Savages

God, thank God, thank God, Elena thinks. She asks, “Magda?”
    “We’re on her. She’s fine.”
    She’s at Starbucks near campus, sitting at her laptop, apparently writing a paper. Lado has two men across the street.
    “I want to talk with her.”
    “She doesn’t know anything about—”
    “Get her on her cell.”
    A few moments later she hears Magda’s slightly irritated voice. “Hello, Mama.”
    “Hello, darling. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
    Magda lets a small silence intrude to let her mother know that she’s interrupting something substantial for sentimental maternal nonsense and then says, “Well, this is my voice, Mama.”
    “Are you well?”
    “I’m busy.”
    Meaning she’s well.
    “I’ll let you go, then,” Elena says, a small quiver of relief in her voice.
    “I’ll call you this weekend.”
    “I’ll look forward to that.” Elena takes a real breath.
    “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she tells her men.
    It’s silly, but what she wants is a bath and she rings Carmelita to get it ready but the men won’t let Carmelita or anyone else up to the secondfloor, so, annoyed, she draws it herself.
    The hot water feels good on her skin, she feels the muscles in her lower back loosen, hadn’t realized that they were so tight. She sits up to open the hot water tap again and then realizes that she can now hear the water running and couldn’t before and she lets herself lie in the tub for ten more minutes before she gets out, gets dressed, and takes charge again.
    Queen Elena.
    This is my life now.
    She puts on a severe black sweater over jeans and goes downstairs.
    The men are waiting in the dining room.
    “We think it was El Azul,” Salazar says. A colonel of the state police, he is unimaginative but reliable as long as the money holds out.
    “Of course it was him,” Elena snaps. “The question is how did his men get so close?”
    “It was an IED,” says Beltran, twice removed from the much-missed Lado. The man who held the job in between was El Azul.
    “Explain?”
    “Improvised explosive device,” Beltran says. “Basically a bomb planted near your route, detonated by remote control.”
    Elena shakes her head. “How many killed?”
    “Five. Three of ours, two civilians.”
    Elena says, “Find the families, pay the funeral expenses.”
    “I feel strongly,” Beltran says, “that you should go to the
finca
for a while, where we can look after you.”
    “You’re supposed to be looking after me
here
,” Elena says. She stares at him until his eyes drop and he looks at the table. She sighs and says, “Very well, I will go to the
finca.
”
    The door opens and Hernan bursts in.
    “Mother, I just heard. Thank God.”
    He kisses her cheek, turns to Beltran, and yells, “Why aren’t you doing your job?! I swear, if my mother had been hurt …”
    Hernan doesn’t finish the threat. Instead he says, “We have to respond to this. We can’t let them think they can act with impunity. Find who did this and—”
    “We know who they are,” Beltran says.
    Elena looks at him, surprised.
    “Azul is recruiting soldiers in the States,” Beltran explains. “Literally soldiers—Mexicans fresh out of the U.S. Army. They know how to do these IEDs. They learned it in Iraq.”
    “Get them,” Hernan says.
    “They’re probably across the border already.”
    “Give it to Lado,” Elena says.

238
     
    O and Esteban like to smoke up, eat pizza, and watch
The Biggest Loser.
    Bolting fat greasy carbs while stone-watching a show about people trying to lose weight is perverse enough to satisfy O’s boredom and, as has been mentioned, the girl likes to grub.
    Esteban just likes smoking up, watching television, and being with O.
    The pizza, too. Tonight’s is an extra-large pepperoni with hamburger, green pepper, and extra cheese. Esteban doesn’t like the green pepper but he does like to keep O happy.
    Anyway, O is fascinated that she’s fascinated with the idea of watching an activity that you can’t actually
see.
It’s like, tele
vision,
right, but you can’t see fat burning inside any of these obese bodies. But you can watch them sweat and groan and cry, and in addition to the pure pleasure of troughing out while they’re starving, O has developed an affection for some of them.
    It’s, like, they’re trying to
do
something.
    Change their lives for the better.
    It’s admirable.
    Unlike yourself, she says to herself one night.
    “Let’s face it,” she says to