Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  Joaquín, leaning his broad head a little to the side, regarded the legislator with a straightforward expression. “Whatever the moral question, it is justified historically. To smuggle drugs to the Americans is a tool of historical revenge, and you know what I mean. Who needs any more justification than that? It is an act of patriotism. Do you consider yourself a patriot, my friend?” “¡Por supuesto!” replied the politician. “¡Absolutamente!” Carrasco stood and donned his cowboy hat. “Then let me hear no more talk about second thoughts and distancing.”

  The Professor’s respect for him had increased twofold that afternoon. Here was a man who could think! A vanquished country’s revenge on its oppressor. It was so right!

  His beer was getting warm, but he refrained from guzzling it and ordering a cold one. Drinking in daylight always dulled him, and he needed to stay sharp for this evening’s work. Gloria, living up to the El Norte stereotype of the mañana mexicana, was nearly half an hour late. He glanced idly at the TV directly across from his barstool, suspended above the mirrored backbar with its gold-leafed cornices. A college basketball game on ESPN. Cigarette smoke formed a pale haze around the paddle fans, twirling slowly beneath the pressed-tin ceiling. A waiter brought a bowl of limes to three young British tourists drinking tequila shooters, their accents evoking memories of The Professor’s father. Went back to England years ago, split up from Mom, whose madness was serious enough to make her impossible to live with but not serious enough to warrant being institutionalized. He seldom gave a thought to either of them. He was his own parent, he was The Professor, father as well as mother to Gregorio Bonham and Euclid J. Carrington.

  Where the fuck was Gloria?

  “¿Capitán, otra cerveza?” asked the bartender.

  And just as the bartender gave him a fresh bottle, a tall young woman walked in and spoke to the Nogales city cop who worked off hours as a doorman-slash-bouncer. The cop pointed at El Profesor, and she, cracking vertebrae in every male neck in the place, paraded across the floor in stiletto heels and stood next to him.

  “Buenas tardes, Capitán.”

  A body that could have been molded only by the hand of a loving God, every bit of six feet in those heels; tight turquoise pants and a white blouse; long black hair, opal eyes, smooth, fawn-colored skin—Gloria was, well, glorious.

  “Mucho gusto,” he said, a thickness in his throat. “Encantado.”

  She apologized for her tardiness—an unavoidable delay—and asked if she could sit down. ¡Por supuesto! She ordered a Coca-Cola with lime. When he went for his wallet, she tapped his wrist.

  “I pay for my own drinks. I’m not a bar girl.”

  Her speech was educated, none of that rough Sonoran slur.

  “You’re certainly not. You’re everything Victor said you were, and more. Preciosa, you are a national treasure.”

  Gloria smiled and ever so slightly raised and lowered her plucked eyebrows to say that ornate flattery could not interest her less. “We have business to conduct, Capitán.”

  “Gregorio, please.”

  She took a cigarette out of her purse. He lit it for her and said, “An associate of mine is going to do some work for me. He is very skilled at what he does, a craftsman, an artist. He will be paid well for his services, but I would like to give him a bonus, and you will be the bonus. His name is Félix.”

  “Who pays? You or this Félix?”

  “I do.”

  She sipped her Coke and looked at him directly and without warmth. “One hundred fifty U.S. for one hour, five hundred for the night. Also, I expect to be taken out for dinner first. Also, I don’t take it up the ass for any amount. Be sure Félix the artist understands that before he calls.”

  The Professor hesitated. The sound of her voice as she uttered certain words, like culo, stimulated his other senses. A kind of cool, tingling sensation in his fingertips, a taste of salt, white rhomboids sparkling before his eyes.

  “The five hundred, then. Félix will take one look at you and wish for more than an hour.”

  “In advance, please. And don’t be conspicuous.”

  He reached into his inside jacket pocket for his money clip and, as inconspicuously as possible, counted out five hundred dollars and slipped the bills into Gloria’s purse, hanging from the barstool. “For another fifty, would you agree to a … a … shall we call it a screen test?” he asked.

  Gloria passed him an embossed business card that read, in Spanish on one side, English on the other: “Border Rose Escort Service—For Discriminating Gentlemen. Discretion Guaranteed.” Below were her landline and mobile phone numbers. “This screen test, as you call it, what did you have in mind?”

  “Nothing that will take too much time. I am to meet Félix soon.”

  “The artist. And now”—warming up at last, stroking the back of his hand with her coral-lacquered fingernails—“I will teach you the meaning of artistry.”

  Which she did, stripped down to her purple satin underwear as she knelt and took him into her mouth in a room on the second floor of the St. Regis. When she was finished, he was ready to give her fifty more to reward her for truth in advertising.

  “That’s a beautiful color,” he said, gesturing at her bra and panties.

  “Purple for Lent.”

  “Lent doesn’t start for another two weeks.”

  “I’m getting in the mood.”

  “What are you giving up?”

  She freshened her lipstick. “Wearing blue and red. Yourself, what do you give up?”

  “Certainly not you,” he said, his mind flashing on Clarice. How could he waste his time on that nut when there was one such as Gloria so near? “I will see you again, I hope.”

  “You have my card.”

  Sexual acts always intensified his condition; Gloria’s performance had brought it to a new level. Usually, when one sensory experience stirred another, the effect vanished with the stimulus, but now, as he walked up Avenida López Mateo toward the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the color of her underwear lingered in his mind’s eye, rousing a powerful, persistent scent. He couldn’t quite find the words for it—indeed, he was seldom able to describe these sensations with any precision. Approximations had to serve. Musky was the best he could do at the moment. A damp muskiness, pleasant but almost unpleasant, something like the odor of decaying leaves after a rain.

  In his youth in Mexico City he’d confessed to his closest friend, Emilio, that he could hear surfaces and shapes and smell colors. Emilio thought he was crazy. Because his religious-fanatic mother was also a manic depressive, he himself thought he was nuts, or at the very least the victim of an addled imagination. After Emilio he confessed his secret to no one until, while he was attending Georgetown, he volunteered to become a subject in a research study. It was conducted by a prominent neurologist, who interviewed him at length and put him through tests with sophisticated equipment that measured electrical impulses in his brain and recorded the effects that various drugs had on his cortex. The scientist told him his condition was called synesthesia and that it arose in something called the limbic brain. Merely to know that it had a name was a relief. Synesthesia affected very few people but was not, the neurologist assured him, a mental illness or a flight of the imagination. In the synesthete, the boundaries between the senses are not clearly drawn, and in some cases are nonexistent, allowing two or more senses to combine without losing their distinct identities. That was why he could hear shapes without losing his hearing, smell colors without losing his sense of smell. For The Professor that was a moment of enlightenment and still greater relief—he wasn’t mad, he was a rarity, a marvel.

  For years afterward he thought of his gift as little more than a fascinating curiosity that made life more interesting and enriching. Only when he was discharged from the U.S. Army and, as a newly naturalized American citizen, joined the DEA did he find a practical use for it. With his Mexican heritage and bilingual skills and combat experience in Panama to recommend him, the DEA a
ssigned him to its El Paso Division, first as liaison to the antidrug commandos he’d helped train at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, later to the Intelligence Center as an undercover agent. At this he excelled. He made deals and infiltrated the Juárez Cartel up to its highest levels. Undercover work caused many clandestine operatives to lose touch with the real world, but he suffered little mental distress playing outlaw and lawman at the same time, gliding between two different worlds with ease because he’d lived in two different worlds all his life.

  A young girl was selling flatbreads in front of the church. He bought a slice, earning a stare of disbelief and gratitude when he gave her five dollars and told her to keep the change. One must keep the muscles of generosity toned. He went inside, dipped his fingers into the holy water font, crossed himself, and sat down in the rear pew of the nave, next to a shrine to the Virgin, upon which vigil candles flickered in little glass jars. Except for three or four pious women at prayer, the church was empty. He was ten minutes early and settled back to wait for Félix Cabrera, who had been among his trainees at Benning, one of the best. Without question the right man for tonight’s job, a professional’s professional who’d done missions before in the United States, one in Phoenix, another in El Paso, a third in Dallas. El Verdugo, the Executioner, he was called for his meticulousness, for his preternatural calm—the man probably had a pulse rate of around fifty—and his accuracy with a pistol. Once, out on Carrasco’s ranch near Caborca, The Professor—no mean marksman himself—had challenged him to a contest shooting Gambel’s quail with .45 semiautomatics. Stationary birds were prohibited—they had to be hit on the run at a range of fifteen or twenty yards. When the match was over, Félix had accounted for nine, The Professor for five. He was not abashed to have been outshot by such a margin, for if the pupil is not greater than the teacher, then the teacher has failed.

  The careers of teacher and pupil had followed similar paths. After graduating from the School of the Americas, Félix served with the Special Air Mobile Forces Group of the Mexican army, dueling with the Gulf Cartel in Tamaulipas and Matamoros until he and some thirty members of his battalion experienced a collective epiphany: they were earning roughly five hundred dollars a month fighting the cartel; they could do much better by joining it. They went to work as enforcers and assassins, as escorts for drug shipments, tasks for which their martial skills and martial virtues of discipline and valor made them far superior to the cholos previously employed in those capacities. Los Zetas, they called themselves, after the radio call sign of their old battalion commander, Zeta.

  Then, as narco-barons often did, the cartel’s boss overreached. He attempted to kidnap and kill an American DEA agent and an FBI agent, which brought pressure from Washington on Mexico City to do something about him. He was busted and sent to Las Palmas prison. Though he continued to operate from his jail cell, some Zetas felt they owed no more loyalty to him and struck out on their own, scattering across northern Mexico. Félix fetched up in his native Sonora with several comrades and hired themselves out to Joaquín Carrasco.

  That was when teacher and pupil were reunited, The Professor having deserted the DEA a couple of years before Félix had deserted the army. The cause of his flight could be traced to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of his friend, another undercover agent, named Carlos Aguilar. Carlos was an explorer who’d made an astonishing discovery—the Juárez Cartel operated a vast marijuana plantation in southern Chihuahua that employed several hundred field hands and was guarded by soldiers and state police. There was no way an operation that big could be clandestine; it had to have the full consent of the Mexican government. Though no cartel operated without some sort of official sanction, the partnership between the Juárez gang and the government was especially blatant. Exposing it became Carlos’s personal crusade.

  One day he disappeared. His decomposed body was found in the Chihuahuan desert a month later. He’d been shot through the back of the head. Forensic experts determined that both shoulders and his ribs and jaw had been broken. In time informants came forth with details about what had been done to him, and it was truly unspeakable. He’d been tortured by experts for days before the Angels of Mercy sang to them, and they executed him. The El Paso office sent every available agent into Mexico to find out who had murdered its man and who had ordered his killing. The Professor was among them. For weeks, at enormous risk to himself—if he was caught, he would have suffered even worse treatment than Aguilar—he tracked down leads, met with snitches, compiled lists of names, and made a discovery of his own: Carlos’s torturers had been trained by the CIA, back when the Agency was involved in the drug trade to finance the Contras in Nicaragua. One of his colleagues uncovered a still more interesting fact—the word to abduct Aguilar had come not from the Juárez boss but from the commanding general of the Fifth Military District in Chihuahua City, whose soldiers protected the plantation, and who, it was said, received mordida amounting to a hundred thousand dollars a month.

  Sometime after this information came to light, the special agent in charge summoned The Professor and the other agents back to El Paso. They were at first bewildered and then enraged when they learned why: the general was married to the sister of the minister of defense, who had gotten wind of the investigation. In this instance, the pressure flowed from Mexico City to Washington. To implicate El General in the drug trade and in the torture and murder of an American law enforcement agent would greatly embarrass the Mexican government. Phone calls were made to El Paso. The agent in charge had heard from no less a figure than the head of the Latin American desk in the U.S. State Department. To avoid an international scandal and to maintain amicable relations between the United States and its southern neighbor, the investigation was to proceed no further.

  The Professor didn’t turn in his gun and badge in righteous indignation, like Dirty Harry in the movies. Being a good soldier, he obeyed orders. He stopped investigating and took a month’s vacation. It was a working holiday. He knew the identities of the three men who’d tortured Aguilar. He capped one in Mexico and trailed the second across the border to a house in Eagle Pass, Texas, shooting him through the window as he watched TV. There was law, and then there was justice. A week after disposing of him, The Professor picked up the trail of the third man. It led back into Mexico. He was on the road, south of Juárez, when his mobile phone jingled. The caller didn’t identify himself. He knew it was someone in the El Paso office by what was said. “This is to say thanks for doing what we all wanted to do. The dude you capped last week was still on the CIA’s payroll, a top informant. The spooks are pissed. They know you were the shooter, and we can’t help you. Don’t know where you are, but I know you’re in deep shit.” The anonymous caller went on to say that the mierda was rolling downhill—the CIA had prevailed upon the attorney general’s office to prevail upon the DEA to apprehend its rogue agent. In fact, a warrant had been issued for his arrest. “And that’s the least of your problems, know what I’m saying?”

  He did. The Agency probably had an open contract out on him as well. So the question was, where were his chances of survival better? Mexico or the United States? He opted for Mexico, in effect repatriating himself. He traveled to Mexico City, where he set about counterfeiting a whole new identity. It was his own version of a witness protection program. He knew the right people; obtaining forgeries of the necessary documents—passport, driver’s license, birth certificate—was not difficult. He made certain cosmetic changes—dying his dirty blond hair to dark brown, removing the mole from his left cheek—but otherwise he didn’t get fancy. Thus was Gregorio Bonham born.

  Señor Bonham journeyed to Hermosillo, checked in to a cheap hotel, then sought an interview with Victor Zaragoza, the federal police comandante in Sonora. The Professor wasn’t as familiar with the Hermosillo Cartel as he was with Juárez, but he did know that the way to Carrasco led through the comandante. In the lingua franca of the trade, he had given Carrasco la plaza, meaning that he had lic
ensed Carrasco to traffic in the state, for which he received a certain amount in protection money. At police headquarters, The Professor was told that the comandante wasn’t in and to come back the following day. He did and got the same story. On his third try he was allowed into the comandante’s office. Except for the automatic rifles racked along a wall, it was as nondescript as a budget motel room. Zaragoza, a tall man with severe Castilian features and the build of a slightly underfed wolf, motioned for him to sit in the chair in front of his desk. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

  The Professor was perfectly candid—he wished to meet Joaquín Carrasco; he believed he could be of great service to Don Joaquín, for he knew that the Hermosillo Cartel was at war with the Juárez organization over control of smuggling routes. The comandante glared at him, then said, affecting incredulity: “Joaquín Carrasco is a criminal, and you are telling me you wish to go to work for him? Are you crazy?” The Professor assured him of his sanity. “This is amusing,” said the comandante. “Tell me everything about yourself. I need to determine if I should arrest you or have you committed to an asylum.” He presented his curriculum vitae, his entire history; he enumerated his assets, which he thought would be as advantageous to Don Joaquín as they had been to the DEA. Zaragoza concluded the meeting, went to the door, and summoned two men, one of whom wore an Oakland Raiders T-shirt and looked as if he might have played middle linebacker. “This man is out of his mind,” Zaragoza said. “See if you can help him recover his senses.”

  The goons took him out to a car and drove to a small unoccupied house near the bus terminal. There they tied him to a chair, put a hood over his head, and began to punch him in the liver, in the kidneys, in the ribs. He’d expected something like this—indeed, he would have been suspicious if it didn’t happen. The beating continued off and on for a couple of hours. He tried to distract himself from the pain by focusing on the smells aroused by the blackness under the hood. Then he heard Zaragoza’s voice: “Basta!” The blows ceased, the hood was removed, and the comandante stood over him with the passport and birth certificate he’d obtained in Mexico City. “We found these in your hotel room,” he said. “They’re forgeries.” Of course they were. Who are you? I told you, Gregorio Bonham. Is that your real name? No, I told you so in your office. What is your real name? I told you that, too. Tell me again. He did. And you say you were an agent of the DEA? Yes. But you still are, aren’t you? No. I am being completely honest with you. We will see about that. Zaragoza turned to his thugs. “He’s still crazy,” he said, and left.