THE SHARP SHADOW of the serial billboards hawking to border arrivals and departures gave shade to the small herd of news crews and spectators at the ground-breaking for a new immigration center that was the centerpiece of Mayor Richard Poole’s economic redevelopment plan for south San Diego. Just an empty scrape of San Ysidro commercial land, its few acres tufted with half-buried garbage and goatgrass and smother weed, within walking distance of the Tijuana border crossing and a long spit from the permanent gridlock of traffic crawling through customs. At the back of the gathering, where two local news mobile vans were cabled up to Betacams on tripods, was Stix Mahrez with tiny twisted reflections of the smiling mayor twinned in his Ray-Bans.
His side still ached, where the blade had done its crazing. He didn’t want to be here, but so much control of his existence, since the Feds showed up at his door, had been slipping like sand through his fingers, he had to do something. Anything. To keep hold of what remained.
Strategically fenced by an SDPD uniformed security detail, Poole gave a short speech, thanking the sundry politicians and businessmen who made this possible, including a few Mexican nationals, one of whom Mahrez recognized as Juan Blanco. Those mirror Revos, that big arrogant smile, Blanco was surrounded by his own honor guard consisting of tattooed, shaved-head, leather-clad steroid freaks suggesting a quorum of B-list Luchadores backstage at intermission.
That the Mexican narco was attending Poole’s dog-and-pony show was not the surprise; it was how he was thanked for attending that struck Mahrez as odd, possibly worrisome. Rumors sifting across the border like the stories of the Greek gods had it that after the recent arrests of Quintero and Carrillo, God of Gods cartel jefe Félix Gallardo had gone into seclusion and apportioned his empire to a collective of relatively unknown subsidiaries: Juárez to the Carrillo Fuentes family, the Sonoran corridor to Miguel Quintero, Tijuana to the Arellano-Félix brothers, the Gulf territories would stand pat with Abrego, and Joaquín Guzmán and Ismael García would take over the Pacific Coast routes, henceforth to be called the Sinaloa Cartel.
Blanco, a midlevel suck-up not known for having more than single-syllable thoughts, was generally considered to be barely another brick in the wall, but his presence here might mean he was soon to be more than that. Mahrez mused darkly that if Richard Poole knew this, it was bad—and if he didn’t, it was worse.
—
KIRBY WAS, at that same time, having a wrestling match, dueling Armani suits, with Mahrez’s attorney in Kirby’s Federal Building office, which he’d made a self-conscious half-assed effort to clean up by stacking all his case files precariously on the minifridge in the corner.
Several of them had already avalanched back onto the floor.
“Don’t do this, Kirby.” Damien Belasco decided not to sit, well aware that the guest chairs often also served as food trays for various high-risk burritos brought back from roach coaches that prowled the streets around City Hall.
“It’s not my call.” Kirby, hating himself, toed the company line. “My boss wants your client’s help.”
“Your boss. Your new boss?”
“Yes.”
“I heard she’s a piece.” A roguish delay. “Of work.”
Kirby said without mirth, “Ha ha.”
“Look, man, the girlfriend, Rose, is deaf and disfigured, for Chrissakes. I mean. Kirby. C’mon.”
Kirby made a vague, helpless gesture. His phone line lit up, got answered. The receptionist’s interoffice message ID scrolled: GUNN. Kirby tapped the CALL BACK key.
“This is so beneath you.”
“I am just glad Mr. Mahrez finally contacted his attorney,” Kirby said.
“Yeah, now that everybody and his uncle thinks he’s your informant.” Belasco was the best criminal lawyer south of San Francisco, and still refused to take any cases in L.A., which took balls. Kirby admired him. Kirby admired anybody who wasn’t AUSA Kirby, these days. Belasco had noted the wardrobe uptick. “I bet you haven’t worn a suit like that since you were at Gibson and Dale.”
Kirby shrugged. “New dress code.”
“Only for you, I guess. Lipstadt’s still wearing that J. C. Penney polyester two-piece his mom bought for his bar mitzvah.”
“Maybe he didn’t get the memo.”
“Do you even know the story? Of Rose and Stix?” Belasco put his hands in his pockets, casual, the way he did when he gave his summations; he had a faint Denzel Washington vibe, right down to the contagious smile. “She’s a former Paris runway model who found a little trouble with the junk. Her heroin dealer got her a green card, brought her to America, and then pimped her out to his wealthiest clients.”
“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know. Your stories always make me want to start drinking at, like, ten in the morning.”
“She spirals down, you can only imagine, conventions and shore leave, but crawls back out, meets Nick at an AA meeting, tells him she wants to quit the life, so he gets her some catalog work with Hang Ten. Pimp finds out and attacks her with battery acid.” Belasco said it simply, but took a pause to let the full weight of this sink in. “Ruined her face, pain so intense it shorted out her auditory nerves. But Stix took her in, man. That night. To his own house, hired security. Found her specialists, nursed her himself. He fell in love with her after she was maimed. He saved her life.”
Kirby started to say something cynical, but stopped himself. Belasco wasn’t just working him. There was real feeling in this. And yet— “What happened to that pimp?” Belasco started to answer, but Kirby beat him to it, “Lemme guess: Somebody pounded two feet of rebar through his head, and his body washed up on the beach. Or, no—no, a hiker found him rotting on the banks of the Salton Sea, sans hands, teeth, and feet. Or maybe he just vanished one day. Never to be seen again?”
Belasco said something under his breath.
“This isn’t the movies, Damien. Whores don’t have a heart of gold, bad guys don’t see God and get grace. Our version of a happy ending is where Jack the Ripper gets taken out by Charlie Manson.”
So much for avoiding the cynical.
Kirby laid it out. “All your client has to do is apologize for the stunt in the mayor’s office and talk shop with us. Fill in some blanks; advise and consent. It’s not really snitching, per se, it’s . . .” Kirby couldn’t find the words, because the whole thing was such bullshit, his side, their side, an endless circle, “. . . more like consulting.” His shoulders sagged. Shit.
“Consulting.” Belasco stared at him. Kirby felt dumb.
“It is what it is,” Kirby said after a while.
“Unless it isn’t,” Belasco pointed out.
Kirby let his palms flutter out, helpless. Exposed.
Nothing.
Belasco seemed genuinely disappointed. “Don’t do this. Don’t do this, man. Just say no.”
—
SAAD FANOUS WAS SURE he’d figured it out. The FBI agent Tina Zappacosta, lovely today, he noted appreciatively, in her sharp black skirt and coat, sat on the other side of the visiting booth glass, waiting for him to explain why he’d summoned her, but the truth was he didn’t understand why he’d needed to summon her, he’d given everybody what they wanted, so, okay, maybe she was the problem since their case together appeared to have been derailed by his arrest and detention, potentially exposing him to the very suspects he and she, Tina, had been attempting to ensnare.
“I want you to get me out of here,” Saad said.
“I can’t do that.”
She seemed truthful. Perhaps, he thought, because she was a woman. “Get the government prosecutor to arrange it for us,” Saad advised.
“You’re in on a felony possession charge,” Tina said to him. “Your case will have to work through the system.”
“I have a deal.”
“You have an understanding that they’ll put in a good word for you at sentencing.”
This was where, for Saad, it all became a bit of a fog. But he had figured out his work-around. “I will make it possible for you to arrest a cell of Shia terrorists.”
“A she-what?”
“Yes. Let me elaborate.” Through a very lithe Moroccan stripper he’d met at the Hot Box, Saad had been introduced to some U.C. San Diego graduate exchange students, mostly Jordanian, he insisted, from very wealthy families and typically clueless; he was confident that he could persuade these earnest young Arabs to donate a portion of their allowance to give to the Hezbollah resistance in Lebanon without realizing that they would, in fact, be agreeing to the direct purchase of weapons and explosives for domestic mischief and, Saad believed, upon delivery to their apartment of the same, give Tina Zappacosta the local terror cell she needed to replace the local terror cell she’d lost. “Islamic jihadists.”
“You’re making this up.”
“No. The Shia are a violent group. You can’t imagine.” Saad tried not to blush. “It’s a dangerous situation, for sure. But, of course, I cannot do it from inside of a jail.”
He didn’t see how an American federal agent could refuse this. What was one harmless Egyptian when put on the scale with an entire group of radical fundamentalists?
“This cell is supported directly by the ayatollah.”
“Khomeini? Guy in Iran?”
“You are very well read, Tina.”
She smiled. “You gotta give me something more solid, Saad. So far this is all pretty sketchy.”
“They wish to purchase explosives and weapons.”
“From you?”
“Who else? I am told there is a man on the Marine base at Pendleton who can arrange for such things.”
He watched her tense up. “Who?”
“I knew you would be interested.”
“I need a name.”
“When I am released,” Saad said, annoyed that she didn’t understand the bargain.
“No.” Tina stared at him, thinking, and Saad started to lose confidence. To make a good sale you never let the buyer think. “The cell is something you made up,” she said, as if reaching into his thoughts. “But the Pendleton thing is real.”
Saad mumbled that he had no idea what she was implying. Women should not be asked to do these kinds of jobs.
“You think you have access to military surplus. We’ve had rumors of a weapons black market for a while now. You were going to set up some poor Arab stiffs, but you know it wouldn’t stick unless there was actual hardware to change hands. You wouldn’t bring me over here if the Pendleton of it wasn’t real.”
While Saad didn’t know what Tina was talking about, he felt confident he’d made progress.
“This embark officer. Give me a name. Then we can talk.”
“When I am released,” Saad said.
“No.”
Saad shrugged, bluffing. Tina got up to leave.
“Albert.” Desperation made Saad blurt it out, and after he’d done so he worried that she’d ask him for a last name, which he didn’t know, but Tina just stood and looked at him for a long time, saying nothing, her eyes emptying as he waited.
“All I have is this name,” Saad admitted, just to break the uncomfortable silence. “There. You have everything. I am at your mercy.”
“You’re lying,” she said, finally. “You’re wrong.”
Saad knew he could be. But about which part?
—
EMILIO, THE BODYGUARD, was watching a Mexican-league soccer game and clipping his toenails when Rose breezed past him, hands and fingers moving. He understood enough to know that she couldn’t find something, she was going outside to look for it. In the cars? His ten-year-old daughter had helped him learn a few of the deaf signs.
Rose tended to glide through the house, her body so fluid, the slight vertigo she suffered causing her hips and shoulders to do a strange samba, all woman, and Emilio never tired of watching her. As long as he kept his eyes off her disfigurement, it was like an ever-giving gift from God. In and out of the room once, twice, and Emilio finally understood that she was searching for the experimental device his boss had brought home for her: a compact square polished silver microcassette player that, if she held it against her skull, under her ear, at the back of her jaw, allowed her feel the music that pulsed through it at a special frequency. She loved David Bowie.
Emilio recalled the first week after Señor Nick brought the ruined woman home: the black rages, the shrieking, the bloody fingernail marks on Mahrez’s arms and neck. The only blessing was she couldn’t see herself, because they’d carefully removed every reflective surface before she returned. This went on for six, seven weeks, but slowly Nick had tamed her, rebuilt her, sculpted with his odd, relentless unconditional love a new world and new girl she could live in silence with and learn to love, too.
It was slick work, Emilio thought. He himself probably would have romanced her until it became tedious, then sent her back to whatever cold, bleak, Scandinavian climate had spawned her.
But Emilio was a practical man. Señor Stix Mahrez was a fantasist.
A couple moments after Rose breezed through the room one more time, still signing and now vocally chirping about the device, he heard the security system chime, indicating an outside entry door that was opening, and she was going outside.
Shit.
“Señora Rose?”
Of course, she couldn’t hear him.
He heaved himself up, hoping Pachuca wouldn’t score while he was bringing the beautiful, broken diosa back inside.
—
HIS BORDER GROUND-BREAKING ceremony and photo op concluded, Mayor Richard Poole was shaking hands that his aide had strategically selected for him when a voice over his shoulder murmured, “You’ve been ducking my calls,” and Poole flinched. He finished a pleasantry he couldn’t even remember as he was saying it, and, still smiling professionally, pivoted into Nick Mahrez as if that was what he was expecting to do, next, all along.
“You’ve left messages?” Poole’s lie was unconvincing. “Sorry, Nick. Gee. Dammit. My staff must be screening my—”
“Grande Stix Mahrez! Hola, amigo!”—and there was Blanco, pushing imperiously through a restive, disappointed constituency hoping to glad-hand the mayor and buy a few seconds of his time to plead a cause; the Mexican’s big cold evil smile leered and his dead mirror Revo eyes fixed on Mahrez like a shark’s.
“—Long time.”
Mahrez said, “Not long enough.”
Only Blanco’s chin registered the insult. Poole and his aide traded panicked looks for different reasons. The aide touched his watch. The mayor mimed helplessness and let his eyes drift back to worry about Mahrez as the Mexican talked shit; he wasn’t sure if his old friend recognized how much the world had changed.
“Just the other day, I was asking, whatever happened to him? And then I remembered: Me! I happened! I took your business, yeah? You had to, what, go make like toys or something.” There was nothing but violence behind Blanco’s feigned good nature.
“Surfboards.”
“¿Qué?” Blanco tipped his Revos down for effect.
“Surfboards was always my business, Juanito,” Mahrez said.
Blanco winked. “Oh. Sí, sí. Of course. That and collecting melted whores.”
“Your memory’s fuzzy.” Mahrez refused to be rattled by this thug. “Must be all the paint and glue you were huffing, between the fifty-cent blow jobs in La Zona, back in the day.”
Blanco’s face flushed purple and his manner lost all its cheap bravado. Poole remembered how Vic had always pegged Blanco for success, even as he mocked him to his face for what Vic called Blanco’s “natural gifts of reptilian stupidity.” Mahrez never liked him, or trusted him, and thought that Blanco was the weakest link in their distribution chain, an unavoidable risk factor emboldened by his inexplicable ties to Gallardo, who gave Blanco carte blanche over the marijuana trade with Southern California, this peasant who could barely count to ten. Mahrez made Vic deal with him. Vic assured Poole it was like heeling a dog. And while Vic would return from Tijuana and Baja with fantastical tales of bacchanalian Cabo orgies, Mahrez was fairly convinced that Blanco had double-crossed Vic on a two-truck shipment of pot that got interdicted at the Mexicali border crossing, and which subsequently put Vic on a short list to be taken out by the Sinaloans.
Poole pulled Mahrez away: “Would you excuse us, Señor?” They crossed the empty lot until Poole thought they were safely distant, and muttered, “Nice work. Christ on a cracker, Nick. Why don’t you just piss on him?”
“You wouldn’t mind?” Mahrez made as if to start back toward Blanco, but the mayor grabbed his arm.
“Enough.”
“What is a scumbag like Blanco even doing here? What has happened to you?” Mahrez had to ask, and Poole didn’t really know how to answer, except officially:
“He’s part of their delegation, Tijuana sends who they want, I can’t—why are you so—”
Mahrez cut him off. “Somebody tried to kill me, Dicky. Because word leaked that I came in to you wired. I guess the full story didn’t translate, the part where I warned you Feds were on your ass.”
Poole had heard about the stabbing. “And you think I was the leak? Me?” He still couldn’t tell how much Mahrez actually knew, or what Vic might have told him in a stoned blear of candor, back when everything was boxes within boxes.
The stubborn quilt of inland clouds scudded, horizon to horizon, blemishing a vault of turquoise sky. Mahrez said nothing, patient to see how Poole would react, and Poole’s eyes slid this way and that as people circled them, making eye contact, closing the distance on the mayor again with their endless agendas, and he had to have his mechanical politician’s reassuring smile in overdrive.
“Tell me that you don’t know what Blanco does for a living.”
“I’d be lying,” Poole said. “But I’m not stupid, Nick. He’s also a Mexican government official. Someday he could be useful. He found us some private foundation money for the center. And nobody of import over there is clean.”
“The leak was you, or the Feds.” Mahrez kept his voice conversational. “And the Feds have too many reasons to keep me safe and happy, most of which relate to what they think I know about you.”
A new silence not born of awkwardness. Poole felt an acid rise in his throat, the way it had in his office. He rubbed the back of his neck and rolled his shoulders to release some anxious tension. Blanco was still staring darkly at them from across the lot.
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing,” Mahrez said. “Yet.” He walked away.
Poole barked after him, more a hope than a warning, “Because you don’t know anything, man. You don’t.”
Mahrez didn’t look back.
—
BY THE TIME EMILIO REACHED the open front door, Rose was halfway down the front walkway pavers. Two of the newly hired private security guys were up at the driveway entrance, standing sentry behind the electric gate, big handguns strapped to their hips, backs turned to the street, watching Rose make her way to the car just like any man should watch her, not so much wishing he could have her as appreciating, like Emilio, that such a thing, even sadly damaged, could exist.
The Guatemalan called out, “Let me get it for you, Miss Rose,” and quickened to catch up with her because he knew she couldn’t hear him, but his feet were bare and the walkway was peppered with painful stubs of broken acorns from the huge evergreen oaks that overhung the house.
She was in the driveway, threading awkwardly through the small fleet of cars to the newly detailed, gleaming 928, finally turning, looking back at Emilio, smiling, eyes alive, hands up, signing: It’s in the Porsche. Emilio glanced guiltily to the guards at the gate and hoped they wouldn’t say anything later; Señor Nick’s constant fear was that the men who had disfigured the girl would come back to finish the job, and that was why he insisted that Emilio never let her leave the house alone.
The alarm on the Carrera chirped, and Rose had the driver’s-side door open before Emilio could finish gingerly navigating the walk, dust off his tender soles, and catch up with her.
He touched her lightly. “Miss Rose, please, let me get it for you.”
She ignored him, stubborn. Vocalizing and signing, “I can do it.” Climbing in, she reached down the front of the passenger seat and found her music box wedged against the seat frame. Holding it up:
“See?”
She climbed out again, using Emilio for leverage. Her hand was like a child’s. She brushed against him, angular and soft, flush with soap and cotton.
She signed: Thank you, Emilio.
He couldn’t help but smile at her. In another life, he thought wistfully, I’d have to make her turn her face. Once she found her balance and slipped past him, he closed the door, gently, and the car exploded in a fireball.