“Your brother,” Sabella said to Bern, leveling his eyes at him, “was good, but he wasn’t as good as Ghazi Baida. And he never would be. When they met in Ciudad del Este, it was a contest of masters from the start. Judas was trying to lure Ghazi into Mexico, and he had decided to play a very risky game to achieve that, a game of… insouciance. Do you know that word… Paul?”
“Yes, I know the word.” But Bern had taken note of the way Sabella had hesitated before saying his first name. And he also noticed something that he hadn’t seen in the previous few minutes. As he had done that night in the Hotel Palomari, Sabella seemed to be covering up the fact that he was under a lot of pressure. Perspiration was beginning to glisten on his temples, and an underlying note of tension had begun to show through his relaxed manner.
“Unworried,” Sabella said. “Unconcerned. Take it or leave it. That was Judas. When that game is played well, and Judas played it very well indeed, it can be most enticing. If the target-in this case, Ghazi-senses that this insouciance is an act-then it’s all over. But Judas was a master of the fuck-off attitude. He offers you a deal, but it is slightly in his favor. He pretends not to notice this, but he knows that you do. And then he tells you to take it or leave it. He bets the whole table on his attitude, and on this moment when his target might say, Okay then, I’ll leave it. If he says that, it’s over. Taking that kind of risk, all or nothing, that takes very big balls.”
Sabella looked a the two women, then back to Bern.
“But you know what?” he went on. “Insouciance, genuine insouciance, can be seductive. Why? For the same reason that gold is seductive, or certain kinds of pearls, or love. Because it is rare.”
Sabella leaned a little more toward Bern, his body language suggesting he was about to share a secret.
“Ghazi Baida saw himself in Judas,” Sabella said softly. “He saw the same kind of man that he was looking back at him from Judas’s eyes. And he accepted Judas’s challenge. Why? Because it was the ultimate challenge, to bet your life-everything-against a man who is exactly like yourself. Ghazi accepted Judas’s challenge, and he came to Mexico City, stepping willingly into Judas’s advantage.”
Sabella paused and smiled, despite his barely subdued agitation.
“And he won,” Sabella said.
Suddenly, Alice burst into a tantrum.
“No! No! Nononono! He’s the who man! Just really… really the shitty no man,” she blurted at Bern, flinging a look at Sabella, her Asian features hardened into an indictment. “ He’s the who of the whole thing about him.”
Sabella flinched and locked his eyes on Alice, anger, alarm, and suspicion mingled in his expression.
Before Bern could speak, Susana intervened.
“Alice, Alice, listen to me… listen… the lights… the lights… don’t worry about it… anytime. Just the lights. It’s okay. Understand? Understand?”
Bern was caught off guard, and it seemed for a moment that Alice was, too. She looked at Susana, her eyebrows raised in puzzled fascination, and then she began to rock her head from side to side.
“You need to listen to me, Alice,” Susana went on. “The lights.. . okay. Now! The lights now!”
“Okay,” Sabella snapped. “That’s enough of this shit. You think you can do this? You think I’m an idiot, Judas? You don’t have any idea what’s happened to you.”
Bern was dumbfounded. Sabella really thought he was Jude!
“Wait a second,” Bern said, his head growing lighter, his disbelief at what was happening almost scrambling his thinking. “This is… insane. Look, I’m not Jude. I can prove it.”
“No!” Sabella said, stretching out an arm as one of his guards handed him a small tape recorder. “Let me prove something to you. ”
He clicked a button the recorder, and they listened to Mondragon’s final moments in Carleta de Leon’s apartment overlooking the plaza Jardin Morena.
There was a loud smashing noise as Quito and Susana burst into the room, sending Mondragon and Quito crashing into the dining room table and chairs.
“Guns on the table!” Bern yelled.
“Don’t do it!” Susana screamed as she swung her gun around to Quito, who was scrambling to his feet. “No! No!” But Quito brought up his gun anyway.
They heard the punt and smack of her silenced bullet blowing out the back of Quito’s head. There was the sound of Bern rushing to Baida’s side as he tried to stanch the hem-orrhaging wound in his neck.
Silence. Then: “Jude,” Susana snapped, “has he talked?”
“No!”
“Nothing? You don’t know anything?”
“No!”
Another prolonged silence while Bern continued to stanch the bleeding in Baida’s neck, and Susana had her gun on Mondragon.
“Oh! God. Shit! Good, good!” Bern said, momentarily deluded into thinking that Baida’s bleeding was stopping. In fact, he was dying.
Silence.
“Jude,” Susana said again, trying to get his attention.
Sabella punched off the recorder.
Shocked, Bern and Susana looked at each other, realizing what her slip of the tongue had done to them.
Silence.
Alice, picking up on the building tension in the room, was growing increasingly flustered. Then suddenly her arm flew up and she pointed a finger at Sabella and began yelling.
“ He’s the who man!… The who man!… The who man!…” she chanted, her eyes flashing at Sabella. “ He’s the who man!… The who-”
Sabella’s two bodyguards threw nervous glances at everyone, shifting their weight from foot to foot as if to be ready for anything, as if Alice’s wailing could unleash some hidden threat.
“The lights!” Susana yelled at Alice. “Goddamn it, the lights!”
The last word hit Bern with a flash of understanding, and his thumb hit the bottom button on the remote.
Instant darkness.
Alice screamed, a prolonged high-pitched shriek.
Everything was crowded into the short burst of the next few seconds.
Sabella yelled, “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!”
But the bodyguards’ hesitation was fatal.
From Susana’s corner of the sofa, one, two, three shots blasted through the darkness, and one of the guards flew backward as the other guard lunged away, ripping off a wild burst from his weapon an instant before Susana’s fourth and fifth shots blew into him, driv-ing him into a worktable and knocking over glass jars of Bern’s old paintbrushes, everything crashing into the darkness.
“He’s Ghazi!” Susana screamed. “He’s Ghazi!”
Unconsciously, a stunned Bern was keeping track of the sounds of the choreography: one down, two down, the third man bolting across the paths of the other two.
Bern threw himself at Baida just as the Lebanese reached the glass wall, their momentum and combined weight exploding the glass and hurling them through the railing on the deck and over the side.
The two men embraced.
The fall lasted for days.
Bern’s face was buried in Baida’s sweaty shirt, and he could smell the other man’s fear and his violence, and he could feel his taut muscles and energy and even the painfully slow boom… boom… boom of his heartbeat as it demanded life, even in the airy fall through the moonlight above the lake.