Chapter XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVI
Devin Vaughn and Aldo Bern sat in a storage room at the back of a produce warehouse on Baltimore’s Frankford Avenue, their table illuminated only by early morning light. The business was currently another of Vaughn’s legitimate operations, although it hadn’t started out that way. In the beginning, fruit importation was a convenient means of smuggling narcotics. Perishables were usually fast-tracked through customs, even allowing for insufficient manpower to begin investigating random heavy crates of bananas and pineapples in the hope of uncovering contraband. In addition, Blas Urrea’s contacts, who included corrupt officials at the points of departure and arrival, ensured that searches were the exception, not the rule, which meant Vaughn’s losses were minimal, verging on nonexistent.
But all that was in the past. The animosity between Urrea and Vaughn had caused the collapse of all such arrangements, leaving Vaughn with a warehouse costing him more to maintain than he earned from selling its contents. Vaughn felt a fire coming on, followed by an insurance settlement. He’d have to be subtle about it, since the word was out that he might be having cash-flow issues. He didn’t want arson investigators sifting through the rubble because close behind them would follow the DOJ whispering of criminal charges coming down the tracks. It was all about increasing the pressure on his operation, intensifying it until someone or something cracked.
To relieve some of that pressure, he and Bern had been seeking alternative sources for the supply and importation of more lucrative products than mangoes and grapes. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Bern, Vaughn had planned, funded, and carried out his little Mexican expedition in December. Bern had to give Vaughn some credit for keeping the whole affair secret until it was concluded, but it didn’t do much to make him happier. In Bern’s view, it was a risk that should never have been taken. It might result in war being openly declared on them, pitting Vaughn’s crew not only against Blas Urrea but also against his associates, some of whom made Urrea look like a declawed pussycat.
Yet the initial aim of the mission to Mexico had been achieved. The operatives had returned to the United States with their prizes, and no one on either side had been killed. Admittedly, the Mexicans had suffered nonfatal casualties, and one of Vaughn’s people received a minor stab wound. Still, considering the other possible outcomes, this counted as a triumph.
Blas Urrea had then proceeded to do just what Bern himself would have done under similar circumstances. He began walking back the cat, testing the chain to establish who might have moved against him. Vaughn would have been on his list of suspects from the start, but probably not high. Urrea would first have looked to enemies closer to home because such a level of incursion required local knowledge. Since Vaughn had indeed been obliged to call on certain natives, even if they weren’t aware of whom they were working for, the identity of those individuals was always at risk of being discovered by Urrea’s men. So it came to pass, and once Urrea had the first link in the chain, he could proceed to the next.
Except Vaughn, to his credit, had been careful to distance himself and the other major shareholders in the venture. Until recently, the children had been held together in a secure location, and only a handful of people were intimate with every facet of the operation. Unfortunately, one of those people was Roland Bilas, who had been stupid and greedy enough to go back to Mexico while Urrea was on the warpath before managing to get himself picked up by U.S. Customs with contraband in his suitcase. By the time Bern had sent two of his Los Angeles contacts to the motel, Bilas was already dead, having most assuredly given up all he knew: that was not in question. Bilas was discovered naked on the motel bed, and Bern’s people had stopped counting the wounds on his body once they reached double figures. Under similar duress, Bern would have capitulated, and he was a lot harder than Roland Bilas—but then, Jell-O was harder than Roland Bilas.
So Blas Urrea now knew that Devin Vaughn was responsible for the abduction of the children from Mexico, but no message or ultimatum had been received from Urrea, and Bern doubted any would be forthcoming. Even were the children to be returned, Urrea would not be minded to forgive. He would want blood, particularly that of Vaughn and anyone close to him, including family members.
Vaughn was nearing the end of divorce proceedings. It would be better if the full extent of his troubles remained concealed from his estranged wife, Karin, and her legal representatives, but she and their two children also needed to be protected. Bern’s first task, then, as agreed with Vaughn, had been to persuade Karin and the children to go into hiding. That wasn’t easy, for obvious reasons, not least work, school, and Karin’s understandable anger at her unloved spouse for putting his family in a position of danger, even if its exact nature was not a subject for discussion. Bern had personally advised Karin of the need to safeguard herself and her children, but he also intimated that Devin Vaughn might be forced to reassess his uncombative approach to both funds and custody should Karin not cooperate, which helped focus her mind.
Karin had found employment with a start-up that was piggybacking on that Marie Kondo decluttering shit—wealthy people emptying their closets of once-worn clothes just so they could fill them with new stuff—and was reluctant to give up a position that paid well, especially when the commission she received from designer resellers was taken into account. Bern reminded her that there would be other start-ups, while she and her kids had only one life. Also, if she’d wanted a Regular Joanne existence, she shouldn’t have hooked up with a man like Devin Vaughn to begin with, though Bern didn’t have to say that aloud, Karin being able to join those dots for herself. As for the kids, it wasn’t like they were studying for their SATs; they were four and six, for Christ’s sake. As long as they had Mommy with them, they’d be fine. The result was that, as of the day before, the family had been packed off to Nowheresville, in Nothing County, Wisconsin, there to watch Netflix and eat cheese curds until—
Well, there was the rub, as someone much wiser than Bern once wrote. Karin had asked Bern how long they’d be expected to lie low. He guessed it would be no more than a month or so, but he’d hesitated before replying, which was when Karin put herself right in his face.
“Two weeks,” she said. “Get this shit sorted by then or—”
She let it hang. Bern didn’t push her with an “or what?” because that didn’t sound clever even in movies. He knew she was just letting off steam. There was no “or” worth countenancing. Once she and the kids were safely housed, bodyguards would be with them everywhere they went, so trying to escape was off the cards. And what would be the point in running if Devin Vaughn’s enemies were prepared to hurt them to get at him? Of course, Karin could turn to the feds if she was desperate, but their protection would come with a price, requiring her to share all she knew about her husband and his dealings. Nevertheless, if the crisis dragged on, or Urrea’s people made their presence felt, she might regard it as a price worth paying. Bern would then be forced to shorten Karin’s leash in case her desire to preserve herself and her children made her forget her obligations—to tighten it so hard she choked.
However, that was for another day. Today’s challenge was Devin Vaughn himself. In an ideal world he, like his family, would have holed up somewhere safe, but with his syndicate on the verge of collapse, the option of concealment was denied him. It was all about maintaining a front, keeping Vaughn simultaneously visible yet protected. Extra manpower had been drafted, and security overhauled. Bern was confident the main house in Manassas remained safe, so that would be their base for the time being. Any movement beyond its walls, such as that day’s warehouse excursion, would be limited: planned well in advance, but revealed only at short notice.
And all the while, Bern was spending money they couldn’t afford—and calling in favors he would have preferred to save—to gain some insight into Blas Urrea’s plans. Until the previous day, he’d had no luck at all. South of the border, the news had spread that something valuable had been taken from Urrea, and the culprits, along with their families, their pets, and the bones of their ancestors, were now marked, as was anyone who assisted them or failed to share knowledge of their whereabouts.
But then a call had come through to Bern from a woman named Elena Díaz, who needed to get out of Mexico. If she didn’t, a band of killers from Coahuila, Urrea’s seat of power, were going to rape her, remove her arms, legs, and head, and hang her dismembered torso from the aqueduct in Saltillo, all because she had declined the advances of the wrong man. Díaz, therefore, urgently required money, and her immediate fear of torture and death had overcome her longer-term fear of Blas Urrea, especially because the man whose attentions she’d spurned was one of Urrea’s senior lieutenants.
Díaz worked for a private Mexican bank, one that had long maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with the cartel boss. The funds it held for Urrea were both clean and officially unconnected to him, which meant that transfers did not attract undue attention, either domestic or international, and cursory government inspections found nothing to be alarmed about. The core banking team, of which Díaz was a member, was aware of the identity of some but not all of the clients through regular exposure to transfer and investment patterns, helped by hearsay and the occasional conversational nugget dropped by Las Tres Jefas, as they were known—because, unusually, the highest positions in the bank were occupied by women.
Regrettably, none of those women, all of whom were aware of Díaz’s predicament, had proven willing to intervene with Urrea on her behalf. They might have been anxious not to endanger themselves or alienate an important client, but Díaz also suspected that Blas Urrea was more than a customer and might well be among the bank’s owners, if not the principal. Díaz couldn’t prove this, and even if she could, she knew there would be no smoking gun to entice the authorities, so scrupulously did Las Jefas adhere to the banking laws—or within reason, because any bank that appeared too honest was, quite rightly, automatically assumed to be hiding something, a situation not unique to Mexico but common to global finance.
So Díaz had been looking for a way out, and the raid on one of Blas Urrea’s isolated compounds had unexpectedly provided her with a potential route. The details of what had occurred—and, more precisely, what had been taken—were unclear, but the result was that, a month after the first whispers about the raid reached the bank, Las Jefas had reactivated two accounts that Díaz knew to be dormant Urrea holdings. Díaz had processed the transfers as instructed, the funds moving from Mexico to Nashville, Tennessee, one of the cities frequently cited as a Buckle of the Bible Belt. The money landed in the No. 1 and No. 2 accounts of a company dealing in repurposed Bibles, both English and Spanish, from the cheap to the costly. An off-the-shelf website indicated that the Nashville Codex Corporation was additionally devoted to creating “unique books of worship from existing volumes,” thus ensuring the “propagation of the Word” in a manner that was both “environmentally sustainable and historically appropriate,” enabling buyers to become part of a “Christian continuum,” possessors of beautiful books once owned by other worshippers, which could be passed on to the next generation.
The purpose of the payments, acknowledged in a formal, beautifully phrased, and unsigned letter of receipt, was for the production and delivery of eight impeccably restored eighteenth-century Bibles—four English and four Spanish—each with new artwork and capitalization, as well as fresh leather binding, gilding, and jeweled cases, within a time frame of not less than five years, a schedule somewhat at odds with the urgency of the transfers. The Nashville Codex Corporation also committed to sourcing up to five thousand used Spanish-language Bibles within the same period, which would be given new covers and marked as un donativo penitencial de un pecador reformado —a penitential offering from a reformed sinner. The total of the two transfers came to $500,000—which represented, Díaz thought, a hell of an investment in the hope of salvation, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms.
Against all protocols, Díaz installed stealth monitoring software to log all transactions to and from the Nashville Codex Corporation and illegally harvest historical financial records going back a decade. It was this information, starting with the name and location of the company, that she was now offering to sell to Aldo Bern. Devin Vaughn’s name had recently been mentioned in unflattering terms in the bank’s halls, and by the same Urrea lieutenant who had given Díaz to understand that, at a time of his choosing—whether days, weeks, or months in the future—she would be dispatched to the next world, but not before her body had been violated and sundered. It hadn’t taken Díaz long to identify Vaughn’s relationship to Blas Urrea, and then Aldo Bern’s to Vaughn.
Díaz had named a non-negotiable price for her trove and given Bern the details of an account set up solely to receive those funds. As soon as the first tranche was safely deposited, Díaz would commence sharing all she knew. But Bern needed Vaughn to okay the transfer. This, in the environs of a soon-to-be-immolated produce warehouse, he was proving reluctant to do.
“How can we be sure she’s straight?” Vaughn asked.
Vaughn was consuming a clementine, segmented and laid out on its peel. He ate methodically, chewing each piece for what seemed to Bern like precisely the same number of seconds, but with no obvious relish. Vaughn had contracted COVID in the early days of the pandemic, and his taste buds still hadn’t fully recovered. Bern knew it had made Vaughn depressed, which might have affected his judgment and contributed to the current havoc.
“She knew your name,” said Bern. “Urrea’s associates are talking about you. She wouldn’t have approached us otherwise.”
“Or she figures we’re desperate and can be played.”
“She’s at least as desperate as we are,” said Bern. “We’ve both dealt with el Amante. If she doesn’t get out of there, she’s a dead woman.”
El Amante was the nickname given to Urrea’s lieutenant and Díaz’s nemesis. It was what passed for humor in the Mexican underworld, referring to a compulsive rapist as “the Lover.” Maybe, Bern reflected, el Violador was taken. There certainly wasn’t any shortage of candidates for the title.
“But a hundred thousand dollars?” Vaughn continued.
He finished the clementine, tossed the peel in a garbage can, and wiped his hands on the pleats of his tan trousers. Bern spotted what he thought might be a urine stain beside the fly. Vaughn was letting himself go, though it wasn’t for Bern to point this out. It might have been easier if Vaughn still had a wife to attend to his domestic needs.
“A quarter up front,” said Bern, “and the rest in escrow, to be released once we’re satisfied with the material.”
“It’s still twenty-five thousand in advance.”
Bern was growing impatient. Only a couple of years earlier, Vaughn would have dropped $25K on updating his summer wardrobe, and regarded a conversation like this as quibbling over nickels and dimes.
“We need to know exactly where the threat is coming from,” said Bern. “Right now we’re in the dark, waiting to be hit.”
“If Díaz screws us over, do we have anything to use against her?”
“She has a mother and a younger sister, but they’ll vanish with her. She can’t leave them for el Amante. If Díaz is as bright as she seems, she’ll have tried to hide her snooping at the bank, but if she’s that bright, she’ll also know how hard it will be to eliminate all traces. When she drops out of sight, her employers may initially put it down to the threat of el Amante, but you can be sure they’ll also review her recent activities. Whatever dangling ends she’s left, they’ll find, and Urrea will be informed.”
Vaughn scowled.
“So she and her family are dead, no matter what she does,” he said. “Another reason not to give her our money.”
Bern wanted to grab Vaughn by the hair and beat his head against the table.
You fucking infant. You child. All this is because of your recklessness, your covetousness—
Bern took a deep breath.
“We need what she’s offering,” he said, “and she has a vested interest in ensuring we’re satisfied. If Urrea goes down, so does el Amante. She wants us to succeed. It’s the best hope she has for staying alive.”
Vaughn was silent for a while longer before nodding.
“Then do it,” he said, finally. “Give the bitch her money.”