Triple Crossing

by Sebastian Rotella

  Aguirre nodded, warming her hands on the coffee mug. Puente fiddled with her sunglasses, trying not to touch anything else. Méndez whisked a cockroach off his sleeve.

  “I have to get out of here,” the Colonel muttered huskily. He had a rather square face. His watery eyes gave the impression that he was perpetually on the brink of shedding sentimental tears.

  The bravado of the welcome had faded. The Colonel looked old and haunted in the gloom. He contemplated his outsized hands—the ridges of the veins, the knuckles like knots of bone—flat on the table in front of him. Without looking up, he said: “You must help me, Licenciado Méndez. I know that sounds strange, after our discrepancies of the past. But why delude ourselves? I need help.”

  “Doctora Aguirre gave me the sense that we could be of mutual help to one another,” Méndez said.

  “I know you want that snot-nosed little son of a bitch,” the Colonel rasped. “That little brat sitting on that hill in Colonia Chapultepec who toys with human beings the way children torture insects. Junior has no conception of honor like you and I, Méndez.”

  Aguirre rearranged her shawl. She said: “Perhaps you could give the Licenciado an idea of how you could help, Colonel. Regarding the Ruiz Caballeros. As we discussed.”

  “What a partner you have, Méndez.” The Colonel raised his head, brightening a bit. “That’s why everybody wants her to run for governor. A real lady. And tough as a soldier.”

  Aguirre laughed uneasily. Méndez took a long sip of coffee.

  “I see this as the first step toward a dialogue,” the Colonel continued. “I assure you we don’t have much time. Junior’s people are closing in. I have reliable reports about two heavyweight sicarios among the inmates who have been approached separately. Each has been given an advance payment for my head. Like a macabre competition.”

  “If it’s as bad as you say, then you should act first,” Méndez said. “That’s the best strategy. That means you trust me and hold nothing back.”

  “That would certainly be one way of looking at it,” the Colonel said. “César!”

  Everyone jumped. The short servant appeared.

  “Bring the book I was looking at earlier,” the Colonel ordered. He leaned toward Méndez. “I can give you a sign of my good faith. I can give you the larger scheme of things. You probably see parts of it already, but not the dimensions, the audacity.”

  César placed a large and moldering atlas on the table. Scrawled in orange Magic Marker on the cover was a reminder that the atlas was the property of the prison library.

  Rico flicked on an overhead light. The Colonel’s scalp gleamed through the gaps in his comb-over. He had acquired the air of a field marshal dispensing orders in a battle tent. His veined hands pried the atlas open to a full-color map of the Americas. A thick finger searched out and tapped a spot slightly below the center of South America.

  “I assume you have heard of the Triple Border,” the Colonel said.

  “Of course,” Méndez said.

  “This is the Triple Border,” the Colonel proclaimed, ignoring him. “The place where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina come together. The Tijuana of South America, you could say. The core of the Ruiz Caballeros’ scheme.”

  The Colonel’s hands hovered over the map, little bursts of movement accompanying and diagramming his words.

  “Being a student of organized crime, you know that Mexican drug mafias now dominate the world cocaine market. Mexican narcos have taken over areas once run by the Colombians, such as cocaine distribution in the United States and smuggling to Europe. Certain visionary Mexicans have established connections with suppliers in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, transporters in Venezuela, Italy, Africa. And as you know, the Ruiz Caballeros have decapitated and absorbed the cartels in northwest Mexico. Thanks largely to my help when I was chief of police, modesty aside. Though that ingrate Mauro Fernández Rochetti wants to take the credit now.”

  The Colonel stabbed the heart of South America again. His mood seemed to swing back toward euphoria.

  “But Junior is also developing a revolutionary route, new allies. This could make him richer and stronger than the competition. It is untapped territory. You know more history than I do. If I understand correctly, the Triple Border became a smuggler’s paradise during the dictatorship of that general who ruled Paraguay for so long.”

  “Stroessner,” Méndez said.

  “That one. A kleptocrat. When he fell, the civilians took over Ciudad del Este. The smuggling business kept growing.”

  “The government barely exists there,” Araceli said to Méndez. “The mafias move an enormous amount of money.”

  The Colonel nodded graciously. “Billions a year, they say. You still have to pay toll to the Paraguayans, but it is an international platform now. Asian gangs. Arabs. Brazilians, Russians. Pure mafias. The United Nations of crime.”

  Méndez’s eyes were on the map. He decided to jab the Colonel. “What could be so profitable down in the middle of nowhere?”

  The Colonel’s fist clenched on the atlas. He looked miffed.

  “Look. It is what the South American cops call a ‘liberated zone.’ You have every racket: Drugs. Guns. Fake documents. Money laundering. Contraband. Junior got interested in the place when he found out they were pirating the discs of his damned norteño bands faster than the pirates in Mexico. He had some emissaries sniff around. He went down himself. There are waterfalls, jungle parks. Better than Niagara Falls. Junior established alliances with big capos down there. Cautious, experimental. But huge potential.”

  “When was this?” Méndez asked, intent on the map. He had known that Junior was doing business with South Americans, but not to this extent.

  “During the past year. They are starting to move drugs to the United States, but also to Europe through Africa. The market of the future. And migrants here: Chinese, South Americans, Africans. You have seen the results.”

  “The smugglers and migrants we arrest speak Portuguese mixed with Spanish,” Méndez said.

  The Colonel’s trigger finger aimed at Méndez in acknowledgment, then traced lines back and forth between the Mexican border and the Triple Border.

  “That’s because Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguaçu, the Brazilian city across the river, are like one continuous city. The border is an imaginary line, Licenciado. The languages mix together, like everything else. Like San Diego and Tijuana.”

  “The Colonel says gangsters from the Triple Border are here, Leo,” said Aguirre. “The Ruiz Caballeros have used Arab and Brazilian sicarios.”

  The Colonel nodded vigorously. “They fly in, they kill, they leave. Very efficient. For one job I went to the airport to receive the specialists.”

  “Which job?”

  The Colonel was not accustomed to direct questions, particularly on his own turf. His upper lip drew back against his teeth.

  “Ay Licenciado, let’s just say it was the recent murder of a government official. There have been so many, lamentably. And more to come. César! More coffee for our guests.”

  As the youth in the Georgetown sweatshirt refilled cups, Méndez wondered if the Colonel had gone to the Triple Border himself; the Diogenes Group knew that off-duty state police accompanied Junior Ruiz Caballero on trips. Méndez wondered how much the Colonel knew for a fact and how much was conjecture. He was framing a question when gunfire erupted outside.

  Porthos cursed and put his hand on his gun. Méndez, Rico and Puente followed suit. There were more shots, volleys from an assault rifle somewhere outside the Colonel’s compound.

  Athos burst in, AK-47 in one hand, a radio to his ear. There was grim satisfaction on his face, as if he felt vindicated that his fears had come true. After scanning the room and reassuring himself the Colonel had not sprung an ambush, he ducked back outside.

  Méndez remained in his chair. His body ached with accumulated tension. He saw that Aguirre had her cup encircled in her hands. She sipped pensively. The Colonel sat straight-backed, ha
nds flat on either side of the atlas. He looked as if he had just eaten something distasteful and was being polite about it. No one spoke.

  Moments later, Athos stuck his head inside again.

  “It came from the main yard,” he reported. “Some monkey shooting in the air, celebrating the Saturday. The guards say nothing to worry about. They say they have it under control.”

  Athos pronounced the last two words with quotation marks around them. He gave Rico and the Colonel a look and withdrew.

  The Colonel exhaled.

  “Maybe someone was saying hello to our guests,” he grumbled. “Anyway, Méndez, I hope I am enlightening you a bit. Now I’d like to talk about how you can help me. Permit me to start by saying I have no illusions. And I want you know this: One way or another, I am getting out of this prison. Soon.”

  Hours later, Méndez and Aguirre finished lunch at a little restaurant in a colonial-style shopping mall across a busy downtown traffic circle from the Tijuana Cultural Center. Isabel, who got impatient during extended Tijuana lunches, had joined them long enough to drink a Coke and left. Méndez and Aguirre lingered over cigarettes and coffee, exhausted by the visit to the prison. Their bodyguards sat at the bar watching a Saturday sports roundup on an overhead screen.

  Araceli Aguirre took a drag on her cigarette. She had removed her glasses. Her face looked younger, even thinner, the eyes bright despite the circles beneath them.

  “I won’t argue with you—the Colonel is a perverse beast,” Araceli said. “But what do you think he will do?”

  “Oh, he will testify if he has to. But he’s fully capable of playing both sides, using us to pressure Junior to get him out, or pay him off, or whatever.”

  “I imagine it’s up to your pushy Cuban friend to get help from the yanquis.”

  “My friend Isabel, who does not deserve insults, will help through the task force. But Mexico City is key at this point. I have to talk to the Secretary about what this means for the investigation, get organized to move fast.”

  “The Secretary,” Aguirre said drily. “Your beloved boss. A creature of the system in disguise.”

  “Let’s not get started. I think he would intervene to transfer the Colonel to a new prison. But the state authorities will try to block it because he has been charged under state law as well as federal law.”

  “So you are pessimistic.”

  “Araceli. The Colonel is extremely valuable. The Triple Border connection intrigues me. He’s a blowhard, but if he will testify in detail, I do think this is as big as he says it is.”

  The owner of the restaurant stopped by the table to say hello. He was one of the itinerant Basques who had come to Tijuana to play professional jai alai, then settled there. Méndez was not fond of the Spaniard, or Spain, or what he considered snobby colonial cuisine. But Aguirre had studied for her doctorate in Madrid on a fellowship and developed a weakness for the “mother country.” The cozy restaurant, with its posters of far-off mountain villages and fields sectioned by stone walls, did give Méndez a sense of shelter. Especially when he was with Aguirre.

  “Did you see Porfirio Gibson’s show last night?” Méndez asked. “He’s getting nasty with his commentaries. Last night he went after you again. He took a shot at me too, because I dodged an interview.”

  “I can’t imagine that anyone whose opinion I respect pays attention to that buffoon. One day he’ll call me a lesbian narco-satanist.”

  “It’s not so much what he says, it’s the fact he says it. They are trying to isolate us. I don’t have to tell you these are dangerous times. The times of excellent cadavers.”

  “Of what?”

  The lines in his face creased. He kept his voice low.

  “It’s an expression from the Sicilian mafia wars. It refers to murders of people in power. I’m reading a book about Falcone, the Sicilian judge. There are parallels to Mexico, Colombia. La vita blindata, that’s what the anti-mafia judges called it. Bodyguards, bunkered courthouses, armored cars: the armored life. Do you know when Judge Falcone said he realized that they were going to kill him?”

  Aguirre half smiled. “The gloomier the better, no?”

  He continued: “When they went after him publicly. Bureaucrats, politicians allied with the mafia. They tore him down with news stories, anonymous letters. Preparing the terrain. That worried him more than the threats. He said it was a fatal combination: He was dangerous but vulnerable, because he had become isolated. That’s what they want to do to us, Araceli. This visit to the Colonel will make it worse.”

  “Leo,” she said sweetly. She put her hand on his. “Don’t you think it’s an exercise of lunatics, trying to calculate the danger? If we do this, it’s x amount dangerous. If we don’t do that, y amount of danger. We do what we do and that’s that. Nothing has stopped us so far.”

  “No one wants to stop,” Méndez said. He leaned back, watching a slow-motion replay on the television above the bar: A forward for the Mexican national soccer team attempted an elegant back-to-the-goal scissors kick, his mane of hair swirling. The bodyguards at the bar hooted sorrowfully. A narrow miss.

  “At least it’s good to hear you talk for once, unburden yourself,” Aguirre said. “I am probably more worried about you than you are about me. I talked to Estela last night.”

  At the mention of his wife’s name, Méndez’s tone grew cold. “Estela.”

  “That’s right.” Her smile was defiant. “She called me. She’s worried too.”

  “She called you.”

  “My God, Leo, you practically threw her and Juancito out of Tijuana. You lined up the job for her at Berkeley, totally clandestine. And you forced her to take it.”

  He kept watching the soccer footage. He said, “It was for their own good. It was absolutely impossible for them here. Going everywhere with bodyguards, to school, the supermarket. And it’s an excellent opportunity for her.”

  “She doesn’t see it like that.”

  “All I can tell you is, I am finally able to concentrate for the first time since I took this job. I know they are living a safe, normal, civilized life. Far from here.”

  Aguirre lit another cigarette.

  “I suppose everyone deals with the danger in different ways,” she said. “But you have banished your family. That doesn’t make their life normal or civilized. You have systematically cut yourself off from everyone and everything. Except the Diogenes Group. You talk about the mafias trying to isolate us. You don’t need any help.”

  “I haven’t cut myself off from you.”

  “Because I am essential to your work.”

  “I see.” Méndez’s mouth tightened. “And how do you deal with it, if I may ask?”

  “I live my life, for God’s sake.” She brandished the cigarette. “Why let them control your existence? I have lunch with my husband whenever I can. I spend time with my kids. I certainly don’t—”

  “Excuse me, but now that you mention it, I meant to tell you I don’t think it’s wise to bring Elena and Amalia to the office, not with those protester thugs around—”

  “Leobardo, you are really impossible!”

  “Alright, alright, enough,” he said. “This unburdening that you like so much is the modern disease. What’s your point?”

  “Promise me you’ll call your wife and have a real conversation with her. “Alright?”

  “Done.”

  They talked about their plan for the coming week, the logistics of coaxing the Colonel into testifying before a prosecutor as he had promised. Méndez raised a hand as the television filled with images of a bloodied boxer against the ropes, warding off punches.

  “Wait,” he said. “That’s the fight from Wednesday. Junior made an appearance.”

  Méndez asked the owner to turn up the sound. There were fans booing, scuffles with helmeted police in a boxing ring, hurled coins tracing shiny arcs through smoke and floodlights. The top-billed match of the Wednesday-night fights at Multiglobo Arena had ended in favor of the champ
ion, infuriating partisans of the challenger. He appeared to have outfought the champion, a long-armed Mexican-American managed by Junior Ruiz Caballero’s company. The champion’s fans had counterattacked with bottles and folding chairs.

  The television showed a crowded hallway, the camera advancing among police, rich kids, sultry women in fight-night finery. Junior Ruiz Caballero appeared, turning back from a doorway to attend to a couple of microphones poked at him between hulking backs. With Junior were two American Las Vegas types in double-breasted suits and a thick-necked African-American prizefighter.

  Junior was unshaven and deeply tanned, as usual. He wore a two-toned leather jacket that looked like something out of a music video. The gossip magazines portrayed Junior as a swashbuckling ladies’ man; he was good-looking in a baby-faced, degenerate sort of way. He appeared to be going through one of his bloated phases.

  Junior Ruiz Caballero grinned hugely over his shoulder at the female reporter.

  “We always give the people what they want, that’s what show business is all about,” he said, using the English phrase. “The people want a rematch, we’ll give them a rematch. The people want drama. We’ll give them drama.”

  5

  BEFORE HIS PURSUIT OF Pulpo a month earlier, Pescatore had only crossed twice into Tijuana.

  The first time was during a trip to San Diego that was part of the nineteen-week training course at the U.S. Border Patrol academy. Near the end of the course, when the trainees had been assigned to stations, The Patrol flew them to their sectors to see the reality waiting beyond the gauntlet of Spanish classes, arcane immigration laws and role-playing exercises with Latino actors impersonating suspects. Pescatore and three other rookies walked into Tijuana, had a drink in the first tourist bar they found and went right back, heads down, sweating profusely, pretending they were not worried about getting lynched if someone realized they were U.S. feds.

  The second crossing was with Garrison, Dillard and Macías before Christmas. They got hammered in a noisy basement club featuring raunchy dancers and bartenders blowing whistles. A couple of hard-ass-looking Mexicans showed up and slammed drinks with the agents. Garrison explained that they were informants from his days on The Patrol’s antismuggling investigative unit: They were called madrinas (godmothers) or aspirinas (aspiring cops). The Mexican police used them as all-purpose ass-kickers, snitches and flunkies.