The sole white-tablecloth restaurant in Eden featured American fare and a surprisingly impressive bar. Towering glass shelves, illuminated from beneath with a cool cobalt glow. As Aragón was greeted with customary warmth by the proprietors, Evan took in the bottles, his eye gravitating to the selection of clear liquids.
It took them some time to reach their booth, everyone rising to receive Aragón. He tried to wave them aside. “Please, please. Enjoy your meals.”
They slid into the cushioned seats: Evan and a cartel leader.
Just another Sunday-night drink.
The waitress came over, a woman in her twenties with a stout build and a mess of red curls twisted up around a pencil. “Greetings, Señor Urrea. Should I bring your usual?”
Aragón confirmed—Blanton’s on a single big cube. Before she could turn to Evan, Aragón said, “Miss?”
She hesitated. Played with her wedding band. She had a stain on her jacket by the lapel.
“Last time I was here,” Aragón said, “I recall I gave you a big tip.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Like a grand on an eighty-dollar check.”
“You weren’t happy,” Aragón told her. “Why?”
She set a fist on her hip. “You really want to have this conversation?”
“Yes.”
Her lower jaw shifted left, right. “It was like … like you were saying you’re better than me. Like if I didn’t thank you profusely, it would bug you. Like, enough to bring it up later.”
At this she gave him a look.
Aragón frowned thoughtfully and nodded. “Thank you for telling me.”
Her attention tracked to Evan. “What’ll you have?”
Evan said, “Would you mind if I go to the bar to see the vodka selection?”
The waitress nodded. “Suit yourself.”
Evan excused himself and crossed to the bar, leaning on the counter and examining the vodka. Just seeing the bottles there, illuminated with a cool sterile light, gave him a charge in the bloodstream.
The bartender, an older white gentleman in a well-worn suit, came over, sweeping a rag across the burnished wood. “Help you, my friend?”
“The Polugar, please,” Evan said. “Up. Bruise it.”
The man filled a martini glass with ice to chill it and then set to work with the stainless shaker. The loud rattle of ice would have been unpleasant if it didn’t presage what was to come.
He paused, readying to pour, but Evan said, “More, please.”
The bartender gave the shaker another trouncing, raising it up by his ear like a maraca. When he finally flicked the cubes from the martini glass and filled it with vodka, a thin sheet of ice crisped the surface.
“Olives?”
“No, thank you,” Evan said. “Not for the Polugar.”
“I understand.”
The single-malt rye vodka smelled like dough. A throwback to the pre-ethanol distillation process that produced the Russian breadwine enjoyed by literal and literary nobility from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, Polugar meant “half-burned.” The term signified the outstanding portion of liquid remaining after the excess had been burned away. Far off the beaten path in the woods of Poland, the vodka was not aged in oak barrels but triple-distilled in copper and filtrated with egg whites and birch coal.
The first sip struck bready hints of dill and honey, the aftertaste tinged with hazelnut on the fade. Evan felt the dopamine hit right away, the endorphin release hazing his mood at the edges. After the day’s long journey into night and the moral confusion it had brought, he needed something clean, an antiseptic. He tasted the vodka once more, closing his eyes into the burn. Unlike the warm, earthy whiskey hues that Aragón preferred, it tasted elevated and azure and unpolluted—the taste not of grounding but of altitude.
The bartender observed him. “You understand it,” he said. “Alcohol.”
Evan nodded.
“We are honored by Señor Urrea’s presence. You are a friend of his?”
It took Evan a moment to identify the sensation the question had elicited in him, surprised to discover that he felt offended. “A friend? No.”
The bartender studied him. “Ah,” he said. “You know of his livelihood.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
The bartender set his rag aside and busied himself spearing olives. “I’ve known him for twenty-three years. As for many in Eden, he is my first call when I’m in trouble. And never once in hours of conversation has he given me advice tainted with envy or arrogance or vanity. Not one time. I’ve heard that he has darker dealings. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Evan set down two twenty-dollar bills. “I’d best be getting back to the table.”
“Wait one moment.” The bartender removed another martini glass from the freezer and transferred the remainder of Evan’s drink. “I was waiting for this one to frost.”
Evan lifted the glass in thanks and headed back to the booth. At an adjoining table, a trio of young women in spandex dresses took pictures of their food and of one another, applying various filters, flipping their hair, tilting their chins just so. It looked more like a confabulation between phones than a social meal.
Aragón observed them. “All our sins and temptations at our fingertips all day. We carry them in our pocket. Our technology outweighs our character.”
One of the women came over, plucking down her dress to cover her ass. She traced a finger along Aragón’s shoulder. “Señor Urrea.” She brushed a hip against his elbow. “I am so appreciative for everything you’ve done for, like, the town. And I know things are … distracting at home. If you ever want to talk…?” She pinched a puffy lower lip between perfect white teeth.
Aragón finished the last of his bourbon, the block of ice clinking when he set down the glass. He did not look at her. “My wife is sleeping two miles from this very spot, and I do not need a whore.”
She retreated, her color rising to match her makeup. The women and their phones made a swift exit.
A cloud had lowered over Aragón. He rolled his empty glass back and forth in the sweat ring it had left on the table.
For a few minutes, neither man spoke. They were into it now, the bone-weariness of waiting for the next thing to do, the horror of the situation held barely at bay.
Then Aragón said, “Last night I dreamed I was eighteen years old. And I chose to go to university. I became an anticorruption lawyer, and I fought for the very things that matter to me now, but I did it better, cleaner. And my wife, she was happy and clear-eyed, and there were no savages at the gates baying for my blood, and my daughter was safe in my house, and it was not hidden in an armored compound but set on a street like every other street.” His face was still downtilted, so he glowered darkly at Evan from beneath the ledge of his brow. “Then I woke up.”
A pause so long that Evan wasn’t sure if the story was finished.
But Aragón continued, “And I realized that yes, that girl in my dream was safe. But the girl in the dream, she wouldn’t be my Anjelina. She’d be the daughter of a good man.”
Evan didn’t understand why Aragón was telling him this.
Aragón set the glass down, pushed it away. “Maturity is graduating from the belief that the world misunderstands you to the awareness that you misunderstand the world.” He laced his fingers together. “Who I have failed to become is the story of why my daughter suffers. That load of product I burned yesterday? I could have burned it, burned them all, two years ago or three. And then maybe she would be safe. I didn’t need you to tell me to do it. I didn’t need you. But clearly I did.”
Evan thought again about how he’d recoiled from the bartender’s question: A friend? No. He wondered what he was doing here in this booth talking with Aragón while Anjelina was out there somewhere, terrified and alone. And he wondered if somehow this very conversation was taking some tiny step toward setting things right, things so deep in the design of Aragón’s life and maybe even Evan’s that they lived beneath the tectonic plates, mired in the primordial sludge of emotion and fate that drove the whole confusing enterprise.
This was not a language he spoke, an outlook he trafficked in.
“Why didn’t I take steps sooner?” Aragón peered into his glass as if hoping it had refilled itself. “I was still afraid, though I didn’t want to admit it. Afraid of being soft and weak, of being like everyone else. When life comes at you and bad shit happens, it knocks off your edges, wears through your veneer. Makes you more ordinary. That’s why there’s so much resentment at people who act entitled. Rich people who think they’re special and better, above it all. They aren’t special. They just haven’t yet learned they’re ordinary like everyone else. All those cabróns with their fancy university degrees, they learn everything but humility. And I thought I’d learned it. But I hadn’t even begun.” He looked at Evan with something approaching deference. “You’re different. You’ve learned humility without having to be ordinary.”
“I never had the chance to be ordinary,” Evan said.
Aragón’s eyebrows lifted with curiosity. He was fully engaged, his focus like a beam of energy. Evan couldn’t recall being the subject of such attention, of having an opportunity to be seen the whole way through. It was every last thing that his training sought to protect him from, and it felt uncomfortable and liberating and intoxicating all at once.
The words came before Evan had considered them. “When I was young—” He halted.
“Please.” Aragón waved a hand.
Evan looked down at his glass and realized that he had never spoken about what Aragón’s words had just called to the surface. Though he’d known it somewhere beneath awareness, he’d never hauled it into the light, given it form, set it to words.
He cleared his throat, steeled himself with another sip. The vodka warmed his temples, the tips of his fingers. “When I was young, I shut myself off to the world. It wasn’t safe to … to take in too much. It was like I was on an airplane and I closed all the windows. Everything blocked out except the view through the windshield. The way forward. There wasn’t much … light. Or color. Warmth. Comfort. Feeling. Just … darkness.” He stared at his hands, the frost receding from the rim of the martini glass. “I needed something extreme just to feel. To feel anything. Danger. Risk. Pain. But it served me to live that way. To keep everything muted. With the windows closed, there were no distractions to see. There was only … only the path ahead. It kept me alive.”
The textured pouches around Aragón’s eyes seemed a part of his eyes themselves, his focus conveying a care and warmth Evan had rarely—never?—felt directed at him.
“Lately—” He halted again. The next sip of air felt cool traveling down the spirit-fired channel of his throat. “I’ve started thinking about opening some of those windows. Letting in more light. But I worry…”
Aragón leaned forward. “Yes?”
“I worry that if I let in the light, I won’t be able to do what I do. I worry that I won’t be able to go as fast and with such … singularity of purpose. Do you understand?” Evan felt something twisting in his chest, a need to be heard, to be understood, and that need was as foreign to him as a mother’s caress or a baby wanting a diaper change.
Aragón bobbed his head, drawing him out.
Evan continued, “When I think about how much I’ve missed all these years, all my life, I feel…”
He couldn’t find the word. Angry? Resentful? Vengeful?
“Grief?” Aragón offered.
The word slid between Evan’s ribs.
“I don’t know that I know how to do anything else,” he said. “To be anything else.”
“I understand,” Aragón said, and Evan saw in his eyes that he did. “How could you not feel loss at everything you’ve missed? You’ve traveled way beyond what most people know, over uncharted lands, and you haven’t even seen them.” He paused, giving the statement its due. “But if you dare? To open those windows now? You will look down at a different view than anyone else. Perhaps that is the reward for your sacrifice. If you have the courage to take it.”
The waitress approached bearing the bill, and without breaking eye contact with Evan, Aragón held up his credit card to her. She read the table and retreated without a word.
Evan’s mind churned and churned, and he felt unable to shape any of its content into words. Aragón gave him the silence.
The waitress returned with the check folio, which Aragón flipped open.
Evan read the bill upside down. The tip of Aragón’s ballpoint hesitated over the slip.
Aragón tipped 20 percent.
Crossed it out.
He left twenty-five.
“If you look ‘patient’ up in the dictionary, you know what there’s a picture of?” Joey’s voice over the RoamZone, despite being ping-ponged through two dozen virtual telephone switch destinations on six continents, was undiminished in its aggrievedness.
Evan sat cross-legged on the sofa bed in the upstairs study of Aragón’s house. It was dark, moonlight falling in stripes across the carpet. “I’m guessing something you think is clever that winds up insulting me?”
He’d tossed the RoamZone to nano-stick on the wall at eye level. It conveyed Joey’s words holographically in sound waves with angry peaks and valleys.
They projected spikily in the darkness, electronic blue daggers: “It’s a picture of you with a Ghostbusters slash sign around it.”
“What’s a ghostbusters?”
“Oh. Em. Gee. You’re kidding, right? It’s the red slashy sign. That means, like, the opposite.”
“A bend sinister?”
“What’s a bend sinister?”
“A diagonal red band on a coat of arms. It’s a sign of bastardy.”
“Okay, Jack.”
“Or you could call it a circle-backslash or an interdictory circle.”
A thumping sound, probably Joey banging her forehead against her keyboard. “Never mind! Just … stop! I already told you I’ve almost got a handle on the San Bernardino delivery. I’m getting into some of their phones even to track correspondence. The more you bug me, the longer I’ll take. So just leave me to my Red Vines and Red Bull, and I will call you when I’m done. Gawd!”
Click.
Evan pried the phone off the wall and checked his watch fob. It was nearing midnight. He didn’t want another day to pass without getting a step closer to Anjelina. If she was still alive, whatever danger she was in would be worsening with every passing hour. Hostage situations wore down as they wore on. Strained patience. Frayed nerves. Appetites no longer held at bay.
He listened to the silence of the house. Aragón had excused himself upon their return, leaving Evan to the converted guest room. His unease returned, an eerie sense of connection with the other sleeping bodies under the same roof.
Out in the hall, a door creaked open.
He was on his feet, padding quietly to the threshold. He peered out.
Belicia’s door was once more ajar an inch, maybe two. It had been shut minutes before.
He emerged from his doorway, moving silently toward her room.
He halted outside. The same smell, air-conditioning and something else, the weight of unvented air within.
A voice, husky and feminine, said, “Come in.”