The Execution (18 page)

CHAPTER 48

W
here are you staying now?”

“The Sheraton,” Garza said. She was checking her messages on her phone. “Tomorrow is the big day.”

“I don’t like this feeling,” he said. “The feeling of running out of hours in a day.”

“I’m so exhausted. And keyed up at the same time. I can’t believe I lost a man today. Two.”

Fisk nodded. There was nothing to say to that.

IT WAS NEARLY TEN
by the time Fisk and Garza reached the Sheraton. He pulled up outside under the overhang, watching theatergoers trickle in from Times Square. A homeless man stood praying and singing to a streetlight.

She opened her door and extended one leg out, her foot reaching the curb before a valet could arrive. “Did you eat?” she said, without looking back.

“I’ve been dining out of a vending machine pretty exclusively.”

She nodded. “Cop cuisine.”

“Are you offering to buy me dinner?”

“No,” she said, rising from Fisk’s car. “But you can join me if you like.”

THEY FOUND SEATS TOGETHER
at a table near the lounge. But when the time came to order, neither one wanted food.

Garza said, “What do you think of a Chilean Malbec?”

“Love it.”

“You didn’t seem like a shot and a beer kind of man.”

“Oh, but I am. Just not tonight.”

The server came and Fisk ordered two glasses. The San Felipe Garza had wanted only came by the bottle. She tried to make him change the wine, but he refused, and the server went away to get a bottle.

Then Fisk felt strange. He hadn’t drunk wine with anyone, never mind an exotically beautiful woman, since he was with Gersten. Suddenly he was moved to keep the conversation about work.

“Tell me about Vargas, your president.”

Garza’s eyebrows lifted and she fiddled with the cocktail napkin the server had left in front of her. “President Vargas is a good man. A courageous man. And I believe the presidency will break him.”

“How?”

“He is still a man of principle.”

“You say ‘still’?”

“I knew him when he was a law professor.”

“Oh,” said Fisk, not sure if he wanted to know more.

“I believe the accord is built on a good foundation. In the past, cooperation between Mexico and the States has focused on equipment, police funding, communications protocols, all sorts of law enforcement tools. Gifts, I call them. As from a parent to a child. Your country saying, ‘Here, play with these, and keep quiet and out of our way.’ I like more guns, more breaching explosives, more trucks, more helicopters, more body armor, better radios. But it is just money. There is no working relationship. No sense of responsibility.”

“As your number one importer of illegal substances.”

“ ‘The giant nose to the north,’ we say. It is just confronting violence with violence. In an illegal market, the natural tendency is toward monopoly, and beyond the rule of law, all that is left is violence. On the other hand, this is also a big fat check for corrupt Mexican military and police to stuff in their pockets. Most
federales
make less than a worker at McDonald’s. Drug cartels pay no taxes, but more than the equivalent in bribes to mayors, prosecutors, governors, state and federal police. I’m forgetting the army and navy.”

Fisk said, “This accord will cut the purse strings.”

“You have to go after the money. The product is plentiful and cheap. Very cheap until it gets across the border, when the cost of doing business rises and rises. It is the money coming back—often in the same shipping containers the drugs go north in—that needs to be intercepted. The blood flowing back to the heart—that is where the knife blade must go.”

Fisk’s eyebrows shot up at the gory image. Garza winced.

“Sorry,” she said. “What about you?”

“About me? You can look me up on Wikipedia.”

“Yes?” She smiled. “Is it accurate?”

“No.” His turn to smile. “What about you?”

“Am I on Wikipedia?” she asked.

“I don’t know. We could check.”

“Don’t,” she said.

“So?”

She squirmed a little.

“You don’t like talking about yourself. I imagine there’s quite a story in there. How you ended up doing this kind of work,” he said.

Her eyes darkened. She actually looked pained.

“I’m not putting the thumbscrews on you,” he said. “We’re just making conversation. I think.”

She seemed to be trying to maintain her formidable front. But cracks were forming, as though she was getting tired of the strain.

After a moment she said, “Okay. Yes. There is a story.”

Then she clammed up again.

“Waiting.” Fisk let a hint of a smile appear on his lips.

She seemed to be considering whether she wanted to open up to him or not. Before she could make up her mind whether to answer him, the server arrived and showed Garza the label, unscrewed the cork from the bottle of San Felipe, poured a bit, let her taste. She smiled and nodded, and he completed her pour, and Fisk’s. He asked about food, but they demurred. He came with a bowl of glorified Chex mix and left them talking over a hissing candle.

Fisk watched Garza drink. She appreciated the vintage, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, there was the barest gleam showing.

“Your English is very good,” said Fisk, trying to start her off. “Schooling?”

“My father went to graduate school here. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So he sent me to the American school in Mexico City.”

Fisk took another sip of wine and then set the glass aside so he could focus on her. “It must be hard, though. There can’t be many people like you in the Mexican police.”

“Like me?”

“Female. Incorruptible. At your level.”

She shrugged, tossing that away.

“I get it,” said Fisk. “I’ll stop. I’m not in the habit of talking about myself much either. That counselor I mentioned, the therapist. Like pulling teeth with pliers. Something about it. As though once I start talking about myself, I’ll overindulge and that will be all I talk about.”

“It’s lonely.”

“Therapy?”

“No. The job. For me. You asked.”

“Lonely, yeah.” He nodded. “It’s lonely as hell sometimes.”

“You found someone on the force you could confide in.”

Fisk nodded, trying not to look forlorn. The candlelight, the red wine, the lounge chatter around them.

“I envy that very much,” she said. “I have never found such a person.”

“Never?”

“I’ve dated. A few men in Mexico City over the years. But they were always lawyers, dentists. Once a political functionary—never again.” A brief smile. “Somehow they all seemed like boys—smooth, soft, talky—but when it came right down to it, barely competent to cross a street safely. You can say what you will about the men in my unit, the ones I surround myself with . . . but they are men.”

“None for you?” he said.

She shook her head strenuously. “I cannot. It is hard enough maintaining my position. To do that would weaken me irreparably. Once they see me as anything other than their boss, I will lose command. That is my trap.”

“Trap? That sounds harsh.”

“I may look like a born cop, but . . .” She shook her head, her hair shifting around the sides of her face. “When I was at university, I was going to be an artist. Until I realized I had no talent. I shouldn’t say that. There was talent. But there was no
talent
. I had a bit of a crisis. Who am I? Why am I here? Difficult questions, even at that ridiculously young age.”

“True,” he said.

“I switched to law. I finished my degree, all the while knowing that I would never be happy as a lawyer. But I had gone too far down the road by that time. I worked briefly in the Justice Ministry. One day I went out with the Policía Federal on a raid. The first time I went out, I thought: This is it! I quit my job that day and signed up for the police academy.”

“Really?” said Fisk. Her story seemed to take some abrupt turns. “How was that?”

“Honestly? Awful. It wasn’t being a woman that was the worst. You are operating under a misconception there. There are actually quite a few women in the PF.”

“Then what was it?”

“In the United States, you maintain the fiction that there are no class divisions in your country. But in Mexico, there’s no fiction, no papering over the fact that some people are rich and some are dirt poor. Working people are very happy to hate the rich down there. My father is an affluent man. I suppose you could even call him rich. He was in the electronics assembly business. Owned a couple of
maquiladora
factories up by the border. Circuit boards for refrigerators and toasters and things like that. Eventually he sold out to a big Korean company.” For a moment she looked sad. “We are not close. He’s getting on in years now, but he’s on his second marriage. Has a couple of young kids. His wife is younger than me. We speak . . . but only occasionally.

“Anyway, to return to my story—the other girls in the Policía Federal, they all hated me. Constant hazing. One time they held me down at night and beat me up a little and shaved my head. That sort of thing. I got my revenge by beating them at everything. I shot straighter, I trained harder, I studied more diligently. And once I was out of the academy and on duty, I was the first one into every room, the first one to grab a perpetrator, the first into the line of fire. I was like a tiger.” She looked grimly at the bottles on the other side of the bar. “I progressed very quickly through the ranks. But I never let my guard down. Not with anyone. Not ever.”

Fisk studied her carefully. He couldn’t quite figure it out—but it seemed to him that some facts had gone AWOL here. There was some part of the story that she wasn’t telling him. It was the interrogator in him. He wanted to push, but could not.

“Eventually they started calling me the Ice Queen. They don’t say it to my face, of course. At first it was an insult. But I think that over time they have come to have a certain fondness for me. I hope so, anyway.” Her eyes were hooded. “It’s so hard to maintain your integrity in Mexico. The corruption among the police is unimaginable. But men have a hunger for purity, for goodness. It preys on their souls to take money, to do things for evil men. So I think—I hope—that they are able to look at her, their Ice Queen, and say, ‘If she can do it, if she can remain pure . . . then so can I.’ ”

“Her,” Fisk said. “You referred to yourself as ‘her.’ ”

She frowned, looking at her half-empty glass as though blaming it. “Yes. Well, in a manner of speaking, she is a character I invented.” Her frown went away and she smiled, but without warmth. “If you had known me fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have recognized me. I was . . . she was . . .” Cecilia Garza looked at Fisk sharply. A sudden change had come over her, a stiffness, a defensiveness, like the armor was suddenly clanking into place again. “I don’t like this conversation.”

Fisk could see what it was that angered her. There were two versions of this woman hiding inside one body. She and Fisk might have shared similarly unusual cop biographies. But they weren’t the same. Fisk had never really felt the way she obviously did. Had he avoided certain topics of conversation once he joined the force? Had he concealed the fact that his father had left him a trust fund—however modest it was? Had he been slow to parade his ability to speak five languages in front of other cops? Sure. There were things he didn’t talk about when he went out for a drink with the guys. He skipped the stories about vacations in the south of France when he was a kid. But he’d never felt like Jeremy Fisk was an invented character. Quite the reverse. In a lot of ways he felt like he’d only discovered the true Jeremy Fisk when he’d left the world of Ivy Leaguers and jet-setters.

It must have been very difficult to be Cecilia Garza.

She drew herself up very straight in her chair. Suddenly she seemed distant. “Look, perhaps this was a mistake, Detective. Virgilio is gone, and . . . here I am, drinking wine. With you.”

Fisk said, “That doesn’t seem like a bad thing, necessarily. We’re not going out dancing.”

Garza shook her head, as though to say,
This is not what I do
. “Again, I want to apologize for my rudeness earlier. It was uncalled for.”

Not only had her words gone formal, her voice had gotten hard. Even her accent had gotten stronger, as though her entire being were drifting back toward Mexico.

She pushed back her chair and stood.

“It’s getting late, Detective.”

Fisk extended his hand, motioning for her to stop. He almost pulled it back again, once he realized that . . . he did not want her to go.

“Don’t rush off,” he said. “Finish your wine, at least.”

She dug into her handbag, pulling out a twenty-dollar bill.

Fisk said, “You better not leave that here.”

She started to, then put it back inside her bag.

He said, “I think you’re running away, not walking.”

Her face grew masklike. “Is that therapy talk?”

“It’s real talk.”

“Good night.”

CHAPTER 49

C
ecilia Garza was so angry, she was trembling.

Standing there, waiting for the elevator, not even remembering what floor her room was on. Tasting the Malbec on her tongue.

For a moment there, she’d thought that he was different. For a moment, she’d thought that they shared something. Two cops. Two people with similar burdens. Two people on opposite sides of the same border.

And then there had been the expression in his eyes. It was as though he was looking through the surface of her skin, like her face was made of glass and he was seeing right through it, seeing deeper, seeing the real Cecilia Garza.

She was no fool. She knew how men looked at her—how they had always looked. Women, too. The thing that made men gravitate toward her, she had found a way to make it useful. To counteract their hunger with starvation. To give them nothing and make them accept it.

One of the great reliefs of being in the PF was that once you were geared up—vest, helmet, mask, gun, boots—everyone looked the same. Inside the helmet and the mask, she was just a cop.

So she never took it off.

Not even when she saw Virgilio’s body floating facedown in that wretched cemetery pond.

She felt a tear reach the corner of her eye. She pushed the elevator button frantically.

Virgilio was dead. The man in the New York Yankees cap, the one on the cell phone: it was Chuparosa. He was near. She was close.

The elevator car arrived and she darted inside, waiting for the doors to close again. As soon as they did, she let out all her breath, trying to remember which floor number to press.

What had gotten into her with Fisk? Normally she did not allow herself the luxury of regretting that she had offended people. She never cared.

And now she felt she had offended him again.

Those dark, intent eyes . . . listening, actually listening, to every word she said. For years she had told herself that she was looking for a man who could look past her face, who could see the real Cecilia Garza. Not the Ice Queen. Not the cop. Not the beautiful woman. Past all of that.

And here he was. He’d looked past all of that, probed down into something underneath. And what had she done?

Thrown dirt in his face. Squandered it. Sabotaged herself.

Maybe the sad truth was that she truly did not want anyone looking into her soul. Maybe it was too late.