The Cartel

by Don Winslow

  “Well, I blame you,” Pablo says. “How can she love a gringo?”

  “Well, I’m only half gringo,” Keller says. “Half gringo, half pocho.”

  “A pochingo.”

  “I guess.”

  “I just made that word up,” Pablo says. “I’m a Juarense. Born and bred.”

  Marisol walks over to rescue him. “Pablo, I see you’ve met Arturo.”

  “The pochingo spy.”

  “Pochingo?” Marisol asks.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Keller says.

  “You’re okay, pochingo,” Pablo says. “I’m going to get another beer. You want another beer?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Okay.”

  Pablo walks away.

  “He’s a little over-refreshed,” Keller says.

  “Kind of a sad story, Pablo.”

  “I like him,” Keller says. “He has a crush on you.”

  “A small crush,” Marisol says. “He’d be in love with Ana if he had any brains. Are you having a good time?”

  “I am.”

  “Liar.”

  “No, I am.”

  “Let’s go talk with Ana,” Marisol says. “I’d love for you to be friends.”

  They go and sit on the steps with the petite black-haired woman who’s in an intense discussion with a bespectacled middle-aged man with a cane. Keller figures that this has to be the famous Óscar Herrera, the eminent journalist whom the Barreras tried to assassinate back in the day.

  “Tell me how it’s different, Óscar,” Ana is saying. “Tell me how this isn’t an army of occupation.”

  “Because it’s our own country’s army,” Óscar answers.

  “Still, it’s martial law.”

  “I’m not disputing that,” Óscar says. “I’m disputing your notion that it’s an army of occupation and I’m also asking, what are the other options? We have a police force that either cannot or will not enforce the law, that is afraid to come out of its precinct houses for fear of being killed, so what is the city government supposed to do? Just surrender to anarchy?”

  “This is anarchy.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Marisol says. “I wanted to introduce you to my friend. Óscar Herrera, this is Arturo Keller.”

  “Mucho gusto.”

  “The pleasure’s mine.”

  “We were just discussing the sad condition of our city,” Óscar says, “but I, for one, am glad to be interrupted. You’re a North American, Señor Keller.”

  “Art, please. And yes.”

  “But you speak Spanish so well,” Óscar says. “Do you read it, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who do you read?”

  Keller mentions Roberto Bolano, Luis Urrea, and Elmer Mendoza, among others.

  “Dr. Cisneros!” Óscar exclaims. “You have done it! You have found a civilized North American! Sit down, Arturo, sit down next to me.”

  Keller squeezes in next to Óscar, who moves his cane to make room, and they talk about The Savage Detectives, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and Silver Bullets until Óscar gets up and announces that he needs to leave the late night to the young people.

  Marisol walks him out to help him find a cab.

  Ana wastes no time. “She’s in love with you, you know.”

  “I hope she is,” Keller says.

  “I’m not sure you’re the man I would have chosen for her,” Ana says. “A North American, and…well, we joke about your being a spy, but the joke isn’t that far off, is it?”

  Keller doesn’t answer.

  “You be good to her,” Ana says.

  “I will,” Keller says. “What about you and Pablo?”

  She looks over at the reporter, who is standing and laughing with Giorgio. “I don’t know that there is a ‘me and Pablo.’ ”

  “He seems like a nice guy.”

  “Which might be his problem,” Ana says. “He’s a nice guy with a soft heart, and he’s carrying a torch for his ex-wife, his son, and Marisol.”

  “Just a crush.”

  “Oh,” she says, “she’s so far out of his league it isn’t funny. No, the problem with Pablo and me is that we work together and maybe know each other too well.”

  “It’s not a bad basis for a relationship.”

  Ana’s voice turns serious. “If you have any influence with Mari, get her out of this political stuff. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “She doesn’t listen.”

  “Well, maybe if we both keep trying.”

  “Deal.”

  They shake hands. Marisol comes back out. “What are we shaking on?”

  “A newfound friendship,” Keller says.

  “That’s good,” Marisol says. “I was hoping for that.”

  She goes back with him to the Candlewood Suites in El Paso, where DEA keeps a room for him, rather than risk a late-night drive back to Valverde. It’s one of those extended-stay hotels, hardly luxurious but not so depressing. As they get into the room, she asks, “By the way, what’s a pochingo?”

  “Half pocho, half gringo.”

  “I see. Which half would like to make love to me?”

  Both, as it turns out.

  —

  New Year Day 2010 is the bloodiest day in Juárez history.

  Twenty-six people are murdered in twenty-four hours.

  Sixty-nine across Mexico.

  Keller kisses Marisol goodbye and then leaves for Nuevo Laredo.

  To hunt Zetas.

  Carrejos admitted everything.

  Yes, I was the one who bought the weapons from Wagner and turned them over to the Zeta team assigned to kill the Córdovas. Yes, Heriberto Ochoa—Z-1, El Verdugo—personally gave the order for the murders, to set an example. Yes, I was behind the wheel, but I didn’t go in, I swear on my mother’s eyes, didn’t participate in the shootings. I just drove. Please stop!—don’t do it again.

  He even gave up the names of the hit squad.

  José Silva.

  Manuel Torres.

  And the commander, the one in charge—Braulio Rodríguez—“Z-20.” They call him El Gigante.

  Keller knows the aporto Z-20 means that Rodríguez was one of the original Zetas, one of the first group that Ochoa recruited from the special forces. That means he’s important, a top guy, so the murder of the Córdova family was a high-priority mission.

  Rodríguez was in the extensive FES intelligence file. Sure enough, he’d served with Ochoa in Chiapas, so murdering women wasn’t a new thing for him.

  Carrejos even gave up the locations of the team.

  Silva and Torres were in Nuevo Laredo.

  Rodríguez was in Veracruz.

  What is he doing in Veracruz? Keller wondered. The port city is a long way from the action, down in territory that had long been a Tapia stronghold, now allegedly being taken over by Crazy Eddie Ruiz.

  He relayed the question through the FES guys, who were just wrapping up their interrogation of Carrejos, and he gave them the best answer he knew. It was a promotion, he told them, a reward to Rodríguez for the Córdova mission. Rodríguez would get Veracruz as his own plaza, if he could take it from Ruiz.

  Ports are important to the cartels not so much for the product they send out as for the product they bring in—the precursor chemicals needed to fuel their methamphetamine super-factories, the new maquiladoras. Mazatlán, firmly in the hands of the Sinaloa cartel; Lázaro Cárdenas, contested between the Zetas and La Familia Michoacana; and Matamoros, held by the CDG, are all important inlets for the chemicals that come mostly from China. And now Veracruz, which Eddie’s using to supply his operations there, but also in Monterrey and Acapulco, as he tries to reassemble the Tapia operation under his own aegis.

  The Z Company has other ideas—they want the port for themselves. And Rodríguez—Z-20, El Gigante—is leading the charge.

  But first things first, Keller thinks.

  José Silva’s been spott
ed in Nuevo Laredo, Eddie Ruiz’s old stomping grounds before the Zetas took it for their CDG bosses. He’s a whoremaster, running Central American immigrant girls in Boy’s Town. The small brothel is on the second floor of a building just off the corner of Front Street and Calle Cleopatra.

  Keller looks every inch the drunk middle-aged gringo crossing the border to get laid. Yellow polo shirt, jeans, a white golf cap, the stink of booze. He walks from the taxi stand past the cribs of freelance prostitutes and finds Casa Las Nalgas, which has a shabby bar where he has a beer until the women come out for the “lineup.”

  There are four of them at this time in the early afternoon. Keller chooses a girl who is maybe seventeen, in an ill-fitting black negligee that barely conceals her thin breasts. She looks drugged as she leads him up the narrow, creaky stairs into a filthy room that looks a little larger than a closet. A mattress sits on old box springs, with a single cover sheet over it.

  A button is set in the wall over the bed.

  Keller noticed the glance she exchanged with Silva at the bar. He closes the door behind him but doesn’t lock it.

  The girl says, “Please, the money.”

  “No.”

  She looks surprised and scared. “Please.”

  “I’ve never paid for it in my life,” Keller slurs. He takes a latex glove from his jeans pocket and slips it on. “C’mere.”

  She backs away from him and presses the button.

  Keller pulls the clean, suppressed Beretta that the FES gave him from under his shirt and hears the feet coming up the stairs. The door opens and Silva comes in looking annoyed, saying, “Listen, pendejo—”

  Keller double-taps him in the chest.

  The girl screams.

  Standing over Silva, Keller fires another shot into the back of his head, then takes a jack of spades from his pocket—the calling card of the Matazetas—and lays it on the body. He drops the gun, walks down the stairs and out onto Front Street, where an FES work car picks him up.

  —

  Manuel Torres holes up.

  Doubtless he’s heard about Silva, and that Carrejos’s brutalized corpse was found in a ditch outside of town with a jack of spades pinned to his shirt, and that the FES is tracking him down. They know he’s in Nuevo Laredo, but they don’t know where, and he’s not using his cell phone or his computer. He’s not reaching out to contact his buddies, and they can’t find him.

  They do find his mother.

  Dolores Torres is eighty-seven and not in good health. She lives in the El Carrizo neighborhood in the central part of town, and every day walks down the street on her cane to the little market.

  She’s on the sidewalk this morning when an ambulance pulls up with its flashers on. Two EMTs get out and, supporting her by the elbows, guide her gently toward the back of the ambulance.

  “It’s going to be all right,” one of the EMTs says. “We have you.”

  “But I’m fine, I—”

  “Just be calm. We’re going to take care of you.”

  They help her into the ambulance and lay her down on the gurney. At least fifty people on the street see this, and see the ambulance take off toward Hospital General. At least three of them phone Manuel Torres to tell him that his beloved mother collapsed on the sidewalk and was taken to the hospital.

  Keller waits in a van parked on Calle Maclovio Herrera opposite the entrance to the emergency room. It takes twenty minutes before a Chevrolet Suburban races up. There’s a Zeta behind the wheel, a bodyguard in the passenger seat.

  Torres in the back.

  The car hasn’t come to a complete stop before Torres opens the door and hops out.

  The two FES snipers have a clear shot. Two suppressed M-4 rifles put tightly patterned bursts into Torres’s head and chest.

  A jack of spades flutters out of the van before it takes off.

  —

  The wind—cold and whirling—blows trash against the tires of Pablo’s car as he sits in the parking lot of S-Mart eating breakfast.

  He hears the call on the police scanner. “Motivo 59.”

  Another murder.

  “One 91.”

  A woman.

  Pablo starts the engine, crumples up the burrito wrapper, throws it on the floor, and heads for the address, a restaurant near the university where he’s eaten a few times. Giorgio has beaten him there, but he’s not shooting photos now, just standing next to the victim’s car, looking down.

  Jimena Abarca’s body is sprawled by the driver’s door, her right arm stretched out in a pool of her blood, her hand still grasping her car keys.

  She was shot nine times in the face and chest.

  A couple of more photographers roll up to get pics for la nota roja. Giorgio steps between them and Jimena’s body. “Don’t.”

  “What the hell, Giorgio?”

  Giorgio shoves the man back. “I said don’t fucking shoot this! Píntate! Get the fuck out of here!”

  They back off.

  Pablo gets back in his car, takes a deep breath, and calls Ana.

  —

  They bury Jimena in Valverde.

  Hundreds of people come, from Juárez and all over the valley, and Marisol thought it would have been thousands if so many hadn’t left and crossed the river. And some are scared to come, afraid to be seen and photographed and become the next person buried.

  The army is there, in force, in case a violent demonstration breaks out, and to photograph the people at the funeral.

  “They should be here,” Marisol hisses as they walk the coffin from the bakery to the cemetery. “They killed her.”

  “You don’t know that,” Keller says.

  “I know it.”

  Witnesses inside the restaurant said that four men came up to Jimena as she was walking to her car, so they clearly knew her habits and that she had breakfast in that place every morning. A woman who ducked down in her car heard one of the men say to Jimena, “You think you’re so fucking cool.”

  Jimena fought back, clawing at them with her car keys.

  “Of course she did,” Marisol said when she heard this. “Of course she fought.”

  One woman with car keys against four men with guns. There was so little left of her face that her casket had to be closed for the wake.

  “The army killed her,” Marisol says, “because she wouldn’t stay silent.”

  Neither will Marisol.

  “Jimena Abarca was my friend,” Marisol says at the burial service, “and a friend to everyone in this valley. No one ever came to her for help who didn’t get it, for kindness that didn’t receive it, for support who didn’t find it. She lived with dignity, courage, and purpose…and they …”

  To Keller’s horror, Marisol points at the soldiers.

  “…killed her for it.”

  She pauses to stare down the soldiers, including Colonel Alvarado, who goes pale with fury.

  “Jimena died as she lived,” Marisol continues. “Fighting. May that be said of us all. I hope it’s said of me. Goodbye, Jimena. I love you. I will always love you. May God fold you in Her arms.”

  Now the priest looks angry, too.

  Marisol, Keller thinks, is managing to infuriate everyone.

  They argue about it that night.

  Keller stays with her in Valverde and tries to persuade her to leave.

  The town is a shell, he argues. Half the houses are boarded up, only one tiendita is open, and that just barely. There’s no town government—the mayor and council members have all fled and no one will take the job. The police have all run away, too, and Keller can’t blame them. It’s not just Valverde—all the little towns on the border are in the same condition.

  “It isn’t safe here for you,” Keller says, and adds, “Especially now that you’ve made yourself a target.”

  “My clinic is here, and they made me a target,” Marisol says.

  They glare at each other for a second, then Keller says, “Come live with me.”

  “I will not run to
El Paso,” Marisol says. “I will not do that.”

  “Your goddamn pride, Mari…Okay, fine. Come back to Mexico City. You can open a practice—”

  “I’m needed here.”

  “—in Iztapalapa, if that makes you feel better.”

  “It’s not about my feelings, Arturo,” she says angrily. “It’s about the facts. Fact: I am the only physician in the valley. Fact: This is my home. Fact—”

  “You could get killed here. Fact.”

  “I’m not running away.”

  In fact, she does the opposite.

  The next evening, Marisol holds a meeting in her clinic. About thirty people from the valley come, most of them women. It makes sense—so many of the men are dead, in jail, or have crossed the river.

  That’s Marisol’s point.

  “What the men can’t or won’t do,” she says, “the women have to. It’s always been women’s role to create and preserve the home. Now our homes are threatened as never before. The army and the narcos want to chase us from our homes. If we don’t stand up to them, no one will.”

  The meeting lasts for three hours.

  At the end, two Valverde women have volunteered for the town council. Three more become mayors and councilwomen in other border towns. A twenty-eight-year-old law student volunteers to become the only police-(woman) in Práxedis; another woman takes over as the only member of the police department in Esperanza.

  And Marisol becomes the new mayor of Valverde.

  She holds a press conference. La Médica Hermosa has no trouble getting media, and looks straight into the cameras as she says, “This is our announcement—to the politicians, to the army, to the criminal cartels. To you, the thugs who murdered Jimena Abarca, to you, the Zeta cowards who slaughtered the Córdova family as they slept in their beds, I am here to tell you that it didn’t do any good. We are here. We will be here. And we will continue to work for the poor people of the valley who tear the souls out of their bodies every day just to feed their children. We are not afraid of you, but you should be very afraid of us. We are women, fighting for our families and our homes. Nothing is more powerful.”

  The “Woman’s Revolution”—spurred by the murder of Jimena Abarca—has taken over the Juárez Valley.

  —

  There’s only one position missing.

  Valverde has no police officer.

  Two of the previous cops were killed, the others fled to the United States.