1
MEXICO CITY
January 2024
The driver pulled up in front of Jeronimo Hermosa’s house at precisely six thirty pm on a cool winter evening. Hilario was the only name Lilly knew the driver by. He was an elderly Indio that had served Hermosa and his family since Jeronimo’s childhood. Since Jeronimo was well into his seventies, that meant Hilario had to be at least in his eighties or nineties.
In contrast to his wrinkled, tobacco-colored face, Hilario’s hair remained thick and coal black. He wore it long and pulled back into a braided and tightly coiled ponytail. As was his custom, the old man always wore an ill-fitting black suit with wide lapels that was shiny with wear. Jeronimo once speculated to Lilly that the suit predated his own birth.
Hilario raised a scabrous hand to tilt the rear-view mirror to meet Lilly’s eyes. With a subtle nod of his head, he acknowledged their arrival. As was his manner, he meticulously placed the Mercedes in park and switched off the ignition and then slowly and laboriously climbed out, straightening his suit before opening Lilly’ door.
“Señorita,” he croaked and offered a curt bow.
“Gracias, Hilario,” she replied, taking his proffered hand.
She paused a moment to survey the estate’s manicured grounds. The evening had grown quite cool and the air was heavy with the smell of wood smoke, for many of the residents in this neighborhood still favored fireplaces. The fading daylight softened the leafy grounds and contours of the Hermosa ancestral home. The mansion was situated in the Miguel Hidalgo neighborhood and bordered the Bosque De Chapultepec. From the driveway, a break in the tall conifer trees allowed a view of the looming edifice of the Chapultepec Castle.
As she made her way up the steps to the portico, she grimaced at the stitch of pain in her left thigh. Her femur had been shattered seven years prior and had never healed well, thus leaving her with a slight but still noticeable limp. This was in no small part to the inept orthopedic surgeon who had repaired her fractured femur in Arizona. The doctor had been contracted by the prison, and Lilly had always suspected he was an incompetent drunk. The damp evening air only served to aggravate the injury. Of course, the thirty minutes she had just spent on the treadmill at the gym hadn’t helped matters either.
As she approached the portico, she spotted a figure standing in the shadow of a large potted fig tree. It was a man holding a shot gun loosely at his side. Even though he was half Hilario’s age, his shoulder-length hair was shot with gray. He had a chiseled, weathered face and wore a blue tracksuit and black silver-toed cowboy boots.
“Buenos Noches, Alfonso,” she said with a nod. “¿Como está tu esposa?”
“Ella está bien. ¿ Y tú?”
“Bien.”
He leaned past her to open the massive wooden front door. Maria, Jeronimo’s young house servant, greeted her at the door, no doubt expecting her. She too looked more Indio than mestizo, her heritage made more obvious by the elaborately embroidered huipil she always wore. She nodded a demure greeting and led Lilly down the wide, high-ceilinged hallway.
The last of the early evening light leaked through a large canopied skylight that ran the length of the hallway. In contrast to the mansion’s colonial-styled exterior, the interior reflected more the taste of some Scandinavian timber baron – the molding and wainscoting done in polished, blonde teak. The hallway’s Venetian-plastered walls were finished in a very pale yellow and accentuated by a mosaic of panels consisting of various colored and shaped tiles of translucent glass. A row of large aviaries lined one wall, and as they passed by, a chorus of bird song from a cage of finches announced their approach.
Lilly paused momentarily to offer a cautious finger to a large, brilliantly colored scarlet macaw perched on a bare tree branch in an open vestibule. She heard Maria behind her, clicking her tongue in disapproval.
“We have an understanding, don’t we, Bruno? Un entendimiento. ¿Si?” Lilly whispered to the bird. “You bite, I bite. ¿Si?” She turned and followed Maria down the long hallway.
Jeronimo’s father, a wealthy banker, had inherited the house from his father who had made his fortune in cattle and Yucatan sisal. At first, Jeronimo had embraced the family enterprises, going so far as pursuing an undergraduate degree in economics from Rice University and then a graduate business degree from the University of Texas in Austin. While studying there, he had cultivated a taste for a more libertine lifestyle.
He returned home soon after his father’s death and promptly turned his back on the staid upper class Chilango world he grew up in and began to dabble in high risk, and not always above board, real estate schemes. He quickly realized his head for business dovetailed quite nicely with the city’s burgeoning appetite for distractions, especially among Mexico City’s nouveau riche.
He began purchasing restaurants, night clubs, and partnerships in the growing casino industry. As his reach into those endeavors grew, he found this gray world more to his liking. He soon found it easy enough to expand his interests into providing risky, high interest loans to entrepreneurs of less than stellar reputations and backing questionable real estate deals. From there, he migrated to bribing public officials, influence peddling and money laundering for certain select clients. Soon enough, no form of criminal enterprise or graft was off the table except for prostitution and drugs, his opposition to these enterprises based as much on practicalities as his often-Puritanic moral code.
Shortly after Jeronimo had hired Lilly, he, in a curious display of candor, related his curriculum vitae to Lilly. His openness was in response to Lilly’s recounting of her own open litany of transgressions, including how she had ended up doing five years in an Arizona prison for armed robbery. Out of caution, she withheld telling him about her orchestrated escape from prison and the subsequent events that led her to seek refuge in Mexico City. He accepted her claim that she had come to the city looking for a second chance.
How she had risen to the position of his personal courier in less than a year had been partly the result of serendipity and partly due to her aptitude for recognizing opportunity. Soon after arriving in Mexico City, she had found a job tending bar in one of Hermosa’s clubs that catered mostly to American tourists and expatriates. Outside of the idle gossip of her fellow employees, she knew little of her employer’s criminality or his stature in the hierarchy of Mexico City’s underworld.
One night while Lilly was cleaning the bar before closing, she inadvertently witnessed the club manager concealing two briefcases in the club’s storeroom. After he departed, she gave into her curiosity and looked inside the briefcases only to find them stuffed with packets of white powder. Cocaine, she guessed, but for all she knew it might be heroin or fentanyl. One of the cases also contained bundles of pesos and US currency. She already had become aware that the manger had been skimming money. So she decided to take a chance.
Early the following morning, she appeared unannounced at Jeronimo’s home to report what she had witnessed – both the drugs and the skimming. Jeronimo immediately dispatches several of his men to deal with the problem. Jeronimo was so impressed by her honesty and initiative that he offered Lilly the club manager’s position.
That was a year ago. She steadily worked her way into Jeronimo’s circle of trusted employees and soon became his courier and gofer. She never stopped marveling at this turn of events and her good fortune. Once a fugitive from both the US authorities and the Sinaloa cartel, she had now found refuge in Jeronimo Hermosa’s patronage.
Maria opened the door to the study without knocking. The room was no less modern in its decor and furnishings. The walls were clad entirely in light brown teak with darker walnut accents. One wall displayed a large and elaborately painted depiction of Mayahuel, the Aztec goddess of the Maguey plant. The opposite wall displayed a pair of large Persian silk rugs.
The study’s rear wall consisted of several immense glass sliding doors that opened on to a large solarium, its dominant feature a twenty-foot-high wall of black lava studded with dozens of orchids and stag horn ferns. The walls on either side of the solarium were adorned with large carved stone images of various Aztec deities.
The study itself was Spartan, its spare furnishings consisting of nothing more than a modest- sized leather and teak sofa, a large Afghani Kilim, and a glass-topped desk the size of a dining table.
This was where Jeronimo Hermosa sat peering at a large computer monitor. He raised one hand in greeting without taking his eyes off the screen. It was only when Lilly had dropped onto the sofa to wait that she noticed the man standing in the solarium. His back was turned toward the study, and he was leaning forward as if to smell an orchid. He was dressed entirely in black, his profile almost blending in with the dark lava rock.
“Good evening, Lilia,” Jeronimo said, redirecting her attention. He cast a critical eye at the sight of her in gym clothes.
“I was at the gym when you called. You said it was urgent,” she explained, aware of his unspoken, pedantic edict that women in his company be dressed in at least a semblance of decorum, Maria being the sole exception. As for his own attire, he usually preferred expensively tailored sport coats and slacks and always a crisp white dress shirt. This evening proved the exception, for he wore a rumple blue Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
Jeronimo admitted to being seventy, although Lilly knew for a fact, he was edging seventy-five. He had a longish, fine-boned face beneath a stylishly coiffed mane of silver hair. His mouth was wide and generous with thin, aristocratic lips that rarely gifted a smile. Only his deep- set hazel eyes were ever allowed to display amusement.
He removed his glasses, tossed them onto a pile of papers, and sighed. “I’m sorry, but this is something that can’t wait,” he said softly with only the hint of an accent, although at times Lilly could often detect a drawl hinting at the years he had spent in Texas. “May I offer you something to eat? Some cerviche? Or perhaps some lettuce and carrots?”
She smiled, for she knew it was his way of mocking her newfound health food kick. “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
“Tequila, then? Surely that isn’t prohibited on your diet.”
“Sure. Tequila’s vegan. So, what’s so urgent, jefe?”
Jeronimo removed a decanter of amber liquor from the desk cabinet along with a couple of crystal tumblers. He poured a generous amount in each glass and then stood and walked over to Lilly to hand her one before returning to his desk. He waited a moment as if lost in thought before picking up a large manila envelope at his elbow and slowly sliding it across to the edge of the desk.
“Inside you will find both of your plane tickets, hotel vouchers, two thousand US dollars and a name and address. You will seek out the person whose name I have provided and await her instructions.”
“Wait. You said both. Who am I going with?”
He ignored her question, instead turning his attention back to the computer monitor.
She had never been accompanied on any of her previous courier assignments. Two or three times a month, she had traveled on his behalf to various cities in Mexico, twice to Rio de Janeiro, once to Cartagena, and at least a half-dozen times to Panama. Her duties entailed nothing more than personally delivering packages or letters, and then returning to Mexico City, sometimes with written replies, sometimes not. These tasks seemed simple and open. On the surface, they seemed to be business dealings with banks, hotels, restaurants, and the occasional assembly plant, and consisted mostly of delivering missives to secretaries and the occasional upper-level management type.
Only once had Jeronimo sent her to deliver a cryptic, spoken message. The recipient, an unsavory-looking gangster wannabe dressed in a cheap polyester suit met her outside of an outdoor market in Tepito, one of the city’s sketchier neighborhoods. The message was simply, “No cuelguestu ropasucia en public,” What dirty laundry Jeronimo was referring to was never made clear. At first, the man received the message with scornful bravado. It was only when Lilly leaned closer and whispered, “No te lo volverà a preguntar” that his face registered apprehension. Telling someone that this was a final warning from El Zorro Plateado, the Silver Fox as Jeronimo was often called, always focused one’s attention. She felt emboldened enough by this reaction to playfully pat his cheeks before smiling and strolling away.
When another long moment passed without a response from Jeronimo, Lilly took a swallow of her tequila and set the tumbler on a side table, knowing when to wait him out. Even though she hadn’t known him that long, she had become used to his practiced, deliberate style of discussing matters.
“I will not lie to you, Lilia,” he said finally. “This task may prove to be more difficult than your previous ones. It may present many complications and will require…”
He paused as the man who had been standing in the solarium stepped through a glass sliding door into the study. She recognized him, even though she didn’t know him well. His name was Jaime Soledad, and he was also an American, a Tejano from South Texas. She knew second hand that he had been in Jeronimo’s employ for six or seven years, but she still had no idea what role he served. They had encountered each other on a handful of occasions, but the actual number of words they had ever exchanged would fit on a gum wrapper.
Neither of them nodded a greeting. Soledad remained standing at the door as if awaiting an invitation to come in. She guessed he was in his late thirties. She had been told he was a Chicano despite his appearances, for he was what Mexicans referred to as a Guero – light-skinned and blonde. He had a smooth boyish face, was handsome, and knew it.
“I believe you know each other,” Jeronimo said.
“We’ve met,” she replied bluntly.
“Jaime will accompany you,” he said, raising his hand as if to preempt her objection. He paused and started over. “This is a demanding situation. What you will be doing for me is something very personal. It has nothing to do with business. It is not the kind of thing I could ask any of my other people to do. It is a delicate task. A favor for an old friend, and one that will require discretion and, might I say, a woman’s touch,” he said, nodding at Lilly. “Nevertheless, it requires you both leave in the morning.”
“Shit, jefe,” she said, giving into her irritation. “Can you at least tell me first where I’m going? Where we’re going?” she added, correcting herself. She glanced at Soledad who hadn’t moved from the door. “You will go to Houston. I have booked you both on the six AM Aeromexico flight,” Jeronimo said.