51

Two weeks pass and there is another party. Cacho has been freed of the cast shoe and now has no need even of a cane and is eager to dance again. At the greeting line for the girls from Monterrey, Quino pairs Axel with a pretty and very amiable girl named Azuela. Axel has sex with her in his room before taking her to the lounge, where he looks around for Celinda but doesn’t see her. He isn’t surprised, because surely any man paired with her would want to have her for the full length of her visit. But neither is he disappointed. Which he is pleased to discover. He then dances with a girl named Rosa Blanca, takes her to his room, and again has a grand time.

As he would have with two different girls at the next party as well.

Now they are into September. Quino has a photographer take Axel’s picture in front of a portrait screen backdrop. “For your passport and license,” he says.

Five days later he hands Axel a Mexican passport with his picture and physical description and bearing the name “Alejandro Xavier Capote Lobos.” Plus both a Laredo and a Nuevo Laredo driver’s license with the same photo and ID.

“Social Security card’s gonna take a while longer,” Quino says.

He takes target practice almost every day at the little range outside the compound, as often as not accompanied by Quino and Cacho. Several times a week, with one or the other Capote brother, Axel goes for a long drive out on the open plain, each time in a different vehicle so he can get acquainted with all of them.

One day they take him to Nuevo Laredo for his first visit. They dine in an excellent seafood restaurant, Axel relishing his first oysters since preprison days, amazed at their freshness. Flown in every morning from Corpus Christi, Quino tells him. They stroll through the streets and ogle the girls, take a walk along the river. At a sporting goods store Axel and Cacho buy running shoes, and the next day begin a daily routine of jogs around the ranch compound, ignoring the gibes of other Malos, who call them lunatics and mad dogs.

A week later, at breakfast, Quino says to Axel, “By the way, it might interest you to know that Duro Cisneros may still be alive.”

Axel sets his fork down and clears his throat. “What makes you think so?”

“You said he had a red mark on his inside wrist like a crescent moon. I asked around and found out that such a tattoo had been the sign of a robbery gang along the Lower Rio Grande many years ago. La Luna Roja. So I asked the Zetas to put the word out that anyone who knows anybody who was a Luna Roja or who has such a tattoo was to inform me of it. Because it was a small gang and has been out of existence for nearly thirty years, it’s no surprise that only three men were located. All three were taken to Nuevo Laredo, and when I went there yesterday to meet with Sino I also went to talk to them. You said Cisneros was probably between thirty-five and forty when you knew him, which would now put him in his late fifties, mid-sixties. One of the three guys was eighty-five years old and looked it. He was able to provide a birth certificate, and I cut him loose. The other two were in their sixties, but one of them could prove he’d been in the army during the time you were with Cisneros, and the other swore he couldn’t speak English, and you said Cisneros spoke it well. We gave that one a little test that proved he really doesn’t know the language. However, in the course of our Q&A, that man, whose name is Azcal, told me there was guy in the gang named Jesús Gallo whose nickname was Duro. Hardly an uncommon name, of course, but, according to Azcal, Duro Gallo could speak English very well. Azcal and Gallo were the same age and both from Monclova, and after the gang broke up they sometimes ran into each other back home. The last time Azcal saw him was about twenty-five years ago. Gallo told him that he and a partner had been doing well pulling robberies in New Mexico and Texas. He said he could use a third man, but Azcal had quit the life. He didn’t hear anything about Gallo again until eight years ago, when he heard that he had been working as a money courier for the Juárez cartel and tried to steal a transfer somehow or other. To make a lasting example of him, they crippled him severely. The way Azcal heard it, they placed him in a Monclova apartment and the people paid to care for him were under orders to put him on display on the balcony for an hour every morning and again in the late afternoon. As far as Azcal knew, Gallo might still be there, though of course he might long since have died or been taken somewhere else. So I had it checked out. He’s still there. Apartment number eleven-F.”

“You put a lot of effort into this,” Axel says.

“I’m still thanking you for my brother, but I don’t want to discuss it. The only question is, do we go see this guy?”

They hold each other’s eyes a moment.

“Let’s do it,” Axel says.