Vlad

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“I wouldn’t trouble you, Navarro, if Dávila and Uriarte were available. I’m not going to call them your inferiors—subordinates sounds better — but neither will I forget that you are a senior partner, primus inter pares, and so are higher ranked in this firm. I am entrusting this task to you because, first and foremost, I consider this a matter of utmost urgency. .”

Weeks later, when the awful adventure had ended, I recalled that, at its beginning, I had chalked up the absence of Dávila and Uriarte to luck. Dávila was off on his honeymoon in Europe, and Uriarte was tied up in a judicial embargo. As for me, I was neither going away on a wedding trip, nor would I have ordinarily accepted the work, appropriate for a lawyer just out of school, that our boss had delegated to our indefatigable Uriarte.

But I respected the decision of my elderly employer and appreciated the meaningful intimacy of his trust. He had always been an uncompromising man whose decisions were final. He was not in the habit of asking anyone for advice. Although he was tactful enough to listen attentively to his co-workers’ points of view, he replied with orders. And yet, in spite of what I just said, how could I ignore the peculiar circumstances by which he’d acquired his fortune? His status as a rich man was recent enough for him still to be considered “new money,” but even that new money, thanks to the gravitas of its owner, felt every bit as old as his eighty-nine years and tied to the history of an already buried century. His wealth was largely a result of the obsequiousness (or the moral flexibility) with which he had served (and risen in his service of) successive governmental administrations during his long years in Mexico. Suffice it to say he was an “influential man.”

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