by Don Winslow
His sweep just missed Adán at his safe house in San Diego, but the bust was epic.
On the East Coast he hit pay dirt again, arresting one Jimmy “Big Peaches” Piccone, a capo in the Cimino Family. The FBI in New York passed along every surveillance photo of the crew they had, and Art’s looking through them when he sees something that freezes his balls.
The photo is obviously taken outside some wise-guy hangout, and there’s fat Jimmy Piccone and his equally obese little brother, and a few other goombahs, and then there’s someone else standing there.
Sal Scachi.
Art gets on the phone to Dantzler.
“Yeah, that’s Salvatore Scachi,” Dantzler tells him. “A made man in the Cimino Family.”
“In the Piccone crew?”
“Apparently, Scachi isn’t in a crew,” Dantzler says. “He’s sort of a wise guy without a portfolio. He reports directly to Calabrese himself. And get this, Art—the guy was a full colonel in the U.S. Army.”
Goddamn, Art thinks.
“There’s something else, Art,” Dantzler says. “This Piccone guy, Jimmy Peaches? FBI has had a tap on him for months. He’s Chatty-fucking-Cathy. Been running his mouth about a lot of stuff.”
“Coke?”
“Yup,” Dantzler says. “And guns. Seems like his crew is heavy into selling off hijacked weapons.”
Art is taking this in when another line rings and Shag jumps on it.
Then, sharply, “Art.”
Art hangs up from Dantzler and gets on the other line.
“We need to talk,” Adán says.
“How do I know you have him?”
“Inside his wedding ring. It’s inscribed, 'Eres toda mi vida.’ “
You’re my whole life.
“How do I know he’s still alive?” Art asks.
“You want us to make him scream for you?”
“No!” Art says. “Name the place.”
“The cathedral,” Adán says. “Father Juan will guarantee safety for both of us. Art, I see one cop, your man is dead.”
In the background, along with Ernie’s groans, he hears something that gives him, if possible, worse chills.
“What do you know about Cerberus?”
Art kneels in the confessional.
The screen slides back. Art can’t make out the face behind the screen, which, he supposes, is the point of this sacrilegious charade.
“We warned you and warned you and warned you,” Adán says, “and you wouldn’t listen.”
“Is he alive?”
“He’s alive,” Adán says. “Now it’s up to you to keep him alive.”
“If he dies, I’ll find you and kill you.”
“Who is Chupar?”
Art’s already thought this through—if he tells Adán that there is no Chupar, it’s tantamount to putting a bullet in Ernie’s head. He has to string it out. So he says, “You give me Hidalgo first.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
Art’s heart practically stops as he says, “I guess we have nothing to talk about, then.”
He starts to get up. Then he hears Adán say, “You have to give me something, Art. Something I can take back.”
Art kneels back down. Forgive me, Father, I’m about to sin.
“I’ll shut down all operations against the Federación,” he says. “I’ll leave the country, resign from the DEA.”
Because, what the hell, right? It’s what everyone’s been wanting him to do anyway—his bosses, his government, his own wife. If I can trade this vicious, stupid cycle for Ernie’s life . . .
Adán asks, “You’ll leave Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“And leave our family alone?”
Now that you’ve crippled my daughter.
“Yes.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”
“I swear to God.”
“Not good enough.”
No, it’s not.
“I’ll take the money,” Arthur says. “You open an account for me, I’ll make a withdrawal. Then you release Ernie. When he shows up, I’ll give you the identity of Chupar.”
“And leave.”
“Not a second later than I need to, Adán.”
Art waits for an eternity while Adán thinks it over. While he waits, he prays silently for both God and the devil to take this deal.
“A hundred thousand,” Adán says, “will be wired to a numbered account in First Georgetown Bank, Grand Cayman. I’ll phone you with the numbers. You will withdraw seventy by wire. As soon as we see the transaction, we’ll let your man go. You will both be out of Mexico on the next flight. And Art, don’t you ever come back.”
The window slides shut.
The waves rise ominously, then break and crash on his body.
Waves of pain, larger with each set.
Ernie wants more drugs.
He hears the door open.
Are they coming with more drugs?
Or more pain?
Güero looks down at the American cop. The dozens of puncture wounds where the ice pick was inserted are pussy and infected. His face is bruised and swollen from the beatings. His wrists, feet and genitals are burned from the electrodes, his ass . . . The stench is horrendous—the infected wounds, the piss, the shit, the rancid sweat.
Clean him, Adán had ordered. And who is Adán Barrera to give orders? When I was killing men, he was selling blue jeans to teenyboppers. And now he comes back, having made a deal—without M-1’s knowledge or permission—to release this man, in exchange for what? Empty promises from another American cop? Who is going to do what, Güero wonders, after he sees his tortured, mutilated comrade? Who is Adán kidding? Hidalgo will be lucky to survive the car ride. Even so, he will probably lose his legs, maybe his arms. What kind of peace does Adán think he will buy with this bleeding, stinking, rotting piece of flesh?
He squats beside Hidalgo and says, “We’re going to take you home.”
“Home?”
“Sí,” Güero says, “you can go home now. Go to sleep. When you wake up, you will be home.”
He sticks the needle into Ernie’s vein and pushes the plunger.
The Mexican Mud takes only a second to hit.
Ernie’s body jerks and his legs kick back.
They say that a jolt of heroin is like kissing God.
Art looks at Ernie’s naked corpse.
Lying fetal inside a sheet of black plastic in a ditch off a dirt road in Badiraguato. His dried blood is caked flat black against the shiny black plastic. The black blindfold is still around his eyes. Otherwise he’s naked, and Art can see the open wounds where they jammed an ice pick through his flesh and scraped his bones, the electrode burns, the signs of anal rape, the needle marks from the lidocaine and heroin injections up and down his arms.
What have I done? Art asks himself. Why did someone else have to pay for my obsession?
I’m sorry, Ernie. I’m so goddamn sorry.
And I’ll pay them back for you, so help me God.
There are cops—federales and Sinaloa State Police—everywhere. The state police arrived first and effectively trampled the scene, obscuring tire prints, footprints, fingerprints, any evidence that might tie anyone to the murder. Now the federales have assumed control and are going over everything again, making sure that not a shred of evidence has been neglected.
The comandante comes over to Art and says, “Don’t worry, Señor, we will never rest until we find out who did this terrible thing.”
“We know who did it,” Art answers. “Miguel Ángel Barrera.”
Shag Wallace loses it. “Goddamnit, three of your fucking guys kidnapped him!”
Art pulls him away. He’s holding him up against the car when a jeep comes roaring up and Ramos hops out and trots over to Art.
Ramos says, “We found him.”
“Who?”
“Barrera,” says Ramos. “We have to go now.”
“Where is he?”
“
El Salvador.”
“How did—”
“Apparently, M-1’s little girlfriend is homesick,” Ramos says. “She called Mommy and Daddy.”
El Salvador
February 1985
El Salvador, “The Savior,” is a little country about the size of Massachusetts located on the Pacific coast of the Central American isthmus. It’s not, Art knows, a banana republic like its eastern neighbor Honduras, but a coffee republic, whose workers have such a reputation for industriousness that they were nicknamed “the Germans of Central America.”
The hard work hasn’t done them much good. The so-called Forty Families, about 2 percent of the current population of three and a half million, have always owned almost all the fertile land, mostly in the form of large coffee fincas—plantations. The more land that was devoted to growing coffee meant less land devoted to growing food, and by the mid–nineteenth century most of the hardworking Salvadoran campesinos were basically starving.
Art looks at the green countryside. It looks so peaceful—pretty, really—from the air, but he knows that it’s a killing ground.
The serious slaughter started in the 1980s as campesinos started to flock into the FLMN, the Martí National Liberation Front, or into workers’ unions, while students and priests led the movement for labor and land reform. The Forty Families responded by forming a right-wing militia called ORDEN—the Spanish acronym means “order”—and the order they had in mind was the same old order.
ORDEN, most of its members active-duty Salvadoran army officers, got right to work. Campesinos, workers, students and priests started disappearing, their bodies finally turning up on roadsides or their heads left in school playgrounds as a civics lesson.
The United States, pursuing its Cold War agenda, pitched in. Many of the ORDEN officers were trained at the U.S. School of the Americas. To hunt down FLMN guerrillas and farmers, students and priests, the Salvadoran army had the help of American-donated Bell helicopters, C-47 transport planes, M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns. They killed a lot of the guerrillas, but also hundreds of students, teachers, farmers, factory workers and priests.
Nor were the FLMN exactly angels, Art thinks. They committed their own murders, and funded themselves through kidnappings. But their efforts paled in comparison to the well-organized, amply funded Salvadoran army and its ORDEN doppelgänger.
Seventy-five thousand deaths, Art thinks as his plane lands in a country that has become its own mass grave. A million refugees, another million homeless. Out of a population of only five and a half million.
The Sheraton lobby is gleaming and clean.
The well-dressed and the well-heeled relax in its air-conditioned lounge or sit in the cool, dark bar. Everyone is so clean and so nicely dressed—in cool linens and the white dresses and jackets of the tropics.
It’s all so nice in here, Art thinks. And so American.
There are Americans everywhere, drinking beer at the bar, sipping Cokes in the coffee shop, and most of them are military advisers. They’re in civvies, but the military look is unmistakable—the short sidewall haircuts, the short-sleeved polo shirts, the jeans over tennis shoes or highly polished brown army-issue.
Ever since the Sandinistas took over Nicaragua, just to the south, El Salvador has become an American military ghetto. Ostensibly, the Americans are there to advise the Salvadoran army in their war against the FLMN guerrillas, but they’re also there to make sure that El Salvador doesn’t become the next domino to topple in Central America. So you have American soldiers advising the Salvadorans and American soldiers advising the Contras, and then you have the spooks.
The Company types are as obvious in their own way as the off-duty soldiers are in theirs. They dress better, for one thing—they wear tailored suits with open shirts and no ties instead of sports clothes that came off the rack at the base commissary. Their haircuts are stylish—even a little long, in the current Latin American fashion—and their shoes are expensive Churchills and Bancrofts. If you see a spook wearing tennis shoes, Art thinks, he’s playing tennis.
So there are the soldiers and the spooks and then there are the embassy types—who might be neither, either or both. There are the actual diplomats and the consular officials who deal with the daily, mundane issues of visas and lost passports and American retro-hippie kids arrested for vagrancy and/or drug use. Then there are the cultural attachés, and the secretaries and the typists; and then there are the military attachés, who look just like the military advisers except that they dress better; and then there are the embassy employees, who wear fictional job descriptions as transparent veils of decency, and who are really spooks. They sit in the embassy and monitor radio broadcasts out of Managua, their ears keenly pitched for the sound of a Cuban accent or, better yet, Russian. Or they work “the street,” as they say, meeting their sources in exactly such places as the Sheraton bar, trying to suss out which colonel is on the way up, which is on the way out, which might be planning the next golpe—coup—and whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing.
So you have your soldiers, your spooks, your embassy types and your embassy spooks, and then you have your businessmen.
Coffee buyers, cotton buyers, sugar buyers.
The coffee buyers look like they belong. They should, Art thinks. Their families have been down here for generations. They have the easy air of ownership of the place—this is their bar, theirs and the Salvadoran growers with whom they’re having lunch on the broad patio. The cotton and sugar buyers look more classically American corporate—these are more recent crops on the Salvadoran landscape—and the American buyers have yet to blend in. They look uncomfortable, incomplete without ties.
So you have a lot of Americans, and you have a lot of wealthy Salvadorans, and the only other Salvadorans you see are either hotel workers or secret police.
Secret police, Art thinks. Now there’s an oxymoron. The only thing secret about the secret police is how they manage to stand out so much. Art stands in the lobby and picks them out like bulbs on a Christmas tree. It’s simple—their cheap suits are bad imitations of the expensive tailored look of the upper class. And while they try to look like businessmen, they still have the brown, weathered faces of campesinos. No ladino from the Forty Families is going to enroll in the ranks of the police, secret or otherwise, so these guys assigned to monitor the comings and goings at the Sheraton still look like farmers attending a city cousin’s wedding.
But, Art knows, the role of the secret police in a society like this isn’t to blend in but to be seen. To be noticed. To let everyone know that Big Brother is watching.
And taking notes.
Ramos finds the cop he’s looking for. They repair to a room and start the negotiations. An hour later he and Art are on their way to the compound where Tío is holed up with his Lolita.
The drive out of San Salvador is long, frightening and sad. El Salvador has the highest population density in Central America, growing every day, and Art sees the evidence everywhere. Little shanty villages seem to occupy every wide spot in the road—jerry-rigged stalls made of cardboard, corrugated tin, plywood, or just plain chopped brush offer everything for sale to people who have little or nothing with which to buy. Their owners rush the jeep when they see the gringo in the front seat. The kids push up against the jeep, asking for food, money, anything.
Art keeps driving.
He has to get to the compound before Tío disappears again.
People disappear in El Salvador all the time.
Sometimes at the rate of a couple hundred a week. Snatched by right-wing death squads, and then they’re just gone. And if anyone asks too many questions about it, he disappears, too.
All Third World slums are the same, Art thinks—the same mud or dust, depending on the climate and the season, the same smells of charcoal stoves and open sewers, the same heartbreakingly monotonous scenery of malnourished kids with distended bellies and big eyes.
It’s sure as hell not Guadalajara, whe
re a large and generally prosperous middle class softens the slope between rich and poor. Not in San Salvador, he thinks, where the shanty slums press against gleaming high-rises like the thatched huts of medieval peasants pressed against castle walls. Except these castle walls are patrolled by private security guards wielding automatic rifles and machine pistols. And at night, the guards venture out from the castle walls and ride through the villages—in jeeps instead of on horseback—and slaughter the peasants, leaving their bodies at crossroads and in the middle of village squares, and rape and kill women and execute children in front of their parents.
