The last thing he did before heading off for Mexico was memorize the map on the back of the crumpled and then flattened business card, and then mail it to Art Castro with a note to hold on to it for him. He had no idea if that had anything to do with what the apartment wreckers had been after, but there was no point having it on his person. He drove straight down to Tijuana and followed the toll road south from there to Ensenada. He hadn’t wanted to use the toll road, but larcenous road signs just over the border had sent him to the toll road by default, calling it the “scenic route” but not mentioning any other.
Art Castro was absolutely right about the flag. The road skirted around a rocky point and into town, and there it was, on a flagpole as tall as a twenty-story building. The huge Mexican flag, billowing inland on the sea breeze, was so ludicrously overlarge that it virtually reduced the good-sized city in the basin to a toytown.
The big flagpole turned out to be in a plaza next to the sleepy harbor, and parking nearby was easy. He sat on a bench for half an hour, listening to the eerie flup-flap overhead like the landing approach of some malign Flying Dutchman. He had never noticed before, but there was something inherently nightmarish in very large things that made noise. Perhaps he was just attuned to nightmares now, having spent his short night’s sleep retreating block by block as a flood slowly inundated the town he had grown up in. He didn’t even want to speculate on what it might mean.
Finally a man in a cowboy shirt approached across the cement expanse. He had his black hair slicked back in a pompadour and he wore expensive-looking cowboy boots. It was either the cop, or Jack Liffey was about to be offered a bag of dope.
“Jack?”
“Jaime?” They shook hands.
“You can call me James if you want. James Torres.” He spoke nearly perfect English.
“I can get my mouth around ‘Jaime.’ ”
“Come.”
The cop nodded and began to stroll toward the harbor and he followed, noting a bulge or two at odd points under the man’s clothing. “Your English is very good.”
“Garfield High in East Los,” he said. “My parents sent me up there to learn about your country and get my education. Our public schools, I must admit, are not very good.”
Jaime Torres looked around now and then, as if suspecting a tail. It seemed strange for such a chunky, stolid-looking man to act so skittish. They turned onto a harborside promenade lined with mostly sport-fishing boats nodding gently on the placid water. On the land side were dry docks and closed-up restaurants. There were several little knots of strollers, heading both ways. Jaime’s cowboy boots had taps that clicked and clacked on the cement, which didn’t seem particularly advisable for a cop, but what did Jack Liffey know about Mexican police work?
“Let me tell you a tale.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Two months ago, a college student in town comes to a real estate office to buy a nice house. Up on Chapultepec Hill. He’s got it picked out, and he closes the deal right away. This is in the neighborhood of $100,000 U.S. In cash—used hundreds. Now, this real estate lady doesn’t say too much because cash has been used in this town before. Large amounts of cash are not unheard of in Baja California. Some of the narcotráficos buy nice homes here and in Rosarito with cash, to get their families out of the horrors of Tijuana. And there are legitimate ways of coming up with North American cash, too, of course. Especially in the tourist trade.”
They approached two men in work clothes peering into a trash bin, as if it might contain something interesting. “Galleons have been stopping in this bay since Cabrillo.” The policeman switched subjects without missing a beat. “It is the only sheltered bay on the whole north coast of Baja and I’m sure you will find it’s a fascinating town.”
“Nice flag, too.”
The cop was silent for a while until the two men were well astern. “Now the real estate lady notices something else odd. This college boy isn’t really the one to move into the house, she discovers. It’s a very nice house, I might add. It is a norteamericana moving in, maybe eighteen. She calls herself ‘Betty Olson,’ and she looks a lot like the photograph Art sent on the fax, except her hair is bright red now. She is seen several times at the El Gigante supermarket stocking up on food, and buying some furniture over on Juarez, like somebody planning to stay awhile.”
They had to come to a stop as a bell clanged and the sidewalk lifted all of a sudden ahead of them like a drawbridge. A beautiful two-masted wooden yacht began to wheel seaward across their path in a dry dock, freshly varnished. Men yelled at each other to direct the operation. “If you look at those islands out in the bay, those are the Islas de Todos Los Santos. They are supposed to have buried treasure from the galleons. Your Robert Louis Stevenson lived in San Miguel up the coast for many years, and those islands are supposed to have inspired Treasure Island.”
“He isn’t really my Robert Louis Stevenson, I don’t think, but I did like him as a child.”
Jaime Torres crooked his neck as a signal and they turned around and headed back along the promenade.
“It was the connection to the college boy, information that Art passed on to me—well, I think that is what made my search successful so quickly. I suppose the other people looking for this girl did not know about that.”
“What other people?”
“Do you know who the judiciales are?”
“Maybe you better tell me.”
“They are a federal police agency. They have a certain reputation.”
He glanced at Jack Liffey as if trying to decide how far to trust him.
“I don’t think it’s a big secret, but maybe you better tell me the reputation, too.”
“They have been known to be very close to the narcotráficos, to protect them, to act as bodyguards for their drug shipments, and to do their tareas—their dirty work, I think you say. Some parts of my English are rusty. But who knows, perhaps in this case, the judiciales are only cooperating with your authorities. They must do some legitimate police work, after all. Your federal agencies have this girl listed as a class-one offender. That is very bad. It means they really, really want her.”
“And you found her. It sounds like you earned your money.”
He nodded. “And it was enough money for me to report to you and not them. And also because Arturo is my good carnalito.”
Jack Liffey noticed that the policeman hadn’t actually told him anything yet, except the name of the hill. He wondered if there was going to be a surcharge. A deep horn bleated out in the bay and he saw a sleek white cruise ship rounding the breakwater with a lot of people on deck.
“In forty-five minutes this town will be overrun with your countrymen asking the way to Hussong’s, and trying to buy a human skull made into an ashtray. There is one thing else, amigo.”
“As long as it’s not my skull made into an ashtray.” Here came the mordida, he thought.
“I paid a visit to my adivina this morning. My fortune-teller. I asked about you, because I knew I was going to have to do business with you, and she said you are honorable, but you have a rare thing, a duplicate out there in the world. No, I wonder how to say ‘doppelganger’?”
“It’s ‘doppelganger.’ ” Jesus, Jack Liffey thought. He really was an outsider here. In his wildest fancies, he couldn’t imagine a Culver City cop telling him he’d dropped by the palm reader that morning to ask about him.
“Okay. She says only a few of us have this doppelganger somewhere in the world who is a complement of our soul. Normally we never meet him in the journey of our life. But if we do, there are explosions and surprises. Our soul struggles with this other, and some bad shit goes down. Or very good shit, but not very often. This is what Madame Sosostris told me.”
The name seemed familiar, and then he remembered that the name was from Eliot, from The Waste Land. Super-duper, he thought, personal messages from a Mexican soothsayer who had named herself out of one of the great English poems of despair. It didn’t do much for the dread he had felt ever since Jaime Torres had mentioned the judiciales. They troubled him a lot more than any doppelgangers. “Did Madame Sosostris say where she got her information?” he asked to be polite.
“She talks to the dead.”
They were almost back to the flag, and he heard it flupping again, beating and whapping the air. Something big and bad descending from far above.
“Fuck the dead,” Jack Liffey said, suddenly tired of all the nonsense. “What the hell makes her think the dead tell the truth? They probably lie just as much as your ordinary Joe. Are you going to tell me where the girl lives, or am I going to have to pay extra?”
“Go down to the bus depot. It’s on Calle 2a, but you won’t find any street signs saying that. Go north on this street and it becomes Alemán and takes you up the hill. Keep going to the pink house with the dolphins on the posts.”
“Thank you, Jaime.” He was relieved.
“See those two men by the food stand? Don’t look directly.”
There were two preoccupied-looking men in dark suits, with white cowboy shirts a lot like Jaime’s. They seemed to be eating tacos.
“So you know what judiciales look like. Buena suerte, amigo.”
* * *
They might have been dolphins, but they might as easily have been big concrete tunas sitting on their bent-under tails, or even bass. The house was on the flank of the hill and looked out over the entire basin, with the huge flag smack in the middle of things since the coast curved out again behind the flag. There was probably meant to be an automatic gate on rollers between the guard fish, but it didn’t seem to be functioning yet and sat open. Everything looked brand-new, just built. He parked in the courtyard, where the cement had been stained red and grooved to suggest tiles. There was a spiffy new purple Toyota RAV-4 with Frontera plates.
She opened the massive antiqued door right away to his knock, with a big silver revolver pointed straight at his face. “Who are you?” Her voice was very jumpy.
“Relax, Becky. The guys to worry about won’t struggle up your hill in an old VW.” He opened his jacket to show there were no guns in his waistband.
She seemed to be trying to hide her face behind both fists and the big pistol, but a lot of bright red hair stuck out all around.
“How do you know my name?”
“Your father sent me to find you. Don’t worry. I never take anybody back if they don’t want to go. I just need to find out if you’re okay.”
“My fucking father, the jerk-off,” she said contemptuously.
“Right, the fucking jerk-off. Could you put the pistol down, please. It makes me nervous.”
“Me, too.” She lowered it but kept it ready. He could see she was a lot more attractive than the photo. She had one of those faces that relied on mobility, and freezing its expression in a single instant would never do it justice. She was wearing a Mexican peasant blouse and a big skirt—protective coloration.
“Let’s sit down,” he suggested, “and talk a bit so I can reassure your father, and then I’ll get out of your life. Is that satisfactory?”
She didn’t say anything but she beckoned him through the living room, out glass doors onto a rock patio that looked out over the town and the monster flag again. She left him for a moment and then brought out a tray that held the pistol, a pitcher of lemonade, and two handmade deep blue glasses. Judging from the barrel, the pistol used some odd oversize ammunition—maybe a .44.
“Hold the gun,” he said, waving it off. “I’ll just have the lemonade.”
She smiled just a little, but remained very nervous. “What’s your name?”
“Jack Liffey.”
“So my tool belt of a father hired a private dick to find me. Mierda! Like, do you know how aggravating that man is?”
“I think I know a bit of it.”
She sat and poured them some lemonade. She seemed to relax a little.
“When I was growing up, I’d, like, do something, and he was always, Why are you doing that? And then he’d tell me why I was doing it. He, like, couldn’t stop digging at me.”
He took his glass and sipped. It was bitter, but refreshing.
“I mean, all the time, at me. Interpreting. Inspecting. Like, cross-examining. I couldn’t get in a word edgewise about my own motives, before he was making me the absolutely perfect object lesson in some goddamn theory.”
“And his theories are nowhere near as bright as he thinks they are,” Jack Liffey offered.
She focused on him all of a sudden. “Huh? Yeah. That’s exactly true. It’s nice to have somebody agree with your reality. Did he annoy you, too?”
“Some. Not enough for me to screw up my whole life out of spite.”
She grinned. “Well, that’s your opinion, Jack. You’re not his daughter. And anyway I feel pretty good these days. Wanna go inside and get down, a little recreational sex, feel like it? This is Mexico—all things are permitted.”
It wasn’t a serious offer, just showing off, so he didn’t have to deal with it. “Could you tell me how you can afford all this?”
“I’d rather not.”
There was a hoot from the harbor, echoing between the hills, and a second cruise ship came slowly around the point, looking top-heavy with so many decks.
“How about the idea of going back with me, maybe just for a visit?”
She laughed. “You don’t get it, do you? This is, like, a done deal. I can’t go home. Why do you think I’ve got red hair and the horrible name ‘Betty Olson’? Wasn’t she something in the Archie comics?”
“I don’t think so. It’s best not to keep any of the same initials, you know. I know it’s comforting but it can be a giveaway, just a hint that catches the observant eye in an otherwise-featureless list of possibilities.”
“You’re an expert on disappearing?”
“Finding. It can amount to the same thing. I’m on your side here, but I think you’d better tell me who the bad guys are. I found you. You can bet they will.”
“Oh, shit!” That realization seemed to be dawning hard on her, and she picked up the pistol again for comfort. “Damn, damn, damn! You’re right, of course. Stay here.” She climbed a staircase up to a widow’s walk on the roof and surveyed the road that climbed the flank of the hill, then came back down.
“You think anybody might have followed you?”
He shrugged. “This isn’t my country. It’s hard to tell. I’ve only had one lesson on what judiciales look like.”
She shuddered. “That would not be good news. Okay, I’ll tell you what happened, like, just the newsbreak. Film at eleven.”
She settled back into the wood chaise, sipped at the lemonade, and made a face. “This is awful, isn’t it? Contrary to what people may have told you, I was deeply in love with Fariborz Bayat, really, really in love. He was a wonderful guy, thoughtful, smart, kind and passionate, with an amazingly dry sense of humor. I was head over heels. Right up until that religion stuff got its hooks into him. Well, he was still all those wonderful things, he just directed it elsewhere and his gurus made him, like, cut me off cold. I wasn’t Moslem, wasn’t moral, wasn’t a good influence.” She smiled. “We did get it on some, and the Prophet seems to disapprove of that, just like Jesus.
“While this is going down, without us knowing much about it, his dad is, like, sinking into deep economic doo-doo. The market for new housing in Southern California is in the tank, nobody’s building anything, and consequently, like, nobody’s buying his ugly fake rocks.”
“So, something has to give. I think the bright idea to solve his cashflow crisis comes from his number two, Mahmoud. You meet him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mahmoud talks to some guys in T.J. who specialize in … importing stuff across the border. Mr. Bayat shudders and says no. He’s not a bad guy—a lot like his son—but Mahmoud has already made some arrangements and you don’t back down on these guys. So finally, I think to save Mahmoud’s neck as much as anything, Mr. Bayat Senior says he’ll do this thing just one time, and that’s it. Unfortunately, this comes just as the boys are getting all holy at Kennedy. Fariborz found out about his dad’s deal. Which is part of how I found out about it. Fariborz had worked down at the plant in T.J., and he’s a bright boy.”
She poured herself some more lemonade. There was a look of relief on her face, telling her secret to someone at last. Jack Liffey guessed most of the rest, but he sat silent.
“The Kennedy Four decide to, like, liberate the money and trash the dope, to the greater glory of Allah. The dope money would buy a lot of prayer rugs, or whatever. They sneak into the warehouse in Bev Hills and find it’s not so easy to trash the dope. It’s sealed inside hundreds of those fake rocks.” Jack Liffey recalled the sloshy feeling of the rock with fluid inside. “It’s dissolved in some solvent used for the purpose, but it would take them all night to empty the rocks, one by one. They do get the money in their surprise raid, though; a big pigskin suitcase full of cash. Lord knows where the buy-money would be now”—She grinned—“I blindsided them while they were busy trying to empty out the rocks. They’re just boys. It took me three solid hours to count the money when I got it away. Almost two million dollars in used bills: hundreds, fifties, and twenties. I’d been wanting to run away and, like, what better nest egg, huh?”
“I can think of a lot better one,” Jack Liffey said. “A nest egg that doesn’t belong to the Arellano drogistas.”
“I didn’t have much choice.”
“You know, they tend to machine-gun everything in the area on general principles and sort out who’s who later.”
She shrugged. “Everybody disappeared at once. The Mexicans probably think Mr. Bayat took them off, or some L.A. gang took him off. Mr. Bayat probably thinks his son took it, so he’s not going to squeal. Only the boys know I took it. I’m not afraid of them.”
“There’s a cop in this town who found you pretty easily, when I asked. He says the Border Patrol and the judiciales have Rebecca Auslander listed as a class-one offender. I think they reserve that for serial killers and the heads of drug cartels. It’s just a measure of their seriousness in looking for you. I wouldn’t count on cheap hair dye going very far.”
“Did your cop pal tell the judiciales?” Her eyes were as big as saucers.
“Not yet. They’d be swarming up the hill right now. You can bet there’s a hell of a reward, though, and I can’t promise he won’t. As I see it, you’ve got two choices. Come back with me now. I’ll protect you and try to find a way to return the money to mollify the narcos. Or run. Now, today. Abandon everything, leave the car, dye your hair black with shoe polish and take the bus out of here, and don’t look back. I’d head for Europe, get out of this hemisphere completely. Or Australia. You’d probably be even better off in Idaho, though our own feds are looking for you, too. I’m not sure why.”
“Shit!” She stared out over the town. “I guess it was just a false sense of security, wasn’t it? Like, I hardly got settled. Wanna buy a nice house with a view for $2.98?”
He laughed. She was pretty self-possessed for someone her age. Her father must have done something right. “Come back with me. I’ll do everything I can. You can probably go into witness protection.”
“I don’t know a thing that would make the FBI bargain with me. I just, like, grabbed a bag of money and ran. I think you’d better go now.”
“Sure?”
“The longer you’re here, the more dangerous for me, right?”
He told her his P.O. box number and asked her to write, and promised he would forward stuff to her father with no return address.
“Sure, sure. Beat it. Wait.” She considered. “Tell Dad I’m growing roses now. He’ll know what it means.”
“All the luck in the world.”
“Go straight back to the States—okay?—so nobody can torture my location out of you.”
“Yeah, well, you be gone in a half hour, and then I can tell them everything I know before I lose all my fingernails. I’m no hero.”
He stopped at a bright-colored roadside place called El Mirador on the sea cliffs halfway back to the States and had a Coke on a patio that overlooked a steep drop-off to the surf below. Now that he’d found Rebecca Auslander, he finally knew why wanting to talk to her first was such a big deal. The first one to get to her got the brass ring, the two million bucks. He decided he’d tell her father, and that was it. The FBI could do their own hunting, and he certainly wasn’t going to snitch to Bayat Senior, since that would bring on the drogistas.
That seemed to be all he had left to do, really: Report to her dad that she was okay, and hopefully she would be in touch. She was growing roses, he remembered. Whatever that meant.
It was a real letdown he felt there in the Mirador, the job suddenly over. A moroseness settled over him as he sipped the Coke, and he thought of Aneliese, wondered if he ought to buy some Viagra on the way back. You could buy anything at all over the counter here. But, Jesus, he wasn’t an old man yet. He was just under some kind of psychological stress, just knocked off balance.
Below him the water crashed and foamed, trapped in a rocky inlet, a fair analogue of his troubled psyche, he thought. Various kinds of dread and distress banging one way and another in there. Was he just afraid of getting old and ending up alone, tottering home from the convenience store every day with tiny frozen dinners? He registered that the Coke tasted better than the ones across the border, fizzier and less sweet, more like the Cokes of his youth. Nearby, Mexican children played recklessly on the cement walls. He was about to go shoo them back when a heavyset woman bellowed at them and they scattered with squeals of delight. The men’s room demanded a quarter before it would let him in to pee.
The wide toll-road from Ensenada circumnavigated the west side of T.J., up the coast, and then it ran due east hard along the border for several miles. Scores of bored-looking men lounged against the steel border wall right next to the road, as if waiting for the moment to make their break for it. Coming down the slope earlier, he’d seen over the high wall into the U.S., and it was clear that jumping the border fence wouldn’t get anyone very far right here. The rolling scrub beyond had been cleared of any trees or cover for miles, and big white-and-green four-wheelers from the Border Patrol held lookout on all the hillocks. In between, other agents putted about in those three-wheel dune buggies, or whatever they were called. And then you’d have to wade through what was left of the Tijuana River as it flowed out north of the border into the sea, which would probably etch your shoes right off your feet. Finally, you’d have to cross twelve lanes of 1-5.
He’d read that Tijuana was the busiest border crossing in the world, and one of the few where the Third World met the First directly. The road to the crossing carried on straight and dusty, the ugly graffiti-filled border wall on the left and a continuous barrio to the right. Most of the exits into the barrio were walled up, but here and there a road left at an angle up into a dismal-looking shopping street. At one of those breaks, a beige Jeep with a light bar on top appeared abruptly and hustled up to keep pace with his VW, right behind him. He checked his speed and kept it well down.
Glancing nervously into his mirror, it was as if a UFO had landed—he’d never seen so many flashing lights on a vehicle. Red and white flares chased back and forth across the roll bar, a steady red light on each fender and a spinning blue light behind the windshield. They pulled alongside as he slowed, and a man in a dark suit pointed to the next opening ahead into the barrio. A sign said COLONIA CASTILLO and took him into a narrow calle of shops. He hadn’t had time to read the legend or the seal on the Jeep’s door, but it looked official enough.
He parked and had the presence of mind to pocket his car keys. He got out and two men in dark suits came toward him, one grinning and the other frowning darkly, as if to make up precisely for the grinner. They were wearing off-white cowboy shirts, and the grinner sported a string tie.
“Manos arriba, señor,” the frowner said. “The hands op.”
“Was I speeding? I’m sorry.”
They patted him down thoroughly, but he wasn’t crazy enough to bring a gun into Mexico.
“Manos … behind they back.”
The grinner was carrying a roll of duct tape, and he tore off a strip and lashed Jack Liffey’s hands together behind his back.
“Run out of handcuffs?”
“Si, we run out of handcuffs. Now, welcome to Mexico, shut the fock op.”
Another strip of tape went over his mouth, and he panicked for an instant until he satisfied himself he could breathe easily through his nose. A third strip of tape went tight over his eyes, and he could tell it was going to hurt coming off—probably take his eyelashes and some of his eyebrows with it. He felt himself pushed into the back of the Jeep, and they drove away, making no attempt to avoid potholes as he bounced in back like a big bag of doorknobs.
He wasn’t sure of the time, but he was pretty sure it had been about an hour since he’d left Becky. He hoped she had taken him seriously. He was not going to be able to hold back much when the judiciales started asking questions in earnest.