That was why, moments before Gato Fierros and Pote Gálvez appeared at the apartment near the Garmendia market, she broke the rules—turning the pages of the black leather notebook that held the keys to what had happened and what was about to happen. Names, addresses. Contacts on both sides of the border. She had time to grasp the reality before the shit hit the fan and she found herself running down the street holding the Double Eagle, alone and terrified, knowing exactly what she was trying to run away from. It was summed up very well that same night by don Epifanio Vargas himself. “Your man,” he had said, “liked his little jokes too much. Liked to play around.” The wagers he placed on his own cleverness had even included her.
Teresa knew all this when she went to the Malverde Chapel with the notebook she should never have read, cursing Güero for the way he’d put her in danger just to save her. A typical twisted fucking Güero way to deal with the situation. If they burn me, the pinche fucking hijo de la pinche madre had thought, there’s no way out for Teresa. Innocent or not, those are the rules. But there was a remote possibility: show that she was really acting in good faith. Because Teresa would never have turned the notebook over to anybody if she’d known what was inside. Never, had she been aware of the dangerous game being played by the man who had filled those pages with deadly notes. By taking it to don Epifanio, godfather to her and to Güero himself, she showed her ignorance. Her innocence. She’d never have dared, otherwise.
And that afternoon, sitting on the bed in the apartment, turning the pages that were simultaneously her death sentence and her only possible salvation, Teresa cursed Güero because she finally understood it all. Taking off, just running, was condemning herself to death within a few miles. She had to take the notebook to don Epifanio, to show that she didn’t know what was in it. She had to swallow the fear that was wringing her belly into knots, keep her head, give her voice just the right amount of anguish, just the right degree of pleading with the man Güero and she had trusted. The narco’s morra, the scared little rabbit. I don’t know anything. You tell me, don Epifanio, why would I read that. That was why she was still alive today. And why now, in the conference room of her office in Marbella, DEA agent Willy Rangel and chargé d’affaires Héctor Tapia were staring at her with their mouths open, one sitting, the other standing and with his fingers still at his jacket buttons.
“You’ve known all this time?” the gringo asked, incredulous.
“Twelve years.”
Tapia dropped back into the chair. “Cristo bendito,” he murmured.
Twelve years, Teresa told herself. Surviving with and because of a secret about the people who killed Güero. Because that last night in Culiacán, in the Malverde Chapel, in the stifling atmosphere of heat and humidity and smoke from the altar candles, she had played the game laid out for her by her dead lover—she’d had almost no hope, and yet she’d won. Neither her voice nor her nerves nor her fear had betrayed her. Because he was a good man, don Epifanio. And he loved her. He loved both of them, despite realizing from the notebook—maybe he knew before, or maybe not—that Raimundo Dávila Parra, aka Güero, had been working for the American antidrug agency, and that that was almost certainly why Batman Güemes had dropped him. And so Teresa had been able to fool them all, gambling on this crazy game, walking the knife-edge, just as Güero had foreseen. She doesn’t know anything. No way. How could she bring me the pinche notebook if she did? So let her go. Órale. It was one chance in a hundred, but it was enough to save her.
Willy Rangel was now observing Teresa very attentively, and with a respect that hadn’t been there before.
“In that case,” he said, “I’d ask you to take a seat again and listen to what I have to say, señora. Now you need to more than before.”
Teresa hesitated, but the gringo’s words had convinced her. She looked to one side and then the other, and then at the time, feigning impatience. “Ten minutes,” she said. “And not one minute more.”
She sat down again and lit another Bisonte. Tapia, now back in his chair, was still so stunned that it took him a moment before he even registered that a lady was lighting her own cigarette, so by the time he held out the lighter to her, murmuring apologies, it was too late.
Then the DEA man told the real story of Güero Dávila.
Raimundo Dávila Parra was from San Antonio, Texas. Chicano. After having worked from a very young age on the illegal side of the drug trade, bringing small amounts of marijuana over the border from Mexico, he was recruited by the DEA when he was arrested in San Diego with five keys of weed. He had talent, and he was an adrenaline junkie—he liked taking risks, feeling the rush. But he was cool, despite his outgoing appearance, and he was brave. After a period of training when he was supposedly in prison in northern California—part of the time he was, in order to make his cover look good—Güero was sent to Sinaloa, and his mission was to infiltrate the transportation networks of the Juárez cartel, where he had some old friends.
He liked the work. He also liked to fly, and he’d taken flying lessons as part of his training with the DEA, although as cover he took more lessons in Culiacán. For several years he infiltrated more and more deeply into the drug-trafficking world, using his job with Norteña de Aviación first as a right-hand man for Epifanio Vargas, with whom he worked in the big airbus operations led by the Lord of the Skies, and then as a pilot for Batman Güemes. Willy Rangel had been his handler. They never communicated by telephone except in cases of emergency. They would meet once a month in discreet hotels in Mazatlán and Los Mochis. And all the valuable information that the DEA got on the Juárez cartel during that period, including descriptions of the fierce power struggles the Mexican narcos waged to gain independence from the Colombian cartels, came from the same source. Güero was worth his weight in coke.
Then his narco friends killed him. The formal pretext was true enough: Seeking that little extra thrill, Güero took advantage of his drug runs for the Sinaloans to transport his own stuff. He liked to live dangerously, and he brought his cousin Chino Parra into it. The DEA knew, more or less, what Güero was up to, but he was a valuable agent, so they looked the other way. The narcos, however, decided not to. For some time, Rangel had wondered whether it was because of Güero’s back-door transports or because somebody broke his cover.
It took him three years to find out. A Cuban arrested in Miami who’d been working for people in Sinaloa turned state’s evidence in exchange for a slot in the Witness Protection Program, and he filled eighteen hours of audio-tape with his revelations. He told his interrogators that Güero Dávila had been murdered because somebody found out he was working for the feds. A stupid error: a U.S. Customs agent in El Paso somehow got access to a confidential report—no names, but the circumstances were pretty clear—and sold it to the narcos for $80,000. The narcos put two and two together, followed the trail, and at the end of it found Güero.
“The story about the drugs in the Cessna,” Rangel concluded, “was a pretext. They were after him. What’s strange is that the people that took him out didn’t know he was working for us.”
He fell silent.
“How can you be sure?”
The gringo nodded. Professional. “Ever since the murder of Agent Camarena, the narcos have known that we never forgive the murder of one of our men. That we don’t give up until the people responsible die or are in prison. An eye for an eye. It’s a rule, and if there’s one thing they understand, it’s rules.”
There was a new coldness in his voice. We’re bad to have as enemies, it said. We’re nasty. And we’ve got all the money and all the persistence in the world.
“But they killed Güero as dead as you can get.”
“Right.” Rangel nodded again. “Which is why I say that whoever gave the direct order to lay the trap in the Espinazo del Diablo didn’t know he was an agent. . . . You may have heard the name, although a few minutes ago you denied it: César ‘Batman’ Güemes.”
“I don’t recall it.”
&
nbsp; “No, of course not. Even so, I can assure you that he was just following orders. ‘That dude is running his own stuff,’ somebody told him. ‘We need to take him out, make an example of him.’ We know that Batman Güemes resisted—they had to beg him. Apparently, he liked Güero Dávila. . . . But in Sinaloa, commitments are commitments.”
“And who, according to you, put the bug in Batman’s ear and insisted that Güero get taken out?”
Rangel, smiling crookedly, rubbed his nose, turned to Tapia, and then back to Teresa. He was sitting on the edge of his chair, his hands on his knees. He didn’t look like such a charmer anymore. Now he looked like a pissed-off hunting dog with a good memory.
“Another man I’m sure you’ve never heard of . . . Sinaloa’s representative to the House of Deputies, and future senator, Epifanio Vargas.”
Teresa leaned against the wall and looked at the few customers that were in the Olde Rock at this hour. She could often think things through better when she was among strangers, watching, instead of being alone with the other woman who was always hanging around, no matter where Teresa was. On the way back to Guadalmina she’d told Pote Gálvez to drive to Gibraltar, and after crossing the line she directed the bodyguard through the narrow streets until they came to the white façade of the English bar she used to go to—in another life—with Santiago Fisterra.
Pote Gálvez parked the Cherokee, and she went in. Everything was the same: the beams on the ceiling, the walls covered with historical engravings, naval souvenirs, and photographs of ships. At the bar, she ordered a Foster’s, the beer she’d always drunk with Santiago when they came here, and without tasting it she went to sit at the same table as always, next to the door, under the engraving of the death of the English admiral—now she knew who this Nelson was and how he’d gotten his at Trafalgar. The other Teresa Mendoza was hanging back, studying her from a distance. Waiting for conclusions, for a reaction to everything she’d just been told, which had finally filled out the general picture the other woman had been explaining to her, and also cleared up the events back in Sinaloa that had led her to this place in her life. She now knew much more than she thought she knew, and she needed to sit and think.
It’s been a pleasure, she’d said—exactly what she’d said when the man from the DEA and the man from the embassy finished telling her what they’d come to tell her and sat there watching her, waiting for a reaction. You two are crazy, it’s been a pleasure, adiós. They left disappointed. Maybe they had expected comments, promises. Commitments. But her inexpressive face, her indifferent manner, left them little hope. No way. “She just told us to fuck ourselves,” she heard Héctor Tapia say under his breath, so that she wouldn’t hear, as they were leaving. Despite his perfect manners, the diplomat had that defeated look about him.
“Think about it carefully,” the DEA man had said. His words of farewell.
“The problem,” she said as she was closing the door behind them, “is that I don’t see what there is to think about. Sinaloa is a long, long way away. Adiós.”
But she was sitting there now, in the bar in Gibraltar, thinking. Remembering point by point, putting everything Willy Rangel had told her in order in her head. The story of don Epifanio Vargas. The story of Güero Dávila. The story of Teresa Mendoza.
It was Güero’s former boss, the gringo had said, don Epifanio himself, who’d found out about Güero and the DEA. During those early years as owner of Norteña de Aviación, Vargas had leased his planes to Southern Air Transport, a U.S. government cover company that flew the arms and cocaine that the CIA was using to finance the Contras in Nicaragua, and Güero Dávila, who back then was already a DEA agent, was one of the pilots who unloaded war matériel at the airport in Los Llanos, Costa Rica, and returned to Fort Lauderdale with drugs from the Medellín cartel. When that operation, and that period of history, was over, Epifanio Vargas had maintained his good connections on the other side, which was how he could later be informed of the leak from the Customs agent who’d ratted out Güero. Vargas had paid the rat, and for a good while had kept the information to himself, not making any final decision about what to do with it. The drug boss of the sierra, the former patient campesino, was one of those men that never rush into things. He was almost out of the business, he was taking another road now, the pharmaceuticals that he managed from a distance were doing well, and the state’s privatizations in recent years had allowed him to launder huge amounts of money. He maintained his family comfortably, in an immense rancho near El Limón that replaced the Colonia Chapultepec house in Culiacán—and kept a lover, too, a former model and TV host, whom he set up in a luxurious place in Mazatlán. He saw no reason to complicate things with decisions that could come back to bite him and whose only benefit was revenge. Güero was working for Batman Güemes now, so he was no business of Epifanio Vargas’.
However—Willy Rangel had said—at some point things changed. Vargas made a lot of money in the ephedrine business: $50,000 a kilo in the United States, compared with $30,000 for cocaine and $8,000 for marijuana. He had good connections, which opened the doors of a political career; he was about to collect on the half a million a month he’d been investing in payoffs to public officials all these years. He saw a quiet, respectable future for himself, far from the potential problems of his old trade. After establishing ties with the principal families of the city and the state—money, corruption, complicity made very good relationships with these people—he had enough money to say basta, or to go on earning it by conventional means. So suddenly, suspiciously, people related to his past began to die: police officers, judges, lawyers. Eighteen in three months.
It was an epidemic. And in that scenario, the figure of Güero Dávila was also an obstacle: he knew too many things about the heroic times of Norteña de Aviación. The DEA agent was lurking in his past like a stick of dynamite that could go off at any time, and destroy Vargas’ future.
But Vargas was smart, Rangel had said. Very smart, with that campesino shrewdness that had gotten him where he was today. He passed the job off to somebody else, without revealing why. Batman Güemes would never have taken out an agent of the DEA, but a pilot of two-engine Cessnas who was dealing behind his bosses’ backs, fucking them over a little here and a little there—that was another thing. Vargas insisted to Batman: An object lesson, to teach the others that we can’t let this happen, et cetera. Güero and his cousin. I’ve got a bone or two to pick with him, too, so consider this a personal favor you’re doing me. Plus, you’re his boss now—it’s your responsibility to enforce discipline.
“How long have you known all this?” Teresa had asked Rangel.
“Part of it, for a long time. Almost when it happened.” The DEA agent moved his hands to underscore the obvious. “The rest, about two years, when the witness I mentioned gave us the details . . . And he said something else.” He paused, looking at her intently, as though expecting her to fill in the blanks. “. . . He said that later, when you started to grow over here on this side of the Atlantic, Vargas decided he’d made a mistake in letting you get out of Sinaloa alive. And he reminded Batman Güemes that he had unpaid bills over here . . . and Batman Güemes sent two hit men over here to finish the job.”
That’s your story, said Teresa’s inscrutable expression. You think you know everything. “You don’t say. And what happened?”
“You’d be the one to tell me that. Nothing more was ever heard of them.” Héctor Tapia gently interrupted. “Of one of them, Willy means. Apparently, the other one is still here. Retired. Or semi-retired.”
“And why have you come to me with all this now?”
Rangel looked at the diplomat. Now it’s your turn, his expression said. Tapia again took off his glasses and put them back on again. Then he studied his fingernails, as though he had notes written on them.
“Recently,” he began, “Epifanio Vargas’ political star has been rising. It has been, in fact, unstoppable. Too many people owe him too much. Many people love him or fear h
im, and almost everyone respects him. He was able to get out of the activities directly related to the Juárez cartel before it got into its serious trouble with Justice, when the struggle was carried on almost exclusively against its competitors in the Gulf. . . . In his career he has involved judges, businessmen, and politicians, and the highest authorities in the Mexican Church, police, and military—General Gutiérrez Rebollo, who was about to be appointed the republic’s antidrug prosecutor before his links with the Juárez cartel were discovered and he wound up in the Almoloya prison, was a close friend of Vargas’. . . . And then there are the people themselves, the men and women in the street: since he was named state representative to the House of Deputies, Epifanio Vargas has done a lot for Sinaloa, invested money, created jobs, helped people—”
“That’s not bad,” Teresa interrupted. “Usually in Mexico, people steal from the state and keep it all for themselves. . . . The PRI did that for seventy years.”
“Those are two different things,” replied Tapia. “For the moment, the PRI is not in power. There’s a new wind sweeping through the government, we all hope. Maybe in the end not much will have changed, but there is a will now to try. And all of a sudden, Epifanio Vargas appears on the scene, ready to become a senator.”
“And somebody wants to screw him.” Teresa saw it all now.
“That’s one way of putting it. On the one hand, a very large sector of the political world, many linked to the current government, don’t want to see a Sinaloan narco become a senator, even though he’s officially retired and serving as a member of the House of Deputies. . . . There are also old accounts, which it would take too long to go into.”
Teresa could imagine what those accounts might consist of. All of those hijos de la pinche madre, at war over power and money, the drug cartels and the friends of the respective cartels and the various political families, related to drugs or not. No matter who’s in power in the “government.” México lindo, as they say—beautiful Mexico.
Queen of the South Page 43
