The Cartel (19 page)

So PAN is more than happy to sweep the Puente Grande prison escape scandal under the rug, and PRI’s history of narco-corruption prevents them from bringing it up as an issue.

Nobody wants to talk about Adán Barrera.

Batman and Robin are happier subjects, especially with Vera providing irresistible quotes like, “Contreras has his own army? So what? I have
my
own army—we’ll see who wins.”

“I didn’t come here for Contreras,” Keller told Taylor.

“We’re thinking the same thing,” Taylor said. “It might be time to pull you out. The bees probably miss you, right?”

I’m on the endangered species list, Keller thought when he hung up the phone. The ax is looming over my head and Luis Aguilar can’t wait to swing.

On the other hand, Gerardo Vera has become something of a friend.

Well, not exactly a friend—Keller has no friends in Mexico, will allow himself no real friends among colleagues whom he doesn’t trust—but they do share an end-of-the-day beer from time to time, and Vera is as gregarious as Aguilar is closed.

Almost everything Keller assumed about Vera turned out to be wrong. He’d thought that Vera was from your typical privileged Mexico City upper crust, when in fact he came up the hard way and had been a beat cop in one of the city’s most notorious slums.

He’d fought his way up the ranks, gaining attention from his superiors for cleaning up tough neighborhoods, and when PAN took over and was looking for someone to clean up the scandal-ridden corrupt
federales,
they turned to Gerardo Vera.

“Oh, I gained some sophistication along the way,” he joked to Keller one afternoon over beers at the Omni Hotel bar. “I learned which fork to pick up when, where to buy my suits…Mistresses mostly taught me things. I was sleeping with a higher class of women, and they cleaned me up so that I’d be more suitable material for scandalous gossip.”

He never married or had children.

“Never had the time or interest,” he said. “Besides, families make you vulnerable. I prefer married women and expensive whores. You have a nice meal, a few laughs, a good fuck, and then you each go back to your own lives. It’s better that way.”

So he took Keller out for a drink and asked him to go to Nuevo Laredo on an errand. “Alejandro Sosa. Osiel Contreras’s personal pilot. We’ve had him under surveillance for months.”

“I’m here for Barrera.”

Vera was ahead of him. “We both know that the clock is running on you. If you help me get Contreras, you’d be untouchable. You could stay in Mexico.”

True, Keller thought. But his brief was strictly the Barrera Coordinating Committee, the CDG was other agents’ turf, and he’d be trespassing, a poacher. “Why do you want me?”

Vera was silent for a few seconds before he answered. “You and I, we’re very much the same. You and I know that you can’t punch the narcos with gloves on. It’s a bare-knuckle fight. I want you in the alley with me. These people are scum. Garbage to be hosed off the streets. By any means necessary.”

“What’s your way into Sosa?” Keller asked, knowing that he was walking down an alley where he shouldn’t go. It was in violation of his working agreement, in violation of DEA practice, and in violation of his own better sense.

But he wanted to stay in Mexico, and Vera was offering him the chance.

Vera chuckled. “It’s a little complicated, almost baroque. One of those things that might just be crazy enough to work, but very embarrassing if it doesn’t. Like your CIA sending poisoned cigars to Castro.”

Now Keller looks at the casually but well-dressed man who looks to be in his thirties. Sandy hair, light-complexioned, he sits at the bar, sips on a beer, and watches the strippers. Sosa looks soft to him. Thin, unmuscled, a man who can fly a plane but hasn’t seen a lot of life. Maybe it’s the green pastel polo shirt or the pressed white jeans. Maybe it’s the sandy hair, thinning already—Sosa is what, thirty-nine?—and it looks like he might be using Rogaine or something.

A few minutes later—thank God—Sosa flips a few bills on the bar and walks out onto Cleopatra Street, where he window-shops along the cribs of younger attractive prostitutes that line the street.

The older hookers are on the back streets.

Keller doesn’t feel like waiting for the man to get laid, so he makes his approach. “Alejandro Sosa?”

Sosa turns around and looks puzzled, not recognizing this man. “Yes? How can I help you?”

“I don’t need your help,” Keller says. “You need mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your boss,” Keller says, “Osiel Contreras. You probably know that he goes to a gypsy, right? A fortune-teller?”

“Yes…”

Keller says, “She told him that someone very close to him—light-skinned, light-haired—was going to betray him. You know anyone close to him with light skin and light hair?”

Sosa’s skin turns lighter. Like
white.
“Oh my God.”

“You’re on the hit list, my friend.”

“What can I do?”

“Run,” Keller says. “I guess in your case fly.”

“Who are you? Why are you telling me this?”

“You don’t want me to flash my DEA badge here, do you?” Keller asks. “Let’s walk, talk, like two guys in La Zona looking to catch the clap.”

It’s the critical moment.

Keller has flipped scores of informants, and he knows that there’s a moment in which you literally have to make the man come along with you, get him into the habit of doing what you say. He starts to walk away, and is relieved a moment later when Sosa falls in with him.

“Look around you,” Keller says. “Do you see trees with ornaments on them? Bulbs? Candy canes?”

Not hardly. What he sees are sleazy bars, hookers, their customers, young punks, drunk students, and narco lookouts.

Keller continues on the classic bad-cop routine. “Do I look like a jolly fat man? Am I wearing a red suit? I guess what I’m getting at here, Alejandro—this isn’t Christmas. There are no presents under the tree. Do you know what the definition of a present is? Something for nothing. You want me to get you out of Mexico, get you a snitch visa on the other side, you’re going to have to give me something I want.”

“I can give you a lot of information about Contreras.”

Keller stops in front of a window and runs his eyes up and down the body of a young woman in a purple negligee. “I
have
a lot of information about Contreras. I have
warehouses
of information about Contreras. I bet I know more about him than you do. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“Like what?” Sosa asks. He’s scared.

“Look at the woman, not at me,” Keller says. “His location.”

“I never know,” Sosa answers. “He only tells me a few minutes ahead of time. To get the plane ready.”

“Well,” Keller says, “when he does, you can tell me.”

Sosa shakes his head. “I can’t go back there. He’s going to kill me.”

“Then if I were you?” Keller says. “I’d call me at the first possible opportunity.”

“I won’t do it.”

And then there’s that moment with an informant where you pull the carrot away and just show him the stick. You have to let him know he’s trapped, and the only way out is you.

I am the truth and the way.

“Yeah you will,” Keller says, smiling at the woman behind the glass. “Or I’ll put it out that you were talking to DEA. Then Contreras won’t need any goddamn gypsy to tell him to kill you. He’ll turn you over to Ochoa to find out what you told me.”

“You evil motherfucker.”

“Hey, you could have chosen to fly for the friendly skies,” Keller says, walking down the street with Sosa at his side like a puppy. “Now, you have options: The
federales
arrest you right now and you go to a jail where Contreras’s guys kill you; you run until Ochoa finds you and tortures you to death; or you go back, you do your job like nothing happened, you call me when you know where your boss is going to be, and I put you in the ‘program.’ ”

Sosa chooses door number three.

Now they just have to wait for him to call.

Keller flies back to Mexico City.

—

Luis Aguilar finally broke down to his wife’s imprecations and invited the North American to dinner, albeit not without some rearguard resistance. “It would be unkind.”

“How so?” Lucinda asked.

“The man lost his own family,” Luis assayed, “and it would be unkind to confront him with our happiness.”

“Is that the best you can do?” Lucinda asked. “How do you win any cases?”

“I’ll call him.”

Keller got the call at his desk and was too surprised to think of an excuse. He showed up that night at Aguilar’s with a bottle of wine and flowers, both of which Lucinda graciously accepted.

If Keller expected Luis Aguilar’s wife to be, well…dull…he’s disappointed. In a word, she’s striking. A head taller than her husband, with long chestnut hair and an aquiline nose, subtly but elegantly dressed.

The daughters, luckily, favor their mother. Tall, thin, each resembling a ballerina (which, he learned over dinner, was accurate), Caterina and Isobel, sixteen and thirteen respectively, are lovely, perfect combinations of their father’s reserve and their mother’s graciousness.

They politely answer Keller’s polite questions over a meal that starts with a delicious soup made of cactus tenders, followed by diced chicken in a creamy almond sauce over wild rice, and then a coconut flan.

“You went to a lot of trouble,” Keller tells Lucinda.

“Not at all. I love to cook.”

At a subtle nod from their mother, the girls excuse themselves after dinner and Lucinda says she’s going to “finish up” in the kitchen.

Keller starts to say, “Let me—”

“We have help,” Aguilar says as he takes Keller into his study. “Do you play chess?”

“Not very well.”

“Oh.”

“We can play.”

“No,” Aguilar says, “not if you don’t play well. It wouldn’t be a challenge.”

A maid—Keller learns that her name is Dolores—brings in coffee, which Aguilar laces with cognac. They sit down, and with nothing else to talk about, the conversation turns to Vera.

“Gerardo runs roughshod on the law,” Aguilar complains. “It looks good in the media, I suppose it gets results, but sooner or later it comes back and bites you in the ankle.”

Keller is a little skeptical about Aguilar’s by-the-book pretense. The lawyer hasn’t been exactly reluctant to use the information that Vera’s none-too-gentle interrogations produce. Half the time, the suspects actually confess, and Keller hasn’t noticed Aguilar asking too many questions as to how those confessions were induced.

He doesn’t tell Aguilar about his trip to Nuevo Laredo for Vera.

“And this ‘Batman and Robin’ business,” Aguilar says, “it’s silly and demeaning.”

“But it gives the media a hook,” Keller says.

“I’m not in the media business.”

“Sure you are.”

Lucinda comes in and rescues them from another debate, steering the conversation to film, sports, and Keller. He finds himself telling them about his background—the absentee Mexican businessman father, his days at UCLA, meeting Althea, Vietnam…Then he sees Aguilar glance at his watch. “And I should be going. Thank you for a wonderful evening.”

After he leaves, Lucinda says, “See, he isn’t so bad. I like him.”

“Hmmmm,” Aguilar says.

Gerardo Vera spends the evening with his latest mistress. Good wine, good food, better sex.

Drink, food, and women. What else is there in life?

“God?” Aguilar asked him when he’d spouted this philosophy over lunch.

“That’s the next life,” Vera said. “I’ll worry about that when I get there.”

“Then it will be too late.”

“Yes, Father Luis.”

Luis believes in heaven and hell, Vera knows that there is neither. You die and that’s it, so you have to suck the marrow out of life. The American, Keller, he likes to pretend that he’s lost his faith, but it’s still there, tormenting him with guilt over his supposed sins.

Vera has no such torments.

He doesn’t believe in sin.

Right and wrong, yes.

Courage and cowardice, yes.

Duty and dereliction, yes, but these are parts of being a
man.
A man does the right thing, does his duty and does it bravely.

Then he drinks, eats, and fucks.

The woman tonight is a charmer, her husband a government official too busy with his work to do
his
duty at home, and Vera is the grateful beneficiary of this neglect, cheerful to hang horns on a fool.

It’s an epidemic in Mexico these days, what with these Ivy League technocrats bringing the absurd American “work ethic” back with them. They have volunteered to become cogs in a machine, and they forget why it is that they work.

Vera doesn’t forget.

He’s ordered a fine meal delivered to this Polanco love nest, has put fine champagne on ice, music on the stereo.

Discreet, trusted sentries stand guard outside.

Vera pours the woman a glass of champagne, just enough now to make her giddy but not sloppy, then savors the perfume of her elegant neck, then reaches down to feel her equally elegant ass.

She freezes but doesn’t stop him, and he lifts the silk up and then reaches around to feel the essence of her, and she doesn’t object but leans back and lays her head on his shoulder as he strokes her and whispers filth into her ear.

The rich ones, their husbands are too tame, they like to hear words that come from the slums.

Luis hopes for heaven.

Keller fears hell.

Vera fears only death, and that because he takes such pleasure in life.

—

Sosa calls that night.

“I’m taking Contreras from Nuevo Laredo to his niece’s birthday party in Matamoros tomorrow,” he tells Keller. “After that, he’s going to have a party of his own at one of his safe houses.”

“I need an address.”

Sosa gives it to him—a three-story apartment building on Agustín Melgar in the Encantada district.

“Anyone flying with him?”

“Ochoa,” Sosa says. “And Forty. And another Zeta named Segura. Crazy guy who wears a grenade on a chain around his neck. Other Zetas are coming to the party. Look, I don’t want to stay on the phone too long.”