“Some of your famous clients have been there?”
He nodded. “Yeah. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you who—which I’m not.”
“I admire your discretion, Fred. Which brings me to the heart of our little talk. You will receive a generous tip tonight, Fred. An extravagant tip. It is meant to not only seal your lips tighter than usual, but to erase from your memory everything that occurs from this moment until you drop me off at LaGuardia.”
“You’re not going to mess up my passenger area, are you?”
“I’m not planning to. But on the subject of ‘messing up,’ I feel obliged to give you a warning: In my homeland we have a way of dealing with someone who has seen too much and talks about it. We cure him of his affliction by removing his tongue and eyes. Unless we’re feeling particularly merciful, in which case we leave the eyes and take only the eyelids. And the tongue, of course. The tongue always goes. Do you understand what I am saying, Fred?”
Emilio hoped the driver would not take this as an empty threat. He knew of no such tradition in Mexico, but that didn’t matter. He meant every word, and would personally do the cutting. And enjoy it.
Fred gulped. “Yeah. Loud and clear. No problem.”
“Excellent. Then you can look forward to being hired whenever Senator Crenshaw comes to town.”
Fred’s expression did not exactly reflect unbridled joy at the prospect. He said, “You want to hit the Dog Collar now?”
Emilio folded the stiletto blade and put it away.
“Yes. Immediately.”
As they drove on in silence, Emilio hoped the Senador had some plan for Charlie, some solution for the threat he posed. For he was indeed a threat. In order to be president, the Senador first had to be nominated by his party. And in order to secure that nomination, he had to run in primary elections in various states. Emilio had studied all this in his civics lessons for his citizenship test, and he’d heard the Senador discuss it numerous times, but none of it made much sense. However, one thing that did make sense was that many of those primary states were in regions of the country where a the right kind of rumor could tilt a close race the wrong way. And if the primaries were going to be as hotly contested as the experts were predicting, having a maricon son might be the kiss of political death.
But there seemed to be more to it than that. The Senador seemed obsessed with finding Charlie and keeping him under wraps. Emilio didn’t understand.
What he did understand was that whatever kept the Senador from the White House also kept Emilio from the White House.
The White House. It had become Emilio’s dream.
Not to become president. That was to laugh. But for Emilio Sanchez to accompany the Senador to the world’s center of power, that was the ultimate spit in the eye to the many throughout his life who had said he’d go nowhere, be nothing unless he changed his ways.
But I never changed, Emilio thought. And look at me now. I am the most trusted aide of United States Senator Arthur Crenshaw. I am riding in a stretch limo through New York City. I have my pick of the women in the Senate Building in Washington. I own my own Coup de Ville. And I’m still moving up. Up!
Even now he loved to drive his shiny Cadillac back to his native Tijuana and park in front of the old haunts. Pay some street tonto to guard the car while he went inside and watched their eyes go wide and round as he flashed his money and rings and bought a round for the house.
In the span of a few heartbeats the word would get around: Emilio’s back! Emilio’s back! So that when he strolled the narrow streets the children would follow and call his name like a deity and beg for his attention. And not far behind them would be their mothers and older sisters, doing the same.
He loved to drive by the St. Ignatio School where the priests and sisters had tried to beat some religion into him and make him like all the other sheep they imprisoned in their classrooms. He loved to stop in front of the adobe chapel and blow the horn until one of those black-robed fools came out, then give them the dirty-digit salute and screech away.
He knew where his mother was living--still in the same old shack down in the Camino Verde settlement where he’d been born--but he never visited her. They’d be ice-skating in Hell before he gave that puta the time of day. Always putting him down, always saying he was a good-for-nothing puerco just like his father. Emilio had never known his father, and he’d spent years hating him for deserting his family. But after Emilio’s last blow-up with his mother, he no longer blamed his old man for leaving.
That blow-up had come when Emilio turned twenty and took the bouncer job at The Cockscomb, the toughest, meanest, low-rent whorehouse in Tijuana. His mother had kicked him out of the trailer, telling him he was going to hell, that he was going to die before he was twenty-one. Emilio had sauntered off and never looked back.
He proved himself at The Cockscomb. He’d been fighting since he was a kid and he’d learned every cheap, dirty, back-alley brawling trick there ever was, usually the hard way. He had the scars to prove it. He was good with a knife--very good. He’d stabbed his share and had been stabbed a few times in return. One of his opponents had died, writhing on the floor at his feet. Emilio had felt nothing.
He started working out, popping steroids and bulking up until his shoulders were too wide for most doorways. He had a short fuse to begin with, and the juice trimmed it down to the nub.
But not to where he was out of control. Never out of control. He always eased the belligerent drunken Americanos out to the street, but Heaven help the locals who got out of line. Emilio would beat them to a pulp and love every bloody minute of it. Another man died from one of those beatings, but he’d deserved it. Over the succeeding years he caused the death of three more men--two with a blade, and one with a bullet.
He moved up quickly through the Tijuana sex world, from whorehouses, to brothels, to chief enforcer at the renowned Blue Senorita, a high-ticket bordello and tavern that catered almost exclusively to Americanos. Orosco, the owner, liked to brag that the Blue Senorita was a “full service whorehouse,” catering to all tastes--strip shows, live sex shows, donkey sex shows; where a man could have a woman, or another man, or a young girl, or a young boy, or--if he had the energy and a fat enough wallet--all four.
For his first few years at the Blue Senorita Emilio had been proud of his position--inordinately so, he now thought--but the sameness of its nightly routine, along with the realization that he had risen as far as he could go and that somewhere along the corridor of his years, when he’d aged and softened and slowed, he’d be replaced by someone younger and stronger and hungrier. Then he’d find himself out on the street with no income, no savings, no pension. And he’d wind up one of those useless old men who hung around the square in their cigarette-burned shirts and their pee-stained pants, sipping from bottles of cheap wine and yammering to anybody who’d listen about their younger days when they’d had all the money they could spend, and any women they wanted. When they’d been somebody instead of nobody.
He could see no future for him in Tijuana. Nowhere in all of Mexico. Perhaps America was the place. But maybe it was too late for him in America. He would be turning thirty soon. And how would he get in? Damned if he’d be a wetback. Not after practically managing The Blue Senorita.