Triple Crossing (41 page)

“I want you to stop prolonging the inevitable. Surrender. Turn yourself in.”

Méndez saw Porthos flash a surreptitious thumbs-up at Isabel.

“Very funny. Stop fucking around. Send me Aragón with my money. You’ve got nothing on him.”

“Oh yes I do. I want to see the look on your uncle’s face when he hears.”

“Aragón is an employee of the Mexican Senate. You can’t hold him.”

“Watch me. This is going to make a stink in the D.F.”

“No one would print it. No one cares what happens in Paraguay. You’re dreaming.”

“In any case, say good-bye to Aragón and his suitcase. Say good-bye to your Paraguayan police escort. You are losing friends
fast.”

Another silence. Méndez thought he heard the clink of ice cubes in a glass.

“Fine. Keep him. Keep the fucking money.”

“I think I can find a worthy purpose for it.”

“Fucking Diogenes. Nobody likes your attitude. Nobody will come to your funeral.”

“Calm down. Take a Valium. I’ve got a proposition. If you want Aragón, I’ll consider a trade.”

“Trade?”

“Give me Buffalo Mendoza. And Pescatore, the yanqui. The cop-killer.”

Isabel bounced off the wall and gestured incredulously at Méndez. He turned away.

“You think you have real big balls, talking to me like that,” Junior said.

“I’m serious. It will buy you time with your uncle. He’s had about enough of you. Give me those two, something to show the
Americans. Enjoy your last vacation a bit longer.”

A snort. “Listen, Méndez, it’s been an immense pleasure, but that’s about enough.”

“Think about my offer.”

After he hung up, Isabel pulled him aside. Her eyes flashed. “What in God’s name were you thinking about with that offer for
Valentine?”

“Perhaps it is a way to get him back, which I assume is what you want. At the least, it sows dissent, keeps them guessing.”

“Or they could decide it’s not worth sheltering a cop-killer, which he’s not, by the way, and get rid of him.”

“Isabel,” Méndez said gently, “I think it’s time you accepted that Pescatore has gone over to the other side.”

“You don’t know that. He’s undercover, trying to survive.”

“It may be too late. That comment the Senator made about housecleaning makes me think they have found out on their own that
he worked as an informant for you, even if his heart was not in it. And the point of this whole complicated exercise, I am
afraid to tell you, is not to rescue Valentine Pescatore.”

O
N THE LOOSE AT LAST
, Pescatore headed straight for the border.

He bought a chocolate bar and a Chicago Bulls cap from a street vendor. He wolfed down the chocolate bar without really tasting
it.

The cap was a pirated imitation. The bull looked more like a goat. He pulled the brim low. He walked fast.

The sidewalk was a tunnel formed by shops on his left, vending stalls on his right. He threaded through a manic crowd. He
flinched every time someone jostled him. He imagined spies and pursuers everywhere, braced himself every time he saw a cop
or a security guard. He got spooked by the drivers cursing in the congealed traffic, by eruptions of metal against metal as
merchants yanked down burglar gates over storefronts. Ciudad del Este started closing early, no doubt for good reason.

The street dipped. The human current pushed him faster. The street emptied into a road that ran along the riverbank. Pescatore
turned left toward the border crossing.

He heard an amplified guitar echoing among buildings, probably from one of the high-rise shopping galleries. Carlos Santana
playing “Europa.” The sweet sustained wail tugged at him. He knew that guitar solo note by note, like the words of a song.
A
wave of melancholy and nostalgia made him close his eyes momentarily. But then the music was swallowed up by a guttural symphony
of motors, car horns and radios. And the sounds of another protest at the bridge: chants, a siren, an amplified voice. A tear-gas
gun thudded; smoke billowed in the afternoon sunlight.

Pescatore zigzagged across the road into the weeds of the riverbank. He came to a kind of lean-to with a wood roof and an
open front. It faced onto the border canyon and the torpid waters of the Paraná River below.

The structure resembled a bus-stop shelter, but three times as long. It was a way station, a loading depot for smugglers.
And it was packed. An assembly line of shirtless men removed cigarette cartons from crates and wrapped them into bales. They
sealed the bales with black tape and attached straps for backpack-style carrying. They helped smugglers hoist the prepared
bales onto their backs. Once outfitted, however, the smugglers didn’t go anywhere. They removed the packs and fiddled with
them. They smoked cigarettes in the shade. They surveyed the Paraguayan riot police at the bridge and the Brazilian soldiers
patrolling the opposite riverbank. They dozed.

Pescatore made his way into the shelter. He felt invisible. The smugglers all but averted their eyes as he passed. He assumed
they were reacting to his vest: In the fashion code of the Triple Border, the vest labeled him as a Man with a Gun.

Pescatore found a spot next to a group of diminutive backpackers with straight black hair. They wore long-sleeved shirts despite
the heat. He nodded and got polite nods in return. He wasn’t an expert, but they looked to him like Bolivians. He had a flashback
to that night in San Diego when Vince Esparza had complained about having to process “Bo-livians.” If Pescatore could have
rewound his life back to that moment, he would have made some different choices. Definitely different.

Crouching, he saw the wooden wall was smothered with graf
fiti. Knives and pens had scrawled profanities and boasts. But there was also political philosophy in multicolored spray paint:
“Viva El Jinete y los generales.” “Muerte al Jinete y los generales.” “Viva la democracia.” “El Jinete, los generales y la
democracia son todos la misma mierda.”

What now, Valentine? He calculated angles. They had taken away his new Paraguayan passport. He had no vehicle. No one he could
trust. On the positive side, he had a couple of hundred dollars and a pistol. Also tucked into the pockets of his vest were
Pelón’s useless cell phone and Garrison’s USB flash drive.

Otherwise, Pescatore had nothing. He was your basic undocumented alien. A tonk. What a joke on him.

Squatting on their haunches or sitting cross-legged in the dirt, the possible Bolivians listened to a man in a brown hat.
The man apparently held rank in the microsociety of the loading depot. His seat of honor was an empty crate. His bony knees
protruded from cutoff canvas shorts. His hat was a wondrous thing: a jaunty shape that evoked Fred Astaire or Frank Sinatra,
but corduroy, decrepit, too small. It perched on lank gray hair. Tropical feathers poked out of the band.

“You’re not getting across today,
compañeros,
” the man said. His age was indeterminate, but they had clearly been hard years. His rust-colored, nearly toothless face collapsed
from his cheekbones to a pointy chin. Though he spoke Spanish, he sounded and looked Brazilian: a pretty even mix of European,
Indian and African. “Another damned riot at the bridge. Might as well get some rest, get out of the sun. This mess won’t clear
up for a while yet.”

Someone asked why.

“Politics.” The man rubbed stubble, a street sage with skeletal wrists and elongated, misshapen fingers. “Politics. A big
fight going on. Some Mexican mafiosos trying to take over. The Chinese are against them. The Arabs are divided. The police
in the middle. And us little working people suffer. You try to earn a living…”

Pescatore scanned the slope leading down to the water. He could swim for it. He could find someone with a raft and pay his
way over. Maybe there was a way to fly out. The place was full of secret landing strips. But he’d have to wait for nightfall.
It was risky. If he got caught, chances were he’d get handed over to Junior’s people or to Méndez’s people. If he actually
escaped, he’d have no control over what happened between Méndez and Junior. And he would break his word to Isabel one last
time. Though that didn’t mean much now that he knew about her affair with Méndez. Who really deserved his loyalty at this
point: Isabel or Buffalo?

“And you,
argentino?
” The man in the hat gave Pescatore the once-over. “What’s your story?”

“I need to cross,” Pescatore blurted instinctively, affecting an Argentine accent.

“No papers?”

“No.”

“You are Argentine, yes?”

“More or less.”

The toothless mouth masticated that response. “Just you? No packages? Nothing complicated?”

Pescatore nodded, the flat eyes of the Bolivians on him. He felt a rush of hope. Maybe Mr. Hat could get him across. Pescatore
needed a coyote.

“I can pay, no problem,” Pescatore said.

“Well, that’s good. You can pay. Congratulations.” The man in the hat sneered, aware of their audience. Pescatore had breached
etiquette, gone too fast. The man made a face as if preparing to sniff him. “You wouldn’t be some kind of
milico,
would you? Snooping around?”

Milico,
Pescatore figured, meant “cop” or “spy.” He heard muttering. The unloading and loading had come to a stop. People were listening.

“Not me, man,” Pescatore said, as nastily as possible. He
reached into his vest and gripped the butt of his holstered gun. He left his hand there. “How about you?”

He got a rise out of the way the man in the hat faltered, the sneer wilting. Pescatore considered drawing down on him, jamming
the Glock into his ear just for fun. Pescatore no doubt looked as mean and desperate as he felt. The heat alone made him want
to shoot somebody.

Macho thrills aside, he had worn out his welcome. Nobody here was going to help him.

“A very good afternoon to you, friends,” Pescatore said. He straightened out of his crouch and left the shelter, ignoring
the chatter in his wake. “Buncha criminals.”

Pescatore advanced toward the bridge, scanning the river for smugglers on the move. Nothing. The Brazilians and Paraguayans
had shut the line down cold. No wonder the citizens of Ciudad del Este were rioting. No wonder Junior was getting a bad rep.
But still, how hard could it be to get out of town? Pescatore was an expert on border-crossing, wasn’t he? In San Diego, he
had seen it all. He had seen people use tunnels, speedboats, car trunks, human pyramids, truck-borne ramps that sent load
cars soaring right over the fence.

The bridge to Brazil was guarded by a contingent of gas-masked riot cops who checked the endless single-file traffic and tossed
occasional tear-gas canisters at the rock-throwing demonstrators. He caught a whiff of the stuff. That was all he needed.
He reversed direction. He was in way over his head; too far to escape now.

He retraced his steps uphill. He couldn’t spot anyone tailing him in the crowds. The
locutorio
was on a street corner near Galerías Alhambra, the shopping arcade where he had gotten his passport. The
locutorio
was a public-phone business. The red letters on the barred front window advertised cheap calling rates and wire transfers
all over the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. There was a counter in front and six glass-partitioned cubicles with
phones.

It was his third visit of the day, but the dour Asian lady behind the counter gave no sign that she appreciated his business.
She handed him a slip of paper with the number of a phone cubicle on it.

The air-conditioning was not getting the job done. In the solitude of the cubicle, Pescatore dried his sweaty hands on his
jeans. He wiped his upper lip with his sleeve. If he lived through this, the mustache was history. He closed his eyes and
held his head in his hands. The pulse in his temples drummed against his palms. He pursed his lips and blew hard a couple
of times. He remembered what Buffalo had said on the day Pescatore drove Garrison’s corpse into Tijuana: Kick it. Kick it
stone cold.

Pescatore placed a collect call to San Diego, California, USA. By now, the operator at the task force knew exactly who he
was. She had been prepped for the call.

“Mr. Valentine, right?” she chirped. “Have you connected in a jiffy.”

This time, the triangular patch-in to Isabel Puente back in Ciudad del Este took less than a minute.

“There you are,” Isabel said.

“On time, right?”

“Ready?”

“To see you, yeah.”

“Where?” He could tell she was wound up, forcing herself to go soft and smooth.

“There’s a little department store. Minerva Mall. The only swank place in this sleazoid town. You know it?”

“Yes.”

A tingle of confidence: It was the first time he was calling the shots. “Alright then. Let’s say the fourth floor. Where the
pianos are at.”

“What time?”

“In an hour.”

“OK.”

“Just you and me, right?”

“We went through that already.”

“I don’t surrender to anybody but you.”

“OK.”

“What I’m saying is, I know your precious Méndez has got your back. I know that fucker don’t trust me. But you keep him away
until you and me can talk. I ain’t talkin’ to him. If him or his dirtbag
judiciales
get in my face, it’s not gonna be pretty. You understand?” Pescatore fought the tremble in his voice.

“Just you and me, Valentine.” He wanted to think he heard a glimmer of warmth when she said his name. “I hope I can trust
you.”

“Like old times, huh?”

“Six-thirty p.m.,” she said. The line went dead.

Pescatore hung up. He picked up the receiver again. He punched out another number. It was difficult: His hands were out of
control and tears blurred his vision.

I
SABEL PUENTE ENDED THE ARGUMENT
by getting out of Facundo’s car and marching toward the Minerva Mall.

Méndez regarded Porthos and Facundo. They looked like uneasy witnesses to a domestic dispute. Méndez lifted his narrow shoulders.