“Listen, Mazen,” Bern said, turning his back to the plaza again. He hunched over the phone box as if protecting a private conversation, then carefully pulled Kevern’s phone out of his inside coat pocket.
“I’ve got a secure cell phone to my people, and I’m opening it right now,” he said, running his thumb down the three digits as Lupe had showed him. “Okay?”
“Yes, okay,” Sabella said.
Bern waited, listening to the hum, the click, the connection.
“I’m here,” Kevern said.
“Now… I’m talking to both of you,” Bern said into both phones. “You’re both hearing what I’m saying at this moment. Okay, Mazen?”
“Yes, okay.”
“Lex?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” Kevern’s voice had slipped into the smooth monotone of operational dispassion. Be cool, it said to Bern. Be careful. Don’t let the juice confuse your thinking.
“Lex, let me bring you up to-”
“We know,” Kevern said quickly. “Your phone’s been live all this time. We’re up to speed.”
Bern was stunned and pissed, but there was no time for that.
“Well, shit, then,” he snapped, “are you sending someone?”
“We’re on the way,” Kevern said.
Move on, move on, Bern kept telling himself.
“Mazen, I know you’re at a vantage point where you can see this side of the plaza. Are you in rooms above Farmacia Pedras?”
“Hurry,” Mazen said.
Flustered, Bern went on. “Okay, these men in the plaza are Vicente Mondragon’s. He’s got Susana, and he said he’d kill her if I told you, or contacted my people. He’s expecting me to lead him to you. I don’t know what he’s doing, what he’s planning, but we’ve tried to stop him. Now he’s broken communication with us.”
Bern was talking fast, cramming everything in.
“Mazen, listen, you said that we had only a small window of opportunity here and after that it would be too late. Were you referring to information that you have that’s time-critical? Do you need to tell us something now? Do we need to do something?”
The ensuing lack of response was the most unnerving silence Bern had ever experienced. Weirdly, he began to experience an alteration in perception, not of sight or sound or touch, but of the flow of time. Sabella’s silence extended through the afternoon and into dusk.
“Mondragon,” Sabella said. His voice, too, was accommodating the numbing stress of their situation. “Yes, that was a good choice, Judas. A good choice, because we didn’t even know that he was still alive.” His voice had lost its tension, and he seemed composed. Or was it the serenity of resignation?
“Where’s Vicente now?” Sabella asked.
Bern told him about Mondragon catching up to him on his way to Jardin Morena, about the phone, the conversation they’d had, the threats.
“So I don’t know where he is,” he added. “I guess he’s in the area somewhere.”
“Yes, hanging back,” Sabella agreed.
“But Kevern is on the way with people.”
“Four of us,” Kevern interjected.
“Four,” Bern said to Sabella.
“We don’t have any people here,” Sabella said, and this time Bern could clearly hear the resignation in his voice. And yet it wasn’t quite resignation, either, it was more like an intimacy with fate, as if he held no rancor for the inevitable. It was a philosophical acceptance of the inevitable.
“We come to Plaza Morena twice a week, if we can. We’ve done it for over a year now. But we come alone. We have a very elaborate process that we go through that allows us to come here-safely, alone. When we enter Plaza Morena, we’re just two more anonymous capitalinos, nothing more.”
“Twice a week?”
“Ghazi has a woman here,” Sabella explained.
Oh shit. “He’s with her now?”
“Yes.”
“And no bodyguards?” Bern couldn’t believe it. Despite what Kevern had told him, he thought Sabella and Baida would have someone to help them.
This explained why Sabella seemed to know the plaza so well. He must have spent hours sitting by the window, wherever the window was, gazing down at the plaza. When you are familiar with the daily rhythms of life on a street or in a neighborhood, you acquire a sense of what normal is in that place. A new face or a change in routine is like an alarm going off.
Bern related Baida’s situation to Kevern and then asked, “Where the hell are you?”
“We’re about halfway there.”
“Look, when you get to the Jardin Morena,” Bern said, “I’m-”
“There’s GPS on your cell, Paul. We know exactly where you are.”
“He’s taking too long,” Quito said, referring to Bern talking on the pay phone. He was sitting in Mondragon’s Mercedes, around the block from Jardin Morena. Susana was in the backseat with Mondragon, and Quito was sitting beside the driver, working the radio equipment that was keeping him in touch with his men on the plaza. “He’s talking to Kevern or Baida, telling them what’s happened.”
“I don’t know,” Mondragon said. “Baida’s plan will be very elaborate, complex. He will want to give himself plenty of room to check and cross-check.”
“He’s not writing anything down,” Quito said.
“Baida wouldn’t let him do that,” Mondragon replied. “Bern could be memorizing the route, the time sequence. Maybe repeating it back to Baida, rehearsing it.”
“Or he could be spilling his guts,” Quito insisted.
“You know,” Mondragon said, “Jude might have done that. He was just crazy enough to take the risk that we wouldn’t shoot her. But Bern’s not that tough, doesn’t have that kind of discipline.”
“But he’s taking too long,” Quito warned.
In truth, Mondragon was uneasy about the amount of time Bern was spending on the phone, too. Quito was probably right, damn it.
“Where’s Kevern now?” Mondragon asked, spritzing the front of his head.
“They’ve just passed Parque Hundido.”
“ Perfecto, ” Mondragon said. “Wait until they are approaching the on-ramp to the circuito and do it there.”
“Judas,” Sabella said, breaking the silence. “Stay where you are. I’m going to be off the phone for a few minutes, but I’ll be back.”
“What? Wait!”
“Just stay where you are. Stay on the phone. Talk to your man. I’ll be back. Do it.”
Bern couldn’t believe it. “He just left the phone,” Bern said to Kevern.
“Left the phone? Whatta you mean?”
“He left the goddamned phone. Said for me to stay on the phone. Not to leave the phone.”
“Shit, he’s running,” Kevern said. “He’s running, goddamn it!”
Mondragon’s man inside the pharmacy could see Bern through the front window. He kept one eye on him as he milled around the rows of shelves in the small shop. There was no one there at first, and then a young woman came in with a child, one of those children who simply stared at you in sober silence and could not be charmed into any kind of reaction at all. And yet she wouldn’t stop looking at him. Gave him the creeps.
The store was L-shaped, so he went around the corner into another row of shelves to get away from the kid, although still keeping Bern in sight. Good, magazines. He looked for some sexy covers and picked up one of them just as another woman entered from the back door of the shop, which opened into a typical courtyard.
The woman was nice-looking, late thirties, her dark hair done up quickly. She wore a blue shirtwaist dress that buttoned up the front. The top button was undone, exposing a very nice set of chichis. He glanced at Bern.
The woman came right at him, apparently interested in the magazines, too. But she seemed to want to see the ones on the other side of him. Gathering her skirt delicately, she begged his pardon, and he stepped back to let her by. For one sweet moment, they were face-to-face as she slipped past him, her eyes modestly averted as her bosom wafted by right under his nose. On the other side now, she turned her back to the front of the store, Bern behind her, and bent down to search through the magazines on the bottom shelf.
Her position couldn’t have been better for him. His eyes only had to move a slight flick to switch from Bern to her bosom, where gravity swelled her breasts to the spilling point.
Then suddenly, the little girl was in the picture again, appearing squarely in the center of the aisle behind the woman, her moronic stare fixed on him once more, her head poking up just above the woman’s hips, as if it were balanced on top of them.
Tits, child, Bern. Tits, child, Bern. The kid was irritating the shit out of him. The woman moved a few magazines, looking under them, her movements causing her breasts to shift and roll. The kid stared at him. Bern talked. With all the bending, the woman had to adjust herself, slipping a pretty hand inside-
The kid’s moronic eyes shifted slightly to a position over the man’s right shoulder, her expression still as dumb as a rock.
The hand coming over his shoulder and covering his mouth hardly registered on him before the knife did its work on his throat. He knew he was dying. The woman straightened up and walked past him as if he weren’t there. Then he felt himself being dragged backward.
The last thing his eyes registered was the mute, imbecilic stare of the little girl, who did not run or blink or react to what she was seeing. She seemed to think that watching a murder in the back aisle of a pharmacy was no extraordinary thing.