“Trece eres?” he asked. Loosely translated, Are you one of us?
“Por vida,” I said. For life.
Payaso pulled an exaggerated face of skepticism, his long, mobile mouth turning down, but with a trace of amusement. “Funny, I ain’t seen you around the neighborhood,” he said.
“I know.”
His eyes flashed with humor. “I’m just playing with you,” he said. “I know who you are. You’re the famous Hailey.”
“I doubt I’m famous.”
“Warchild used to talk about you, not just recently, but a long time back. Talking about how you used to jump outta airplanes for the Army, shit like that, saying how tough you were.”
This was news to me. I disciplined myself not to look back at her in surprise.
Payaso said, “You want something to drink?” He looked at the boy who’d answered the door. “Get her something. Warchild, too.”
“I’m cool,” Serena said. Apparently, her status with Payaso was such that it was acceptable for her to turn down hospitality.
When the boy came back with a Coors for me, Payaso said, “Warchild tells me they just initiated you last night.”
I nodded.
“Yeah, you got some marks on you,” he said, and smiled. “I bet you didn’t know Latin girls were so tough, eh?”
I shook my head modestly. Actually, I had expected a good beatdown from Serena’s sucias, but Payaso wanted to brag on his homegirls, and I wanted to let him.
He said, “So now you’re In-soo-la,” exaggerating the second syllable. “What kind of name is that?”
“Latin,” I said.
“You really speak that?”
“Mostly,” I said. “I couldn’t get a job translating or anything.”
“There’s jobs translating Latin? I thought it was a dead language.”
“It is,” I said, “but scholars are still doing new translations of the classic poems.”
“Why do people translate things that have already been translated? What’s the point?” he said.
I said, “The same reason that bands cover songs that someone else has recorded, I guess. To put their own spin on it.”
He nodded thoughtfully. His homeboys were all watching and listening. I wondered if they really found this interesting, or if it was their way of showing Payaso respect, pretending to be absorbed in everything he found interesting.
Payaso said, “So what’s my name in Latin?”
“Fossor,” I said, for clown, jokester.
“Fossor?” He frowned exaggeratedly again. It was easy to see where he got his moniker; he did have mobile, clownish features, with intelligence underneath them.
I said, “Sorry. It does sound better in Spanish. Latin isn’t as pretty a language as a lot of people think. It can make a lot of things sound like an STD.”
His guys laughed.
“You were at West Point, too,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What’s that like?”
“Hard,” I said, “but like a lot of things, if you work hard and respect the underlying ideals, people respect you. It’s rigorous in a lot of ways: academically and physically and psychologically. A lot of people don’t make it. Including me.”
This was risky. If he wanted to know why I washed out, he’d ask now, and I didn’t know if I could refuse him. And if I did tell him the answer, I didn’t know how he’d feel about it.
But he just said, “They got a lot of girls there? Are the guys cool with that?”
“Most guys are,” I said.
“What about guys like me? Does West Point take vatos?”
“I don’t know if I’d call them vatos,” I said. “They take Latinos, if they’re as square as I used to be.”
Payaso lit a cigarette, not offering me one. He took a drag, held it, and exhaled at length. Then his face changed, turning serious. I didn’t have to be told it was time for business.
He said, “So tell me about the shit that went down in Mexico.”
I told him the story. Fast through the part I knew Serena had told him already, about Lara and the arrangements to take Nidia to Mexico. More detailed on the things only I witnessed, like the ambush in the tunnel, and my run-in with Babyface up in San Francisco. Briefly, I talked about what lay ahead, getting Nidia back. In doing so, I salted the conversation with words from my military background, calling the information-gathering I was doing intel and a prospective mission against Skouras asymmetric warfare. I wasn’t just playing to Payaso’s earlier interest in West Point, but to every gangster’s romantic conviction that his life was part of a war. It was no coincidence that most writing done on the Mafia, for example, referred to lieutenants and foot soldiers.
“These guys are serious,” I said. “I told Serena and I’ll tell you, this isn’t going to be a walk in the park.” Did that sound too authoritarian? I went on: “But I can’t do it without the kind of backup that you can provide, guys who can shoot and don’t scare easy.”
“That’s us,” Payaso said, and his guys murmured agreement.
He stubbed out his cigarette. “All right, Insula, me and my homeboys are in. Whatever you need. Those guys are gonna learn they can’t mess with a Mexican girl like that.”
The guys around him nodded.
Payaso added, “But I’m gonna need to know what you’re planning, though, the details of it.”
I shrugged wryly. “As soon as I plan it,” I said, “you’ll be the first to know.”
He stood up, and we shook hands, formally.
Then he looked at Serena. “Warchild,” he said, “there’s a car out in the driveway, a blue Volkswagen. Go drive it to Chato, to his shop.”
The car turned out to be a rather nice Passat with leather seats and a high-end sound system. Somebody out there was missing this car in a way insurance didn’t make up for.
“You don’t have to go with me,” Serena told me. “I can just take you home.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”
“You want to drive, then?” she asked, abruptly reversing position. “I’m getting a headache.”
I’d worried about being dragged into sucia business, and here I was, volunteering for it. I didn’t know exactly why, except that I’d felt bad for Serena, back in the house. I was used to seeing her among her sucias, the undisputed leader; I wasn’t used to seeing her take orders. I’d known gang life was hierarchical, but I’d felt a twinge of distaste nonetheless.
I navigated her darkened neighborhood, then up onto the freeway. While I was merging into traffic, Serena flipped on the Passat’s sound system. There was a CD in the drive, but I didn’t notice the music until Serena said, “What the fuck are we listening to?” Alerted, I listened, and in a second recognized the song coming from the speakers: vintage Simon and Garfunkel, the lilting strains of “Feelin’ Groovy.”
Without waiting for an answer, Serena jabbed at the controls, replacing acoustic music with rap. “Who listens to that shit?” she said, lower-voiced but still irritable.
I didn’t answer. It would be easy to dismiss Serena’s outburst as ghetto monoculturalism, like a child rejecting a food she’s never really tried, but I knew her better than that. What she was really saying about the song’s easy, happy lyrics was not Who listens to this? but Who lives like this? Who feels this way? She didn’t. Nobody she knew did.
After a moment, she spoke again. “You know what really bothers me?”
“What?”
“Payaso and his guys,” she said. “I knew they weren’t going to sign on to this for your sake, but they’re not even doing it for me. They’re doing it for her, Nidia, and they don’t even know her. It’s what she represents to them. The nice girl from the block, the sweet little virgen.”