The Power of the Dog

by Don Winslow

  One of Ramos’ men comes in, holding the red-hot, glowing metal in an oven mitt.

  Álvarez faints.

  “Wake him up,” Art says.

  Ramos shoots him in the calf.

  Álvarez comes to and screams.

  “Bend him over the couch.”

  They heave Álvarez over the arm of the couch. Two men hold his arms and spread them wide. Two others pin his feet to the floor. The other man brings over the hot iron and shows it to him.

  “No, please . . . no.”

  “I want the names,” Art says, “of everyone you saw in the house with Ernie Hidalgo. And I want them now.”

  No problema.

  Álvarez starts talking like a comic speed-reader on crank.

  “Adán Barrera, Raúl Barrera,” he says. “Ángel Barrera, Güero Méndez.”

  “What?”

  “Adán Barrera, Raúl Barrera—”

  “No,” Art snaps. “The last name.”

  “Güero Méndez.”

  “He was there?”

  “Sí, sí, sí. He was the leader, Señor.” Álvarez takes a gulp of air, then says, “He killed Hidalgo.”

  “How?”

  “An overdose of heroin,” Álvarez says. “An accident. We were going to free him. I swear. La verdad.”

  “Pick him up.”

  Art looks at the sobbing doctor and says, “You’re going to write out a statement. Telling all about your involvement. All about the Barreras and Méndez. ¿De acuerdo?”

  “De acuerdo.”

  “Then you’re going to write another statement,” Art says, “affirming that you were not tortured or compelled to make this statement in any way. ¿De acuerdo?”

  “Sí.” Then, regaining his composure, he starts to deal. “Will you offer me some kind of consideration for my cooperation?”

  “I’ll put in a good word for you,” Art says.

  They sit him down at the kitchen table with paper and pen. An hour later, both statements are finished. Art reads them, puts them in his briefcase and says, “Now you’re going for a little trip.”

  “No, Señor!” Álvarez screams. He knows all about little trips. They usually involve shovels and shallow graves.

  “To the United States,” Art says. “We have a plane waiting at the airport. You’re going of your free will, I assume.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Goddamn right, of course, Art thinks. The man just dropped a dime on the Barreras and Güero Méndez. His life expectancy in Mexico is approximately nil. Art hopes his longevity in Marion federal penitentiary will be of Old Testament proportions.

  Two hours later they have Álvarez, cleaned up and with a fresh pair of pants, on a plane to El Paso, where he is arrested and arraigned in the torture murder of Ernie Hidalgo. At his jailing, he’s photographed, naked, from his head to his knees to show that he hasn’t been tortured.

  And Art, faithful to his promise, puts in a good word for Álvarez. Through the federal prosecutors, he doesn’t seek the death penalty.

  He wants life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  Life without hope.

  The Mexican government protested and a squadron of American civil-liberties lawyers joined them, but both Mette and Álvarez are sitting in Marion federal maximum security prison awaiting their appeals, Quito Fuentes is in a San Diego jail cell, and no one has laid a restraining hand on Art Keller.

  Those who would, can’t.

  And those who can, won’t.

  Because he lied.

  Art lied his ass off to the Senate committee that investigated rumors that the CIA was somehow complicit with the Contras’ arms-for-drugs dealings. Art still has a transcript of his testimony running in his head like the sound track of a movie you can’t shut off.

  Q: Have you ever heard of an air-freight company called SETCO?

  A: Remotely.

  Q: Are you now or were you ever of the belief that SETCO airplanes were being used to transport cocaine?

  A: I have no knowledge on that subject.

  Q: Did you ever hear of something called the “Mexican Trampoline”?

  A: No.

  Q: May I remind you that you’re under oath?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Have ever heard of TIWG?

  A: What’s that?

  Q: The Terrorist Incident Working Group.

  A: Not until just now.

  Q: How about NSD Directive #3?

  A: No.

  Q: The NHAO?

  Art’s lawyer leaned across and said into the microphone, “Counsel, if you just want to go fishing, may I suggest you charter a boat?”

  Q: Have you ever heard of NHAO?

  A: Only recently, in the newspapers.

  Q: Did anyone at NHAO pressure you in regard to your testimony?

  “I’m not going to let this go on much longer,” Art’s lawyer said.

  Q: Did Colonel Craig, for instance, pressure you?

  This question had the intended effect of waking up the press.

  Colonel Scott Craig was shoving the American flag, pole and all, right up another committee’s butt as it tried to pin him to the arms-for-hostages deal with the Iranians. In the process Craig was becoming an American folk hero, a media darling, a television patriot. The country focused in on the Iran–Contra sideshow, the shitty guns-for-hostages deal, and never caught on to the real scandal—that the administration had helped the Contras deal drugs for arms. So the suggestion that Colonel Craig, whom Art had last seen at Ilopongo off-loading cocaine, had pressured Keller into silence was a dramatic moment.

  “That’s outrageous, counselor,” Art’s lawyer said.

  Q: I agree. Will your client answer the question?

  A: I came here to answer your questions truthfully and accurately, and that’s what I’m attempting to do.

  Q: So would you answer the question?

  A: I’ve never met nor had any conversations with Colonel Craig on any subject whatsoever.

  The media went back to sleep.

  Q: How about something called “Cerberus,” Mr. Keller? Did you ever hear of that?

  A: No.

  Q: Did something called Cerberus have anything at all to do with the murder of Agent Hidalgo?

  A: No.

  Althea left the gallery at that answer. Later, at the Watergate, she told him, “Maybe a bunch of senators can’t tell when you’re lying, Art, but I can.”

  “Can we just go and have a nice dinner with the kids?” Art asked.

  “How could you?”

  “What?”

  “Align yourself with a bunch of right-wing—”

  “Stop.”

  He held his hand up and turned his back to her. He’s tired of hearing it.

  He’s tired of hearing everything, Althea thought. If he was remote during their last few months in Guadalajara, that was a goddamn honeymoon compared to the man who came home from Mexico. Or didn’t come home, not the man she recognized as her husband. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to listen. Spent most of his long “administrative leave” sitting alone out by her parents’ pool or taking long, lone walks through Pacific Palisades or down on the beach. He’d sit at dinner barely speaking, or worse, launching into an angry diatribe about how politics is all bullshit, then excusing himself to go upstairs, alone, or out for a nocturnal stroll. Late nights he’d lie in bed, thumbing the TV remote like some kind of speed freak, switching from channel to channel, pronouncing everything crap and more crap. On the increasingly rare occasions that they would make love (if you wanted to call it that), he was aggressive and quick, as if he were trying to work out his anger rather than express his love or even his lust.

  “I’m not a punching bag,” she said one night as he lay on top of her in one of his spectacular postcoital depressions.

  “I’ve never hit you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He remained a dutiful, if wooden, father. He did all the daddy things he used to do, but now
it was more like he was just going through the motions. Like a robot version of Art taking the kids to the park, robot Art showing Michael how to body-board, robot Art playing tennis with Cassie. The kids knew.

  Althea tried to get him to see someone.

  He laughed. “A shrink?”

  “A shrink, a counselor, somebody.”

  “All they do is give you drugs,” he said.

  Christ, then take them, she thought.

  It got worse when the subpoenas came.

  The meetings with DEA bureaucrats, administration officials, congressional investigators. And lawyers—God, so many lawyers. She was worried that the legal fees would bankrupt them, but all he would say was not to worry, “It’s taken care of.” She never knew where the money was coming from, but it was coming because she never saw a legal bill, not one.

  Art, of course, refused to discuss it.

  “I’m your wife,” she’d pleaded one night. “Why won’t you open up to me?”

  “There are things you can’t know about,” he said.

  He wanted to talk to her, tell her everything, get close again, but he couldn’t. It was like there was this invisible wall, this science-fiction force field—not between them but inside him—that he just couldn’t break through. It was as if he spent all his time walking through water, underwater, looking up at the light of the real world but seeing only the water-distorted faces of his wife and his kids. Unable to reach up, reach through and touch them. Unable to let them touch him.

  Instead he dove deeper.

  Retreated into silence, the slow poison of a marriage.

  That day at the Watergate he looked at Althea and knew that she knew he’d taken a dive—lay down and lied for the administration, helped them cover up a shitty deal that had put crack out onto the streets of American ghettos.

  What she didn’t know was why.

  This is why, Art thinks now as he peers through the window blinds across the way at 2718 Cosmos Street, where Tío Barrera is holed up.

  “I got you now, motherfucker,” Art says. “And no one’s going to snatch you out of it this time.”

  Tío’s been switching residences every few days, moving around between his dozen apartments and condos in Guadalajara. Whether it’s a result of his fearing arrest or, as rumor has it, because he’s been smoking his own product, Tío has become increasingly paranoid.

  With good reason, Art thinks. He’s been watching Tío in this place for three days now. That’s a long time for Tío to be in any one place. He’ll probably move again this afternoon.

  Or thinks he will.

  Art has his own plans for Tío’s next move.

  But it has to be done right.

  His government has promised the Mexican government that it will be done with no fuss, no muss. Above all, with no collateral casualties. And Art has to disappear as soon as possible—this has to look like a Mexican operation all the way, a triumph for the federales.

  Whatever, Art thinks.

  I don’t care, Tío, as long as it ends with you in a prison cell.

  He crouches by the window and peeks out again. The reward for My Years in the Desert, as he came to call that god-awful stretch of ’87, ’88 and ’89, when he maneuvered through the minefield of investigations, sweated out the perjury indictment that never came, watched as one president left office and his vice president—the same man who had run the secret war against the Sandinistas—came in. My Years in the Desert, Art recalls, transferred from one desk job to another as his marriage dried up, as he and Althea retreated into separate rooms and separate lives, as Althea finally demanded a divorce and he fought it every step of the way.

  Even now, Art thinks, a fresh set of divorce papers sits unsigned on the kitchenette table of his barren little apartment in downtown San Diego.

  “I will never,” Art told his wife, “let you take my kids.”

  Eventually peace came.

  Not to the Kellers, but to Nicaragua.

  Elections were held, the Sandinistas were tossed out, the secret war came to end, and about five minutes later Art went to John Hobbs to claim his reward.

  The destruction of every man involved in the murder of Ernie Hidalgo.

  A laundry list: Ramón Mette, Quito Fuentes, Doctor Álvarez, Güero Méndez.

  Raúl Barrera.

  Adán Barrera.

  And Miguel Ángel Barrera.

  Tío.

  Whatever Art might have thought about the president, John Hobbs, Colonel Scott Craig and Sal Scachi, they were men of their word. Art Keller was given a free hand and all possible cooperation. He went on his tear.

  “As a result,” Hobbs had said, “we have a burned embassy in Honduras and a raging civil-liberties battle, and our diplomatic relationship with Mexico is in ashes. To stretch the metaphor to the breaking point, State would like to host an auto-da-fé for you, to which Justice will bring the marshmallows.”

  “But I’m confident,” Art says, “that I have the full support of the White House and the president.”

  Which was Art reminding Hobbs that before the current president occupied the White House he was busy funding the Contras with cocaine, so let’s not hear any more bullshit about “State” and “Justice.”

  The extortion worked; Art got permission to go after Tío.

  Not that this had been easy to arrange.

  Negotiations at the highest level, and Art hadn’t even been involved.

  Hobbs went to Los Pinos, the president’s residence, to make the deal: The arrest of Miguel Ángel Barrera would remove one stumbling block to the passage of NAFTA.

  NAFTA is the key, the absolutely essential key, to Mexican modernization. With it in place, Mexico can move ahead into the next century. Without it, the economy will stagnate and collapse, and the country will remain a Third World backwater forever, mired in poverty.

  So they’ll trade Barrera as part of the deal for NAFTA.

  But there’s another, more troublesome condition: This is the last arrest. This closes the books on the Hidalgo murder. Art Keller won’t even be allowed back in the country after this. So he’ll get Barrera, but not Adán, Raúl, or Güero Méndez.

  That’s okay, Art thinks.

  I have plans for them.

  But first, Tío.

  So now Art watches and waits.

  The problem is Tío’s three bodyguards (Cerberus again, Art thinks, the unavoidable three-headed guard dog), armed with 9-mm machine pistols, AK-47s and hand grenades. And willing to use them.

  Not that it worries Art overmuch. His team has firepower, too. There are twenty-five special federale officers with M-16s, sniper rifles and the whole SWAT arsenal, not to mention Ramos and his crew of privateers. But the Mexican mandate was “We can absolutely not have a gun battle in the streets of Guadalajara, it just cannot happen,” and Art is determined to live up to the deal.

  So they’re trying to find an opening.

  It’s the girl who gives it to them.

  Barrera’s latest stringy-haired mistress.

  She won’t cook.

  Art has watched the past three mornings as the bodyguards have trooped out to a local comida to buy their breakfast. Listened through sound detectors at the arguments, her shouting, their grumbling as they go out and come back twenty minutes later, nourished and ready for a long day of guarding Miguel Ángel.

  Not today, Art thinks.

  Going to be a short day today.

  “They should be coming out,” he says to Ramos.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I worry,” Art says. “What if she gets a sudden attack of domesticity?”

  “That pig?” Ramos asks. “Forget it. Now, if she were my woman, she’d cook breakfast. She’d wake up in the morning whistling and wanting to please me. The happiest woman in Mexico.”

  But he’s edgy, too, Art sees. His jaws are clamped on the omnipresent cigar, and his fingers are drumming little tattoos on the stock of Esposa, his Uzi, as he adds, “They have to eat.�
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  Let’s hope so, Art thinks. If they don’t, and we miss this opportunity, the whole fragile arrangement with the Mexican government could fall apart. They’re already nervous, reluctant allies. The secretary of the interior and the governor of Jalisco have literally distanced themselves from the operation; they’re miles out at sea on a three-day “diving excursion” so that they can plead non-involvement to both the nation and the surviving Barrera brothers. And there are so many moving pieces in this operation, all of which have to be coordinated, that the whole thing is extremely time-sensitive.