What had gotten into her with Fisk? Normally she did not allow herself the luxury of regretting that she had offended people. She never cared.

And now she felt she had offended him again.

Those dark, intent eyes . . . listening, actually listening, to every word she said. For years she had told herself that she was looking for a man who could look past her face, who could see the real Cecilia Garza. Not the Ice Queen. Not the cop. Not the beautiful woman. Past all of that.

And here he was. He’d looked past all of that, probed down into something underneath. And what had she done?

Thrown dirt in his face. Squandered it. Sabotaged herself.

Maybe the sad truth was that she truly did not want anyone looking into her soul. Maybe it was too late.

CHAPTER 50

Fisk sat there looking at Garza’s half-empty glass, finishing his own, and trying to find the server so he could get the hell out of there. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Okay,” said Garza, her hand leaving his shoulder as she settled back into her chair. “I’ll tell you how it really happened.”

It was impossible to say what the difference was, but the woman sitting across from him now barely resembled the woman who had left. She seemed younger, softer, less certain. It was still Cecilia Garza, still the same slim neck, the same high cheekbones, the same glossy black hair. But there seemed nothing of the comandante left in her.

Fisk shook his head. “How what happened?”

She drank another sip of wine. “My father was a very stern, practical man. He indulged me in certain ways, the way rich men do when they have a daughter. He was proud, but that pride came out in such a way that I believe he wanted a daughter who was . . . what? . . . an ornament? I don’t want to be cruel. But that was what was expected of the girls I knew back then. Grow up and be respectable, pretty, marry a guy whose dad owns a bank or a telecom company. Have multiple children. Put on nice parties.”

She shrugged, as though gesturing, Here I am.

“I never quite fit the mold. I tried to please him at first. I was a good student, didn’t drop out of school and smoke pot with American dopers or anything. But I started getting in trouble because I wouldn’t shut my mouth, drinking, staying out too late, jumping in the swimming pool naked.”

“Really,” said Fisk.

“Believe it or not. My father had a place in the country, and when we would go out there I would ride dirt bikes and shoot guns and climb rocks, or steal the Jeep and ride off-road. I broke my leg once. I was always smashing something I wasn’t supposed to or generally scaring the hell out of my parents. I was acting out, I suppose. I was an adrenaline junkie. Still am.

“Anyway, I felt like I spent my entire childhood trying to fight my way out of this correct little box that my mother and father had built for me. I always enjoyed drawing. So when I went to university, I thought I would be a painter. You know, I read all the books about Frida Kahlo and I thought I’d be this rebel artist genius fighting the conventions of society and . . .”

She sighed.

“As I said, I loved the ideal of the artist. The life! Sitting around in cafés, running counter to the prevailing culture, nobody to tell you how to live or how to dress or what to do. But that’s not reality. Reality is, you have to paint pictures. You have to make something profound and beautiful, not just nice and interesting. And after a few years of painting pictures, I could see in the eyes of my teachers . . . that they were not excited by my work. They weren’t even very stimulated. My goal was to set the world on fire with my art, not be a mere candle on a cake.

“I still wanted to crash cars and ride dirt bikes and shoot guns. So I went into this sort of funk. I knew that I wasn’t going to finish the art degree. So if I wasn’t that cool artsy girl, smoking filterless cigarettes in the café, who was I?”

Fisk smiled. “You were young and no longer idealistic.”

“In Mexico you study law as an undergrad. It’s not just a graduate degree like it is here. So I took a class with Umberto Vargas. He was the big star teacher on campus. All the girls thought he was so great, so brilliant, so handsome . . . and he was. Made quite an impression. But he made practicing law come alive. There was a flavor of art to it, at least the way he taught it. Of ideals, of protecting interests rather than exploiting them. Typical lefty rich girl, I was going to take on the vested interests, all the big rich jerks like my father, change the system, make the world better . . . all the naive things any girl in law school should think she’s going to do.”

She finished her first glass and slid it toward him to be refilled.

“Now, my father was deliriously happy when I switched to law, and yet whenever I came home we would argue. He, too, had originally trained to be a lawyer, so we argued stupid abstruse points of the law. But really it was about the same old thing. Was I going to be the conventional little ornament to my father? Or was I ever going to be my own person?”

She shrugged sadly.

“Over time we just stopped talking. Then one day I got a phone call. It was my father. I knew something bad had happened because . . . he never called me. My mother had a minor heart condition—I thought maybe she had suffered a heart attack. But that wasn’t it.”

He slid her refilled glass back to her, but now she just looked at it.

“You read about the cartels and you think that crime in Mexico is just drug gangs blasting away at each other. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There is also, as you may or may not know, a terrible epidemic of kidnapping.”

Fisk nodded, hanging on her words now.

“My father called . . . and all he said was, ‘It’s your mother. And your sister.’ ”

“My god,” said Fisk.

She shook her head once, violently, as though trying to expel the memory from her brain.

“I drove straight home. My little sister and I . . . we never had much in common. Seven years between us, and she was a sort of flighty girl. Pliable. Indulged. Whatever her friends did, whatever my mother and father said, whatever the teachers said—she went along with it.” She closed her eyes. “Anyway. I drove so fast that I almost wrecked my car. I arrived at the house, and my father was absolutely beside himself. Underneath his sternness, he was a very emotional man. And he loved my mother just unimaginably. So he didn’t care about the money, didn’t care about anything. He just wanted my mother back. And of course my sister.

“But a kidnapping is a process. It’s a kind of game. And my father, he thought he understood the game. So he played the game the way you have to play it. Certain brokers are hired. Certain corrupt police who play both sides of the street are called. There’s this theater that’s played out where you pretend that you’re negotiating with people at a distance through honorable intermediaries. But in truth, the intermediaries are working for the bad guys. Or sometimes they are the actual ringleaders and the kidnappers are simply working for the cops. You never really know which is the tail and which is the dog.” She smiled sourly. “You just have to trust in the goddamn process.”

She was silent for a moment, staring at Fisk.

Finally she continued. “In a perfect world you go back and forth, there’s a certain amount of shouting and screaming on the phone . . . all to scare you. A few false alarms to squeeze the maximum figure out of you. But these guys are businessmen. They just want the money and they are rational creatures. That’s what everyone hopes, at any rate.

“So eventually there’s a handoff that’s shepherded by the crooked cops. It’s the one place where the cops are of value, you see—because their credibility in this process is predicated on their ability to reliably assure the safety of kidnap victims. If a cop gets a reputation as a man who can’t control the crazy assholes who actually do the kidnappings, then word will get around. People won’t trust him. They want this to work.