To The Lions - 02 (23 page)

“Look
at me, dear,” Señora Moreno cajoled.
 
“This is my seventy-second year on this earth.
 
I have two men who work for me and both avoid
me at all costs...it’s not that they hate me, but I think they find me old,
irascible, unpleasant on the eyes and difficult to please.
 
My tenants are now all set for the summer—and
all very boring—and my television shows are wrapping up their seasons.
 
So now all I’m left with are reruns, my
books, the arriving summer birds and my two old cats, one of whom seems to be
on his last legs.”
 
She tilted her
head.
 
“So humor an old woman.
 
If this is a secret, it’s safe with me.
 
I want to treasure the friendship of a
beautiful young lady.
 
And her telling me
her story will do nothing harmful to her, or her beau, but it
will
add a firm foundation of trusting
in another.”

After
letting out a long breath, Justina took a large quaff of the tinto de verano,
finding it more palatable as the ice had melted and diluted its strength.
 
“His name is Gage, Señora, and we only met a
few weeks ago.
 
I was in Lloret, working
for the season at a horrible job, when he arrived at the bar one
afternoon.
 
I didn’t know him at the
time.”

“Go
on,” Señora Moreno said reverently.

“Initially,
our meeting was quite odd.
 
More odd was
what he did to my abusive boss.”

“Abusive?”

“Not
physically.
 
I worked with other Polish
girls—they treated all of us like slaves.”

“And
what did your Gage do to this boss?”

“He
came into the bar during the day.
 
A few
minutes after he came in, he knocked my boss to the floor and…” Justina told
Señora Moreno the entire story of their first day, up to Gage’s liberating her
in the back alley.

When
Justina came to the portion of the story about their first night alone
together, in Gage’s Lloret hotel, Señora Moreno again stopped her with a raised
hand.
 
“This is just grand, dear and,
please, do go on.
 
But when you get to
the romantic parts…” she crossed herself, “…you know, the sex, do
definitely
be detailed, my dear.
 
All I’m left with are memories so, perhaps, I
can enjoy the interludes vicariously through you.
 
Mateo and I used to do the most wonderful
things on afternoons such as this, but now…” she said wistfully, her voice
trailing off.

Justina
listened to this, struggling not to appear amused.
 
She cleared her throat and resumed her
storytelling.
 
After relaying their
rather innocuous first night, she gleefully told the story of their day at the
beach, and Gage’s taking a most unusual job for a large sum of money.
 
She told her about Berga Prison, pausing when
it looked like Señora Moreno was going to say something, but continuing when
Señora Moreno, rapt, twirled her hand impatiently.
 
And, of course, she detailed the few romantic
encounters she’d enjoyed with Gage, watching as Señora Moreno appeared
breathless, hanging on every detail.

Finished
with her story, Justina watched her landlady cross herself again, kissing her
rosary and whispering a litany of thanks.
 
Then she said, “My dear, that was beautiful.
 
Absolutely breathtaking and, despite your
wonderful imageries, I gather there are more details.”

“Well,”
Justina said, drawing it out and shrugging.

“Have
you plans tonight?”

“No,
señora.”

“Splendid.
 
Please finish planting your flowers—don’t
press the soil down too hard…leave it loose—then go and get cleaned up.
 
Be at my house at eight, where you and I will
do something I rarely get to do any more.”

“And
that is?”

“We’ll
drink fine wine and cook a feast just for the both of us.
 
While we cook and drink, I want to treat you
to the music of my favorite classical pianists, Valentina Lisitsa and Yuja
Wang, both of them as spectacular as that story you just told me.
 
Afterward, we will retell your story of Gage,
with additional backstory on you and more detail about this prison…as well as the,
well, the steamy areas of the story.”
 

“It’s
a date.”

Señora
Moreno clasped her hands, placing them under her chin as if she were a child,
eagerly awaiting Christmas morning.

After
finishing her flowers, Justina craved a cigarette.
 
So she wrote Gage a letter.

* * *

The
following day, after morning chow, a very sore Gage trudged back to his cell
while Salvador “attended to some business.”
 
Feeling feverish and in a state of torpor, Gage lay on his bunk with a
wet towel over his head.
 
In his sickly state,
he worried that he might be a tantalizingly easy target for someone.
 
Well,
there’s nothing I can do about it right now
, he reasoned, closing his eyes,
hoping that there was some manly prison code that frowned upon inmates taking
out a wounded duck.

Around
mid-morning, he heard the casual shuffle of sandals scraping into the cell.
 
Blinking sleep from his eyes, Gage realized
he had dozed off.
 
When his eyes cleared,
he saw Cesar Navarro standing in his cell.

Gage
sat up, wincing from the stab of pain.
 
He’d been shown dozens of pictures of Cesar Navarro at the meeting with
his father and Cortez Redon.
 
But he was
taken aback at the way prison had affected Cesar’s appearance.

Roughly
five-and-a-half feet tall, Cesar probably weighed 150 pounds.
 
He and Salvador, in regard to size, were
close matches.
 
In the pictures Gage had
seen, Cesar had once had wavy sandy hair, worn down to his shoulders like that
of a soccer player.
 
Now, his hair was
buzzed to his scalp, showing only perhaps a week’s worth of growth.
 
Cesar’s thin arms were covered in sleeves of
tattoos.
 
Large bags drooped under his
eyes, far too heavy and dark for a man who of only thirty-four years of age.
 
His prominent nose that seemed to fit his
face so well in the pictures now looked oversized and cartoonish and, when he
spoke, Gage noticed a broken tooth.

“My
father sent you,” Cesar said in a soft voice.

Gage
carefully lowered himself from the top bunk, holding the bedframe as the blood
rushed away from his head.
 
“Did your
father tell you that?”

Cesar
shook his head, a sneer on his face.
 
“I
can always tell.”

“Perdón?”

“I
said, I can always tell.”

“Always?”

“Yeah,
you deaf?”

Alarms.
 
Loud, cacophonous klaxons clanged in Gage’s
mind.

“What
do you mean you can
always
tell?”

“Not
one of you has fit in here,” Cesar growled, the tendons in his neck showing
with his strain.
 
“It’s obvious as shit
and if I wasn’t smart it would get me killed.
 
I don’t need you looking after me,
pelotudo
.”

Gage’s
chest tightened from the sudden onset of stress brought about by Cesar’s
words.
 
“Cesar, please tell me exactly
what you’re talking about.
 
Are there
others, here to protect you, besides me?
 
Because, if so, I need to know that.”

Navarro’s
only son cocked his head.
 
“He didn’t
tell you?”

“Tell
me what?”

“That
devious old bastard.
 
He thinks if he
tells someone like you the real truth they’ll cut and run.”

“And
what is the real truth?”

“Here
I am, papa, doing your dirty work again,” Cesar spoke to the concrete ceiling
before his eyes came back down.
 
“There’ve
been three men before you, all sent here with the mission of protecting papa’s
little boy.”
 
Cesar studied Gage
enigmatically, then showed his broken tooth in a wicked smile.
 
“Each man,
mi amigo
, now lives with the maggots.”

Wanting
to respond, wanting to grab the diminutive Cesar by his sneering head and judo
flip him out of the cell, Gage instead shut his eyes and regulated his
breathing.

“I
can see you’re upset,” Cesar remarked, crossing the cell.
 
He leaned against the wall, removing one of
Salvador’s books, thumbing through it before dropping it to the floor, holding
his fingers open as if he’d been handling a soiled diaper.
 
“Understand this,
gabacho
, I do not want, or need, your help.”

Gage
didn’t respond.

“So
you do me a favor, faggot…you stay the hell away from me.”

“Cesar…”

“Don’t
say my name again,
puta
.”

Backing
away, Cesar made double hand pistols before firing them at Gage.
 
Then, when he grinned, Gage realized his tooth
wasn’t broken—it was capped in gold, along with several others.
 
Outside the cell, when Cesar turned and
walked away, several prisoners greeted him, slapping hands before they
descended the stairs together.
 
The other
prisoners wore the distinctive neck tattoo of a gang: a long barreled revolver,
canted upward with smoke trailing from its barrel.
 
There was an “L” emblazoned on the grip of
the pistol.

He’d
seen many others with the same tattoo.

The
gang, as Gage had read before coming here, was called Los Leones.
 
It was the largest gang in Berga and the
fastest growing crime syndicate in all of Spain.

Wide
awake now, Gage shuffled from his cell, noticing a few nearby inmates back
away.
 
He crossed the concourse to the
mesh fencing, staring downward as Cesar waded into a large group of prisoners.
 
A dangerous-looking bunch, they seemed to
welcome him, laughing and making gestures common to gangs the world over.

A
half-hour later, when Salvador returned, Gage played dumb and asked him about
the pistol tattoo with an “L” on the grip.

Salvador
snorted, picking up his fallen book, staring at it a moment, then placing it
back on the shelf.

“What
about the tattoo?”

Head
whipping around, Salvador said, “Come on, man.
 
Don’t act like you don’t know.”

“I
don’t.
 
Tell me.”

Glancing
outside the cell, Salvador walked to Gage and stood very close, lowering his
voice to a whisper.
 
“That’s the mark of
Los Leones.
 
My
banda
, Los Sementales, are less than fifteen men,” he said, holding
his hands close together before opening his arms wide.
 
“Los Leones number in the hundreds.
 
If you see anyone with that tattoo, turn and
walk the other way.”

“They’re
the biggest gang here?”

Again
Salvador checked the entry to the cell.
 
He turned back, saying, “The biggest here and in every Catalonian
prison.
 
But now they’re in and
out
, growing everywhere.”
 
He cocked his head.
 
“And if you were pinched for murder, I would
think you would have known that.”

“I
was convicted in Melilla.”

“Where?”

“Melilla,
it’s a Spanish territory in Morocco.”

“Morocco?
 
In Africa?”

“Yes.”

“How
is Spain in Africa?”

Gage
shook his head.
 
“It’s just a territory
of Spain.
 
Doesn’t matter.”
 

“Why
you asking?”

“A
few men came by while you were gone.
 
They had the Leones tattoo.”

Salvador
straightened.
 
“What did they say?
 
Did they mention my name?”

“No,
Salvador.
 
They were here to see me.”

“What
did they say to you?”

“Not
much.”

“But
they were here to see you?”

“Yes.”

Salvador
closed his eyes for a moment, his hand going to his forehead.
 
“What did they want?”

Gage
sat down on Salvador’s bed.
 
“They gave
me a warning.”

“A
warning about what?”