Flashback

He didn’t have time now to study the flags. Men armed with automatic weapons came out from behind the permanent barricades.

“¿Qué quieres, viejo?”

Professor George Leonard Fox didn’t appreciate the “old man” but he presented the card Emilio had given him and answered in a voice he managed to keep from quavering, “Exijo que me lleven a la casa de Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa.”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have used the verb “demand,” but it was too late now. One of the spanics started to laugh but his comrade holding the small card showed it to him and the laughter died.

“¿Por qué quieres ver a Don Fernández y Figueroa, gringo viejo?”

Leonard was tired of the smirks and insults. “Just take me there,” he said in English. “Don Fernández y Figueroa is expecting me.”

Five of the armed men conferred rapidly. Then the one with the card gestured Leonard toward a black Volkswagen G-wagen parked behind a barricade. “Come.”

Emilio lived in a huge old home just east of Evergreen Cemetery.

Actually, Leonard realized as his escort led him through layers of roadblocks and sentries, it was far more an armed compound than a home. Military vehicles with the crowned-eagle Nuevo Mexico flag painted on the sides filled the streets for blocks around. Across the street, the wall and fence surrounding the huge Evergreen Cemetery had been knocked down and Leonard could see scores more wheeled and tracked vehicles parked on the faded grass. In front of Emilio’s address, rows of large, black SUVs filled the street at roadblock angles. The compound’s walls were topped with embedded broken glass and multiple rolls of razor wire.

His guide was stopped half a dozen times inside the compound’s walls and in the house itself and each time the card was presented. Twice Leonard was frisked—aggressively, embarrassingly, thoroughly. It would have been absurdly easy for them to appropriate his bag of money, but other than a quick search through the rubber-banded stacks of bills, no one paid attention to his paltry life’s savings.

On all sides of the tiled foyer hallway clustered groups of men in various rooms. They were smoking, arguing, bent over maps, gesturing. Everyone seemed to be talking on cell phones even as they argued and gestured. His escort led him up two flights of stairs and down a broad hallway. Two men in civilian clothes but carrying automatic weapons stood guard outside the open doorway of a library. Again the card was presented by his guide. Leonard was frisked a third and final time and they opened the door wider and allowed him to enter. Again the searchers looked at his messenger bag full of bank notes and said nothing.

The room was impressive. Bookcases filled with leather-bound old tomes rose twelve feet on three sides of the library. The fourth wall was windows and through it Leonard could see and hear black helicopters landing in a paved area of several acres within the walls of the compound. Emilio Gabriel Fernández y Figueroa was sitting behind a broad desk. Opposite him was a bald man in his early fifties and Leonard could see at once that the two men were related. Both stood as he approached.

“Leonard,” said his Saturday-morning Echo Park chess partner of the past four years.

“Don Fernández y Figueroa,” said Leonard, bowing slightly in respect.

“No, no,” said the older man. “Emilio. I am Emilio. Allow me to introduce my son Eduardo. Eduardo, this is my chess and conversation partner of whom I have spoken with such respect, Professor Emeritus Dr. George Leonard Fox.”

Eduardo bowed his bald head. His voice was very soft. “Es un verdadero placer conocerlo, señor.”

“The pleasure is mine,” said Leonard.

Saying to Emilio, “I will see to the dispositions, Father,” Eduardo bowed toward Leonard again and left the room, shutting the tall door behind him.

Leonard felt his heart pounding. All these years he’d known that Emilio’s sons and grandsons must be important in the reconquista movement in California and Los Angeles, but now he realized that it was Emilio who was in charge. Why had this important—and dangerous—man wasted so many slow Saturday mornings with a retired classics/English lit professor?

Leonard had never noticed bodyguards in Echo Park on those mornings, but now he realized that they must have been there.

“You have decided to leave Los Angeles, my friend?” said Emilio, waving Leonard to the empty chair and taking his own seat behind the broad, empty desk. Outside the window, more helicopters were landing and taking off.

“Yes.”