Текст книги "The Execution"

Автор книги: Dick Wolf

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

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

Cecilia 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.

CHAPTER 50

Fisk sat there looking at Garza’s half-empty glass, finishing his own, and trying to find the server so he could get the hell out of there. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Okay,” said Garza, her hand leaving his shoulder as she settled back into her chair. “I’ll tell you how it really happened.”

It was impossible to say what the difference was, but the woman sitting across from him now barely resembled the woman who had left. She seemed younger, softer, less certain. It was still Cecilia Garza, still the same slim neck, the same high cheekbones, the same glossy black hair. But there seemed nothing of the comandante left in her.

Fisk shook his head. “How what happened?”

She drank another sip of wine. “My father was a very stern, practical man. He indulged me in certain ways, the way rich men do when they have a daughter. He was proud, but that pride came out in such a way that I believe he wanted a daughter who was . . . what? . . . an ornament? I don’t want to be cruel. But that was what was expected of the girls I knew back then. Grow up and be respectable, pretty, marry a guy whose dad owns a bank or a telecom company. Have multiple children. Put on nice parties.”

She shrugged, as though gesturing, Here I am.

“I never quite fit the mold. I tried to please him at first. I was a good student, didn’t drop out of school and smoke pot with American dopers or anything. But I started getting in trouble because I wouldn’t shut my mouth, drinking, staying out too late, jumping in the swimming pool naked.”

“Really,” said Fisk.

“Believe it or not. My father had a place in the country, and when we would go out there I would ride dirt bikes and shoot guns and climb rocks, or steal the Jeep and ride off-road. I broke my leg once. I was always smashing something I wasn’t supposed to or generally scaring the hell out of my parents. I was acting out, I suppose. I was an adrenaline junkie. Still am.

“Anyway, I felt like I spent my entire childhood trying to fight my way out of this correct little box that my mother and father had built for me. I always enjoyed drawing. So when I went to university, I thought I would be a painter. You know, I read all the books about Frida Kahlo and I thought I’d be this rebel artist genius fighting the conventions of society and . . .”

She sighed.

“As I said, I loved the ideal of the artist. The life! Sitting around in cafés, running counter to the prevailing culture, nobody to tell you how to live or how to dress or what to do. But that’s not reality. Reality is, you have to paint pictures. You have to make something profound and beautiful, not just nice and interesting. And after a few years of painting pictures, I could see in the eyes of my teachers . . . that they were not excited by my work. They weren’t even very stimulated. My goal was to set the world on fire with my art, not be a mere candle on a cake.

“I still wanted to crash cars and ride dirt bikes and shoot guns. So I went into this sort of funk. I knew that I wasn’t going to finish the art degree. So if I wasn’t that cool artsy girl, smoking filterless cigarettes in the café, who was I?”

Fisk smiled. “You were young and no longer idealistic.”

“In Mexico you study law as an undergrad. It’s not just a graduate degree like it is here. So I took a class with Umberto Vargas. He was the big star teacher on campus. All the girls thought he was so great, so brilliant, so handsome . . . and he was. Made quite an impression. But he made practicing law come alive. There was a flavor of art to it, at least the way he taught it. Of ideals, of protecting interests rather than exploiting them. Typical lefty rich girl, I was going to take on the vested interests, all the big rich jerks like my father, change the system, make the world better . . . all the naive things any girl in law school should think she’s going to do.”

She finished her first glass and slid it toward him to be refilled.

“Now, my father was deliriously happy when I switched to law, and yet whenever I came home we would argue. He, too, had originally trained to be a lawyer, so we argued stupid abstruse points of the law. But really it was about the same old thing. Was I going to be the conventional little ornament to my father? Or was I ever going to be my own person?”

She shrugged sadly.

“Over time we just stopped talking. Then one day I got a phone call. It was my father. I knew something bad had happened because . . . he never called me. My mother had a minor heart condition—I thought maybe she had suffered a heart attack. But that wasn’t it.”

He slid her refilled glass back to her, but now she just looked at it.

“You read about the cartels and you think that crime in Mexico is just drug gangs blasting away at each other. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There is also, as you may or may not know, a terrible epidemic of kidnapping.”

Fisk nodded, hanging on her words now.

“My father called . . . and all he said was, ‘It’s your mother. And your sister.’ ”

“My god,” said Fisk.

She shook her head once, violently, as though trying to expel the memory from her brain.

“I drove straight home. My little sister and I . . . we never had much in common. Seven years between us, and she was a sort of flighty girl. Pliable. Indulged. Whatever her friends did, whatever my mother and father said, whatever the teachers said—she went along with it.” She closed her eyes. “Anyway. I drove so fast that I almost wrecked my car. I arrived at the house, and my father was absolutely beside himself. Underneath his sternness, he was a very emotional man. And he loved my mother just unimaginably. So he didn’t care about the money, didn’t care about anything. He just wanted my mother back. And of course my sister.

“But a kidnapping is a process. It’s a kind of game. And my father, he thought he understood the game. So he played the game the way you have to play it. Certain brokers are hired. Certain corrupt police who play both sides of the street are called. There’s this theater that’s played out where you pretend that you’re negotiating with people at a distance through honorable intermediaries. But in truth, the intermediaries are working for the bad guys. Or sometimes they are the actual ringleaders and the kidnappers are simply working for the cops. You never really know which is the tail and which is the dog.” She smiled sourly. “You just have to trust in the goddamn process.”

She was silent for a moment, staring at Fisk.

Finally she continued. “In a perfect world you go back and forth, there’s a certain amount of shouting and screaming on the phone . . . all to scare you. A few false alarms to squeeze the maximum figure out of you. But these guys are businessmen. They just want the money and they are rational creatures. That’s what everyone hopes, at any rate.

“So eventually there’s a handoff that’s shepherded by the crooked cops. It’s the one place where the cops are of value, you see—because their credibility in this process is predicated on their ability to reliably assure the safety of kidnap victims. If a cop gets a reputation as a man who can’t control the crazy assholes who actually do the kidnappings, then word will get around. People won’t trust him. They want this to work.

“Funny thing. I was at my father’s side the entire time. And you know what? We never argued, there was never a harsh word between us. Normally we argued constantly. But when the chips were down . . .”

For a moment her eyes welled up, and she fought back tears.

“The only time in our lives—before or since—that we got along, was while the most horrible thing was happening to us. If my father and I could have spent our lives fighting a horrible, grueling, vicious war, we might have been great friends.”

She blew out a long breath, centered herself.

“Eventually it all fell apart. As time went on we could feel the negotiations going wrong. The go-between cop was a fool, incompetent. Too stupid even to be properly corrupt. At the very end, we were supposed to make the swap. When you do these things, you hire a man to carry the money. We paid. My father paid something like six hundred thousand U.S. dollars. An incredible amount. And we never saw them or the money again.”

Fisk said, “Never?”

She shook her head. “Not alive. They were identified two years later, after their deaths. Drug addicted, infected with hepatitis, bodies covered in sores. They had been sold as sex workers and held captive in a city eighty miles south of Mexico City. They had been kept inside security houses known as a calcuilchil, or “houses of ass.” Mirrored glass for windows, so outsiders cannot see who is living inside. They were both shot in the head. Perhaps trying to escape, perhaps . . . I’ll never know.”

She was nodding slightly to mask her trembling.

Fisk said, “I don’t know what to say . . .”

“Or what to think, I know. It’s my hell. Each of us, we’ve been through something, we’ve been marked, scarred, changed. I tried to go on, maybe like you are now. I took a job at the Ministry of Justice, filing papers, doing all the things junior prosecutors do. But I was insane inside, crazy. Doing reckless things. I was not cut out for the work. I may have had an appetite for the mission. But not for the job itself.

“Then, as I said earlier, one day I arranged to go out with the PF . . . something I had been thinking about for some time . . . and everything fell into place. I was no more built to be a lawyer than I was an artist. Not for the girl who used to wreck dirt bikes in the country. So I joined the PF and you know the rest of the story, the one I told you earlier.”

Fisk was processing this. “Please tell me this doesn’t link up somehow to Chuparosa.”

She looked puzzled. “No. I know who took my mother and sister. Who sold them like drugs to men who treated them like nothing.”

“Who?”

“Ochoa. Do you know the name?”

Fisk did. It was a moment coming to him. “Vaguely.”

“German Ochoa. He ran the Guerrero Cartel. Guerrero is close to Central America, and he was tapped into Colombian cocaine. But that wasn’t enough, of course, and his crimes extended into human trafficking, among other things. But soon after the kidnapping of my mother and sister—perpetrated not by him directly, of course, but by his men, operating under his protection and control—his empire began to crumble. He was fantastically rich, of course. You realize that the goal of these cartel leaders is not to sell drugs. It is to make money and remain free to spend and enjoy it. That is why he essentially bought the former iteration of Mexican Intelligence. He was worth billions.”

Fisk got it. “He’s the plastic surgery guy.”

She nodded. “He underwent extensive surgery, including a full facial reconstruction, liposuction, everything. And died on the operating table. Heart attack, or anesthesia overdose—it’s not known. Your DEA identified the body using DNA recovered from his house. Six weeks later his doctors were discovered in barrels encased in concrete, their corpses showing evidence of torture. ‘Uncle Ochoa.’ Disgusting.”

“And the Guerrero Cartel?”

“The cartel names are fluid. One disappears, another rises immediately to take its place. So no . . . my revenge has no direct outlet. But Chuparosa, above all others, reminds me of the brutality of Ochoa, who died before I could do anything about it.”

Fisk sat there, not knowing what to say. He wanted to refill his glass, and yet he had lost his taste for the wine.

Garza said, “You will look at me differently now, you will think of me differently. But here is the thing. It could have been me. If I wasn’t away at school . . . it would have been me. That is my reality. Ochoa would have served me up just like he did my mother and my sister—who were not rag dolls, by the way. They were not fighters as I am now . . . as I have made myself to be . . . but they must have fought, as much as they could. They were brutalized. They were victimized. And here I stand on the other side. A woman of the law, who looks out for the victims now. Who acts for those who cannot.”

“And your father?”

“He suffered, too. And then he moved away from Mexico City, to California. Remarried.”

Fisk said, “You resent that.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I envy him.” She leaned closer, speaking so that no one else could ever hear. “You faced down the man who murdered your lover. You saw your revenge.”

Fisk said, “I arrested him.”

“You faced him and you stopped him. You won. There was an ending. For me, there is no ending.”

Fisk sat back. She had touched something deep inside him, and he wanted to express this correctly.

He said, “All I can tell you is that it is never the victory you think it will be.” Fisk was remembering Jenssen’s words to him in that prison room, about America’s tolerant system of justice. Its weakness for the rule of law. “We have to be better than those we hunt. It is the very thing that defines us. We lose that . . . then we are lost ourselves. This cycle of murder and retribution, be it personal or international . . . it sickens us a little, just being exposed to it. Like radiation poisoning. There is no end. There is no cure.”

Garza listened, but it seemed to Fisk she was trying to understand how these words related to him—rather than giving any thought to how they related to herself.

“Aren’t you glad you asked?” she said. “About me?”

“Yes,” Fisk said, and meant it. “I want to know more about you.”

Her eyes narrowed a bit, shadowed by the candle flame. “You know the worst, and still you want to know more?”

Fisk nodded. “I think I want to know everything.”

She looked confused for a moment. Almost amazed. Then—as always—she pulled back. “Maybe we are too much alike. Maybe we have found our counterpart and simply want to ask it questions. Maybe we are a two-person support group.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the Malbec.”

“Maybe. And exhaustion. And overload.” He conceded all those points. “And maybe it’s more than all that.”

She smiled as though he might be right. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I won’t be distracted. I cannot be distracted. Not until . . . after tomorrow.”

“After tomorrow,” Fisk said.

Her eyes had gone dark again, her expression hard. He could tell she was picturing the image of Chuparosa in her head, visualizing him. Wondering where he was at that very moment, what he was doing, what he was thinking.

She stood, and so did Fisk.

“To be continued,” she said.

No handshake, no good-bye. He watched her walk out of the lounge and into the hotel lobby.

CHAPTER 51

Dubin called him into his office at Intel first thing in the morning.

He did not look happy. He stood immediately as Fisk entered. “You’re dropping the ball on UN Week.”

“I’m not,” said Fisk. “I’m doing my best—”

“I hear from Secret Service you’ve been running down this threat to the Mexican president, which is all well and good, but we’ve got other potential targets out there, and that’s the Secret Service’s brief. Your job is to protect the city of New York. Not one of its visiting dignitaries.”

“This is a serious threat, and it may—I say, may—involve our president. The background we have on the potential assailant is that he is a potential suicide risk. This could involve a crowded event, something public . . .”

“Who is this Comandante Garza?”

Fisk put his hands on his hips. “I think you probably know who she is.”

Dubin said, “Did you forget that there were something on the order of a dozen eyes on you last night? While you were getting gooey eyed and wine-drunk with Miss Mexico in a bar at the Sheraton?”

Fisk pulled back on his anger. Gooey eyed? If anything, it was the opposite. But he understood how their talk, her confessional, might have looked. Then his anger came out anyway. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“First there’s an imminent threat in New York. Then there’s a wine date at a hotel bar.”

Fisk boiled. “The Mexican president was tucked away safely. We went there to eat and instead . . . we had a talk. Did your tattlers tell you we went our separate ways after?”

Dubin waved that away as though it did not matter—though, if he had gone up to her room, it would certainly have mattered. “You’ve been off your desk escorting this Garza around—”

“Escorting! Jesus, Barry.”

“You’ve been AWOL chasing an alleged cartel hit man who many people think is a legend, not an actual person. A cartel fiction, a bogeyman—”

“This is total bullshit.”

“You’re getting caught up in one woman’s personal crusade instead of doing your job here. Now, I don’t know if this has anything to do with the other thing, but for appearance’s sake alone—”

“What other thing?” said Fisk.

“The other thing,” said Dubin, adopting a softer tone, stepping forward. “Gersten.”

“God,” said Fisk. “Is that the talk? Nobody has any time to do any police work around here?”

“It’s in your after-action file from Dr. Flaherty. A caution about repeating patterns, trying to replay the past. About saving this Garza from a similar fate as Gersten.”

Fisk laughed out loud. In that moment, he was embarrassed for Dubin. “I’m working a case here,” said Fisk.

“Exactly. When you are supposed to be liaising with UN security and making sure everything in this city that employs us is running smooth.”

“You know what?” said Fisk. “I’ve got an employment file with quite a few victories in there, and now suddenly this therapy report is the number one thing about me.”

“You are a pipeline between the NYPD and the United Nations. You are not to be gumshoeing around the five boroughs with the head of security for another country’s president.”

Fisk tried one more time. “This involves New York. This is New York. There is an assassin here now. He’s killed three people in the last forty-eight hours. Dumped thirteen bodies in Rockaway, none of them with heads.”

“Believe me, I know all that.” He held up the New York Post. The headline screamed, in the Post’s usual fashion, CARNAGE. Then, below that, MEX DRUG WAR HORROR COMES TO NYC.

Fisk said, “You see?”

“I see it. We have people on this. I got a call from a supervisor in Rockaway saying that you authorized one of his homicide detectives working the headless thirteen to share evidence with the Mexican federales?”

“It’s how they made these guys!”

“Chain of command, Fisk. Not the first time I’ve uttered those words to you. Now listen up. You’re just back on full active duty. You want to stay that way? Distance yourself from Comandante Hottie. Okay? I don’t care how nice her ass is. Do your job. Show up at the UN briefings you are supposed to go to, and let the Secret Service do their duty.”

“Dukes, right?” said Fisk. “He call you direct, or have someone else do it for him?”

“Stay out of the way.”