Dance with the Dragon (13 page)

COLONIA ZONA ROSA

From the carved oak front door, the Club Wild Stallion could have been the office of a group of high-priced lawyers, or a boutique selling haute couture to fashionable women, not a sex club. A very small brass plaque engraved with a plain
CWS
above a stylized stallion reared up on its hind legs and the number 84 was the only indication that the elegant three-story brown brick building was anything other than what it was.

They had driven over from Gloria’s apartment in McGarvey’s Toyota, and when they pulled up in front of the club a valet in a red vest came out to park their car.

“Do you think you’ll see anybody you know here?” McGarvey asked her.

She had changed into a short black dress with almost no back and a plunging neckline. “It’s possible someone from the embassy will be here.”

“Perry or Chauncy?”

She laughed. “Not those two.”

“Welcome to the Club Wild Stallion,” the valet parker said. He gave McGarvey a ticket.

Just inside the door McGarvey paid a one-hundred-dollar club membership to a pretty receptionist seated at a desk. “This will be good for one year, sir,” she said pleasantly. She was young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, and she was Oriental, probably Japanese.

Through an inner door, they found themselves in a large, dimly lit room, with a long bar to the right, and small tables facing a stage across from a fairly good-sized dance floor. The hum of conversations from perhaps fifty or sixty people, most of them at the tables, nearly half of them scantily clad girls and women, was a low, underlying drone.

A pretty Mexican waitress in a topless costume and spike heels showed them to a table near the dance floor. “Welcome to the Wild Stallion,” she said. “Our next show begins any minute. Maybe I bring you a drink?”

“Champagne,” McGarvey said. “Dom Pérignon. A good year.”

“Yes, sir,” the waitress said, and she left.

“Do you see the age of most of these girls?” Gloria asked. “They’re just kids. Let’s get out of here, Kirk.”

Most of the men were middle-aged or older, and although the majority of them were probably Mexicans, there were a fair number of gringos. All of them seemed to be prosperous. But the girls were mostly in their teens. It reminded McGarvey of some of the clubs in Taiwan where well-to-do Europeans went to have sex with young girls. The look on the men’s faces was sickening.

“Have you spotted anyone you know?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Gloria said. “What the hell are we doing here?”

McGarvey leaned closer. “This is one of the places Updegraf hung out. I want to see what goes on and who shows up, so keep your eyes open.”

“You think Perry or Chauncy might come through the door?”

McGarvey shrugged. But it wouldn’t have surprised him if either man had been there. His primary target, though, was General Liu. If Shahrzad had been telling the truth, this was one of the places the man liked to frequent.

Their champagne came, a minute later all the lights went out, and suddenly Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” began to play from a piano somewhere to the left, and a soft red light illuminated the stage. A large bed had been set up in the middle of the stage, a mirror suspended above it at an angle so the audience would have no trouble seeing what would be happening.

A short, slender Japanese girl who could have been the twin of the receptionist came out onstage. She was dressed in a clinging silk nightgown that fluoresced in the dim light. She looked out at the audience and held out her hand as if she was lost and was asking for help.

After a beat, a man who looked as if he could be a gymnast, dressed only in a pair of tight-fitting jeans, his chest bare, came out onstage, spotted the girl, and went to her. She turned, hesitated for a moment before she gave the audience a big smile, and then fell into the gymnast’s arms.

They embraced for what seemed a long time, and when they parted the gymnast ripped the nightgown off the woman’s body with a flourish, shoved her back onto the bed, then pulled off his jeans to reveal an almost impossibly large erect penis.

Some of the girls in the audience cheered and a few of the men laughed and clapped as the gymnast mounted the Japanese girl and began to have intercourse, slowly at first, then with increasing speed and force.

“Do you think this is sexy?” Gloria asked across the table.

“No, not at all,” McGarvey said. He was of mixed feelings thinking about Shahrzad in this place, doing these things. Her father had tossed her into the ring with Baranov when she was only fifteen, and ever since that time she’d apparently been used by a series of men, so that now she was probably hardened to such things. Yet she could have walked away long before she’d met and fallen in love with a CIA officer. For Updegraf, however, his feelings were anything but mixed. On the surface, at least, the man had been a son of a bitch, and quite possibly had deserved what he got.

But there was so much more that they didn’t know. Whispers around the edges, coming from dark places with hidden meanings. Nothing was as it seemed to be.

One of the men from the audience got up and led a girl across the dance floor and through a door to the right of the stage, as the couple on the bed continued to have sex, and the woman began to moan.

“Louis was a bastard just like every other man,” Gloria said under her breath. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough.”

TWENTY

COLONIA LOMAS ALTAS

On the way back to Gloria’s apartment she sat hunched in the corner silently watching the traffic, which had started to pick up. Mexicans usually started late: drinks around eight in the evening, dinner around ten, and then the clubs really came alive around midnight. It wasn’t even ten when McGarvey drove up the hill to her apartment above the Iranian embassy and parked in one of the guest spots.

“I’d invite you in, but I know you’d refuse,” Gloria said. She was subdued. “Let’s go for a walk. There’s a jogging path that runs just below the road. Nice view.”

“Okay.”

She slipped out of her heels and took McGarvey’s arm, and they headed past the apartment buildings and started down a blacktop path that wound its way around the hills a few meters below the road. Every so often there was a park bench, and sometimes the glittering night view of the city stretched out below was fabulous.

“I’ve never met your wife,” she said. “But if your daughter Elizabeth is any indication, she must be lovely.”

“She is,” McGarvey told her.

“Lucky lady.”

They walked for a while in silence, but the evening was getting chilly, so McGarvey took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She stopped. “Look, I’m not sorry, you know.”

“For what?”

“For falling in love with you. That’ll never change. But I promise to stop throwing myself at you.”

McGarvey smiled despite the situation, despite what he wanted her to do. Updegraf had nothing on him. “I was flattered,” he admitted to her. “But this way is going to be a lot easier on both of us.”

She laughed lightly, but then became serious again. “Growing up in Cuba my poor mother never knew what to do with me. She tried to teach me the proper manners for a lady, when all I wanted to do was fight with the boys. When I was twelve or thirteen, she took me to a beauty salon downtown where I got my first do. My hair had only been trimmed, never cut, so by then it was most of the way down my back. When we got home that afternoon, my father told me how beautiful I looked. He said I’d been transformed from a tomboy to a young lady.”

Gloria looked across the valley toward the lights of the skyscrapers downtown.

“The next morning I got up early, before my mother, took a pair of scissors into the bathroom, and cut my hair so it was as short as a boy’s. When I showed up at the breakfast table wearing jeans and a T-shirt, my mother almost fainted, but she didn’t say a word about my hair. She never said anything about it, and after that I let it grow, started to wear makeup, and even went on chaperoned dates.”

“But it was never the same after that, was it,” McGarvey said. He’d had the same sort of falling-out with his sister. When their parents died, he inherited the ranch in western Kansas, which he sold over his sister’s objections. They never spoke about it again; in fact, they hadn’t spoken at all in years.

“A few months later the situation between my father and Castro had become intolerable, so my father stole a light plane and took me and my mother to Key West. Only we ran out of gas and the plane crashed in the strait just offshore. My mother drowned.” Gloria’s eyes were filling. “I never got to tell her how sorry I was that I’d disappointed her.”

“Did you tell your father?”

Gloria laughed. “Oh, him. He was always too busy after that. For the first couple of years I was pretty much on my own, with just a housekeeper in the apartment in Washington. But then I was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Miami. I don’t know which was worse. The moment I could get out and go to college on my own, I left.”

“Were you ever resentful?” McGarvey asked.

She looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Your childhood didn’t go the way you’d wanted it to go, your father uprooted you from your life and your friends in Havana, and because of it your mother was killed, and then when you got to the States you were all but left on your own. Maybe there were times when you just wanted to say fuck it.”

She smiled wistfully. “You sound like the Company shrinks.” She nodded. “Damned right I wanted to say fuck it, but I was usually too busy doing something whenever the idea came up.”

“Why law school?” McGarvey asked. Nothing he’d learned about her background so far pointed toward a law degree.

“I never wanted to be a lawyer, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “But the French have a saying,
Le droit mène à tout.
The law leads to everything. Scratch a rich person in the States and you’ll probably find a law degree.”

“Is that what you wanted to be?” McGarvey wanted to know. “Rich?”

“We were rich in Cuba, relatively speaking. We lived in a big finca in the country, and I grew up having cooks and maids and gardeners and chauffeurs. And that was under Castro, so we did okay. Being poor, having to scramble for a living, never occurred to me until we came to Washington and I saw the black ghettos.” She shook her head, remembering. “They looked at my dark skin and they thought that I was one of them. But when I looked at them, I knew that I could never be like that. I wasn’t a black woman, I was
cubana.
There’s a world of difference.”

“There’re plenty of poor people in Cuba.”

“That’s because of the regime. Anyway, I never noticed until Washington.”

They walked in silence for a while, arm in arm, McGavey hyperaware of the warmth radiating off her. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she was definitely Latina. If she’d been a man she would have become a wheeler-dealer, probably a major player in the Cuban community in exile down in Miami.

“After law school why’d you go to work for the Navy?” he asked. “Nobody gets rich that way.”

She smiled. “No, but you make contacts. Defense is what: a three-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year industry? I figured there’d be a place somewhere in there for me.” She looked at McGarvey. “And before you ask me why I left the JAG’s office to join the CIA, I’ll tell you that I didn’t know at the time except that I wanted to get back at the bastards who had made my father’s life so impossible he had to defect.”

“And kill your mother,” McGarvey said softly.

“El hijo de puta,”
the son of a bitch, she said with feeling. But the moment of anger passed as swiftly as it had come, and again she smiled wistfully. “That was a long time ago, Kirk. And whatever my initial reasons were for joining the Company, I’m in it now for the long haul.”

“Why?”

“Good question,” she said, shrugging. “For the thrill of the hunt, maybe? Knowing stuff that no one else knows? Women love secrets. That’s one of the things the Agency doesn’t have right. They don’t hire enough women spies. Why is that?”

“They don’t show up at the door.”

“Your daughter’s a spy. Ever ask
her
why? Or is it just like father, like daughter? Or maybe she was rebelling against her mother for you not being there when she was growing up?”

McGarvey said nothing, wondering how she had gotten that kind of information. She must have talked to somebody or hacked the Company’s mainframe. The fact that he’d been divorced from his wife all during Elizabeth’s childhood was not something in his unclassified personnel file. There were damned few people still around who knew anything in depth about his background, but there were a couple.

“Or, why did you become a spy? And why have you come out of retirement again?” She stopped and looked up into his eyes. “It’s really an unfair question. I am what I am for a billion separate reasons. It’s the same for everyone.”

“Was it the same for Updegraf?”

“Probably more him than anyone else. I don’t think he really knew why he worked for the Company. At least not the real reason.” She thought of something else. “Did they tell you how he was found in Chihuahua?”

“His body was dumped at the hospital’s emergency-room door, an apparent suicide.”

“That’s a laugh,” she shot back. “He had a bullet in his head all right, but that’s all he had.”

“I’m not following you.”

“That’s all that was left in front of the emergency-room door. His head. His body wasn’t found until Chauncy got up there the next day. After they cut off his head, they wrapped his body in plastic and dumped it in a ditch outside of town.”

“Drug dealers?”

“That’s what it was made to look like.”

“But you don’t believe it,” McGarvey said.

She shrugged her shoulders again. “I don’t know what I believe.”

“When we were leaving the club you said he was a bastard just like every other man. What’d you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said, turning away for a moment. “But did you see the looks in those bastards’ eyes? If Louis hung out there he was one of them.” She turned back to McGarvey. “And what was all that about, taking me there tonight?”