After a few seconds, he took another drink of his beer, still watching me. He must have liked me, because he finally smiled a little, just a hint. “Is this for a novel or a movie?” he asked. I told him I didn’t know yet; it could be either, or both. At that, he offered me a beer, went to get another one for himself, and started to tell the story of Güero Dávila’s two-timing.
He wasn’t a bad guy, Güero. Kept his word, a lot of heart—brave, really brave. He was good-looking, a little like Luis Miguel, but thinner—and tougher. Great sense of humor. Easygoing. Raimundo Dávila Parra spent money as fast as he made it, or almost, and he was generous with his friends. He and Batman Güemes had been up until dawn lots of nights, partying with music, alcohol, and women, celebrating successful operations. At one time they were even close friends—bro’s, or carnales, as the Sinaloans put it. Güero was a Chicano—he’d grown up in San Antonio. And he started young, transporting grass in cars to the U.S. They’d made more than one run together up through Tijuana, Mexicali, or Nogales, until the gringos offered him a stay in a jail up there somewhere.
After that, Güero didn’t want anything to do with cars—all he wanted to do was fly. He had a pretty good education, high school anyway, and he took pilot’s classes in the old flying school on Zapata. He was a good pilot—the best, Batman Güemes acknowledged, nodding emphatically—one of those that aren’t afraid of anything: the right man for clandestine takeoffs and landings on the little hidden runways up in the sierra, or for low-altitude flights to avoid the Hemispheric Radar System that scanned the air routes between Colombia and the U.S. The Cessna was like an extension of his hands and his courage: he would land anywhere and at any hour, and that brought him fame, respect, and green. The guys in Culiacán called him the king of the short runway, and for good reason. He was so famous that Chalino Sánchez, who was also a close buddy of his, promised to write a corrido for him using that exact name—“The King of the Short Runway.” But Chalino got taken out before he could do it—Sinaloa was not a healthy place to live, depending on the neighborhood—and Güero never got his song.
Anyway, with or without his corrido, he never lacked for work. His padrino was don Epifanio Vargas, a narco boss who was a veteran of the sierra, a guy with real balls, tough and straight-shooting in every sense of the word. Epifanio Vargas’ cover was Norteña de Aviación, a company he owned that sold and leased Cessnas and Piper Comanches and Navajos. And on Norteña’s payroll, Güero Dávila did runs of two or three hundred kilos, before the big deals of the golden age, when Amado Carrillo earned himself the title Lord of the Skies by organizing the biggest air bridge in the history of drug trafficking between Colombia, Baja California, Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Jalisco. A lot of the missions that Güero flew back in the early days were diversionary—he was a decoy for both the land-based radar screens and those Orions crammed with technology and manned by mixed gringo and Mexican crews. And they were for diversion meaning “fun,” too, because he loved it. So he made a fortune risking his skin on flights to the limit, day and night: fancy-as-hell maneuvers, takeoffs and landings on forty feet of runway and in places you wouldn’t think a plane could ever manage, diverting attention from the big Boeings, Caravelles, and DC-8s—bought during the period when the cartels were all pooling together—that would transport eight and ten tons in one trip. And all this with the complicity of the police, the Ministry of Defense, and even the President of the Republic. Because those were the good times—the high times—of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, with narcos running drugs under the protection of the presidency itself. They were good times for Güero Dávila, too: empty planes, no cargo to be responsible for, playing cat and mouse with adversaries that it wasn’t always possible to completely buy off. Flights where you risked your life on a roll of the dice, pure chance whether they popped you or not—or threw your ass in jail for a long stay if they caught you on the gringo side.
Back then, Batman Güemes, who had his feet on the ground figuratively as well as literally, was beginning to do pretty well in the Sinaloa narcomafia. The Mexicans were beginning to declare their independence from the providers in Medellín and Cali, raising the stakes, being paid with greater and greater amounts of coca, and commercializing the Colombian drug that they’d only transported before. That made Batman’s rise in the local hierarchy easier, after some bloody settling of scores to stabilize the market and the competition—some days, there would be twelve or fifteen bodies, your side and theirs. He had put as many cops, military men, and politicians on the payroll as possible—including Customs officers on the Mexican side and INS officers, the migras, on the U.S. side—and in a very short time, packages with his trademark, a little bat, started to cross the Río Grande in eighteen-wheelers. Sometimes hashish, what they called goma de la sierra, rubber from up in the mountains, and sometimes coke or weed—marijuana. There was a song, a corrido they say somebody commissioned from a norteño group on Calle Francisco Villa, and the lyrics summed it up: Vivo de tres animales—mi perico, mi gallo y mi chiva. I make my living from three animals: my parakeet, my rooster, and my goat—which in Mexican slang was coke, marijuana, and heroin.
At about this same time, don Epifanio Vargas, who until then had been Güero Dávila’s employer, began to specialize in drugs of the future like crystal meth and ecstasy. He had his own laboratories in Sinaloa and Sonora, and also on the other side of the border. “The gringos want to ride,” he would say, “I saddle the horse for ’em.” In not very many years, and with not many shots fired or trips to the cemetery—practically what you’d call a white-collar operation—Vargas managed to become the first Mexican magnate of precursors for designer drugs like ephedrine, which he could import problem-free from India, China, and Thailand, and one of the main producers of methamphetamines north or south of the border. He also started looking into politics. With legal businesses in plain view and the illegal ones well camouflaged behind a pharmaceutical company with state backing, the cocaine and Norteña de Aviación were unnecessary. So he sold the airplane business to Batman Güemes, and with that, Güero Dávila got a new boss in the drug-running game. Güero wanted to fly even more than he wanted to make money. By then he’d bought a two-story house in Las Quintas, was driving a brand-new black Bronco instead of the old one, and was living with Teresa Mendoza.
And that’s when things started getting complicated. Raimundo Dávila Parra was not a discreet fellow. Living forever didn’t interest him particularly, so he seems to have decided to blow it all fast. He was one of those guys that don’t give jack shit about much of anything, as his daredevil antics with the Cessna showed all too clearly, but in the end he basically let his mouth get the better of him—which happens even to sharks, so the saying goes. He got careless—and things got ugly—when he bragged about what he’d done and what he was going to do next. Better, he used to say, five years on your feet than fifty on your knees.
So little by little, rumors began reaching Batman Güemes. Güero was sandwiching his own cargo into flights full of other people’s, taking advantage of the runs he was making to do his own deals. The drugs, he got from an ex-cop named Guadalupe Parra, aka Lupe the Chink, or Chino Parra, who was Güero’s first cousin and had contacts. Usually it was cocaine confiscated by Judiciales who grabbed twenty, reported five, and sold the rest down the line. This was the worst thing you could do—not on the part of the Judiciales, but Güero, doing his own deals—because he was charging a shitload of money for his work, rules were rules, and doing private deals, in Sinaloa and behind your employers’ back, was the quickest way to get yourself in very ugly trouble.
“When you live crooked,” Batman Güemes said that afternoon, a beer in one hand and the plate of meat in the other, “you’ve gotta work straight.”
So in summary: Güero talked too much, and the asshole cousin was no brain surgeon. Stupid, sloppy, a real mouth-breather: Chino Parra was one of those guys you sent out for a shipment of coke and he came back with Pepsi. He had debts, he
needed a snootful every half-hour, he loved big cars, and he had bought his wife and three kids a mansion in the most ostentatious part of Las Quintas. It was a disaster waiting to happen: the dollars went out faster than they came in. So the cousins decided to set up their own operation, and big-time: a shipment of a certain cargo that the Judiciales had confiscated in El Salto, Durango, and found buyers for in Obregón. As usual, Güero flew solo. Taking advantage of a flight to Mexicali with fourteen fifty-gallon drums of lard, each containing twenty kilos of smack, he made a detour to pick up fifty keys of White Horse, all neatly shrink-wrapped in plastic. But somebody fingered him, and somebody else decided to clip Güero’s wings.
“Which somebody?”
“What the fuck. Somebody.”
The trap, Batman Güemes went on, was laid on the runway at six in the afternoon—the precision of the hour would have been perfect for that corrido Güero wanted and Chalino Sánchez, R.I.P., never quite composed—near a place up in the sierra known as El Espinazo del Diablo. The runway was just 312 yards long, and Güero, who flew over without seeing anything suspicious, had just touched down, with the flaps on his Cessna 172R on the last notch, the plane having come down so vertical it looked like he was dropping in on a parachute, and he was rolling down the first stretch of the runway at about forty knots when he saw two trucks and a bunch of people that shouldn’t have been there, camouflaged under the trees. So instead of hitting the brakes he gave it the gas and pulled up on the stick.
He might have made it, and somebody later said that by the time they started emptying their AR-15s and AK-47s at him, he’d already gotten the wheels off the ground. But all that lead was a lot of weight to lift, and the Cessna crashed about a hundred yards beyond the end of the runway. When they got to him, Güero was still alive among the twisted wreckage of the cabin; his face was bloody, his jaw smashed by a bullet, and splinters of broken bones were sticking out of the flesh of his legs; he was breathing weakly. He couldn’t last long anyway, but the instructions had been to kill him. So they took the smack out of the plane, and then, like in the movies, they threw a lighted Zippo into a trickle of the hundred-octane aircraft fuel that was leaking out of the gas tank. Fluhm! The fact is, Güero hardly knew what hit him.
When you live crooked, Batman Güemes repeated, you’ve got no choice but to work straight. This time he said it as a kind of conclusion, pensively, setting his empty plate down on the table. Then he clucked his tongue, held up the beer bottle to see how much was left, and looked at the yellow label: Cervecería del Pacífico, S.A. All this time he had been speaking as though the story he’d just told me had nothing to do with him, as though it was just something he’d heard here and there. Something in the public domain. And I figured it was.
“What about Teresa Mendoza?” I chanced.
He looked at me suspiciously from behind his dark glasses, wordlessly querying, What about her? So I asked straight out whether she’d been implicated in Güero’s operations, and he shook his head instantly. No way, he said. Back then she was just another girl, like all the rest: young, quiet, a typical morra—a narco’s girlfriend. The only difference was that she didn’t dye her hair blond and she wasn’t one of those bitches who liked to show it all off. The morras here just do girl things: they get their hair done, they watch the telenovelas on TV, they listen to Juan Gabriel and norteño music, and then they go on little $3,000 shopping sprees to Sercha’s and Coppel, where their credit’s even better than their cash. You know—when the hunter comes home, the little woman’s there to massage his worries away. Teresa had heard things, sure, but she didn’t have anything to do with the deals.
“Why go for her, then?”
“Why’re you asking me?” he said, turning serious.
Once again I feared he was going to cut off the conversation. But after a moment he shrugged.
“There are rules,” he said. “You don’t get to pick the ones you like, you follow the ones they give you when you come in. It’s all about reputation, and respect. Like piranhas. You go chicken or bleed, the others are all over you. You make a pact with life and death: so many years as a king, and then . . . Say what you will, dirty money spends as green as clean. Plus, it gives you luxuries, music, wine, and women. Then you die fast, and rest in peace. Not many narcos retire, and the natural way out is jail or the cemetery. Cases of really lucky guys, or really smart ones who get off the horse in time, like Epifanio Vargas, are rare. People here don’t trust anybody that’s been too long in the business and is still active.”
“Active?”
“Alive.”
He let me chew on that for three seconds. “They say,” he went on then, “those who are in that line of business”—he stressed the third-person, distant aspect of all this—“that even if you’re good at your business and you’re straight with people—no funny stuff, you know—you come to a bad end. You come, slide in easy, you’re preferred for some reason over others, you move up before you even know it, and then the competitors come after you. That’s why any false step, you pay. Plus, the more people you care about, the more vulnerable you are. Take the case of that other famous gringo, corridos and the whole thing, Héctor Palma. The story goes that he and a former associate of his had a falling-out, so this former associate of his kidnapped and tortured his family. So they say, you understand. And on his birthday this former associate sends him a box with his wife’s head in it. Happy birthday—to—you.
“Living on the edge like that, nobody can afford to forget the rules. It was the rules that took Güero down. He was a good guy, I give you my word. A fine fellow to work with, that compa. Brave—the type who’ll risk his soul and die wherever he’s supposed to die. A little talkative, you know, and ambitious, but not much different from the best we’ve got around here. I don’t know if you understand that. But as for Teresa Mendoza, she was his woman, and innocent or not, the rules went for her, too.”
Santa Virgencita. Santo Patrón. The little Malverde Chapel was in shadow. A single light glowed in the portico, whose doors were open night and day, and through the windows filtered the reddish flicker of four or five candles lighted before the altar. Teresa had been sitting motionless in the dark a long time, hidden by the wall between Avenida Insurgentes—deserted at this hour—and the railroad tracks and the canal. She tried to pray, but couldn’t; other things occupied her mind.
It had taken her a long time to decide whether to make the phone call. Calculate the possibilities. Then she’d walked here, watching her surroundings carefully, and now she was waiting, a lighted cigarette cupped in her hand. Half an hour, don Epifanio had said. Teresa had forgotten her watch, so she had no way to know how much time had passed.
She got a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she hurried to stub out the cigarette when a patrol car passed by slowly, headed toward Zapata: silhouettes of two cops in the front seats, the face of the one on the right slightly illuminated, seen and not seen, by the light on the porch of the chapel. Teresa scooted back, seeking more darkness. It wasn’t just that she was outside the law. In Sinaloa, as in the rest of Mexico, from the patrolman looking to get his back scratched—wearing his jacket zipped up so you couldn’t see his badge number—to his superior who received a stack of bills every month from the narcomafia, crossing paths with the law could often mean stepping into the lion’s den.
That useless prayer that never ended. Santa Virgencita. Santo Patrón. She’d started it six or seven times, and never finished. The chapel to the bandido Malverde brought back too many memories linked to Güero Dávila. That may have been why when don Epifanio Vargas agreed over the phone to the meeting, she named this place almost without thinking. At first don Epifanio had suggested she go to Colonia Chapultepec, near his house, but that meant crossing the city and a bridge over the Tamazula. Too risky. And although she didn’t mention any details about what had happened, just that she was running and that Güero had told her to get in contact with him, he understood immediately that th
ings were bad, or even worse than that. He tried to reassure her: Don’t worry, Teresita, I’ll come to see you, just calm down and don’t move. Hide and tell me where to find you. He always called her Teresita when he saw her with Güero on the malecón, in the restaurants on the beach at Altata, at a party, or eating mussels or shrimp ceviche and stuffed crab on Sunday at Los Arcos. He would call her Teresita and give her a kiss, and he had even introduced her to his wife and children once. And although don Epifanio was an intelligent, powerful man, with more money than Güero had ever had in his life, he was always nice to Güero, and he kept calling him his godson, just like in the old days. And once, around Christmas, the first Christmas that Teresa was Güero’s girlfriend, don Epifanio sent her flowers and a pretty Colombian emerald on a gold chain, and an envelope with $10,000 inside, so she could buy her man something, a surprise, and with the rest buy herself whatever she wanted.
That was why Teresa had phoned him that night, and was intending to give him that notebook of Güero’s that was burning a hole in her gym bag. Santa Virgencita. Santo Patrón. Because don Epi is the only one you can trust, Güero had always told her. He’s a gentleman, and a stand-up guy—he was a good boss when he was boss, and he’s my godfather. Pinche Güero. He’d said that before everything went to shit and that telephone rang. . . . Now she knew she couldn’t trust anyone, not even don Epifanio. Which was probably why she’d asked him to come there, almost without thinking, although actually thinking about it pretty well.
Queen of the South Page 5
