“They’ve seen us,” Evita said.
“But they can’t know who we are. Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for? For Valentin to show up? Let’s get out of here. We can’t do anything.”
McGarvey stared across at the other man for a long time. He wanted the Russians to see them. He wanted them to know they’d come. He wanted them to know that everything wasn’t going to go their way this time. At least in this one thing, Baranov was going to lose.
“Please, Kirk,” Evita said. “I am becoming frightened.”
“Where is the American embassy?” McGarvey asked. “Is it far from here?”
“Not far,” she said. “On the Paseo de la Reforma. Back the way we came.”
McGarvey put the car in gear, waited for a gap in the traffic, and made a U-turn so that they passed directly in front of the Soviet embassy gate. Evita turned her head so that she would not be seen, but McGarvey looked directly at the Russian guard. Tell Baranov I’ve come for him. Tell him it won’t be long now. And then they were past and turning again at the barricades blocking Hidalgo, the demonstration still building. Even more police had arrived, and they were anxiously directing traffic away from the park.
The crowd had spilled clear across the park onto the Avenida Juárez. They had to drive two blocks farther south before they could turn back to the west past the Hotel Metropol.
“What can you hope to accomplish here like this?” Evita asked. “Just driving around the city at night. Sooner or later someone will spot us. Valentin has his spies everywhere.”
“I want him to know that we’re here.”
“This is insanity!”
“The insanity, Evita, has been going on for twenty-five years. I’m going to end it.”
“It’ll end when you’re dead,” she cried. “He’ll kill us all, and in the end he’ll get his way.”
She was beginning to come apart. It was too soon. He needed her for a little while longer. “Listen to me, Evita. You’re going to have to be strong, but just for a couple of days.”
“I can’t,” she cried.
“You won’t have to do a thing except make a phone call. One call tomorrow night. After that you can come back to New York. I promise you.”
“Then what are we doing out here like this tonight?” she screeched. She held out her hand. “No, you don’t have to tell me, you bastard! You’re provoking him! You’re parading around his city with me. You’re showing him that you aren’t afraid of him. Well I am!”
She was right. But he needed her. “I’ll put you on a plane first thing in the morning, if that’s what you want.”
“You’re goddamned right that’s what I want!”
“He and your husband will have won.”
“I don’t care!”
“And Juanita will be theirs. Body and soul. She’ll have about as much chance as you had.” He was thinking about his ex-wife, Kathleen, and his, daughter. They didn’t have much of a chance either. Maybe it was too late for them after all. Maybe he was charging at windmills. Maybe he should have remained with Marta in Switzerland. Lausanne seemed so terribly far away just now. Unattainable. Unreal. As if that part of his life had never occurred.
“Oh, you bastard,” she said.
“Forty-eight hours, maybe less,” he told her, turning the corner onto the Paseo de la Reforma. She buried her face in her hands and began to sob.
A double row of tall trees lined the main boulevard, Mexico City’s most magnificent. Stone and bronze statues of national heroes seemed to be everywhere. It reminded McGarvey of Rome’s Via Vento or Paris’s Champs Elysées. He expected to see legions marching in broad phalanxes to the roar of cheering crowds.
They came around a traffic circle at the center of which was a towering monument to Cristóbal Colón, which was the Spanish name for Christopher Columbus. If anything, traffic was much heavier now. There seemed to be an urgency throughout the city. A stridency to the note of the horns, to the snarl of the engines, to the movement of the pedestrians crossing against the lights and in the middle of the blocks.
Banners still proclaimed the opening of a new gallery in the Banco International next to the Hotel Continental and the statue of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, still rose above the intersection with Avenida Insurgentes — and all of it was cast in a violet glow from the streetlights. Mexico City was a pagan arena.
They could hear the roar of the crowd before they could see it. Traffic began immediately to slow. Evita looked up and sat forward.
“What is it now?” she asked.
“I think it’s our embassy,” McGarvey replied absently as he looked for a place to turn around. He did not want to get caught in a traffic jam here.
A blue and white police car, its lights flashing and its sirens blaring, raced past, followed by three ambulances. In the distance they could hear gunfire.
“What’s happening?” Evita cried, holding her ears.
Two canvas-covered army trucks roared up from a side street and careened around the traffic circle, pulling to a halt on the grass. Immediately two dozen armed soldiers leaped from the trucks and on their officer’s orders took up positions across the boulevard. Traffic came to a complete standstill and began to back up. A huge explosion lit the night sky with a tremendous flash and a heavy thump. A ball of fire rose from a building on the next block. Some of the soldiers looked over their shoulders, while others ran forward up the broad boulevard, motioning with their weapons for the cars and trucks to turn around. But it was impossible. Already traffic was backed up for several blocks.
People began piling out of their cars, talking excitedly with each other, shouting at the soldiers and pointing toward the flames and sparks shooting up into the sky. In the distance, from all directions, it seemed, they could hear sirens converging on the scene of the explosion. McGarvey had little doubt that it was the American embassy. Already he was considering the danger he was in because of his nationality. Evita might get by, but he didn’t know more than a dozen words in Spanish. The mood of the crowd on this side of the army barrier was rapidly turning ugly. He’d found out what he wanted to find out in any event. The mood in Mexico City was rabidly anti-American, and the Soviet embassy had seemed to be on standby for an emergency.
They were near the head of the traffic jam. McGarvey eased the Volkswagen out from behind a taxi and bumped slowly up onto the median strip, ignoring the shouts for him to go back. One of the soldiers rushed down from the traffic circle, brandishing his rifle and shouting for them to stop.
“You’re sick,” McGarvey told Evita. “We have to get you to the hospital.”
Evita’s eyes were wide. She looked from the advancing soldier to McGarvey and back.
“Hospital! Hospital!” McGarvey shouted out the window.
Another grim-faced soldier raced over. Evita suddenly held her gut and doubled over, screaming in what sounded like agony.
McGarvey took his pistol out of his pocket and laid it on the seat beside his right leg. He’d come too far, he decided, to be caught like this without a fight.
“Hospital,” he shouted out the window again. And Evita moaned as if she were half-dead. It was a convincing performance.
A crowd was beginning to gather around them. The soldiers held a hurried conference and then stepped aside, waving McGarvey onto the traffic circle toward a side street that headed north.
“Hospital de la Raza,” one soldier shouted. “De la Raza.” He was gesturing toward the north. “Insurgentes Norte,” he shouted as McGarvey passed.
The other soldiers watched them curiously as they drove past. Before they turned up Calles Rhin, McGarvey got a clear view down the broad boulevard at the huge crowd. The front of the U.S. embassy had been blown away and had collapsed into the street. Half the block was engulfed in flames. Soldiers seemed to be everywhere. The sounds of gunfire were clearly audible over the screaming and shouting of the crowd, the sirens, and the blaring bullhorns warning the people back.