The Arraignment (43 page)

“Here. Put this on.” He hands me a white linen smock, the kind waiters in posh restaurants wear.

“Would you like to tell me what we’re doing? Or is that a surprise?”

“Probably best you don’t know the details. That way you free. Know what I mean? Adapt to the circumstances. What my main tai chi man says. What you don’t know can’t fuck witch your brain.”

“Inscrutable.”

“What ya say?”

“Nothing.

I slip on the smock and button it up to the tunic collar.

In the meantime, Herman is going through a bag of soiled ones, trying to find a tunic big enough. He finally settles on one. He has to leave three of the buttons undone high up around his chest and neck. It fits him like a rubber coat, the bottom barely reaching his belt.

“Don’t worry. Man’s gonna be in no mood be doin’ fashion reviews. Be too busy with his ass pucker lookin’ down the barrel your gun.”

“We aren’t gonna shoot him?”

He doesn’t look at me.

“Herman.”

“Depends what he has to say. He tells me he sent somebody over to shoot Julio, you can expect to find little bits of him stuck in the holes I’m gonna be making in his wall with little emma gee in the bag there.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Think what you want. But you gonna be thinkin’ it in the dark by yourself in about ten seconds.” He grabs the bag with the guns, pulls the string on the light overhead, then opens the door a crack and peeks out.

“Show time,” he says and steps out into the hall, the linen bag over his shoulder looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy after a bad day. I watch as he latches onto a rolling stainless steel cart against the far wall.

There’s a linen tablecloth over the top of it and a warming compartment underneath. He checks to make sure there are no lit sterno candles inside the compartment, then slings the bag with the guns inside, and closes the stainless steel door.

I look at my watch. It’s ten minutes to four. Adam and I weren’t scheduled to meet Ibarra until six-thirty.

“You comin’?” Herman’s looking at me.

“He may not even be there.”

“Then we’ll flop down on his nice furniture and wait.”

I push the cart out into the corridor. “Let’s hope the man has nothing but good things to tell us,” I say.

“Good. There you go. Positive thinkin’,” he says.

We take the service elevator. It stops three times along the way, to pick up a maid on five and drop her off on seven, and once again on the eighth floor.

A maintenance man with a bucket in his hand stands in the doorway looking at us.

“Abajo?”
he says.

Herman holds his fist out with his thumb pointing up.

The man shrugs his shoulders and starts to get on anyway.

Herman moves his bulk in front of the door. “Elevator’ll be right back down, bro’.”

The man looks up at him. I don’t think he understands a word Herman said, but he comprehends the body language. He stays where he is, and the doors close.

We ascend the last two floors undisturbed. When the doors open again, we are in a small pantry area, dishes stacked on shelves against the wall in front of us, crystal glassware, towels and linen napkins, everything arranged in a neat order. To the left is a door leading out into a hallway. To the right, another wall. A large double refrigerator, zero clearance built into it, with silverware and serving utensils on shelves and hooks on each side of it.

Herman puts his thumb on the open-door button and holds it as he leans to his right and looks toward the hallway, then nods, giving me the all clear.

I push the cart out into the pantry, and Herman steps out. The elevator doors close behind us, point of no return. This is Pablo Ibarra’s private lair. Offices and living quarters and, if Herman’s plan is star-crossed, his own personal army.

I step to the front of the cart and peek around the door leading out into the hallway. I snap my head back in quickly just as the guy sitting in the chair twenty feet down the hall turns and looks this way.

Herman’s big dark eyes stare at me like two dots under question marks.

I hold up one finger and point in the direction down the
hall. Then I make a sign, a circle with my thumb and finger. I look through it and pretend that I am turning a crank. Then I point to the ceiling.

Herman nods. He turns and looks at the wall behind him. Quietly he lifts a large soup ladle from a hook on the wall and takes a towel from the shelf. He wraps the ladle tightly in the towel with the handle facing the end of the cart near his hand.

Then he goes to the refrigerator and opens the door. He looks around without touching until he finds what he wants. When he turns around he’s holding an aerosol can of whipped cream.

I look at him like, “What’re ya gonna do, give the guy a sugar high?”

He ignores me, nods toward the door that we should be going now.

Before I can even think, he pushes the cart with me in front of it out into the hall. I turn around and take my end as if I’m pulling with my back to the guard sitting in the hall.

I look over my shoulder and get my first good look at him. He’s wearing a blue serge suit, sitting in a straight-back chair against the wall. He has one leg crossed over the other, reading a newspaper. Just beyond him is a set of double doors, heavy polished teak.

He hears the clatter of the cart, as the wheels rumble slowly over the thick carpet, and looks this way. Lean face, dark eyes, and no mirth, he checks us out, then turns back to his newspaper.

“Like I was sayin’, chef tells me sauce is not the thing,” says Herman. I look like, “Maybe they might be expecting Spanish.”

He ignores me. “Sauce is out. Now the French, they got their sauces down. But it’s the Eyetalians can cook. And they don’t put sauce on nothin’. You can’t cook, you need sauce.” Herman is pushing the cart with one hand, talking with the other.

As we approach, the man in the chair puts his newspaper down on the floor and gets up. He leans a little and looks at
the cart, first one side and then the other, from a distance. Herman pushes the cart until my back is almost right into the guy. The guard is trying to see around me to the side with the compartment.

“As I was sayin’, you really wanna learn how to cook . . . Why don’t you step outta the man’s way, so’s he can do ’is job?”

I shuttle sideways to the other side of the cart.

“I was sayin’, you lookin’ to buy perfume, you talk to the French.”

The guard leans down.

“You wanna cook . . .”

He reaches for the stainless steel door to the warming compartment.

“You gots to talk to the . . .” Herman wacks him with the heavy end of the ladle, backhand along the side of the head without even looking, “fuckin’ Eyetalians,” he says.

The man hits the floor like a sack of cement.

Herman grabs the aerosol can of cream off the top of the cart and runs to the other end of the hall. By the time he gets there, the cap is off the can. He reaches up and sprays whipped cream all over the lens of the security camera, covering it with white foam until some of it is dripping on the floor.

I open the compartment and take out the bag.

Herman jogs back, rolls the guard over, and frisks him on the floor. He comes up with two pistols, a semiautomatic in a shoulder harness, then a small revolver strapped to the man’s ankle. “Put ’em in the bag.” He tosses them to me.

“Gotta move before that shit melts.” Herman’s talking about the cream. “After that they be seein’ us, only difference is gonna be two whities. Besides, they be sendin’ somebody from maintenance up here any minute.”

“That’s if they weren’t looking at the screen when you nailed him.”

“That case,” says Herman, “they be carryin’ somethin’ besides buckets.”

I take the shotgun out of the bag, check the safety, holding my finger along the outside of the trigger guard.

Herman strips the belt off the guard’s pants and hog-ties him, hands and feet pulled up behind him.

Then he grabs the pistol pack from the bag, straps it around his waist. He quickly checks the machine gun, pulls the bolt and cycles a round into the chamber, and checks the safety one more time.

He hands me the bag with the extra ammunition. “If you be thinkin’ positive thoughts, be thinkin’ we not gonna need that shit,” he says. “We do, it means we in a fuckin’ Mexican bullet fiesta.”

He tries the handle on the door. “Shit. It’s locked.” We’re standing in a dead-end corridor, armed like terrorists, not knowing whether Ibarra has a task force coming up the elevator for us at this moment, and all we have for cover is a food cart half the size of Herman’s ass.

I go to the guard’s pants pockets as he’s lying on the floor. Nothing but change and a pocketknife. I feel a lump in his suit coat pocket, reach in, and find a large ring with a single key on it.

Herman takes it. It slides into the lock and turns. He looks at me and takes a deep breath. Then he inches the door open and peeks through. “We’re in business.”

Quietly he opens the door, then lifts the cart so the wheels don’t make any noise, and uses it to hold the door open. Then the two of us grab the guard under the arms and drag him inside, closing the door behind us.

We are in a kind of entryway. A partition wall directly in front of the door, with a large oval mirror hanging in the center and a low credenza with some books and a plant on it forming the centerpiece underneath it.

The partition extends ten or twelve feet up. Overhead, the ceiling is glass, rising on the diagonal toward the apex of the pyramid. On both ends, the partition is open.

Herman goes to the right. I do the left. When I peek around my end, I find myself looking across a large room
toward a wall of slanting glass that becomes the ceiling as it rises overhead.

In the center of the room is a large desk on the Mexican tile floor. There is a man seated behind it with his back to us, typing, hunt-and-peck style, on a computer keyboard.

I look along the partition and see the edge of Herman’s forehead taking in the same picture I am.

There is a door to another room on Herman’s side. Nothing on mine but more glass. For the moment, the other door is closed.

We pull our heads in, backs against the partition, and look at one another. Herman gives me a strange expression, shakes his head, and shrugs. How do you figure, drug lord at the keyboard? It’s as if neither one of us wants to be the first to shatter his serenity. Man lost in his own thoughts.

But time is running. We step around opposite ends of the partition at the same moment. Herman clears his throat.

The man at the computer stops, lifts his head, and turns. When he sees the guns, his eyes widen. He reaches for the desk.

Herman lowers his muzzle on him. “Not ’less you wanna be changing out all those nice windows behind ya.” The man leans back in his chair and raises his hands above his shoulders. Whether he understood Herman or the gun isn’t clear.

“Se habla inglés?”
says Herman The man doesn’t answer.

“Shit,” says Herman. “How’s your Spanish?”

“You got mine beat.”

The man behind the desk is small, slight of build, no more than five-foot-six. His black hair is graying at the temples; I would say he’s in his mid-sixties. His dark eyes are wide at this moment, taking in Herman and the submachine gun.

“Listen fuckhead, you better start saying somethin’ I can understand or I’m gonna shoot ya,” says Herman.

“I speak English,” he says.

“Good for you. I wasn’t lookin’ forward to callin’ an
interpreter. Where’s that door go?” Herman sweeps the closed door with the muzzle of his cannon.

“To living quarters.”

“Who’s in there?”

“No one.”

“You wouldn’t be bullshittin’ me?”

“Perhaps a maid. I don’t know.”

“Anybody likely to come through there?”

He shakes his head. “I left instructions not to be disturbed.”

“Good, cuz if somebody comes walkin’ in that door unexpected, they gonna be gettin’ one hair-raisin’ shock. And it ain’t gonna be doin’ your wall no good either. You Pablo Ibarra?”

He doesn’t answer, just looks back and forth at Herman and me, my shotgun pointed at the floor.

“Who sent you?”

“Why, you expecting someone?” says Herman.

He doesn’t answer.

“I ain’t exactly sure who sent my friend over there. But you might say whoever the god is handles revenge had a hand dispatching me.”

“Herman.”

He looks at me. “What?”

“Let the man talk.”

“I’m tryin’. Fucker keeps askin’ questions,” says Herman. “Where I come from, one’s gots the guns gets to ask the questions. Motherfucker lookin’ down the barrel’s the one’s gotta answer.”

The Mexican in the chair is looking back and forth as we argue, probably wondering if we’re high on something.

“What do you want to know?” he says.

“Your name for starters. Make sure we get it right on the headstone,” says Herman.

The man hesitates.

Herman clicks the safety off on his spray gun.

“Herman. That’s enough.”

“Maybe we take him outside, see if he wants to do some window washing,” says Herman.

“I am Pablo Ibarra,” he says. He closes his eyes as if waiting for the impact of the bullets.

“Father of the two assholes in the trailer down in Tulúm?” says Herman.

He opens them again. “They are my sons. Did they send you?”

Herman gives me a look. “Must be a cordial fuckin’ family. Can’t wait to meet the mother of your children.”

“My wife is dead,” he says.

“Oh. Sorry. Natural causes or did one of the kids shoot her?”

“Cancer,” he says.

“Too bad, but that ain’t the death I’m here for right now. Why did you kill Julio?”

“Who?”

“Don’t you make like some fuckin’ Mexican owl to me. You know who I’m talkin’ about. Julio Paloma. Big guy. Used to have a forehead without a hole in it.”

“I don’t know this man.”

“You may notta met him, but you sure as shit had him shot.”

“Why would I do this?”

Herman looks at me. Rolls his eyes. “See? Keeps askin’ more fuckin’ questions.” He has his finger inside the trigger guard.