Cari Mora Read online

  “Go!” Victor said. “Go! Haul ass!”

  Victor and Paco ran for the front companionway up to the deck. Cholo lingered, wanting Schneider’s watch. He was tugging at it when Schneider shot him. Schneider got to his feet and ran aft toward the rear companionway. Victor and Paco shot at him, bullets screaming off the metal.

  On deck Schneider fell backward over the railing and into the water on the river side of the ship. Victor and Paco shot at him as he submerged. They went down into the hold for Cholo.

  Victor put his hand on Cholo’s neck. “He’s dead. Get his ID.”

  They ran down the ramp to the wharf and threw the machine pistols into the big ice chest.

  Mateo was fleeing in Schneider’s car.

  “The papers,” Candy said. “Where are the papers?” She was dumping her empties in her purse and reloading from a speed strip.

  “Papers, shit—let’s go,” Paco said.

  “God damn it. Get the papers. Are you sure Cholo’s dead?”

  “Fuck you if you think I would leave him,” Victor said.

  Candy closed the cylinder on her revolver. “Come on.”

  Back in the hold they stuffed the drawings into Candy’s bag. Cholo’s dead eyes were drying. They did not look back at him.

  On the wharf, Paco ran to the station wagon parked up on the road, Candy and Victor took the lunch truck. They roared away. Sirens sounded in the distance.

  The fish beneath the bridge could feel the elevated train approach. The Tri Rail rolled across the river, shaking bugs from the bridge, sprinkling the water with bugs. The waiting fish sucked them down, making swirls in the smooth surface of the river.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Candy drove the lunch truck. She could see the lights of the airport, the beacon sweeping over. She had to speak loudly to Victor beside her as an airplane passed low overhead.

  “What does it say on the paper, which garage?”

  “Across from D concourse,” Victor said. “Right across from international departures. Our flight goes in forty minutes.”

  They were approaching a level railroad crossing. The crossing lights came on and the warning bell began to clang.

  “Mierda,” Candy said. She rolled to a stop as a slow freight train crossed the road. Candy turned the rearview mirror to look at her makeup. Her face exploded as a burst of automatic fire swept across the cab from behind. Victor was shot dead beside her. Candy’s body slumped over the wheel, sounding the horn. “La Cucaracha” over and over with the crossing gong and the roar of the train. Her foot slid off the brake and the truck began to creep toward the side of the moving train.

  The back door of the truck went up. Bloody Hans-Peter Schneider climbed out of the back, the rags of his shirt half covering his ballistic vest. He carried a machine pistol. Another car was coming, a taxi. The driver tried to turn around and flee but Schneider shot him through the side window and pulled him out onto the ground. He climbed into the driver’s seat and fired a short burst into the butane tank in the back of the lunch truck. It went up with a whoosh that rocked the taxi as Schneider drove away.

  Schneider dropped the flag on the meter and drove the taxi, its radio muttering. He had shot through an open window, but the passenger-side window had holes in it. He was able to roll the window down. The seat and wheel were sticky and gritty with bone fragments.

  The cab probably had no LoJack, but the cab company could see his location by satellite. He wasn’t hot yet, but very soon there would be a BOLO out on the cab. He was bloody and wet and his shirt was in shreds. He sang high through his nose as he drove. Now and then he said “Jawohl!”

  A bus stop was coming up. An old man sat on the bench. He wore a straw snap-brim hat and a short-sleeved shirt with flowers on it and he held a frosty Corona caguama in a paper bag.

  Schneider hid the gun between his leg and the door. He leaned across the passenger seat.

  “Hey. Hey you.”

  The old man finally opened his eyes.

  “Hey. I will give you one hundred dollars for that shirt.”

  “What shirt is that?”

  “That shirt, the one you are wearing. Come here.”

  Schneider held up the money, leaning across to the passenger window. The old man got up and walked to the car. He had a limp. He looked at Schneider with his rheumy eyes.

  “I might take two hundred fifty.”

  Schneider got a fleck of foam in the corner of his mouth. He brought the MAC-10 around to point at the old man.

  “Give me the shirt or I blow your fucking brain out!” It occurred to him that he couldn’t shoot without ruining the shirt.

  “On the other hand, a hundred is fine,” the old man said. He peeled off the shirt and passed it in the window. He plucked the hundred-dollar bill out of Schneider’s fingers. “I have on some slacks that might interest you—” he said as Schneider drove away. The old man took his seat in only his pants and undershirt and took a long drink from his paper bag.

  Schneider drove the taxi to the nearest Metro stop.

  Mateo answered Schneider’s call.

  “I took off in your car,” Mateo said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were—you know—like they got you.”

  Hans-Peter rolled the gun in a floor mat from the cab and held it under his arm while he waited for Mateo to pick him up.

  Hans-Peter had two personal rooms adjacent to his online peep-show studio in his warehouse on the bay. One of his rooms had flocked wallpaper and a lot of velour, all burgundy with chinchilla throws.

  The other room was the soundproofed tile room with the drain in the center of the floor. It contained his big shower and sauna, with nozzles all up and down, his refrigerator and his cremation machine, his masks, and his obsidian scalpels—both six-millimeter and twelve-millimeter—eighty-four dollars apiece and much sharper than steel.

  He sat on the floor in the shower in his clothes and let the hot water beat the blood off of him. When the water ran under his vest he took it off and threw it in the corner of the shower along with the old man’s shirt.

  There was music in the room. Schneider had the remote in a condom, the receptacle end sticking up like a little blunt antenna. He kept it in the soap dish. He played Schubert’s Trout Quintet. It was the music of his parents’ house in Paraguay. It used to play all afternoon on Sundays when he was waiting to be punished.

  Quietly and then louder, and then louder the music in the tile shower, Schneider sitting on the floor, leaning into the corner while the shower beat the blood out of his clothes. With a quick movement of his arm, his body slack, he raised to his lips his Aztec death whistle and blew and blew and blew with all his breath, over the music, the whistle like ten thousand victims screaming, the music of Montezuma’s coronation drowning out the Trout Quintet. He blew until he collapsed, his face near the drain, his eyes open, his vision filled with the circling water around the sucking drain.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Hans-Peter was dry and clean now, lying in his bed, the blood beaten out of the clothes that lay on his shower floor.

  Seeking a place for his mind to sleep, he wandered through older and older memory rooms to arrive at last at the walk-in freezer of his youth in Paraguay.

  His parents were in the freezer and he could hear their voices through the door. They could not get out because the freezer door was secured with a chain Hans had tied in an excellent chain knot, the way his father had taught him to tie a chain, shaking the knot until the links jammed tight.

  Lying in his bed in Miami, Hans-Peter gave voice to the images swarming on the ceiling. The voices of his father and his mother came out of his face, the mixture of their features.

  Father: He is kidding, he is going to let us out. And then I’ll beat him until he shits.

  Mother, calling through the door: Hans, dear. The joke is over, we will catch cold and you will have to wait on us with tissues and tea. Ha-ha.

  Hans-Peter’s voice muffled now, his hand over his mouth
as he repeated what he heard through the door, muffled pleadings all through the night, so long ago.

  “Chug, chug, chug” Hans went, like the quivering hose from the car exhaust he taped to the air vent in the freezer.

  When after four nights he opened the freezer door, his parents were seated and not in each other’s arms. They looked at him, their frozen eyeballs glinting. When he swung the ax they broke up in chunks.

  The chunks stopped bouncing; the figures were still, like a mural on the ceiling above Hans-Peter’s warm bed in Miami.

  He rolled over and slept like an abattoir cat.

  Hans-Peter woke in complete darkness. He was hungry.

  He padded to the refrigerator in the dark and opened the door, appearing suddenly in the dark room, white and naked in the refrigerator light.

  Karla’s kidneys were in an ice bath on the bottom shelf, pink and perfect, perfused with a saline solution and ready for pickup by the organ vendor. Hans-Peter was letting the pair go for $20,000. He could have offered to take Karla home to Ukraine and harvested her kidneys there for about $200,000 had he not been tied up at the Escobar house.

  Hans-Peter hated mealtimes and the ceremonies of the table but he was hungry. He wet one end of a kitchen towel and hung it in the handle of the refrigerator. He spread another towel on the floor.

  Hans-Peter took a whole roast chicken in his two hands and said the blessing he carried in his heart, the one he was beaten for saying at the family table:

  “Fuck this goddamned shit.”

  Standing at the open refrigerator he bit into the chicken like he would bite an apple, tearing out chunks of flesh and bolting them with jerks of his head. He paused to imitate Cari Mora’s cockatoo: “What the fuck, Carmen?” And he bit and bit again. He took milk from the refrigerator, drank some and poured the rest over his head, milk streaming down his legs and running to the drain.

  He wiped off his face and head with the towel and walked under the shower, singing:

  “Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben; hätt mein’ Mutter Fleisch gekocht, so wär’ich länger blieben.”

  He liked that so much, he sang it again in English:

  “Sauerkraut and beets have driven me out; had Mother cooked meat, I’d have lingered about.”

  Singing, singing, Hans-Peter put into his sterilizer his obsidian scalpels, so popular in Miami cosmetic surgery. He was careful with these delicate blades of volcanic glass. Ten times sharper than a razor, their thirty-angstrom edge can divide individual cells in half without tearing. You can cut yourself and not know it until the blood draws your attention.

  From Hans-Peter’s mouth came the voice of Cari Mora: “Good chuletas at Publix. Good chuletas at Publix. Good chuletas at Publix.”

  He wiped his hands on the wet kitchen towel. “There are the lunch trucks,” he said in Cari Mora’s voice. “I like Comidas Distinguidas best.”

  And again the bird: “What the fuck, Carmen?”

  He picked up his death-scream whistle and blew and blew and blew in the tile room with its floor sloping off to the drain, his liquid cremation machine sloshing end to end like a slow metronome.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mr. Imran arrived at Hans-Peter’s building shortly after 11 p.m. He was riding in the third seat of a van. A blanket-covered mound was on the floor where the middle seat had been removed. The mound moved slightly after the van came to a stop.

  Mr. Imran was shopping for his extremely rich employer, Mr. Gnis of Mauritania, whom Hans-Peter had never seen.

  The driver got out and opened the sliding side door for Mr. Imran. The driver was a large, impassive man with a cauliflower ear. Hans-Peter noticed that the driver wore archery arm guards under his sleeves on both arms. Hans-Peter did not get too close to the van. He did not get too close to Mr. Imran either, as he knew Mr. Imran to be a biter, and that he could not always help it.

  Hans-Peter kept a Taser in his pocket.

  They sat on stools in Hans-Peter’s shower room.

  “Do you mind if I vape?” Mr. Imran said.

  “No, go right ahead.”

  Some perfumed vapor emerged as Mr. Imran lit up.

  The liquid cremation machine rocked gently and gurgled to itself, basting Karla’s body with lye solution.

  Hans-Peter was wearing her earrings, and a locket containing a picture of Karla’s father. He pretended it was his father in the locket, and the locket full of carbon monoxide.

  Mr. Imran and Hans-Peter watched the machine for a few minutes without saying anything, like men absorbed in a ball game. Hans-Peter had added a little fluorescent color to the liquid and on the upward motion of the machine Karla appeared, her skull and remaining face glistening.

  “That is a particularly becoming shade,” Mr. Imran said.

  His eyes met Hans-Peter’s, each thinking how amusing it would be to dissolve the other alive.

  “Did you put her in there alive?” Mr. Imran asked in a confidential tone.

  “No, regrettably. She suffered a fatal injury while trying to flee in the middle of the night. Even dead, they do move entertainingly when the heat hits them,” Hans-Peter said.

  “Could you set up an apparatus like this for Mr. Gnis’s den and demonstrate the machine on a conscious subject, do you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have something to show me today.”

  Hans-Peter handed Mr. Imran a large leather folder, the cover tooled in a floral pattern. It contained candid photographs of Cari Mora taken with a telephoto lens as she worked around the Escobar house and garden, along with Hans-Peter’s sketched suggestions.

  “Um!” Mr. Imran said. “Yes, Mr. Gnis was very enthusiastic about these and thanks you for sending them. Quite remarkable. How did she get the scars?”

  “I don’t know. She will probably tell you as the work goes forward—I expect there will be work?”

  “Oh yes,” Mr. Imran said. “I hope I will be privileged to watch and hear that conversation—the conversations are the very best part.” He smiled. Mr. Imran’s teeth are slanted backward like those of a rat, but their color more resembles the rust orange of a beaver’s teeth, with their heavy concentration of iron in the dentin. There were dark stains at the corners of his mouth.

  “The major work should be done on the other side, Mr. Imran, because afterward she will be too difficult to move. It’s not like simply harvesting a kidney at the airport.”

  “This is a hands-on project for my Mr. Gnis,” Mr. Imran said. “He wants to actively participate in every phase. Does he need to work on his Spanish?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt. She is completely bilingual. In extremis, though, she will probably revert to Spanish—they often do.”

  “Mr. Gnis wants the services of Karen Keefe for some portrait tattoos of his mom, Mother Gnis. He would like them drawn on the subject at the sites of the original work when that work is completed and healed over.”

  “Sadly, Karen is finishing a prison sentence and has about a year to go.”

  “That could still work into the long arc of the project; Mother Gnis’s birthday will come once a year forever. Will Karen be able to travel after her release?”

  “Yes, a felony does not disqualify you for a passport if you owe no fines,” Hans-Peter said.

  “Mr. Gnis values her portrait shading and halftones.”

  “Karen is superb,” Hans-Peter said.

  “Would it be useful to provide Ms. Keefe with portrait photos of Mother Gnis to study during her remaining incarceration?”

  “I will ask her.”

  “When can you deliver this Miss…”

  “Mora,” Hans-Peter said. “Cari Mora is her name. If Mr. Gnis is sending his boat across we could coordinate with that. And there may be something else I’d like to send. Small, but heavy.”

  “She’s going to require some gavage,” Mr. Imran said. “We could start that on the boat.” Mr. Imran made a few notes in his eelskin diary.

  The liquid cremation
machine began to tinkle in its rocking movement, rocking Karla away.

  “It’s a chain mail bikini you hear,” Hans-Peter said. “It begins to tinkle on the bones as the flesh goes away.”

  “We’ll take one,” Mr. Imran said. “Are they difficult to alter in size?”

  “Not at all,” Hans-Peter said. “Additional snap links come with it at no extra charge.”

  “May I see the kidneys?”

  Hans-Peter got Karla’s kidneys from the refrigerator.

  Mr. Imran poked the plastic covering them in their slurry of ice and water. “Bit short in the ureters, both of them.”

  “Mr. Imran, they are going in the pelvis, within an inch of the bladder, not up in the renal position. Nobody’s put a kidney up there in years. Get current here. There is plenty of ureter.”

  Mr. Imran took his leave with the pair of pink kidneys perfused with their saline bath. Considering the recipient could live with one, and with two new incisions would not know the difference, Mr. Imran ate the other one in the car.

  His eyebrows went up. “Pré-salé!” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Oro del Mar is a small fish cannery on the waterfront in Barranquilla, Colombia. Don Ernesto’s ’63 Lincoln with the suicide doors was parked with the battered trucks of the fishermen.

  At a conference table on the top floor, Don Ernesto was talking with J. B. Clarke of Houston, Texas, and the plant manager, Señor Valdez. The Don was helping with a start-up. Two plates of snails and a bottle of wine were on the table. Gomez, too large for his chair, sat where he could see the door, fanning himself with his hat. His role was bodyguard, but Don Ernesto tolerated his advice.

  Clarke was an ad man. He opened his portfolio. “You tell me you want advertisements that suggest exclusivity and prestige. Words like ‘prestigiosos.’”