Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (20 page)

“Depends on what’s in there,” I said.

Talena said, “Let’s assume for the moment that it’s drugs.”
   “Fair enough.” I considered. “Then I think we can also assume that if we and the briefcase just plain disappear, Sinisa figures we stole it and tracks us down and kills us.”
   “In San Francisco? In America?” Saskia asked, shocked at the thought that such things could happen in our golden end-of-the-rainbow destination.
   “I hate to disappoint you,” I said, “but America is not exactly a murder-free zone.”
   “Then we should not leave the briefcase,” Saskia said. “I am sorry, Talena, but I think Sinisa is very dangerous.”
   “You and me both,” I agreed. “But that still doesn’t mean we have to use Sinisa’s guys. We could still cross the border ourselves. But it’s a big risk.”
   “Big risk?” Talena asked. “It’s crazy. It’s fucking insane. You understand that if we get caught driving a suitcase full of drugs across the border, our lives are over, right?”
   “Metaphorically,” I said. “But if we don’t get that suitcase over the border, our lives are literally over.”
   “If you do this for Sinisa he’ll just turn around and ask you to do something else.”

“But by then we’ll be in America,” I said. “In America we can say no. I’ll be very happy to say no. But not until we get there.”

“I can’t believe how fucked up this is,” Talena said.

Neither Saskia nor I had anything to say to that.

“All right,” she said. “Fine. We take Sinisa’s briefcase into America for him. But we get there by ourselves. No getting involved with more drug smugglers. Right?”

I nodded. We both looked at Saskia.

“Whatever you think is best,” she said, obviously still a little reluctant.

“Trust us,” I said. I hoped I wouldn’t regret it.

* * *

   “You want to go for a walk?” Talena asked later that night.

I looked at her, surprised. Saskia had just gone to her room to sleep, and I had been on the verge of doing the same.

“Where?” I asked.

“The beach,” she said.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

Cancun’s beach, despite the best efforts of the vile high-rises and gated tourist complexes that polluted it, was very pretty, a pale endless arc of sand. The rushing sounds of the ocean drowned out most of the thumping techno from the waterfront discos. A warm sea breeze plucked at Talena’s long hair as we walked, and the sand was cool and damp against our bare feet. I was in shorts, she in a green patterned sarong and blue bikini top.We walked hand in hand, silently, but comfortably so, for a long time.

“I wish we could walk forever,” Talena said. “Somewhere the sun would never come up, and the beach would never end, and we would never get tired, we could just go on and on and never go back to real life.”

“This is real life too,” I said.

She nodded thoughtfully.

A little while later she said, “Let’s sit down for a bit, okay?”

We sat next to one another and faced the ocean, watched the whitecapped waves surge and ripple in the moonlight, then lay back and stared up at the stars. I reached out for her without thinking about it, natural as breathing, and she rolled towards me and we lay together on the damp sand, my arm around her, her head on my chest. I felt her whole slender body quiver a little with each heartbeat. Her breath was warm against the hollow of my throat. She closed her eyes, and so did I, and we slept a little.

When I woke up I didn’t know how much time had passed. Talena was motionless but I could tell by her breathing that she was awake. My arm around her ached slightly.
   “Paul?” she whispered, after a little while.
   “Yes?”
   “If we try again?”
   I swallowed. “Yes?”
   “You have to be nicer and better to me –”
   “I know,” I said hastily, “I know, I’ve been –”
   “Wait,” she said. She wasn’t whispering any more but her voice was low and soft and thick with sleep. “Please. I’m not finished. I have to be nicer and better to you too. I’ve been vicious sometimes. I know you’re sorry for how you’ve been. Well, I’m sorry too.”

I reached to her with my free hand and took her chin and tilted her face towards mine. There were tears on her cheeks. I kissed her very softly. We held each other for a long time.

“We don’t have to live in the same apartment any more if you don’t want,” she said. “You can get your own place and we can date like before. But I was thinking, I mean, if you want to, maybe we could find a new place together. So it would feel more like home for both of us. Just if you want to. The other way is fine too.”

“I’d like that,” I said. “Us finding a new place together. That would be fun.”

She smiled and kissed me.

“Silver lining department,” I said. “You know how great normal life is going to seem when we get back? I swear, I’ll whistle on the way to work every morning. You will too. All the crap that pisses people off, Muni and money and taxes and, I don’t know, bad waiters, we’re going to be fucking overjoyed to be so lucky as to experience them. People will think we’re on happy drugs.”

“Yeah,” Talena said. “You know what I’ve decided? Adventure sucks. Boring is good. Boring is the new black. From three days from now on, you and me are going to be as boring as boring can be.”

“Deal,” I agreed.

Her smile grew strained. “Unless of course we both get arrested and thrown in jail for ten years tomorrow. That would be very unboring. Let’s not do that.”

We laughed nervously.



Cancun to Ciudad Juarez via Mexico City by bus is an epic journey of suffering and endurance, one that would be worthy of television specials and ballads and Shakespearean plays, except the suffering consists of boredom and jackhammer headaches. You try spending 28 consecutive hours on buses in a country where mass transit entertainment consists of dangling a dozen TVs from the bus ceiling, turning their collective volume all the way up to eleven, and showing an endless stream of amazingly low-production-value ninja action shoot-em-ups. My advice is to bring lots of Aspirin, or a baseball bat to knock yourself out with. Especially if you happen to be in a position where your tedium turns to gut-wrenching dread every time you think of the next day’s border crossing.

I learned on that bus that fear and boredom reinforce one another in a vicious spiral. Boredom gave me plenty of time to brood, the more I brooded the more scared I got, and the more scared I got, the slower time seemed to pass. I fluctuated between periods of being nervous but confident that the odds were in our favour, when I just wanted the crossing to be over with, and periods of abject gasping terror, when I wanted to turn around and stay in Mexico as long as possible, rather than dare the border.

It was Moby who saved my sanity, Moby and his buddies Radiohead, Fleetwood Mac, and the Sex Pistols, powered by the twenty-pack of batteries I had wisely purchased for my Discman. Saskia and Talena and I passed the Discman and the Harry Potter books we had bought in Cancun back and forth, when we weren’t dozing. It was hard to read, with the constant jostling of the bus and the sounds that kept trying to batter their way into our consciousness, mostly movie gunfights and chop-socky ninja battles but sometimes car horns or passenger arguments.

Our only respite was in Mexico City, where we traded boredom and dread for hassle. We arrived at the southern bus station, hopped a shuttle bus to the northern bus station, and promptly got stuck in traffic. It was night, which I regretted; I wanted to get a sense of Mexico City’s vast megalopolis, which contains in its greater urban area more people than the entire population of Canada, but all I saw was an endless ocean of roads, cars, street lights, neon signs, brightly lit storefronts, and occasional glimpses of mobs of people that reminded me of Hong Kong. Thankfully Mexico’s bus stations were considerably more efficient and less chaotic than I had expected, and we made it onto the northbound bus to Ciudad Juarez.
   “Talk about a good walk spoiled,” Talena said, as the TV ninja slaughtered a golfing foursome for poorly explained reasons.
   “He forgot to yell ‘fore’ before he threw the throwing star!” I said. “Two-stroke penalty!”
   “I bet the ninja is really a member of the fashion police,” she said. “The fashion assassin. Look, my God, that guy’s wearing a paisley jacket over a striped shirt, he better not get away!” He didn’t.
   “I bet he’s just jealous,” I said. “Sure, he knows eighty silent ways to kill a man, but he’s still a thirty handicap.”
   “Maybe the country club has a No Ninjas policy,” Talena suggested. “But look, do they ever have heavily armed security! In golf carts!”
   “I bet they’re Humvee golf carts,” I said. “The Pentagon paid a million dollars each for those. Thirty gallons a mile.”
   “Now they’re chasing him! It’s a low-speed pursuit!”
   “The ninja is down!” I announced. “I repeat, the ninja is – oh, wait, he’s hiding in the water hazard. He’s going to catch a cold.”
   “Maybe he’s looking for golf balls,” Talena said. “Even ninjas have to make ends meet.”
   “Where’s he going to dry that ninja suit?” I asked. “Where do ninjas do laundry?”
   “They sneak in late at night and hotwire the machines,” she explained. “It’s one of the lesser-known secret ninja tricks, along with sneaking to the front of the line at the bank.”
   “I wondered how it was the damn ninjas always beat me to the tellers.”
   “Look, he’s making a reed into a blowgun! He’s a ninja and a Boy Scout! Now –”

The old woman in front of Talena turned and furiously shushed us. I looked around and realized that every Mexican on the bus, which meant everyone but the three of us, was glaring in our general direction. I smiled weakly. “Sorry,” I said, and Talena and I shrank back down into our seats, chastened, until we looked at one another and started giggling wildly again, like children.

Saskia leaned over and whispered, “I think we should not make so much noise. I think maybe this is a very important movie for them.”

Then we really started laughing, heedless of the angry Mexicans.

“Ninja III: The Domination –” I said, but I was laughing too hard to finish.

“It’s the
Schindler’s List
of Mexico!” Talena howled, and we whooped with laughter until it hurt. The Mexicans, writing us off as crazy or drug-addled, sighed and turned back to their own devices.

We were a little crazy. We were frightened of the upcoming border crossing, and punch-drunk from nonstop bus travel, and our laughter was a little hysterical. But more than that, Talena and I were just giddily happy with one another again, silly and childish and wonderfully unselfconscious together for the first time in more than a year. I wouldn’t have traded that feeling for anything.

When we settled back down I noticed that a score of our fellow passengers were in a single tight group; mostly men in jeans and T-shirts, small and dark-skinned, but a few women in homemade dresses and blue-and-white shawls. They were…Indians? Native Mexicans? First Nations? I didn’t know what the culturally sensitive descriptor was in Mexico. The leader of the group was a pretty young woman just out of her teens, with considerably paler skin than those she led, wearing Juicy Couture sweat pants and an expensive-looking jean jacket. I couldn’t understand a word she said, but when she lectured her followers, many of whom were much older than her, I could tell she had all the usual petulance and know-it-all impatience of youth, and then some. I had imagined coyotes as tough-looking middle-aged hombres, the kind of men who smoked cigarillos and wore fringed leather jackets. This girl would have looked right at home in Beverly Hills. I supposed in a way that was the point. I wonder if she would actually lead this pack of would-be farm workers right over the border and across the desert in those Juicy Couture sweatpants, or if she was just a recruiter, she took them to Ciudad Juarez and somebody else handled the actual crossing.

As we advanced northward the landscape changed from green hills, to rocky scrub tufted with thorn bushes, and then the kind of arid desert I always imagined when I thought of Mexico, thanks to the thousand Hollywood depictions deep in my cultural DNA. We passed dozens of 24-hour tire-repair shops, which said a lot about Mexican roads, their presence indicated by huge truck tires with naked light bulbs burning within like bullseyes.

Around midnight Talena curled up against me and fell asleep, her head on my shoulder, my arm around her neck. I watched her sleep for a little while, luminously beautiful. I felt like I cradled something invaluably precious and terribly fragile in my arm. I didn’t move a muscle for fear of waking her. She occasionally muttered a few garbled words of Croatian. I knew that even though for years now she had thought only in English, she often still dreamed in Croatian.

I was uneasy when we finally entered the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez the next morning. I knew from Internet research that this was a city of dire reputation, the hunting ground of one or more extremely busy serial killers. Given the numbers it almost had to be a group. Over the last decade, the bodies of at least 100 young women had been found abandoned in the desert, raped and strangled and mutilated. The one thing every source agreed on was that the true number of victims was far larger. Estimates of the real body count varied from 300 to over a thousand, but nobody really knew how many more might lie undiscovered by the Cuidad Juarez police. Or perhaps outright hidden by them. Site after site excoriated the catalogue of police idiocy, corruption, and laziness in connection with this case. Their hunt for the most prolific murderers in the history of the continent was at best lacklustre. Several commentators had suggested that the police were somehow involved or actively trying to protect the killers. True or not, it underscored that this was not a good place to get into any kind of trouble.
   Serial killers aside, Ciudad Juarez was a terrible city, one that had obviously grown too far too fast, a wasteland of rotted streets, crumbling walls, broken traffic lights, rusted skeletal automotive remains abandoned on the street, masses of beaten-down people shambling from place to place like extras in a George Romero movie. I splurged on the Holiday Inn, rather than one of Ciudad Juarez’s several backpacker hostels. I wondered, as I passed my credit card to the receptionista, if I was getting old. The full-on sensory overload of hostels nowadays seemed frenetic and draining. Somehow, while my back was turned, the inhabitants of such places had become young, callow, and loudly alcoholized, people I would rather avoid. Once they had been full of people just like me. These days, especially after a long bus ride, the relative peace and serenity of the Holiday Inn was extremely inviting.
   Our plan was idiot-simple. Saskia and I would spend the night in Ciudad Juarez. Talena would cross the border to El Paso. Tomorrow she would rent a car, drive down here, pick us up, and drive back, with me in the passenger seat and Saskia and the briefcase in the trunk. We would simply hope that ours was one of the cars not selected for further inspection. The odds were pretty good. About 1 in 50 was pulled aside, said the all-knowing Internet. A 98% chance of success. Who wouldn’t take that? But those last 2% loomed Tyrannosaurus Rex large in our minds.
   Talena came up with Saskia and I to our Holiday Inn room. I thought she was just saying goodbye before hopping a cab to the border. But instead she said something to Saskia in Croatian. Saskia fell silent for a moment, and then smiled widely, said something back, and quickly exited the room.

I looked at Talena. “What was that all about?”
   “I told her to stay down there with her magazine and give us an hour of privacy.”
   “Oh.” I turned and looked at her as she closed and locked the door.
   “Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Clock’s ticking.”
* * *
   “Are you scared?” Talena asked.
   “Yeah,” I said.
   She raised herself up to kiss me and lowered her head back to my sweat-soaked chest.
“Are you?” I asked.
   “Sure. But not like I was before. Now the worst that can happen is getting arrested. Which would really suck but isn’t as bad as finding out Dragan found you and tortured you to death. I’d catch myself imagining that sometimes. The things the back alleys of my brain can come up with, God, you have no idea. Anyways, never mind, never happened. It’s all good.”
   “It’s all good,” I echoed, closing my eyes.
   She snorted. “I almost forgot how little you like to talk after sex.”
   “No, I like it,” I protested. “I always like talking to you. I’m just kind of dreamy. Especially this time. This was, yeah. Wow.”
   “Yeah. I could tell. You’re not usually so noisy.”
   “Was I noisy?”
   She giggled.
   “Oh,” I said, embarrassed.
   “Sorry about the bite marks,” she said, inspecting my shoulder. “They, um, seemed like the thing to do at the time. I don’t think they’ll bruise. I’m sure glad this cheap-ass Third World bed held up. You’d think Holiday Inn could afford better. I was getting a little worried about it while I was still, you know, able to think.”
   “Yeah. If Saskia came up here and found out we broke the bed I bet she wouldn’t stop blushing for weeks.”
   “She’s not so shy and innocent as all that, believe me,” Talena said. She paused. “How is she? How do you think she’s doing?”
   “She seems okay,” I said. “I guess. I don’t know. She has a lot of nightmares. I guess when someone tells you she has a head full of land mines you can’t really say she’s okay. But I think she will be eventually. She’s getting better. I really like her. We get along really well. She’s funny. And she’s so smart, can you believe how good her English is already? Give her a year or two, and the whole total new environment thing, and I think she’ll be okay.”
   “I hope so,” Talena said. “I bet being around you has been good for her. I don’t know if she would have been able to be friends with a guy for a long time otherwise.”
   “Yeah.”
   “You’re a good man, Balthazar Wood.”
   “You’re a good woman, Talena Radovich.”
   “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
   I laughed.
   “All right,” Talena said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
* * *
   On Wednesday, the fourteenth of May 2003, at 4:15 PM, we approached the border between Mexico and America. Borders are fuzzy things but this one was pretty clearly marked. The real border here was the US immigration post.

Talena drove. I sat in the passenger seat. Saskia was curled up in the trunk with Sinisa’s briefcase. There was nobody else, there was no elaborate plan. DIY smuggling. It had seemed like a good idea. But as we approached, I was visibly sweating, my heart was thundering like I had contracted malaria and then snorted a line of cocaine, and I was silently but desperately wishing we had used Sinisa’s connection after all.
   I tried to emanate vibes of being nothing more suspicious than a pleasant young couple who had come down to Ciudad Juarez for a weekend of fun. Not exactly a perfect cover. For one thing, I wasn’t sure there was any fun within a fifty-mile radius of Ciudad Juarez. And the whole drug-mule thing was still an issue. Be cool, I told myself. Be cool.

I did not feel cool. All this anticipation, stop-and-go as car after car filed through the border, was slowly driving me insane. And I hadn’t seen a vehicle pulled aside for further inspection for a long time. I thought it was about due to happen again.

The car in front of us pulled away from the border station, and it was officially too late to back out. The bar swung back down to block our entry and Talena eased the car up to the booth in which the bored immigration officer stood. My heart sank when I saw it was a man. I had hoped for a women. Women are more sympathetic.
   The man was big and white, obviously a gym rat, with a nearly-shaved layer of dyed-blond hair on his head and a single earring, standard current-American-cool look. His eyes held no spark of intelligence. And this Eminem wannabe, who probably didn’t even have a college education, hadn’t read a book since high school, and had never been out of the country himself, was about to decide the course of my life, and Talena’s, and Saskia’s. I swallowed, told myself not to be such an intellectual snob, and put on my best shit-eating smile.
   “Are you U.S. citizens?” he asked.
   “I am,” Talena said. ” He’s Canadian.”
   “Passports.”
   We passed ours over. He glanced at Talena’s American passport and immediately passed it back. “What is the purpose of your travel?” he asked me.
   “I’m…purpose? In the States? Oh. I’m visiting her. She’s my girlfriend.”
   Talena gave me a steady-yourself look. I was sure he could see that I was visibly nervous. But then he was probably used to that, I thought wildly, he probably knew that lots of innocent people got nervous when facing Immigration, including me, I actually wasn’t that much more nervous than I was when entering America without an illegal Bosnian refugee and a briefcase probably full of drugs tucked into the trunk of my car.
   “Where is your place of residence?”
   “Toronto,” I lied. I couldn’t answer ‘San Francisco’ because I wasn’t legally allowed to live there indefinitely without a job.
   “What do you do there?”
   “I’m a computer programmer.”
   I tried to think of a Toronto company I could claim to work for, but he didn’t ask. He flipped through my passport, and his eyes narrowed. A common reaction. My passport was double-wide, 48 pages rather than the usual 24, and was decorated with the stamps of more than thirty countries. Some of those countries were Indonesia, Morocco, Mauritania, and Egypt,  Islamic-majority nations, my visits to which could well cause suspicion in post-World-Trade-Center America. Even without those four stamps, the fact that I travelled so much might alone make him decide to pull us over and open the trunk. I kicked myself for not having realized that I was the risk. I should have gone over the border by myself and allowed Talena to shuttle Saskia and the briefcase alone.
   “Where’s your entry stamp?”
   I blinked. “Excuse me?”
   “Your entry stamp. Into Mexico. When you come in, they’re supposed to stamp your passport.”
   Not the way I came in, I almost said. Instead I shrugged.
   “Why don’t you have an entry stamp?” he demanded, looking straight at me.
   I tried to think of a good reason but couldn’t. My throat was so tensely constricted that I could barely breathe. I thought it was obvious that I was panicking but later Talena told me that I just looked very confused.
   “I don’t know,” I croaked.
   The immigration officer shook his head.