They both heard a faint tickling at the door handle, but neither of them had a chance to react before the door was pushed open and two men stepped inside, automatic weapons ready, although not pointing at them. As Susana gathered the front of her dress and started buttoning it, one of the men raised his hand for them to be calm.
Mazen Sabella came through the door between the two men.
“My apologies for coming in this way. Sorry.”
He was holding a paper bag.
One of Sabella’s guards went into the bathroom and then came out again.
“I have some coffee,” Sabella said, holding the bag up to them. “And a few pastries.” He was wearing the same clothes he had worn when Bern met with him. They were a little more wrinkled now.
The same guard went to the armoire and opened it. Then he got down on his knees and checked under the bed.
“What’s going on?” Bern asked.
“You and I have to talk,” Sabella said. “You’ve done a very good job of cleaning yourselves. The street is clean.” He addressed Susana. “Your cell phone, please.”
She reached for her purse, retrieved the phone, and gave it to Sabella, who gave it to the second guard. The man left the room with it.
“You’ll get it back,” Sabella said. “We just don’t want to be overheard.” He looked around the room. “So we’ll talk here.” Then he spoke to Susana again. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to talk alone. My men will take you across the street for a bite to eat. We’ll be able to see you from the window.”
Silence.
“Now?” Susana asked.
“Yes, please.”
Giving Bern a level look that told him nothing, she stepped into her shoes as she picked up her purse, then left the room with the two men. Bern and Sabella were alone now.
Sabella walked around the bed and sat in the chair where Susana’s bag had been. He opened the sack and put one of the paper cups of coffee on the nightstand, then placed a hard pan dulce beside it. He took the other coffee for himself.
Bern came around the end of the bed, too, and glanced down at the street, where Susana was crossing Calle Pasado to the pasteleria. The lights inside the pasteleria gave it a cheerful glow. Susana went to the glass display cases to order while one man sat at a table and the other one waited outside, where a light fog moved along the street.
Bern went over and sat down on the bed, picked up the pan dulce and the coffee, and bit into the bread, which was sweet and crumbly. His stomach was churning. What in God’s name was going to happen now?
Sabella sipped his coffee and looked at Bern with large dark eyes that sagged at the outside corners. They were bloodshot, the irises deep brown, melting into the pupils. Bern tried to swallow the bite of pan dulce, but it was too dry and hung in his throat. He sipped the coffee. This was Sabella’s show. He would have to handle the opening scene himself.
“We are completely alone,” Sabella said. “No one listening. Only the two of us. My people aren’t listening. Your people aren’t listening.” He gestured at Bern with his coffee. “You and I are alone.”
Bern stared at him, still trying to make the bread go down. Sabella stared back.
What did a man like Sabella think about in such a moment? Was he thinking strategically, trying to foresee how Jude would react to what he was about to say, and then trying to decide what his own reaction should be in response to that? This moment of hesitation, was it a moment of doubt? What could he be thinking as he sipped his coffee and watched Bern trying to hide the fact that he was nearly choking on a chunk of sugared bread, trying to hide the fact that he was petrified that his outrageous lie had been discovered by these violent people who had seen and used every imaginable trick to kill and to survive.
“Jude the smuggler,” Sabella said pensively. He sat in the straight-backed chair as if it were a throne, occupying it with confidence and shrewdness. His legs parted in a posture of stolid resolution. His back was straight, and wiry black hair showed through the open front of his shirt, while on his wrist, as on Baida’s, a black military watch counted down the diminishing hours.
“We talked about so many things, didn’t we, Judas, in Ciudad del Este?”
Bern nodded. He wanted to appear… Jude-ish. Wiser than Bern. With more guts than Bern. With a view of the world that made him unflappable, and with a cynicism that Bern would never be able to understand.
“Do you know what I think, Judas?” Sabella’s eyes were alert, but his face was benumbed by the gravity of his game, by the high stakes involved. “I think you know… precisely… who Ghazi Baida is.” He paused, letting the surprise do its work in silence. Then: “He’s not just some guy who wants to move twenty kilos of something in a box. And you’re not just a smuggler who doesn’t care what it is, who will move anything but dope. You’re not just some guy who’s trying to save his ass, who wants a bundle of money.”
Sabella raised his coffee and blew on it softly, his eyes remaining on Bern all the while. But he didn’t take a sip of the coffee.
“I think you know Ghazi Baida… intimately, Judas,” Sabella said, “the smell of his breath, the way he understands the color of light, the way he tastes something… the way he hates. I think you know… every tiny thing about him. You have memorized him from dossiers. You know his shoe size. You know the women he’s slept with. You know the brand of cigarettes he smokes, and you know how many he smokes a day.”
Bern sipped his coffee. He felt sweat popping out along his hairline. He saw faint shadows behind Sabella, clumps of fog prowling along the street. He felt not entirely within himself, as if he were pulling loose from his own personality, the discombobulated Dr. Jekyll.
Sabella lifted his chin in a kind of acknowledgment and went on.
“You know, too, that we have not been able to find out a damn thing about you, my friend. Nada. You appear, in fact, to be Judas Teller. An artist. A smuggler. A fucker of many women. A loner. A nobody much. Perhaps a bitter man.”
Now Sabella sipped his own coffee. He swallowed, nodded to himself.
“But… Baida smells you, Judas. He smells the shit on you. He doesn’t care what he can’t prove; he knows what he knows. Ghazi is not an idiot.”
His face didn’t change. He didn’t blink. His voice was curiously pensive, with no edge to it, no urgency.
“What is it?” Sabella asked. “They want to kill him? Is it you? Are you supposed to do it yourself? It’s not the right time yet? Not the right place? And Mexico makes it more difficult for you, doesn’t it? Maybe it has to look like something else. It wouldn’t do for the CIA to be involved in an assassination scandal in a country so close. So there has to be some elaborate planning. That takes time. Not easy, huh?”
Bern watched Sabella’s face, and he knew what was happening. Sabella was giving him a polygraph test, his own version of that dubious examination. He had seen this kind of penetrating scrutiny too many times on Alice’s face, the impaling gaze that saw the unseen, that read the unreadable, the gaze that crawled inside the head, and even inside the heart, and sniffed out the lie. After more than twenty years of running and hiding with Baida, Sabella’s whole being had become a trembling sensor for the lie. It had kept them alive, this tremulous humming within him, attuned to deceit. Bern remembered reading the incisive interviews that Jude had had with Sabella before Baida even showed his face. Extraordinary.
“I don’t know,” Bern said. “But I think there’s a big misunderstanding here.”
Something changed in Sabella’s face, subtle, hardly there at all, Bern couldn’t even describe it, but he knew that Sabella had just gotten the answer that he knew was there all along.
Sabella leaned forward, lowered his voice.
“Ghazi Baida wants to make a deal,” Sabella said.
Bern swallowed. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to take a sip of coffee to cover it.
“A deal,” Bern said. What did he do with this? He was numb. He couldn’t make his mind put together a response.
“He wants you to kill him,” Sabella said. “He wants you to put him out of his misery. And in return, he will spare ten thousand American lives.”