“None for you?” he said.

She shook her head strenuously. “I cannot. It is hard enough maintaining my position. To do that would weaken me irreparably. Once they see me as anything other than their boss, I will lose command. That is my trap.”

“Trap? That sounds harsh.”

“I may look like a born cop, but . . .” She shook her head, her hair shifting around the sides of her face. “When I was at university, I was going to be an artist. Until I realized I had no talent. I shouldn’t say that. There was talent. But there was no talent. I had a bit of a crisis. Who am I? Why am I here? Difficult questions, even at that ridiculously young age.”

“True,” he said.

“I switched to law. I finished my degree, all the while knowing that I would never be happy as a lawyer. But I had gone too far down the road by that time. I worked briefly in the Justice Ministry. One day I went out with the Policía Federal on a raid. The first time I went out, I thought: This is it! I quit my job that day and signed up for the police academy.”

“Really?” said Fisk. Her story seemed to take some abrupt turns. “How was that?”

“Honestly? Awful. It wasn’t being a woman that was the worst. You are operating under a misconception there. There are actually quite a few women in the PF.”

“Then what was it?”

“In the United States, you maintain the fiction that there are no class divisions in your country. But in Mexico, there’s no fiction, no papering over the fact that some people are rich and some are dirt poor. Working people are very happy to hate the rich down there. My father is an affluent man. I suppose you could even call him rich. He was in the electronics assembly business. Owned a couple of maquiladora factories up by the border. Circuit boards for refrigerators and toasters and things like that. Eventually he sold out to a big Korean company.” For a moment she looked sad. “We are not close. He’s getting on in years now, but he’s on his second marriage. Has a couple of young kids. His wife is younger than me. We speak . . . but only occasionally.

“Anyway, to return to my story—the other girls in the Policía Federal, they all hated me. Constant hazing. One time they held me down at night and beat me up a little and shaved my head. That sort of thing. I got my revenge by beating them at everything. I shot straighter, I trained harder, I studied more diligently. And once I was out of the academy and on duty, I was the first one into every room, the first one to grab a perpetrator, the first into the line of fire. I was like a tiger.” She looked grimly at the bottles on the other side of the bar. “I progressed very quickly through the ranks. But I never let my guard down. Not with anyone. Not ever.”

Fisk studied her carefully. He couldn’t quite figure it out—but it seemed to him that some facts had gone AWOL here. There was some part of the story that she wasn’t telling him. It was the interrogator in him. He wanted to push, but could not.

“Eventually they started calling me the Ice Queen. They don’t say it to my face, of course. At first it was an insult. But I think that over time they have come to have a certain fondness for me. I hope so, anyway.” Her eyes were hooded. “It’s so hard to maintain your integrity in Mexico. The corruption among the police is unimaginable. But men have a hunger for purity, for goodness. It preys on their souls to take money, to do things for evil men. So I think—I hope—that they are able to look at her, their Ice Queen, and say, ‘If she can do it, if she can remain pure . . . then so can I.’ ”

“Her,” Fisk said. “You referred to yourself as ‘her.’ ”

She frowned, looking at her half-empty glass as though blaming it. “Yes. Well, in a manner of speaking, she is a character I invented.” Her frown went away and she smiled, but without warmth. “If you had known me fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have recognized me. I was . . . she was . . .” Cecilia Garza looked at Fisk sharply. A sudden change had come over her, a stiffness, a defensiveness, like the armor was suddenly clanking into place again. “I don’t like this conversation.”

Fisk could see what it was that angered her. There were two versions of this woman hiding inside one body. She and Fisk might have shared similarly unusual cop biographies. But they weren’t the same. Fisk had never really felt the way she obviously did. Had he avoided certain topics of conversation once he joined the force? Had he concealed the fact that his father had left him a trust fund—however modest it was? Had he been slow to parade his ability to speak five languages in front of other cops? Sure. There were things he didn’t talk about when he went out for a drink with the guys. He skipped the stories about vacations in the south of France when he was a kid. But he’d never felt like Jeremy Fisk was an invented character. Quite the reverse. In a lot of ways he felt like he’d only discovered the true Jeremy Fisk when he’d left the world of Ivy Leaguers and jet-setters.

It must have been very difficult to be Cecilia Garza.

She drew herself up very straight in her chair. Suddenly she seemed distant. “Look, perhaps this was a mistake, Detective. Virgilio is gone, and . . . here I am, drinking wine. With you.”

Fisk said, “That doesn’t seem like a bad thing, necessarily. We’re not going out dancing.”

Garza shook her head, as though to say, This is not what I do. “Again, I want to apologize for my rudeness earlier. It was uncalled for.”

Not only had her words gone formal, her voice had gotten hard. Even her accent had gotten stronger, as though her entire being were drifting back toward Mexico.

She pushed back her chair and stood.

“It’s getting late, Detective.”

Fisk extended his hand, motioning for her to stop. He almost pulled it back again, once he realized that . . . he did not want her to go.

“Don’t rush off,” he said. “Finish your wine, at least.”

She dug into her handbag, pulling out a twenty-dollar bill.

Fisk said, “You better not leave that here.”

She started to, then put it back inside her bag.

He said, “I think you’re running away, not walking.”

Her face grew masklike. “Is that therapy talk?”

“It’s real talk.”

“Good night.”

CHAPTER 49

Cecilia Garza was so angry, she was trembling.

Standing there, waiting for the elevator, not even remembering what floor her room was on. Tasting the Malbec on her tongue.

For a moment there, she’d thought that he was different. For a moment, she’d thought that they shared something. Two cops. Two people with similar burdens. Two people on opposite sides of the same border.

And then there had been the expression in his eyes. It was as though he was looking through the surface of her skin, like her face was made of glass and he was seeing right through it, seeing deeper, seeing the real Cecilia Garza.

She was no fool. She knew how men looked at her—how they had always looked. Women, too. The thing that made men gravitate toward her, she had found a way to make it useful. To counteract their hunger with starvation. To give them nothing and make them accept it.

One of the great reliefs of being in the PF was that once you were geared up—vest, helmet, mask, gun, boots—everyone looked the same. Inside the helmet and the mask, she was just a cop.

So she never took it off.

Not even when she saw Virgilio’s body floating facedown in that wretched cemetery pond.

She felt a tear reach the corner of her eye. She pushed the elevator button frantically.

Virgilio was dead. The man in the New York Yankees cap, the one on the cell phone: it was Chuparosa. He was near. She was close.

The elevator car arrived and she darted inside, waiting for the doors to close again. As soon as they did, she let out all her breath, trying to remember which floor number to press.