The Cartel (70 page)

I’m shrinking with my city, Pablo thinks as he bunches up the
torta
wrapper and tosses it on the floor of the car. The once thriving
mercado
is almost deserted because the tourists don’t come anymore; one famous bar or club after another has closed; even the Mariscal, the red-light district just by the Santa Fe Bridge, has been shut down because men won’t take the risk of going, even for whores.

Now he forces himself to get out of the car for yet another corpse. Just one more
malandro,
one more piece of garbage swept up in
la limpieza.

The cleansing.

Usually Giorgio beats him to the scene, but he’s probably still in bed with the North American.

Then he spots Giorgio.

—

It’s Pablo who tells Ana.

He goes into the city room, holds her tight, and tells her, and she screams and her knees buckle and she falls into him and he almost tells her.
It’s my fault. It’s my fault, if I had said something, told him, maybe…

But you didn’t, Pablo thinks.

And you still don’t.

Because you’re a coward.

And because you’re so ashamed.

Óscar writes an editorial about Giorgio’s murder, a classic El Búho piece full of moral outrage and grief mixed with erudition.

Giorgio’s funeral is a horror show.

The whole Juárez journalist community is there, and Cisneros and Keller. The service at the cemetery goes about as usual, then Pablo notices a car parked just outside the gates.

He walks over.

A severed head, its mouth fixed in a macabre grin, is set on its hood.

With Óscar’s editorial pinned to its neck.

There’s a subdued gathering at Ana’s that night. Pablo, Óscar, Marisol, and her North American. A few others. A shrunken group, Pablo thinks, with our shrunken souls.

People drink sadly, sullenly.

A few attempts are made to tell funny stories about Giorgio, but the effort falls flat.

The gathering breaks up early. Marisol, looking tired and in pain, says that she has to be getting back to Valverde, and the others quickly use the opportunity to make their escapes.

When people were gone, Ana, in her cups, says, “Make love to me. Take me to bed.”

“Ana.”

“Just fuck me, Pablo.”

Their lovemaking is angry and afterward she sobs.

The day after Giorgio’s funeral, Óscar shows Pablo and Ana an editorial he intends to publish.

“
Señores
of the organizations disputing the plaza of Ciudad Juárez,” he reads, “we would like to bring to your attention that we are reporters, not fortune-tellers. Thus, we would like you to explain what is it that you want from us? What do you want us to publish or refrain from publishing? You are, at present, the de facto authorities in this city, due to the fact that the legally established rulers have not been able to do anything to keep our colleagues from falling, despite our repeated demands that they do so. And it is for this reason that, faced with this unquestionable reality, we are forced to pose this question, because what we least want is for another of our colleagues to fall victim.

“This is not a surrender on our part, but an offer of a truce. We need to know, at least, what the rules are, for even in a war, there are rules.”

The editorial itself makes headlines internationally. It resonates among the journalistic community in Mexico because so many journalists have been murdered in Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Michoacán.

The Zetas, especially, have established a virtual silence born of terror in the areas that they control, with media in Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa having stopped running stories on the narcotics trade at all, and average people in the street afraid even to speak their names, referring to them instead as “the last letter.”

The paper receives hundreds of letters and e-mails.

No answer, however, comes from the cartels.

No rules, no stated expectations.

Pablo knows what the expectations are; he doesn’t need a rulebook to know the rules: Write what we tell you, and only what we tell you, or we’ll kill you. Take the
sobre,
or we’ll kill you. Sell us your soul, or we’ll kill you.

It’s a bitter lesson—you think you can rent your soul, but it’s always a sale, and all sales are final.

That night, the envelope man Pablo finds him on the street.

“Tomorrow,
pendejo,
we see that story or—” He smiles, sticks his two fingers out like a gun, and squeezes the “trigger.”

Ana’s in bed when Pablo gets back. He doesn’t want to wake her so he sleeps on the couch. Or tries to, without a lot of success. He thinks of writing Mateo a goodbye letter, but decides that’s too melodramatic.

He decides to write the Sinaloa article.

Then the Zeta one.

Then neither.

In the morning, he decides, I’ll go into the office and hand Óscar my resignation.

Then I’ll cross the bridge.

—

In the morning Pablo tries to find a way to tell Ana what he’s going to do.

But he can’t find the words.

Or, face it, he tells himself, the courage.

Maybe that’s the way, though, Pablo thinks. Just tell her that you’re afraid, that you don’t want to end up like Armando or Giorgio. She’ll think less of you, but she won’t hate you the way she will if she knows you took money.

Just tell her that you’re afraid.

She’ll believe that.

Five times he tries to open his mouth, but nothing comes out. He tries again as they drive to the office together. He feels like he’s on a conveyor belt headed inexorably for the blades of an abattoir, but can’t yell to stop it.

They get to the office and park the car, cross the street to get a coffee.

Pablo can picture the crushed, disappointed look on El Búho’s face.

He thought about simply typing up his resignation and e-mailing it, but decided that would be too cowardly. Óscar deserves a face-to-face explanation, and an apology, and somehow Pablo feels that he deserves it, too. Deserves to look into Óscar’s hurt eyes and remember his expression. Deserves to hear Óscar’s disappointed words and have them replay in his head. Deserves to walk out of the office in shame, clean out his desk, feel the stares on his back, and then (try to) explain things to Ana.

And then what? he thinks as he sips his café con leche and looks across the street at the office building that’s been the only professional home he’s ever known. You’re done in journalism—no decent paper will hire you. The best you can hope for is to freelance for
la nota roja,
circling the city like a vulture, picking at its bones.

A creature that makes its living from corpses.

Can’t do it, he thinks.

Can’t and won’t.

Then again, you might not have the chance—you might
be
one of those corpses, if the narcos get angry that they’ve wasted their money on you and decide to do something about it. Face it, there’s no future for you in journalism and there’s no future for you in Juárez.

Or anywhere in Mexico, for that matter.

You’re going to have to cross the bridge.

Become a
pocho.

“You’re particularly uncommunicative this morning,” Ana says.

“Ummm.”

“That’s more like it.”

He sets his cup down and gets up. “I’m going in.”

“I’ll go with you.”

He crosses the street and shows his ID badge to the security officers at the front door, who know him anyway. Getting into the elevator, he acknowledges that this might be the last time and almost changes his mind, but knows he can’t.

He has to say something now, before he goes into Óscar’s office.

“Ana—”

“What?”

“I—”

Óscar appears in the doorway and announces that he wants to see the entire reportorial staff in the conference room immediately.

“I am no longer willing to risk the lives of the people for whom I am professionally and personally responsible,” he says when they’ve assembled, “to report upon a situation that even the best of journalists—and that’s what you are—cannot affect. We will no longer report on the drug situation.”

Ana objects. Red in the face, almost tearful, she asks, “We’re just going to give in to them? Knuckle under? Allow them to intimidate us?”

Óscar has tears in his eyes as well. His cane taps on the floor and his voice quivers as he answers, “I don’t feel that I have a viable choice, Ana.”

“But how is this going to work?” Pablo asks. “Say there’s a murder. We just don’t report it?”

“You report the fact of an apparent homicide,” Óscar says, “but leave it at that. You make no connection to the drug situation.”

“That’s absurd,” Ana says.

“I agree,” Óscar answers. “Our civic life, however, has become an absurdity. This is not a suggestion, this is an instruction. I will wield a heavy editorial pen and simply delete anything you write that might jeopardize the safety of anyone on this paper. Do you understand?”

“I understand that it’s the death of a great newspaper,” Ana says.

“Which I will cheerfully bury,” Óscar says, “before I will bury another one of you. I will announce our new policy in tomorrow’s edition so that the narcos will be notified.”

“What about Giorgio?” Ana presses.

El Búho raises an eyebrow.

“Are we going to investigate it?” Ana asks. “Or just let it go?”

Because the police
have
let it go, Pablo thinks. Of the over five thousand murders in Juárez since the cartel war began, not a single one has resulted in a conviction. They all know the reality—no one has investigated Giorgio’s murder, and no one is going to. And now Óscar is telling them that they’re not going to, either.

This man, this hero, who once took a narco gun blast and wouldn’t let it stop him, now leans on his cane, and looks tired and old, and says with his silence that he, and they, have been silenced.

Not Ana.

They’re drinking at Oxido that night, one of the clubs still open in the PRONAF Zone, and she has a couple more than she usually does.

“I might as well have taken the money,” she says.

“What do you mean?” Pablo asks.

“When the narcos offered me a bribe,” Ana says, “I should have taken it. They’re our bosses now, right? So they should pay us.”

Pablo drains his beer.

“I’m not letting it go,” Ana says. “They killed our friend and our colleague and I’m not letting it go.”

“Ana, you heard Óscar. What are you going to do?”

“Push,” Ana said. “Push the authorities until they do something about it.”

“Like they did something about Jimena’s murder?” Pablo asks. “Like they did something about the attack on you and Marisol? How about those two women up in the valley? Or the dozens of murders we see every week? Are those the authorities you’re going to?”

“I’ll shame them,” Ana says.

“Ana, they’re shameless.”

He’s scared. If she pushes on this, she could be next.

“Well, I’m not,” Ana mutters. “I’m not shameless.”

“Óscar won’t print what you write.”

“I know,” Ana says.

A little while later Pablo pours Ana into a taxi and takes her home. Puts her to bed and then he goes out again.

Pablo is not by nature heroic.

He knows this about himself and he’s okay with it. But tonight he goes back out because he has to do something to prevent Ana from running headlong off the edge of the cliff. If I can get an answer, he thinks, about who killed Giorgio and why, maybe I can get the story published in a North American paper under a phony byline. Maybe that would satisfy Ana, or even pressure the police to do something about it.

Nor does Pablo look particularly heroic, and he knows that, too. He wears a black, somewhat soiled T-shirt under a black, somewhat soiled untucked shirt with a light windbreaker and a red Los Indios ball cap, and he’s aware that his stomach hangs over his belt.

Now he rings Ramón’s doorbell. It takes a few minutes, then some lights come on and the door cracks open behind the security chain.

“Ramón, it’s me.”

The door opens and Ramón has a pistol pointed at Pablo’s face. “
Mierdito, ’mano,
what the fuck?”

“I have to talk to you.”

Ramón lets him in. “Don’t wake up the kids, okay?”

They walk into the kitchen. The house is a mini McMansion out in the new suburbs and looks like the generic home of any midlevel manager.

“I haven’t seen our fucking story, Pablo,” Ramón says.

Pablo tells him about Óscar’s decision.

“I guess you’re off the hook, then,” Ramón says. “That’s good—spares us both a lot of pain.”

“Why was Giorgio Valencia killed?”

“Fuck, you just got
out
of the hot water—”

“Why?”

“He took the wrong pictures.”

“Which wrong pictures?”

“That Cisneros
chocha,
” Ramón says. “You tapping that, Pablo? You know her, right? Jesus shit, I would like to bang that, I mean before she got, you know, fucked up. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Pablo, it could have been you.”

“Why wasn’t it?” Pablo asks.

“You weren’t on the Zs’ payroll.”

Pablo feels his head spinning. “What are you saying?”

“Your boy Giorgio was
sucio,
” Ramón says. “Dirty. Like you. Only he was taking the Zs’ money and then he fucked them by doing those pictures of the broad showing off her scars. You want to see
my
scars, ’Blo? I have some beauties.”

“You have names? Who did it?”

“Fuck, you want to get me killed with you?” Ramón asks. Then he shuts up because he hears Karla coming down the stairs. His wife comes into the kitchen and looks blearily at Pablo.

“Hi, Pablo.”

“Hello, Karla. Nice to see you.”

“Nice to see you.” She looks curiously at Ramón.

“Go back to bed, baby,” Ramón says. “I’ll be back up in a few minutes.”

“Come by sometime for dinner,” Karla says to Pablo.

“I will.”

She walks back upstairs.

“Names?” Ramón asks. “
Names?
Grow up. What the fuck difference does it make? They’re all the same cat. I’m telling you, Pablo, leave this the fuck alone. Leave it all the fuck alone. Me, I’ve decided to get out of here. Karla’s pregnant again, I got some money set aside on
el otro lado.
A few little things to take care of and then I’m out of here. You should do the same.”