by Don Winslow
“So Damien’s allied with Tito now,” Ric says. “What does Elena think about that?”
“What choice does she have?” Núñez says. “She doesn’t like it, but she has to accept it. With Tito and Damien on her side, she thinks she can beat us. And she might not be wrong. Because Caro might be with her now, too.”
“He just sided with us!”
“Did he?” Núñez asks. “Think about it. Tito got what he really wanted. His son is going to be released. At no cost except making Damien let the Esparzas go. I wouldn’t be surprised if Caro okayed their kidnapping. I wouldn’t be surprised if Caro was behind the whole thing.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To make us come to him,” Núñez says. “Now we owe him, Tito owes him, Damien owes him. And he just showed the world that he’s the only one who can make a deal. Now he’ll sit back and see who’s winning. Then he’ll make his real move.”
Núñez lays his head back on the seat and closes his eyes.
“Caro,” he says, “wants to be El Patrón.”
3
La Bestia
Suffer the little children,
And forbid them not . . .
—Matthew 19:14
Guatemala City
September 2015
For all of his ten years, Nico Ramírez has known nothing but El Basurero.
The garbage dump is his world.
He’s a guajero, one of the thousands who scrape out a scant living scavenging garbage in the city dump.
Nico is very good at what he does.
A small scrawny kid dressed in torn jeans, holey sneakers and his one treasure—a Barcelona fútbol shirt with the name of his hero, Lionel Messi, number 10, on the back—he is a master at eluding the guards at the big green gates into the dump. Kids aren’t supposed to go in—although Nico is one of the thousands who do—and he doesn’t have one of the precious ID cards that would gain him entrance as an “employee,” so he has to pick his spots.
That’s where being small helps, and now, clutching a black plastic bag in his right hand, he ducks down behind an adult woman and waits for the guard to turn his head. When the guard does, Nico dashes in.
The dump occupies forty acres in a deep ravine, and Nico looks up to see the parade of yellow city dump trucks wind its way down the switchback, delivering over five hundred tons of garbage every day. Each truck has numbers and letters painted on the side and Nico, although he can barely read or write, knows the meanings of these numbers and letters as well as he knows the alleys and warrens of the shantytown he lives in just outside the dump. The codes refer to the neighborhood from which the truck collects, and Nico has his eye peeled for the trucks that come from the rich parts of the city, because that’s where the best trash comes from.
Rich people throw away a lot of food.
Nico is hungry.
He’s always hungry.
He throws away nothing.
The boy’s hair and skin are white from the perpetual cloud of smoke and dust that hangs over the dump and permeates every aspect of the basureros’ lives—their clothes, their skin, their eyes, their mouths, their lungs. His eyes are bloodshot, his cough chronic. The smell of smoldering garbage—sour, fetid, acid—is in his nostrils, but he knows nothing different.
No one in El Basurero does.
Nico wipes his nose with his sleeve—his nose is always running—and peers through the smog at the line of trucks winding down into the ravine.
Then he spots it—NC-3510A.
Playa Cayalá, a rich neighborhood all the way out in Zone 10.
Those people, they throw away treasures.
Moving deeper into the dump, he tries to gauge where the Cayalá truck will stop. He knows other basureros have spotted it, too, and the competition will be fierce. Some people say that there are five thousand dump pickers, others say it’s more like seven thousand, but it’s always crowded and it’s always a fight for the good stuff.
His mother is among them somewhere, but Nico is too intent on tracking the Cayalá truck to look for her. He’ll see her at home later, hopefully with money in his hand from collecting a full bag.
He does spot La Buitra.
The Vulture.
Thousands of real vultures circle overhead, waiting to land and fight the human guajeros for the choice scraps, but La Buitra—Nico doesn’t know her real name—has the keenest eye of them all. The middle-aged woman has sharp eyes and long sharp fingernails that she’s not afraid to use. She’ll claw, scratch, kick, bite—anything to get at the best pickings.
Then there’s her stick—a short piece of wood with a sharp metal spike she uses to stab bits of garbage and put them in the bag. Or she uses it to poke people out of her way.
Or worse.
One time Nico saw her plunge the spike into Flor’s hand. Flor is his friend, about his age, and one time she stooped under La Buitra to grab a sandwich wrapped in yellow paper and La Buitra jammed the spike right into the back of her hand.
It got infected and her hand still isn’t right.
There’s a hole in it just the size of La Buitra’s spike and it’s all red around it and sometimes yellow stuff oozes out the hole and Flor can’t close her hand the whole way.
That’s what La Buitra will do.
But Nico’s not afraid of her—at least, that’s what he tells himself.
I’m faster, Nico thinks, and smarter. I can duck under her claws, jump away from her kicks. She can’t catch me—no one in El Basurero can.
Nico wins every race, even against the older kids. Nico Rápido, they call him, “Fast Nicky,” and on the rare occasions when they can find something resembling a fútbol, Nico is the star—quick, shifty, clever, skilled with his feet.
Now he sees that La Buitra has spotted the Cayalá truck.
Nico can’t let her get to it first.
He needs the money that truck might bring, needs it desperately because he and his mother already owe the mara a week’s payment, and if they fall another week behind, the gang’s retribution will be terrible.
A good guajero can make as much as five dollars a day, and of that, they owe the mara two dollars and fifty cents, or half of anything they make. Everyone in El Basurero, everyone in every barrio, pays the mara—either MS-13 or 18th Street—half of what they make.
Nico has seen what happens to people who don’t make their payments—he’s seen them beaten with sticks and electric cords, seen the gangsters pour boiling water over their children, seen them drag the mother of the family to the ground and rape her.
He and his mother have been saving every quetzal—the money that might otherwise have gone to breakfast this morning is in a tin can buried in their dirt floor—but they are still behind, and Calle 18 will be by to collect tonight.
A marero came last night to tell them so.
His name is “Pulga.” They call him the Flea because he bites and bites and bites, sucking blood out of everyone in the neighborhood. Nico is terrified of him—the Flea’s face is covered with tattoos: the Roman numerals XVIII cross his forehead, the letters UNO run down the right side of his nose, the letters OCHO down the other. Mayan designs are inked on the rest of his face so that not a square inch of flesh shows.
Pulga looked down at Nico’s mother, who sat on the dirt floor with her knees folded under her. “Where’s my money, puta?”
“I don’t have it.”
“You ‘don’t have it’?” Pulga asked. “You’d better get it.”
“I will.” Her voice was shaking.
Pulga squatted in front of her. Skinny, his muscles taut, he took her chin between his fingers and lifted it, forcing her to look at him. “Puta, you have my money tomorrow or I will take it out of your pussy, your ass, your mouth.”
He saw the flash of anger in Nico’s eyes.
“What, little faggot?” Pulga asked. “What are you going to do? Stop me? Maybe I make you suck my cock, get it good and hard for your mami.”
Nico
was ashamed, but he pressed himself back against the wall, a section of an old movie billboard they’d found in the dump.
Pulga said, “You want your mami to have a good time, don’t you?”
Nico looked down.
“Answer me, hijo,” Pulga said. “Don’t you want your mami to have a good time fucking me?”
“No.”
“No?” Pulga said. “What limp dick did she fuck to make you? She didn’t have a good time then, did she?”
The insult hurts Nico’s heart. He was four when his papi died, and they buried him in the Muro de Lágrimas, the Wall of Tears—tiny crypts built into the cliff above the dump like little apartment buildings, one on top of the other. Nico and his mother have to come up with twenty dollars a year to keep his remains there. If you don’t pay, or can’t afford to be put there in the first place, they toss your body down into the ravine below the wall.
Nico can’t let his papi be thrown into the Canyon of the Dead.
It’s the worst place in the world.
Nico remembers his papi and loved him, and now the mara was saying terrible things.
“I asked you a question,” Pulga said.
“I don’t know.”
Pulga laughed. “Nico Rápido they call you, right? Because you’re fast?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Fast Nicky,” Pulga said, “I’ll be back tomorrow, and you better have my fucking money.”
Then he left.
Nico shuffled from the wall and hugged his mother. She’s young and pretty, he knows Pulga wants her, sees the way the mareros look at her.
He knows what they want.
Like he knows his mother’s story.
She was four years old when the PAC came into her village, deep in the Mayan country, looking for Communist insurgents that they didn’t find. Enraged, they grabbed the villagers, heated wires on open flames and shoved the red-hot wires down the villagers’ throats. They made the women cook them breakfast and forced them to watch as they ordered fathers to kill their sons and sons to kill their fathers. Those who refused, they doused with gasoline and set on fire. Then they raped the women. When they ran out of women, they started in on the little girls.
Nico’s mother was one of them.
Six soldiers raped her into catatonia, and she was one of the lucky ones. Others they raped, then hanged from trees, slashed with machetes, or dashed their heads against stones. She watched them cut pregnant women open and rip the babies from their wombs.
These PAC were civilian militia, almost children themselves, raised in the same Mayan villages and then brutalized and drugged into becoming animals by the Kaibiles, special forces trained by the US in its global war against communism. After the Guatemalan Civil War, some went to the United States, where they encountered racism, unemployment, isolation and no help for the psychosis they brought with them. Some went to prison and formed gangs like Mara Salvatrucha and Calle 18.
The vicious maras were conceived in an American-backed war and born in American prisons.
When the PAC left the village, Nico’s mother was one of twelve left alive.
Twelve out of six hundred.
Like thousands of other Mayans, she migrated into the city.
Now Nico has to beat La Buitra to the Cayalá truck. No, he thinks, don’t get in front of her where she can see you. Stay behind her, watch what she sees, then swoop in at the last second and grab it.
If she’s the vulture, he thinks, you’re the hawk.
La Buitra, meet Nico Rápido, El Halcón.
Bending low to become even smaller, he squeezes through the crowd, peering between legs and around arms to keep his eye on La Buitra as she shoves her way to the Cayalá truck.
The truck stops, its carriage tilts up and the hydraulics groan like a giant mechanical mule as it dumps its trash. La Buitra moves in, her hips swinging resolutely, her elbows flying, bumping people out of her way.
Other trucks are dumping their trash, guajeros poring over their contents like ants swarming on a hill. Nico doesn’t look at their finds, he just focuses on La Buitra’s stubby legs. His excitement is intense—what could have come out of the Cayalá truck? Clothes, paper, food? He stays low behind her, keeping two other guajeros between them.
She beats everyone to the Cayalá truck and then Nico sees it.
A treasure.
Strips of aluminum.
He can get forty cents a pound for aluminum. Just three pounds—a dollar twenty—would be enough to pay off the pandilleros.
La Buitra sees it, too, of course. Unable to stab it, she clutches her stick under her arm, reaches down to pick up the aluminum.
Nico makes his move.
Moving out from his human screen, he dashes in under La Buitra’s outstretched arm and grabs the strips.
She screams like a bird.
Grabs her stick and swings at him, but he’s Nico Rápido, El Halcón, and dodges easily out of her way. She swings a backhand, just missing his head, and she raises the stick to stab him, but he scrambles away, clutching the precious strips of metal to his stomach.
He doesn’t stop to put more trash in his bag. He has to go to the vendedor to sell the aluminum. Then he can come back and pick more trash. But first he has to get out and get his money.
His money, he thinks.
The phrase sings in his head—my money.
The smile won’t leave his face as he pictures himself walking into their shack, pulling the bills out of his pocket and saying, “Here, Mami. Don’t worry about anything. I took care of things.”
I’m the man of the family.
Maybe, he thinks, I’ll find Pulga myself, step up to him and say, “Here’s your fucking money, you limp-dick pendejo.”
He knows he won’t, but it’s a happy thought and it makes him laugh. He puts his head down and trots toward the gate and then he sees—
a McDonald’s wrapper—
white—
a hamburger—
untouched.
God, Nico wants that burger.
God, he wants it.
He’s so hungry and it smells wonderful and it looks beautiful with red catsup and yellow mustard leaking out from the bun. A McDonald’s—something he’s heard about but never had. He wants to shove it in his mouth and bolt it down but . . .
Nico knows he should sell it to one of the meat vendors in El Basurero, who will put it in a stew. He can probably get as much as ten cents for it, five of which will belong to Pulga and Calle 18.
But the other five cents he should share with his mother.
He sticks the burger into his pocket.
Out of sight, out of mind is his idea.
But it isn’t.
Out of his mind.
It lingers there like a tantalizing dream. He can smell the burger even over the stink of the dump, the acrid smoke, the smell of seven thousand human beings scavenging garbage to survive.
Mami would never know, he thinks as he gets to the gate.
Calle 18, Pulga, would never know.
But you’d know, he thinks.
And God would know.
Jesus would see you eat the burger and he would cry.
No, he thinks, sell the burger and take so much money home to Mami that she will cry with joy.
Nico’s thinking this happy thought when the stick hits him in the face.
Knocks him off his feet and stuns him. Through teary eyes he sees La Buitra reach down and snatch the aluminum strips.
“¡Ladrón!” she yells at him. “Thief!” La Buitra swings the stick again, hitting him in the shoulder and knocking him onto his back.
He lies there and looks up at the sky.
Or what there is of it.
A cloud of smoke.
Vultures.
Nico reaches up and feels the blood on his face. His nose hurts like crazy and he can feel it already swelling.
He starts to cry.
He’s lost the money.
And Pulga will com
e tonight.
Nico lies there for several minutes, a little boy on a pile of garbage. He wants to lie there forever, give up, just die. He’s so tired and they say death is like sleep and it would be good to sleep.
It would be good to just die.
But if you do, he thinks, you leave Mami alone to face Pulga.
He makes himself sit up.
Then he pushes himself up with one hand and gets to his feet. He still has the burger and that will bring a little money. Then he can come back to the dump and maybe get some more.
Maybe enough to pay their debt to the mara.
He trudges out to find the meat man.
The meat man takes the burger and sniffs the wrapper. “It’s no good.”
“It’s not spoiled,” Nico says, thinking the man is trying to cheat him.
“No, it’s not spoiled,” the man says, “but the McDonald’s sprays oil on their garbage so it can’t be eaten. I can’t sell this—it will make people sick. Now go away, go find something I can sell.”
Nico walks away. Why would they do that? he wonders. If they’re not going to eat it, what’s the harm of letting other people have it? Because they can’t pay? It doesn’t make any sense.
Hungry, tired and discouraged, he sneaks back into the dump. His face hurts like fire, the blood on his face sticky and mixed with soot. The trucks from the rich neighborhoods will have been picked through by now, so Nico searches through the piles of garbage picking out anything that he can sell—a pair of old socks, trash paper, anything.
Finding a jar of jam, he smells it first, then runs his finger inside and licks some jam off. It tastes good, sweet, but only stimulates his hunger. He drops the jar into his plastic bag—he might get a few cents for it.
His stomach aches from hunger, but more from anxiety.
Time is running out, he hasn’t found enough to pay the mareros, and he knows that he won’t.
“What are you going to do?” Flor asks. She tears the tortilla and hands him half.
Nico shoves it into his mouth. “I don’t know.”
“I wish I had some money, I’d give it to you.” She’s nine years old and looks much smaller. But not younger—undernourished with a chronic low-grade infection, the little girl has sallow skin and dark circles under her eyes. “Pulga will do what he says.”