The Cartel (48 page)

“I’m beginning to feel like a pornographer,” Giorgio says as he takes the photographs.

Violence porn, Pablo thinks. He wonders if Óscar will really put these images on the pages of his newspaper.

A lot of papers do. It’s become a new industry,
la nota roja,
tabloids with pictures of the dead—the bloodier the better—hawked by newsboys from street corners and traffic islands. You can make a lot of money taking photos for
la nota roja,
and Pablo wonders if Giorgio is tempted.

Now Pablo tries to get identifications of the dead, but the soldiers look at him like he’s crazy. They haven’t even matched the heads to the bodies; something, Pablo learns, that the coroner will try to do by matching the cut marks on the trunks and the necks.

“Decapitations?” Pablo asks Ana over a drink (okay, drinks) at San Martín that night. “When did we start doing
that,
cutting off heads?”

“It’s not new,” Ana said. “Remember that thing in Michoacán last year? Five heads rolled into a nightclub?”

“But that’s Michoacán,” Pablo answered. “Religious whack jobs.”

“So to speak.”

“Not funny.”

“Sorry.” It’s
not
funny, Ana thinks. It’s horrific, disgusting, and traumatic, and she worries about Pablo. Since Victoria took Mateo away, Pablo’s treating himself like a refugee—staying out half the night, drinking too much, crashing on couches.

Including yours, Ana reminds herself. She’s thought of going out there and inviting him into her bed, but it’s a bad idea. Pablo is a train wreck waiting to happen—it would be simply self-destructive to get on board the Mora Express now. But she feels for him and worries about him, just as she worries about her city and, well, herself.

Admit it, Ana thinks.

You’re scared.

Journalists have already been killed in Nuevo Laredo, and now the war has come here, and she feels this sense of threat that she can’t seem to shake off. It’s annoying—she’s a tough “hard-bitten” reporter of the old school, and she’s seen and reported
plenty.

But this seems different.

Cops hiding in the station houses…

Decapitated, dismembered bodies under patios…

It’s surreal, like one of those dreams you have after too much booze chased with spicy food.

The difference here is that the alarm clock doesn’t seem to ring.

But the next morning, Pablo actually whoops with laughter.

The same press release in which the Juárez mayor’s office announces that ninety-five people have been killed in the first two months of 2008 also announces a major crackdown on jaywalking.

—

Then the army comes in. The Juárez mayor didn’t want them in the city but felt that he had no choice. With the police department dysfunctional he was simply out of men, and not only were the murders stacking up, but “ordinary” street crime was out of control.

So he made a deal with the federal government—Los Pinos would send in troops in exchange for a complete remaking of the city police department. The government launches “Operation Chihuahua” and sends 4,000 troops with 180 armored vehicles and an air wing that includes a helicopter gunship.

At first it does little good.

A city policewoman is struck with thirty-two bullets as she opens the door to her house. A police chief in the small town of El Carrizo on the Texas border is killed in his car as he pulls into his driveway. The army has to take over the town because every police officer quit or just ran off after that.

When police bring four narcos into a Juárez hospital, other narcos come in and execute them on their gurneys. Hospital staffers call police for three hours, but nobody comes.

It gets worse and worse.

A twenty-four-year-old woman is killed in a crossfire at the car wash where she works. Two Juárez cops are gunned down as they drop their kids off at school. A twelve-year-old girl is killed when narcos in a gun battle use her as a human shield.

The mayor of Juárez tells Ana in an interview that he knew “the killing season” was coming, had been informed that it would start in January, and that it was just a conflict between two rival gangs.

The governor announces that of the five hundred—
five hundred
—people killed in Chihuahua so far in the year, the mayor said, “only five” were “innocents.”

Only five, Pablo thinks.

Does that count the baby in the young woman’s womb?

It infuriates him, this killing, this death.

Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet,
garapiñados,
pan dulce,
the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs.

And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the
narcocorridas
sung by no-talent sycophants.

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground.

And for what?

So North Americans can get high.

Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (
down,
of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption.

It’s not the “Mexican drug problem,” Pablo thinks now, it’s the North American drug problem.

As for corruption, who’s more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors?

Corrupt to the soul.

That’s the big story, he thinks.

That’s the story someone should write.

Well, maybe I will.

And no one will read it.

—

Pablo is holding up pretty well under all this until the Casas murder.

Police captain Alejandro Casas was also named on the placard. He’s leaving his house to drop his eight-year-old son at school on his way to work when five men with AKs attack his Nissan pickup truck in the driveway.

Casas is killed immediately.

A dozen 7.62 rounds shatter the boy’s left arm.

The EMTs manage to get to him quickly, but he bleeds to death in the ambulance.

Pablo comes back from the emergency room, dutifully types up the story, and then leaves the office with the intention of getting very drunk. Out on the sidewalk, a man he doesn’t know comes up to him and slips an envelope into the inside pocket of his rumpled khaki blazer.

“What are you doing?” Pablo asks, completely taken aback. “Who are you and what are you doing?”

“Take it,” the man says. He has the face of a cop and the body to match. Barrel chest, wide shoulders that strain his gray sports coat. Pablo has met dozens of cops but he doesn’t know this one.

“What is this?’ he repeats.

“El sobre,”
the man says.

The bribe.

“I don’t want it.”

The man’s smile turns threatening. “I’m not asking you if you
want
it,
m’ijo.
I’m saying take it.”

Pablo tries to give him the envelope back, but the man traps his wrist against his chest before he can get to it. “Take it. There’ll be another like it every Monday.”

“From who?”

“Does it matter?” the man asks.

Then he walks away.

Pablo rips the envelope open.

It’s three times his weekly salary.

In cash.

Enough to hire a decent lawyer, if that’s what he wants to do. Enough, if you add it up week by week, to take a flight to Mexico City twice a month and rent a modest room. Enough…

He recalls an old
dicho
—

When the devil comes, he comes on angel’s wings.

3

Jolly Coppers on Parade

Oh, they look so nice

Looks like the angels have come down from Paradise

—Randy Newman

“Jolly Coppers on Parade”

Mexico City

2008

Keller walks down the center aisle to the Altar of Forgiveness.

As if, he thinks.

The altar allegedly got its name because victims of the Inquisition were brought there to ask for absolution before they were taken out and executed.

Yvette Tapia kneels there now, her head covered in a veil.

Keller kneels beside her.

She’d called an hour ago.

Not with the confident voice he’s used to, but something different. Stressed, under pressure. Not surprising, given that she’s on the run from both Barrera and the police. “Can we meet?”

The Metropolitan Cathedral in Cuernavaca is hundreds of years old, started in 1562—almost sixty years, Keller thinks, before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. The stones were taken from the destroyed temple of the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, so, in a sense it’s even older. The cathedral wasn’t finished until 1813 and has survived floods, fires, and earthquakes.

They don’t talk. He simply feels her hand reach out and put something in his. Keller slips it into his pocket.

Yvette crosses herself, gets up, and walks out.

Keller forces himself to wait long enough to mumble a decent prayer and then goes through the mockery of a confession with a Mexican priest.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, he thinks. I have lied, been otherwise deceitful, and have touched off a war that has taken lives and will take more. In short, I have inspired men to murder, and I hold hatred in my heart.

He doesn’t say that, but confesses instead to impure thoughts about women and receives the penance of a half dozen Hail Marys, which he says at the altar before he leaves the cathedral.

Back out on Madero Street, he refrains from the temptation of reaching into his jacket pocket to touch the item that Yvette gave him. He’s seen it a hundred times from street dealers or buyers—that guilty “tell” where the contraband is. Instead, he stops at a street stand and buys a paper bag of
papas
with hot sauce and eats them while he checks the street for any surveillance that might have dropped Yvette in favor of him. The greasy potato chips taste good. He crumples up the bag, throws it into a trash can, and drives back to Mexico City.

It’s a tape cassette.

Keller puts on headphones and listens.

“By all means continue your campaign in Michoacán. La Familia is a dangerous threat to public safety—lunatics really—not to mention the largest purveyors of methamphetamine in the country.”

Keller recognizes the voice—Martín Tapia.

“What about the Zetas?”

Keller thinks he recognizes that voice, too.

Gerardo Vera.

—

The guards stop Keller in front of Aguilar’s house.

It’s late, after ten at night, and the guards are wary. They are asking what he’s doing there when Lucinda comes to the door.

“Arturo?”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Keller says. “Is Luis home?”

“Come in, please.”

As she ushers Keller inside, Aguilar walks in from the den and looks at Keller quizzically.

“Do you have a moment?” Keller asks.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“I wanted to wait until the kids were in bed,” Keller says.

Aguilar stares at him for a long moment, and then says, “Ten minutes. Come into the study.”

“Do you want coffee?” Lucinda asks. “A glass of wine?”

“No,” Aguilar snaps.

Keller follows him into the study. Aguilar sits down and looks at Keller as if to ask,
So?

“I came to apologize,” Keller says. “My suspicions about you were wrong.”

Aguilar looks surprised but unconvinced. “Thank you. But this doesn’t change my mind about you. Is that all?”

Keller takes the audiocassette out of his pocket and sets it on the desk.

“What is this?” Aguilar asks.

“Play it.”

Aguilar gets up and slips the cassette into a player. He sits back down and listens.
“By all means continue your campaign in Michoacán. La Familia is a dangerous threat to public safety—lunatics really—not to mention the largest purveyors of methamphetamine in the country.”

“Martín Tapia,” Keller says.

“Well,
you
would know,” Aguilar says. “And you didn’t tell me about this because you suspected I was complicit.”

He says this as a fact, not a question, and Keller doesn’t answer.

“Did you tell Vera?” Aguilar asks.

“No.”

Aguilar restarts the tape.

“What about the Zetas?”

Keller watches Aguilar’s face turn pale and his jaw tighten as he rewinds the tape and listens again.

“It can’t be,” Aguilar says, stopping the tape.

Keller says nothing.

“Where did you get this?”

Keller shakes his head, then leans over and hits
PLAY
.

“What about the Zetas?”