Gun Work

He woke up with an enormous man in a gray sharkskin business suit staring down at him. The suit barely contained him, its seams heroically restraining a cinderblock physique. His silk necktie was knotted stranglehold-tight. From the neck up his head was encased in a skin-tight lace-up mask in metallic kelly green, adorned with red vinyl flames rocketing backward. The eyeholes were teardrop-shaped and edged with more crimson, as though blood-enraged. Only the man’s mouth and chin were visible; the mask was cut away and molded for that small freedom. He had a dark goatee. He stood with oaken-stout arms folded, as imposing as a Mayan statue, looking down upon Barney, godlike, with eyes the color of strong Colombian coffee.

“This,” said Mano, “is El Atrocidad.”

The Mexican wrestling superstar known as “The Atrocity” already held Barney in his debt. He had helped Mano dispose of the assassin’s body by dumping it in the Arroyo de La Llorona. Where else?

In guttural but very serviceable English, Atrocidad told Barney that his own wife’s brother, Carlos Fuentes, had been kidnapped in Mexico City by men who sacked his head, stuffed him into a van, and drove him to an unknown location where he was held in a hostage hotel until a hefty ransom had been forked over. Carlos, too, had suffered the loss of two fingers, and an ear, but could still play the guitar, and, presumably, hear music. As Atrocidad gestured, Barney saw that his massive, knotty hands lacked fingernails.

Atrocidad had also been present at the donnybrook inside Mano’s shop. A single stiff-armed blow to the forehead had taken the punk with the .32, breaking his nose, freeing four of his teeth, and landing him in the emergency ward with a skull fracture. There was the roughhouse ballet of lucha libre — beer-bellied athletes in elaborate, bone-crunching choreography — and then there was actual combat; it was impossible to be adept at one without being able to perform the other. As Atrocidad said, the first rule is knowing how to fall down without getting killed or landing yourself in a wheelchair — that is, if you wanted a career as a wrestler that lasted beyond your first bout.

Barney had actually seen El Atrocidad wrestle a few years back at the Vatican of Mexican wrestling, Arena Coliseo, as part of a tag team with Tiburon Negro and Doctor Hate, a.k.a. the Black Shark and Medico Odio. As rudos, bad guys, their job was to foul constantly, pillory or distract the referee (unless the ref was a rudo, too), kick the good-guy técnicos in the balls at every opportunity to cheat, and otherwise represent evil triumphant in the squared circle.

“Ah,” said Atrocidad, pleasured by the memory. “That was when we took the belt from La Aureola, Flecha de Jalisco, and Caballero del Espacio.” La Aureola — Golden Halo — was a religious-themed good guy whose big gimmick was to kneel in the center of the ring when things looked blackest, asking God to intervene with divine righteousness. Usually that was when he got stomped down, at which point the audience would go berserk, lofting garbage and plastic cups of piss into the ring at the injustice of it all, permitting the Halo to bounce back with his own special brand of retributive resurrection. There is no more perfect example of the passion play than lucha libre wrestling, and the masked strongmen, good or bad, were the closest thing the culture had to actual heroes who could been seen striding the streets. Anyone mocking the sport as precious fakery would not last twenty seconds in a ring with one of these grapplers, who knew the difference between reality and theatre and did everything they could to erase the line.

Half-hour bouts featuring constant acrobatic movement quickly taught you a lot about your own personal energies, and luchadors did it every week, risking their lumbar support for peanuts.

El Atrocidad had wrestled championships all over the globe, including California, from Orange County swap meets to big-ticket bouts at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, nearly all them as an illegal alien.

“We know this promoter in Orange County,” he said. “We fly or drive to Tijuana, usually three or four of us, and his wife picks us up. She’s totally white, hot, a blonde, Irish, I think. The border guards see her in a car with a bunch of Mexicans in suits, and they always wave her through. We go up to O.C., do some bouts, make a few hundred, have dinner, get laid a lot, then come back, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group, but that part is easy — nobody smuggles anything into Mexico.”

“I think they can help you,” said Mano. “I think they can help you get to where you need to go.”