The two agents looked at each other and shook their heads.
“Tough guy,” the shorter one said.
“You have no idea,” I said to them, smiling.
The shorter agent ignored Gus and me, turned his attention to Daniel.
“You need to know something, Mr. Ortega,” he said. “Your buddy got lucky today, absolutely. Caught himself a dream judge. So he won, we lost, the judge gave us some shit. Happens. But not very often, does it, Eddie?”
“Hardly ever, Larry,” Eddie said.
“And you know all that information about yourself that you gave the judge a few minutes ago?” Larry said to Daniel. “Now we’ve got it, too. We’ve actually had it since you went on the witness list. We know where you work, and who you work for. We know a lot.”
“And now we’re giving you a heads-up,” Eddie said, “that one of these days you might get yourself on the wrong side of all this.”
“You know what guys like us find out in our line of work?” he said. “That everybody has secrets.” He smirked at Daniel. “You got any secrets, Mr. Ortega?”
I thought, This started off badly and has gone downhill.
“We should leave,” I said to Gus.
Gus looked at the tall one, then the short one. Even dealing with a couple of federal agents, I knew how much he hated bullies.
“Them first,” he said, his eyes still not leaving them.
No one said anything then.
“Screw it, the guy’s been put on notice,” the shorter one, Larry, said, before he and his partner walked back up the steps of the Immigration Building.
But when they got to the top, Larry turned around, shouted down at Daniel.
“Hey, Ortega?” he said.
Daniel looked up at him.
“Good luck with that horse of yours,” the agent said, before he was following Eddie through the door.
I wasn’t sure why that sounded like a threat.
But it did.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
WHEN GRANDMOTHER HEARD about the events in Miami she decided we needed to celebrate, and booked us a big table across from the bar at Duke’s. The restaurant at the Wanderers Club overlooked the polo fields where they were setting up for a match the next night.
“Breaking news,” she said when we’d all ordered food, “good guys win for a change. I should alert the media.”
Mom was there, and Gus and Daniel and Hector and his wife, Maria. And me. Hector and Maria weren’t saying much, just sitting next to each other and holding hands and mostly doing a lot of smiling.
Daniel clinked a fork against his bottle of beer to get everybody’s attention, raised it and said, “Mejores dias.”
Better days.
I looked at Maria Suarez and saw she couldn’t stop herself from crying.
“No blubbering,” Grandmother said from her side of the table, and everybody laughed.
Then Gus said he wanted to raise a glass to Daniel.
“Please, don’t,” Daniel said.
“Want to try and stop me?” Gus said.
“Obviously even the federales cannot do that,” Daniel said.
“To Daniel,” Gus said. “Who’s what I call a foxhole friend.”
“Takes one to know one,” I said.
“Zip it,” Gus said.
It was as if everybody at the table was allowed to exhale tonight, for the first time in a long time and for a lot of different reasons. There was mostly show talk, once Gus finished his play-by-play of what had happened inside the Immigration Building and then outside later. Gus told Hector that he had a job at his barn starting in the morning. We all talked excitedly about the events coming up. It was a celebration tonight that had hardly anything to do with horses.
When we were all studying the dessert menu, Grandmother told a story I’d never heard about the time she’d ridden in Paris, at the Saint Hermes, and how she was chased from Notre Dame to the Louvre and back by a show jumper from Argentina.
“Too much information,” I said.
“I was young once, too, missy,” she said. “I had some horse that year, I don’t mind telling you. But Juan Carlos, that was his name, he had a much better one. And had been winning all over Europe that year. But he was hot for me, which is why I think he might have slowed down just enough at the end to let me beat him out of a third-place ribbon. Knowing it meant a lot more to me than him.”
I had my wineglass nearly to my lips, but slowly put it down now.
“Did he tell you he had?” I said. “Slowed up?”
Grandmother grinned. “I intuited it, especially after he invited me to an extremely romantic dinner at L’Ami Louis.” She winked at me.