The Jaguar (6 page)

Alfredo drifted briefly back to the present at the sight of a pretty girl's face transferred across the side of a double-decker London bus. It looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn't think why. Staring at the impossibly white smile between crimson lips, he rolled his tongue idly around the foul-tasting innards of his own mouth. He resolved to clean his teeth, but was drawn back to the bus as it occurred to him that it was light blue, rather than a reassuring London red. The world was no longer as it was supposed to be: not since that night. For want of any further distraction, or the will to do anything more constructive, Alfredo's mind returned once more to the previous month.

“Gennaro, take him out the back, and you two get the car.” Alfredo grabbed his attacker by the hair, forcing his face upward and into the light.

His features were a curious mix of old and young: baby brown eyes beneath long dark lashes and a heavily furrowed and pitted brow. The man glared back at him defiantly, releasing a spray of spittle that peppered Alfredo's shirt and trousers. Alfredo gestured for a gun, flipped it over, took slow, deliberate aim then smashed it into his assailant's mouth. A mixture of blood and teeth spattered onto the floor. Gennaro followed up from the other side with a jaw-breaking right uppercut. The gunman sank to his knees and would have collapsed in a bloody heap had not Gennaro used his substantial weight to drag him towards an emergency exit.

Several minutes later they were well clear of the scene, on the freeway that partially encircled the city. Alfredo told Gennaro to drive slowly, so could think. He listened to the laboured, guttural breathing of the figure slumped in a rear seat of their inconspicuous blue Toyota sedan. Everyone and everything was covered in his blood. They had been unable to establish so much as a name, despite a thorough search of his jacket and trouser pockets, and could only speculate at his motive.

Alfredo made his decision. The freeway could take them south towards the Mexican border, but also north towards the Franklin Mountains. Being stopped at the border was unlikely, but also potentially disastrous, given hard-line Texan police attitudes to drug-related crime. The mountains were the obvious dumping ground.

Three-quarters of an hour later the crunch of gravel and the gathering gloom confirmed that they had left the last paved highway. They edged their way along a narrow mountain-bike trail. Alfredo stared at the city lights of El Paso below, his home town of Juarez a distant smudge of luminous yellow beyond the core of high-rise buildings and spreading suburbs.

“Stop here, Gennaro.”

They had come to a particularly steep section of hillside. The trail suddenly narrowed to no more than a footpath, descending in a series of zig-zags into the semi-darkness of a moonlit night. Alfredo opened the door, which caught the breeze and swung out over the downward slope. He lowered himself carefully onto a patch of bare earth between rocks and tussock grasses. He lit a cigarette and contemplated the view. Gennaro joined him. They stood in silence as stiff cool air rustled through the sparse vegetation and an owl called from somewhere beyond the nearest bluff. Suddenly there was another noise, halfway between a rattle and a hum. A large, nondescript beetle crash-landed onto Alfredo's face. Gennaro laughed involuntarily as his boss stumbled down the slope, arms flailing wildly. Alfredo growled, rage supplanting his moment of fear and fuelling a thirst for revenge.

Other headlights came into view. The beams played across the mountainside like smouldering fires, momentarily igniting each patch of thin grassland. “Tell them to cut the lights,” Alfredo barked. The sight of a backup vehicle stiffened his resolve. He took a last distasteful look at the shadows around him and shuddered, trying to dismiss a conviction that he was being observed and, possibly, hunted.

“Do it. Do it now,” he spat.

Two men in dark suits glanced towards Gennaro for confirmation then turned back to the car. A door creaked open. There was a muffled cry of pain and protest, followed by a dragging sound. The henchmen ripped open ribbons of duct tape, securing their prisoner's mouth and feet. Then one took firm hold of two trembling hands and forced them onto the steering wheel. The other wound more tape between each wrist and its rim. All hints of defiance in the man's eyes had now drowned in deep pools of terror. The trunk slammed and liquid sloshed across upholstery. Gennaro reached over the front passenger seat to release the handbrake, struggled to extract his bulk from the car again, and nodded solemnly.

Alfredo raised his cigarette close to his eyes, the arc of its light trail temporarily obscuring the shining city-scape below. He drew deeply until it was a hard ball of fire and flicked it casually onto the backseat. The fire spread across the fabric, first in one direction, then the other. Wisps of smoke wound inconsequentially upward and out through the open rear windows. The flames took hold, despite a flood of tears, spreading across the ceiling through a soup of acrid black smoke. The bound figure tried frantically to push open the driver's door with his hip. Then he began a strange, staccato dance of death.

Walking slowly back along the track, Alfredo concentrated upon the approaching headlights. The others assembled cautiously at the rear of the burning car. As they pushed, it began to creep along the path. Gathering its own momentum, it veered across the downward slope, bouncing between the rocks. A trail of flame and sparks shot into the night sky at each collision. Suddenly it was gone, lost beyond the rim of a hidden canyon. For a short while all was still, until a muffled, distant explosion heralded a deeper silence.

Although he couldn't articulate why, Alfredo's reverie seemed more real than this cold, surreal country called England. He closed the curtains. A London morning held no further interest. He examined the remaining contents of the minibar, pulling out a Twix and a bottle of water. Back in bed, he poked randomly at the buttons on the remote control in an unsuccessful effort to find a programme that might distract him. Nothing could stop his mind returning, just as he had eventually done on that fateful night, to Mexico.

His older brother, Luis, was out of town, so their father was making a sortie out of semi-retirement on the Caribbean coast, near Cancun. Alfredo hadn't looked forward to explaining himself to old Paulo. They had met the next morning at a safe house in Juarez, the owner nervously obsequious as he gestured Alfredo from one cluttered but hastily tidied room to another. Two children stared from the top steps of open stairs. The wife prepared drinks in the kitchen in a nervous clatter of glasses. They were led to a small, sparsely furnished office overlooking a whitewashed courtyard full of laundry. Alfredo noticed the large black gate at the back of the yard and the guards placed on either side. Beyond these, parallel lines of smashed or boarded up windows framed an alley that led down to the railroad. There was always an emergency exit.

Don Paulo, as he liked to be called by anyone other than close family, rose stiffly from behind the single desk, placed a slight and trembling hand on each of Alfredo's shoulders and reached up to kiss his youngest son's cheeks. Every time Alfredo saw the old man he looked smaller and thinner, despite a tan thicker than his skin.

“Alfredo. Always your brother worries about you and always you give him more to worry about. Your Uncle Felipe, my own little brother, is already in gaol. Why do you have to make the same mistakes?”

Alfredo had not been asked to sit down. Partly because it was unclear where he could sit and partly because he sensed that any further display of familiarity would not be welcomed, he thrust his hands deep into his trouser pockets and did his best to look relaxed. “Hello Papa. How was your journey?”

Paulo frowned at the glib response, took a deep, seemingly painful breath then spoke in a slow, laboured monotone. “Eusabio flew me most of the way. We landed at Rancho Morales. It was good to catch up with that side of the business. It looks like a big harvest and the market is strong now there's so little heroin out of Colombia. The poppies are healthy: soon there'll be fields of scarlet, yellow and orange across the mountainsides. The local police chief took us to tea with a couple of the growers - Senor and Senora Barosso, as I recall - proud people, who claim to be Aztec. Everyone seems to be making money. The chief was like an excited child, driving through the dirt in the Range Rover he bought with our money.

“Marcelo told me the product we're supplying is too good - too strong. Kids keep overdosing and getting us noticed.”

Paulo paused and took a deep breath. He urgently needed to talk to Luis about Marcelo and Barrio Fuerte. “Alfredo, we don't need product to get us noticed when you're around.” He gave him a serious and disapproving stare - not the look of mock disapproval with which Alfredo was comfortably familiar.

“Sure,” Paulo mused, “some college kids have died, but it is all part of the plan. A few deaths get us noticed in the right way, because buyers know we're selling quality goods. It's a user's own fault if he's too stupid not to OD. Anyway, Barrio Fuerte lower the quality for those they know to be hooked. Trash deserves trash and why shouldn't a few Yankie children die, when our graveyards spill over with a generation of young Mexicans?”

Paulo sat for a few seconds looking at the floor, frail hands on bony knees, fighting to control his anger. “Sit down please, son. There are important things I need to say.”

He gestured towards a thin, whitewashed chair standing in a corner of the room. The seat was barely visible beneath a pile of children's school books. Alfredo paused to assess this inconsequential evidence of normality. Somehow picking up the books and depositing them on a nearby shelf grew, second by second, into a tiny act of humiliation. His father meant business.

“I know Luis thinks he has to look after you because you're young and you were your mother's favourite, but for once he's wrong. You're not so young anymore and your mother and I both loved Luis at least as much as you. It's hard for him. He's the one who has to coordinate everything and this isn't as easy as it was in my time. There's too much traffic, too many different drugs and too many players trying to control what can never really be controlled.”

“But you controlled it, Papa. We're the biggest family along the border.” Alfredo gave an expansive gesture towards nothing in particular, but the narrow domestic scene made him feel vaguely ridiculous. He dropped his gaze and shuffled uncomfortably on his tiny seat.

“I controlled nothing. It was all a bluff. Luis understands that. You lean on someone here and take a cut there and try to make it look as if you're the boss, but I've spent my whole working life reacting to things I hadn't planned and didn't really understand. You just try and make a call that other people think makes sense. Look at the US Government. They know they can never control the drugs trade. It's part of the fabric of their country. They play the game for the sake of public opinion, winning a battle here and taking an important step there, whilst everywhere else we can do what we want.”

“But you were strong, Papa.” Alfredo instantly regretted using
were
, as his father scowled.

“Perhaps, but sometimes that means not making violence. It means not settling a score and not killing a man just because you can. You've made too many mistakes. It makes us look desperate. It makes us looks like amateurs, like any of the other street hoodlums that infest this town.”

Alfredo reflected upon his father's words. He struck out when he was afraid, but his enemies had only multiplied, and this had spawned an increasing sense of foreboding. There was now an edge of desperation to his violence.

Paulo continued. “You think our enemies carry guns and make themselves known to us. Those are bums, like the kid you killed yesterday. Yes, we have enemies. We have other families testing us to see if they can break into our operations, because we've got greedy and we've got weak. And you're part of the weakness, Alfredo.”

“Papa, I took care of business last night. Nobody will mess with us now.”

“You took care of
nada
. You've stirred up a hornet's nest. Why do you think I have to extend my stay in this God-forsaken city? Over the border you've created two serious crime scenes for the US Authorities. Our family's name's written across both. Have you any idea how pissed off the Americans will be? Why, at least, didn't you dispose of the guy in Juarez? We drive truck-loads of weapons from the US into Mexico every week. Who would care about a Spik with a bit of blood on him?” Paulo paused to catch his breath and his foul temper.

“Luis can't sort this out alone. Luckily I still have enough influence here to help him. Otherwise this family would be finished.”

Alfredo remained mute. In all his life it had never occurred to him that his family could be anything other than all-powerful. It was his world; one where you were never held to account.

“I'm sorry, Papa.” He meant it.

“Sorry doesn't cut it anymore. Luis told you many times never to mix work with pleasure. What were you doing at that night club? What were you doing with Barrio Fuerte? Just because you can make a deal with someone doesn't mean you can trust them. Gennaro is family to us. He is your Godfather. You put him in danger and two of his best men as well.”

“Marcelo invited me. I thought it would be rude to refuse; that it would be safe because they make so much money from our business.”

Paulo sighed and studied his errant son. How could he have seen so much and be so naive? Under the desk he clasped his hands tightly between his knees. A general dull ache from each joint and a stabbing arthritic pain from a poorly healed, bullet-induced fracture reminded him of how little time he had to repair the damage. Slowly, he began to outline the situation.

“Last night you killed Marcelo's brother. As you would expect, we have a couple of people high up in their organisation. Gennaro made a call this morning and it was definitely him. We don't know why he tried to shoot you. The girls you were dancing with were hired hands, presumably meant to distract you. It doesn't really matter. Barrio Fuerte are dead to us now. We no longer have a way of shifting our product once it's across the border. Now, all we have on the other side are enemies, ones who'll almost certainly look to join forces with another family.”