The House of Wolfe (22 page)

We don't ask his name and he doesn't ask ours and it doesn't take long to make a deal. Charlie tells him he has to keep an eye on two men, the Asian guy on the bench over there, and a man who will be coming out of the bank. When I start describing Belmonte, the kid interrupts to say he knows who I mean. He'd marked him going in and had intended to take his wallet when he came back out. He says he will not now carry out that intention. He'll wait under the canopy for as long as it takes for Belmonte to come out, and when Belmonte does, the kid will wait to see if Chong makes a call. If he does, the kid will take the phone after Chong puts it back in his jacket. If he doesn't make a call, the kid will take the phone when Chong starts to leave. Either way, Charlie tells him, for his time and service we'll pay him another fifty dollars now and another fifty afterward. He jacks us to another hundred bucks up front and one fifty after. His only condition is that after I slip him the hundred advance we go to the cashier and have her hold the other 150 dollars for him. We do that, and find out she's his cousin. He then makes a quick trip to the men's room and goes back across the street to keep an eye on Chong and wait for Belmonte's exit.

We stay at our table to do the same.

An hour crawls by. Then another. The kid's sitting on a bench and fooling around with an iPad or whatever it is. I never once catch him looking at Chong, who's had time to read every word in the newspaper twice and is now applying a clipper to his fingernails. The waitress stops by our table every few minutes to see if we want more coffee and we say no thanks and give her a big tip to keep her from pestering us any more. The quirky rain continues to alternate between stretches of light sprinkling and short-lived windy downpours.

It's past noon when we see Belmonte approaching the glass doors, the fat gym bags under his arms and strapped to his shoulders. The crowd outside is bigger than before, but the kid and Chong have spotted him too and are on their feet. The kid shuffles out to the sidewalk as Chong eases a little way into the crowd and gets out his phone and puts it to his ear. Charlie heads outside to make sure we don't lose sight of Chong after he makes his call, and I keep watching from the window to see if the kid does his job.

Belmonte goes by Chong, who slips the phone into his side pocket and starts after him. The kid heads toward Chong and they jostle past each other in the crowd and I catch the flicker of the kid's hand plucking the phone.

I hustle outside and jog across the street as the kid angles out of the crowd and bumps my arm and passes me the phone with an underhand move. We hadn't told him to give us the phone, and I'm so surprised I almost drop it, then stick it in my pocket and keep on chasing after Charlie. Up ahead of us, Chong's trailing Belmonte. All of us with umbrellas, adding to the bobbing sidewalk stream of them.

29 — THE BETA HOUSE

The five hostages are now all in the slightly warmer of the two bedrooms, the lights of the Beta house still on against the day's dark cast and still sporadically flickering, when Barbarosa gets a call from Espanto, wanting to know if the locksmith was able to open the basement door. It's been an hour since he said the smith was on his way.

Locksmith, my ass, Barbarosa says. The joke's over, prick. You wanted a big laugh and you got it and now you—

Hey, hey, hold on, Espanto says. You telling me he
isn't
there? I talked to him not twenty minutes ago. Took longer than expected for the mechanic to change the belt, but the smith was back on the road and on his way. He should've been—

Oh bullshit! Barbarosa says. Go fuck yourself. And I'll tell you something else. . . .
What?
. . . I'm on the phone here, God damn it!

Someone is addressing Barbarosa but Espanto can't make out what he's saying. What's going on? he asks.

Locksmith's here, Barbarosa mumbles—and severs the connection before he can hear Espanto's laughter.

A short, stout man carrying a toolbox, his Windbreaker beaded with rainwater, his fedora brim dripping, the locksmith introduces himself as Anuncio and begs their forgiveness for his tardiness but says it couldn't be helped. There are no signs on most of the streets around here and very few buildings have numbers, and in the rain it's been an effort to find the house by way of nothing more than Espanto's description of it.

He listens patiently as Barbarosa berates him anyway and expounds at length about the stink. Anuncio sniffs the air with a face of disgust and nods in sympathetic understanding. Then asks to be shown the troublesome lock.

Barbarosa says he doesn't know why they should bother trying to find the cause of the smell at this point, but leads Anuncio to the kitchen and the landing of the basement stairwell.

Woo, the locksmith says as he descends into the greater stench.

Yeah, says Barbarosa, stopping midway down the stairs. Like something dead rotting in an unflushed toilet.

The stairwell is very dim, the only light from the kitchen door. Anuncio coughs a few times, takes a handkerchief from his back pocket and wipes his eyes and nose, then gets a flashlight out of his toolbox. He turns the padlock this way and that, examining it closely. He fingers the small section of exposed shackle and purses his lips as if forming a silent whistle. I don't have anything with me that can cut this, he says to Barbarosa. There's a certain grinder that could probably do the job, but I'd have to rent it from a place back in the city.

Jesus Christ, by then we'll be out of here, Barbarosa says. Fuck it. We've put up with it this long.

I'd sure like to know what that stink
is
, Flaco says from the top of the short staircase.

I may be able to pick it, Anuncio says.

A lock that hard to cut sure as hell can't be picked, Barbarosa says.

That's not always true, the smith says. I'd like to try.

Do what you want, man, Barbarosa says, going up the stairs. I gotta go out and get some fresh air, rain or no rain.

Flaco follows after him.

The locksmith endures another coughing fit, then folds his handkerchief and ties it around the lower half of his face like a bandit. He takes a ring of keys from his toolbox and finds three keys that will enter the lock face. He inserts one and bumps the lock lightly and repeatedly on the door, simultaneously trying to turn the key with each bump. He tries this with each key unsuccessfully. It would have been too easy had this technique worked, but you never know. He again resorts to his toolbox and extracts a small metal case containing an array of instruments. He selects one shaped like a little saw blade and one that looks like an ice pick with a curved tip, both of them very flexible. Then he once more sets to work.

Again and again he curses softly as he feels the tumbler pins' sly evasions of his probing. At times he feels the instruments touch exactly where they should, but each time, one or the other slips off its mark before he can execute the requisite manipulation. He pauses occasionally to work the stiffness out of his cold fingers and ease his frustration even as he admires the lock's interior design. From time to time, one or another of the men comes to the top of the stairs to watch him work, then goes away without comment.

Anuncio has been laboring at the lock for more than half an hour when Flaco shows up again and sits on the top step to observe him. When Barbarosa appears at the doorway, Flaco gestures at the locksmith and says he's never seen anyone so determined.

Barbarosa scoffs. “So crazy,” you mean. He watches for a minute, then shakes his head and starts to turn away.

And there's the unmistakable
snick
of the shackle uncoupling.

Holy Mother, Flaco says.

Anuncio expels a long breath and pulls down his mask, removes the huge lock, and with a victorious grin at them raises it high like a trophy.

Barbarosa pushes the basement door open to almost total darkness and an even more powerful concentration of the stench. The men cough and cover their mouths and noses with their hands and stand fast just inside the threshold, reluctant to enter any farther for fear of what they might step on. A decomposed body or a bunch of rats rotting in traps, or as Flaco has suggested, a litter of starved cats after they pissed and shat in every corner of the place. Barbarosa now detects something vaguely familiar about the stink, yet can't quite place it. He runs his hand over the wall to one side of the door and says, Where's the light switch?

The locksmith feels about on the other side. “Aquí 'sta,” he says, and clicks the switch.

The basement comes alight from a pair of shaded lamps to either side of the room and a naked high-watt bulb dangling on a frayed cord from the center of the ceiling. Tables line three sides of the room, covered with glassware and opened and unopened crates, with car batteries, plastic jugs of antifreeze, hot plates, rolls of plastic tubing, boxes of coffee filters and plastic baggies. The walls are stacked almost to the ceiling with propane tanks, cans of lye and paint solvents, acetone, lighter fluid, drain cleaners, kerosene, ammonia.

The lights flicker, cut out for a few seconds, plunging the room into darkness, and come back on again in a tremoring cast. Then the room again goes black and this time stays that way.

“Chingada!” Barbarosa says. Work the switch, man.

The locksmith clicks the switch up and down a number of times before the room's lights come back on but continue to flicker.

Terrible wiring, the smith says.

And now Barbarosa sees that the far corner of the room is piled almost to the ceiling with cartons of cold medicine. The floor is littered with torn and empty blister packs and small plastic medicine bottles, with flattened cardboard boxes.

The overhead electric cord starts to sizzle and a wisp of black smoke issues from the tattered insulation just above the bulb.

Oh Jesus, says Flaco, and takes a step back toward the door.

That's when Barbarosa remembers the laboratory in Jalapa where last year he and the lately murdered-by-his-girlfriend Chisto delivered a truckload of equipment—and just as the word “anfetamina” enters his mind, the overhead cord crackles and sheds bright blue sparks and the room detonates in a white blaze.

The stone-walled basement compresses the force of the explosion and directs it upward in a fiery eruption through the floor that sunders the house and everyone in it and propels wreckage as far as the next block. Chunks of concrete smash through neighboring windows. Burning pieces of woodwork clatter on adjacent roofs. The Beta house occupants who had been above the basement now litter the street, smoking and disfigured beyond recognition, all of them missing at least one limb, two of them headless. Body parts are strewn into weed lots and shrubbery and will be discovered and fed on by crows and dogs and rats. Of those who were in the basement no remnant will be found larger than a ham or other than charred black.

The neighbors pour out into the mizzling rain to gawk at the fiery remains of the Beta house and the smoking roofs of flanking homes whose residents stand huddled and crying in the muddy street. A few people with phones call the fire department, some the police, but it will be most of an hour before the cops or the water-tank trucks arrive and by then the rain will have dampened the fires to steaming embers.

The blast was heard at the perimeters of the slum but did not carry into the central city's tenacious clamor, and the smoke of its fires is hardly distinguishable in the overcast sky and perpetual haze encircling the Federal District. Still, word of the explosion reaches the city's news centers, and though the misfortunes of the slums are rarely deemed newsworthy, it has been a slow day marked principally by its miserable weather, and two television stations dispatch camera crews to the scene in hope of footage they might fashion into a local drama for the afternoon broadcast.

30 — CHATO

Chato follows Sosa from the bank into the beltway's teeming traffic, the chains of headlights and taillights streaking through the heavy grayness, but the yellow Cadillac is easy enough to keep in view. Even though Galán told the two fathers they would be followed to and from the banks, you don't want them to spot you. You want to keep them apprehensive with the knowledge that you see them but they don't see you. Chato maintains a buffer of one or two vehicles between himself and the Caddy, a tactic requiring deftness, as Sosa is staying in the rightmost lane and holding to the speed limit. Behind Chato, vehicles pull out to pass at the first opportunity, horns blaring and shadowy drivers making rude gestures as they go by. Chato pays them no mind. The radio is tuned to a rock station and he taps his hands on the steering wheel in time to the music.

A carpet store truck follows Sosa onto the exit ramp, preserving the shield between Chato and the Caddy. As he comes down the curving exit, Chato checks his mirrors and sees a pink-and-white station wagon directly in back of him and glimpses a blue car and a black one behind the wagon. Sosa makes a right turn onto the two-lane junction road, on which the traffic is heavier than it was this morning. The carpet truck makes the same turn and Chato stays behind the truck. Six blocks farther on, Sosa turns off the road and Chato makes the same turn and in the rearview sees the next cars and the station wagon pass on by, their tires raising small rooster tails of water. There's no one behind Chato now and only Sosa up ahead as they follow the winding street to Belmonte's house.

Chato imagines himself forcing the Cadillac to the curb, taking the money from it, absconding to some distant haven of the world to live in luxury for the rest of his life. It's a mere fancy, of course. Because he wouldn't be robbing only Los Doce, but Los Zetas, too, who are expecting a one-million-dollar membership fee from the ransom. Nobody to fool with, those boys. They would find him wherever he went, and what they left of him could be buried in a shoebox.

The Belmonte estate comes in view. The Caddy slows as it approaches the entrance to the driveway, and the attendant opens the gate. Passing by, Chato gives him a glance—Arturo, he recalls, whom he recently enriched by a thousand pesos.