Kevern’s tech had patched Susana into their audio surveillance, and she listened on her new cell phone as she sat on the edge of the sofa in Jude’s studio. When the first shot was fired, she sprang to her feet. She pressed the cell phone to her ear, unconsciously raising her free hand in defensive shock as she listened to the sporadic distribution of subsequent shots, flinching with each one, not knowing who was on the receiving end of the blasts.
Then silence.
She didn’t even think. She grabbed her shoulder bag and flew down the stairs, through the apartment, down the building’s stairwell, out onto Avenida Mexico, and into the park. Dialing furiously, she sought the darkest part of the park, then stopped in the middle of one of the wide paths to listen.
The rings were too long. Endless. Each one a toll announcing Bern’s death. She couldn’t believe it. God.
“Yes! Yes!” His voice was frantic.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” He was still running. She could hear him huffing. “God, it was kids, just kids, just a couple of kids.”
She could hear the wild dismay in his voice.
“Listen to me,” she said, every nerve in her body focused on a plan. “Are you alone?”
“Yeah-” He was still running.
“Listen to me: The place I told you about where Jude used to sketch the dancers-don’t say the name-do you remember it?”
Don’t say the name? Oh Jesus. Remember. Remember. The pages in Jude’s file flew through his mind, swirling like litter scattered in a storm.
“Yeah! I got it. Yes.”
“Get a taxi. Go there. Okay? You have that?”
“Yeah, good. I… I’ve got it.”
“Now, get rid of the phone!” Susana snapped. “Throw it away right now. Drop it. Now! Go, get away from it!”
She ran through the dark edges of the park. When she got to Avenida Sonora, she flagged a taxi.
He threw the damn cell phone against a building, shattering it, unable to get rid of it fast enough, and kept running. He ran for another block without thinking, just getting farther away from the shooting, from the phone, from the images in his head. Finally, he had to stop to catch his breath. He fell back against a building, bent over, and grabbed great desperate gulps of Mexico City’s thin, resinous air.
In the darkness his mind cast up images of the shooting. He saw the shoe-shine boy’s little hunched shoulders as he burrowed the muzzle of the huge handgun into Mingo’s stomach, each blast digging deeper into him. He saw Mingo’s astonished face: shock, pain, realization, dismay, horror. Every explosion from the hands of the child assassin reflecting in his face as he spun deeper and deeper into his vanishing mortality.
Horrible.
He began running again, but it couldn’t have been more than just another block before he had to stop once more. Jesus. The altitude. Where was he? Shit. He was hopelessly disoriented by his mad dash into nowhere. Though he couldn’t have gone all that far, the streets were narrow and murky, the doorways were hollows descending to unknown horrors, and the few people he encountered under the trees hurried past without looking, wanting nothing to do with a marked man, wanting nothing to do, even, with the night air that moved around him.
To his left, across the street and near the middle of the next tree-lined block, he saw light spilling onto the sidewalk from a doorway, a few people milling in the glow inside. He forced himself to walk slowly, to control his breath, not wanting to approach them gasping for air.
It was a small hotel, its lobby door thrown open to the cool night. Pausing in the low wattage of the foyer, he saw a young woman standing behind an old curved registration desk, an older woman mopping the terrazzo floor, and a young man with no apparent purpose other than to talk to the young woman. They turned their eyes on him.
He asked the girl if she would call a sitio for a taxi. It was dangerous to flag a taxi off the street, especially the little green Volkswagen cabs. These innocuous-looking little vehicles had a brutal history of collusion with armed robbers and kidnappers, and not a few people had lost their lives after stepping inside one of them.
The girl did as he asked, and he thanked her, moving out of the spill of light to wait alone at the curb. Immediately, he heard sirens. He looked back at the small foyer and saw that all three pale faces were turned to him. But their expressions were unreadable. It was a learned trait in a city of secrets. No one knew anything. And no one, no one, was curious.
The night shadows are impatient in Mexico City. They stick close to you when you turn off a major street, crowd you as you walk, and overtake you by the time you’ve gone only a few yards. So Bern stood surrounded by them, his back flat against a stone wall a few feet from where the taxi had left him.
He was in a neighborhood on the edge of Colonia Roma, not all that far from Condesa-a fact that made Susana’s choice wildly reckless to him. Across the street and a little farther down, Beso Azul-the Blue Kiss-stood on the corner under a old jacaranda that fractured the light falling onto the sidewalk from a nearby streetlamp. The club’s entrance was on the angle of the corner, and through the dappled haze in front of its opened doors, a languorous music floated out into the darkness.
Should he go inside, then? Wasn’t that implied? He didn’t know what the hell was implied. The words stood alone, stubbornly without implication. “Go there” was all she had said.
It seemed rash to leave the shadows. Jesus Christ. To show his face anywhere seemed insanity. Suddenly, he was aware of his legs trembling. She had said, “You don’t know this yet, but you can trust me. You need to grab hold of that fact as quickly as you can.”
He stepped out of the shadows and crossed the street.
Once inside, his eyes began to adjust to the gloam. He saw immediately that the Beso Azul was not de moda, was not de ambiente. This was not the gathering place of the chic young crowds that frequented the stylish and trendy clubs in Condesa and Polanco. There were no cell phones here, no sunglasses, no pounding electronic storm.
Though the decor was an unintentional faded memory of the Art Deco era of the late 1920s, the crowd was, in fact, a mixture of the middle-aged and young. Here, in a blue haze, the dancers embraced closely, exuding a poignant sexual melancholy as they glided about the dance floor in the fluid slow-quick-quick, slow-quick-quick rhythm of the graceful Cuban danzon, a sweet and romantic music played by a cello, a couple of violins, an old piano, and a flute.
“Aaaah, Judas.” The purring woman’s voice caught him by surprise. He turned to see her as she was passing by with her partner, a woman his own age, the bare tops of her breasts swollen by her partner’s tight embrace. Turning her head to follow him with her eyes as she danced, she smiled, her white teeth iridescent. Her swarthy partner jerked his head in a serious greeting without speaking, and they slowly danced away.
He was on the edge of the dance floor moving among the tables along its perimeter, moving to nowhere.
“Judaaaas.” A middle-aged man smiled and lifted his chin at Bern from a tiny table, cigarette smoke streaming from his nostrils, his woman leaning on him, smiling at Bern, too.
Jesus Christ. He thought he spoke to them; he thought he smiled at them; he thought he seemed at ease.
Someone hissed through the danzon, and he turned and saw a woman smiling from a table farther away. Another man nodded his head soberly in greeting.
This was surreal. Enveloped in a smoky sapphire glow, surrounded by the languid music and dancers who seemed to belong to another era, Bern began to feel a weird disconnect from the heart-hammering velocity of his flight. The tacky Club Cuica, the blast of the child’s gun, the blown blood and viscera-all of it seemed to recede, as if it had never been anything but a memory anyway, as if it were being absorbed, even obliterated, by this reanimation of a scene from an old movie.
Inexplicably, he even began to feel as if he were remembering this place, the Blue Kiss in Roma, as if he were returning to an old retreat, returning to these strangers, old friends forgotten. He felt that he understood these people, that he knew why they came here, seeking one another’s company in this melancholy place with its sweet, heartbreaking music. Instinctively, he knew exactly why Jude had come here to sketch the somber faces of these lovelorn men and the coy smiles of their women.
Gently, she took his arm from behind, and when he turned, she was as close to him as the embracing dancers, as close as when she had kissed him the very first moment that they met. She pulled his face to her, not for a kiss this time, but to whisper. His lips were at her neck, in the shallow of her collarbone, and he smelled her skin. And he smelled fear.