The chapel was a quiet place she could get to by skulking along the train tracks that ran along the canal. From here, she could watch the street on both sides in case Güero had been wrong in his calculations and the man who called her Teresita—and who gave her $10,000 and an emerald at Christmas—didn’t come alone. Or in case she got cold feet and—in the best of cases, if she was still able—took off running again.
She struggled with the temptation to light another cigarette. Santa Virgencita. Santo Patrón. Through the windows she could see the candles that threw flickering light across the walls and pews of the chapel. During his mortal life, St. Malverde had been Jesús Malverde, the good bandit who stole from the rich, they said, to help the poor. The priests and church authorities never recognized him as a saint, but the people canonized him on their own. After his execution, the government had ordered that the body not be buried, as an object lesson for other would-be Robin Hoods, but people who passed by the place would put down stones, one each time—religiously, you might say—until they’d given him a Christian burial. The chapel grew out of that devotion. Among the gruff people of Culiacán and all of Sinaloa, Malverde was more popular and had done more miracles than God Himself, or Our Lady of Guadalupe. The chapel was filled with little signs and ex votos placed there in gratitude to Malverde for the miracles: a lock of a child’s hair for a successful childbirth, shrimp in alcohol for a good catch, photographs, kitschy religious prints.
But above all, St. Malverde was the patron saint of the Sinaloa narcos, who came to the chapel to offer their lives up to him, and to give thanks, with offerings and hand-lettered signs after each successful return and each profitable deal. Gracias for getting me out of jail, one might read, stuck up on the wall next to an image of the saint—dark-skinned, moustached, dressed in white with an elegant black neckerchief. Or Gracias for you know what. The toughest of them, the worst criminals, murderers from the sierra and the plains, had his likeness on their belts, on scapulars, on their baseball caps, in their cars; when they spoke his name they would cross themselves, and many mothers would go to the chapel to pray when their sons made their first run or were in jail or some other trouble. There were gunmen who glued a picture of Malverde to the butts of their pistols, or on the shoulder stocks of their AK-47s. And even Güero Dávila, who said he didn’t believe in that sort of thing, had a photo of the saint on the instrument panel of his plane; it was in a leather frame, with the prayer God bless my journy and allow my return, misspelling and all. Teresa had bought it for him at the shop at the chapel, where, early in their relationship, she’d often go, secretly, to light candles whenever Güero didn’t come home for several days. She did this until he found out and forbade her. Superstitions, prietita. Idiotic. Chale, I don’t like my woman being ridiculous.
But the day she brought him the photo with the prayer, he didn’t say a word, didn’t even make fun of it—he just put it up on the Cessna’s instrument panel.
By the time the headlights went out, after illuminating the chapel with two long sweeps, Teresa was aiming the Double Eagle at the car. She was scared, but that didn’t keep her from weighing the pros and cons, trying to foresee the appearances under which danger might present itself. Her head, as the men who gave her a job as a money changer had discovered years before, was good at figures: A plus B equals X, plus Z probabilities backward and forward, multiplications, divisions, additions and subtractions.
And that brought her once again face to face with The Situation. At least five hours had passed since the telephone rang, and maybe two since that first shot fired into Gato Fierros’ face. Her dues in horror and confusion had been paid; all the resources of her instinct and her intelligence were now committed to keeping her alive.
Which was why her hand didn’t tremble. Which was why she’d wanted to pray, but couldn’t. Instead she recalled with absolute clarity that she had fired five shots, that there was one in the chamber and ten in the clip, that the Double Eagle’s recoil was very powerful, and that the next time, she needed to aim slightly below the target if she didn’t want to miss. Her left hand was not under the butt of the gun, like in the movies, but rather on top of her right wrist, to steady it. This was her last chance, and she knew it. If her heart beat slowly, her blood circulated quietly, and her senses were on alert, it would make the difference between being alive and lying dead on the ground. Which was why she’d taken a couple of quick sniffs from the package in the gym bag. And which was why, when the white Suburban pulled up, she’d instinctively turned her eyes away from the headlights, so as not to be blinded. She looked over the top of the weapon again, finger on the trigger, holding her breath, alert to the first possible sign that something wasn’t quite right. Ready to shoot anybody, no matter who.
The doors slammed. She held her breath. One, two, three. ¡Híjole!—shit. Three male silhouettes standing alongside the car, backlighted by the streetlamps. Choose. She’d thought she could be safe from this, on the sidelines, while somebody did it for her. You just take it easy, prietita—that was at the beginning—you just love me, and I’ll take care of the rest. It was sweet and comfortable. It was deceptively safe to wake up at night and hear her man’s—any man’s?—peaceful breathing. There was not even any fear back then, because fear is the child of the imagination, and back then there were only happy hours that passed like a pretty love song, or a soft stream. And the trap was easy to fall into; his laughter when he held her, his lips traveling over her skin, his mouth whispering tender words, or dirty words down below, between her thighs, very close and very far inside, as though it were going to stay there forever—if she lived long enough to forget, that mouth would be the last thing that she forgot. But nobody stays forever. Because nobody is safe, and all sense of security is dangerous. Suddenly you wake up with proof that it’s impossible to just live—you realize that life is a road, and that traveling it entails constant choices. Who you live with, who you love, who you kill. Whether you want to or not, you have to walk the road by yourself. . . . The Situation . . . What it came down to was choosing.
After hesitating a second, she aimed the gun at the broadest and biggest of the three silhouettes. It was the best target, and besides—he was the boss.
“Teresita,” said don Epifanio Vargas.
That familiar voice stirred something inside her. Suddenly, tears blurred her vision. Unexpectedly, she’d turned fragile; she tried to understand why, and in the effort it was too late to avoid it. Stupid bitch, she told herself. Pinche fucking stupid baby. If something goes wrong, you had your chance. The distant lights from the street blurred and wavered before her eyes, and everything became a confusion of liquid lights and shadows. Suddenly there was no one to aim at.
So she lowered the pistol. All because of one fucking tear, she thought, resigned to what awaited. Now they’re going to kill me, and all because of one pinche tear.
It’s bad times.” Don Epifanio Vargas took a long puff of his cigar and stood looking at the ember, pensive. In the semidarkness of the chapel, the candles and altar lights illuminated his Aztec profile, his thick, combed-back jet-black hair, his norteño moustache, all those stereotyped features that Teresa had always associated with Emilio Fernández and Pedro Armendáriz in the old Mexican movies on TV. He was probably somewhere around fifty, and he was big and wide, with huge hands. In his left hand he held a cigar, and in his right, Güero’s notebook.
“In the old days, at least there was some respect for women and children.”
He shook his head sadly, remembering. Teresa knew that “the old days” referred to the time when, as a young campesino from Santiago de los Caballeros, tired of being hungry, Epifanio Vargas traded in the brace of oxen and the little field of corn and beans for marijuana plants. He’d screened out the seeds for a clean product, he’d put his life on the line selling it and taken the lives of everybody else he could, and finally he’d come down from the sierra to the flatland, settling in Tierra Blanca. That was when the networks of
Sinaloa drug smugglers had first been moving north not just their bricks of Mexican gold but also the first packages of white powder that came in by boat and plane from Colombia.
The men of don Epifanio’s generation—men who had once swum the Río Grande with cargos on their backs—now lived in mansions in Colonia Chapultepec. They had pliant rich-kid offspring who went to high school in their own cars and to American universities. But they’d had their long-ago days of big adventures, big risks, and big money made overnight: a lucky operation, a good crop, a big cargo that got to the right place. Years of danger and money, living a life that up in that sierra would have been scarcely more than a miserable getting-by. Intense and short, because only the toughest of men managed to survive, make a life for themselves, and mark off the territory of a large drug cartel. Those had been years when the lines were still being drawn. When nobody held a place without pushing out somebody else, and if you fucked up, you paid the price.
But the price was your life, not anybody else’s with you. Just yours. “They went to Chino Parra’s house, too,” he said. “I heard it on the news a little while ago. Wife and three kids.” The ember of his cigar glowed bright again. “Chino was found in the driveway, in his Silverado.”
He was sitting beside Teresa on the pew to the right of the little altar. When he moved his head, the candles made patent-leather glints in his thick, stiff-combed hair. The years that had passed since he first came down from the sierra had refined his appearance and his manners, but under the handmade suits, the Italian ties, and the $500 silk shirts, there was still the campesino from the mountains of Sinaloa. And you could see that not just because of the norteño ostentation—pointed-toe boots, huge silver belt buckle, gold centenary medal on the keychain—but also, and especially, because of the eyes, which were sometimes impassive, sometimes distrustful or patient. They were the eyes of a race that for generations, hundreds of years, had been forced, time and time again, by a hailstorm or a drought, to start over again, from scratch.
“Apparently they caught Chino in the morning and spent the day with him, talking. . . . From what the radio said, they took their time with him.”
Teresa could imagine, and it didn’t take much effort: Hands tied with wire; cigarettes; razor blades. Chino Parra’s screams muffled by the plastic bag or the strip of duct tape, in some basement or warehouse, before they finished him off and went for his family. Maybe Chino himself had ratted out Güero. Or his own family. Teresa had known Chino well, his wife, Brenda, and the three kids—two boys and a girl. She remembered them playing, running around on the beach at Altata, the previous summer: their warm little brown bodies in the sun, covered by towels, sleeping as they drove back in that same Silverado their father’s remains had been found in. Brenda was a petite woman, very talkative, with pretty brown eyes, and on her right ankle she wore a gold chain with her man’s initials on it. She and Teresa had gone shopping together many times in Culiacán—getting expensive manicures, buying tight leather pants, spike heels, Guess jeans, Calvin Klein, Carolina Herrera . . . She wondered whether they’d sent Gato Fierros and Potemkin Gálvez, or some other gunmen. Whether it had happened before or at the same time as they were coming after her. Whether they killed Brenda before or after the kids. Whether it had been fast, or whether they’d also taken their time with them. Pinche hombres puercos.
She inhaled and then breathed out slowly, so that don Epifanio wouldn’t see her sob. Then she silently cursed Chino Parra, after cursing that cabrón Güero Dávila even more. Chino was brave the way so many that killed or ran drugs were—out of pure fucking ignorance, because he didn’t think. He got into jams because he was fuck-stupid, unaware that he was putting not just himself but his whole family in danger. Güero had been different: he was smart. He knew all the risks, and he’d always known what would happen to her if they got him, but he couldn’t care less. That fucking notebook. Don’t read it, he’d said. Take it, but don’t even look at it. Damn him, she muttered again. God damn him, pinche Güero cabrón.
“What happened?” she asked.
Don Epifanio Vargas shrugged. “What had to happen,” he said.
She looked at the bodyguard standing at the door, AK-47 in hand, silent as a shadow or a ghost. Just because you’d traded in drugs for pharmaceuticals and politics didn’t mean you didn’t take the usual precautions. The other backup was outside, also armed. They’d given the night watchman two hundred pesos to take off early. Don Epifanio looked at the gym bag Teresa had set on the floor, between her feet, and then at the Double Eagle in her lap.
“Your man had been tempting fate a long time, Teresita. It had to come sooner or later.”
“Is he really dead?”
“Of course he’s dead. They caught him up in the sierra. . . . It wasn’t soldiers, or Federales, or anybody. It was his own people.”
“Who?”
“What difference does it make? You know what kind of deals Güero was doing. He got caught playing both sides. And somebody finally blew the whistle on him.”
The cigar’s ember glowed red again. Don Epifanio opened the notebook. He held it in the candlelight, turning pages randomly.
“You read what’s in here?”
“I just brought it to you, like he told me. I don’t know anything about these things.”
Don Epifanio nodded, reflectively. He seemed uncomfortable. “Poor Güero got what he’d been looking for,” he concluded.
She was staring straight ahead, into the chapel’s shadows, where ex votos and dry flowers were hanging. “Poor Güero my ass,” she suddenly said. “That pig never thought about what would happen to me.”
She’d kept her voice from shaking. Still staring into the shadows, she sensed that don Epifanio had turned to look at her.
“You’re lucky,” she heard him say. “For the time being, you’re alive.”
He sat like that a while longer. Studying her. The smell of the cigar mingled with the fragrance of the candles and the cone of incense burning slowly in a censer next to the bust of the sainted bandit. “What do you plan to do?” he asked at last.
“I don’t know.” Now it was Teresa’s turn to shrug. “Güero said you’d help me. ‘Give it to him and ask him to help you.’ That’s what he said.”
“Güero was always an optimist.”
The hollow feeling in her stomach got worse. The waxy smell of candles, the flickering lights before St. Malverde. Humid, hot. Suddenly she felt an unbearable sense of anxiety, and of trepidation. She repressed the urge to jump up, knock over the burning candles, get out, get air. Run again, if they’d still let her. But when she looked up, she saw that the other Teresa Mendoza was sitting across from her, watching her. Or maybe it was she herself sitting there, silently, looking at the frightened woman leaning forward on the pew next to don Epifanio, with a useless pistol in her lap.
“He loved you,” she heard herself say.
Don Epifanio moved uneasily in his seat. A decent man, Güero had always said.
“And I loved him.” Don Epifanio was speaking very softly, as though he didn’t want the bodyguard at the door to hear him talk about emotions. “And you, too . . . but those stupid runs of his put you in a tough spot.”
“I need help.”
“I can’t get mixed up in this.”
“You have a lot of power.”
She heard him cluck his tongue in discouragement and impatience. In this business, don Epifanio explained, still speaking softly, power was relative, ephemeral, subject to complicated rules. And he had kept his power, he said, because he didn’t go sticking his nose in other people’s business. Güero didn’t work for him anymore; this was between him and his new bosses. And those people mocharon parejo—they took out everybody, wiped the slate clean.
“They don’t have anything personal against you, Teresita. You know these people. But it’s their way of doing things. . . . They have to make an example when people fuck with them.”
“You could talk to them
. Tell them I don’t know anything.”
“They already know you don’t know anything. That’s not the issue . . . and I can’t get involved. In this country, if you ask for a favor today, tomorrow you’ve got to pay it back.”
Now he was looking at the Double Eagle on her lap, one hand lying carelessly on the butt. He knew that Güero had taught her to fire it, and that she could hit six empty Pacífico bottles one after another, at ten paces. Güero had always liked Pacífico and liked his women a little tough, although Teresa couldn’t stand beer and jumped every time the gun went off.
“Besides,” don Epifanio went on, “what you’ve told me just makes things worse. If they can’t let a man get away, imagine a woman. . . . They’d be the laughingstock of Sinaloa.”
Teresa looked at his dark, inscrutable eyes. The hard eyes of a norteño Indian. Of a survivor.
“I can’t get involved,” she heard him repeat.
And don Epifanio stood up. So it was useless, she thought. It all ends here. The hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach grew until it included the night that awaited her outside, inexorable. She gave up, but the woman watching her from the shadows refused to.
“Güero told me that you’d help me,” she insisted stubbornly, as though talking to herself. “‘Take him the book,’ he said, ‘and trade it for your life.’”
“Your man liked his little jokes.”
“I don’t know about that. But I know what he told me.”
It sounded more like a complaint than a plea. A sincere and very bitter complaint. Or a reproach. She was silent for a moment, and then she raised her face, like the weary prisoner waiting to hear the sentence. Don Epifanio was standing before her; he seemed even bigger and more heavyset than ever. His fingertips were drumming on Güero’s notebook.
Queen of the South Page 6
