The Return: A Novel (28 page)

“It looks like L.A.”

“Oh, it’s a lot bigger than L.A. L.A. is a hick provincial town compared to Defe. And this huge thing occupies practically no cultural space in the minds of most Americans, even though it’s the largest city on the planet and the real capital of Latin America, of half a billion people. Cultural imperialism in action. It has more museums than any other city in the world, more concert halls, the works. If you were a European intellectual in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century and you came to the New World, this would be the place you’d visit to see peers, not New York or Boston, which were a tenth its size back then.”

“Yeah, I got all that from Mom. Are you going to show me the sights?”

“I don’t know the sights. I passed through here only once. I married your mother here and then we left Mexico.”

*   *   *

The plane dropped through the smog, the blue sky vanished, and the plane lighted gently on the runway and taxied to the general aviation terminal. They trooped down the lowered stairway into thin, throat-biting air smelling of fuel and exhaust. Behind a low fence were a man in uniform, holding a
SR. MARDER
sign, and a waving young man in a tan photographer’s vest, obviously waiting for Pepa. She strode out ahead without a word to anyone and then, to Marder’s surprise, halted, spun on her heel, and walked back to look him in the face.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Truly. I think I’m having post-traumatic shock or something. I had no right to speak to you that way. Please forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” said Marder. “I was out of line with that comment on your writing.”

She smiled. “With respect to manners, perhaps, but not substantively. I know what I want to say, but I have trouble with the actual words.”

“Many quite famous writers say the same,” he replied, returning the smile.

“And … well, I was on the phone with my producer just now and I mentioned you and what you were doing—not in a complimentary way, I confess—but he suggested that you might be a story, I mean, who you are, the background, and it ties in with what we’ve been running recently about the violence. I have video of what went on on the causeway the other day, and we’re going to run it. Would you be open to, say, interviews, camera crews on your property…?”

“As long as they include you,” he said.

“I think I can guarantee that.” She held out her hand. “Thank you. I think I have your number at the house. I’ll be in touch.”

“Not so fast. I’d like a favor in return.”

“Oh?” Suspiciously.

“I have an appointment with Marcial Jura, to introduce Lourdes.”

“Marcial? Really? I’m impressed. You’re full of surprises, Señor Marder.”

“It’s Rick, please. Yes, we have some mutual connections in New York. I called in a bunch of chips and he kindly agreed to spare us a few minutes. But I’d consider it a great favor if you’d spend some time with Lourdes beforehand—help her shop for clothes, you know, an impressive outfit so she won’t look like she just walked in from the
rancho
, and show her how to use makeup. And talk to her, all the things you mentioned, how to walk and hold her hands and so on. I think she’ll listen to you. She thinks you walk on water.”

“You’re the water-walker if you arranged for Marcial Jura to look at an unknown child.”

Spontaneously, they both looked over at the unknown child. She was standing near the door to the general aviation terminal, swaying to the music coursing through her earbuds, smiling, her long black hair flipping about in the light breeze, radiating gorgeousness to every eye. A baggage handler, they observed, had been so transfixed in his dutiful passage that he clipped a cart and sent a cascade of suitcases crashing to the tarmac.

“I rest my case,” Marder remarked, and Pepa laughed freely, an appealing sound he had not heard before but wished to hear again.

“Well, I’ll do it,” she said. “When’s the interview?”

“Tomorrow at four. We’re at the Marquis Reforma.”

“Of course you are. Where do you get your money, Rick, if I may ask an American question to a distinguished Mexican gentleman?”

“Investments,” he replied.

“The safest possible answer. I’ll be there at ten.” She stuck out her hand. He declined to kiss it, an entirely proper gesture, but instead shook it firmly, like a gringo.

*   *   *

The last time Marder was in a bed in Mexico City, the bed had been in a tiny upstairs room in a
pensión
in Tepito. The room had smelled of grease from the
taquería
downstairs, and enormous roaches scuttled noisely along the baseboards, but the bed had contained one who made it an enchanted bower. They had just been married. The smell and the scuttling distracted not a bit from that well-remembered carnal paradise. The Reforma’s lonely bed was vast and comfortable, however, and Marder spent the first hypnagogic moments sunk in a pleasant fantasy involving various potential partners and in regretful memory.

From this he was roused by a pounding on the door. He rose, groaned when the full force of gravity pulled at his head, threw on a hotel bathrobe, and opened the door to Skelly.

“What time is it?”

“Around eight.”

“Scram. I’m going back to bed.”

“Uh-uh, chief. We have a big day. I need to see some people and you need to come with me. I brought you a present.”

Skelly handed him a large paper bag. From this Marder removed a contraption of leather straps; he held it up, shook it out, and finally identified it.

“A shoulder holster?”

“Yeah. You’re going to shoot your ass off if you keep carrying that cannon stuck in the back of your pants.”

“That’s very considerate of you. I assume it’s to be used when we see these people? I mean, they’re the kind of people one visits armed.”

“Not at all. They’re respectable merchants of death, but they do a cash business, and they’re located in one of the underprivileged regions of the city. You know Itzapalapa?”

“I’ve heard of it. How much cash?”

“A hundred large, more or less.”

“Pesos?”

Skelly rolled his eyes. “I assume you can get the cash, no problem.”

“Sure, I’ll just call Bernie and have it transferred to an HSBC branch here. I assume this is why we’re going strapped.”

“Exactly. I thought of hiring a
sicario
or two, but you never can tell with guys you don’t know; they might decide to go into business for themselves. And being you’re Deadeye Dick…”

“Right. Let me make that call now.”

He used the hotel phone and caught the accountant at home.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Rick,” Bernie Nathan said when Marder told him what he wanted. His voice over the wires sounded strange to Marder, the tone of someone who did not shoot and get shot at, an echo of a former life.

“Yeah, Bernie, it’s a property deal. I can get a real bargain if I show some cash up front.” He finished the conversation and turned to Skelly. “So, what are we buying for all this money?”

“Just enough basic machinery to make the
casa
not such a pushover if anyone decides to get serious, just whatever they have immediately available. It’ll all be ex-Soviet stuff, but I don’t want to be handed off any condemned crap, so we have to pay top dollar. Put some clothes on, chief, I don’t want to keep my guy waiting.”

“So early?” said Marder, dropping the robe and pulling on chinos, T-shirt, and his old leather huaraches. “I thought this kind of stuff got done by dead of night.”

“Only in the movies. You look like shit, by the way. What did you do last night?”

“Nothing much—while you were out with your international criminals, we had a nice dinner at Aura downstairs, and then Carmel and Lourdes went clubbing.”

“You let that girl out on the street at night in the big town? I’m surprised she didn’t get snatched out of her high heels.”

“Oh, you know, she was with Carmel. And Carmel can take care of herself.” He fumbled into the shoulder holster, stuck the Kimber in it, and Skelly helped him adjust the straps. Marder sighed. Another aspect of a trip he had definitely not signed on for was learning that his little girl was packing. The previous night he’d raised the same issue about Lourdes that Skelly had just mentioned, and Statch had flashed his father’s Colt Woodsman at him and promised she wouldn’t let the dazzling charmer out of her sight. He’d watched them go and then walked around the ritzy neighborhood for a while, found a bar, and watched Los Tigres beat Morelia 3–0 on the TV while downing an unaccustomed quantity of old brown tequila, much of which he could still taste on the back of his tongue. He brushed his teeth, however, which helped, and drenched his face with cold water; then he slipped into his jacket and they left.

Skelly had rented a battered white Jetta. They drove to an HSBC on Paseo de la Reforma a few blocks from the hotel. Marder discovered that the seat belts were reluctant to stop providing safety, and he cursed and clicked while Skelly (who never used them) chuckled cruelly. Once free, he went into the bank carrying a nylon duffel bag like a bandito, spoke with a manager, and related his business. He showed his passport and his credit card, and there were a number of phone calls made and doubtful looks exchanged. Marder overheard the phrase “eccentric American millionaire” several times. He had to accept part of the cash in pesos, unless the señor wished to wait. The señor did not wish, but then they had to go to a guy Skelly knew and turn the paper pesos into fifty-peso gold coins. Apparently the international illegal-arms market recognized only dollars, euros, and gold.

After that, Skelly took them around the south end of Chapultepec Park, onto the La Piedad expressway east. He drove with his usual brio, weaving, speeding, hunched over the wheel, checking the mirrors with quick jerks of his head.

“Something wrong?” Marder asked.

“Two cars behind us in the right lane, a dark-blue Dodge van.”

Marder looked. The van was there, but the reflected sun on the windshield made it impossible to see the occupants.

“What about it?”

“It’s been there since we left the bank on Reforma.”

“A tail?”

“Possibly. Let’s find out.” Skelly floored it, shot around a semi, raced ahead on the left for half a mile, cut right again to the center lane, and checked his mirrors. Marder twisted in his seat and looked behind. He could make out the top of the blue van two cars behind in the center lane: certainly a tail.

Skelly said, “Okay, let’s lose them and hope they weren’t smart enough to use more than one chase car.”

Marder sat back in his seat and braced himself. Skelly swung the car into the passing lane again and slowed down. A Mercedes moved up into tailgate position, flashing its lights. Marder studied his friend’s face. He saw the jaw tighten, the skin of the forehead take on a dull shine from tiny beads of sweat. Skelly was frightened, but Skelly was always frightened. Marder remembered realizing that in the bamboo forest and recalled how it surprised him then, that Skelly was terrified of dying and he himself was not.

*   *   *

What frightened Marder was imprisonment, being confined and tormented. He remembered crouching there, with the striped shadows of the bamboo giving a tigerish appearance to the faces of the men crouching around him. They were trapped on a little knoll in a tiny perimeter, less than a quarter mile below its blunt summit, with nowhere to go and no chance of being airlifted out, not with the dense growth of bamboo and thick forestation on the top of the knoll. The firing had slackened because they had very little ammunition left. Marder had kept his M79, even though he had no ammunition for it, only a couple of smoke grenades. And he had his .45. The NVA company that had chased them here was probably running out of ammo too, but obviously they could send for reinforcements; they had thousands of men in the immediate area, and they still had quite enough ammunition to keep the SOG detachment pinned down. He could see Skelly with his radio operator through the green poles of the bamboo; he was talking into the plastic handset, his voice calm, his eyes wild and staring.

But Skelly stood up with bullets snapping around him and came over to Marder and asked him for the grenade launcher and a red smoke grenade and he had shot the grenade a hundred or so meters upslope. And then he’d come back and told Marder that there would be a C-130 flying over fairly soon and that when he heard the sound of its engine he should lie flat and cover his ears with his hands. Then Skelly had walked through the bullets and told all his surviving troops the same thing. Marder could not, however, resist looking up as the sound of heavy engines passed overhead. He saw a scant few lines of green tracer, seeking for the Hercules, and then it was over and gone, leaving a tiny black dot in the air behind it.

*   *   *

Skelly tromped on the gas again, the engine screamed, and the Jetta shot forward and cut right across the traffic, passing in front of a big diesel truck with less than a yard of clearance. Marder heard air horns, the roar of air brakes, screeches of tires, the blaring of offended vehicles. The Jetta gunned across two lanes of traffic, crossed the hatch lines of an exit ramp, bounced against the near shoulder, and careered up the ramp on two wheels. The blue van, neatly boxed in, could only speed on down the freeway.

Marder considered his friend, whose demeanor had now relaxed into one appropriate for a Sunday drive through the park, and he wondered yet again about the peculiar nature of Skelly’s bravery. Terror did not paralyze him, far less cause him to cower or retreat. Rather, it prompted a cool consideration of the probabilities and an instant commitment to whatever desperate action was most likely to bring about an agreeable solution. Thus this latest death-defying driving stunt, and thus also that long-ago decision to lie to his control about where his detachment was pinned down, so that they would deliver a fifteen-thousand-pound Daisy Cutter bomb to the top of the knoll while a couple of dozen men crouched on the very edge of the thing’s kill radius. The black dot had dropped to earth and the earth had moved, popping Marder five inches into the air, and the sound had entered his bones, turning them to liquid, and he had wet his pants. Then the gunship had come over and sprayed their pursuers with cannon and minigun fire, and the helicopters had landed on the mountaintop buzz-cut by the bomb and taken them for the short ride back to Bronco One.