The Lazarus Drop Read online

  “Why are you going to Michoacan?"

  “I was sitting at home, bored, pushing buttons at random on my World Express trip planner, and all of a sudden I had a ticket to Morelia. So I decided, what the hell, and here I am."

  “You are being disrespectful. That is not advisable. At the very least, I could send you straight back to the United States."

  “Try it. All my documents are in order."

  Salazar picked up one of the papers from his desk and tore it in half, gazing at me with an amused look as he did it.

  “Paper is fragile, Senor Blue. I can do what I want. Oh, you could complain, and perhaps my jefe, my coronel, would come to me and say, ‘Oh, Mario, be nice to the tourists. We need the dollars.’ Or you might really be an important tourist, and then the coronel's boss would complain to him, and then he would call me Salazar instead of Mario, and it could be that I would have to do without gringo cigarettes for a week or so."

  He threw the torn paper back down on the desk.

  “Then life would go on, and you would be sitting in your home in Los Angeles, and I would be sitting in this dingy little room, herding yanqui sheep."

  I spread my hands in surrender.

  “My apologies, Captain. I get irrational about my privacy at times."

  Salazar smiled and shook his head. “You have no privacy, Senor Blue. There is no privacy in the world. Not here, not in your country, not anywhere. I simply have to put your name into this machine.” He turned to a keyboard at his side and tapped the keys. “And your passport number.” He typed some more. “And it goes into the hypernet, and all over the world, machines like this one approach it, sniff at it like curious dogs, nudge it this way and that. And then, even if they lose interest and turn to sniff elsewhere, everywhere in the world it is known that one Senor Nathaniel Blue, single man, aged 50, resident of Los Angeles, California, USA, is sitting in this office."

  Salazar handed my papers back to me.

  “I am going to allow you to pass on your way. I know you are going to make trouble for someone. I feel this in my bones. But who knows? Perhaps you will make trouble for someone I don't like.” He nodded toward my permiso. “In theory, that will get you safely to and from Morelia. But you should remember that paper is fragile. Morelia is a dangerous place these days.” He cocked his head and smiled that transparent smile again. “But then I suppose the world is a dangerous place, que no?"

  “Adios, Capitan,” I said.

  “Vaya con dios,"he replied. Go with God. It sounded like he meant it.

  I walked out into the cool night air of the plaza, which was still filled with lights, and music, and people, and headed for the bus station.

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  Chapter 5

  “Everybody with a grudge these days gets a gun or a bomb, calls himself a revolucionario, and starts killing people,” the old man said. We sat together on a bench, waiting for the night bus to Morelia, me with my suitcase, and him with a bundle tied with string, and an open bottle held loosely in his wrinkled, brown hands.

  “Mescal?” he said, waving the bottle at me. “Para el frio. For the cold.” He smiled. “You're a gringo, no?"

  I nodded. “From California."

  “I have a brother who went to California. He did good. Got a job, made money. He used to send us letters now and then. Put a little money in them, sometimes. Then one day, no more letters, no more money. I don't know if he got killed, or just forgot us."

  “That's a shame."

  “Yeah. A shame. But that was fifteen, twenty years ago. Life goes on.”

  He offered me a drink of mescal, which I had never had before. I took a swallow, just to be polite, and decided I liked it better than the beer. I told him so.

  “For certain,” he said. “Beer is a transplant. Mescal is a child of this very land. The world can fall apart, and some Mexican will still know how to make good mescal.” He took another swallow, handed the bottle back to me, and patted his jacket. “Drink up. There's more.”

  His name was Juan, he said. Juan Escamilla Lopez, come from Morelia with his daughter and granddaughter. He pointed to an attractive, tired looking woman across the way, with a little girl on her lap. The child was skinny and frail, with a pretty, heart-shaped face dominated by huge, coal-black eyes under a fringe of straight bangs.

  “That's my daughter, Marisa, and my little nieta, Graciela, who has been very sick. There aren't any real doctors in Morelia, at least not for us poor people. The pinche General, I suppose he gets any doctor he wants. But we had to make a trip all the way to Mexico City to get help for little Graciela."

  “She's all right now?"

  “Dios volante. God willing. Her poor father will be happy. It nearly broke his heart not to be able to come with her. But they wouldn't let him leave his job, even for a few days. ‘You don't want to work, we have a dozen men who do,’ they told him. ‘We don't pay you to have kids,’ they told him.” He made an obscene gesture. “Putos."

  The old man held the bottle up and examined it. There wasn't much mescal left. He handed it to me.

  “Finish it, amigo. I got to go to the pisser, anyway. When we get on the bus, I'll open the other one, and we can talk some more. I never talked to a gringo before. You can tell me about California.”

  He got up and walked a little unsteadily across the room.

  * * * *

  The bus had to be 90 years old, at least, a broken down General Motors job with funny, fat tires and an old-fashioned gas turbine engine that screamed like a breaking heart whenever the driver accelerated up a hill. It had been air conditioned once, but no longer seemed to have anything electrical functioning on the inside, not even lights. Any ventilation problems caused by the lack of air conditioning had been solved long before by the expedient of breaking out the windows. Sheets of clear plastic were attached to the window tops, so they could be rolled up in the warmth of daytime. Now they hung loose, flapping in the breeze.

  I quickly learned the reason for the oversized tires. The road was a mess, and whatever suspension the bus had once possessed was in the same shape as the air conditioning. Even with the fat, soft tires, the bus lurched and bounced over the broken road bed.

  Old Juan and I sat together. His daughter and granddaughter sat across the aisle. We talked and worked on the second bottle of mescal, which did its job of keeping us from noticing the cold, mountain air that came past the plastic sheeting.

  Eventually, between the jouncing and bouncing of the bus and the spreading warmth of the mescal, I dropped off to an uneasy sleep.

  Then I was awake again. The bus wasn't moving, and a painfully bright light was on my face.

  “Documentos,” a shadowy figure, hidden behind the light, said. Other figures bearing flashlights were moving up and down the aisle of the bus, demanding documents from other passengers. I shielded my eyes with one hand, reached for my permiso with the other, and held it out. It disappeared into the darkness.

  “Oye, sargento,” the voice called out. “This one's a gringo."

  “So? There's no law against being a gringo. At least not tonight.” The sergeant and the man standing over me laughed, and the papers were shoved back at me.

  “Here, gringo. The sargento says there's no law against you for now. Maybe by the time you pass this way again, there will be, que no?” He laughed again.

  I smiled politely and stuffed my permiso away again with a mumbled, “Gracias.”

  The soldiers eventually took themselves and their bright lights off the bus, and it started to move again.

  “What was that about?” I asked Juan.

  “The frontier. The line between the Federal District and Michoacan. Sometimes they stop the bus, sometimes they don't, and sometimes, when they do, they take somebody off the bus. Who knows why?"

  He settled deeper into his seat, and Graciela, who had also been awakened by the soldiers, crossed the aisle and crawled into his lap. He tousled her hair.

  “Go ba
ck to sleep, little one. The doctor said you must get a lot of sleep, so you can get well.”

  “I was sleeping. Those men with lights woke me up,” she replied with a yawn. She was asleep again almost before she finished talking.

  “So light,” old Juan said, stroking her thin body. “So skinny. She used to be nice and plump. Now she doesn't weigh as much as a feather."

  The bus groaned and whined deeper into the mountains, bouncing over some holes, swerving to avoid others. Uphill, it labored and seemed at times barely to be moving. Then it would hit a downhill stretch, and the driver would attack the road with suicidal abandon, the bus lurching and swaying around the curves on its rotten suspension. A dangerous place, Captain Salazar had said. I decided he must ride the buses.

  I still managed to fall asleep again, coming half awake a few times when the vehicle made especially violent movements. Once I woke up and discovered that Graciela had moved from her grandfather's lap to mine. He was right. She hardly weighed as much as a feather.

  Suddenly, violently, I was wide awake, the ringing of an explosion in my ears. The bus lurched crazily, reared up on its three left wheels, then slid its rear end into a giant arc, as people screamed in fright. Then the bus slammed down on all of its wheels again, and I was flying through the air, past the hanging plastic, and out the window.

  I landed in something resilient and soft, a bush of some kind; but landing hard, even into something soft, took the wind out of me. I lay there, gasping silently and painfully for air, and realized that my arms were wrapped tightly around Graciela. She had come flying out of the bus with me.

  I got my breath back, and seemed to be able to move everything that counted. If any bones were broken, I decided, they weren't critical ones. Graciela wasn't moving, and her eyes were closed, but she was breathing, and I couldn't see any obvious injuries, although it was too dark to tell for sure.

  I started to get up, then froze. Above the moans of the passengers still in the bus, and the grinding whine of the turbine, which was still running, I heard other voices. I scrambled deeper into the shadows, dragging Graciela with me.

  Three men with lights approached the bus, which had been torn almost in half. That explained the explosion. It had been a bomb of some kind. Down the road, in the direction the men were walking from, I made out the shadowy form of a barricade.

  Graciela shifted and whimpered slightly. Don't wake up and start crying right now, kid, I prayed. She shifted again, buried her head against my chest, and was silent. I let myself breathe again.

  The men had weapons as well as lights. They talked loudly, obviously unconcerned about being heard. One of them clambered up to a window at the front of the bus and crawled inside. He turned the engine off, and then his light flickered and shifted as he began to move through the bus. One of the other men worked his way through the gaping hole in the side, while the third walked alongside the vehicle, poking his light into windows. At one of the windows there was a brief flurry of activity as someone tried to get out and the man clubbed whoever it was with the butt of his weapon.

  “Shit, what a mess,” came a voice from inside. “You made the bomb too strong, Efren."

  The one who was still outside the bus laughed. “So next time, I'll use my kid brother's holiday firecrackers. You see the gringo in there?”

  “No. But if he's in this part, we'll never be able to tell. It's all hamburguesa, you know? Oh, Christ. This one was pregnant, and she's still alive. Mother of God, don't stare at me like that.” A shot echoed inside the bus. “There, that's better. Like to made me sick, you know?"

  The third man, who had been crawling around the rear of the vehicle, came back out a window.

  “Nobody who looks like a gringo back there. They should have given us a picture. Think we can make magic, like a brujo, I suppose."

  The other man came out, and they stood, staring at the bus, while it sank into my brain, which was still pretty dazed from the mescal and getting tossed around like a toy rocket, that they were looking for me. I was the gringo, the only one on that bus. All the other gringos that night were headed out to nice tourist places, except for the unlucky ones like Sister Bergstrom, of course, who were lying in hospital beds somewhere in Toluca, waiting for someone to ship them home.

  “So what do we tell the buzzard?"

  “We tell him, maybe we got him, maybe we didn't. Who knows? And if he doesn't like it, que se chingue. He can just screw himself. These goddamn foreigners think they own us, anyway."

  “Pues, ni modo,” the man who had stayed outside the bus, the one called Efren, said. “Never mind. Let's finish this. Go get the tank, Jorge."

  “Hey, man. A lot of those people are still alive.”

  “So? You want to go in there and ask their permission? Maybe you could give them your name and address while you're at it. Get the tank."

  The man called Jorge walked behind the barricade, then came reluctantly back carrying a silvery cylinder with a hose dangling from one end. He stood uneasily at the side of the bus, twisting the hose between his hands.

  “Oh, shit, you pansy. Let a man do this.” Efren said. He grabbed the tank and turned a valve. A white mist drifted across the road as he played the hose over the vehicle, and there was a strong, pungent smell of jet fuel. He poked the nozzle into several windows, spraying the interior as well. Frightened cries and pleas for mercy came from those passengers who were beginning to understand what was about to happen.

  Satisfied, he stepped back and handed the tank to Jorge.

  “Take it back behind the barricade."

  He pulled something from his pocket. There was a snapping sound, then a brilliant flare lit the scene. He tossed the flare toward the bus, as he and the other man scrambled toward the safety of the barricade. I ducked my head and grabbed dirt. There was a soft whoomp and a flash of light, and a shock wave of hot air washed over me. When I looked up again, the bus was settling and sagging in on itself, while bright flames licked the night air. It was eerily quiet, no screams or cries from the burning passengers, just the crackling of the flames, and the growing smell, sickly sweet, of human flesh roasting in jet fuel.

  I watched, horrified, held in a kind of evil trance, as the flames embraced the bus, and so I didn't realize Graciela had awakened until it was too late, and she was up and dashing across the road toward the burning vehicle, screaming, “Mama! Mama?"

  The man called Efren came running from behind the barricade and grabbed her.

  “Where the shit did you come from, chica?” He held her by the hair and one arm, and started marching her toward the barricade. Then he swore loudly and jerked his hand away. She had bit him.

  Good for you, kid, I thought. Now run like hell. Find the shadows and hide.

  I raised myself to a crouch and fumbled at my ankle. The little handgun was still there. I pulled it out, ready to use it, but before I could move, Efren had caught Graciela again. He clubbed her with the butt of his weapon. Then he grabbed her by the hair, swung her skinny little body around his head, and tossed her into the flames.

  I didn't know I had screamed until Efren jerked his head in my direction.

  “There's another one out there somewhere,” he called out to his companions. “Sounded like a man. Jorge! You go into the trees over there, to the left. Tomas, you go around the other way, to the right. Let's flush this pigeon and add him to the roast."

  I backed further into the trees. The hillside rose steeply behind me, and I began to climb. Alfred would have been proud. Alfred was one of my teachers when I first joined Stuart's crew of odd-job boys. He was an alcoholic, semi-retired soldier of fortune who put me through two years of training in the nastier ways of winning arguments. One of his standard pieces of advice was, “Always take the high ground, whether you're hunting pigs or people. Always the high ground, whatever it is, even if it's only a table, or the tallest chair in the room."

  I took the high ground. I climbed and scrambled around bushes and stunted pine tre
es, trying not to make any noise, until I bumped up against a sheer rock wall. I explored it with my fingers, and discovered it wasn't as sheer, or as vertical as it had seemed at first. There where cracks and little shelves sticking out, and even occasional tufts of strong grass and bushes—at least I hoped they were strong.

  I slipped the stinger into my boot and started up again, hand over hand this time, still going for the high ground. Once I had to muffle a yelp when my right hand got a firm grip on a cactus. Finally a reached a ledge wide enough to crouch on. I pulled myself onto it and looked down. The flames around the bus were beginning to die down, allowing a bright, half-moon to reassert itself in the chilly night sky.

  I retrieved the little handgun and crouched there, catching my breath, listening for sounds. I heard a crash of brush and a muted curse below and to my right. That would be Jorge, I figured. I felt for the belt that was still wrapped around me, under my shirt, and opened it up. I was looking for my saw. It's called a molecular saw, and it's a little gem. The blade is flexible, almost limp, until you turn the thing on. Then you have a long, thin stiletto with a vibrating edge. I don't begin to understand the technology behind it, but it works very well.

  I began to creep along the ledge, letting the occasional small sounds Jorge was making guide me until I was directly above him. I heard him pause at the ledge, then start climbing it. I crouched down and waited.

  He must have heard the slight hum of the sawblade first. Then he jerked his head around and looked at me. He froze, his eyes widening in terror.

  “Oh sweet Jesus, pray for me,” he said, in a scared, little boy voice.

  A molecular saw goes through hard steel alloys with only a slight tug. I couldn't feel anything at all as it went through Jorge's neck.

  Tomas was quieter than Jorge, and he almost made an end of me. He had taken Albert's advice better than I had, climbing the hillside until he was well above my ledge. He must have had a beautiful view of what I did to Jorge, courtesy of the bright moonlight which washed over the ledge.