much of a head, even.” He extended an elegant bespoke shoe and nudged the woman’s bare hip. “But I recognize her panocha. ” He nudged her again, as if to confirm her lifeless condition.

“Well, at least you were screwing the middle one,” he said. “Estele was getting a little long in the tooth for a really good screw. Besides, we’d already worn her out in the old days, hadn’t we?”

He turned and went to the dining room table, glanced at the passports, and got a chair, which he took over and set down in front of Baida, a little to one side. He sat in the chair, his back to the windows and the rain. He crossed his legs and then crossed his forearms over his lap, his long hands dangling open on either side.

He took a small spritzer out of his coat pocket and misted the front of his head.

“This is my constant companion now,” he said, holding up the spritzer. He held it up for a long time before he lowered it again.

Mondragon looked at Baida in silence. Deliberate silence. He was relishing whatever was happening between the two men now. He owned the moment and, finally, he owned Ghazi Baida, too.

“I know you appreciate irony, Ghazi,” Mondragon said. Even if he didn’t have a face to read, Mondragon’s body language-the angle of his head, the tilt of his shoulders, the occasional flip of a relaxed hand-clearly conveyed his satisfaction at being in control of the situation.

“There’s a hell of a lot of irony in this moment right now,” he said, “that we meet here, to settle an old score after nearly three years, and neither of us has the face now that we had back then. I’m not looking at the face I’ve hated all that time since London. And you, Ghazi, well, you aren’t looking at a face at all, are you?”

Mondragon shook his head slowly in feigned amusement, and his lips, even without the rest of a face, managed to communicate a disdainful sneer.

“It was a good thing that it happened in London,” Mondragon said. “They have good doctors there. They saved my life.” He looked at Carleta de Leon, his lidless eyes darting over her. “I have plans for her,” he said. “But I want to wait awhile for that. I want to make sure you can’t shut your eyes when I do it.

“You should have sent someone other than Colombians to do the job in London,” he said. “They have passion for their work, but sometimes they are so slapdash about it. Apart from being crazy, of course. They told me who had sent them, and they told me not to be afraid, because they had strict instructions not to kill me.” He paused. “Not… to kill me.” Another pause as he let the emphasis sink in.

“Then they forced me to take drugs, all kinds of drugs, everything. They loaded me up on them because, they said, that would anesthetize my system, keep me from going into shock. They said they wanted me to have… a vivid experience. And then they tied me to my bed. They were taking drugs also. All kinds of stuff, I think. And then they just went to work on me.

“It took hours,” he continued. “They drank my liquor and smoked bazuco and played music. They would cut awhile, look at me, play around with pieces of me. I remember that they had special fun with my nose, flicking it at one another on the ends of their knives, laughing like idiots when they managed to hit one another with it. Then they would smoke some more bazuco. Drink some more. Visit awhile. They talked about women, about sex. Then they would cut some more.”

Mondragon spritzed his face. He looked at Carleta de Leon. The rain had slackened again, and now a fine mizzle was drifting across the plaza.

“It was a miracle that they didn’t blind me,” Mondragon said. “And why they avoided my mouth, why they didn’t cut off my lips, that will always be a mystery. Then sometime during the early-morning hours, they just lost interest in what they were doing. Too much bazuco. Too much liquor. Not enough brains. They passed out.

“Sometime around dawn, they left. I didn’t know it. I had passed out again, too. I think what happened was that when they finally came around the next morning and saw what they had done to me, saw how much blood there was-I almost bled to death-when they saw the pieces of me scattered around all over the place, I think they just assumed that they had gone too far with it and that I was dead. That’s understandable.”

Mondragon looked at Carleta. “Just like her. I’ll bet those boys out there didn’t even check her heart. They just assumed that she was dead. I assume she’s dead, too.”

He spritzed his face and looked at Baida for a long time.

“Four million dollars, Ghazi. That’s all I stole from you. And you sent those fucking Colombians to do this to me. And you wanted me to live… with this.”

He shook his head and took a deep breath. “Again, you know, I was lucky it was London. The British understand the importance of being discreet. My business manager found me later that day. It was she who managed to pass out enough bribes-yes, even the British-to keep my situation quiet. At least out of the press.

“I had heard that you thought those idiots had killed me. So I went along with that as best I could. I sold my place here and bought another one under a different name. I did my best-spent a fortune, really-to disappear. To be forgotten. Of course, I began to make plans for you from the beginning. This moment, right now, I’ve thought about it every single day for nearly three years.

“I began to offer the same services that I had offered before, only under another name. I always worked through Quito and a whole line of intermediaries he provided. I became a nobody. A recluse. A night dweller. Through intermediaries and our old connections, I was able to follow you pretty well, but I could never get close. Then you turned up in Iguacu Falls, in Ciudad del Este. Then, God bless you, Ghazi, you came back to Mexico City.”

Kevern hung his handkerchief out the window of the sitio to get it wet, then cleaned his face with a trembling hand while his terrified driver headed for Colonia Santa Luisa. The driving rain gnarled traffic and slowed them down. Kevern had a huge lump on his forehead, and sometimes he felt nauseated and dizzy. His stomach felt gorged. Still, he was lucky. He had gotten out of the damned thing alive.

His cell phone had been knocked out of his hand in the crash, so he was completely cut off from Bern. The only damn thing he had going for him in this whole sorry enterprise was that Mondragon thought he was dead.