Chapter Thirty-Eight
THE BOMBARDIER ROLLED to a stop among the other private jets, PJs as Matheson’s friends called them, at the New Orleans Lakefront Fixed Base Operator flight line.
Matheson looked out the window and admired the other planes: their size, livery paint, and parking positions.
The FBO managers parked the jets in order of size and Matheson’s was at the far end; the wrong end.
Not for long.
As Kimbel had flown back earlier to prep the New Orleans team after the successes in New York, Matheson immersed himself in the business pages throughout the flight.
His stock was surging. More satisfying, the reporters were calling him both a business wunderkind and a leader in cancer care research.
About damned time.
The co-pilot opened the door and heavy salt air rushed in off Lake Pontchartrain.
Though called a lake, the enormous body of water was a shallow marsh estuary, connected to the Gulf via the Rigolets and Chef Menteur passes.
Matheson was born in Louisiana, to unknown parents, adopted and raised by a kind couple who still lived on the far side of the lake.
His adoptive father, an HVAC dealer, insisted they fish together for speckled trout on this estuary, dropping lines from a steel boat.
Matheson had never been interested, waiting out his father’s lectures and provincial career advice with silent irritation.
The old man wanted Derek to join him in the air-conditioning business.
“People always need to be comfortable,” he’d say.
“There’s a future in that.” A future of shitty houses, bland women, and Chevrolets, Matheson would think to himself.
When he returned from an exotic vacation or an important meeting, that swamp air remained a salient reminder of his roots, taunting him that no matter how hard he tried, his feet would always remain stuck in the thick swampy mud.
Today was different. Matheson welcomed the thick air. He was returning triumphant.
Carolyn had told him that now was the time to play up his modest N’awlins background, his working-class roots, the Budweiser to Moet story.
She had remained in New York, making sure the previous day’s sound bites stuck.
As he descended the stairs and felt the heat on his shoulders, a familiar wave of irritation washed over him.
She better make that story stick. This was the moment, the golden opportunity.
In the interval between the FBO lobby and the driveway, he developed a scowl, annoyed by the smell of the baking asphalt.
His mood changed when he saw his driver standing in front of a new Tesla Cybertruck, the angular stainless steel body glinting in the sun. If he were to be seen as a tech disruptor, he needed to upgrade from black SUVs.
While Dale stowed the luggage in the truck’s bed, Matheson admired the vehicle in the warm breeze. This was his day. But just as every rose has its thorn, every cherry has its pit. Matheson found his when Dale opened the rear door revealing Walt Kimbel, his face creased with worry.
“Problem?” Matheson asked, knowing the look all too well.
Kimbel answered by jabbing a thumb at the flight line. “See that last Gulfstream over there?”
Matheson slid inside and looked through the tinted glass. “What about it?”
“It belongs to Vargas. We’re on our way to see him.”
“Please inform Mr. Vargas we’re here,” Kimbel said to the woman behind the desk at the New Orleans Four Seasons Hotel.
Matheson lounged in the plush seating area, suit jacket on, no tie. Harris had taken a standing position where he could see the revolving doors and most of the lobby. A tan line outlined his eyes and the bridge of his nose where his wraparounds usually rested.
“Someone’s coming down,” she replied.
Someone turned out to be a Latin man with spiky black hair and a goatee wearing a loose, short-sleeved button-up with a wide collar. “Let’s go,” he said.
Kimbel signaled Harris to step forward.
Vargas’s man shook his head. “He stays here.”
In the elevator, Kimbel and Matheson were subjected to a frisk.
“Is this really necessary?” Kimbel asked.
The man didn’t answer. He simply went about patting them down, checking their pockets, treating them like they had been selected for secondary screening at a TSA airport checkpoint.
“Well, well,” Vargas said when the door to the presidential suite opened. “It has been a while, hasn’t it?”
Matheson was forced to squint to get a good look at him.
The far side of the room was nothing but glass, a view over the Mississippi River and the flat marshlands that stretched for miles to the south.
The clouds had thickened with the afternoon heat.
Some of the flat, gray bottoms beneath them showed dark streaks, stretching down to the ground like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
“This is a very pleasant surprise,” Matheson said.
Kimbel was equally gracious.
“Leave us,” Vargas said to his security man as he poured two fingers from a bottle of Patrón en Lalique Serie 2 into a glass at the bar.
Fulgencio Vargas was a legitimate, self-made businessman, presiding over a business that exported sugar from San Salvador to the U.S.
and Europe. He was also an increasingly ruthless drug boss who went by the name Cuchillo.
As the value of the latter business had grown, Matheson was increasingly uncertain as to which of those personalities would show up whenever they met.
Matheson led with cautious solicitude. “I saw your new jet on the tarmac.”
Vargas waved at a room service table with ice buckets. “Drink?”
Kimbel took a beer from the ice, relieved that the Central American sugar-magnate personality was presiding and not the terrifying drug lord. Matheson snatched a Topo Chico sparkling water and popped the top.
The two Americans settled onto a sofa. Vargas took a chair, his back to the windows, his hands resting comfortably on the squared-off armrests.
“I watched the earnings call,” he said. “Good numbers.”
“Not bad,” Matheson said with obvious satisfaction.
Kimbel stepped in. “We are forever in your debt. Long-suffering cancer patients will soon have the pain relief they require. Xylaxyn really has a chance to change things.”
“I stopped by the Tulane wing,” Vargas answered, his face shadowed and hard to read against the white sky behind him. “My mother.”
“She’s on the Xylaxyn protocol,” Matheson said. He received regular reports on Vargas’s mother, one of the first to get the treatment during the clinical trial phase. “I think I can honestly say she’s getting the best palliative hospice care in the world.”
Vargas sighed. “She’s dying. She looked gray.”
“Conscious?”
“Yes.”
“Comfortable?”
Vargas offered a rueful half smile and shook his head. “You’re not selling, here, Derek. There are no cameras.”
Matheson felt a pang in his gut. “I want to do everything I can for her. You know I mean that. I mean it as a physician and a friend.”
“Thank you.” Vargas sipped his drink. “How long does she have?”
“I’ll check with the team tonight,” he replied. “It could be as long as six months.”
In truth, she might have a month. Xylaxyn could make her comfortable. It could lessen the worst symptoms of her liver cancer and buy her a few extra weeks. Matheson was not eager to be the messenger of that news.
Vargas swirled the liquid in his glass.
Matheson looked past him at the distant rainfall. What was he supposed to say? How do you make small talk with a volatile psychopath drinking tequila and contemplating his mother’s death?
“On to business,” Vargas said, leaning forward, eyeing the two men across from him.
“What can we do for you?” Kimbel said a little too quickly.
“You know, Mr. Kimbel, Matheson here is a doctor, and doctors plunge their hands into blood and guts.”
“We can speak plainly here,” Matheson said. “Transparency among business partners is a sign of health.”
Vargas laughed. “You are such an American. So high-minded. So condescending. So full of shit.”
Matheson desperately wanted to reach for his sparkling water but remained frozen in place.
“My grandfather,” Vargas said, “owned a sugar plantation in Cuba, back in the days of Batista, Fulgencio Batista, my namesake. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I thought your family was from San Salvador,” Matheson replied.
Vargas tossed back the remaining ounce of tequila.
“No. My father lost everything when Castro came to power. He held on for a long time, fighting for his land. He thought the Americans would save us. ‘They hate the Comunistas and the Marxistas’, he told me. But the Americans didn’t come.
Castro’s people did. They took the cane fields, killed my grandfather, many of our family.
My parents made it to Nicaragua. And there, my father said, ‘The Americans will protect us here. They love Somoza.’ ”
He stood, re-upped his drink at the bar cart, and sat back down.
“In 1979, when I was eleven years old, Somoza fell. We crossed the border to El Salvador, fleeing the Sandinistas because once again, the Americans didn’t come.
Instead, they were pouring money and guns into El Salvador, letting the contras do the dirty work. ”
“I see,” Matheson said, desperate to offer some understanding. “So that’s how your family ended up in San Salvador?”
“My father had learned; it wasn’t so much that he hated Communists or even the Americans.
He now saw them as two sides of the same coin.
The ideological struggle of the Cold War was really just a fight over money.
The governments, whether American- or Communist-backed, fought for the fields.
In our case, the sugarcane fields. That’s when my father taught me how to play this game, how to get a business off the ground.
It has nothing to do with transparency.”
He set his glass on the coffee table between them.
“Be careful about how you speak to me, Dr. Matheson. Your company crawled out of the same swamp as mine, a benefactor of powerful people in the government who profit from the rise. You think you’re a genius.
I think you’re smart enough to know that when you need someone like me, you jump at the chance.
I kept you afloat when you were on the verge of losing it all. That makes us partners for life.”
Vargas grabbed his drink and sat back.
“Do we understand each other?”
“We do.”
The gangster’s demeanor shifted. “Good. So let’s talk about the logistics of our business. Dirty hands and all.”
Vargas stood up and turned his back on them, surveying the river, a meandering white ribbon reflecting the milky overcast sky. “I can see my refining plant from here,” he said. “Two ships unloading today, direct from San Salvador. You know we process more than a million pounds of sugar per day?”
“You’ve tapped the right market,” Kimbel said, attempting to relieve the tension. “Americans love sugar.”
“My more profitable business, the one we share together, however, is in trouble.”
“How so?” Kimbel asked.
“These attacks on my, our, people.”
“Fulgencio, we—”
“Did I not just give you five million dollars for that Ice Queen’s campaign? Does she not run the police department? What the hell are they doing? What the hell are you doing? Can’t you get control of her?”
“I’m working on it,” Kimbel replied as coolly as possible.
“The good news is that Bates’s people recovered everything from the Staub house.
These murders, these attacks, are being spun the right way as Mexican cartel spillovers.
It’s not touching Genyra. If you look through all the papers, you’ll see no mention of Snowball.
We’re keeping that out of New Orleans. Bates only lets dealers sell Snowball to out-of-towners, and the murders sound like the usual cross-border mayhem. ”
Vargas rolled his head on his neck as though limbering up. “Be that as it may. Someone is killing my workers. My men. Someone knows.”
“The police think it might be a sicario,” Kimbel offered.
“I think it might be a sicario!” Cuchillo shouted. He closed his eyes, regaining his composure. “These men he killed were Barrio Eighteen. Do you know what that is?”
Kimble nodded. “A gang.”
“Not just a gang. It’s a fucking army. Your State Department just designated them a foreign terrorist organization, a label they wear with honor. My sources tell me they were killed by one man with a dog?”
“That’s what we understand. Bates has the resources of the NOPD at his disposal. Whoever this is, he won’t be around much longer, that I can assure you.”
“Let me make this perfectly clear to you, both of you, Bates, your Ice Queen in the DA’s office: You find him and make him suffer. If not, my associates from Barrio Eighteen might just pay you a visit.”