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“How can I help you?” he said.
“I’m buying a Gulfstream SPX,” Bourne said, “and I’m thinking of housing it here.”
“You got the wrong guy.” Flores indicated the office building across the runway from the hangar where they stood. “You need to talk to Castillo. He’s the boss.”
“I’m more interested in talking with you,” Bourne said. “You’ll be taking care of my plane.”
Flores eyed Bourne appraisingly. “How’d you hear about me?”
“Anunciata.”
“Really?”
Bourne nodded.
“How’s her mom?”
“Maria-Elena died yesterday.”
Bourne seemed to have passed some kind of test. Flores nodded. “An inexplicable tragedy.”
Bourne had no intention of telling Flores just how explicable Maria-Elena’s death was. “Did you know her well?”
Flores regarded him for a moment. “I need a smoke.”
He led Bourne out of the clanging hangar where three other mechanics were at work, out onto the airfield. Keeping to the side of the runway, he shook out a cigarette, offered it to Bourne, then stuck it into his mouth and lit up.
He stared up at the high clouds as if looking for a sign. “You’re a Gringo, so I suppose you know Anunciata better.” He let smoke drift out between his lips. “Maria-Elena had a difficult life. Anunciata didn’t like to talk about it.” He shrugged bull shoulders. “Maybe she didn’t know. Maria-Elena was very protective of her daughter.”
“She wasn’t the only one,” Bourne said, thinking of the conversation he had overheard in the rectory of the Basilica de Guadelupe between Anunciata and el Enterrador. “Maceo Encarnación kept her like a hothouse flower.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.” Flores looked around as if at any moment one of Maceo Encarnación’s men was going to pop out of the shadows like a ghoul.
Bourne shrugged. “I assumed you knew the two of them well.”
Flores took a last suck on his cigarette, dropped it, shredding it beneath the heel of his boot. “I have to get back to work.”
“Are we getting into dangerous territory?”
Flores shot him a look. “Whatever it is you want, I can’t help you.”
“This can help you, though.” Bourne spread the five hundred-dollar bills between them.
“ ¡Madre de Dios!” Flores puffed out his cheeks, exhaled heartily through pursed lips. He looked up at Bourne. “What is it you want?”
“Only one thing,” Bourne said. “Maceo Encarnación took off this morning. Where was he headed?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Bourne stuffed the bills into the pocket of his overalls. “I’m sure your wife and kids could use some new clothes.”
Flores looked around again, still jumpy, though no one was in earshot and those who could be seen weren’t paying them the slightest attention. “I could lose my job...or my head. Then where would my wife and kids be?”
Bourne added another five hundred. “A couple of iPads will make you a hero.”
Flores, visibly sweating, ran a hand through his hair. Bourne could see the tug of war between greed and fear being played out on his face. Still Flores hesitated. It was time to play his last card.
“It was Anunciata who suggested I talk to you about Encarnación’s destination.”
At this, Flores’s eyes opened wide. “She was—”
“She wants you to tell me.” A jet turned onto the head of the runway, its engines building to a roar. Bourne took a step closer. “It’s important, Señor Flores. It involves Maria-Elena’s death.”
Flores’s face registered shock. “What d’you mean?”
“I can’t tell you,” Bourne said, “and you don’t want to know.”
Flores licked his lips, took one last glance around the airfield, and nodded. As the jet shot down the runway and, in a veil of noise and fumes, lifted off, he leaned forward and whispered a word in Bourne’s ear.
Martha Christiana took the call from Maceo Encarnación with an icy serenity.
In an hour his plane would be landing, he would send one of his people to fetch her, and that would be the end. She would be in the center of the vortex, unable to extricate herself. The moment she stepped onto his plane, she would be in jail—she could feel it. She possessed too much incriminating information on him. One way or the other, he would never allow her to leave him.
From Don Fernando’s living room windows, Martha Christiana stared longingly at the ethereal spiderwork of Notre Dame, its floodlit stone cool as marble. In the depths of night, she was wide awake. Don Fernando wasn’t. He slept on one side of the large bed in the master bedroom, the curtains closed against the lights and noise of the city.
Below her, on the western tip of the Île Saint-Louis, rose the sounds of young laughter, a guitar being strummed, drunken voices raised briefly in a raucous chorus of some beer-hall sing-along. Then more laughter, a shout. A fistfight broke out, a beer bottle smashed.
Martha did not look down. She wanted no part of the ugliness below; she had enough ugliness in her own life. Instead, she allowed her eyes to trace the ancient grace of the cathedral’s flying buttresses, curved like angels’ harps. She was tired, but she wasn’t sleepy, a semipermanent state in her profession.
As she often did when her eyes lit on beauty, she thought of her home in Marrakech, of the beauty with which her benefactor, her captor, her teacher, surrounded himself. He had been an aesthete. He taught her how to appreciate all forms of art that brought beauty and joy to his life. “For me, there is nothing else,”he told her once. “Without art, without beauty, the world is an ugly place, and life the ugliest of all states.”She had thought about this when she escaped his airless, obsessive museum-villa. She had thought about it many times afterward, after every kill, after sitting through a concert or visiting an art gallery, or flying high above the earth from assignment to assignment. As she did tonight, with Don Fernando asleep in the next room, faced once again with both the beauty and the ugliness of the world, of life.
She closed her eyes and ears to everything but the rushing of her blood. She heard her heartbeat as it might sound to a doctor. Her torso swayed a little as she drifted into a deep meditative state. She was back in Marrakech, amid the incense, chased silver services, the intricate filigreed wood screens, the colorful tiled floors and walls made up of geometric shapes. She was her young self again, imprisoned.
She opened her eyes and found that she held her handbag in her lap, cradling it as one would a toy poodle. Without looking, she opened it, feeling around for what appeared to be a book of matches. She took it out. It said Moulin Rouge on one side. Where the striker ought to be was a thin metal rod. When she dug a nail beneath it and pulled, a nylon filament unspooled to a length of eighteen inches. She had constructed this murder weapon herself, using principles handed down by the hashashin, the ancient Persian sect whose objective was to assassinate Christian knight infidels.
She stood so abruptly that her handbag slid off her lap to the carpet. Landing, it made no sound. On bare feet, she picked her way across the living room, to the doorway beyond which Don Fernando lay asleep in his bed.
He had told her that he was different from all the other men in her life, men who had sought to manipulate her in one way or another, bend her to their own ends, use her like a gun or a knife, to work out their need for power and revenge.
From the moment she stepped aboard his plane, Don Fernando’s plan to turn her from her assignment had been set in motion. He had played on her long-buried emotions, bringing her face to face with her past, her dead father, her demented mother. He had brought her home, seeking to soften her to his will, which was to live. And in the plane on the return flight, he had turned the screws on her even tighter by lying to her over and over until she had made the decision he had wanted her to make all along: abandon her mission.