In the silence, Bern rehearsed his role as Jude. He had just come out of hiding. He had met with his intelligence man, who had discovered that he was still alive, and then someone had shot him. A couple of kids. What would Jude have been thinking? What would Mingo’s death have told him? What would Jude have seen in all of this? Would he have been thinking of anything except what he could do to save his skin?
Baida sat slumped in his chair, his right elbow on the arm of the chair while his face rested in the fingers of his hand, two fingers folded across the right side of his mouth, two fingers vertically bracing his temple. Bern noticed a black military-style watch on his left wrist. As he stared at Bern, watching him closely-did he sense something, suspect that this wasn’t Jude sitting in front of him?-Baida gave off a sense of animal masculinity, which was probably one of the first things anyone would notice about him.
“Tell me,” Baida said finally, straightening up in his chair, “why you were at that place in Tepito the night of the shooting.”
“Khalil called me and told me to meet him there. Didn’t say why. I nearly stumbled right into it.”
“And how did you manage to avoid that?”
“Dumb luck.”
“Did you see what happened?”
“No.”
“You heard the shooting.”
“Yeah, and I ran. Ran like hell.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“I heard… on the street, like everybody else.”
Baida nodded pensively. “And why have you been hiding all this time?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened in Tepito that night. I just wanted to make damn sure that the word on the street had that straight before I showed my face again.”
There were raised voices in the courtyard below, and then someone was running somewhere on the second floor. Baida seemed oblivious of this, and his eyes remained fixed, boring into Bern. He appeared to have something on his mind, maybe a decision to make, and Bern could only assume it had something to do with Jude. He tried to follow the logic of it, follow it the way he thought that Jude would have, play it the way he thought Jude would have played it.
“What was Domingo Huerta doing for you?” The question came from Sabella, who had been sitting quietly, watching Bern. He had sipped once from a white demitasse cup. Coffee, Bern guessed.
“You know what he does,” Bern said. “I went over that with you when we talked in Ciudad del Este.”
“And you weren’t in communication with him… while you were waiting during these past weeks?”
“I think you know damn well we haven’t been in touch.” Bern focused on Sabella. “You’ve been all over him, I’d guess.”
“Who else does he work for?”
“He doesn’t tell me.”
“He works only for you.”
“No. I can’t afford that.”
“Who else, then?”
Bern glanced at Baida, who remained quiet, watching him, then back to Sabella.
“What the hell’s going on here? What’s the matter?”
“After you disappeared,” Sabella said, “Domingo began looking around in places where he shouldn’t have been looking.”
“Shouldn’t have been?”
“What was he talking about tonight when he said that he had done what you had said for him to do? That he had found a woman who ‘has the thing you want’?”
Bern felt a warm flush envelope him. This was insanely beyond him. He wouldn’t be able to sustain this.
“I have a client looking for a certain kind of pre-Columbian figurine. I had heard of a woman here who might have such a thing. That’s what I thought he was referring to.”
“What is the woman’s name?”
“No, I can’t do that. I don’t mention your name to other people. I don’t mention her name to other people. That’s how I do it. That’s the way I stay in business. People know they can trust that.”
“Where does she live?”
Bern shook his head. “No.”
Sabella didn’t respond. Both men sat in the coppery half-light and looked at him. They didn’t glance at each other or communicate in any way that Bern could detect, and yet it seemed to him that they were both weighing his response on the same scale, using the same criteria for finding him worthy… or not.
The slip of paper in his pocket burned into his groin like an ember.
“Are you sure that’s what he was referring to?” Baida asked.
“I said I thought that’s what he was referring to. I didn’t have any reason to believe otherwise. He didn’t live long enough for me to be sure.”
They said nothing, watching him in silence. Bern was scared. Suddenly, what little bravery he had been able to screw together was slipping away. This is a smuggling deal, he reminded himself. A smuggling deal. Just a smuggling deal. Terrorism is not on the table.
“Look,” he said. “If this isn’t what you want anymore, then fine. I’m not exactly comfortable being on the edge of your fucked-up drug deals, either. Just remember, your people came to me. It wasn’t the other way around. I’m not pushing my way into your business here. I can walk away. Easy.”
Bern could hear more running.
He waited for Baida’s reaction, but the other man sat there like a sphinx, a handsome sphinx, a sphinx with blood on its breath, with dead souls hanging around its neck like a necklace strung with withered lives. Bern thought of the paragraphs Jude had written about him, a kind of free verse about a man who was entirely likable, a man unworthy of his own personality.
“How long has it been since you were in Austin?” Baida asked.
Bern was staggered by the question. Jesus Christ. He suddenly felt nauseated. He knew. Baida knew. Bern was not going to walk out of here alive. And then just as suddenly, he remembered: Austin was Jude’s home, too, and Baida’s city of fondest memories, his halcyon university days, before the world turned cruel for him.
Jude had written that Baida loved to reminisce about it, about little things he remembered, a lane, a hilltop view (was it still the same?), a bar (was it still there?), a coffee shop, a bookstore. Details. The minutiae of memory, the small things that one missed and longed for, which grew larger and larger as time pushed them further and further away.
“Three months, maybe,” Bern said.
“April,” Baida said, his voice actually softening. “That’s a good time.” Another pause, then he said, “I had a friend whose family owned a home on the lake. Lake Austin.”
Bern felt faint. What was this? Did he know after all, then? Was Baida toying with him?
“I used to go to this guy’s house all the time. Beautiful place. Idyllic, really. We swam off the dock and watched the people skiing up and down the lake. Those wooded cliffs. They’re still there, aren’t they?”
“Still there.”
“This guy’s name was-what was it-Holbrooke. You know any Holbrookes?”
“No.”
Baida nodded, as if understanding that it would have been a fluke. He kept his eyes on Bern, but Bern had the feeling that Baida was reading his mind, that every time he elicited a response from Bern, the red needle on his bullshit detector registered a “This is not Jude” response.
Alice popped into Bern’s mind. She would be laughing her head off at his counterfeit performance. She would be making fun of him, mocking him in her Wonderland language and striking eye-rolling poses that made no bones about what she thought of his dismal imitation of a man he’d never met.
Baida fell silent. Maybe he was thinking of April in Austin, or the lake, or the wooded cliffs, or the Holbrookes. He thought about it so long that Bern began to wonder what the hell was going on.
“We want you to get a package to Houston for us.”
This time, it was Sabella who spoke. Baida continued looking at Bern. Was that it, then? Had he passed some kind of test? Had Baida mysteriously communicated to Sabella his decision that Bern was clean enough to work with them after all? What the hell was going on here?
Bern knew only one thing: His job was to reestablish contact with Baida, using Jude’s bogus smuggling route as a lure. This was the first sign in this whole damn nightmare that maybe he was going to have the chance to actually do that. He just wanted to get it over with. He just wanted the hell out of this situation.
“How big’s the package?” Bern asked.
“About a cubic meter,” Sabella said. “Maybe twenty kilos.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Soon meaning?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Where do my people pick it up? Guatemala?”
“No. It’s here,” Sabella said. “Mexico City.”
Bern gave it some more thought. “I’ll have to check with my people, set things up, make some arrangements.”
“There’s not a lot of flexibility here,” Baida interjected. “Practically none.”
Bern got the picture.
Sabella looked at his watch. “As soon as you have final plans,” he said, “let us know. If we don’t hear from you by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, we’ll be forced to do it some other way.”
“Fine. How do I get in touch with you?”
“Call the American British Cowdray Hospital,” Sabella said, “any hour, at exactly a quarter before or a quarter past the hour. Ask for the pharmacy. Ask for Flor. When she asks, tell her you are Luis. She will tell you what to do.”
As if on cue, they could hear people entering the sala, the loud voices echoing in the vast empty room. They fell silent as someone rapidly crossed the room and then came out onto the terrace and approached them.
“Take him wherever he wants to go,” Sabella said in English to the man who waited at the edge of the arbor. Then the three of them stood, and Bern saw that Ghazi Baida was not a big man, but he was powerfully built. Baida casually put his hands in his pockets.
“Ten o’clock tomorrow,” Sabella said.
“Yeah,” Bern said, and that was that.
Bern sat in silence, alone in the backseat of the car. Most of the architectural monotony in Mexico City was created in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the millions who flooded into the metropolis from the impoverished countryside strangled its lakebed plains and its foothills and ravines with a metastasizing blight of squatters’ shanties. Fleeing the destitution of their small villages, where even industrious Death could hardly stir the energy to take them, they sought hope among strangers and created a new kind of misery for the masses.
The car entered one of these vast spiritless colonias of two-story cinder-block buildings, where every structure had started to deteriorate the moment its crude construction began. The streets were narrow, straight, endless, and full of potholes, and the few low-wattage streetlights that worked glowed sullenly. Despite the fog and closed windows, the car filled with the odor of dust. The whole surreal scene was a physical representation of Bern’s mental state: stark and alien and menacing.
The driver pulled to the curb and cut the engine. He rolled down his window, and they waited. Bern looked at his watch. Five minutes passed. Ten. He rolled down his window also. Twenty. Twenty-five. The driver’s cell phone rang. He opened it and listened.
“ Bueno, ” he said. He snapped the phone closed, started the car, and then drove away.