by Don Winslow
Art would think about that, the realization that until Adán Barrera, he’d never really had a friend.
He had Althie, but that was different.
You can describe your wife, truthfully, as your best friend, but it’s not the same thing. It’s not that male thing, that brother-you-never-had, guy-you-hang-out-with thing.
Cuates, amigos, almost hermanos.
Hard to know how that happens.
Maybe what Adán saw in Art was what he didn’t find in his own brother—an intelligence, a seriousness, a maturity he didn’t have himself but wanted. Maybe what Art saw in Adán . . . Christ, later he’d try for years to explain it, even to himself. It was just that, back in those days, Adán Barrera was a good guy. He really was, or at least it seemed that way. Whatever it was that was lying dormant inside him . . .
Maybe it lies in all of us, Art would later think.
It sure as hell did in me.
The power of the dog.
It was Adán, inevitably, who introduced him to Tío.
Six weeks later, Art was lying on his bed in his hotel room, watching a soccer match on TV, feeling shitty because Tim Taylor had just received the okay to reassign him. Probably send me to Iowa to check if drugstores are complying with regulations on prescribing cough medicine or something, Art thought.
Career over.
There was a knock at the door.
Art opened it to see a man in a black suit, white shirt and skinny black tie. Hair slicked back in the old-fashioned style, pencil mustache, eyes black as midnight.
Maybe forty years old, with an Old World gravitas.
“Señor Keller, forgive me for disturbing your privacy,” he said. “My name is Miguel Ángel Barrera. Sinaloa State Police. I wonder if I might have a few moments of your time.”
No shit you can, Art thought, and asked him in. Luckily, Art had most of a fifth of scotch left over from a bunch of lonely nights, so he could at least offer the man a drink. Barrera accepted it and offered Art a thin black Cuban cigar in return.
“I quit,” Art said.
“Do you mind, then?”
“I’ll live vicariously through you,” Art answered. He looked around for an ashtray and found one, then the two men sat down at the small table next to the window. Barrera looked at Art for a few seconds, as if considering something, then said, “My nephew asked if I’d stop in and see you.”
“Your nephew?”
“Adán Barrera.”
“Right.”
My uncle is a cop, Art thought. So this is “Tío.”
Art said, “Adán conned me into getting in the ring with one of the best fighters I’ve ever seen.”
“Adán fancies himself a manager,” Tío said. “Raúl thinks he's a trainer.”
“They do all right,” Art said. “Cesar could take them a long way.”
“I own Cesar,” Barrera said. “I’m an indulgent uncle, I let my nephews play. But soon I will have to hire a real manager and a real trainer for Cesar. He deserves no less. He’ll be a champion.”
“Adán will be disappointed.”
“Learning to deal with disappointment is part of becoming a man,” Barrera said.
Well, that’s no shit.
“Adán relates that you are in some sort of professional difficulty?”
Now, how do I answer that? Art wondered. Taylor would no doubt employ a cliché about “not washing our dirty laundry in public,” but he’d be right. He’d shit jagged glass anyway if he knew that Barrera was even here, going under his head, as it were, to talk with a junior officer.
“My boss and I don’t always see eye to eye.”
Barrera nodded. “Señor Taylor’s vision can be somewhat narrow. All he can see is Pedro Áviles. The trouble with your DEA is that it is, forgive me, so very American. Your colleagues do not understand our culture, how things work, how things have to work.”
The man isn’t wrong, Art thought. Our approach down here has been clumsy and heavy-handed, to say the least. That fucked-up American attitude of “We know how to get things done,” “Just get out of our way and let us do the job.” And why not? It worked so well in 'Nam.
Art answered in Spanish, “What we lack in subtlety, we make up for with a lack of subtlety.”
Barrera asked, “Are you Mexican, Señor Keller?”
“Half,” Art said. “On my mother’s side. As a matter of fact, she’s from Sinaloa. Mazatlán.”
Because, Art thought, I’m not above playing that card.
“But you were raised in the barrio,” Barrera said. “In San Diego?”
This isn’t a conversation, Art thought, it’s a job interview.
“You know San Diego?” he asked. “I lived on Thirtieth Street.”
“But you stayed out of the gangs?”
“I boxed.”
Barrera nodded, and then started speaking in Spanish.
“You want to take down the gomeros,” Barrera said. “So do we.”
“Sin falta.”
“But as a boxer,” Barrera said, “you know that you just can’t go for the knockout right away. You have to set your opponent up, take his legs away from him with body punches, cut the ring off. You do not go for the knockout until the time is right.”
Well, I didn’t have a lot of knockouts, Art thought, but the theory is right. We Yanquis want to swing for the knockout right away, and the man is telling me that it isn’t set up yet.
Fair enough.
“What you’re saying makes great sense to me,” Art said. “It’s wisdom. But patience is not a particularly American virtue. I think if my superiors could just see some progress, some motion—”
“Your superiors,” Barrera said, “are difficult to work with. They are . . .”
He searches for a word.
Art finishes it for him. “Falta gracia.”
“Ill-mannered,” Barrera agrees. “Exactly. If, on the other hand, we could work with someone símpático, un compañero, someone like yourself . . .”
So, Art thinks, Adán asked him to save my ass, and now he’s decided it’s worth doing. He’s an indulgent uncle, he lets his nephews play; but he’s also a serious man with a definite objective in mind, and I might be useful in achieving that objective.
Again, fair enough. But this is a slippery slope. An unreported relationship outside the agency? Strictly verboten. A partnership with one of the most important men in Sinaloa and I keep it in my pocket? A time bomb. It could get me fired from the DEA altogether.
Then again, what do I have to lose?
Art poured them each another drink, then said, “I’d love to work with you, but there’s a problem.”
Barrera shrugged. “¿Y qué?”
“I won’t be here,” Art said. “They’re reassigning me.”
Barrera sipped his whiskey with a polite pretense of enjoyment, as if it were good whiskey, when they both knew that it was cheap shit. Then he asked, “Do you know the real difference between America and Mexico?”
Art shook his head.
“In America, everything is about systems,” Barrera said. “In Mexico, everything is about personal relationships.”
And you’re offering me one, Art thought. A personal relationship of the symbiotic nature.
“Señor Barrera—”
“My given names are Miguel Ángel,” Barrera said, “but my friends call me Tío.”
Tío, Art thought.
“Uncle.”
That’s the literal translation, but the word implies a lot more in Mexican Spanish. Tío could be a parent’s brother, but he could also be any relative who takes an interest in a kid’s life. It goes beyond that; a Tío can be any man who takes you under his wing, an older-brother type, even a paternal figure.
Sort of a godfather.
“Tío . . .” Art began.
Barrera smiled and accepted the tribute with a slight bow of his head. Then he said, “Arturo, mi sobrino . . .”
Arthur, my nephew . . .
&nb
sp; You’re not going anywhere.
Except up.
Art’s reassignment was canceled the next afternoon. He was called back into Taylor’s office.
“Who the fuck do you know?” Taylor asked him.
Art shrugged.
“I just had my leash jerked all the way from Washington,” Taylor said. “Is this some CIA shit? Are you still on their payroll? Who do you work for, Keller—them or us?”
Me, Art thought. I work for myself. But he didn’t say it. He just ate his ration of shit and said, “I work for you, Tim. Say the word, I’ll have 'DEA’ tattooed on my ass. If you want, it can be a heart with your name across it.”
Taylor stared across the desk at him, obviously unsure of whether Art was fucking with him or not, and of how to respond. He settled on a tone of bureaucratic neutrality and said, “I have instructions to let you alone to do your own thing. Do you know how I choose to view this, Keller?”
“As giving me enough rope to hang myself?”
“Exactly.”
How did I know?
“I’ll produce for you, Tim,” Art said, getting up to leave the room. “I’ll produce for the team.”
But on the way out he couldn’t help singing, albeit softly, “I’m an old cowhand, from the Rio Grande. But I can’t poke a cow, 'cuz I don’t know how . . .”
A partnership made in hell.
This is how Art would later describe it.
Art Keller and Tío Barrera.
They met rarely and secretly. Tío chose his targets carefully. Art could see it building—or, more accurately, deconstructing, as Barrera used Art and the DEA to remove one brick after another from Don Pedro’s structure. A valuable poppy field, then a cookery, then a lab, then two junior gomeros, three crooked state policeman, a federale who was taking the mordida—the bite, the bribe—from Don Pedro.
Barrera stayed aloof from it all, never getting directly involved, never taking any credit, just using Art as his knife hand to gut the Áviles organization. Art wasn’t just a puppet in all this, either. He used the sources Barrera gave him to work other sources, to establish leverage, to create assets in the metastasizing algebra of intelligence gathering. One source gets you two, two gets you five, five gets you . . .
Well, among the good things, it also gets endless servings of shit from the cop types in the DEA. Tim Taylor had Art on the carpet a half-dozen times. Where are you getting your info, Art? Who’s your source? You got a snitch? We’re a team, Art. There’s no I in team.
Yeah, but there is in win, Art thought, and that’s what we’re finally doing—winning. Creating leverage, playing one rival gomero against another, showing the Sinaloan campesinos that the days of the gomero overlords are really coming to an end. So he told Taylor nothing.
He had to admit there was an element of Fuck you, Tim, and your team.
While Tío Barrera maneuvered like a master technician in the ring. Always pressing forward, but always with his guard up. Setting up his punches and throwing them only when there was minimal risk to himself. Knocking the wind and the legs out from under Don Pedro, cutting off the ring, then—
The knockout punch.
Operation Condor.
The mass sweep of troops and supporting aircraft, with bombing and defoliants, but still it was Art Keller who could direct them where to hit, almost as if he had a personal map of every poppy field, cookery and lab in the province, which was almost literally true.
Now Art crouches in the brush, waiting for the big prize.
With all the success of Condor, the DEA is still focused on one goal: Get Don Pedro. It’s all Art has heard about: Where is Don Pedro? Get Don Pedro. We have to get El Patrón.
As if we have to hang that trophy head on the wall, or the whole operation is a failure. Hundred of thousands of acres of poppies destroyed, the entire infrastructure of the Sinaloan gomeros devastated, but we still need that one old man as a symbol of our success.
They’re out there, running around like crazy, chasing every rumor and tidbit of intelligence; but always a step behind, or, as Taylor might say, a day late and a dollar short. Art can’t decide what Taylor wants more—to get Don Pedro or for Art not to get Don Pedro.
Art was out in a Jeep, inspecting the charred ruins of a major heroin lab, when Tío Barrera came rolling up out of the smoke with a small convoy of DFS troops.
The fucking DFS? Art wondered. The Dirección Federal de Seguridad—Federal Security Directorate—is like the FBI and CIA rolled into one, except more powerful. The DFS boys virtually have carte blanche for whatever they do in Mexico. Now, Tío is a Jalisco state cop—what the hell is he doing with a squad of the elite DFS, and in command, no less? Tío leaned out of his open Jeep Cherokee and simply said, with a sigh, “I suppose we had better go pick up old Don Pedro.”
Handing Art the biggest prize in the War on Drugs as if it were a bag of groceries.
“You know where he is?” Art asked.
“Better,” Tío said. “I know where he’s going to be.”
So now Art sits crouched in the brush, waiting for the old man to walk into the ambush. He can feel Tío’s eyes on him. He looks over to see Tío pointedly looking at his watch.
Art gets the message.
Anytime now.
Don Pedro Áviles sits in the front seat of his Mercedes convertible as it slowly rumbles over the dirt back road. They’ve driven out of the burning valley, up onto the mountain. If he gets down the other side, he’ll be safe.
“Be careful,” he tells young Güero, who’s driving. “Watch the holes. It’s an expensive car.”
“We have to get you out of here, patrón,” Güero tells him.
“I know that,” Don Pedro snaps. “But did we have to take this road? The car will be ruined.”
“There will be no soldiers on this road,” Güero tells him. “No federales, no state police.”
“You know this for a fact?” Áviles asks.
Again.
“I have it straight from Barrera,” Güero says. “He has cleared this route.”
“He should clear a route,” Áviles says. “The money I pay them.”
Money to Governor Cerro, money to General Hernández. Barrera comes as regular as a woman’s curse to collect the money. Always, the money to the politicians, to the generals. It has always been this way, since Don Pedro was a boy, learning the business from his father.
And there will always be these periodic sweeps, these ritual cleansings coming down from Mexico City at the behest of the Yanquis. This time it’s in exchange for higher oil prices, and Governor Cerro sent Barrera to give Don Pedro the word: Invest in oil, Don Pedro. Sell off opium and put the money in oil. It’s going up soon. And the opium . . .
So I let the young fools buy into my poppy fields. Took their money and put it into the oil. And Cerro let the Yanquis burn the poppy fields. Doing work that the sun would do for them.
For that’s the great joke: Operation Condor timed to happen just before the drought years come. He has seen it in the sky the past two years. Seen it in the trees, the grass, the birds. The drought years are coming. Five years of bad crops before the rains come back.
“If the Yanquis did not burn the fields,” Don Pedro tells Güero, “I would have. Refresh the soil.”
So it is a farce, this Operation Condor; a play, a joke.
But still he has to get out of Sinaloa.
Áviles has not stayed alive for seventy-three years by being careless. So he has Güero driving and five of his most trusted sicarios—gunmen—in a car behind. Men whose families all live in Don Pedro’s compound in Culiacán, who would all be killed if anything should happen to Don Pedro.
And Güero—his apprentice, his assistant. An orphan whom he took off the streets of Culiacán as a manda to Santo Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of all Sinaloan gomeros. Güero, whom he raised in the business, to whom he taught everything. A young man now, his right-hand man, cat smart, who can do monumental figures in his head i
n a flash, who is nevertheless driving the Mercedes too fast on this rough road.
“Slow down,” Áviles orders.
Güero—“Blondie,” because of his light hair—chuckles. The old man has millions and millions, but he will cluck like an old hen over a repair bill. He could throw this Mercedes away and not miss it, but will complain about the few pesos it will cost to wash the dust off.