Triple Crossing (12 page)

“When was this?” Méndez asked, intent on the map. He had known that Junior was doing business with South Americans, but not
to this extent.

“During the past year. They are starting to move drugs to the United States, but also to Europe through Africa. The market
of the future. And migrants here: Chinese, South Americans, Africans. You have seen the results.”

“The smugglers and migrants we arrest speak Portuguese mixed with Spanish,” Méndez said.

The Colonel’s trigger finger aimed at Méndez in acknowledgment, then traced lines back and forth between the Mexican border
and the Triple Border.

“That’s because Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguaçu, the Brazilian city across the river, are like one continuous city. The
border is an imaginary line, Licenciado. The languages mix together, like everything else. Like San Diego and Tijuana.”

“The Colonel says gangsters from the Triple Border are here, Leo,” said Aguirre. “The Ruiz Caballeros have used Arab and Brazilian
sicarios.
”

The Colonel nodded vigorously. “They fly in, they kill, they leave. Very efficient. For one job I went to the airport to receive
the specialists.”

“Which job?”

The Colonel was not accustomed to direct questions, particularly on his own turf. His upper lip drew back against his teeth.

“
Ay
Licenciado, let’s just say it was the recent murder of a government official. There have been so many, lamentably. And more
to come. César! More coffee for our guests.”

As the youth in the Georgetown sweatshirt refilled cups, Méndez wondered if the Colonel had gone to the Triple Border himself;
the Diogenes Group knew that off-duty state police accompanied Junior Ruiz Caballero on trips. Méndez wondered how much the
Colonel knew for a fact and how much was conjecture. He was framing a question when gunfire erupted outside.

Porthos cursed and put his hand on his gun. Méndez, Rico and Puente followed suit. There were more shots, volleys from an
assault rifle somewhere outside the Colonel’s compound.

Athos burst in, AK-47 in one hand, a radio to his ear. There was grim satisfaction on his face, as if he felt vindicated that
his fears had come true. After scanning the room and reassuring himself the Colonel had not sprung an ambush, he ducked back
outside.

Méndez remained in his chair. His body ached with accumulated tension. He saw that Aguirre had her cup encircled in her hands.
She sipped pensively. The Colonel sat straight-backed, hands flat on either side of the atlas. He looked as if he had just
eaten something distasteful and was being polite about it. No one spoke.

Moments later, Athos stuck his head inside again.

“It came from the main yard,” he reported. “Some monkey shooting in the air, celebrating the Saturday. The guards say nothing
to worry about. They say they have it under control.”

Athos pronounced the last two words with quotation marks around them. He gave Rico and the Colonel a look and withdrew.

The Colonel exhaled.

“Maybe someone was saying hello to our guests,” he grumbled. “Anyway, Méndez, I hope I am enlightening you a bit. Now I’d
like to talk about how you can help me. Permit me to start by saying I have no illusions. And I want you know this: One way
or another, I am getting out of this prison. Soon.”

Hours later, Méndez and Aguirre finished lunch at a little restaurant in a colonial-style shopping mall across a busy downtown
traffic circle from the Tijuana Cultural Center. Isabel, who got impatient during extended Tijuana lunches, had joined them
long enough to drink a Coke and left. Méndez and Aguirre lingered over cigarettes and coffee, exhausted by the visit to the
prison. Their bodyguards sat at the bar watching a Saturday sports roundup on an overhead screen.

Araceli Aguirre took a drag on her cigarette. She had removed her glasses. Her face looked younger, even thinner, the eyes
bright despite the circles beneath them.

“I won’t argue with you—the Colonel is a perverse beast,” Araceli said. “But what do you think he will do?”

“Oh, he will testify if he has to. But he’s fully capable of play
ing both sides, using us to pressure Junior to get him out, or pay him off, or whatever.”

“I imagine it’s up to your pushy Cuban friend to get help from the yanquis.”

“My friend Isabel, who does not deserve insults, will help through the task force. But Mexico City is key at this point. I
have to talk to the Secretary about what this means for the investigation, get organized to move fast.”

“The Secretary,” Aguirre said drily. “Your beloved boss. A creature of the system in disguise.”

“Let’s not get started. I think he would intervene to transfer the Colonel to a new prison. But the state authorities will
try to block it because he has been charged under state law as well as federal law.”

“So you are pessimistic.”

“Araceli. The Colonel is extremely valuable. The Triple Border connection intrigues me. He’s a blowhard, but if he will testify
in detail, I do think this is as big as he says it is.”

The owner of the restaurant stopped by the table to say hello. He was one of the itinerant Basques who had come to Tijuana
to play professional jai alai, then settled there. Méndez was not fond of the Spaniard, or Spain, or what he considered snobby
colonial cuisine. But Aguirre had studied for her doctorate in Madrid on a fellowship and developed a weakness for the “mother
country.” The cozy restaurant, with its posters of far-off mountain villages and fields sectioned by stone walls, did give
Méndez a sense of shelter. Especially when he was with Aguirre.

“Did you see Porfirio Gibson’s show last night?” Méndez asked. “He’s getting nasty with his commentaries. Last night he went
after you again. He took a shot at me too, because I dodged an interview.”

“I can’t imagine that anyone whose opinion I respect pays attention to that buffoon. One day he’ll call me a lesbian narco-satanist.”

“It’s not so much what he says, it’s the fact he says it. They are trying to isolate us. I don’t have to tell you these are
dangerous times. The times of excellent cadavers.”

“Of what?”

The lines in his face creased. He kept his voice low.

“It’s an expression from the Sicilian mafia wars. It refers to murders of people in power. I’m reading a book about Falcone,
the Sicilian judge. There are parallels to Mexico, Colombia.
La vita blindata,
that’s what the anti-mafia judges called it. Bodyguards, bunkered courthouses, armored cars: the armored life. Do you know
when Judge Falcone said he realized that they were going to kill him?”

Aguirre half smiled. “The gloomier the better, no?”

He continued: “When they went after him publicly. Bureaucrats, politicians allied with the mafia. They tore him down with
news stories, anonymous letters. Preparing the terrain. That worried him more than the threats. He said it was a fatal combination:
He was dangerous but vulnerable, because he had become isolated. That’s what they want to do to us, Araceli. This visit to
the Colonel will make it worse.”

“Leo,” she said sweetly. She put her hand on his. “Don’t you think it’s an exercise of lunatics, trying to calculate the danger?
If we do this, it’s
x
amount dangerous. If we don’t do that,
y
amount of danger. We do what we do and that’s that. Nothing has stopped us so far.”

“No one wants to stop,” Méndez said. He leaned back, watching a slow-motion replay on the television above the bar: A forward
for the Mexican national soccer team attempted an elegant back-to-the-goal scissors kick, his mane of hair swirling. The bodyguards
at the bar hooted sorrowfully. A narrow miss.

“At least it’s good to hear you talk for once, unburden yourself,” Aguirre said. “I am probably more worried about you than
you are about me. I talked to Estela last night.”

At the mention of his wife’s name, Méndez’s tone grew cold. “Estela.”

“That’s right.” Her smile was defiant. “She called me. She’s worried too.”

“She called you.”

“My God, Leo, you practically threw her and Juancito out of Tijuana. You lined up the job for her at Berkeley, totally clandestine.
And you forced her to take it.”

He kept watching the soccer footage. He said, “It was for their own good. It was absolutely impossible for them here. Going
everywhere with bodyguards, to school, the supermarket. And it’s an excellent opportunity for her.”

“She doesn’t see it like that.”

“All I can tell you is, I am finally able to concentrate for the first time since I took this job. I know they are living
a safe, normal, civilized life. Far from here.”

Aguirre lit another cigarette.

“I suppose everyone deals with the danger in different ways,” she said. “But you have banished your family. That doesn’t make
their life normal or civilized. You have systematically cut yourself off from everyone and everything. Except the Diogenes
Group. You talk about the mafias trying to isolate us. You don’t need any help.”

“I haven’t cut myself off from you.”

“Because I am essential to your work.”

“I see.” Méndez’s mouth tightened. “And how do you deal with it, if I may ask?”

“I live my life, for God’s sake.” She brandished the cigarette. “Why let them control your existence? I have lunch with my
husband whenever I can. I spend time with my kids. I certainly don’t—”

“Excuse me, but now that you mention it, I meant to tell you I don’t think it’s wise to bring Elena and Amalia to the office,
not with those protester thugs around—”

“Leobardo, you are really impossible!”

“Alright, alright, enough,” he said. “This unburdening that you like so much is the modern disease. What’s your point?”

“Promise me you’ll call your wife and have a real conversation with her. “Alright?”

“Done.”

They talked about their plan for the coming week, the logistics of coaxing the Colonel into testifying before a prosecutor
as he had promised. Méndez raised a hand as the television filled with images of a bloodied boxer against the ropes, warding
off punches.

“Wait,” he said. “That’s the fight from Wednesday. Junior made an appearance.”

Méndez asked the owner to turn up the sound. There were fans booing, scuffles with helmeted police in a boxing ring, hurled
coins tracing shiny arcs through smoke and floodlights. The top-billed match of the Wednesday-night fights at Multiglobo Arena
had ended in favor of the champion, infuriating partisans of the challenger. He appeared to have outfought the champion, a
long-armed Mexican-American managed by Junior Ruiz Caballero’s company. The champion’s fans had counterattacked with bottles
and folding chairs.

The television showed a crowded hallway, the camera advancing among police, rich kids, sultry women in fight-night finery.
Junior Ruiz Caballero appeared, turning back from a doorway to attend to a couple of microphones poked at him between hulking
backs. With Junior were two American Las Vegas types in double-breasted suits and a thick-necked African-American prizefighter.

Junior was unshaven and deeply tanned, as usual. He wore a two-toned leather jacket that looked like something out of a music
video. The gossip magazines portrayed Junior as a swashbuckling ladies’ man; he was good-looking in a baby-faced,
degenerate sort of way. He appeared to be going through one of his bloated phases.

Junior Ruiz Caballero grinned hugely over his shoulder at the female reporter.

“We always give the people what they want, that’s what show business is all about,” he said, using the English phrase. “The
people want a rematch, we’ll give them a rematch. The people want drama. We’ll give them drama.”

B
EFORE HIS PURSUIT OF
Pulpo a month earlier, Pescatore had only crossed twice into Tijuana.

The first time was during a trip to San Diego that was part of the nineteen-week training course at the U.S. Border Patrol
academy. Near the end of the course, when the trainees had been assigned to stations, The Patrol flew them to their sectors
to see the reality waiting beyond the gauntlet of Spanish classes, arcane immigration laws and role-playing exercises with
Latino actors impersonating suspects. Pescatore and three other rookies walked into Tijuana, had a drink in the first tourist
bar they found and went right back, heads down, sweating profusely, pretending they were not worried about getting lynched
if someone realized they were U.S. feds.

The second crossing was with Garrison, Dillard and Macías before Christmas. They got hammered in a noisy basement club featuring
raunchy dancers and bartenders blowing whistles. A couple of hard-ass-looking Mexicans showed up and slammed drinks with the
agents. Garrison explained that they were informants from his days on The Patrol’s antismuggling investigative unit: They
were called
madrinas
(godmothers) or
aspirinas
(aspiring cops). The Mexican police used them as all-purpose ass-kickers, snitches and flunkies.

The main thing Pescatore remembered from that night was an Indian woman, one of the street vendors known as Marias, who had
knocked on the window of Garrison’s Jeep Cherokee on the way back to San Diego. The Saturday-night line of cars waiting to
be inspected at the San Ysidro Port of Entry wound for a mile over ramps and under bridges. Pescatore dozed in the backseat,
his head against the glass. He awoke to see a dark, rutted face framed by a shawl. The old woman extended a fistful of black
strings at him. Lowering the window, he saw they were small braided crucifixes made entirely of thread, with a tiny red bead
embedded in the center of the cross. A single thread served as the short necklace.

“You gonna buy one?” Garrison glanced over his shoulder disapprovingly. “That’s what the TJ jailbirds wear. You know where
those crosses got started? The joint. The convicts pulled thread out of their clothes to make ’em.”

“Yeah, well, I think they’re cool,” Pescatore mumbled, handing her a dollar.

“Que Dios le bendiga, mi hijo,”
the woman said.