Chapter 37: ENVIRONMENTAL RECONNAISSANCE
POV: Anna De'Leon
She had been sitting at the bar for two hours.
The water glass in front of her had gone warm and tasteless, the kind of glass you held because holding something gave your hands a purpose and hands without a purpose advertised themselves in rooms where everything was being read by someone. She had learned this. She had learned it in the same way she had learned everything in the last months, by doing it wrong first and then doing it less wrong and then doing it well enough that the doing of it stopped requiring active attention and became something that happened underneath the surface of whatever she appeared to be doing.
She appeared to be sitting at a bar recovering from a correction.
She was conducting what Victor called environmental reconnaissance, which was a phrase that meant watching without appearing to watch, listening without appearing to listen, building a picture of the room from the accumulated detail of things that people produced when they believed they were unobserved.
The clubhouse ran around her in its evening register, the pool tables and the cigarette smoke and the beer and the particular quality of masculine sound that filled spaces like this, the laughter that was louder than it needed to be and the conversations that were more performative than their content required and underneath all of it the specific tension of men who were afraid and were performing not being afraid with the energy that fear produced when it had nowhere else to go.
She had learned to hear that frequency.
Victor had taught her what to listen for and she had listened and she had learned and now she could hear it without trying, the way you heard music you had learned to play, automatically and in the body before the mind.
She watched the room.
She watched Cutter at the far end of the bar nursing a beer he had not touched in forty minutes, his old eyes moving through the space with the same patient methodology she had been developing, and she looked away from him the way she always looked away from Cutter, because looking at Cutter too long produced things she was not able to manage in public.
She watched the newer members near the pool tables, the ones who had come up under Victor and understood the club entirely in Victor's terms, and she watched the way they performed their ease with a fluency that the older members no longer had, because ease was easier when you had nothing to compare it to.
She watched the corner booth near the back wall.
Two men had claimed it twenty minutes ago with the specific intentionality of people who wanted sight lines to both exits and enough ambient noise to mask what they were saying, and she had noted it the way she noted everything, with the automatic filing system that had developed in the months since Victor had taught her what to file.
Eddie Santana. Raul Morales.
She knew them both.
She had known Eddie from the compound her entire life, had watched him at her father's table eating Sunday dinners that her mother had made and that her father had used as the informal architecture of the brotherhood he believed in, the communion of shared food as a form of loyalty that did not need to be declared because it was simply practiced. Eddie had brought her candy when she was small. He had a daughter two years younger than Anna who he carried on his shoulders at club barbecues and whose name he said with the specific softness that men used for their daughters when they thought no one was listening.
She was thinking about the daughter when she began to hear the fragments.
The clubhouse noise was not consistent. It moved in patterns she had mapped over months of sitting in it, building and receding in rhythms produced by the music and the pool game and the conversations and the specific acoustics of a concrete room with leather furniture, and she had learned to use the receding moments, the brief spaces when the ambient level dropped below the threshold that masked the corner booth.
She heard enough.
Not everything. Enough.
The cartel percentages and the old president and the Phoenix chapter and the money flow, the specific vocabulary of men who had moved past abstract dissatisfaction into the operational language of people who were considering what to do about it.
She held what she had heard in the part of her that held things.
She looked at the water glass.
She looked at her own reflection in the surface of the water, trembling slightly with the vibration of the room, and she thought about Eddie Santana's daughter on his shoulders at a club barbecue and the candy he had brought her when she was small.
She thought about Eddie's face when he talked about the old president.
She thought about the photographs in Victor's leather folder.
She thought about the storage room and the dark and the three days and what had been taken and what had been left and what she had become in the space between those two inventories.
She thought about her father on a Sunday morning.
She held all of it for the length of one breath and then she held it for the length of another and then Victor was beside her, his presence arriving in her peripheral awareness before she heard him, the specific gravity of him that she had been learning to register the way you learned to register changes in atmospheric pressure.
His hand settled on her shoulder.
She looked at the water glass.
She thought about Eddie Santana's daughter one more time.
She swallowed.
"Eddie and Raul," she said. "Corner booth. They are talking about the cartel percentages. Comparing the operation to how things were run before." She paused. "They mentioned reaching out to the Phoenix chapter. The Vegas chapter. They used the word organized."
Victor's hand squeezed once.
She did not look up from the water glass.
She looked at her own reflection trembling on the surface and she breathed and she did not let herself finish the thought about the daughter, the one that began with a little girl on her father's shoulders at a club barbecue and ended somewhere she was not going to follow it right now.