Page 55 of The Children of Eve

I parked in the Walgreens lot, Walgreens now standing at one apex of a triangle dominated by two boutique hotels, Congress being the new location of choice for upscale, tony places to stay, leaving Commercial for the chains. The latest addition, the Longfellow, hosted a spa. I couldn’t recall ever having visited a spa. I was pretty sure Louis had, though, which he confirmed when I joined him and Angel at the restaurant.

“See this skin?” he said. “You don’t get skin like this at my age unless you care for it, ‘Black don’t crack’ or not. You use retinol?”

I told him that I didn’t think so.

“You got to use retinol, except it may be too late for you. Your face already looks like the sole of an old shoe.”

“Do you use retinol?” I asked Angel.

“He barely uses soap,” said Louis. “Hand him a bottle of retinol and he’d try to drink it.”

Angel, calmness personified, let the wave break over him and recede. He was too occupied by the menu. Hot Suppa formerly opened for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but not necessarily all three on anyparticular day, so it could be hard to remember which days it opened for which ones, or at all. Now it was strictly breakfast and lunch, with Southern food to rival even the Bayou Kitchen—though I wouldn’t have suggested this to Louis, who regarded the Bayou Kitchen as a sacred space. Louis ordered the shrimp and grits, Angel the chicken and waffles, and I the Hollis: two eggs, toast, bacon, with hash browns instead of grits. This caused Louis to wince, but I’d never understood grits and never would. They reminded me of something out of Dickens, gruel and grits not being unrelated.

“You see this?” asked Louis, sliding a newspaper across the table. The lead article concerned the Italianate Victoria Mansion, one of the loveliest buildings in the city, constructed as a summer home by a Mainer–turned–New Orleans hotelier named Ruggles Morse in the mid-1800s. It was common knowledge that Morse had been an ardent supporter of the Confederacy and permitted slave auctions in his hotels, in addition to owning slaves of his own. Before the Civil War, Louisiana was a slave economy. If you did business there, it was slave business, and some of that money had made it north to Portland, leaving its legacy in the form of the Victoria Mansion. Had it not been so beautiful, it wouldn’t have been so problematic.

“Do you have a solution to this thorny Portland quandary?” I asked Louis.

“Time-shares,” he replied. “We run an annual lottery for Black folk and the winners get to stay at the Victoria Mansion for a week, meals included.”

“A ticketed lottery?”

“Dollar a shot. We’re not greedy.”

“It’s certainly an unconventional approach,” I said. “I can have Moxie draw up some paperwork so it looks fully thought through when you present it to the board.”

“Sounds good,” said Louis. “I ought to give him a call, have him set up a meeting.”

“No, I think you should turn up cold. Make it a surprise.”

“So as not to give him time to get away, you mean?”

“That too. Then again, Moxie might agree just to see the looks on the faces of the board. He has a strange sense of humor.”

Our food arrived. While we ate, I updated Louis and Angel on what I’d learned from Jason Rybek, and for what it was worth, Donna Lawrence. In turn, Louis had made those promised calls regarding Devin Vaughn.

“Yeah, Vaughn is in trouble,” said Louis. “He’s overstretched financially because he didn’t have the resources to properly weather the pandemic, but he may also have made some bad calls on cryptocurrency.”

“That hardly makes him unique,” I said. “Smarter people than him have fallen into the same traps, and dumber people have survived them.”

“But how many of those people,” countered Louis, “also had a quarrel with a cartel boss?”

On his phone, Louis pulled up a mugshot of a man in his fifties who looked like he’d swallowed a swarm of wasps, but not before they’d done their best to sting him to death. Even his mother must have squeezed her eyes shut and hoped for the best before kissing him.

“Meet Blas Urrea,” said Louis, “contender for the title of Guerrero’s ugliest man. Oddly, it’s said that he’s restrained by cartel standards, but that’s a low bar. It probably just means that he kills quickly unless he’s bored.

“So: Devin Vaughn ultimately wanted to go straight, but to do that required significant investment to grow his legitimate activities, which meant he had to expand his criminal dealings, and that expansion inevitably resulted in disagreements—because for someone to gain, someone else has to lose. When it came to cannabis, even heroin and cocaine, he could reach an accommodation by agreeing to pay a percentage of the action to the locals, but other disputes proved harder to resolve, particularly once he expanded into illicit fentanyl, which is where the real money is right now.

“If you’re dealing in fentanyl, you’re buying from the PCC, a loose affiliation of drug lords based out of São Paulo in Brazil, of which Urrea is—or was, of which more in a moment—a member in good standing. Urrea started out strictly as a supplier, but he, like Vaughn, is also a fan of trade-based money laundering. Urrea similarly aspires to legitimacy, if not actual respectability, with clean investments to form the basis of his bequest to his family. He’d prefer to build that bequest in the United States. In Mexico, he’ll be bled dry, and there’s no guarantee that his kids will be able to hold on to whatever he’s built after he’s gone.”

I watched pigeons fighting over a discarded sandwich on the street outside. Just because a metaphor is handed to you on a plate doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

“Initially,” Louis continued, “Vaughn bought cocaine from Urrea, and later fentanyl produced in China and exported to Mexico, all packaged and ready to be shipped north. Vaughn was a good customer, so in return, Urrea introduced him to his contacts in the Colombian illegal mining sector, allowing Vaughn to purchase gold at forty to fifty percent of its standard value, with Urrea taking a commission for brokering the deal. Vaughn then used tame aggregators—more commission for Urrea—to blend the illegal gold with legally sourced stock, and they in turn passed it on to refiners, also friends of Urrea’s, who melted it together and re-formed it, so now there was no way to trace the origin of each bar. A portion of the gold, though, Vaughn arranged to be shipped directly to the U.S., concealed in batches of scrap aluminum because it seems it’s now easier to smuggle gold than hard currency.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Blas Urrea is also in the scrap metal business.”

“If something can be bought or sold at a profit, Urrea is interested, especially if illegality becomes virtually indistinguishable from legality. He really does want his family to be clean within a generation.”

“Urrea and Vaughn would appear to be brothers from other mothers,” I said. “So what went wrong?”

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