“It means that every moment Maricruz is away from me is agony.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
Kai shrugged. “I find women the most disposable of commodities. Now and again my penis becomes inordinately interested in them, and then I follow its lead. But when the act is over, I forget all about them. Why wouldn’t I? There’s nothing of interest in an act that’s part mechanical, part chemical.”
“Nothing interesting about the other participant?”
“The women are the least memorable part of it,” Kai said. “One body blends into the next, and as for their faces, frankly, I can’t recall a single one.”
Ouyang laughed. “You know, Kai, I think a sojourn to your club would do you a world of good. Who knows, maybe this time you’ll find someone memorable.”
“I doubt it.” Kai put his head back and closed his eyes. “Spending too much time with you has sapped me of my desire for fun.”
“Outstanding!” Ouyang, piqued despite himself, gestured at the driver. “The car will drop us both at the office and we can get back to work plotting Cho’s imminent demise.”
As they rode along, invulnerable to any interference, either human or atmospheric, Kai took out a small folding pocketknife and gently inserted the point of the blade beneath one nail.
“Kai, what are you doing?”
“Excising the last of General Hwang Liqun.”
Looking closer, Ouyang could see thin crescents of dried blood that had become lodged beneath Kai’s well-manicured nails.
“See that you put that into the ashtray on the door,” Ouyang said. “I don’t want it soiling the carpet.”
“You bet.” Kai started on the second nail.
“What did you do to him?” Ouyang asked idly.
“You don’t want to know.” Kai flipped a thin dark red crescent into the open ashtray. “I didn’t want to make it look like an execution, so it got rather…messy.”
He looked over at Ouyang, smiling. “You know, the product of a—how shall I characterize it?—a disordered mind.”
And Ouyang thought, with an unpleasant start: Is it my imagination or is that smile more than a bit mad?
Another shaving of blood, curling like a living thing about to be born, was transferred from the tip of Kai’s knife to Ouyang’s ashtray.
26
You’re a long way from home,” Bourne said when they had finished the meal.
“I’m a long way from my husband. It’s not the same thing.”
Bourne considered this, knowing her husband the way he did. “Why did you leave Mexico?”
“I could no longer tolerate the constant drumbeat of machismo.” She smiled. “I’m a very modern woman.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
Maricruz wiped her lips on a paper napkin, pushed the tray table away. “Tell me, Javvy, do you have someone to love?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s sad to be alone, isn’t it? I’ve spent a lot of time alone and I know.”
“It’s sadder to lose someone you love.”
She scrutinized him a moment more than was necessary. “I’m so sorry. Your wife must have been special.”
“She died here in Mexico City.” Why did he tell her that? Abruptly, he found himself on dangerous ground that was of his own making.
“Did she fall ill?”
“She was stabbed to death.”
“How terrible.”
Bourne could see that Maricruz was genuinely horrified, and this produced a gush of strange, strangled pleasure inside him, in a way that brought Rebeka back from the dead, made her seem close to him again.
“She called me, but she bled out before I could get to her.”
“You were the one who found her.”
“I was.” He stared down at his hands. “All my knowledge and I wasn’t able to save her.”
“At least you were there,” Maricruz said. “I was on the other side of the world when my father was killed.”
Bourne looked up, stared into her eyes. “How did it happen?”
“I could never find out. The circumstances were murky. All I know is, he stepped into chaos and never got out.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Not really. My father knew what he was doing and where he was going. He was aware of the dangers as well as the rewards. In that respect, he died on his own terms. I wonder how many people can say that at the end of their lives?”
“I imagine not many,” Bourne said.
He was starting to get the measure of her. She was not at all as he had imagined her, and this worried him. It was dangerous to make assumptions about anyone, especially someone like Maricruz. What a pedigree this woman had: daughter of Maceo Encarnación, married to Ouyang Jidan. In every sense of the phrase she was a precious commodity, and Bourne was determined to treat her as such. As long as she remained ignorant of his true identity he knew he’d be all right.
“It seems to me,” she said now, “grief is the loneliest emotion. You get locked into it and it becomes something of a prison to which you’ve forgotten the key. Sometimes, I think you deliberately hide the key from yourself because you don’t want to be set free.”
Bourne looked at her. “Is that how you feel?”
All she offered was a thin smile.
“I think I ought to go.”
“Of course.” As he rose and crossed to the door, she added in a steely voice, “I pity you, Javvy. You can’t outrun your sorrow. Your wife is gone. You loved her, but now she’s just a memory.”
He stopped, but did not turn around to face her.
“It’s time to let it go.”
For the first time since he had left Tel Aviv, Bourne realized that he was sinking, realized that something had been left unsettled by Rebeka’s death, something fundamental, something beyond mere revenge.
“I have to go. I’ll look in on you tomorrow.”
“I know you can’t. Men are weak this way.” Maricruz turned her face to the wall.
Do you trust her?” Diego Salazar said.
Felipe Matamoros lit a cigar and began the process of obtaining just the right burn. “Why should I trust her?”
“There’s a cure for that,” Salazar said.
The two men, sitting at a table in El Ángel, on Venustiano Carranza, had just finished lunch. Dotted around them, no less than six tables were occupied by their Los Zetas soldiers, on the lookout for more intervention from the Federales.
Matamoros, crossing his legs, sat back and blew a plume of smoke upward into air redolent of blackened peppers and beer. “There’s a cure for everything, Diego. But unlike you, I know it doesn’t always involve murder. I have someone keeping an eye on her.”
“The Special Forces trained us both, compadre. Who voted early and often to defect when the Gulf cartel elders contacted us? Our future and our fortunes were made by that decision.”
“Now Maricruz Encarnación holds the key to our future and our continued fortunes.”
“Ouyang,” Salazar said. He was as thin and deadly as a rapier, with a long face, sunken cheeks scarred by a virulent bout with childhood smallpox, and dark and burning eyes, watchful as a crow’s. “She’s Señora Ouyang now.”
“Blood is blood,” Matamoros said. “She’s an Encarnación. She never would have returned to Mexico otherwise.”
“She has her husband’s interests to think of now.”
“As well as her father’s legacy.” Matamoros looked out at the wide street, with its median planted with palm trees. “As long as her husband’s interests are aligned with her late father’s she will follow them. But I have a feeling that if or when they deviate, she will choose the Encarnación path.”
Salazar frowned. “You think they will deviate?”
“Possibly not.” Matamoros turned back to his compadre. “Not without our intervention.”
Salazar grinned, lit a cigarette, and filled his lungs with calming nicoti
ne. “I see you have formed a plan.”
Matamoros nodded. “But first, I would like an explanation as to why the Federales’ helo was struck while it was hovering above us in the forest.”
Salazar shook his head. “I don’t understand you, compadre. The soldiers in the helo were raining fire down on you. Of course I gave the order to fire the missile.”
“When the helo came down, it killed our men. It almost killed Maricruz and myself.”
“What was I to do? I was caught between two conflicting poles.”
Matamoros uncrossed his legs, leaned forward so that his abdomen pressed against the edge of the table. He took the cigar out of his mouth, saw Salazar’s eyes follow it, so that when he pulled the trigger on the noise-suppressed handgun he gripped under the table, his compadre was so surprised a stunned expression paralyzed his face in the instant before he keeled over.
“You could have resolved not to try to kill me under the cover of chaos,” Matamoros said, as his soldiers left their tables and, gathering around, hauled Salazar up and dragged him away with such alacrity and precision not a single diner harbored an inkling of what had actually happened, assuming drunkenness or a sudden illness.
Octavio Luz, another of the Los Zetas compadres, sat down in the chair previously occupied by Salazar, but not before wiping the blood off the seat.
“You know, Felipe, we keep this up, we’ll be doing Carlos’s job for him.”
“Not if we stick together.” Matamoros continued to smoke his cigar as if nothing untoward had transpired. “The danger comes when someone in the cadre decides to be an individual. But, examining your point from another angle, it occurs to me that Carlos may be deliberately trying to divide in order to conquer us.”
“Explain.”
“I have a suspicion that he’s using Maricruz like a fox in the henhouse. I have hardly to tell you that some of us have been dead set against her involvement from the moment she showed up on our doorstep.”
“Salazar was one of those who was certain she was Carlos’s agent, sent in to cause this dissension.”
“Though I very much doubt that the daughter of Maceo Encarnación—a highly intelligent creature—would allow herself to become Carlos’s pawn, nevertheless she has caused dissension. But trying to get rid of me in order to keep her at arm’s distance was the decision of a madman. I only have the best interests of Los Zetas at heart.”
“You have a believer in me.” Octavio Luz hitched his chair forward. “Pero, dígame, compadre, there are others in our cadre who harbor a suspicion that the Encarnación woman has gotten under your skin.”
Matamoros spat sideways, onto the ground. “What are you saying?”
“They believe that you are infatuated with this woman, that you are—how shall I put it?—under her spell.”
“What? They think she’s some kind of bruja—a sorceress?”
“I’m merely the messenger, Felipe. I come to you as a friend.”
“No, no, compadre. You are carrying their water—these cowards who are too craven to speak of her to my face.”
Luz drew back as if struck. “Irrespective of the truth or falsehood of their belief, you see how she is affecting us. One of us is already dead. We’re at each other’s throats.”
“If we fall out, I tell you it’s not because of Maricruz,” Matamoros said emphatically. “It’s because there is an essential flaw in us—in the cadre.”
Luz, who was as solidly built as a professional wrestler and as muscular, gestured. “Do you still have that weapon aimed at me under the table?”
Matamoros placed the gun on the table amid the plates, where only the two of them could see it. “Ay, compadre, what d’you take me for?”
“I tell you, Felipe, sometimes it’s hard to tell.”
Matamoros laughed. “Please.” He handed a cigar to Luz, who bit off the end, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it slowly, running the flame back and forth close to the blunt end. “We were schoolboys together, we chased girls together, we fought off bullies together.”
“Yes, brothers under the skin, is that it? You’re preaching to the choir, compadre. I hold no suspicion, though there are many reasons not to trust the woman.”
“Just as many reasons to consider otherwise. Her truth is compelling—it’s good business for all of us. I believe her when she says she wants to keep her father’s legacy alive. If you were Maceo Encarnación’s child you would want the same.”
“But, Felipe, she ran away from him, from her homeland. Now she’s back, offering us precisely what we want and need.”
“My friend, I think you’re giving Carlos Danda Carlos too much credit. He’s not Niccolò Machiavelli.”
“Agreed,” Luz said, shifting on his chair. “But what about the woman? What about Maricruz?”
27
Maricruz lay back on her pillows after the man she knew as Javvy left her room. She fumbled for the bed’s controls but could not find the buttons. Annoyed more than she should have been by so small a frustration, she pressed the button for the nurse, who entered with her usual official stride.
“I want to lie down.”
Maricruz watched the nurse as she crossed the room and lowered the bed. She hated asking this nurse to do anything for her. At least the first couple of days, when she had to lean on her to get to the lavatory, were behind her. She shuddered at the thought; she had been as weak and helpless as a baby.
“Anything else I can do for you, señora?”
Was that a sneer on the nurse’s face? At another time, another place, Maricruz would have been incensed. Now she simply couldn’t be bothered.
“That will be all.”
She closed her eyes as the door sighed shut behind the nurse. She wanted to think about her last visit with Carlos, but instead her mind slipped its normally tight leash and kept drifting toward Javvy. He seemed a curious mixture of power and sorrow, a compelling combination in any man, but especially so in the surgeon who had restored her to health.
While she was with him she had felt a curious sense of being sexually possessed, as if she were submitting to him. That was not a feeling she had experienced before. She was used to dominating, something Jidan liked far too much, she realized with a start. This new feeling put her in terra incognita, harking back to the darkest days of her adolescence, when a potent combination of rage and raging hormones made her mutinous, barbaric, obsessed with sex. In those half-buried days and nights she had been eager to try anything and everything for the sake of needing to feel something—anything—real, that hadn’t been manufactured by her father.
As far as she was concerned, her marriage to Jidan had been something of a business transaction, though she knew full well he adored her. And yet that was part of the attraction for her—being married to a man who worshipped her, whose demeanor negated Mexican machismo, which, so far as she was concerned, was just another form of misogyny. On the other hand, China had once been ruled by the female emperor Wu Zetian, whose social, religious, and historical reforms outlived her. Not that there wasn’t a bias against females in China—there was, to varying degrees, outright or hidden, in all male-dominated societies the world over—but there was an undeniable history of females ruling from behind the bedchamber curtains, even when they didn’t rule outright.
All this brought her back to Javvy. He did not display the Mexican machismo, which, unlike her, many women inexplicably found attractive, but neither was he burdened with Jidan’s perverse form of ambiguity, which at times bordered on the androgynous.
The truth was, she had felt magnetized to him when he was near her, as if her inner sense of True North had been stripped from her, and this caused a certain fear to rise inside her like mist obscuring the ground on which she walked.
She had closed her eyes and was just falling asleep when the bustling silence of the floor was pierced by an unearthly shriek. She sat bolt-upright. The shriek came again, echoing through the corridors.
Sliding out of bed
, she made her way into the corridor. The nurses’ station was deserted and, apart from Julio, one of her night guards, who was on his feet nervously shuffling from one foot to the other, so was the corridor.
“What’s happening?” she asked him.
He shrugged.
A third shriek, high-pitched, fueled by terror, seemed to emanate from a room not more than a hundred feet from hers.
“Where the hell are the nurses?”
Again, Julio shrugged. “This often happens at night,” he said. “One of the reasons the boss has us here.”
One of the reasons, she thought as she headed down the corridor toward the room.
“Where are you going?” Julio called. “Señora, por favor! You’ll get me fired!”
Ignoring him, Maricruz reached the room. The door was shut. The shrieks had stopped, but now she heard deep, heart-wrenching cries, as if pulled directly from a bloody chest. Steeling herself, she pushed open the door.
Inside the room, she saw the girl from physical therapy. She was sitting up in bed, the sheets rucked around her. The stench of fresh feces filled Maricruz’s nostrils, and as she approached, she saw that the girl was sitting in her own shit. Her head was thrown back, her neck exposed. She stared at the ceiling and, as Maricruz stepped toward her, she let out another unworldly howl that spoke of an anguish beyond imagining.
In the silence between those dreadful wails, Maricruz called for her guard. When he stuck his head in the door, she said, “For the love of God, where are the nurses?”
“I don’t know, señora. Truly.”
“Christ on a crutch,” she murmured to herself.
“Señora?”
“Come here, Julio, and pick this girl up.”
“What are you doing, señora?” He held one hand over his nose and mouth. “How can you stand that stink?”
“Are you serious? Oh, for God’s sake!”
Leaning over the bed, she picked up the girl, who felt as cold and stiff as a marble statue. Ignoring the searing pain in her shoulder, she carried the girl into the bathroom, stripped off her gown, and spent the next ten minutes cleaning her up, holding her all the time, murmuring soothingly to her. The girl’s weight against her shoulder was agony, but as in physical therapy, it was a good pain, it meant something beyond the aftermath of Maricruz’s beating. It brought her out of herself.