Jules noted that like Miguel, Roberto was notable for being clean-shaven and sober. Where his boss was a tightly wrapped bundle of steel cord and knotted muscle, however, Roberto slid from the bonnet of the car in one fluid movement. He reminded her of a snake, uncoiling in the sun. In Miguel’s position, she wouldn’t have trusted him to sit the right way around on a toilet seat. Oh well, not her problem.
A few hand gestures from the two men saw their followers hurrying to turn over engines and reverse the cars out of their herringbone arrangement. Pieraro indicated that Jules should follow him, so she signalled to Fifi to hurry back to the Jeep. ‘It’s cool,’ she said over the radio. ‘We’re going in with this chap.’
With the tension evaporating, she allowed herself a few moments to check out the locale as she followed the former cowboy through the gauntlet of leering street toughs. They’d set up their barricade across an avenue that most of them would never have seen before. Twee little fashion shops, jewellery stores and cafйs lined both sides of a street that recently had been a well-manicured boulevard. She noted Givenchy, Prada and Armani boutiques, all looted and burnt out. Rubbish choked the gutters and footpaths, and a couple of spent brass shell casings twinkled in the mid-morning sun.
Pieraro stopped at his car, forcing Jules to suppress a snigger. It was a micro, some sort of courtesy vehicle from the Fairmont resort, according to the livery; not much more than two doors and four dinky little wheels. Pieraro caught her sceptical expression.
‘It is new,’ he said. ‘And environ… environo-mentally sustainable.’
‘Does it run on tanning butter or something?’ she smirked. She would have taken him for a muscle-car tragic. But then she’d taken him for a crooked cop too, hadn’t she?
‘It is just for running about… with work,’ he emphasised.
She made sure the safety was engaged on the shotgun and then climbed in. A misfire would probably peel off the entire roof. ‘My name is Julianne, by the way – Jules, if you like,’ she told him as they fastened their seatbelts. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’
‘Will you mind if I don’t answer, should the question be none of your business?’ he said. ‘I am an honest person… Not like you, si?’ he added pointedly.
‘Really? Your little shakedown racket here – you’re earning an honest peso with this, are you?’
He started the car but didn’t drive off. ‘I have a family. Three children. I am providing for them. Those men back there, my men now, they have their own to look out for too. Unlike these people…’ he waved a hand to take in all of the Diamante district, ‘my men have nothing to fall back with. La Desapariciуn , it will hurt the poorest the most.’
Pieraro pressed on the accelerator and they pulled away. ‘Your question, senorita?’ he asked eventually.
Jules shrugged. ‘I was just wondering how you ended up on that roadblock, but I guess you answered it. Three children. You were, what, holidaying? Visiting relatives?’
Pieraro snorted at the first suggestion. ‘My wages, they would not have allowed me to clean the streets of el Diamante. I could not holiday here. We were visiting my wife’s cousins further south for a wedding when everyone disappeared. I came as far north as I dared to find work to support them. We have lost everything but our lives.’
Jules glanced in the side mirror to check that the others were still with her. The Jeep was only a few metres behind. She couldn’t get a read on Pieraro at all. He looked like a hard case yet she could detect none of the primitive fear in his eyes that was such a part of the make-up of almost all street thugs – the knowledge that there was always someone harder and meaner than you just around the corner. She could sense anxiety leaking out of him, at the edges, where he couldn’t keep his emotions completely nailed down, but it didn’t seem personalised. If he was telling the truth about his family, that might well explain it. She would have to play him very carefully. In many ways, it would have been a lot easier if he were a simple gang boss.
‘I suppose I should ask how you ended up running that operation. Not a lot of call for herringbone roadblocks, snipers and intersecting fields of fire in the cattle business, is there? Not even when working for Mickey D.’
‘Mickey D? I do not understand… Oh, McDonald’s. I see.’ An arid smile cracked open the dark, sunburnt rock of the cowboy’s face. ‘The catering manager of the resort, an American, once worked for McDonald’s in Houston,’ he explained. ‘I met him on business many years ago. We drank a lot of tequila and he embarrassed himself, eating the worm like a college boy. Well, he was a college boy, I suppose. But I looked after him. I knew he had taken the job here, so this week I came looking for work. Any work.’
‘I see,’ said Jules, nodding. ‘But security work? That’s not your business.’
‘Men are my business. Running cattle and running men. You have never bossed twenty vaquero, no? I have bossed many more. Hard men, not to be crossed. Much harder than those idiotas.’ Pieraro threw a contemptuous look back over his shoulder.
‘Yeah, I get that. But that Roberto guy, he really is ex-military or something, right? He handles the tactical side, yes – where to place your good shooters and how to set up the roadblock?’
The cowboy remained quiet for a moment before finally muttering: ‘He is Colombian. AUC – Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia.’
‘What’s that, some sort of fascist coke-smuggling outfit?’
‘Paramilitaries,’ said Pieraro before hurrying on. ‘So, you have a proposal, Julianne.’ He pronounced the first portion of her name as Chooley.
As the little car wound its way down towards Revolcadero Beach, the signs of breakdown and chaos in the social order became much less evident. The streets remained free of rubbish and any indication of conflict. Huge villas and gated resorts sat quietly underneath palms and soaring canopies of transplanted tropicals. Few people moved about, apparently preferring to hunker down behind their high walls, but those who did, did not seem especially fearful or concerned. Jules scanned the scene for any obvious signs of things beginning to fray, but found none. Perhaps Miguel and his gang were helping to hold it back for now. She decided to take a punt on his honesty.
‘You have three children, Miguel, right?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Two girls and a little boy.’
‘Would you like to get them away from here? From Mexico, I mean.’
There was a slight delay before he answered. ‘Very much so. What you said before, it was not all true. But some was – about how things will soon turn for the worse. I have seen the worst of people. I know what to expect.’