The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  The team of federales from Mexico City is in place here, waiting to grab Barrera. At the same time, a special unit of army troops is perched on the edge of town, ready to move in and detain the entire Jalisco State Police force, its chief and the governor of the state until Barrera is flown to Mexico City, arraigned and jailed.

  It’s a state coup d'état, Art thinks, planned to the second, and if this moment passes, it will be impossible to maintain secrecy for another day. The Jalisco police will get their boy Barrera out, the governor will plead ignorance, and it will be over.

  So it has to be now.

  He watches the front door of the house.

  Please, God, let them be hungry.

  Let them go to breakfast.

  He stares at the door of the house as if he could make it open.

  Tío is a crackhead.

  Hooked on the pipe.

  It’s tragic, Adán thinks as he looks at his uncle. What started as a pantomime of disability has become real, as if Tío acted his way into a role that he can’t shake off. Always a slim man, he’s thinner than ever, doesn’t eat, chain-smokes one cigar after another. When he’s not inhaling the smoke, he coughs it up. His once jet-black hair is now silver, and his skin has a yellowish tint. He’s hooked up to a glucose IV on a rolling stand that he drags behind him everywhere like a pet dog.

  He’s fifty-three years old.

  A young girl—Christ, what is this? the fifth or sixth since Pilar—comes in, plops her ample ass down on the easy chair and clicks the television on with the remote. Raúl is shocked at the disrespect, even more shocked when his uncle says meekly, “Calor de mi vida, we are talking business.”

  Warmth of my life, my ass, Adán thinks. The girl—he can’t even think of her name—is yet another pale imitation of Pilar Talavera Méndez. Twenty pounds heavier, limp, greasy hair, a face that’s many carnitas away from being pretty, but there is a faint resemblance. Adán could understand the obsession with Pilar—God, what a beauty—but with this segundera, he can’t comprehend. Especially when the girl puts a pout on her gash of a fat mouth and mewls, “You’re always talking business.”

  “Make us some lunch,” Adán says.

  “I don’t cook.” She sneers and waddles out. They can hear another television come on, loudly, from another room.

  “She likes her soap operas,” Tío explains.

  Adán has been silent so far, sitting back in his chair and watching his uncle with growing concern. His obvious bad health, his weakness, his attempts to replace Pilar, attempts as persistent as they are disastrous. Tío Ángel is fast becoming a pathetic figure and yet he is still the patrón of the pasador.

  Tío leans over and whispers, “Do you see her?”

  “Who, Tío?”

  “Her,” Tío croaks. “Méndez’s mujer. Pilar.”

  Güero had married the girl. Met her as she got off the plane from her Salvadoran “honeymoon” with Tío, and actually married a girl whom most Mexican men wouldn’t have touched because not only was she not a virgin, she was Barrera’s thing-on-the-side, his segundera.

  That’s how much Güero loves Pilar Talavera.

  “Sí, Tío,” Adán says. “ I see her.”

  Tío nods. Looks quickly toward the living room to make sure the girl is still watching television, and then whispers, “Is she still beautiful?”

  “No, Tío,” Adán lies. “She is fat now. And ugly.”

  But she isn’t.

  She is, Adán thinks, exquisite. He goes to Méndez’s Sinaloa ranch every month with their tribute and he sees her there. She’s a young mother now, with a three-year-old daughter and an infant son, and she looks terrific. The adolescent baby fat is gone, and she’s matured into a beautiful young woman.

  And Tío is still in love with her.

  Adán tries to get back on track. “What about Keller?”

  “What about him?” Tío asks.

  “He snatched Mette out of Honduras,” Adán says, “and now he’s kidnapped Álvarez right here from Guadalajara. Are you next?”

  It’s a real concern, Adán thinks.

  Tío shrugs. “Mette got complacent, Álvarez was careless. I’m none of those things. I’m careful. I change houses every few days. The Jalisco police protect me. Besides, I have other friends.”

  “You mean the CIA?” Adán asks. “The Contra war is over. What use are you to them now?”

  Because loyalty is not an American virtue, Adán thinks, nor is long memory. If you don’t know that, just ask Manuel Noriega in Panama. He had also been a key partner in Cerberus, a touch point on the Mexican Trampoline, and where is he now? Same place as Mette and Álvarez, in an American prison, except it wasn’t Art but Noriega’s old friend George Bush who put him there. Invaded his country, grabbed him and put him away.

  So if you’re counting on the Americans to repay you with loyalty, Tío, count on the fingers of one hand. I watched Art’s performance on CNN. There is a price for his silence, and the price might be you, might be all of us.

  “Don’t worry, mi sobrino,” Tío is saying. “Los Pinos is a friend of ours.”

  Los Pinos, the residence of the president of Mexico.

  “What makes him such a friend?” Adán asks.

  “Twenty-five million of my dollars,” Tío answers. “And that other thing.”

  Adán knows what “that other thing” is.

  That the Federación had helped this president to steal the election. Four years ago, back in ’88, it seemed certain that the opposition candidate, the leftist Cárdenas, was going to win the election and topple the PRI, which had been in power since the 1917 Revolution.

  Then a funny thing happened.

  The computers that counted the votes magically malfunctioned.

  The election commissioner appeared on television to shrug and announce that the computers had broken down and that it would take several days to count the votes and determine the winner. And during those several days, the bodies of the two opposition watchdogs in charge of monitoring the computer votes—the two men who could have and would have asserted the truth, that Cárdenas had won 55 percent of the vote—were found in the river.

  Facedown.

  And the election commissioner had gone back on television to announce with a perfectly straight face that the PRI had won the election.

  The current presidente took office and proceeded to nationalize the banks, the telecommunications industries, the oil fields, all of which were purchased at below-market prices by the same men who had come to his fund-raising dinner and left twenty-five million dollars apiece on the table as a tip.

  Adán knows that Tío hadn’t arranged the murders of the election officials—that had been García Abrego—but Tío would have known about it and given his okay. And while Abrego is thick as thieves with Los Pinos—partners, in fact, with El Bagman, the president’s brother, who owns a third of all the cocaine shipments that Abrego runs through his Gulf cartel—Tío has good reason to believe that Los Pinos has every reason to be loyal to him.

  Adán has his doubts.

  Now he looks at his uncle and sees that he’s anxious to end the meeting. Tío wants to smoke his crack and won’t do it in front of Adán. It’s sad, he thinks as he leaves, to see what the drug has done to this great man.

  Adán takes a taxi to the Cross of Squares and walks toward the cathedral to request a miracle.

  God and science, he thinks.

  The sometimes cooperative, sometimes conflicting powers to whom Adán and Lucía go to try to help their daughter.

  Lucía turns more to God.

  She goes to church—prays, offers Masses and benedictions, kneels before a panoply of saints. She buys milagros outside the cathedral and offers them up, she burns candles, she gives money, she sacrifices.

  Adán goes to church on Sundays, makes his offerings, says his prayers, takes Communion, but it’s more of a gesture, a nod to Lucía. He doesn’t believe, anymore, that help will come from that direction. So
he genuflects, mumbles the words, goes through the motions, but they are empty gestures. On his regular trips to Culiacán to bring his regular offering to Güero Méndez, he stops at the shrine of Santo Jesús Malverde and makes his manda.

  He prays to the Narcosanto, but puts more hope in the doctors.

  Adán markets drugs; he gets biopharmacology.

  Pediatric neurologists, neuropsychologists, psychoneurologists, endocrinologists, brain specialists, research chemists, herbal healers, native healers, charlatans, quacks. Doctors everywhere—in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, England, France, Switzerland and even just across the border, in the USA.

  Adán can’t go on those visits.

  Can’t accompany his wife and daughter on their sad, futile trudges to specialists at Scripps in La Jolla or Mercy in Los Angeles. He sends Lucía with written notes, written questions, stacks of medical records, histories, tests results. Lucía takes Gloria by herself, crosses the border under her maiden name—she’s still a citizen—and sometimes they are gone for weeks, sometimes months, when Adán aches for his daughter. They always return with the same old news.

  That there is no news.

  No new miracle has been discovered.

  Or revealed.

  Not by God or the doctor.

  There is nothing more they can do.

  Adán and Lucía comfort each other with hope and faith—which Lucía possesses and Adán feigns—and love.

  Adán loves his wife and daughter deeply.

  He’s a good husband, a wonderful father.

  Other men, Lucía knows, might have turned their backs on a deformed child, might have avoided the girl, avoided the home, made a thousand excuses to spend time away.

  Not Adán.

  He is home almost every night, almost every weekend. He’s in Gloria’s room the first thing every morning to kiss her and give her a hug; then he makes her breakfast before he goes off to work. When he comes home in the evening his first stop is to her room. He reads to her, tells her stories, plays games with her.

  Nor does Adán hide his child like something shameful. He takes her for long strolls in the Río district. Takes her to the park, to lunch, to the circus, anywhere, everywhere. They are a common sight in the better neighborhoods of Tijuana—Adán, Lucía and Gloria. All the shopkeepers know the girl—they give her candy, flowers, small pieces of jewelry, hairpins, bracelets, pretty things.

  When Adán has to go away on business—as he is now, on his regular junket to Guadalajara to visit with Tío, then to Culiacán with a briefcase of cash for Güero—he calls every day, several times a day, to speak with his daughter. He tells her jokes, funny things that he has seen. He brings her presents from Guadalajara, Culiacán, Badiraguato.

  And those trips to the doctors that he can go on—all of them except in the United States—he goes. He’s become an expert on cystic lymphangioma; he reads, he studies, he asks questions, he offers incentives and rewards. He makes large donations to research, quietly inveighs his business partners to do the same. He and Lucía have nice things, a nice home, but they could have much nicer things, a much bigger home, except for the money they spend on doctors. And donations and pledges and Masses and benedictions and playgrounds and clinics.

  Lucía is glad for this. She doesn’t need nicer things, a bigger home. She doesn’t need—and wouldn’t want—the lavish and, frankly, tasteless mansions that some of the other narcotraficantes have.

  Lucía and Adán would give anything they have, any parent would, to any doctor or any god, every doctor and every god, who would cure their child.

  The more science fails, the more Lucía turns to religion. She finds more hope in a divine miracle than in the hard numbers of the medical reports. A blessing from God, from the saints, from Our Lady of Guadalupe could reverse the tide of those numbers in the blink of an eye, in the flutter of a heart. She haunts the church, becomes a daily communicant, brings their parish priest, Father Rivera, home for dinners, for private prayer and counseling sessions, for Bible study. She questions the depth of her faith (“Perhaps it is my doubt that is blocking a milagro”), questions the sincerity of Adán's. She urges him to attend Mass more often, to pray harder, to give even more money to the Church, to talk with Father Rivera, to “tell him what’s in your heart.”

  To make her feel better, he goes to see the priest.

  Rivera’s not a bad guy, if a bit of a fool. Adán sits in the priest’s office, across the desk from him, and says, “I hope you’re not encouraging Lucía to believe that it’s her lack of faith that prevents a cure for our daughter.”

  “Of course not. I would never suggest or even think such a thing.”

  Adán nods.

  “But let’s talk about you,” Rivera says. “How can I be of help to you, Adán?”

  “Really, I’m fine.”

  “It can’t be easy—”

  “It isn’t. It’s life.”

  “And how are things between you and Lucía?”

  “They’re fine.”

  Rivera gets this clever look on his face, then asks, “And in the bedroom? May I ask? How are the connubial—”

  Adán makes a successful effort to suppress a smirk. It always amuses him when priests, these self-castrated eunuchs, want to give advice on sexual matters. Rather like a vegetarian offering to barbecue your steak for you. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that Lucía has been discussing their sex life with the priest; otherwise, the man would never have had the nerve to raise the subject.

  The fact is that there’s nothing to discuss.

  There is no sex life. Lucía is terrified of getting pregnant. And because the Church forbids artificial contraception and she will do nothing that might indicate anything other than a total commitment to the laws of the Church . . .

  He has told her a hundred times that the chances of having another baby with a birth defect are a thousand to one, a million to one, really, but logic has no traction with her. She knows he’s right, but she tearfully confesses to him one night that she just can’t bear the thought of that moment in the hospital, that moment when she was told, when she saw . . .

  She can’t bear the thought of reliving that moment.

  She has tried to make love with him several times when the rhythms of natural contraception allowed, but she simply froze up. Terror and guilt, Adán observes, are not aphrodisiacs.

  The truth, he would like to tell Rivera, is that it isn’t important to him. That he’s busy at work, busy at home, that all his energies are taken up with running a business (the specific nature of that business is never discussed), taking care of a very ill, severely handicapped child, and trying to find a cure for her. Compared with their daughter’s suffering the lack of a sex life is insignificant.

  “I love my wife,” he tells Rivera.

  “I have encouraged her to have more children,” Rivera says. “To—”

  Enough, Adán thinks. This is getting insulting. “Father,” he says, “Gloria is all we can care for now.”

  He leaves a check on the desk.

  Goes home and tells Lucía that he has spoken with Father Rivera, and the talk strengthened his faith.

  But what Adán really believes in are numbers.

  It hurts him to see this sad, futile faith of hers; he knows she is hurting herself more deeply every day, because the one thing Adán knows for certain is that numbers never lie. He deals with numbers all day, every day. He makes key decisions based on numbers, and he knows that arithmetic is the absolute law of the universe, that a mathematical proof is the only proof.

  And the numbers say that their daughter will get worse, not better, as she gets older, that his wife’s fervent prayers are unheard or unanswered.

  So he puts his hopes in science, that someone somewhere will come up with (literally) the right formula, the miracle drug, the surgical procedure that will trump God and His useless entourage of saints.

  In the meantime, there is nothing to do but keep putting one foot in front of the o
ther in this futile marathon.

  Neither God nor science can help his daughter.

  Nora’s skin is a warm pink, flushed from the bath’s steaming water.