The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Keller reached out to ICE and the Border Patrol—if you stop a car with as much as an ounce of marijuana, please interview about Tristeza. He called in chips with city and state police departments with the same request—ask everyone about Tristeza and if you come up with even a possible “positive” pass it along to us.

  But so far, no results.

  Now Keller finds the book he’s looking for—Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 1940–1949. Marisol will be pleased. He goes to the counter and pays for it, then steps back on the street.

  Someone killed those students.

  Keller is going to find out who it was and he’s going to take them down.

  Because it’s on me, he thinks.

  You destroyed one monster, Keller tells himself.

  Now you have to destroy the next one.

  There has always been philosophical speculation on the question, What if there were no God? Keller thinks as he walks through the slush. But no one has really asked, much less answered, the question, What if there were no Satan?

  The answer to the former is that there would be chaos in heaven and on earth. But the answer to the latter is that there would be chaos in hell—all the lesser demons would be set loose in an amoral struggle to become the new Prince of Darkness.

  The fight for heaven is one thing.

  The fight for hell . . .

  If God is dead, and so is Satan, well . . .

  Merry Christmas.

  Hugo Hidalgo has a present for him.

  He comes into the office with a cat-licking-cream smile on his face and says, “Claiborne might finally be paying rent. Have you heard of Park Tower?”

  “Sounds like a show on PBS.”

  Park Tower, Hidalgo explains, is a high-rise building of offices, shops and condominiums in lower Manhattan. Something called the Terra Company bought it back in 2007, during a real estate boom, putting fifty million dollars down on an almost two-billion-dollar purchase price.

  “That’s just two and a half percent,” Keller says.

  Hidalgo says, “The rest was in high-interest loans, due in a bubble payment in eighteen months.”

  The problem, Hidalgo says, is that the building has been a bust. Terra hasn’t been able to find enough tenants to service even the interest, never mind the principal. And the building needs major remodeling and construction to become competitive.

  Enter Berkeley, the hedge fund Claiborne works for.

  Berkeley created a syndicate to refinance Park Tower and pay off the loan. In exchange they would receive a 20 percent share in the new building. Claiborne put together seventeen lenders from banks in the US and overseas—Germany, China, the Emirates.

  “So what’s the problem?” Keller asks.

  “Deutsche Bank just pulled out,” Hidalgo says. “Now Claiborne is racing the clock to hold the rest together, and he’s $285 million short. It’s a tough sell, because Terra’s credit is for shit. So Claiborne is looking for what he calls a ‘lender of last resort.’”

  “That’s quite a euphemism,” Keller says.

  “Claiborne only brought this to me because I threatened to pull the plug on him,” Hidalgo says. “But when they’ve had similar problems in the past, they’ve gone to HBMX.”

  Keller recognizes the name. HBMX is a private investment bank that’s a major money launderer for the Sinaloa cartel.

  All major drug-trafficking organizations face the same problem, and it’s the opposite of what most businesses face.

  DTOs don’t have too little money, they have too much.

  And most of it comes in cash.

  Cartels are credit-to-cash businesses: they front the drugs to middlemen, who pay when they convert the drugs to a retailer. It’s not unusual for a cartel to advance millions of dollars in drugs on good faith, which is pretty much assured by the lives of the borrowers and their families.

  It’s not that risky for either party, because drugs are almost a sure sell. The only bad thing that can happen is that the drugs get busted by a law enforcement agency before they can be sold, in which case the middleman provides proof to the cartel, usually in the form of a police report, that the drugs were, indeed, seized by a governmental agency. Then they work out an extension of the debt or even, in the case of a steady customer, forgiveness.

  There’s that much money to go around.

  But that’s the problem: the business generates massive amounts of cash that has to be laundered, passed through legitimate businesses so that it can be used and spent.

  A decade or so ago, the cartels cleaned the money electronically, sending it around the world on multiple digital transfers until it came back clean. But Interpol and other agencies got too good at electronic surveillance, so the cartels went old school—started physically shipping the cash back to Mexico, where it was deposited in tame banks.

  Good as far as it went, but the Mexican banks couldn’t handle all the cash, and the prime investment opportunities were in the United States, so they started transferring the money from Mexican to American banks. The problem was that American banks have far stricter reporting rules—they aren’t supposed to accept cash deposits of more than ten thousand dollars without filing an SAR—Suspicious Activity Report—and they’re supposed to file a report on any large deposits, no matter how much, the origins of which are, well, suspicious.

  A couple of banks in the US and UK got caught moving drug money without filing SARs and were fined a couple of billion, which sounds like a lot of money except you’re talking about $670 billion in wire transfers, and the banks’ profits that year were over $22 billion.

  It pays to play.

  But the money can’t sit in the banks and do a lot of good, or generate a return on the investment, so one of the best things you can do with it is invest in real estate.

  Because real estate is expensive.

  Construction is expensive.

  Labor is expensive.

  And all your money can be cleaned through loans, skimming on materials, paying labor that didn’t labor . . . it goes on and on.

  With a project like Park Tower, the possibilities are endless.

  And when a company like Terra is halfway across a wide, fast-moving river like a Park Tower project, runs out of money, and can’t get more credit, it’s going to take whatever assistance it can get to make it to the other shore.

  If drug money is the only lifeline, they’ll grab it.

  “Have they reached out to HBMX?” Keller asks.

  “They won’t,” Hidalgo says, “until they’ve exhausted all other options.”

  Hence the expression lender of last resort, Keller thinks.

  Hidalgo has a weird look on his face.

  “What?” Keller asks.

  “Do you know who the principal partner in Terra is?”

  “No.”

  “Jason Lerner,” Hidalgo says.

  “Who’s that?”

  “John Dennison’s son-in-law,” Hidalgo says. “Are you sure you’re good with going there?”

  Because it’s fraught, Keller thinks.

  Dennison’s been attacking me, so it could be perceived as payback, or political, or both. If Dennison does run for president, it could open up a nasty can of worms.

  We have to be careful.

  Immaculate.

  “In no way,” Keller says, “can you positively assert or even suggest to Claiborne that he approach HBMX or any other entity. You can only require that he provides you with intelligence about meetings that were to happen anyway.”

  It’s a tissue-thin distinction, Keller knows, likely to tear apart anyway, but they have to maintain it.

  “Have Intelligence pull whatever we have on HBMX, Terra and Berkeley,” he says. “But put up flak—bury it in requests on other institutions. Strictly limited access. You bring this to me and only to me.”

  If Howard gets a sniff of this, he’ll run straight to Dennison and then it’s over before it’s started.

  “What ab
out Mullen?” Hidalgo asks.

  “I’ll keep him in the loop,” Keller says. “We owe him that. But no one else.”

  “Southern District?” Hidalgo asks.

  “It’s premature,” Keller says. A money-laundering case involving Terra and Berkeley would come under the jurisdiction of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and they should be involved, but there’s no real evidence yet, just a suggestion of a crime that may or may not happen.

  And they also could leak, which could endanger not only the operation but Claiborne himself, maybe even the call girl who’s at the center of the underlying charge that makes him a snitch.

  “Where’s the call girl now?” Keller asks.

  Hidalgo shrugs.

  “I’ll ask Mullen to pick her up, get her out of town,” Keller says.

  He doesn’t think Claiborne is capable of killing the girl; he knows that the cartels are.

  Marisol is prowling the Latin American shelf at Politics and Prose when she hears—“Excuse me. Dr. Cisneros?”

  She turns to see an attractive middle-aged woman with ash-blond hair. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Althea Richardson,” the woman says. “Before that I was Althea Keller.”

  “Oh. Encantada.”

  They both laugh over the awkward moment of a man’s ex-wife meeting his current one.

  “I recognized you from the magazine photos,” Althea says, “but they don’t do you justice.”

  “You’re very kind,” Marisol says, “and even more beautiful than Arturo described.”

  “I’m sure Art never said any such thing,” Althea says, smiling. “He can be clueless, but not so clueless he’d say something like that to his wife.”

  “Perhaps we weren’t yet married,” Marisol says.

  “Listen, this is a little weird,” Althea says, “but do you want to grab a cup of coffee or something?”

  “Okay, why not?”

  Marisol finds that she likes Arturo’s former wife very much. It’s not a surprise, really; he always spoke very well of her and put the blame for their divorce squarely on his own shoulders. What surprises Marisol is how funny Althea is, funny and sharp, mischievous and self-deprecating.

  The two women are quickly laughing over Art Keller stories and finding they have a lot in common.

  Not just about Art.

  Their political views are closely aligned, their ideas about women’s roles are simpatico, and after only a few minutes Marisol thinks that she might have found a real friend in this city.

  “The attacks on you have been disgraceful,” Althea says.

  Marisol shrugs. “The right wing is the same in every country, no? They don’t like women getting, how do you say, ‘uppity.’”

  “What will you do if . . .” Althea stops.

  “Arturo gets fired?”

  “I’m sorry,” Althea says. “That was really rude.”

  “No, it’s reality,” Marisol says.

  “Would you stay in Washington?”

  “I think so,” Marisol says. “But tell me about you.”

  “Not much to tell,” Althea says. “I teach poli-sci at American. Recently widowed—”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Bob and I had that academic couple life,” Althea says. “It was nice—sitting in the living room together listening to NPR, taking day hikes in our L.L.Bean gear. Wine-tasting weekends, summer vacations on Martha’s Vineyard or the Maryland coast. Then he got sick; the last year wasn’t so nice.”

  “Again, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m really doing all right,” Althea says. “It’s just odd, you know, waking up in the morning and rolling over and that side of the bed is empty. And I can’t quite get the knack of cooking for one. A lot of times I just don’t bother, I get takeout. I’m a lousy cook anyway, maybe Art told you.”

  “No.”

  “The poor guy used to cook out of self-defense.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “It’s sad,” Althea says. “They know me by my first name at Mr. Chen’s. Otherwise I spend my time haunting bookstores, accosting my ex-husband’s wives.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “Me too.”

  When Keller gets home that night, Marisol says, “Guess who I ran into this afternoon? Althea.” It amuses her that he looks absolutely flummoxed. “She came up to me and introduced herself. We had coffee.”

  “Did you talk about me?”

  “What an ego,” Marisol says. “At first, of course. Then, believe it or not, we found other topics of conversation.”

  “I’ll bet,” Keller says.

  Marisol says, “I can see why you love her.”

  “Loved.”

  “Nonsense,” Marisol says. “You can’t be married to someone like that for so long, have children together, and not love her. I’m not jealous, Arturo. What, am I supposed to dislike Althea just because you used to be married to her? Excuse me if I don’t care to be a cliché.”

  “Stereotype.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A cliché,” Keller says, “is a trite verbal expression. A stereotype is a—”

  She freezes him with a look. “Really? You’re going to correct my English now?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “Good choice,” Marisol says.

  “Well, if you run into her again—”

  “Oh, I will,” Marisol says. “So will you, actually, she’s coming over for Nochebuena. Oh, Arturo, let’s do a Mexican Christmas this year. Let’s have people in. We’ve had so much death. It would be good for us to have some life.”

  “Sure, that’s fine, but—”

  “What?” Her face is a portrait of feigned innocence.

  “Althea. You might have asked me first.”

  “But you would have said no.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So why would I do that?” Marisol asks. “She was going to be alone, and that’s not right. And I really do like her, very much. Ana’s coming, too, by the way. You’re going to be an island in a sea of estrogen.”

  “Great.”

  “What’s Hugo doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ask him.”

  Keller knows what she’s doing, even if she doesn’t. He’s a loner, comfortable with solitude, but Mari is a social creature, her happiest days spent in a circle of close friends for whom a new poem was sufficient occasion for a party. He was present at a few of those gatherings—the drinking, the passionate debates, the singing, the laughter. Too many of those friends are gone now—murdered in the drug war—and she is, perhaps unconsciously, trying to re-create the warmth of that embrace, their arms wrapped around her, her arms wrapped around them. He knows that she’s lonely in this cold country, so he tells himself not to be an asshole and object to her Christmas plans.

  Hugo Hidalgo laughs in Keller’s face. “I want to make sure I don’t have this twisted—you want me to come over and have dinner with you, your wife and your ex-wife? No. Let me rephrase that—hell no.”

  “What are you doing for Christmas?”

  “Not that.”

  “You’re smarter than you look,” Keller says.

  “Not hard, boss.”

  Keller plays his trump card. “Mari would love for you to be there.”

  “Damn it.”

  “You should have made prior plans,” Keller says. “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

  Ana arrives on Christmas Eve.

  It’s striking, Keller thinks, how she resembles a bird more each passing year, with her little beaked nose and a fragile frame that looks as if it’s supported only by hollow bones. Her pageboy hairstyle is white now.

  Ana stands on their steps in her cloth coat, clutching her suitcase like a middle-aged orphan. Keller opens the door and she busses him on the cheek.

  She smells of alcohol.

  “Your room’s all made up,” Keller says.

  “Oh, and I was think
ing manger.”

  “I can throw some straw in there if you’d like,” Marisol says.

  She just might have some, Keller thinks. Mari has been in a frenzy of preparation, decorating the house with the traditional red poinsettias, laying out a nacimiento, a nativity scene, and buying special food like salted cod for the bacalao. Now she moves between the kitchen and the dining room, setting plates and glasses, stirring food, sipping wine all the time and chatting with Ana.

  Then she and Ana head out for the midnight Mass.

  “Althea is meeting us there,” Marisol says to Keller. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

  “I’ll take a pass.”

  “No cheating and getting into the ponche before we get back,” she says.

  “I won’t.” Although it smells great—the pulped fruit, cinnamon and rum simmering on the stove. That and the turkey and the ham in the oven. Marisol has gone all out; they’ll be eating leftovers until Groundhog Day.

  “You won’t forget to baste the turkey, will you?” she asks. “We’ll say hello to the baby Jesus for you.”

  He hits the ponche two seconds after they’re out the door.

  It hits back a little, it’s as good as it smelled.

  Keller is just sitting down to watch It’s a Wonderful Life when the doorbell rings and it’s Hidalgo.

  “Damn,” Hidalgo says.

  “What?”

  “I forgot my bulletproof vest.”

  “Won’t matter,” Keller says, “women shoot for the head. You want some ponche?”

  “I want a lot of ponche,” Hidalgo says. “Jesus, it smells good in here.”

  “Mari’s been making tamales all week.”

  “Isn’t it past your bedtime, boss?” Keller is a famously early riser, equally famous for being one of the first in the office every morning.

  “As a matter of fact.”

  “Hey, if you want to take a nap, I’ll maintain the surveillance.”

  Smart-ass.

  “What’s on TV?” Hidalgo asks. He grabs a glass of punch and sits down. “Oh, yeah. I like this one. So where are the sister wives?”