To achieve her hidden goals, she’s had to use a substantial amount of savvy and deception. Her sole connection between herself and the Aliens is Cortez, so she’s had to walk a line that grows finer each passing week between practically protecting a known if elusive felon, and appearing to perform her job not only correctly but aggressively. Her major ploy, and she fears it’s growing thin, has been to continually hint at major future arrests, the leveling of Cortez, Hotel Penumbra, and the entire network of illicit activity that flows in and out its doors. She has had several uncomfortable conferences with Miskewitz, told him she’s building an elaborate investigation that will lock Cortez up in Spooner Correctional for life, rather than the pitiful wrist-slap he’d serve if they grabbed him on the small-time charges they’re already sure of. Luckily, Zarelli backs up everything she says. She knows that’s because he believes it. He’s accepted the fact that Lenore cannot live by the good-partner rule of shared information, that she’s a reservoir of secrets. Zarelli doesn’t even care anymore that he’s left in the dark. His world has narrowed until its boundaries consist solely of Lenore’s neck, breasts, hips, thighs.
Does Lenore find Cortez attractive? There’s no question. Often, as Zarelli clumsily climbs on top of her, smelling of Fiorello’s garlic and cigars, she’s made him into Cortez, lean, foreign, murderous, a slightly hyper nervous system under rigid inner control, a huge and twisted sense of humor, daring in bed up to the line of perversion. Maybe sometimes darting over the line.
She has dreamed of Cortez, the images very faded and confusing now, but involving, among other things, a bed of fresh poppies, leather, gunpowder smoke, scarred dark flesh. She would like, just once, to taste him, to run her tongue from his Adam’s apple slowly down to the imagined patch of jet-black hairs near the navel.
What does Cortez think of Lenore? It’s possible, maybe even likely, that he knows she’s a cop, though neither of them has ever communicated the fact and both continue to play at the vague cover story that she is either a misplaced and rootless, existential bohemian walking foolishly into the dark world of psychotic outlaws and anarchy, or a mysterious, very smart and tough hooker-cumpimpette looking to advance into the world of narcotic brokering. Or, possibly, some weird mutant, an anomaly with an untold story, moving into Bangkok Park for reasons no one is quite connected enough to grasp. In his heart of hearts, at the unstable core of his self-honesty, he is intrigued by Lenore to the point of foolishness. He finds her the most exciting woman in his memory. And Cortez has had more women than Elvis.
Lenore and Cortez have never spoken. All of the communication between them is suggested, implied, an almost too-subtle blend of gesture, attitude, eye movement. She thinks he’s aware that she’s protected him from serious harm for over a year now. He thinks she knows he’s placed her off limits for the normal Park harassments and shakedowns that fall under his domain. They’ve both extended these cloaks of safety for a common, simple reason: they both want to see what will happen in the course of their future interactions.
Cortez secretly refers to Lenore as “the Widow” because of her penchant for wearing black when visibly in the Park. No one understands the intricacies or delicate logics of their relationship and, in fact, though unbeknownst to her, it is Lenore that has been the cause of so many of the right-hand men getting the sack. Already Mingo Bouza, wise in his own way, suspects this. He treads lightly when the boss makes obscure comments about the Widow from the backseat of the Jaguar.
Lenore and Cortez have never really come into direct contact. They see each other from a distance, on the street late at night. They have winked to each other across the packed dance floor at Club 62, in the lobby of Hotel Penumbra. They communicate solely through the written word. They seem to leave humorous and taunting messages for each other in odd, exposed locations — graffiti scrawled in telephone booths and on the walls of dingy unisex rest rooms. Cortez has Mingo drive to strange spots in the middle of the night, run to a designated area, and copy down words off a wall, into an expensive leather notebook. Sometimes, Mingo’s instructed to leave behind some words he doesn’t even understand.
• • •
“How much do you know about this Cortez character?” Woo asks.
“More than anybody else,” Lenore says.
Woo’s presence is more than an aggravation. It’s a kind of personal insult. There’s no way the mayor can know what he’s doing to her, forcing on her the presence of Dr. Woo. It’s an intrusion on the one area of life, the few continuous moments, where she’s satisfied. And in this way, it’s like a subtle rape, a forcing of an alien will. But the rapist isn’t Woo. It isn’t even Miskewitz. The attacker is Welby and Lenore won’t forget that.
She decides to talk, to lay out what she knows. It isn’t that she has any interest in appeasing Woo or being polite or helpful. It’s simply that she loves talking about Cortez and is frustrated by the limits she’s imposed upon herself. Talking about him makes her feel more connected to him, more a part of his world. She wonders, given the right set of tragic circumstances, could she ever draw down on Cortez, grip tight on the Magnum, and fire death into his chest? Unfortunately she knows that she could, that there would be little question about what to do, that self-preservation would carry the day and she’d leave the King of Bangkok in a bloody, gasping heap outside the revolving doors of the Hotel Penumbra.
“The big fact that you have to know,” she says to Woo, “is that Cortez is the King of Bangkok.”
Woo nods, feeling hip, feeling like he’s ready to slide into the swing of things. “He’s the top dog,” he says.
Lenore raises her voice. “That’s not what I said. I said he’s the King of Bangkok. Inside Bangkok, he’s the King. But Bangkok isn’t the whole world, is it? There’s a lot more terrain to this planet than Bangkok Park, right?”
Woo is at once cut back to a fumbling humility. He goes quiet and Lenore, content in his silencing, begins her story.
• • •
Cortez’s history begins the day he got off the bus in Quinsigamond. Logic and the nature of life tell Lenore that he obviously came from somewhere, that there is more information, probably stored somewhere south of the border, in bulging police files in Colombia or Bolivia. But that ancient history is incidental.
Lenore became involved the second that Cortez’s snakeskin-booted heels touched down on the asphalt of her city’s Greyhound station. She wonders if, on that particular day, she felt a change in the atmosphere, noticed some unexplainable rise or dip in the barometric pressure around her body. At the time there would have been no way to ascribe a relevance to it, but today, she swears, she can feel the flux in the air when Cortez’s Jaguar gets within a block of her.
At first Cortez was just one more player in the overload of aspiring brokers feeding off the decay of the Park. Now, his displaced contemporaries will say he had no blueprint, that he tried a little of everything — pimping, extortion, the smack trade. Lenore finds this very hard to believe. She thinks it’s an impression that grows out of the fact that Cortez is so good at thinking on his feet in continually changeable, pressure-filled situations that associates start to decide this indicates a lack of long-range planning skills and backup contingencies. Lenore thinks that the two virtues are not mutually exclusive. She finds them both in herself.
Whatever his endeavor, Cortez started cornering markets within his first six months as a Park resident. His unique intelligence and personality and ability to judge character combined with an innate sense for reading the marketplace that would have done just as well on Madison Avenue or Wall Street.