Triple Crossing

by Sebastian Rotella

  “We can’t sit and wait. What if we make all the arrests—except Junior? We go after the organization: Mauro Fernández Rochetti and the state police, the smuggling bosses, Multiglobo executives, American accomplices. Kill the body. Then we decide when to chop off the head?”

  The Secretary shook his head with finality. “It will be clear that Junior is the target. The impact is the same.”

  Méndez ran his fingers slowly down the lines in his face.

  “There’s another problem,” he said. “As you know, Araceli Aguirre is deeply involved in the investigation. The human rights commission has been invaluable.”

  “A dynamic young woman.”

  “Exactly. She’s dismayed. She thinks the Colonel’s death could have been avoided.”

  “It’s fascinating to me how the human rights fanatics are ready to throw legal niceties out the window if their agenda is affected. As I told you, the prison transfer was difficult because of cases against the Colonel here in the state system. This is a nation of laws, of institutionality. No matter what Araceli Aguirre thinks.”

  “Nonetheless, another delay will convince her we are not serious. She may turn her back on us.”

  The Secretary dabbed fastidiously with the handkerchief again. “Well, only you have control over that.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “You are her friend and mentor.”

  “She might go public. In her position, that’s what I would do.”

  “I can only urge you to ask her to be sensible, consider her political ambitions and refrain from something that could have unfortunate consequences for everyone.”

  His chin cupped in his hand again, the Secretary was retreating behind a bureaucratic shield. And Méndez sounded to himself like a timid ruling-party lifer. Enough genuflecting, he thought.

  “Mr. Secretary, I have to speak frankly,” he said. “Until today I had few complaints. You have backed the Diogenes Group with great strength. Thanks to you, we have done marvels. But now, forgive me for telling you, I am worried. If you want me to wait, if you have to make consultations, I must respect that. But I have to ask you: Do you still want me to do the job? Or is this as far as the thing goes?”

  The Secretary leaned back. He looked undersized and frail in the formidable suit, like a photo of a face superimposed onto someone else’s body.

  “Ah, Méndez. An elegant way of asking if I will betray you.” He raised a hand to cut off the protest. “Please. You are in the line of fire. I admire your courage, your commitment. Nothing would make me happier than seeing Junior Ruiz Caballero in handcuffs. But I have to worry about institutionality. About questions of state.”

  Méndez leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, feeling as if he were in a confessional.

  “Fine,” he said. “But when you talk to the presidential palace”—the Secretary grimaced—“tell them this. If we don’t stop these people now, it may come back to haunt us. As you know, there is a worrisome political dimension.”

  The Secretary’s eyes widened expectantly. Méndez went on in a low voice: “If the Ruiz Caballeros sustain this alliance with the South American mafias, they will have enormous resources flowing in. This goes beyond the border. The Colonel is just the latest example: They are using murders of politicians and policemen to send terroristic messages. I think the Ruiz Caballeros are moving on two tracks. The presidential elections will be next year. The Senator’s group already has a preferred potential candidate, does it not?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So you have the Senator operating at the political level. And Junior on the mafia level, supplying money and firepower. All that money, all that firepower. They could overwhelm everyone: here and in Mexico City. That is a real question of state.”

  The Secretary interlaced his fingers on his midsection with an expression that combined discomfort and paternal approval.

  “A gloomy and paranoid analysis,” he said. “But I happen to think you are right.”

  They spent another twenty minutes talking. A waiter from the airport restaurant appeared with tea for the Secretary and coffee, which revived Méndez, though a hot drink was not ideal in the sweaty confines of the office.

  When they descended the circular metal staircase to the floor of the hangar, they were met immediately by Athos and the Secretary’s personal assistant, Gregorio. A subtle young man with silver-rimmed glasses and a gaunt scrubbed face, Gregorio had a knack for gliding ahead of the Secretary and anticipating his wishes. Gregorio was usually as stolid as Athos, but both of them looked preoccupied. The Secretary’s bodyguards and aides milled around whispering.

  “What’s up?” Méndez asked Athos, who deferred with a raise of his goateed chin to the Secretary’s assistant.

  Gregorio spoke in a breathy Mexico City accent full of rising o’s and a’s. “Mr. Secretary, I’m sorry but this is really peculiar. While you were upstairs, an individual who works for Senator Ruiz Caballero presented himself. He said the Senator happened to be at the airport and heard you were here. He said the Senator apologizes for the imposition, but he would appreciate it if you could make time for him to invite you to lunch.”

  “He happened to be at the airport?” Méndez asked Athos, who had a battle gleam in his eye.

  Athos’s airport sources had told him the Senator and his nephew had showed up earlier in the morning to fly to Nevada in their private jet.

  “Then they delayed the departure,” Athos said. “This monkey, eh, their people started nosing around asking when the Secretary was expected. The Senator has been sitting in the VIP lounge waiting for you to finish. Junior drove off somewhere.”

  “What do I tell the man, sir?” Gregorio asked anxiously.

  The Secretary lit a cigarette with studied nonchalance. He glanced at Méndez, who shrugged. There was no doubt that the Ruiz Caballeros knew the Secretary was meeting with Méndez. It was a typically brazen gambit. Méndez remembered what Araceli had said the night before: The enemy weren’t taking him for granted. They were worried.

  “Tell him…” The Secretary took a drag on the cigarette. “Tell him I don’t have time for lunch. I’m hurrying back to the D.F. But with great pleasure I can say hello to the Senator on the way to my plane. If he’d like.”

  Gregorio dispatched an emissary. The Secretary blew a stream of smoke from his nostrils. Méndez decided that he looked pretty tough for a bookworm in a fancy suit from the Distrito Federal (Mexico City).

  “You will accompany me to the plane,” the Secretary told Méndez.

  “Very well.” Méndez wished he weren’t so grubby.

  “If I say no outright, it might look like we are hiding,” the Secretary said, eyes narrow against the smoke. “Moreover, I’ve known the Senator, on the inevitable level of government affairs, for twenty-five years. Your presence sets the right tone.”

  “I leave the political nuances to you, sir,” Méndez said. He thought he detected a smile on the corners of the bloodless lips. This wily old bastard is enjoying himself, he thought.

  “Shall we, fellows?” the Secretary said.

  Men in suits picked up briefcases and radios. The Secretary dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. He frowned at Athos.

  “Is it necessary for the commander to carry that elephant slayer?”

  Athos looked chagrined, cradling the AK-47 protectively.

  “You know something, sir?” Méndez said, giving the Secretary an unintentionally broad smile. “Usually I’d be the first to agree. But right now, I think it helps set the tone, as you put it.”

  “Very well. The gangster semiotics I leave to you.”

  The sun fell hard on the tarmac. The Secretary’s jet, guarded by uniformed officers of the Diogenes Group and the federal police, was half a soccer field away from the hangar. The Ruiz Caballeros’ Learjet was to the right of the Secretary’s plane. Beyond the planes was the fence separating the airport from the border highway and the border fence.

  The group s
trode across the tarmac: Méndez and the Secretary accompanied by Athos, Gregorio on their heels, and a loose diamond of bodyguards and aides around them.

  Two GMC Yukons parked near the terminal came to life and glided forward. They stopped about halfway between the two planes. Two men got out of the lead vehicle and approached briskly.

  Méndez had interviewed Senator Bernardo Ruiz Caballero several times, but he had not seen him up close for years. The Senator was in his early sixties, his face froglike and dissipated beneath shiny, well-coiffed white hair. He looked chesty in a black linen suit with an open collar that revealed gold chains and medallions. He walked with a horseman’s roll, elbows wide. The heels of his black boots banged the tarmac.

  Méndez recognized the other man, a portly sweating flunky in a guayabera shirt, as the Senator’s administrative assistant.

  “My dear Luis,” the Senator said. It was the first time Méndez had heard anyone call the Secretary by his first name. It reminded Méndez that, though Senator Ruiz Caballero might come off as a crude clown, he had converted provincial power into exponentially greater national power without losing his provincial ways. He was one of the select old hands who controlled their political party’s ancient and arcane machinery.

  Méndez watched in alarm as the Senator opened his arms for a hug. The Secretary thwarted him adroitly; he transformed the greeting into a handshake in which their free hands patted each other’s biceps.

  Disconcerted, the Senator regained composure with a volley of words. His voice was croaky and weathered by tobacco and alcohol. “You must come to Baja more often, my friend. I was set to invite you to lunch, I dropped everything and made reservations. Let me know next time and we’ll go to Las Leñas. We haven’t been there in years, eh?”

  Senator Ruiz Caballero spent a lot of time under sunlamps. His skin was overcooked, wrinkled, mottled under the eyes with deep horizontal dents in the forehead. He chewed a mint, his teeth gleaming white in all that brown.

  “Senator, what a pleasure, I’m sorry I’m in such a rush,” the Secretary said mildly, his body turned as if he would resume stride at any moment.

  Then he paused, as if he had remembered something. He clapped Méndez on the shoulder.

  “You know Licenciado Méndez of the Diogenes Group, don’t you, Senator?” the Secretary said heartily. “One of the finest public servants in one of the finest police agencies in the country.”

  The Secretary was laying it on thick. Senator Ruiz Caballero looked at Méndez reluctantly. His mouth twisted and the loose folds of skin on his throat quivered, as if he were barely able to control his revulsion. Méndez shook the plump, ring-filled hand as briefly and unenthusiastically as possible. The flinty eyes skittered over Méndez and quickly back to the Secretary. Senator Ruiz Caballero told the Secretary again how good it was to see him. The Senator was on his way to Las Vegas to watch a rookie boxer from his nephew’s stable. But he would return to Mexico City in two days and wanted urgently to get together.

  Three more vehicles approached from the terminal at high speed: a convertible Mercedes with the top down, trailed by a chrome-studded Buick Regal and a red Suburban. The trailing vehicles were full of men. Funk music boomed out of the Mercedes, organ and bass arpeggios, raucous voices. Three women sat in the backseat of the convertible, clouds of hair streaming. The vehicles skidded to a stop near the Ruiz Caballero jet.

  Athos took two steps to position himself between Méndez and the vehicles.

  “There’s the young man,” Senator Ruiz Caballero declared. “Always rushing. Junior! Come here a moment.”

  Junior Ruiz Caballero was in no rush. Nor was he listening. He emerged in stages from the passenger door on the far side of the Mercedes. The wind ruffled his hair, which had grown long. He took a couple of somnolent, stiff-shouldered steps toward the Regal, elaborately ignoring the little crowd around the Secretary and the Senator a hundred feet away. Junior had been doing some sunlamp time of his own. He wore a blue T-shirt with short sleeves exposing broad fleshy arms. His jeans were low-slung and oversized in cholo fashion.

  He looks like a wannabe gangster, Méndez thought. Except that a wannabe with a billion dollars and a vicious disposition becomes the real thing.

  “Over here for a moment, Junior,” his uncle called uneasily across the tarmac. “Look who’s here.”

  Junior paid no heed. He was talking to a mustachioed man who had gotten out of the Regal, the only other passenger in the caravan to get out. The second man was a behemoth in black. He looked lethal, his bearing almost military. Méndez recognized him from a photo and remembered the street name: Buffalo. The heavy hitter from Los Angeles, the chief of Junior’s imported pocho triggermen.

  The Secretary took it in impassively. There they are, Méndez wanted to say. The enemy. Look at what we are up against. You better crush them before they crush us.

  Junior rested a hand on Buffalo’s ridge of a shoulder, their heads ducked close together as they talked. Junior sneered, obviously enjoying this bit of theater.

  “Junior, please,” Senator Ruiz Caballero rasped. Méndez could not tell if he was truly embarrassed or just playing his role in a scene for the Secretary’s benefit. “Come say hello to the Secretary… And the Licenciado.”

  The shaggy head turned toward them. Buffalo looked over as well. Junior made a derisive, incredulous face. He said something unintelligible. Buffalo smiled.

  Junior Ruiz Caballero raised a fist and, by way of a sardonic greeting, pumped it in their general direction. He looked directly at Méndez.

  Méndez returned the stare with a tunnel vision that blotted out everything else. Despite the presence of Athos, the bodyguards, his own officers, he felt utterly alone. Sweating, haggard, unsteady on his feet, he returned that stare for all he was worth.

  Junior’s pudgy features grew bored again. He gave Buffalo a quick hug and walked toward his plane. Young drivers unloaded luggage, but the other passengers remained in the vehicles.

  “That boy.” Senator Ruiz Caballero got throaty with facile emotion. “But who can blame him? After what he’s been through. All the ghosts, all the crosses this family has had to bear.”

  The Secretary made a sound that might have been sympathetic. He had clearly had his fill of Tijuana fauna in the sun.

  “Very well, Senator, what a pleasure to have seen you if only for a moment,” he began.

  But now Senator Ruiz Caballero and every other male on the tarmac were watching the second act. A driver held open the rear doors of the Mercedes. The women who got out were instantly recognizable: three members of Las Chicas Ringside from Multiglobo Arena, fixtures in Junior’s entourage. During boxing matches, their job consisted of strutting around the ring in bathing suits holding up signs that indicated the number of the next round. One was Latina, one was black, one was Anglo. They had big hair, big sunglasses, big bodies fortified by silicone and aerobics and encased in leather and Spandex, straps and buckles. Amazon caricatures on towering heels. Eminently aware of their audience, heads high and shoulders back, the women strode to the plane.

  “Híjole.” The Senator leered, his teeth crunching the mint. “If I had known those three were coming along, I would have brought my mountain boots.”

  “We are leaving,” the Secretary said.

  Amalia Aguirre, age three, was getting sleepy. She climbed around in Méndez’s lap making herself comfortable. She put her round face close to his, her ringlets pulled back by a barrette. She clenched his cheeks in her hands and said, “Chubby-chubby. Chubby-chubby.”

  “Amalita, please, careful with Leo’s face,” Araceli Aguirre said, putting two glasses of orange-papaya juice on the white patio table. Watching her daughter curl up in Méndez’s arms, she said: “My love, why don’t you go inside and lie down? Tell Papa to tuck you in.”

  “It’s alright,” Méndez said. “Let her be.”

  He shifted the girl gently to his left shoulder and drank juice. Amalia was so much lighter than his son, w
ho was five. When they were preparing for his son’s birth, Méndez and his wife had bought a stack of parenting books at a café-bookstore in San Diego where they liked to spend weekend mornings. The books had been moderately helpful and written in a strangely robotic tone. Any Mexican parent could tell you how important it was to shower a child with hugs and kisses—without citing academic studies showing the negative impact of insufficient affection later in life. Patting Amalia’s back, Méndez thought that someone should do a reverse study to measure the negative impact on fathers deprived of contact with their children.

  “So it was a grotesque episode,” Aguirre said.

  “Absolutely. Psychological warfare à la Ruiz Caballero. The Secretary held his own. He treated the Senator like a shoeshine boy.”

  “And that gave you a good feeling about the Secretary,” Araceli said bleakly. “You are convinced that he’s totally behind you.”

  Méndez sighed and held Amalita a little closer. “Basically yes, Araceli. Though I’m sure you are about to explain with great vehemence how mistaken I am.”

  “With or without vehemence, I think he treated the Senator like that for your benefit. Consolation for the fact that he’s not going to indict them next week, or next month, or ever.”

  They were sitting on the patio of Aguirre’s house on a low hill in Colonia Juárez. The patio was cozy: trees, plants, a stone fountain painted with pre-Columbian figures. The white walls had small alcoves in them containing statuettes—a Virgin of Solitude with a high ornate crown, a sweet-faced female saint in a penitent’s habit—by Oaxacan artists whose work Aguirre collected.

  Méndez felt soothed by the gurgling water, the greenery, the warmth of Amalia. The girl had fallen asleep, her curls in his face, her breathing soft. His eyelids drooped. He did not want to have this conversation. But after the Secretary left, Méndez had felt honor bound to visit Araceli and deliver the bad news. He found her at home preparing for lunch. When she opened the door, she told him he looked like a zombie.

  “I’m disappointed,” Méndez said, adjusting his arms to cradle the sleeping girl. “But I don’t think his position is unreasonable. He has never let me down.”