Lockestep Page 2

  "That's romantic as hell,” I said. “But where do I come in?"

  He looked at me very straight. It was like locking eyes with a gargoyle. “We can't send a copper to Mexico with him. The lawyers would have a field day when it came time to prosecute the other bastards."

  "Besides which, if he gives you the slip, the egg will be all over the front pages."

  "That, too.” He put his drink down, untasted, and stood up. “What it boils down to is, we need a civilian hard-nose to travel with him."

  "Skipping all the fine print, what will you pay me?” The job sounded interesting. I like Mexico anyway, and this assignment would be unusual.

  "We can't pay you anything. We don't know anything about this, you understand,” Martin said, and as I opened my mouth to protest, he grinned. “But our boy is plenty scared. If you can keep his ex-workmates off his ass, he'll pay you ten grand."

  "How long is the job?” I was never good at arithmetic, but I'd just picked up a thousand a day for three days. Ten thousand was nice, if I didn't have to take six months earning it.

  "One week. There are package tour flights every day from Toronto, but the first one we can get you on is Sunday. If you need to get out, we'll arrange for you to come back on the first available. But, meantime, you're booked to go down this Sunday, come back the next."

  "That makes the pay worthwhile. But I need to know some more things first. Like how many buddies has he got down there waiting to back-shoot me and help him onto his horse to ride away into the sunset?"

  "It figures he's got organization down there. No doubt of that,” Martin said. “He's gotta have all kinds of donkeys bringing in the dope from Colombia, and I gotta admit those boys play rough."

  "You're a real comfort,” I told him, standing up. I think better on my feet, a fighter's reflex, maybe. “Okay, next question: Where is he going?"

  "The tour plane is going to Ixtapa,” Cahill said. “Ever hear of it?"

  I nodded. “Yes, I know it, but that's not where he's going. It's one of the tourist ghettos, like Cancún, a strip of North American hotels and watered lawns and swim-up bars, every Mexican there goes home at night to Zihuatanejo."

  "Never heard of it.” Cahill shook his head. “You sure ‘bout that?"

  "Certain. It's the original fishing village, typical Mexican small town, clustered around a bay where you can swim without having a fifteen-foot wave fall on your head like a wall."

  "You been there?” He looked up at me over the lip of his glass.

  "Several times. Used to go there with my family, back before there was even an airport. Used to come in by boat from Acapulco, which is a couple of hundred kilometers down the coast."

  "Wish I was going,” he said wistfully. “All them señoritas in their bikinis."

  "Gringos in bikinis. The Mexicans are modest."

  He shook his head sadly. “Figures. Anyway, you gonna go?"

  "What about backup? You have any contacts down there? I mean, somebody must've tipped you off about Amadeo. You've got to know someone down there."

  "There is a guy. He's not with us, he's with the Americans, one of their undercover antidrug people. Name of Jesus Soto."

  "That's ‘Haysoos,’ not Jesus. Good, how do I get in touch with him? I'm going to need somebody watching my back while I watch Amadeo."

  "I'll make sure he's at the airport the day you get there. It'll be discreet, though, don't expect him to run up and kiss you on both cheeks, or whatever the hell it is they do down there."

  "I'll need a picture or a good description. It would help if I had the license number of his car—something, anyway, to identify him for sure, I may need him."

  "All right.” Cahill straightened up. “You go on Sunday, a six o'clock flight from Lester B. Pearson Airport, Terminal One. I'll fix up the tickets. Now, whyn't you put the coffee on and bang on the floor for Janet to come on up. I've seen enough ugly for one evening."

  Three

  Sunday was three days away, which was fortunate, since Friday was my mother's birthday and I was needed for my annual walk-on part as family black sheep. Sometimes I get the feeling that if I didn't exist, they would have invented me to flatter my elder brother the geologist, and my sister the shrink Both of them waltzed through school the way most kids waltz through summer camp, married the right people, had the correct number of kids, one of each, and settled down. I didn't. School was a pain, and though my family finagled me into first Harvard and then Cambridge by pulling strings most people never get their hands on, I didn't finish either one. What little education I have has come from the army or from books, mostly history, that I've read to pass the time.

  In the meantime, my family is gritting its teeth and waiting for me to grow up. They like to get me in corners at parties and ask who is going to take care of me when I get old. Except my father, of course. Old age is something that has never crossed his mind. He's sixty-three but looks fifteen years younger and is usually off in some windblown corner of the world drilling for minerals, coming home once a month to let my mother resharpen her claws on him. She's an undisclosed few years younger than he and spends her time doing committee work and looking regal.

  I had picked her up a silk scarf, with a little guidance from Janet, who has made it a hobby to try to civilize me, and I was as ready as I get to sip tea and nibble cucumber sandwiches in the family's twenty-three-room shack in Rosedale.

  My three-year-old Volvo fitted into the circular driveway behind my brother's Audi, my sister's Porsche, and my brother-in-law's camper van. I grinned when I saw that. He had probably come direct from the operating theater. He's a good head, a surgeon at Sick Kids’ Hospital, where he pioneered a new technique for transplanting kidneys. He's explained it to me twice and I still haven't got it, but people bring their children from all over the world to get him involved. His name is Jake, short for Giacomo. His last name is Valenti, which made my mother sigh when he first came home with Susan. Italian! Catholic! I'm lying. She groaned, twice.

  Walter met me at the door. He's worked for the family since I was born, the year he smashed up his leg on one of Dad's drilling operations. I give the old man marks, he's loyal. Anyway, Walter is a buddy of mine in a quiet way. He's a veteran of Korea, and I guess it was his quiet suggestion that sent me off to join the Grenadier Guards after I was sent down from Cambridge, finally giving me the direction I'd been missing so far. “Good to see you, John,” he said and we shook hands.

  "How's the atmosphere?” I asked him.

  He looked around conspiratonally. “Chilly, you ask me. Your mother's on the warpath."

  I winked at him and walked on through. The Matriarch was standing with her back to the fireplace, with my brother and sister making like bookends. My father was on the telephone, Jake was helping himself to tea, and the four grandchildren were sitting in a row on the couch wondering how soon they could go home. My brother's wife was sitting, sipping tea and practicing to look like her mother-in-law when Robert inherits this house.

  I waved at the kids first and they all squealed, and my sister's boy peeled off the couch and hung around my leg. He's dark like his dad and full of Italian enthusiasm that survived being diluted by the ice water he inherited from my sister. I picked him up and kissed him. “Hi, Champ."

  "Hi, Uncle John.” He clung on tight, a sure sign that Mother was indeed on the warpath. I wondered if she had discovered another of my father's adventures. For a guy his age he has a highly developed roving eye. I went up to her and kissed her. She turned her face at the last moment and spoke to Jake as I planted my dutiful peck on the cheek.

  "It doesn't really need milk,” she said, “It's Darjeeling."

  "I thought it might put some heart into it,” Jake said cheerfully. “If I had a patient as weak as this, he would be in intensive care."

  "Happy birthday, Mother,” I said, and held out the parcel. She didn't take it. She was too busy wiping young Andy's nose with his napkin, leaving me with my arm out for thirty sec
onds. Then she said, “You got here at last."

  "I thought zero hour was four,” I said. It was four minutes past by my watch.

  "It was,” she said.

  I set Andy down and handed him the package. “Put that on the table for me, Andy, then come and see what I brought you."

  He pattered over to the table and came back, this time with the other three in tow. “In my pocket,” I told them and bent down so my brother's eldest boy could reach in for the bag of candies.

  "Don't eat them now. They'll spoil your dinner,” my mother said, beating my sister to it by a microsecond.

  I winked at the kids. “Share them out. If there's any left over, I'll have them. No fighting."

  They went back to the sofa and sat happily grubbing in the bag while I bussed my sister and sister-in-law and shook hands all around.

  My father hung up the phone and said, “You're looking pale. You need some fresh air."

  "Up in Baffin Land maybe?"

  "Ellesmere Island,” he said, “We're on to an oil prospect. I'm flying back on Monday."

  "I'm heading to Mexico on an assignment the day before that. Should get some fresh air down there,” I told him.

  My mother said, “What kind of assignment?"

  "Plying my trade, guarding bodies.” I gave her the opening; after all, it was her birthday.

  "That's not a job for a gentleman."

  "Well, my officer-and-gentleman phase is over. It's John Locke, civilian and prole, these days."

  Now my brother took the relay baton off her. “You'd be welcome in the company, John. With your experience in the service you'd do well in management."

  "I like my own line of work,” I explained. “It's like crime. It doesn't pay, but the hours are good."

  Jake was the only one who laughed out loud, although my father grinned until he got a lightning strike from my mother's eyebrows. Jake said, “Have some tea, John. It'll remind you of the army."

  I accepted a cup. “Thanks. Why? Is it laced with saltpeter?"

  His wife asked, “Saltpeter? Why would they put saltpeter in your tea?"

  "The Raj believes it takes the sex drive out of the men. It's part of the folklore of any army. Ask Walter, he'll tell you the same thing. Ask Dad."

  My sister looked at me through narrowed eyes, as if I were paying her fifty bucks an hour for her opinion. “You do set an enormous importance on your sexuality, don't you?"

  For a tightass she is remarkably discerning. “Most guys do,” I told her.

  Apparently they didn't in headshrinking circles. Only patients ever mentioned the dirty word. “More than anybody I've encountered outside my practice,” she said.

  I frowned at Jake. “Are you letting the side down, Giacomo?"

  He laughed. “I just don't ever mention the word,” he said, ignoring the flash from my sister.

  She kept after me. “Think about it. Of all the things you might have said about the tea, you had to bring the topic around to sex."

  "Sorry, Doctor, I'll change the subject before you send me a bill."

  "Most men of your age have finished the promiscuous phase of their lives. They've matured and settled down."

  "You can prove anything with statistics. If you're a believer in statistics,” I said. “When I come across the right woman, I'll settle down to a life of pot roast and diapers and dutiful lovemaking twice a week, like all the other boys on the block. But for the moment I'm still shopping around. Now, can we change the subject before you traumatize the youngsters?"

  She wasn't going to, but my father was uncomfortable enough that he did it for me? “So, what are you going to do in Mexico?"

  "I'm working with the RCMP."

  Even my mother looked impressed for a heartbeat. The Mounties are right up there with the Queen and cucumber sandwiches in her book. “Doing what?” she inquired, almost kindly.

  "I'm sorry, I can't discuss it. I just wanted you to know that I'm carrying the flag on this assignment."

  My father managed a gruff chuckle. “If I know the government, it means you're getting paid next to nothing, right?"

  I owed him one, so I nodded. “Pretty much. But there's a bonus for performance, so the rent still gets paid."

  From that we managed to get the conversation turned around to governments and politics, and Jake was able to make the standard doctor's speech about government regulations in Canada driving most of his colleagues to Texas, where the money, if not the grass, is far greener. After about twenty minutes of it my mother even deigned to open her gifts and be gracious about them, study the lopsided handmade card Susan's kids had drawn for her, and listen while Andy and his sister explained what everything was meant to be. As long as she was holding court, it was almost pleasurable, and I was lulled into accepting the invitation to stay on for dinner, after my brother and sister took their families home.

  Dinner was an honest pleasure. We've had the same cook for thirty years, and she had prepared my mother's favorite, Beef Wellington with mushrooms. Bordelaise, one of the few things on which my mother and I agree. With a robust burgundy it was perfection. Then, off the same Anglo-Saxon gastronomical wall she had made blueberry crumble, with fruit my mother had bought from the Indians up at what I refer to as the summer palace in Muskoka. Afterward we all adjourned to sit around the fire with our coffee.

  My mother excused herself after half an hour to prepare for a meeting she had the next day to put the squeeze on some construction company for the building fund for Sick Kids’ Hospital, leaving me with my father and our Calvados. She was relaxed by now and maternal. She kissed me good-bye and told me to take care of myself in Mexico. After she had gone, my father and I sat down again and relaxed.

  Times like these are the only real communication we ever have. There's something about drinking with your father that transcends the normal relationship. You don't have to get out of shape. Just having a bottle on the table between you gives you an equality that doesn't exist during the day while he's running the world and you're scrambling to find yourself a place on board. Times like these I even like the old bastard.

  Just to break the silence, I said, “You're the only man I know who always drinks Calvados in preference to Cognac. Why's that?"

  "It reminds me of the war,” he said, reaching for his pipe.

  "The locals turned out, did they, when you landed?"

  "We didn't see them on D day. The Germans had cleared everybody out, but once we got through Benìres and into the open country and regrouped, we found ourselves in orchards. Hard fighting, still, but that evening, as the men dug in, the farmer came around with a pitcher of Calvados. It was his best, too.” He puffed on his pipe. “A barrel he'd been aging before the war. He'd buried it under the hay in his barn for the duration, saving it for liberation. God, it was like velvet. I can remember it now. And the pitcher, big, coarse china thing with flowers painted on the side. We drank to victory first, and then to all the friends we'd left on Juno Beach."

  I sat and looked at the fire, enjoying the aroma of his tobacco and my own more recent memories until he prompted me, out of kindness, I guess. “Did you ever get a drink in those kinds of circumstances?"

  "Not quite so memorable, because it wasn't home-grown liquor. But I was with the Paras when they liberated Goose Green in the Falklands, and one of the locals had a bottle of Bushmills. Just one bottle, among the survivors of the whole company, so it didn't do more than wet our lips, but I've preferred Irish to anything else, ever since."

  I'd never thought of him as sentimental but he stood up now and went over to the liquor cabinet for the Bushmills and a fresh glass. He poured me a tot, then topped up his Calvados and handed me my glass.

  "Slínte," he said, Gaelic for “Good Health."

  "Slínte va." I toasted him in return, and we drank as friends.

  Four

  I reported to Cahill the following night at a hotel near the airport. He was in room 880, next door to the room where Amadeo had been on ice
for almost a week.

  "How come you've kept him here this long? There had to be flights sooner than this,” I said as I dumped my flight bag.

  "It's the first charter flight we could get you onto. There are regular flights, of course, but all of them go by way of Mexico City, changing planes. Apparently that's a big airport, lots of chance for him to disappear on you. This one only stops at Manzanillo, and we've arranged for you to stay on board."

  "How about weapons? You're sure this guy of yours will have a piece for me? Or can I take my own? I'd be happier carrying that."

  "I know you would.” He held up one hand, apologetically. “We can get you aboard with it at this end, but you'd never get it out of the airport at that end. We don't have any connections."

  "Not with the police?"

  "A couple, near the top. But there's a whole lot of corruption in Mexico. Hell, the chief of police of Mexico City was staging bank robberies, running drugs, murdering guys. He built himself a palace someplace on the proceeds, right before they got on to him and chased him out.” He stopped and scratched his head absently. “So, that's a long way of saying we can't give you a whole lot of backup."

  "Just so's I'm not standing there bare-handed if some of Amadeo's Mafia buddies come looking for him, that's all."

  "Don't worry. Our guy will be there with a package for you. It'll be a basket of fruit with a gun in it."

  "Where's he going to deliver?"

  "You'll get it at the airport, but don't count on pressing the flesh. He wants to stay low. Drugs is big business in that state, Guerrero Hell, the growers shot down a couple of government helicopters in the mountains there last spring, guys who were out to spray the marijuana crop with Agent Orange."

  "Not very friendly."