Page 52 of The Children of Eve

And all the while, Bern was spending money they couldn’t afford—and calling in favors he would have preferred to save—to gain some insight into Blas Urrea’s plans. Until the previous day, he’d had no luck at all. South of the border, the news had spread that something valuable had been taken from Urrea, and the culprits, along with their families, their pets, and the bones of their ancestors, were now marked, as was anyone who assisted them or failed to share knowledge of their whereabouts.

But then a call had come through to Bern from a woman named Elena Díaz, who needed to get out of Mexico. If she didn’t, a band of killers from Coahuila, Urrea’s seat of power, were going to rape her, remove her arms, legs, and head, and hang her dismembered torso from the aqueduct in Saltillo, all because she had declined the advances of the wrong man. Díaz, therefore, urgently required money, and her immediate fear of torture and death had overcome her longer-term fear of Blas Urrea, especially because the man whose attentions she’d spurned was one of Urrea’s senior lieutenants.

Díaz worked for a private Mexican bank, one that had long maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with the cartel boss. The funds it held for Urrea were both clean and officially unconnected to him, which meant that transfers did not attract undue attention, either domestic or international, and cursory government inspections found nothing to be alarmed about. The core banking team, of which Díaz wasa member, was aware of the identity of some but not all of the clients through regular exposure to transfer and investment patterns, helped by hearsay and the occasional conversational nugget dropped by Las Tres Jefas, as they were known—because, unusually, the highest positions in the bank were occupied by women.

Regrettably, none of those women, all of whom were aware of Díaz’s predicament, had proven willing to intervene with Urrea on her behalf. They might have been anxious not to endanger themselves or alienate an important client, but Díaz also suspected that Blas Urrea was more than a customer and might well be among the bank’s owners, if not the principal. Díaz couldn’t prove this, and even if she could, she knew there would be no smoking gun to entice the authorities, so scrupulously did Las Jefas adhere to the banking laws—or within reason, because any bank that appeared too honest was, quite rightly, automatically assumed to be hiding something, a situation not unique to Mexico but common to global finance.

So Díaz had been looking for a way out, and the raid on one of Blas Urrea’s isolated compounds had unexpectedly provided her with a potential route. The details of what had occurred—and, more precisely, what had been taken—were unclear, but the result was that, a month after the first whispers about the raid reached the bank, Las Jefas had reactivated two accounts that Díaz knew to be dormant Urrea holdings. Díaz had processed the transfers as instructed, the funds moving from Mexico to Nashville, Tennessee, one of the cities frequently cited as a Buckle of the Bible Belt. The money landed in the No. 1 and No. 2 accounts of a company dealing in repurposed Bibles, both English and Spanish, from the cheap to the costly. An off-the-shelf website indicated that the Nashville Codex Corporation was additionally devoted to creating “unique books of worship from existing volumes,” thus ensuring the “propagation of the Word” in a manner that was both “environmentally sustainable and historically appropriate,” enabling buyers to become part of a “Christian continuum,” possessors of beautiful booksonce owned by other worshippers, which could be passed on to the next generation.

The purpose of the payments, acknowledged in a formal, beautifully phrased, and unsigned letter of receipt, was for the production and delivery of eight impeccably restored eighteenth-century Bibles—four English and four Spanish—each with new artwork and capitalization, as well as fresh leather binding, gilding, and jeweled cases, within a time frame of not less than five years, a schedule somewhat at odds with the urgency of the transfers. The Nashville Codex Corporation also committed to sourcing up to five thousand used Spanish-language Bibles within the same period, which would be given new covers and marked asun donativo penitencial de un pecador reformado—a penitential offering from a reformed sinner. The total of the two transfers came to $500,000—which represented, Díaz thought, a hell of an investment in the hope of salvation, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms.

Against all protocols, Díaz installed stealth monitoring software to log all transactions to and from the Nashville Codex Corporation and illegally harvest historical financial records going back a decade. It was this information, starting with the name and location of the company, that she was now offering to sell to Aldo Bern. Devin Vaughn’s name had recently been mentioned in unflattering terms in the bank’s halls, and by the same Urrea lieutenant who had given Díaz to understand that, at a time of his choosing—whether days, weeks, or months in the future—she would be dispatched to the next world, but not before her body had been violated and sundered. It hadn’t taken Díaz long to identify Vaughn’s relationship to Blas Urrea, and then Aldo Bern’s to Vaughn.

Díaz had named a non-negotiable price for her trove and given Bern the details of an account set up solely to receive those funds. As soon as the first tranche was safely deposited, Díaz would commence sharing all she knew. But Bern needed Vaughn to okay the transfer. This, in the environs of a soon-to-be-immolated produce warehouse, he was proving reluctant to do.

“How can we be sure she’s straight?” Vaughn asked.

Vaughn was consuming a clementine, segmented and laid out on its peel. He ate methodically, chewing each piece for what seemed to Bern like precisely the same number of seconds, but with no obvious relish. Vaughn had contracted COVID in the early days of the pandemic, and his taste buds still hadn’t fully recovered. Bern knew it had made Vaughn depressed, which might have affected his judgment and contributed to the current havoc.

“She knew your name,” said Bern. “Urrea’s associates are talking about you. She wouldn’t have approached us otherwise.”

“Or she figures we’re desperate and can be played.”

“She’s at least as desperate as we are,” said Bern. “We’ve both dealt with el Amante. If she doesn’t get out of there, she’s a dead woman.”

El Amante was the nickname given to Urrea’s lieutenant and Díaz’s nemesis. It was what passed for humor in the Mexican underworld, referring to a compulsive rapist as “the Lover.” Maybe, Bern reflected, el Violador was taken. There certainly wasn’t any shortage of candidates for the title.

“But a hundred thousand dollars?” Vaughn continued.

He finished the clementine, tossed the peel in a garbage can, and wiped his hands on the pleats of his tan trousers. Bern spotted what he thought might be a urine stain beside the fly. Vaughn was letting himself go, though it wasn’t for Bern to point this out. It might have been easier if Vaughn still had a wife to attend to his domestic needs.

“A quarter up front,” said Bern, “and the rest in escrow, to be released once we’re satisfied with the material.”

“It’s still twenty-five thousand in advance.”

Bern was growing impatient. Only a couple of years earlier, Vaughn would have dropped $25K on updating his summer wardrobe, and regarded a conversation like this as quibbling over nickels and dimes.

“We need to know exactly where the threat is coming from,” said Bern. “Right now we’re in the dark, waiting to be hit.”

“If Díaz screws us over, do we have anything to use against her?”

“She has a mother and a younger sister, but they’ll vanish with her. She can’t leave them for el Amante. If Díaz is as bright as she seems, she’ll have tried to hide her snooping at the bank, but if she’s that bright, she’ll also know how hard it will be to eliminate all traces. When she drops out of sight, her employers may initially put it down to the threat of el Amante, but you can be sure they’ll also review her recent activities. Whatever dangling ends she’s left, they’ll find, and Urrea will be informed.”

Vaughn scowled.

“So she and her family are dead, no matter what she does,” he said. “Another reason not to give her our money.”

Bern wanted to grab Vaughn by the hair and beat his head against the table.

You fucking infant. You child. All this is because of your recklessness, your covetousness—

Bern took a deep breath.

“We need what she’s offering,” he said, “and she has a vested interest in ensuring we’re satisfied. If Urrea goes down, so does el Amante. She wants us to succeed. It’s the best hope she has for staying alive.”

Vaughn was silent for a while longer before nodding.

“Then do it,” he said, finally. “Give the bitch her money.”

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