Savages (11 page)

Elena admits that he inherited his lack of character and intellect from his father, whom she had married at age nineteen because he was handsome and charming, and she wanted to get out of her parents’ house and out from under her brothers’ thumbs. She’d had a brief period living in San Diego, a tantalizing whiff of freedom, a truncated teenage rebellion that her family quickly sniffed (snuffed?) out before hauling her back to Tijuana, where the only escape was marriage.

And—face it—she wanted sex.

Which is the one thing at which Filipo Sanchez was competent.

He could make the rain fall for her.

Filipo knocked her up quickly, gave her Hernan, Claudia, and Magdalena, and got himself killed by carelessly and stupidly walking into an ambush. They sing songs about him now, beautiful
narcocorridos
, but Elena—if she was to be honest with herself—was almost relieved.

She was tired of his financial incompetence, his gambling, his other women, most of all his weakness. She misses him in bed, but nowhere else.

Hernan is his father’s son.

Even if he managed to take the seat at the head of the table he would not be there for long before they killed him.

So she took the job instead, to save her son’s life.

That was ten years ago.

And now they respect and fear her.

They don’t think her weak, and, until recently, she didn’t have to kill so many.

Elena has a lot of houses.

Right now she occupies the home in Rio Colonia, in Tijuana, but she also has three others in various parts of the city, a
finca
in the country near Tecate, a beach house south of Rosarito, another in Puerto Vallarta, a thirty-thousand-acre ranch in southern Baja, four condos in Cabo, and that’s just Mexico. She owns another ranch in Costa Rica and two more houses on the Pacific side, an apartment in Zurich, another in Sète (she prefers Languedoc; Provence is too obvious), a flat in London she has stayed in exactly once.

Through shell corporations and DBAs she’s purchased several properties in La Jolla, Del Mar, and Laguna Beach.

The Rio Colonia house is known as El Palacio. It’s a compound, really, with outer walls and explosive-resistant gates. Squads of
sicarios
man the walls, patrol the grounds, and cruise the streets outside in armor-plated cars that bristle with guns. Other squads of gunmen guard the first set of gunmen against potential treason. The leaded windows now have grenade screens over them.

The “master bedroom” is bigger than many Mexican homes.

She has furniture imported from Italy, a massive bed, a Renaissance-era mirror from Florence, and a flat-screen plasma television on which she secretively watches lurid soap operas. Her bathroom has a rain shower, a whirlpool bath, and magnifying mirrors that show every new line and wrinkle in what is still, at fifty-four, a pretty face.

In the U.S., Elena would be called a definite MILF.

She maintains her tight little body with rigid discipline in a private gym at the house and the
finca
. Men still sneak glances at her boobs; she knows she has a nice ass. But for what?

Elena’s lonely in the big house.

Hernan, miserably married to a
bruja
of a harridan, has his own
place now; Claudia is a new bride to a nice, dull factory manager; and then there’s Magdalena.

Elena’s wild child.

Her youngest, her baby, the unexpected.

Who seems to have intuited that her advent was unpredicted and responded by becoming unpredictable. It was as if Magda was always saying, through her actions, if you think I surprised you then, wait until you see what I have in store for you next.

A bright child who shocked with her miserable performance in school, and then, just when you had given up on her academic life (“Please, Maria, find her a patient husband”), she became a scholar. A talented dancer who decided that gymnastics were “more her thing,” then quit abruptly to pursue horsemanship (as it were), then gave it up to return to the ballet. (“But I have
always
loved it, Mama.”)

With her father’s face and her mother’s body, Magda broke a parade of boys on the wheel of her willfulness. Casually cruel, intentionally dismissive, a shameless tease—even her mother felt badly for a few of the tortured (“You will take it too far one day, Magda.” “I have geldings harder to handle, Mama.”)—Magda quickly intimidated the pool of available suitors in Tijuana.

No matter, she wanted to leave.

There were student trips to Europe, summers with family friends in Argentina and Brazil, frequent outings up to L.A. to go to clubs and shop. And then just when Elena had become resigned to the fact that her baby was just a party girl … surprise—Magda returns from Peru with a serious desire to become an archaeologist. And Magda being Magda, there was not a college in Mexico that could satisfy her ambitions. No, it had to be the University of California, Berkeley or Irvine, although Elena was reasonably sure that her daughter threatened the faraway former to smooth the way for the relatively nearby latter.

Relatively close, yes, but Magda rarely makes the trip home. She’s busy with her studies, and her video messages home show her in big
eyeglasses, her hair pulled back into a plain ponytail, her body hidden in formless sweaters. As if, Elena thinks, she fears her sexuality diminishes her intellect. Maybe she has the same concern about too-frequent visits home. So, except for holidays, Elena is left alone in her houses with only bodyguards, the soap operas, and her power for company.

It isn’t enough.

It isn’t what she wanted but it’s what she has, and life has made her a realist. Still, she would like someone in her bed, someone at the breakfast table in the morning, someone to hold her, kiss her, make love to her. Sometimes she would like to open a window and yell out—

I’m not a monster

I’m not a bitch

(She knows they joke about her cock and balls, has heard the opposite punch line, “When Elena gets her monthly, blood
really
flows.”) I’m not—

Lady Macbeth

Lucrezia Borgia

Catherine the Great. I am

—a woman doing what she has to do. I am

—the woman you made me.

Elena is at war.

It’s chaos now.

Where there used to be three cartels—Baja, Sonora, the Gulf—now there are at least seven, all fighting for turf.

And the Mexican government has launched a war on all of them.

Worse, she’s faced with a rebellion in her own Baja Cartel. A faction has remained loyal to her and the old family name but another answers to El Azul, an enforcer who used to work for her brothers but would now be
patron.

It has quickly evolved into open warfare. Baja averages five killings a day now. Bodies lie in the streets, or, as is El Azul’s predilection, stuffed alive into barrels of acid. Elena has lost a dozen soldiers in the past month alone.

Of course, she has retaliated in kind.

And been smart—allying herself with the Zetas, formerly an elite antinarcotic police unit that went into business for itself as killers-for-hire. It was the Zetas who started the beheadings.

Killing people certainly causes fear, but decapitation seems to inspire a certain kind of primal terror. There’s just something about the idea of having your head lopped off that really gets to people. Recently they had the idea of going to the IT people and getting it to go viral—old-school leadership technique meets modern marketing—and it has been an effective tool.

But the Zetas are expensive—cash on the barrelhead and their own drug turf as payment—so Elena has to acquire more territory just to stay even.

And El Azul has allies of his own.

The Sinaloa Cartel, perhaps now the most powerful in the country, adding money, soldiers, and political clout to Azul’s rebellion. Putting yet more pressure on Elena to acquire more territory, make more money to hire more men, purchase more weapons, buy more political protection. Government officials have to be paid, police and army bribed … money, money, and always more money … so she has to expand.

But the only place left to go is north.

El Norte.

Thank God she had the foresight to send Lado up there, what is it now, eight years ago? To quietly prepare the ground, recruit soldiers,
infiltrate turf. So when she decided it was time for the Baja Cartel to take over the drug trade in California, Lado was established and ready.

Azul, of course, had followed suit—it was the obvious move—but so far Lado has him outmanned, outgunned, and outprepared up there.

It was Lado who decapitated the seven men.

Lado who will oversee the new marijuana market.

But now these two
Yanquis
want to play games?

She can’t afford their foolishness. She’s at war, she needs the income. It’s a life-and-death matter for her.

Don’t let yourself think that they won’t kill a woman. They have—she’s seen the photos, the women with their mouths duct-taped, their hands tied behind their backs, always stripped, often raped first.

Men teach you how to treat them.

“‘Fuck you’?” she asks now. “He said that? In those words?”

Chinga te?

She talks to Alex and Jaime over the phone.

“I’m afraid so,” Alex says reluctantly.

“‘Fuck you’ ultimately means ‘Fuck me.’”

Alex isn’t going near that. He has a pretty
dulce
life going in California and he doesn’t want to see it messed up with a drug war. They can keep that shit back in Mexico for all Alex cares. So he tries to make peace.

“They did agree to get out of the market immediately and totally,” he says.

Elena La Reina isn’t buying. “We didn’t make them an offer to
which we expected a counteroffer. We made a demand, with which we expected compliance. If we allow them to think that they can negotiate with us, sooner or later that will cause problems.”

“Still, if they are willing to abandon the field—”

“It sets a bad example,” Elena continues. “If we let these two negotiate with us, talk to us like that, other entities will think that they are free to do the same.”

And she’s concerned about these two Americans—the one, they tell him, is a smart, sophisticated, reasonable businessman, who has no stomach for bloodshed. The other is an uncouth, foul-mouthed barbarian who seems to relish violence.

In short, a savage.

Of course, most Americans are.

Savages.

And this is what most Americans don’t understand—that most upper- to middle-crust Mexicans think that Americans are uncivilized, unsophisticated, uncultured, rambunctious rustics who just got on a lucky streak back in the 1840s and rode it to steal half of Mexico.

Mexico is basically Europe laid over Aztec culture laid over Indian culture, but aristocratic Mexicans think of themselves as Europeans and the Americans as …

Well, Americans.

And the
Yanquis
can joke all they want about Mexican gardeners and field workers and illegal immigrants but what they don’t get is that Mexicans think about those people as Indians and look down on them,
too.

This is Mexico’s dirty secret: the darker your skin, the lower your status. Which sort of reminds you of … of …

Uhhhh …

Anyway, lighter-skinned Mexicans look down their noses at darker-skinned Mexicans, but not as much as they look down on Americans.

(Black Americans? Fucking forget it.)

Yeah, okay, so Elena thinks that this “Chon” is an
animale
, but a dangerous
animale.
The “Ben” has his uses, but refuses to use them. In any case, she cannot brook their disobedience.

“So do you want them killed?” Alex asks.

Elena thinks it over and her answer is

Not yet.

Not yet.

Because a Dead Ben couldn’t cultivate the excellent herb that produces so much potential profit. And a Live Ben would never do that if they kill his friend Chon. And this Chon, if past is prologue, has certain uses of his own.

So, wasteful to kill them.

Besides, it is better that these two be seen by the rest of the world to obey.

So—

INT. ELENA’S OFFICE – DAY


ELENA


What we need to do is force him to come work for us on our stated terms.


ALEX


How are we going to do that?


ELENA


(smiling cryptically)


I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.


Yeah, it’s a goddamn shame that Elena is allergic to feline dander, because it would be great to have a cat on her lap at that moment, but in reality she wouldn’t fuck up an expensive dress with all that cat hair anyway.

But basically that’s what she said.

Which begs a question

Doesn’t it?

Elena knows that love makes you strong

And love makes you weak.

Love makes you vulnerable.

So if you have enemies

Take what they love.

O

looks fantastic in your basic little black dress that nevertheless must have cost a mortgage payment. Sheer black stockings and black fuck-me shoes. Her hair cut and dyed back to its “natural” blonde, shiny and sleek.

“Wow.”

Ben says.

Chon nods his agreement.

She smiles at their approval, revels in it, basks in the sunshine of their admiration.

“You went all out,” Ben says.

“I did,” O answers. “I’m going out with both my men.”

They take a limo to the Salt Creek Grille.

Hard to get a table there at short notice unless you’re Ben the King of Hydro and then you could get a table at the freaking Last Supper if that’s what you want. Yeah, they’d rush Jesus through dessert to accom
modate Ben (“The gentleman at the end already took care of the bill, sir. With cash. Come back and see us again soon”), so table for three is
no problema.