Triple Crossing (33 page)

“Here come your dogs, Isabel,” Méndez said into the phone.

“You’re OK. Just hurry up and get across before we have another diplomatic incident.”

The inspectors encircled the car and escorted it on foot, glancing south.

“Say so long to our lovely and beloved Mexico for a while,” Méndez told his men, sinking back in the seat. “This mess will
take a while to clean up.”

In the shadow of the port of entry, Méndez remembered an article he had once read about a Mexican performance artist who portrayed
different characters of the border: a lowrider, a Tijuana yuppie, an indigenous shaman. The artist “baptized” each character
by dressing in full costume and crossing through the U.S. border station on foot to see how the inspectors reacted. Every
crossing is like a rebirth, the artist had said, a transformation of the individual and of the world he enters.

Méndez thought to himself that the idea of birth was only half-right. Crossing was also a kind of death.

T
HE PLANE DESCENDED OUT
of fields of clouds over the jungle.

The treetops were dense and unreal and interminable, a green reflection of the clouds above. The plane descended and descended
and there was no break in the sea of vegetation. Just as the plane seemed about to scrape its belly on the trees, the jungle
gave way to a landing strip.

It was a tiny airport. A low control tower, a deserted shed of a terminal. But the runway was long enough to accommodate a
747.

Wet heat washed over Pescatore as he stepped stiff-legged from the plane. The force of it made him blink. The worst heat he
had ever experienced had been when he worked a detail at the Border Patrol station in El Centro. The Imperial Valley desert
was like a furnace. You felt permanently singed, even at night.

This was worse. This was brutal: a swamp of humidity that smothered motion and thought. Pescatore started to take off his
jacket, but remembered his shoulder holster. He wiped at the sweat blossoming on his unshaven upper lip. He noticed a hangar
near the tree line where a barbed-wire fence enclosed the airstrip. There were
KEEP OUT
signs in Portuguese. The hangar was freshly painted in camouflage colors. The doors were padlocked.

A Brazilian doper airport, Pescatore concluded. Probably guns too. Plus the occasional VIP fugitive.

Moze and Tchai waited by the runway with a crew of thuggish Brazilians attired like them: black lightweight vests with multiple
pockets over their guns, wrists and chests heavy with gold chains. Moze and Tchai exchanged hugs with Abbas and handshakes
with Junior, who looked queasy.

Pescatore ended up with Momo in the far backseat of a sport utility vehicle. Junior and Buffalo were in the middle, Abbas
by the driver. The road led out of the jungle into the outskirts of a city.

“That is the Syrian-Lebanese club, you remember we took lunch there with Khalid,” Abbas told Junior, indicating the arched
wall of a country club on the roadside. “He would like to give you that stallion you fancied.”

Junior grunted. He reclined behind big bug-eye sunglasses, a bronzed arm draped over the top of the seat. His cologne blended
with the smells of upholstery and air-conditioning.

They entered the city. The buildings were taller and more modern than Pescatore had expected: high walls, barbed wire, guardhouses
fronting condominium complexes. The people were a spectrum of colors and races. Palm trees shaded the business district. A
sign bore the words
FOZ DO IGUAÇU.
Pescatore remembered a map Isabel had showed him: Foz was the Brazilian city at the Triple Border.

Although Junior had been here before, Abbas kept up a tour-guide banter. Abbas enjoyed the cultured inflections of his own
voice. “That department store is new… splendid growth in construction and investment… City Hall over here… do you see the
mosque, the minaret there? Khalid is a very generous benefactor.”

Past downtown, open-fronted luncheonettes and flophouse hotels mixed with automotive shops, truck depots, storage yards. Traffic
thickened. Trucks, buses, minivans, columns of pedestri
ans. The road curved along a canyon. Flags fluttered over a bridge.

“That, gentlemen, is the Paraná River. Ciudad del Este on the other side.”

Abbas put some ceremony into the announcement, but Junior did not react. Junior had fallen asleep. His chins nested on his
chest, his lips puckered. Pescatore saw an
R
-shaped diamond in his left ear.

Abbas examined Junior. He continued mechanically. “The Paraná River. Could we call it the river of dreams?”

The muddy stagnant waters at the bottom of the canyon did not look like a river of dreams. But Pescatore realized he was seeing
an international border: the line between Brazil and Paraguay. All his Border Patrol instincts kicked in.

The pedestrians swarming off the bridge from Paraguay carried bags and backpacks. Two youths trotted by: dark-skinned with
blond-streaked nappy hair, sinewy in shorts, T-shirts and thongs. Strapped on their backs were colossal cardboard boxes swathed
in black duct tape. The youths covered ground with the stamina of marathon runners, drenched in sweat, bent beneath their
loads.

“Tripped out,” Pescatore whispered to Buffalo. “What’s in the boxes?”

“Contraband,” Abbas said. “Mostly cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes?”

“For the Brazilian black market. Paraguay imports enough cigarettes for every man, woman and child to smoke a pack a day.
We call the smugglers
formigas
: ants.”

Pescatore was aghast and amused. His fingers cupped an invisible radio. He wanted to call it in: Hey, Brazilian Border Patrol,
there’s like five hundred smugglers coming across. You slugs gonna respond or what?

It was ridiculous. No one made a move to check the vehicles entering and departing the jam-packed two-lane bridge. At the
Brazilian customs station, a green flag depicted a yellow diamond enclosing a blue globe. Sturdy mustachioed cops in gray
uniforms and laced boots stood around a lone truck in the inspection area, arms folded, just watching the parade.

Reaching the bridge, Pescatore felt the vertigo he always got at The Line in San Diego: simultaneous fascination and apprehension.
Amplified now by a brand-new border and the craziness that had brought him here.

A group of smugglers crouched on the walkway of the bridge. They raised hands to shield against the sun, scouting the Brazilian
cops. The smugglers started forward, retreated a few yards. They removed the boxes from their backs and hefted them to a large,
jagged hole in the chain-link fence.

“What’s up?” Pescatore said. “They’re tossing their stuff in the river.”

“It is quite organized, believe me.” Abbas yawned. “Their people down there will retrieve everything.”

Figures at the riverbank below waded knee-deep toward floating boxes. Near them, another line of backpackers climbed a steep
path toward Foz, unmolested.

The bridge had only one lane going in each direction. Like the roads on the riverbanks, it was woefully out of date for all
the vehicles and pedestrians. Traffic crawled, stopped, lurched. A line of armored trucks passed in the opposite direction,
yellow beasts with elongated snouts and slitted rectangular eyes. Pescatore counted six.

“We prefer cash in these parts,” Abbas chuckled. “That lot is freshly washed. On its way back to the politicians and gambling
barons of Brazil.”

Halfway across the bridge, two policemen had a smuggler backed against the fence. The Paraguayan cops wore Foreign Legion–style
caps and oversized fatigues. The cops were practically teenagers, closely shorn with prominent noses, scrawnier and shabbier
than the Brazilians. The smuggler’s ponytail sprouted
beneath an Orlando Magic cap, his duffel bag stuffed to the bursting point. He yelled at the cops, jaw to jaw. Other smugglers
trudged by, ignoring the confrontation, probably figuring it had pushed the odds a bit more in their favor.

One of the officers set himself with a lazy wriggle of his shoulders. He gripped his nightstick with both hands. Pescatore
flinched; the cop whacked the man in the knee. The blow, combined with the weight of the duffel bag, toppled the smuggler.
As the other cop raised his stick, traffic obscured the scene.

Ouch, Pescatore thought. Real professional. Thumping tonks in broad daylight.

The bridge reminded him of training films of the border in El Paso. Except it was much smaller and it crawled with these backpack
smugglers instead of illegal aliens.

Craning forward, Pescatore said: “Uh, excuse me, Mr. Abbas? I thought they called it the Triple Border. These are just two
countries here, right? How come the Triple Border?”

He was aware of Buffalo’s eyes on him, no apparent disapproval. Pescatore felt emboldened: just another gangster, making conversation.

“The border of Argentina is nearby. There is a point where all three borders come together. And our business community mixes
together all three countries.”

The final stretch of the bridge took forever. Ciudad del Este inched closer: a forest of midsized buildings on the bluff overlooking
the river. Walls and roofs were plastered with billboards and banners—pink, yellow, purple—announcing products and stores.
Pescatore saw smugglers clustered on the riverbank with loads of cigarettes. And other items: He spotted a guy stuffing a
plastic bag down the front of his sweatpants.

Ants, Abbas had called them; the action on the riverbank resembled an ant colony.

No one checked papers at the end of the bridge. In Ciudad del Este, the traffic churned up red dust. Crowds spilled into
trash-lined gutters. Vendors’ tables and booths choked the sidewalks in front of stores. A vast tapestry of merchandise: flowers,
diapers, watches, onions, cassettes, compact discs, leather jackets of every hue, nets bulging with soccer balls, stacks of
stereo and computer components.

“Cuanta mierda venden,”
Momo muttered.

Buffalo laughed in his throat. “You can buy anything, homes, long as it’s fake.”

Pescatore saw banks, currency exchanges, more armored cars, omnipresent security guards with shotguns. Itinerant money changers
in orange vests clutched rolls of bills, worked calculators, leaned into car windows. Pescatore saw signs in Portuguese, Spanish,
English, Asian languages, a warning about product piracy, a shingle that said
“ALI BABA AND CO.”
Women in Muslim veils passed a man arranging pornography on a rack. A contingent of shaven-headed Asian monks went by. They
wore sandals and billowing brown robes; they seemed to float through the melee of buying and selling, loading and unloading,
everyone jabbering into cell phones and radios.

The scene recalled Avenida Revolución in Tijuana, but much denser. And Pescatore didn’t see any restaurants, bars, nightclubs
or hotels. Just hundreds and hundreds of stores. It was like TJ stripped down to its core. A demented bazaar.

Ten minutes later, it ended abruptly. A fast avenue took them out of crowds and dust and high-rises into parkland. Houses
dotted a semicircle of hills around a lake.

They approached the walled, palm-shrouded entrance of a hotel: El Naútico Resort. A police van was parked in the driveway,
surrounded by officers who resembled the soldier-boy thumpers on the bridge. They carried short machine guns on straps.

“Your security force,” Abbas told Buffalo. “We will also leave you Mozart and Tchaikovsky.”

The hotel was built onto a hillside and slanted down to a man-
made lagoon in back. Abbas supervised the check-in with ostentatious commands. He shook hands and hurried off, promising that
Khalid would be in touch soon.

The El Naútico Resort had flower beds, a discotheque, a multilevel pool, tennis courts, a playground. But nothing appeared
to have been refurbished—furniture, wallpaper, carpets—since the 1970s. A smell of insecticide hung in the halls. The air-conditioning
clanked and groaned deep in the bowels of the place. Long-faced bellhops in pillbox caps escorted the group, who had no luggage—except
for a golf bag Abbas had provided for the weapons—to a floor two levels below the lobby.

Their rooms faced directly onto the lagoon. Despite high ceilings and dance-floor dimensions, the rooms were dank. Patches
of humidity bubbled on the walls and fogged the mirrors and bay windows. Beyond the glass, a lone rowboat sat at the dock.

Junior stayed awake long enough to have a tantrum when the faucets in the presidential suite spurted rusty brown water. He
spat something in Spanish that Pescatore translated to himself as “What a fucking dump.” Then Junior went back to sleep.

Buffalo handed out two-way radios to Momo, Sniper and Pescatore. He organized a schedule for sentry duty.

Before his shift, Pescatore napped in his room. Then he called room service and ordered macaroni with meat sauce, a jumbo
salad, a strawberry milkshake with a little caramel in it, apple pie and a small pot of espresso. And then another shake.
The meal made him feel better, though the pasta was overcooked and the espresso was watery.

Pescatore’s watch started at 4 a.m. He picked up his radio and resumed his masquerade as a henchman. He prowled like a phantom.
He climbed stairs to a gym littered with dusty barbells. The black-and-white weight-lifting diagrams in a glass case on the
wall had been clipped from an American muscle magazine from 1973. He padded through a ballroom with cracked mirrors and apparitional
white sheets over tables. He wandered long dim
halls to the lobby. A desk clerk watched him furtively, looking cadaverous in the greenish glow of the mahogany-framed reception
area.

As he made his rounds, Pescatore came across hotel security men and uniformed policemen. He greeted them in Spanish. To the
Brazilians stationed near the suites, he repeated the phrase that Moze and Tchai used:
“Tudo bem?”
Everything good?

He counted a dozen sentries, plus the police van at the entrance. It would be hard to get in or out unnoticed.