The Silent Widow

‘Have them wait in the blue room. Offer them some coffee and tell them I’ll join them shortly.’

Luis looked at his watch. In four hours he’d be at the airport. In seven, he’d be in Los Angeles. In the belly of the beast. Now that the day was actually here, it was hard to believe somehow.

Los Angeles, for Luis Rodriguez, meant danger. It meant risk. But it also meant rewards, or at least the opportunity for rewards, of both a business and a personal nature. It’s worth it, he told himself. It’s time to go. To stake your claim and take what’s yours.

Closing his eyes, he shut his computer and pulled his mother’s rosary out of his inside jacket pocket where he always kept it. Three Hail Marys, for Mama, three more for his wife, and he’d be ready for the Colombians.

And after that, for Willie Baden.

God’s on your side, Luis. He reminded himself of his mother’s mantra. God is always on your side.

‘How much longer?’

Andrés Malvino felt his chest constrict. He longed to loosen his tie, but knew that it would be a mistake to show the slightest sign of weakness, or even mild discomfort, in front of his boss.

‘Hopefully only a few minutes. Control say we’re next up for runway two.’

Working as Luis Rodriguez’s private pilot for the last eight years had made Andrés a modestly wealthy man. But his frayed nerves had paid the price. Señor Rodriguez did not like being disappointed, and had no qualms about shooting the messenger.

‘We’d better be,’ Rodriguez grunted and withdrew, displeased, from the cockpit.

Paola, the G650’s outrageously sexy stewardess, rested a manicured hand on the pilot’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He’s stressed about the whole trip. It isn’t you.’

It doesn’t have to be me, Andrés thought. He’ll turn on the nearest available punching bag.

‘I think he’s missing his wife,’ Paola whispered.

More bad news. Nothing, but nothing, could put Luis Rodriguez in a worse mood than thinking about his broken marriage. Andrés had flown his boss’s wife once or twice when they were together and had always liked her, although she and Rodriguez seemed a strange match to the pilot. Luis was larger than life, a superstar in Mexico City for his generosity and for his championing of the underdog, the common man. His wife was the opposite: shy, quiet. Kind, certainly, but never in a flashy way. She also lacked Luis’s legendary, explosive temper, and spent a lot of time apologizing to staff or others in their inner circle for his outbursts, some of which could be genuinely terrifying. It made you wonder what she’d been through, living with him …

Andrés’ headphones crackled. ‘Piper 175JP, you are cleared for take-off. Repeat, Piper 175JP, you are cleared.’

‘You’d better get back there,’ he told Paola with a deep sigh of relief. ‘We’re off.’

Back in the cabin, Luis Rodriguez leaned back in his custom-made, calf-leather chair and sighed with relief himself as his plane roared along the tarmac and shuddered noisily up into the cloudless night sky. His meeting with the Colombians had gone well, and all was set – hopefully – for some productive business in LA. It was Valentina Baden he needed to focus on, he realized now. Willie might wear the crown, but it was plain that his wife was the power behind the throne.

I must try to focus on the business, Luis reminded himself, and not on her.

He’d been a strong, powerful businessman, full of confidence, when his wife met and fell in love with him. If he were ever going to win her back, he needed to project that same strength now, more than ever.

Never be needy. Never be weak.

Putting his computer to one side, he turned his attention instead to the stack of American magazines the flight attendant had handed him. Opening one at random – the latest edition of Time – he stumbled upon a feature that instantly grabbed his attention.

Michael Marks, the new, hardline Republican US President, had launched a slew of new initiatives in his first hundred days in office. Luis wasn’t a fan of Marks, a tiresome bore of a man who’d taken his predecessor’s anti-immigrant rhetoric a step further and already done much to worsen American relations with Latin America – something that, before the election, few Mexicans would have believed possible. One of President Marks’ splashiest efforts had been his renewed war on drugs, and in particular the opiate epidemic, which he described as his nation’s ‘public enemy number one’. On that point, at least, Luis reflected, he was probably right, although his strategy for solving the problem was doomed to failure.

The Time journalist had begun his piece as an interview with Marks’ new opiates tsar, a man named Richard Grier, but then allowed the article to morph into a broader feature on the latest drug flooding the US market and its devastating impact on users and their families: the Russian desomorphine derivative, Krokodil.

Horrifying pictures of dead-eyed people with gangrenous limbs made Luis’s stomach churn. But the images were not as shocking as the statistics. Already on a par with crystal meth in terms of the number of users, only two years after it was first introduced into the US, within the next twenty-four months Krokodil usage was predicted to outstrip meth, heroin and crack cocaine combined. As the Time writer pointed out, this was bad news not only for the American population, but for the Mexican cartels, who’d seen their business decimated by the Russians. In the long term, however, Krokodil might end up being bad news for all traditional illegal drug suppliers, including the Russians. ‘Because, like the meth from which it’s derived, this stuff is pretty easy to cook up at home.’

The journalist went on to compare the predicted collapse of the drug cartels to the downfall of other traditional businesses like record labels, TV networks and book publishers. ‘Once a consumer knows they can access a product either for free or much more cheaply themselves – whether that’s a Beyoncé song or a hit of narcotics – market forces dictate that the middleman gets pushed out.’

Interesting, Rodriguez thought. Pulling out his phone, he dictated a note to himself. ‘Have Marisol look into drug rehab charities in the US. Who’s focused on Krokodil?’

He had yet to finalize his philanthropic plans for the year, but a splashy donation to the fight against Krok had just made its way to the top of the list. The pictures of those poor wretches were haunting, the sort of thing that would catch the attention of even the most jaded public. Plus, if Luis channeled the money correctly, it might even impress the right people in Washington and President Marks’ administration. As an added bonus, acts of generosity in any form were bound to impress his wife.

It was uncanny how everything came back to her in the end.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR