“Haven’t gone bad for you, either.”
Don Epifanio nodded slowly, agreeing. Pensive. Then he sat down beside her. They were sitting exactly the way they had been the last time, except that she wasn’t holding a Double Eagle.
“Twelve years, right? You and I on this very spot, with that notebook of Güero’s . . .”
He paused, giving Teresa a chance to add a memory of her own to the conversation. But she said nothing. After a moment don Epifanio took a cigar out of the chest pocket of his jacket.
“I never imagined,” he started to say as he took off the wrapper. But he stopped again, as though he’d just come to the conclusion that what he’d never imagined didn’t matter now.
“I think we all underestimated you,” he said at last. “Your man. Me. All of us.” He spoke the words “your man” a little softer, as if trying to slip them in unnoticed among the rest.
“Maybe that’s why I’m still alive.”
Don Epifanio thought that over as he held the flame of his lighter to the cigar.
“Being alive is not a permanent state, or guaranteed,” he said with the first puff. “A person stays alive until he’s not anymore.”
The two of them smoked for a while, not looking at each other. She’d almost finished her cigarette.
“What are you doing, Teresa, getting involved in all this?”
She took one last puff, then dropped the butt and carefully put it out with the toe of her boot.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” she replied, “it’s to settle some old debts.”
“Debts,” Epifanio repeated. He took another puff on his Havana. “It’s better to just let some debts go.”
“No way to do that,” said Teresa, “if they keep you from sleeping at night.”
“You don’t gain anything.”
“What I gain is my business.”
For a few seconds the only sounds were the sputtering of the candles at the altar and the rain beating on the roof of the chapel. Outside, the red and blue of the Federales’ car was still flashing.
“Why do you want to screw me? . . . All you’re doing is playing into the hands of my political enemies.”
It was a nice tone, she had to admit. Almost affectionate. Less a reproach than a hurt question. He was the betrayed godfather. The wounded friend. And the fact is, she thought, I never saw him as a bad guy. He was often sincere with me, and maybe still is.
“I don’t know who your enemies are, and I don’t care,” she answered.
“You did wrong in killing Güero. And Chino. And Brenda and the kids.”
If this was about affection, she could go that route, too. Don Epifanio looked at the ember of his cigar, frowning.
“I don’t know what they’ve told you. But whatever it was, this is Sinaloa. . . . You’re from here, and you know what the rules are.”
“The rules,” Teresa said slowly, “include collecting debts from people that owe you.” She paused, and she heard the man’s breathing as he concentrated on her words. “And besides the others,” she added, “you tried to have me killed.”
“That’s a lie!” Don Epifanio seemed genuinely shocked. “You were here, with me. I protected you, I saved your life . . . I helped you escape.”
“I’m talking about later. When you changed your mind.”
“In our world,” don Epifanio said, after thinking about it, “business is complicated.” He studied her once he’d said this, like a man waiting for a tranquilizer to take effect. “Anyway,” he added, “I can understand that you’d want to send me the bill. You’re from Sinaloa, and I respect that. But to strike a deal with the gringos and those cabrones in the government that want to bring me down . . .”
“You don’t have any idea what cabrones, if any, I’ve struck a deal with.”
She said this somberly, with a firmness that left the man thoughtful. He held the cigar in his mouth, his eyes squinting from the smoke, the flashes from the street turning him alternately red and blue.
“Tell me one thing. The night we met you’d read the notebook, hadn’t you? . . . You knew about Güero. . . . But I didn’t realize that. You tricked me.”
“My life was on the line.”
“So why are you digging up all these old things?”
“Because until now I didn’t know who asked Batman Güemes for a favor. And Güero was my man.”
“He was a DEA cabrón.”
“Cabrón and DEA, he was my man.”
She heard him swallow an obscenity as he stood up. His corpulence filled the small chapel.
“Listen,” he said. He looked at the image of Malverde, as though calling the patron saint of drug lords as a witness. “I always behaved well. I was godfather to both of you. I loved Güero and I loved you. He double-crossed me, but despite that I saved your pretty ass. . . . The other was much later, when your life and mine took different paths. . . . Now time has passed, I’m out of that. I’m old, and I’ve even got grandchildren. I’m in politics, and I like it, and the Senate will let me do new things. That includes helping Sinaloa. . . . What do you gain by hurting me? Helping those gringos that consume half the world’s drugs while they decide, depending on what’s convenient to them at the moment, which narcos are good and which ones are bad? Helping the people that financed the anti-Communist guerrillas in Vietnam with drug money and then came to ask us Mexicans to pay for the Contras’ weapons in Nicaragua? . . . Listen to me, Teresita, those people that are using you now once helped me earn a fuckload of money with Norteña de Aviación, and then launder it in Panama. . . . Tell me what those cabrones are offering you. . . . Immunity? . . . Money?”
“Neither one. It’s more complex than that. Harder to explain.”
Epifanio Vargas turned to her again. As he stood before the altar, the candlelight aged him.
“You want me to tell you,” he insisted, “who’s been trying for years to fuck me in the United States? . . . Who’s pressuring the DEA? . . . A federal prosecutor in Houston, named Clayton, with close ties to the Democratic Party . . . And you know who he was before he became a federal prosecutor? . . . A defense lawyer for Mexican and gringo narcos, and a close friend of Ortiz Calderón, who was director of aerial interception in the Judiciales and who’s now living in the United States in the Witness Protection Program after stealing millions of dollars. . . . And on this side, the people trying to bring me down are the same ones that were in bed with the gringos and me: lawyers, judges, politicians, all trying to take the heat off themselves by making me a scapegoat for the whole system. . . . You want to help those people fuck me?”
Teresa didn’t reply. Epifanio regarded her for a while and then shook his head powerlessly.
“I’m tired, Teresita. I’ve worked hard all my life.”
It was true, and she knew it. The campesino from Santiago de los Caballeros had worn huaraches and picked beans. Nobody had ever given him anything.
“I’m tired, too.”
He was still watching her, probing her, searching for a chink through which to see what was going on in her head.
“There’s no way for us to work this out, then, apparently,” he concluded.
“I don’t think so.”
The cigar’s ember flared, illuminating don Epifanio’s face.
“I’ve come here to see you,” he said, and now his tone was different, “to talk to you—to explain things to you. . . . Maybe I owed you that, maybe I didn’t. But I came, like I came twelve years ago, when you needed me.”
“I know, and I thank you for that. You never did anything that bad except when you killed Güero and when you tried to kill me. . . .” She shrugged. “Everybody has their own road to walk.”
A very long silence. The rain was still pelting the roof. St. Malverde looked impassively into the void with his painted eyes.
“All those guns and cops outside don’t guarantee a thing,” Vargas said at last. “And you know it. In fourteen or sixteen hours a lot of things can happen. . . .”
<
br /> “I don’t give a shit,” Teresa replied. “You’re at bat now.”
Don Epifanio nodded as he repeated, “At bat now”—a perfect summary of the situation. He lifted his hands, then dropped them to his sides in desolation.
“I should have killed you that night,” he said. “Right here.”
He said it without passion, calmly and objectively. Teresa looked at him from the pew, not moving.
“Yes, you should have,” she said just as calmly. “But you didn’t, and now I’ve come to collect.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No.” Teresa stood up in the flickering candlelight, in the flashes of red and blue. “What I am is dead. Your Teresita Mendoza died twelve years ago, and I’m here to bury her.”
She leaned her forehead against the fogged-up second-floor window, the wetness cooling her skin. The spotlights in the garden reflected off the rain and turned it into millions of drops of silver falling across the yard, among the tree branches, or hanging on the tips of the leaves. Teresa held a cigarette between her fingers, and the bottle of Herradura Reposado sat on the table next to a glass, a full ashtray, the SIG-Sauer with its three extra clips. On the stereo, José Alfredo: Teresa didn’t know whether it was one of the songs Pote Gálvez was always playing for her, on the cassette for cars and hotels, or whether it had come with the house:
Half my drink, I left on the table
to follow you—I don’t know why.
She’d been up here for hours. Tequila and music, memories and a present with no future. María la Bandida. Just put me out of my misery, don’t let me die of a broken heart. The night I cried. She finished her drink, half the glass, and refilled it before returning to the window, trying to keep the room’s light from making her too conspicuous. She wet her lips on the tequila while she sang along: Half my future you took with you, I hope it does you more good than it did me.
“All of them have left, patrona.”
She turned slowly, all at once feeling very cold. Pote Gálvez was at the door, in shirtsleeves. He never appeared to her like that. A walkie-talkie in one hand, his revolver in its leather holster at his waist, he looked very serious. Dead serious. His shirt stuck to his heavy torso with sweat.
“What does that mean—‘all of them’?”
He looked at her almost reproachfully. Why ask if you know the answer? his look seemed to say. “All of them” meant all of them.
“The Federales, the escort,” he explained. “The house is empty.”
“Where’d they go?”
He didn’t answer. He just shrugged. Teresa read the rest in his suspicious norteño eyes. Pote Gálvez’ rat detector didn’t use radar.
“Turn out the light,” she said.
The room went dark; now there was just the glow from the hallway and the spotlights outside. The stereo clicked and José Alfredo was cut off mid-word. Outside, behind the tall entrance gates, everything looked normal: she could see soldiers and jeeps under the streetlamps. In the garden, though, there was no movement. The Federales that had been patrolling it were nowhere to be seen.
“When was the relief supposed to come on, Pinto?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. A new group came and the old ones left.”
“How many?”
“The usual: three ugly ones in the house and six in the garden.”
“What about the radio?”
Pote hit the button on the walkie-talkie twice and then held it out to her. Nothing. “Nobody says anything. But if you want, we can talk to the guachos.”
Teresa shook her head. She went to the table, grabbed the SIG-Sauer and stuffed the three reserve clips into her pants pockets, one in each back pocket and one in the right front. They were heavy.
“Forget them. Too far.” She loaded the pistol, click click, one round in the chamber and fifteen in the clip, and stuck it in her waistband. “Besides, they could be in on it.”
“I’m going to have a look,” the bodyguard said. “Con su permiso.”
He left the room, revolver in one hand and walkie-talkie in the other, while Teresa went to the window again. She stood to the side and peeked out. Everything looked to be in order. For a second she thought she saw two shadows moving among the shrubbery, under the big mango trees. That was all, and she wasn’t even sure of that.
She tapped the butt of the pistol, resigned. Two pounds of steel, lead, and gunpowder—not much for what they must be organizing for her outside. She took the semanario off her wrist, put the seven silver bangles in her one empty pocket. No need to announce your position.
Her mind was working fast. Numbers pro and con, balances. The possible and the probable. Once again she calculated the distance from the house to the main gate and the walls, and reviewed what she had been recording in her memory these last few days: spots that had some protection and spots that were exposed, possible routes, potential traps. She’d thought about all this so much that even though she was going over it now point by point, she had no time to feel fear. Unless fear, tonight, was the sense of physical helplessness that had come over her—the sense that her flesh was vulnerable and that she was infinitely alone.
The Situation.
That’s exactly what this is, she suddenly realized. The truth was, she hadn’t come to Culiacán to testify against don Epifanio Vargas, she’d come to hear Pote Gálvez say, “We’re on our own, patrona.” She’d come to feel what she was feeling now—with the SIG-Sauer at her waist, ready to pass the test. Ready to step through the dark doorway that had stood before her for twelve years, stealing her sleep in the dirty gray dawns. And when I see the light of day again, she thought, if I do, everything will be different. Or won’t be.
She stepped away from the window, went to the table and took a last swig of tequila. Half my drink, I leave on the table, she thought. For later. She was still smiling inwardly when Pote Gálvez appeared in the door. He was carrying an AK-47, and over his shoulder a heavy-looking canvas bag. Teresa’s hand went instinctively to the butt of her pistol, but it stopped midway. Not Pinto, she told herself. I’d rather turn my back and let him shoot me than distrust him and have him see it.
“Ande, patrona,” the pistolero said. “They’ve laid a trap for us worse than the Coyote’s. Pinches hijos de su madre.”
“Federales or guachos? . . . Or both?”
“I’d say it’s the Federales, and that the others are just watching. But who knows. Should I radio for help?”
Teresa laughed. “Help from who? They all went off to Taquería Durango for vampire tacos and heads on stakes.”
Pote Gálvez looked at her, scratched his head with the AK-47, and then managed a smile—simultaneously confused and ferocious.
“That’s the truth, mi doña,” he said, as the light dawned. “We’ll do what we can.” And at that, the two regarded each other, one in the light, one in shadow, in a way they never had before. Then Teresa laughed again, sincerely, inhaling air deep inside and with her eyes open, and Pote Gálvez moved his head up and down like a man catching a really good joke.
“This is Culiacán, patrona,” he said, “and we’re going to be laughing out loud in just a minute. I wish those hijos de perra could see you before we burn their asses—or vice versa.”
“Well, maybe I’m laughing because I’m scared of dying,” she said. “Or scared it’ll hurt before I die.”
Pote Gálvez nodded again. “You’re just like everybody else, patrona, what did you think? But dying takes time, so while we’re dying—or not—let’s make sure we take some others with us.”
Listening. Sounds, creaks, the pitter of rain on the windows and roof. Try to keep the pounding of your heart, the throbbing of the blood in the tiny veins that run through the inside of your ears from drowning out all the rest. Calculate every step, every movement of your eyeballs. Motionless, with your mouth dry and tension rising painfully in your thighs and belly to your chest, cutting off the little breathing you still allow yourself. The weight of the SIG-Sauer in
your right hand, your palm tight around the butt. The hair you pull back from your face because it gets in your eyes. The drop of sweat running down your forehead to your eye, stinging, that you finally lick up off your lips with the tip of your tongue. Salty.
The waiting.
Another creak in the hall, or maybe on the stairs. Pote Gálvez’ look from the door across the hall—resigned, professional. His misleading bulk kneeling, half his face peering around the door frame, the AK-47 ready, the stock removed to make it easier to handle, a clip with thirty shells clicked into place and another taped on with masking tape, upside down, ready to be turned over and changed the instant the other one empties.
More creaking. On the stairs.
Half my drink, Teresa whispers to herself, I leave on the table. She feels hollow inside, lucid outside. There are no reflections, no thoughts. Nothing but absurdly repeating the chorus of that song and focusing her senses, interpreting sounds and sensations. At the end of the hall, above the opening for the stairs, is a painting: Black stallions galloping over a broad green prairie. In front, a white horse. Teresa counts the horses: four black, one white. She counts them as she has counted the twelve balusters coming off the stairs, the five colors of the stained-glass window that opens onto the garden, the five doors on this side of the hall, the three sconces on the walls, and the one ceiling light. She also mentally counts the round in the chamber and the fifteen in the clip, the first shot double-action and a bit harder, and then the others just fire, one after another, the forty-five in the three reserve clips weighing down her jeans. There’s enough, she thinks, although it all depends on what the bad guys bring in. Anyway, Pote Gálvez recommended that you squeeze them off one by one. No nerves, no rush, just one by one. They last longer and you waste less. And if the lead runs out, insult them—that hurts, too.
The creaking is footsteps. And they’re coming up the stairs.
A head comes up over the landing, warily. Black hair, young. A torso and then another head. They’re carrying weapons, and the barrels swing back and forth, looking for something to shoot at. Teresa puts out her arm, looks at Pote Gálvez out of the corner of her eye, holds her breath, and pulls the trigger. The SIG-Sauer recoils, spitting bullets like thunderclaps—boom, boom, boom—and before the third report, the hallway echoes deafeningly with the short bursts from Pote’s AK-47—ra-a-a-a-ka, ra-a-a-a-ka, ra-a-a-aka—and is filled with acrid smoke.
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