Sasner was clearly a man who had thrived on an image of himself. A dapper little man with a double-breasted blazer sporting a large crest, an RAF necktie, and brown suede wing tips, he'd sat at his large desk, his corpse now driven back, arms splayed by the muzzle velocity of the two bullets he'd taken. One shot had blasted him in the throat, another in the heart.
Carter took in the cruel reality of death. He'd seen it hundreds of times. A person's dignity gone in that last moment, leaving a picture that was actually a parody of the image the victim had tried to maintain in life. Here. Norman Sasner, in death, had his secret revealed. The force of the bullets that had killed him had also dislodged a rather complex toupee. Nevertheless, Sasner had managed to do what Carter had expected. By dipping his neatly manicured index finger into a large silver ink pot, Norman Sasner had managed to leave a clue: LT.
Carter looked quickly about the desk for anything that looked like a note or dispatch Sasner might have thought to pass on to his CIA people. There was no time for a comprehensive search.
He glanced around the desk area, trying to look for anomalies. There was a stack of the Manchester Guardian, but it quickly became apparent to Carter that Sasner's interest in this rather political newspaper was the reporting of English soccer league scores. The Killmaster also noticed an invitation to a poetry reading at the university and a tiny stack of Soldier of Fortune magazines, but nothing that seemed an obvious piece of what was growing to be a vexing puzzle.
He decided to get out of there and take care of his shoulder.
He removed his sports jacket, draped it over the shoulder with the wound, and quickly found a taxi on Isobel la Católica, giving directions for a small, discreet emergency hospital not far away on Calle Mesones.
Whoever they were. Lex Talionis certainly had some organizational claws and were now trying to cover their tracks. Even more important, Carter realized, they were on to him and his interest in them.
"Always intriguing problems you bring me, Carter." Dr. Hakluyt, a resident of Mexico for more than forty years, still retained the speech patterns and metallic pronunciation of his native Europe.
A shaggy, Falstaffian man with curly graying hair, he regarded the Killmaster now as Carter lay, facedown, on a padded table, bathed in powerful mercury vapor light. "Last time you were here, you bring me the interesting problem of sutureless procedure. Now I think there is no way we are going to avoid some stitches."
Carter lay quietly, watching Hakluyt's assistant, a tall, striking woman with wide, high cheekbones and the dark hair and eyes that spoke so eloquently of her Indian ancestry. She seemed aware of Carter's interest, and as Hakluyt stitched the crease on Carter's shoulder, she let her gaze, shadowy with obsidian mystery, dance across his face. Her gaze was direct and filled with challenge — until she suddenly gave way to a grin.
"Interesting man," she said in Spanish to the doctor. "He brings us bullet wounds and hickeys."
"I assure you I favor the hickeys," Carter said in the musical Spanish of the capital city.
The nurse blushed, but her gaze remained steady.
Half an hour later, bandaged, given a handful of pills for pain and antibiotics, Carter was paying his tab.
"It is I who should pay you," Hakluyt said. "Such challenging problems you bring me, Carter. Far be it for me to wish you ill, but I do look forward to your visits. Last time it was the abdominal wall. This time the bullet is creasing your upper muscle sheath."
The old doctor's gruffness had a layer of paternalistic concern in it, reminding Carter of David Hawk. "You are in good condition. Your wound will knit very well and you will have full use of the shoulder, that is if you do not aggravate it for some weeks."
Carter nodded thoughtfully. "Tell me, Doctor, how completely is it possible to surgically change the human appearance?"
"Ah, a most intriguing question for one of your apparent profession. I tell you, Carter, if you could check in here and give me six weeks — even as few as four weeks — I could do things with your nose, literally lower your ears, perhaps even give you higher cheekbones like those you admire on my surgical nurse."
"I didn't mean for me," Carter said. "I mean in general."
"There are some gifted reconstructive surgeons, especially in your country." Hakluyt seemed to be sorting through a mental list. "One of the best at cosmetic reconstruction is Charles Smith. Truly gifted, but equally eccentric. I have seen him repair radial blowouts and maxillofacial traumas that would make you wince when you saw pictures of the original state. Very good with birth defects and traumas. You know, burns, explosions, violent impact."
Dr. Hakluyt spread his knobby hands. "Yes, Carter, if I grasp your meaning, it is possible to take an individual and in the hands of a gifted plastic surgeon, render him or her all but unrecognizable even to intimates."
Carter caught a cab and directed it to the Zona Rosa, where he made for the Palacio de Hierro on Durango, one of the best department stores in the city. He studied the rack of sports jackets, settled on a muted silk weave with flecks of blue and green, then found a blue cotton shirt. At the toiletries counter, he splashed himself with Jean-Marie Farina from Roger & Gallet, and set out to walk the six blocks to Bucareli, where Margo Huerta had her studio and living quarters.
"I apologize for running late," Margo Huerta said, standing back to regard a long panel of Masonite board, largely covered with a bright, angular, and forceful mural of entire families sleeping at a railroad station. "But as you can see, I work big, and when I get involved with something, I lose track of the time."
Watching her, Carter sipped the strong Mexican coffee she'd given him. Her studio was a large, narrow arrangement, running nearly a hundred and fifty feet. Walls had once divided her work area into two, perhaps three smaller studios. A large bank of custom windows caught a diamond-hard northern light. Sketches, unframed larger works, and several more conventional paintings were hung from the walls or leaned haphazardly against any handy surface. From two large speakers, strategically mounted to provide maximum stereophonic effect, came the clean, precise lines of one of Bach's Brandenberg Concertos, and as the selection came to an end, the distinctive, low-key voice of one of the XELA-FM announcers.
Herself a large, dark, flamboyant woman with an expressive face and as yet no need for a bra, Margo Huerta favored the bright colors of acrylic, drippings of which spattered the floors and her Levi's. There were several places on the unfinished wooden floor where there appeared to be violent cross-hatchings made by a knife. Carter realized that Margo Huerta took a direct approach to cutting canvas or mounting her work, preferring the floor to a worktable.
"If you can handle my working and not fawning all over you, we can talk," Margo said. "Some men find that very threatening, especially you guys. We call you norteños. You call yourself Americans. That's a lot of snobbery, you know. We're all Americans."
"What I'm trying to figure is where that accent of yours comes from," Carter ventured.
"Oh, I make no bones about it," Margo said, beginning work on a large, menacing figure. "I got some good education in your country. A few of your so-called liberal arts colleges in the South want to prove they're right for government grants, so they put on the big search for what they like to call minority women."
Margo daubed fiercely at the mural, the figure taking on the identity of a federate, a Mexican federal cop, waving a riot stick. Just short of six feet tall, she nevertheless chose to work in high heels. The top of her torso was barely covered with a paint-stained sleeveless sweatshirt, a souvenir of a long-forgotten Grateful Dead concert. Her long, ebony hair was tied in a complex knot, held in place with a bright pink scarf, giving a sensual accent to her café-au-lait skin.