Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative (29 page)

Early that morning, Maria-Elena had driven out of the heavily protected compound on Castelar Street, heading, as she always did, to her favorite markets to shop for that night’s dinner.

She was a creature of habit. She had worked for only one person in her life. Maceo Encarnación had taken her off the streets of Puebla when she was fourteen, a terribly thin, undernourished girl, and introduced her to his household. As it happened, she had a natural gift for preparing food—all that was needed was a bit of polishing from the then cook. From the moment Maria-Elena cooked her first dinner in his house, she had become an immediate favorite of Maceo Encarnación. He elevated her above others on his staff who had been with him longer, which, of course, caused friction.

Later, looking back on it from her lofty perch, Maria-Elena realized that the temporary chaos her rise had caused among the staff had been deliberate. It was a form of harrowing, Maceo Encarnación seeking to root out the malcontents and troublemakers before anything untoward happened. With their firing, the household returned to a peacefulness deeper than it had experienced before. Maria-Elena was certain Maceo Encarnación was a genius at handling people, not only his staff. Her keen eye observed how he dealt with his guests— how he engaged some, flattered others, humiliated still others, and proposed ultimatums, either by guile or directly, depending on the guest’s personality—to get what he wanted out of them.

In the end, it was the same with me
, she had thought as she shopped for fresh fruit, vegetables, chilies, meat, chocolate, and fish. She knew all the vendors, and they, in turn, knew her, mindful of who she worked for. Needless to say, she received the best of everything, all at prices significantly under those they proposed to their other customers. From time to time, they gave Maria-Elena little treats for herself and for her daughter, Anunciata. After all, she was important in their world, and, besides, in her early forties, she was still a beautiful and desirable woman, though she didn’t consider herself beautiful, not like Anunciata. Anyway, she desired no man at all.

After shopping, she always walked a bit down Avenida Presidente Masaryk, where Maceo Encarnación shopped at all the chic, highend designer boutiques. Seventeen years ago, just after Anunciata had been born, while she still lay in the hospital, Maceo Encarnación had arrived with a jeweled Bulgari bracelet for her. For weeks afterward, she was terrified to try it on, though she fondled it every day and slept with it on her pillow every night.

That morning, after peering in some heavily fortified windows, she had abandoned Avenida Presidente Masaryk for her real destination, the Piel Canela boutique, at Oscar Wilde 20. She stopped in front of the window, staring at the butter-soft handbags, gloves, clutches, and belts that reminded her of the beautiful serpents she used to dream about in her youth. Her eyes slowly filled with tears as desire burned in her heart and lungs like the fire from which the phoenix once rose. There, in the center of the window, was the handbag she coveted and, half wrapped around its double strap, the elegant gloves. Both were the color of
dulce de leche
. Maria-Elena wanted them so badly her throat itched. But she knew she would never buy them. Tears leaked from her eyes, making rivulets down her cheeks. She wept and wept. It was not that she didn’t have enough money. She had been in Maceo Encarnación’s employ long enough, and he had been generous enough with her, that she could afford both items. But she was a girl of the streets; she could no more buy these high-priced items for herself than she would ever leave Maceo Encarnación’s employ, even after what had happened.

The final stop on her early morning excursion had been La Baila, on the Paseo de la Reforma, just four blocks south of Lincoln Park. The beautiful restaurant, lined in colorful Mexican tiles, turned out delicious and authentic food. In fact, over the years, Maria-Elena had been able to inveigle the recipe for the amazing thirty-ingredient
mole de Xico
from the owner-chef.

As the morning was mild, she had sat at an outside table, ignoring the fumes from the hellacious traffic on the Reforma. When Furcal, her favorite waiter, arrived at her table, she ordered her usual,
atole
, a boiled maize drink, flavored today with nopal,
empanadas de plátano rellenos de frijol
, and a double
espresso cortado
.

She had time now all to herself when, for the moment, she was free of obligations to Maceo Encarnación, when her mind could be itself, much as it was each night in the moments between the time she got into bed and the time she fell asleep. Except even then, within Maceo Encarnación’s compound, where his will could stretch out its hand and reach her any time of the day or night, she wasn’t truly free. Not like now, anyway, sitting by herself in a familiar restaurant, the sooty air of the city rushing by her on mysterious errands from the great volcano, Popocatépetl.

A female waiter she didn’t know had smiled warmly at her as she set down Maria-Elena’s
atole
.

“I hope the drink is to your liking,” she had said.

Maria-Elena, always polite, thanked her, took a sip, then another, deeper one, and nodded, allowing the waitress, whose name was Beatrice, to depart.

She wrapped her hands around the hand-thrown mug. She had time now to consider the implications of what she had read in Anunciata’s diary. Last week she had come across it by accident when she was cleaning her daughter’s room. It had been kicked, no doubt inadvertently, under the bed. Maria-Elena recalled with perfect clarity the moment, holding the book in her palms, when she had become aware that it was a diary. She recalled in vivid detail the fateful moment before she opened the diary, when everything was as it had always been. She almost didn’t open it. In fact, she had bent down to return it, unread, to its place beneath Anunciata’s bed. What would have happened then? Reality would not have been ripped and reshaped.

But curiosity had crawled through her like an evil serpent. Even then she had extended her arms, about to drop the diary under the bed. But something—the serpent of desired knowledge?—had stopped her, and she saw herself withdrawing her arms until the diary came back into view.

She did not stand up, and she wondered at that now. On her knees, as if in prayer, she opened the forbidden book, and read what she should never have read. Because in there, near the end, were lines of fire that seared her brain. She would have cried out then if she hadn’t immediately jammed her fist into her mouth.

Anunciata—her daughter, her only child—had been taking herself regularly to Maceo Encarnación’s bed. In horrific detail, the words of fire recounted the first time and every time thereafter. Maria-Elena slammed the diary shut. Her mind was aflame, but her heart, mortally wounded, had already fallen to ash.

She took a sheet of paper out of her handbag, unfolded it, and with a careful, cramped hand, began to write. As she did so, tears slid down her cheeks, staining the paper. She did not care. Her heart overflowed with shame and sorrow, but that did not stop her. Grimly, she kept writing until she came to the dreadful end. Then she folded the sheet away without looking at what she had written. Why bother? It was seared into her heart.

Once again, possessed by the evil serpent and having drained her
atole
, leaving the rest untouched, she threw some bills on the table and rushed down the sidewalk. Returning to the Piel Canela boutique, at Oscar Wilde 20, she pushed through the door, and, egged on by the serpent inside her, pulled out the credit card with which she purchased the food for Maceo Encarnación and bought her longed for purse and gloves. She ran her hands over them as the saleswoman rang up the charge, then she asked for them to be gift wrapped, watching as they were buried in layers of pastel-colored crepe paper, carefully interred in a thick box with the name of the boutique embossed in gold ink on either side. The lid was placed on and all was wrapped with a pink-and-green bow.

On the card the saleswoman handed her, she wrote the name of her beloved daughter. And below it, she wrote, “This is for you.”

Accepting her altered desire, she exited the shop into sudden blinding sunshine. She stood on the sidewalk, unable to take another step. Her legs refused to work, and now a sharp pain pierced the left side of her chest.
Dios
, what was happening to her? A terrible taste in her mouth. What had been in her drink?

Vertigo overcame her, and she fell. Shouts and the sounds of running feet came to her as far-away echoes, unattached to her or what was happening to her.

As she lay, staring up into the dusky sky, tears came again, along with a sob torn from the depths, where the evil serpent coiled and uncoiled, flicking its forked tongue. Her mind, encased in amber, flickering on the edge of a lethal unconsciousness, retreated to the only thing that mattered: the moment of the revelation a week ago.

The catastrophe was her fault. If only she had told Anunciata, but she had wanted to spare her daughter the sordid details of her origin. Now the mother had read those same sordid details in her daughter’s diary, knowing, God help her, that both mother and daughter had shared the same colossal bed, the same monstrous, all-powerful man, the same defilement. Maceo Encarnación was Anunciata’s father. Now he was her lover as well.

That was her last thought before the poison she had ingested at the café stopped her heart completely.

Martha Christiana sat brooding on the flight back to Paris from Gibraltar. Beside her, Don Fernando leafed through the latest
Robb Report.
She stared out the Perspex window at the infinite blue sky. Below her, the clouds looked so billowy that she imagined she could lie down and rest on them.

Rest is what she desired most now. Rest and the deep, untroubled sleep of the righteous, neither of which, she knew, were available to her. Don Fernando had astonished her at every turn. Now, after visiting her father’s grave, after seeing what her mother had become, how could she continue on the same path she had been traveling for years?
How can I not?
she asked herself.

She turned to Don Fernando. “I’m thirsty. Where’s the flight attendant?”

“I sent the cabin crew back to Paris last night,” he said, not looking up.

She returned to her brooding. She realized that she had become unmoored in a world in which she had been certain she knew all the angles. She was confronted now with one she could not have anticipated and did not know how to play. She felt like a little girl again, lost and alone, wanting only to run from where she was into the void of the unknown. She was dizzied, as if falling from a great height. It was only now that she realized how completely Maceo Encarnación had fashioned a world around her, an environment in which she could function—but as what? His iron fist or his puppet, dancing to the tune of each new assignment. Death, death, and more death. She saw now how he had mesmerized her into thinking that killing was all she was good for, that without him, without the assignments he brought her, without the money she received from him, she was nothing.

“
You live for the moment of death,
” Maceo Encarnación had told her. “
This makes you special. Unique. This makes you precious to me.
”

She saw now the load of goods he had sold her, how he had flattered her, stroked her ego, caressing her with his words. She had a mental image of herself as a puppet, dancing to his tune. An icy wind knifed through her, and she shuddered inwardly.

“What do you think of this new Falcon 2000S?” Don Fernando said, plopping a two-page spread featuring the private jet onto her lap. “This plane is due for a major overhaul. Instead, I’m thinking of upgrading.”

“Are you serious?” She looked at him, not the photos of the Falcon. “This is what’s on your mind?”

He shrugged and took the magazine back. “Maybe you don’t have a feel for jets.”

“Maybe you don’t have a feel for what’s going on,” she said, a good deal more hotly than she had intended.

He put aside the magazine. “I’m listening.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“That’s entirely up to you.”

She shook her head, exasperated. “Do you not understand? If I don’t kill you, Maceo Encarnación will kill me.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. I won’t be able to escape him.”

“Again, I understand.”

“Then what am I—?”

“Are you still planning to kill me?”

She snorted. “Don’t be absurd.”

He turned toward her fully. “Martha, this sort of change of heart is not so easily accomplished.”

“No one knows that better than me. I’ve seen the mess it can make. At the last minute—”

“The person can’t go through with it.”

“Even though they want to.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “sensing no exit, they kill themselves instead.”

She looked at him levelly. “That won’t happen to me.”

He took her hand in his. “How can you be certain, Martha?”

“In Gibraltar, you took my heart and dissected it, picked out all the black bits, then put it back together.”

“No,” he said. “You did that.”

A smile formed slowly on her face. “Who handed me the scalpel?”

The plane was descending, touching the top of the clouds, and then, all at once, it was in them, the sky going gray and featureless, as if they were alone in the air, lost to the world. The drone had become a kind of silence, a shroud.

“We’ll be landing soon,” Martha said. “I’ll have to call him.”

“By all means do.”

“What will I tell him?”

“Tell him what he wants to hear,” he said. “Tell him you have completed your assignment. Tell him I’m dead.”

“He always demands proof.”

“Then we’ll give him some.”

“It will have to be convincing.”

“It will be,” Don Fernando assured her.

Her brows knit together. “I don’t understand.”

Unbuckling his seat belt, he stood up. “The plane isn’t going to land.”

The waters of Acapulco were turquoise, clear down to the rocky bottom.