Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (9 page)

Murder Artist

He lives in fear.
He cannot trust me. Or anyone. We could betray him and then he will die. I hear out these concerns as I sit with my back to the levee. The sun sparkles, the air is brown with dirt. Two big concrete lions guard my flanks, and two blue and white swans cut from truck tires beam plants and flowers into my face. Fluted Greek columns hold up the porch.

It is one of those mornings when the world brushes against me, says nothing, but sits there waiting me out. In Juárez, a gang of killers now operates and calls itself the Murder Artists. There is an abundance of new art. I am far from Juárez. I have come a long way to meet the secret part of Ciudad Juárez. And so I wait in a rough barrio down by the river.

A drunk comes up the lane.

He is asked, “How many times have you been in jail?”

He cannot recall.

“Why do you keep doing dope and booze?”

“I like living this way.”

He takes fifty pesos and leaves with his morning thirst.

I return to waiting. I knew he would not be at the café but would send new instructions. I suspect he was watching me in the café parking lot, but I cannot be sure. I suspect he is watching me now. The phone rings about every half hour. He says that he has been delayed but will be there shortly.

Then twenty minutes later it rings again. And so forth.

He is watching me now. And I think he will never arrive until I leave.

This will take time.

Waiting fills my life, a ribbon of motel rooms, cafés, parking lots, bars, and street corners. Time always belongs to someone else and they portion it out in slabs and I simply wait. Two groups in my life have shared my interest in the subject of waiting: drug dealers and narcs. They can never have control and can never be impatient because fast moves lead to nothing at all, the case busted, the deal gone cold. There is an empty book waiting to be written by those who wait listening to the roar of air conditioners in motel rooms and staring at silent phones.

He lives in fear.

He has killed thirty-four people for hire. Or more. Sometimes the number is exact and sometimes the number is a blur because of the nature of the life.

Now fellow professionals are hunting him. They nearly nailed him three months back, it was very close, and so his caution has grown. He was at church when he was spotted. He fled a thousand miles.

So he moves carefully, but he knows that all his caution can only delay the inevitable.

He is a rumor that keeps crossing my mind. He belonged to a crew and they traveled in Mexico killing people for money. They had three sets of uniforms, nicely starched—municipal police, state police, federal police. Also, they would have cars with the proper police insignia on them depending on whatever area they were operating in at the moment. Ambulances also would be mimicked. They would pull you over in their police uniforms and police cars, murder you, and then haul your body away in their faux ambulance.

They traveled constantly, sometimes only being in a city or state for two or three days. The prices varied. For his part, he would earn one grand a killing or five grand or twenty grand. Or more. They had abundant arms.

I walk up to the top of the levee, and a great blue heron lifts off the river and pumps its wings slowly as it courses downstream. The barrio is very poor, the houses often built of scrap materials. The sun feels warm on my face.

I have waited many years for this meeting. Before, I have had glancing blows with contract killers, brief words over beers, they would make vague references to their toils. These were always accidental collisions as we hunted the same ground for our varied prey. They never seemed strange enough. They simply seemed like everyone else, a fact I could not abide.

I am certain he and I agree on some facts. One, if he meets me he is taking a risk because this can only work if he trusts me, and trusting another human being is dangerous. Two, he will be killed, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, no matter, he will be killed. I have come to this place I cannot name to meet a man who will never have a name. We are on the line, but the line is over eighteen hundred miles long.

It must be intriguing for him to be prey after so many years of being the predator. He knows how they will do him. He knows almost certainly it will not be a clean and easy death.

He often has nightmares. Always he is killing someone and they are begging for mercy, for a quick and easy death, and in his dreams, he always hears laughter, his laughter. He calls this “gangster laughter.”

He knows fear, and that is why the duct tape is so important. First, you quickly tape their mouths, then put the plastic bag over their heads and bind it tight around the neck. But attention must be paid to the hands and feet. The hands are taped behind the back, the feet cinched together. Because always, once they realize what is happening, they start “jumping around like chickens that have had their heads cut off.”

I ask him something: Why is the duct tape sometimes gray and then other times beige? Is this simply a happenstance, or a deliberate decision, a kind of homage to the importance of color in life?

He ignores the question.

There is a thumbnail of his life and I have no idea if it is true. He begins as a gofer for the state police, the little guy who scurries when someone wants coffee or some tacos. He is good at serving people, he seems born to such a role. He comes from poverty but he is quite bright. For example, he knows accounting.

In the state police, he makes a friend among the cops he serves, a man who goes on to be the bodyguard of the governor and then rises and joins the cartel. They drift apart, but this relationship will prove important to him.

For himself, he finds he can kill—I don’t yet know the details of how he comes into this knowledge. He joins a crew and operates the uniforms, the cars, the ambulances, the trips. The easy money.

He winds up as the bodyguard for the adolescent son of the boss, and this job is taxing because the boy, seventeen or eighteen, is an asshole. Still, it is a good job—saving the boy from brawls in discos, killing people the boy does not favor, simple chores like that. Also, at times he collects money for the boss, and kills for him. It is a life.

Then he has a problem. He is sent to collect five thousand dollars and he does this. But he spends all the money in one night on a party for himself. This is bad, but he can make up the money. However, the boy he guards has some kind of grudge against him now.

One day, the son tells him to go to the store and get shovels and picks.

He knows what this means.

The other bodyguards take him down to a dry wash and beat him long and hard. But they let him get away—this is simply part of the legend that follows him.

So he gets away. He pays a coyote a thousand dollars to get him into the United States in 2007. He is cheated, of course—the coyote dumps him on the levee. But he crosses, gets works, moves his family north, joins a church. Watches his back.

That is why I wait here in the sun by the levee with a great blue heron wandering the river at my back. He is watching me, I am all but certain of this. I sip ice water out of a clear glass. I am outside in a plastic chair so he can study me. A cat rubs against my leg. I do not blink.

I am fevered and about to pass out. It came to me late yesterday, this fever, but I ignored it and now I sit here wondering if he will show up and wondering if I will be conscious when he shows up. I think he will not show. This is a test, an audition. I sip the ice water, lean down and caress the cat, look out into the glare and feel him watching me.

I must have him. Others question this appetite in me. They say he must be a psychopath. And maybe he is, but how can you know unless you meet him? Or they say he is evil, and then I ask them what evil means and they mutter but never clearly answer me. I think he is essential to understanding. He is my Marco Polo of slaughter.

I have been with mountain lions, twice less than ten feet away, once with the lion standing in the night screaming in my face. I consider them fellow citizens, not predators. The basic American lion kills about once a week—depending on the temperature and how long the meat holds—kills something in the range of seventy-five to one hundred pounds. Their dreams are based on white-tail deer. After the kill, which is quick in order to reduce the chance of injury, they stay on the carcass until it is gone or goes bad. It is not a business. I have no idea how they feel about the killing, but it has to be personal since they kill with their mouths inhaling the scent of the victim, feeling the warm blood flood their tongue as life leaves the body.

I have been with rattlesnakes and often sat a few feet away as they rested in a coil. Their habits vary with the species and the opportunities of the ground, but the ones I spent the most time with only killed about two rats a year. Think of them as armless Buddhas. They are hardly creatures up for duct tape and torture. And they ask for no money for their killings.

The foxes, coyotes, and weasels of my life have been lesser events but all, in balance, quite civil in their behavior and not prone to boasting or excess. I feel no fear, no rancor toward them, not even the coyotes that ripped the throat out of a favored dog.

But the man I am waiting for, he hails from a different country and his tribe is known to me only as rumor and legend and brief flickers out of the corner of my eye. I have sat with the cold men, pistols in their waistbands, and known I was not like them. But I have never known just what they were like.

That is why I have come. That is why I wait. That is why the phone rings, the voice says it will take a little longer. And that is why the man does not come.

It will take time. Days perhaps.

I think it is possible.

And I think it is possible because I have come, and he is not used to that. And because he can see his own death, smell it is near, and he knows he will be soon forgotten because no one really wants to remember him.

My head is nothing but fever. I relax. I could not overpower a fly.

I am ready for the story of all the dead men who last saw his face.

This morning, as I drank coffee and tried to frame questions in my mind, a crime reporter in Juárez was cut down beside his eight-year-old daughter as they both sat in his car letting it warm up. This morning, as I drove down here, a Toyota passed me with a bumper sticker that read with a heart symbol I LOVE LOVE. This morning, I tried to remember how I got to this rendezvous.

I was in a distant city, and a man told me of the killer and how he had hidden him. He said at first he feared him, but he was so useful. He would clean everything and cook all the time and get on his hands and knees and polish his shoes. He took him on as a favor, he explained, to the state police who had used him for their killings.

I said, “I want him. I want to put him on paper.”

And so I came.

But my reasons and path are no stranger than those of others. For a while, across the river, there was this man who worked for the cartel. He collected debts. He would fly to Miami and explain that you owed a million and must pay him and no one had to wonder what would happen if the person who owed said no.

Eventually, he found Christ but at that point he owed the cartel one hundred thousand dollars. The story is that men came with guns to collect. But they retreated because they said they found seven guards around the man with AK-47s. The man says this is not accurate. In reality, he was surrounded by seven angels.

So I wait.

The man I wait for insists, “You don’t know me. No one can forgive me for what I have done.”

He cannot watch the news on television. He says he can see behind the news and hear the screams.

He has pride in his hard work. The good killers make a very tight pattern through the driver’s door. They do not spray rounds everywhere in the vehicle, no, they make a tight pattern right through the door and into the driver’s chest and head. The reporter who died this morning received just such a pattern, ten rounds from a 9 mm and not a single bullet came near his eight-year-old daughter.

I wait.

I admire craftsmanship.

People talk of those
who are innocent and they talk of those who are
sucio
, dirty, people who live and prosper because of illegal lines of work such as the drug industry. This is a comfort, these categories, and of course, these categories are lies. Let us dance through some numbers. In 2004, the budget of the Mexican army was $4 billion. In 1995, by DEA estimates, the Juárez cartel, at that time a wholesale organization moving heroin, marijuana, and principally cocaine from South America and Mexico into the retail markets of the United States, was earning about $12 billion a year. No one on earth thinks its income has declined.

In Juárez, the payroll for the employees in the drug industry exceeds the payroll for all the factories in the city, and Juárez has the most factories and is said to boast the lowest unemployment in Mexico. There is not a family in the city that does not have a family member in the drug industry, nor is there anyone in the city who cannot point out narcos and their fine houses, or who has any difficulty taking you to fine new churches built of narco-dollars. The entire fabric of Juárez society rests on drug money. It is the only possible hope for the poor, the valiant, and the doomed.