The Cartel

by Don Winslow

  Aguilar’s face goes red with anger. “Were you thinking that, when you were sitting at the table, with my family?”

  Good, Keller thinks. It’s out there. “As a matter of fact, I was.”

  The rifles crack.

  Calderón makes a speech.

  “Today I reiterate my promise not to retreat in the quest for a Mexico where order prevails,” he says. “We must say, all Mexican men and women together, that enough is enough. We have come together to confront this evil. We can’t accept this situation. Our fight is head-on. The capacities of the Mexican state are aligned to break the structures of each cartel. We are determined to recover the streets that should never have ceased being ours.”

  Gerardo Vera stands up and says simply, “We will not be intimidated.”

  “You’re corrupt,” Aguilar says to Keller as they walk away. “You’re a corrupt man and a corrupt cop, and I’m going to bring you down.”

  Mutual, Keller thinks.

  Christmas 2007

  Sinaloa, Mexico

  —

  The Barreras come home for Christmas.

  Adán has his new security system in place with the Gente Nueva, the government has come down hard on the Tapias, and while the war with them drags on, it’s more the Tapias on the run than him.

  The killings of three top police officials have shocked the nation. The public relations campaign has worked—people from vastly different demographics agree that the Tapias should be hunted down like rabid dogs.

  The Tapias did the government a huge favor, Adán thinks. It’s a game change—heretofore the public has been lukewarm on Calderón’s war on drugs, some even protesting in the streets against it. But the disgust at the murders has aroused a feeling of patriotism and support for the government not seen in a very long time.

  The Tapias have handed Calderón a mandate.

  And me as well, Adán thinks.

  Eva is glad to be home.

  She decorates the finca in La Tuna with traditional poinsettias—unaware that they symbolize new life for fallen warriors. Sinaloa has a heavy German influence, so she and Adán put up a gigantic Christmas tree outside for the village children to come see because Eva wants to start a new tradition.

  So they sponsor a posada, a children’s parade from the village to the finca, where Eva has spent thousands on the tree with special carved wooden ornaments imported from Germany and a nativity scene with ceramic figures from Tlaquepaque.

  The children, with two playing Mary and Joseph on a burro, march to the nativity scene, where Eva has hung up a gigantic star-shaped piñata from a ficus branch, filled with candy and toys.

  After that, Adán and Eva host a feast for the village, with buñuelos, atole, tamales, and hot ponche spiced with cinnamon and vanilla.

  Then they sing the villancicos, the Christmas carols.

  Adán is a little surprised, but pleased, at how traditional Eva is. Christmas Eve, she insists that they go to the village church for the late-night Mass of the Rooster, and she delights in the fireworks set off after the service.

  Then there’s a midnight dinner, this time the traditional bacalao, dried cod in tomato sauce with onions—which Adán can’t stand but tolerates because it reminds Eva of her childhood—and revoltijo de romerita, shrimp in pepito sauce, which he does like.

  They spend Christmas Day itself quietly, sleeping late and getting up to eat leftovers.

  Three days later comes Los Santos Innocentes to commemorate the boys that Herod slaughtered in his futile hunt for the baby Jesus. Tradition has it that anything borrowed on this day doesn’t have to be returned, and Nacho phones up asking to “borrow” the Laredo plaza. Adán declines and they chat for a few minutes about inconsequential things before hanging up with best wishes for the New Year.

  Los Santos Innocentes is also Mexico’s “April Fool’s Day,” with the mandatory pranks, including phony newspaper stories, one of which announces that Adán Barrera, despite being rumored dead or employed as a sous-chef at Los Pinos, will nevertheless take over as host of Atínale al Precio—The Price Is Right. Eva hides the paper from him, but he laughs when he sees it and, to her delight, does a passable impression of Héctor Sandarti, replete with Guatemalan accent.

  Adán doesn’t really want to go out for New Year’s Eve, but Eva very much does and he doesn’t want her to think that she married a grouchy old man, so they fly to Puerto Vallarta, where his men go into the club first, collect all cell phones, apologize, and tell the other celebrants that they’ll be locked in until El Patrón leaves, and then Adán and Eva come in and join the festivities. She looks more than wonderful in a short red dress and a silly New Year’s Eve tiara, and she even talked Adán into a tuxedo on the promise that she would talk him out of it later.

  Eva dances her head off and Adán does his best to keep up, although he has to admit—albeit only to himself—that he’s quite ready for midnight to come when they do the traditional thing of feeding each other twelve grapes along with the strikes of midnight for good luck in the coming year.

  They leave shortly afterward, and cell phones are restored to their owners, who have a new story to tell.

  Epiphany—El Día de los Tres Reyes Magos, “Three Kings Day”—is the next festival in the liturgical calendar. That night, January 5, Eva, as she did when she was a girl, leaves a shoe outside the door where the Wise Men will enter to greet Jesus. That afternoon, the village children put messages inside helium balloons provided by Adán and Eva that explain why they have been good or bad that year and what they would like as a gift, and then loft them to the heavens with great hope.

  And that night, five Nueva Gente armed with high-powered rifles and night scopes shoot to death five of Vicente Fuentes’s key people in Juárez.

  —

  Holidays are hard on the solitary man.

  The single, the widowed, perhaps most especially the divorced, to whose loneliness is added the bitter spice of regret.

  Marisol invited Keller up to Valverde for Christmas, but he declined. Although the threat against him has diminished—neither side is likely to kill a DEA agent and tip the scales—he prefers to be alone with his angst. Starting things with Marisol again won’t solve any of the underlying issues, and there’s no point in prolonging it for either of them.

  It’s been a miserable six months.

  Luis Aguilar has been waging his own bureaucratic war on Keller, doing everything he can to get him recalled to the United States.

  “You been fucking around with the working agreement?” Taylor asked Keller on the phone a few weeks ago. “Going behind Aguilar’s back, developing your own sources? Is the past prologue here, Art? Tell me you don’t have some sort of relationship with the Tapias.”

  “I’ve been a Boy Scout.”

  “Aguilar says you’re taking money, Art,” Taylor said. “He says you’re in the Tapias’ pocket.”

  “Jesus Christ, Tim.”

  “Could you pass a polygraph?”

  “Could he?”

  “What, you have evidence?” Taylor asked.

  “No.” Not yet. I don’t have it yet, Keller thought, but I know it’s coming. “You test me and I walk.”

  “That’s not much of a threat at this point.”

  “Go to the videotape,” Keller answered. He cited his record—Osiel Contreras sitting in a Houston supermax, Alberto Tapia on a slab, and the Sinaloa cartel split into pieces. “I shouldn’t have to plead for my life here. The fuck, Tim? You think I’m dirty?”

  He heard Taylor sigh. “No, of course not. You’re a lot of things—most of them bad—but you’re not dirty. You do play the edges of the plate, though, and it’s not helpful in trying to keep you there. If it weren’t for Mérida, I’d have no fucking leverage. Play nice, Art, huh? If your usual dick-meter is at, say, 10, try to be, I don’t know, a 5, okay?”

  Not easy, with Aguilar cutting him out of everything and Vera so obsessed with the Tapias that he’s not paying attention. Add to t
hat the fact that Aguilar has him under surveillance now, with SEIDO agents tracking him constantly. Keller has to assume that his phone is tapped, too.

  Aware that he’s wallowing in self-pity, Keller microwaves a Swanson “Hungry Man” turkey dinner with its little tub of cranberry sauce in a parody of Christmas dinner. Balancing the meal on his lap and washing it down with scotch, he watches Mexican television and remembers other Christmases in better times, when the kids were young, the family together and never thinking that they’d ever be apart.

  He almost calls them but then thinks better of it, not wanting to tinge their day with his melancholy. Maybe they’re with their mom, maybe they’re with friends. Maybe Althea took them somewhere special—Utah to ski, Hawaii to lie in the sun. Maybe they’re with Althie’s family in California.

  And I’m here, Keller thinks—Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Ahab chasing the great white whale—alone with my obsession. As hooked as any junkie in a shooting gallery, any crack whore on the stroll.

  My personal war on drugs, my own addiction.

  Two scotches later, he phones Marisol. “Feliz Navidad.”

  “Feliz Navidad to you,” Marisol says. “Are you having a good day?”

  “Not really.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No,” Keller says. “Maybe a little.”

  She’s quiet for a second and then says, “I asked you to come here.”

  “I know.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too,” Keller says. Then, against his better judgment, “Do you want to come down here for New Year’s?”

  “I wish I could,” Marisol says. “But it’s so busy here. Sadly, it’s the domestic violence season as well. Could you come here?”

  He knows he’s being a dick, but he says, “For the ‘domestic violence season’? I think I’ll pass.”

  If his intent was to piss her off, it worked. “All right.”

  “All right, well…I guess I’ll talk to you.”

  “All right. Goodbye, Arturo.”

  Goodbye, Marisol, he thinks.

  Keller gets good and drunk that night, for the first time in many years. The next morning, he showers and shaves and makes himself go into the office. The embassy is all but empty over the holidays, eerily quiet.

  Settling himself behind his desk, he pores over intelligence reports, data spreadsheets, and analyses.

  The Sinaloa civil war (the war you set in motion, Keller reminds himself) has spread corpses out all over Sinaloa and Durango, while the fighting in Michoacán goes on with no end in sight, and the trap Keller set has yet to be sprung.

  But the intense pressure on the Tapias is going to accelerate that, Keller thinks. It has to, because the clock is winding down on you.

  Going through the data, Keller tries to get a line on Barrera’s next move.

  He already has Laredo, Keller thinks.

  He’ll soon have Tijuana back.

  There’s only one other target left, the biggest jewel in the Mexican smuggling crown.

  Juárez.

  2

  Journalists

  Those were truly golden years my Uncle Tommy says,

  But everything’s gone straight to hell since Sinatra played Juarez.

  —Tom Russell

  “When Sinatra Played Juarez”

  Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua

  2008

  Pablo Mora has one of those hangovers where you see yourself in the mirror and think you look familiar.

  The mirror’s not his friend this morning. His unshaven face is puffy, his hair a rat’s nest and badly in need of a cut, his eyes are bloodshot. He brushes his teeth—even that’s painful—finds a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet and swallows two of them, then shuffles back to the bedroom, finds his cleanest shirt on the bed, and then struggles into jeans and sits down to put on socks and shoes. He sniffs the socks—they’re just on this side of acceptable—and notes that the shoes need a shine that they’re not going to get.

  The bed calls him to come back, but he has stories to get in and Óscar will not be happy if he misses another deadline.

  And Ana, who’d had every bit as much to drink, would mock him as a pussy.

  Making coffee seems like too much work—and he’s not sure he has any left anyway—and the thought of breakfast is literally nauseating, so he decides to head downtown and go to the café across the street from the paper’s offices.

  The owner, Ricardo, is simpatico with hungover journalists.

  He’d better be, Pablo thinks. It’s half his business.

  Pablo heads out the door of his second-floor apartment and gingerly navigates the stairs. The place has an elevator but Pablo doesn’t fully trust it anyway and he’s not sure he can handle the doors slamming shut.

  God damn Jaime’s, Pablo thinks as he walks out into the brisk January morning. He’d let Ana talk him into going there after work for one beer, although they both knew how that would turn out. He’d started at Jaime’s with a Modelo, then graduated to dark Indio, at some point Giorgio joined up with them and shouted for tequilas, and, by the time they apparently thought it would be amusing to go to Fred’s, they had graduated to some scotch older than Pablo’s grandmother.

  Which, he thinks now, they could afford neither physically nor financially.

  Newspaper reporters in Mexico make basically shit, and city-beat reporters in Juárez make less than shit—about a hundred dollars a week, paid every Friday—and although his rent is cheap he has child support payments, and now he tries to remember if this is his weekend with Mateo.

  Doesn’t so much matter—he sees his son almost every day anyway. Mateo is almost four now, and getting to that point where his jokes are actually funny. Victoria is good about letting him see their child, and Pablo usually picks him up from preschool these days.

  So his ex-wife is easy about that.

  On other things? Not so much.

  Then again, she’s a financial journalist.

  Whole different world.

  He gets into his ’96 Toyota Camry, which is decked out with all the reporter’s essential equipment—two mostly empty cardboard coffee cups, several El Puerco Loco burrito wrappers (the smiling pig logo grinning up at him with derision), a mapbook of the city streets, which he doesn’t really need, a two-way Nextel phone (provided by the paper), which he does, and a police radio scanner that provides the background track of his working life.

  The Camry isn’t in much better shape than Pablo. It isn’t hungover, of course, but it is in need of a paint job to disguise the dings on all four fenders that Pablo has inflicted on it by getting in and out of literal as well as metaphorical tight scrapes. The back passenger window is cracked from a rock thrown by a disgruntled wino in Anapra, the rubber in the windshield wiper has long since melted in the summer sun, and a fine layer of khaki dust mutes the car’s original blue.

  “Why don’t you get a nicer car?” Victoria asked him just last week.

  “I don’t want a nicer car,” Pablo answered, even though a large part of the answer was that he can’t afford a nice car.

  Besides, a nice car is just a liability in his work. The residents of the poorer neighborhoods that he goes into get jealous and suspicious when they see an expensive car, and people are less likely to steal his old fronterizo, even though car theft is epidemic in Juárez.

  The strange thing about Juárez car theft is that the cars turn up on their own—usually on the same day—which was a mystery to police until reporters like Pablo figured out that minor-league narcos were stealing cars, driving them across the border with drugs, coming back, and dumping them off.

  Anyway, the Camry starts up and Pablo drives to the paper.

  Pablo loves Juárez.

  A true Juarense, he was born here, educated here, and would never live anywhere else. Admittedly, Juárez is surprisingly cold in the winter, miserably hot in the summer, and you just hope that either spring or autumn falls on a weekend s
o you get to enjoy it. The city is known more for its dust storms than its scenic beauty, more for its bars than its architecture, and its most famous invention is the margarita, but Pablo loves his town like a long-married husband loves his wife, as much for her flaws as for her virtues.

  He’s also a little defensive about her.

  Maybe it’s because Juárez has always been looked down on as a place you go through to get somewhere else. Even its original name, Paseo del Norte, proclaimed that it was just a place to cross the Río Bravo to the north, but Pablo likes to remind people—especially North Americans—that the city’s mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe was founded in 1659, when Washington, D.C., was still a malarial swamp.

  The name was eventually changed to Ciudad Juárez to honor the old democrat who threw the French out of Mexico, and it boomed in the late 1880s under the leadership of the Five Families—the Ochoas, Cuaróns, Provencios, Samaniegos, and Daguerres—whose descendants still dominate the city. They created the central business district—the old Calle del Comercio (now Vicente Ochoa) and 16 September Avenue, named to celebrate independence.

  Then again—and Pablo is proud of this—Juárez has always been a hub of revolution. Old Pancho Villa hung out here, arriving in the city with eight men, two pounds of coffee, and five hundred bullets, but eventually becoming governor of Chihuahua, beating Díaz, and even invading the United States. The fighting destroyed Juárez, though—it was a burned-out shell by 1913 and the Five Families had to rebuild the whole thing, which accounts for the city’s early-twentieth-century look.

  Even the neoclassical cathedral was only built in the 1950s.

  Then again, the ’50s were Juárez’s heyday, the old Tourist Zone, now called by the brutally ugly name PRONAF (Programa Nacional de Frontera), was the place celebrities went to have a good time.

  People get sentimental—and, Pablo thinks, silly—about el Juárez de ayer, “Old Juárez,” the freewheeling city of bullfights, brothels, and nightclubs where Sinatra and Ava Gardner would paint the town. At thirty-four, he’s not sure he even knew the real “Old Juárez,” but the city he grew up in was enough for him.