Free The Convert's Song by Sebastian Rotella Page B

hover, suspended in midair, for an unnaturally long time. He belly-flopped to the floor with a resounding crash. The gourd struck and shattered a millisecond later.
    Pescatore looked at the stunned Ferribotte.
    Pescatore said, “Now that was a cheap shot.”

5
Cambalache
    P ersona non grata,” the legal attaché said.
    Furukawa’s office in the U.S. embassy was decorated with Los Angeles Dodgers and Anaheim Angels posters and paraphernalia. There were photos of college-age kids, but no wife. It was Saturday night. The office glowed in the otherwise empty embassy complex like the command deck of a spacecraft. Pescatore reclined full length on a couch. The FBI agent sat behind his desk. His tone was cheerfully bitter.
    “You watch, I’ll get PNG’d,” Furukawa said. “I’ll get kicked out of the country before I’m done unpacking. They won’t let me be leeg-att in fucking Zambia. Thanks to you, pinche baboso cabrón. ”
    Pescatore shielded his eyes from the light. His head throbbed. “How come you talk like that?”
    “Like what?”
    “Like a vato . Like you were born in East LA.”
    “I was born in West LA, actually. Went to school with Mexicans, played baseball with ’em. I worked gangs for the Inglewood police before I joined the Bureau. But enough of my curriculum vitae. We were talking about you pulling that Oscar De La Hoya shit.”
    During the uproar at the headquarters of the antiterror unit after Pescatore punched the inspector, Mendizábal had struggled to his feet and gone after Pescatore. Staggering like a drunken sailor, shouting: “I’m going to give you a shitstorm of a beating!” Mendizábal’s men had wrestled him out of the room. A supervisor threatened to file charges of assaulting an officer. Furukawa threatened to file charges of human rights abuse. Ferribotte and the French female officer played peacemakers and averted a diplomatic incident.
    “Look, I’m sorry,” Pescatore said from the sofa. “They knew I was law enforcement. They could have reached out, explained. I would’ve bent over backwards to help. Instead they treat me like a criminal, smack me around, call me a terrorist. Fuck them.”
    The pouches under Furukawa’s eyes gave him a weary air. “Fine. The nasty man hit your facey-wacey. That doesn’t—”
    “You got that ‘nasty man’ line from a book.”
    “What?”
    Pescatore pointed at a bookshelf. “The Long Goodbye.”
    Furukawa glanced up at the novel and back at Pescatore as if he had just been handed a piece to a puzzle that he thought he had solved.
    “My favorite,” he said slowly. “Especially the part where the cop says there’s no clean way to make a hundred million bucks. You like Chandler?”
    “I liked that one. I read more nonfiction, tell you the truth.”
    “Well—Oh, here’s the commissaire. I was worried you got lost on the way to the Coke machine.”
    Fatima Belhaj walked in carrying two cans of Coke. She put one on the low table in front of Pescatore along with a bottle of aspirin. She was with a French counterterrorism agency. She had arrived that morning to investigate the deaths of two French tourists at El Almacén and other French angles of the case. She spoke multiple languages and was a star of her squad, Furukawa had explained.
    Belhaj had said she was of Moroccan descent. Pescatore had never met a Moroccan; she looked light-skinned African to him. She sipped her Coke with full lips over small teeth. Her brown curls had a rusty tinge and tumbled around those heavy-lidded eyes. The eyes reminded him of the angel in the da Vinci painting The Madonna of the Rocks. Her suede jacket and jeans were no doubt European and expensive and displayed a generous chest, hips and behind. She slid into an armchair by the couch and crossed her long legs.
    “ Et votre tête, Monsieur Valentín?”
    Belhaj touched a finger to her own eyebrow. He realized she was asking about his injury. She talked from her throat, a percussive accent