by Don Winslow
Tío Barrera is wearing a suit.
Even up here in the high brush, the governor’s special assistant is wearing his trademark black suit, white button-down shirt, skinny black tie. He looks comfortable and serene, the image of Latino male dignity.
He reminds you of one of those matinee idols from an old ’40s movie, Art thinks. Black hair slicked back, pencil mustache, thin, handsome face with cheekbones that look like they’re cut from granite.
Eyes as black as a moonless night.
Officially, Miguel Ángel Barrera is a cop, a Sinaloa state policeman, the bodyguard to the state governor, Manuel Sánchez Cerro. Unofficially, Barrera is a fixer, the governor’s point man. And seeing how Condor is technically a Sinaloa state operation, Barrera is the guy who’s really running the show.
And me, Art thinks. If I really want to be honest about it, Tío Barrera is running me.
The twelve weeks of DEA training weren’t that hard. The PT was a breeze—Art could easily run the three-mile course and play basketball, and the self-defense component was unsophisticated compared with Langley. The instructors just had them wrestle and box, and Art had finished third in the San Diego Golden Gloves as a kid.
He was a mediocre middleweight with good technique but slow hands. He found out the hard truth that you can’t learn speed. He was just good enough to get into the upper ranks, where he could really get beat up. But he showed he could take it, and that was his ticket as a mixed-race kid in the barrio. Mexican fight fans have more respect for what a fighter can take than for what he can dish out.
And Art could take it.
After he started boxing, the Mexican kids pretty much left him alone. Even the gangs backed off him.
In the DEA training sessions he made it a point to take it easy on his opponents in the ring, though. There was no point in beating someone up and making an enemy just to show off.
The law enforcement–procedure classes were tougher, but he got through them all right, and the drug training was pretty easy, questions like, Can you identify marijuana? Can you identify heroin? Art resisted the impulse to answer that he always could at home.
The other temptation he resisted was to finish first in his class. He could have, knew he could have, but decided to fly under the radar. The law enforcement guys already felt that the Company types were trespassing on their turf, so it was better to walk lightly.
So he took it a little easy in the physical training, kept quiet in class, punted a few questions on the tests. He did enough to do well, to pass, but not enough to shine. It was a little harder to be cool in the field training. Surveillance practice? Old hat. Hidden cameras, mikes, bugs? He could install them in his sleep. Clandestine meetings, dead drops, live drops, cultivating a source, interrogating a suspect, gathering intelligence, analyzing data? He could have taught the course.
He kept his mouth shut, graduated, and was declared a Special Agent of the DEA. They gave him a two-week vacation and sent him straight to Mexico.
Right to Culiacán.
The capital of the Western Hemisphere drug trade.
Opium’s market town.
The belly of the beast.
His new boss gave him a friendly greeting. Tim Taylor, the Culiacán RAC (Resident Agent in Charge) had already perused Art’s shield and seen through the transparent screen. He didn’t even look up from the file. Art was sitting across from his desk and the guy said, “Vietnam?”
“Yup.”
“ 'Accelerated Pacification Program’ . . .”
“Yup.” Accelerated Pacification Program, aka Operation Phoenix. The old joke being that a lot of guys got peaceful in a hurry.
“CIA,” Taylor said, and it wasn’t a question, it was a statement.
Question or statement, Art didn’t answer it. He knew the book on Taylor—he was an old BNDD guy who’d lived through the low-budget bad days. Now that drugs were a fat priority, he didn’t intend to lose his hard-earned gains to a bunch of new kids on the block.
“You know what I don’t like about you Company Cowboys?” Taylor asked.
“No, what?”
“You aren’t cops,” Taylor said. “You’re killers.”
And fuck you, too, Art thought. But he kept his mouth shut. Kept it firmly clamped while Taylor launched into a lecture about how he didn’t want any cowboy shit from Art. How they’re a “team” here and Art better be a “team player” and “play by the rules.”
Art would have been happy to be a team player if they would have let him on the team. Not that Art cared one hell of a lot. You grow up in the barrio as the son of an Anglo father and a Mexican mother, you’re not on anybody’s team.
Art’s father was a San Diego businessman who seduced a Mexican girl while on vacation in Mazatlán. (Art often thought it was funny that he was conceived, albeit not born, in Sinaloa.) Art Senior decided to do the right thing and marry the girl—not too painful an option, as she was a raving beauty; Art gets his good looks from his mother’s side. His father brings her back to the States, only to decide that she’s like a lot of things you get in Mexico on vacation—she looked a lot better on a moonlit beach in Mazatlán than in the cold, Anglo light of the American day-to-day.
Art Senior dumped her when Art was about a year old. She didn’t want to throw away the one advantage her son had in life—U.S. citizenship—so she moved in with some distant relations in Barrio Logan. Art knew who his father was—sometimes he’d sit in the little park on Crosby Street and look at the tall glass buildings downtown and imagine going into one of them to see his father.
But he didn’t.
Art Senior sent checks—faithfully at first and then sporadically—and he’d get occasional bouts of paternal urges or guilt and show up to take Art to dinner or maybe a Padres game. But their father-son time was awkward and forced, and by the time Art was in junior high the visits had stopped altogether.
Ditto the money.
So it was no easy thing when the seventeen-year-old Art finally made the trip downtown, marched into one of those tall glass buildings, strode into his father’s office, laid his killer SAT scores and UCLA acceptance letter on his desk and said, “Don’t freak out. All I want from you is a check.”
He got it.
Once a year for four years.
He got the lesson, too: YOYO.
You’re On Your Own.
Which was a good lesson to learn because the DEA just chucked him into Culiacán, virtually on his own. “Just get the lay of the land” is what Taylor told him at the start of a cliché-fest that also included “Get your feet wet,” “Easy does it” and, honest to God, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”
It should have included “And go fuck yourself,” because that was the thrust of it. Taylor and the cop types totally isolated him, kept info from him, wouldn’t introduce him to contacts, froze him out on meetings with the local Mexican cops, didn’t include him in the morning coffee-and-doughnut bullshit or the sundown beer sessions where the real information was passed.
He was fucked from jump street.
The local Mexicans weren’t going to talk to him because as a Yanqui in Culiacán he could only be one of two things—a drug dealer or a narc. He wasn’t a drug dealer because he wasn’t buying anything (Taylor wouldn’t free up any money; he didn’t want Art fucking up anything they already had going), so he had to be a narc.
The Culiacán police wouldn’t have anything to do with him because he was a Yanqui narc who should stay home and mind his own business, and besides, most of them were on Don Pedro Áviles’s payroll anyway. The Sinaloa state cops wouldn’t deal with him for the same reasons, with the additional rationale that if Keller’s own DEA wouldn’t work with him, why should they?
Not that the team was doing much better.
The DEA had been hammering on the Mexican government for two years, trying to get them to move against the gomeros. The agents brought evidence—photos, tapes, witnesses—only to have the federales promise to mo
ve right away and then not move, only to hear, “This is Mexico, señores. These things take time.”
While the evidence grew stale, the witnesses got scared and the federales rotated posts so that the Americans had to start all over again with a different federal cop, who told them to bring him solid evidence, bring him witnesses. Who, when they did, looked at them with perfect condescension and told them, “Señores, this is Mexico. These things take time.”
While the heroin flowed down from the hills into Culiacán like mud in a spring thaw, the young gomeros slugged it out with Don Pedro’s forces on a nightly basis until the city sounded to Art like Danang or Saigon, only with a lot more gunfire.
Night after night, Art would lie on the bed in his hotel room, drinking cheap scotch, maybe watching a soccer game or boxing match on TV, pissed off and feeling sorry for himself.
And missing Althie.
God, how he missed Althie.
He had met Althea Patterson on Bruin Walk in his senior year, introducing himself with a lame line: “Aren’t we in the same Poli Sci section?”
Tall, thin and blond, Althea was more angular than curvy; her nose was long and hooked, her mouth a little too wide, and her green eyes set a little too deep to be considered classically pretty, but Althea was beautiful.
And smart—they actually were in the same Poli Sci section, and he’d listened to her talk in class. She argued her viewpoint (a little to the left of Emma Goldman) ferociously, and that turned him on, too.
So they went out for pizza and then they went to her apartment in Westwood. She made espresso and they talked and he found out that she was a rich girl from Santa Barbara, her family Old California Money and her father a very big deal in the state Democratic Party.
To her, he was madly handsome, with that shock of black hair that fell over his forehead, that rugged broken nose that saved him from being a pretty boy, and the quiet intelligence that had brought a kid from the barrio to UCLA. There was something else, too—a loneliness, a vulnerability, a hurt, an edge of anger—that made him irresistible.
They ended up in bed, and in the postcoital darkness he asked, “So, can you cross that off your liberal checklist now?”
“What?”
“Sleeping with a spic.”
She thought about this for a few seconds, then answered, “See, I always thought that spic referred to a Puerto Rican. What I can cross off is sleeping with a beaner.”
“Actually,” he said, “I’m only half a beaner.”
“Well then, Jesus, Art,” she said. “What good are you?”
Althea was the exception to Art’s Doctrine of YOYO, an insidious infiltrator into the self-sufficiency that was already well ingrained in him by the time he met her. Secrecy was already a habit, a protective wall he had carefully constructed around himself as a kid. By the time he fell in love with Althie, he’d had the added advantage of professional instruction in the discipline of mental compartmentalization.
The Company’s talent-spotters had lamped him in his sophomore year, picked him like low-hanging fruit.
His International Relations professor, a Cuban expatriate, took him out for coffee, then started advising him on what classes to take, what languages to study. Professor Osuna brought him home to dinner, taught him which fork to use when, which wine to select with what, even which women to date. (Professor Osuna loved Althea. “She’s perfect for you,” he said. “She gives you sophistication.”)
It was more of a seduction than a recruitment.
Not that Art was hard to seduce.
They have a nose for guys like me, Art thought later. The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither. And you were perfect for them—smart, street-tough, ambitious. You looked white but you fought brown. All you needed was the polish, and they gave you that.
Then came the small errands: “Arturo, there’s a Bolivian professor visiting. Could you escort him around the city?” A few more of those, then, “Arturo, what does Dr. Echeverría like to do in his leisure time? Does he drink? Does he like the girls? No? Perhaps the boys?” Then, “Arturo, if Professor Méndez wanted some marijuana, could you get it for him?” “Arturo, could you tell me who our distinguished poet friend is speaking to on the telephone?” “Arturo, this is a listening device. If you could perhaps insinuate it into his room . . .”
Art did it all without blinking, and did it all well.
They handed him his diploma and a ticket to Langley practically at the same time. Explaining this to Althie was an interesting exercise. “I can sort of tell you, but I can’t really,” was about the best he could manage. She wasn’t stupid; she got it.
“Boxing,” she told him, “is the perfect metaphor for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“The art of keeping things out,” she said. “You’re so skilled at it. Nothing touches you.”
That’s not true, Art thought. You touch me.
They got married a few weeks before he shipped out to Vietnam. He’d write her long, passionate letters that never included anything about what he actually did. He was changed when he got home, she thought; of course he was, why wouldn’t he be? But the insularity that had always been there was intensified. He could suddenly put oceans of emotional distance between them and deny that he was doing it. Then he would revert to being that sweet, intensely affectionate man with whom she had fallen in love.
She was relieved when he said he was thinking about changing jobs. He was enthused about the new DEA; he thought he could really do some good there. She encouraged him to take the job, even though it meant he was going to leave for another three months, even when he came home just long enough to get her pregnant and left again, this time for Mexico.
He wrote her long, passionate letters from Mexico that never included anything about what he actually did. Because I don’t do anything, he wrote her.
Not a goddamn thing except feel sorry for myself.
So get off your ass and do something, she wrote back. Or quit and come home to me. I know Daddy could get you a job on a senator’s staff in no time, just say the word.
Art didn’t say the word.
What he did was get off his ass and go see a saint.
Everyone in Sinaloa knows the legend of Santo Jesús Malverde. He was a bandito, a daring robber, a man of the poor who gave back to the poor, a Sinaloan Robin Hood. His luck ran out in 1909 and the federales hanged him on a gallows just across the street from where his shrine now stands.
The shrine was spontaneous. First some flowers, then a picture, then a small building of rough-hewn planks, put up by the poor at night. Even the police were afraid to tear it down because the legend grew that the soul of Malverde lived in the shrine. That if you came here and prayed, and lit a candle and made a manda—a devotional promise—Jesús Malverde could and would grant favors.
Bring you a good crop, protect you from your enemies, heal your illnesses.
Notes of gratitude detailing the favors that Malverde has bestowed are stuck into the walls: a sick child cured, rent money magically appeared, an arrest evaded, a conviction overturned, a mojado returned safely from El Norte, a murder avoided, a murder avenged.
Art went to the shrine. Figured it was a good place to start. He walked down from his hotel, waited patiently in line with the other pilgrims and finally got inside.
He was used to saints. His mother had faithfully dragged him to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Barrio Logan, where he took catechism classes, made his First Communion, was confirmed. He had prayed to saints, lit candles at the statues of saints, sat as a child and looked at paintings of saints.
Actually, Art was a pretty faithful Catholic even during college. He was a regular communicant in Vietnam at first, but his devotion waned and he stopped going to confession. It was like, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, Forgive me, Father, for I have— Oh, fuck it, what’s the point? Every day I mark men for death, every oth
er week I kill them myself. I’m not going to come in here and tell you that I’m not going to do it again, when it’s on the schedule, regular as Mass.
Sal Scachi, one of the Special Forces guys, used to go to Mass every Sunday he wasn’t out killing people. Art used to marvel how the perceived hypocrisy didn’t faze him. They even talked about it one drunken night, Art and this very Italian guy from New York.
“It don’t bother me,” Scachi said. “Shouldn’t bother you. The VC don’t believe in God, anyway, so fuck 'em.”
They got into a ferocious debate, Art appalled that Scachi actually thought they were “doing God’s work” by assassinating Vietcong. Communists are atheists, Scachi repeated, who want to destroy the Church. So what we’re doing, he explained, is defending the Church, and that isn’t a sin, it’s a duty.