by Don Winslow
It only makes sense, Adán thinks—a natural evolution in the face of ceaseless American pressure. Those who survive will be those who can stay small and low. Fly, as it were, under the American radar. It makes sense, but it also makes Adán’s business more complicated and difficult—instead of dealing with one or two large entities, he now has to juggle dozens if not scores of small cells, and even individual entrepreneurs. And, with the demise of the vertically integrated cartels, Adán can no longer rely on the smooth and timely delivery of quality product. Say what you will about a monopoly, Adán thinks, it’s efficient. It can deliver what it promises where and when it says it will, unlike the Baby Bells, with whom the prompt delivery of a quality product has become the exception rather than the rule.
So the production end of Adán’s cocaine business is getting shaky, and this vibrates all the way down the line, from the wholesalers to whom the Barreras provided transportation and protection, to the new retail markets in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York that Adán took over after the Orejuelas’ arrest. Increasingly, he has empty Boeing 727s—expensive to buy, maintain and staff—sitting on airstrips in Colombia, waiting for cocaine that’s too often late or doesn’t show up at all or, when it does get there, isn’t of the promised quality and potency. So the customers on the street complain to the retailers, who complain to the wholesalers, who (politely) complain to the Barreras.
Then the flow of cocaine all but stops.
The flood becomes a stream, then a trickle, then a drip.
Then Adán finds out why:
Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia.
Aka FARC.
The oldest and largest surviving Marxist insurgency movement in Latin America.
FARC controls the remote southwestern area of Colombia, along the critical borders with the cocaine-producing countries of Peru and Ecuador. From its stronghold there in the northwestern reaches of the Amazon jungle, FARC has waged a thirty-year-long guerrilla war against the Colombian government, the nation’s wealthy landowners and the oil interests that operate from the petroleum-rich coastal districts.
And FARC’s power is growing. Just last month, its guerrillas launched a daring attack on an army outpost in the town of Las Delicias. Using mortars and high-explosive charges, it took the fort, killed sixty soldiers and captured the rest. FARC cut off the critical highway connecting the southwestern districts to the rest of the country.
And not only does FARC control the cocaine-smuggling routes from Peru and Ecuador, it also has within its territory the Putumayo district, thick jungle and Amazonian rain forest and now also an important area for growing the coca plant. A domestic supply of coca was long a dream of the giant cartels, and they put millions of dollars of capital into coca plantations in the area. But just as their labors were coming to fruition, as it were, the cartels went out of business, leaving behind the chaotic Baby Bells and some 300,000 hectares under cultivation, and more being planted every day.
What Sinaloa was to the poppy, Putumayo is to the coca leaf—the source, the wellspring, the headwaters from which the drug traffic flows.
FARC cut it off, then reached out to him to offer to negotiate.
And I will have to do just that, Adán thinks now as he looks at Nora lying beside him.
She wakes up to see Adán looking at her.
Nora smiles, kisses him softly and says, “I’d like to go for a walk.”
“I’ll come with you.”
They put on robes and step outside.
Manuel is there.
Manuel is always there, she thinks.
Adán has had a house built for him on the grounds. It’s a small, simple house built in the Sinaloan campesino fashion. Except that Adán had the builder put it up in slightly outsized dimensions to allow for Manuel’s stiff, dragging leg. Had special furniture built to make it easier for him to get up and down, and a little Jacuzzi put in the back to ease the aches in his leg, which get worse with age. Manuel doesn’t like to use it, because he thinks it costs too much money to heat it, so Adán has a servant go over every night and turn it on.
Manuel gets up from a bench and follows them, his right leg dragging. At a discreet distance, he follows, with his distinctive limp. To Nora he is almost a caricature: an AK slung over his shoulder, a double loop of bandoliers over his shoulders like an old-time bandito, a pistol holstered at each hip, a huge knife tucked into his belt.
All he’s missing, she thinks, are the big sombrero and the drooping mustache.
A maid comes scurrying out with a tray.
Two coffees: white and sweet for him; black, no sugar, for her.
Adán thanks the maid and she hurries back into the kitchen. She doesn’t look at Nora, afraid that the gringa’s eyes will bewitch hers the way they did the patrón's. It is the talk of the kitchen—look into the eyes of this bruja and you will come under her spell.
It was difficult at first, the staff’s passive hostility and Raúl’s active disapproval. Adán’s brother thought it was fine to have mistresses but not to bring them into the family home. She heard the brothers quarrel about it and offered to leave, but Adán wouldn’t hear of it. Now they’ve settled into a quiet domestic routine, which includes this morning walk.
The compound is beautiful. Nora loves it especially in the morning, before the sun reduces all the shapes to silhouettes and bleaches out all the colors. They start their stroll in the orchard because Adán knows that she loves the acrid smell of the fruit trees—orange and lemon and grapefruit—and the sweet smell of the mimosas and jacarandas, their blossoms dropping from their branches like lavender tears. They walk past the neatly ordered flower gardens—day lilies, calla lilies, poppies—and into the rose garden.
She looks at the flowers glistening with water, listens to the rhythmic shoop-shoop-shoop of the sprinkler system that sprays all the flowers before the sun makes watering an exercise in instant evaporation.
Adán shoos a peacock away from the garden.
Indeed, the compound is alive with birds: peacocks, pheasants, guinea fowl. One morning when Adán was away she went out early on her own and there was a peacock perched on the edge of the central fountain. It looked at her and spread its tail and it was a marvelous sight, all the colors spread out against the light khaki sand.
Other birds are in the trees. An amazing assortment of finches—Adán tries in vain to teach her their proper names, but she knows them only by colors: gold and yellow, purple and red. The warblers and the lazuli bunting, and the incredible western tanager that looks to her like a flying sunset. And the hummingbirds. Special flowers have been planted and sugar-water feeders hung to attract the hummingbirds—Anna’s and Costa’s and black-chinned, as Adán has tried to distinguish them for her. She knows them only as dazzling flights of jeweled colors, and that she would miss them very much if they no longer came to visit.
“You want to see the animals?” he says.
“Of course.”
Adán is a practical, hardworking man and can’t quite bring himself to approve of the time and money Raúl devotes to the menagerie. It’s just another entertainment for Raúl, a sop to his ego that he has an ocelot, two kinds of camels, a cheetah, a pair of lions, a leopard, two giraffes, a herd of rare deer.
But no white tiger. Raúl sold it to some collector in Los Angeles, and the idiot tried to drive it across the border and got busted. Had to pay a big fine, and the tiger was confiscated. It lives in the San Diego Zoo now.
The whale he owned became a movie star. They busted out the amusement park for every penny it was worth then burned it down, and the whale ended up in a series of hit films. So the whale did pretty well for itself, although Adán hasn’t seen it in any new movies lately.
So Adán and Nora walk through the private zoo in the morning, and one of the keepers is always ready with food for Nora to feed the giraffes. She loves their grace, their long necks and the way they walk.
She gets down from the little platform they use t
o feed the giraffes, picks up her coffee cup and moves ahead of Adán. Another keeper opens a gate to let her into the deer pen and hands her a plastic cup full of food.
“Good morning, Tomás.”
“Señora.”
The deer crowd around her, nuzzling her robe, pushing their noses out to get at the food.
Nora and Adán have breakfast on the east terrace, to catch the sun. She has grapefruit and coffee. That’s all—grapefruit fresh from the orchard, picked literally moments before it is served to her, and coffee. He eats like one of Raúl’s lions. An enormous plate of huevos con machaca with chunks of yellowtail and strands of hot chorizo. A stack of warm corn tortillas. At Nora’s insistence, a bowl of fruit. And a small bowl of fresh salsa—the scent of its tomatoes and cilantro makes her mouth water, but she sticks with the slimming grapefruit.
He notices.
“It has no fat,” he says.
“The tortilla I’d eat with it does.”
“You have a few pounds to give.”
“You’re so gallant.”
He smiles and goes back to his newspaper, knowing that he won’t convince her. She’s almost as obsessed with her body as he is. As soon as he showers and goes into his office for a day of work she’ll spend the whole morning in the gym. He put in a stereo system and a television because she likes noise when she works out. And the gym has two of everything—two reclining cycles, two treadmills, two Universal weight machines, two sets of free weights—although she can rarely persuade him to work out with her.
On alternate days she runs on the long dirt road that winds up to the compound, which caused some complaint among the security staff until Adán found two sicarios who liked to run. Then she complained about it, said it made her self-conscious to have the men following her, but on this issue he put his foot down and there was no argument.
So when she runs two bodyguards trot behind her. At his specific instructions, they alternate running and trotting. He doesn’t want them both out of breath at the same time. If it comes to shooting, he wants at least one of them to have a steady hand. And they have been told, “If anything happens to her, it’s both your lives.”
Her afternoons are long and slow. Because he works through lunch, she dines alone. Then she may take a short siesta, stretching out on the chaise under the umbrella, avoiding the sun. For the same reason, she spends most of the midafternoon indoors, reading magazines and books, idly watching Mexican television, basically waiting for Adán to show up before having a late dinner.
Now he says, “I have to go away on a business trip. I may be gone awhile.”
“Where are you going?”
He shakes his head. “Colombia. FARC wants to negotiate.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
She tells him that she understands. She’ll go to San Diego while he’s gone—do some shopping, see a few movies, catch up with Haley.
“But I’ll miss you,” she says.
“I’ll miss you, too.”
“Let’s go back to bed.”
She fucks him with demonic energy. Grips him with her pussy, holds him tightly with her legs and feels him spurt deep inside her. Strokes his hair as he rests his face on her breasts and says, “I love you. Tienes mi alma en tus manos.”
You have my soul in your hands.
Putumayo, Colombia
1997
Adán sits in the back of a jeep bouncing slowly over a muddy, rutted road cut through the Amazonian jungle of southwestern Colombia. The air around him is hot and fetid, and he swats at the flies and mosquitoes that swarm around his head.
It’s already been a difficult trip.
He rejected the idea of simply flying in on one of his 727s. No one can know that Adán is going to meet with Tirofio, the commander of FARC; anyway, the flight would have been too dangerous. If the American CIA or DEA intercepted the flight plan, the results would have been disastrous. And besides, there are things that Tirofio wants Adán to see en route.
So Adán first boarded a private sports-fishing yacht out of Cabo, then transferred to an old fishing boat for the long, slow trip for a landing on the southern Colombian coast at the mouth of the Coqueta River. This was the most dangerous part of the trip because the coastline is under control of the government and patrolled by the private militias hired by the oil companies to guard their drills and derricks.
From the fishing boat Adán climbed into a small, single-engine skiff. They went into the river at night, guided by the flames shooting out of the refinery towers like the signal fires of hell. The river mouth was silty and polluted, the air thick and dirty. They slipped up the river, past the oil-company properties, wrapped in ten-foot-high barbed-wire fences with guard towers at the corners.
It took them two days to get up the river, dodging army patrols and private security squads. Finally he’d got into the rain forest, and now he gets to make the rest of the trip by jeep. Their route takes them past the coca fields, and for the first time Adán sees the origins of the product that has made him millions.
Well, sometimes he does.
Other times he sees dead and wilted fields, poisoned by the helicopters that spray defoliants. The chemicals aren’t particular—they kill the coca plants, but they also kill the beans, the tomatoes, the vegetables. Poison the water and the air. Adán walks through deserted villages that look like museum exhibits—perfect anthropological exhibits of a Colombian village, except no one’s living there. They’ve fled the defoliants, they’ve fled the army, they’ve fled FARC, they’ve fled the war.
Other villages they pass have simply been burned out. Charred circles on the ground mark where huts once stood. “The army,” his guide explains. “They burn the villages they think are in league with FARC.”
And FARC burns the villages they think are in line with the army, Adán thinks.
They finally reach Tirofio’s camp.
Tirofio’s camouflage-clad guerrillas wear berets and carry AK-47s. A surprising number of them are women—Adán notices one particularly striking Amazon with long black hair flowing from beneath her beret. She meets his stare with one of her own, one of those what-are-you-looking-at glares that makes him turn his glance away.
Everywhere he looks he sees something going on—squads of guerrillas are training, others are cleaning weapons, doing laundry, cooking, policing the camp—and all the activity seems organized. The camp itself is large and orderly—neat rows of olive-green tents are set up under camouflage netting. Several kitchens have been constructed under thatched ramadas. He sees what appear to be a hospital tent and a dispensary. They even walk past a tent that houses a library of sorts. This is not a gang of bandits on the run, Adán thinks. It’s a well-organized force in control of its territory. The camouflage nets—to disguise against airplane surveillance—are the only concession to a sense of danger.
The escort leads Adán to what looks like a headquarters area. The tents are larger, with canvas sunroofs attached to create porches, underneath which are washbasins, and chairs and tables made from rough-hewn lumber. A moment later the escort comes back out with an older, stocky man dressed in olive-green camouflage and a black beret.
Tirofio has a face like a frog, Adán thinks. Fatter than one expects from a guerrilla, with deep pouches under his eyes, heavy jowls and a wide mouth bent into what seems to be a permanent frown. His cheekbones are high and sharp, his eyes narrow, his arched eyebrows silver. Nevertheless, he looks younger than his almost seventy years. He walks toward Adán with vigor and strength—there is no shakiness in his short, heavy legs.
Tirofio looks at Adán for a moment, sizing him up, then points toward a thatched ramada under which are a table and some chairs. He sits down and gestures for Adán to do the same. Without any introduction he says, “I know that you help to support Operation Red Mist.”
“It’s not political,” Adán says. “It’s just business.”
“You know that I could hold
you for ransom,” Tirofio says. “Or I could have you killed right now.”
“And you know,” Adán says, “that you would outlive me by perhaps a week.”
Tirofio nods.
“So what do we have to talk about?” Adán asks.
Tirofio pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket and offers one to Adán. When Adán shakes his head, Tirofio shrugs and lights the cigarette, then takes a long drag and asks, “When were you born?”
“Nineteen fifty-three.”
