The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Flor is young and Guatemalan. She came up from the Petén when the Kaibiles came in and forced her family off their land. They rode a train into Mexico, hoping to make it to the U.S., but somewhere in Quintana Roo, police stopped the train and forced them off.

  The men took her father and brothers away—she doesn’t know where.

  They took her, too, to the city of Morelia, and told her that she’d have good work as a waitress, that she would make money that she could send to her family. She did work in the restaurant, washing dishes and the floor, but they told her that she owed the money she made as rent for the room above the restaurant she shared with twelve other girls.

  She learned the truth from these girls.

  Learned that the men—the “Zetas”—would put her on the street to have sex with men who paid them.

  At first she didn’t believe them, but then she learned to believe.

  One at a time, men taught her to believe.

  In the front seats of cars, they taught her to believe. In cheap dirty rooms, they taught her to believe. Bent over trash cans in an alley, they taught her to believe.

  Now Flor stands under the pools of streetlamp lights in clothes that shame her, and she calls to the men in cars in words that shame her, bidding them to do things that shame her, for money that shames her.

  She doesn’t send money to her family. The men told her that they would help her find them, but never did.

  The money her shame makes goes for rent, goes for food, for clothes, for makeup, it goes to the doctors for medicine, it goes to pay for the train that she rode. The money goes to the “interest” on her debt that grows every day, no matter how much shame she makes at night.

  The money used to go for drugs.

  She started shooting heroin that washed away her shame like a moist and soothing cloud full of rain, that brought dreams of her beautiful home in the Petén, her parents, her brothers. Her heroin dreams were green and soft and beautiful like her home.

  But heroin cost money.

  The men would always give it to her, but they would add it to her “tab,” and as she got deeper and deeper into addiction she fell deeper and deeper in debt, until the men had her working all the time and she shamed herself ten, twelve, fourteen times a night.

  Not that she felt shame any longer.

  Not that she felt anything.

  Then Flor found the Lord.

  Not the Catholic god of her childhood, but a loving Lord.

  Jehovah God.

  A man bought her on the street one night, took her to a dim and dirty room, but instead of taking her, asked, “Child, my sister, do you know the Lord?”

  He read to her from the Bible, and then gave her a book, the one written by the leader, a man named Nazario. He came to see her every night, when the men weren’t watching, when the other girls weren’t watching, and he told her that Jesus loved her, that the Lord loved her, Nazario loved her, and that if she accepted that love she would see her family again in heaven. She read the book and he took her to meet other people, other brothers and sisters, in a house where they live and call themselves a family.

  One night there Nazario walked over to her, rolled up her sleeves, and saw the needle tracks, and he gently said, “You don’t need this, my sister,” and that was the truth and she believed. He taught her to believe.

  That while her body might be a slave, her soul is free.

  She gave up the heroin.

  This night Flor is standing at the edge of the alley and she hears something in the Dumpster and thinks it’s a rat, but then she sees this boy climb out, this child. He looks startled to see her and starts to run, but she asks, “Are you hungry?”

  The boy nods.

  “Wait here,” she says.

  She goes into the restaurant’s kitchen and asks the cook for some scraps—some meat, a little chicken, a corn tortilla—and brings it out into the alley.

  The boy is still there and she hands him the food.

  He eats like a ravenous dog.

  Flor asks, “What’s your name?”

  “Pedro,” he lies.

  “Do you have a place to stay?” Flor asks him.

  Chuy shakes his head.

  “I can take you to a place where you can sleep,” she says. “Jesus loves you.”

  This is how Chuy joins La Familia Michoacana.

  —

  Now Chuy lives in an old house with twenty or so other people, most of them young, most of them otherwise homeless. Some are girls, or even boys, who work the street. Others sell candy, flowers, or newspapers from traffic islands.

  Chuy gets a different job, delivering food to orphanages, homeless shelters, and drug clinics. He hops in a van or a pickup truck in the morning and spends the day unloading boxes of rice, pasta, powdered milk and cereal, big vats of soup, cookies and candies, all labeled “With love from La Familia.”

  At the drug rehab clinics they deliver something else in addition to the food—copies of the Book: The Sayings of Nazario. Sometimes an adult stays behind at the clinic to talk to the addicts, tell them about Jehovah God and Jesus Christ and Nazario. As the weeks go by, Chuy notices that some of the patients he saw at the clinic come to live at the house or work on the delivery trucks.

  At night, Chuy has supper at the house, and then goes to the meeting where they discuss the Bible and the Book, and then sometimes he hangs around the restaurant near the block where Flor works or he sits at home and slogs painfully through the Book, because he was never very good at reading, in Spanish or English. But with Flor’s help, he makes it through, and memorizes key sayings. His favorite is, “A true man needs a cause, an adventure, and a good woman to rescue.”

  On Sunday mornings everyone goes to church, and on special occasions Nazario himself comes to preach—the good word about Jehovah God and Jesus Christ and how to live right and do the right things, and Chuy sees Flor’s eyes light up when she gazes at Nazario, and after the service they line up to get his blessing and Chuy is excited in a way he hasn’t been since he first met Ochoa, which now seems like a lifetime ago, because now he has a new life—he loves Jehovah God and Jesus Christ. He loves Nazario.

  He loves Flor.

  But the Zetas are still very much a part of his new life.

  They’re part of everybody’s.

  As Chuy moves around the city, he sees their gunmen on the street, sees them go into the bars and the clubs, into the brothels and the tienditas—the little stores—and he sees that they collect protection money from everyone.

  The Zetas run Michoacán.

  “Didn’t you know that?” Flor asks him one night.

  “I thought they were just narcos,” Chuy says.

  “They run everything now,” she says. “It was them who took me off the train, brought me here, put me to work. The money I make goes to them. All the girls pay them or they beat you, maybe kill you.”

  She knows girls who have just disappeared.

  The Zetas rule Michoacán like a colony.

  So as Chuy works, he literally keeps his head down. As he goes in the truck all around the city, even out to the little villages in the countryside where La Familia delivers food and clean water, digs wells, and builds daycare centers, he keeps an eye out for Zetas.

  If they recognize him, he knows they’ll kill him.

  And not quick.

  But other than that, life is good. He likes living at the house with his new friends, likes spending his spare time with Flor, even finds he likes going to church, singing the hymns, hearing Nazario preach.

  One of Nazario’s sayings is, “You are only as sick as your secrets,” and Flor urges Chuy to go speak to one of the counselors, the man who brought her into La Familia, to do a “cleansing,” because it’s wonderful and he will feel better.

  “I feel okay,” he says.

  “You have nightmares,” Flor says. “You wake up weeping. If you do the cleansing, the nightmares will stop. Mine did.”

  A few nights l
ater, Chuy does his cleansing. He goes into a small room with the “counselor,” a man in his forties named Hugo Salazar.

  “Tell me your sins,” Hugo says. “Get them off your soul.”

  Chuy balks, says nothing.

  Hugo says, “ ‘You cannot climb a mountain with a sack of garbage on your back.’ ”

  “I’ve done bad things.”

  “God already knows everything you’ve done and everything you will do,” Hugo says, “and He loves you, anyway. This is not a confession, it’s a liberation. Nightmares can’t live in the light.”

  “I’ve killed people.”

  “You look like just a boy.”

  Chuy shrugs.

  “How many people?” Hugo asks.

  “Six?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m pretty sure six.”

  “Were they innocent people?” Hugo asks. “Women? Children?”

  “No.”

  “How did you come to kill?” the man asks.

  “I worked for narcos.”

  “I see,” Hugo says. “Anything else?”

  Chuy wants to tell him about his nightmare, what he did with Ochoa that night, but he’s too ashamed, and afraid. The Zetas might be looking for him, and if he tells, he might be identified, because only Zetas do that kind of thing.

  “Yes,” Chuy says. He stares at the floor. “I killed my best friend.”

  “Why, my young brother?”

  “He was going to kill me.”

  Hugo lays a hand on his shoulder. “Nazario says that this world is full of evil, which is why we must not be fully part of this world, but always have an eye on the next one. In an evil world, sometimes we have to do evil to survive, and God understands this. The point is that we try to do the right thing, with a pure heart. Go back now, my brother, and do what’s right.”

  Chuy leaves and finds Flor on the street.

  “Was it wonderful?” she asks, beaming at him. “I’m so happy you did it.”

  It was good, Chuy thinks.

  He does feel lighter.

  The nightmares still come, but less often, and he knows the reason that he still has them is because he didn’t cleanse what he did with Ochoa that night. Maybe someday, he thinks, I’ll have the courage to say.

  Three days after his cleansing, Hugo approaches him.

  “We have a new job for you, little brother.”

  The Family needs warriors.

  —

  Because La Familia Michoacana traffics drugs.

  Nazario is the chaca, the boss.

  But under the Zetas. Just as the Zetas run Michoacán, La Familia is also under their thumb. But the Family has its own trafficking business, mostly in meth, and it’s bringing in vast amounts of money.

  La Familia pays a tax to the Zetas, so are allowed to exist. Nazario was good friends with Osiel Contreras, who sent his Zetas to train Nazario’s gunmen. Then the Zetas took over.

  Chuy don’t like the idea of working for Forty again, even indirectly, and he tells Hugo that the Zetas are evil.

  “In an evil world,” Hugo tells him, “you have to do evil to do good. The drugs we send to America pay for the food for orphans, the water for the villagers. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “God needs warriors in this world,” Hugo says. “You’ve read the Bible.”

  Chuy hasn’t but doesn’t say so.

  Hugo says, “David was a great warrior. He killed Goliath. The Family needs Davids. Like you.”

  Chuy looks at him, puzzled.

  “Don’t you see, my brother?” Hugo asks. “All those bad things in your past, those things you were ashamed of, God takes and turns into good. When you fight for Nazario, you fight for the Lord. Your soul shines like the armor of a knight.”

  “But I’d be fighting for the Zetas,” Chuy argues.

  “The will of God is a mystery,” Hugo answers, “that we humans can’t always solve. Nor should we. We should only listen to His voice, and if you listen, Pedro, you will hear Him calling you.”

  Chuy hears the call.

  He becomes a warrior of God.

  Every night they meet for Bible study or to discuss the Book. They don’t work on Sundays—instead they attend a massive outdoor service at which Nazario preaches.

  “Every man needs a cause!” the leader bellows. “A cause, an adventure, and a good woman to rescue!”

  His disciples cheer, then sing a hymn.

  After the service there’s a large dinner and then silent time—they spend four hours in quiet, contemplating their souls, their mission, the meaning of their lives, the sayings of Nazario. Sunday evenings they meet in the hall and chant the sayings over and over.

  They watch videos, listen to tapes, and learn the strict rules—no smoking, no drinking, no drugs. A first offense will earn a beating, a second brings a severe whipping, a third means execution.

  Three strikes and you’re out.

  One day the leaders bring Chuy a man they snatched off the streets—a child molester, the worst of the worst—and order Chuy to kill him.

  No problem.

  A warrior of the Lord, he strangles the man with his hands.

  Now Chuy has a different job.

  Now he doesn’t deliver groceries.

  His five-man cell patrols three city blocks. They watch who comes and goes, report anyone suspicious to their superiors, keep things tight, clean, and orderly. They deliver protection money to the local Zeta boss, who hangs out with his underlings in the office of a local auto body shop.

  Instead of boxes, Chuy carries a Glock. He gets a salary. It’s not much, but enough to rent a small room where he moves in Flor. They buy a bed at a junkyard, find a little table at the dump, get a lamp from a secondhand store. And Chuy has a different status—as a warrior, he has respect that earns him a right to make a request.

  “I want to take Flor off the streets,” he tells Hugo. “Let her work as a waitress.”

  “She isn’t your wife,” Hugo answers.

  “She’s going to be the mother of my child,” Chuy answers. Flor told him, shyly and not without fear, that she had missed two periods.

  Part of him was scared, part of him was thrilled. He took her in his arms and held her gently. “It will be all right. I’ll take care of you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I will,” Chuy promised. “I’ll take good care of you both.”

  Now Hugo argues, “That child could be anyone’s, little brother.”

  “Flor is my woman, so it’s my child,” Chuy answers.

  That simple.

  “I’ll have to ask,” Hugo says.

  “The Zeta boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t ask,” Chuy says. “Tell him that the mother of a warrior’s child can’t be a whore.”

  —

  The Zeta boss’s answer comes three nights later.

  With four other Zetas, he walks into the restaurant after closing, when Flor is wiping down the tables and setting up for the morning.

  “Everyone out,” he orders, then looks at Flor. “You stay.”

  The others quickly walk out, their eyes on the floor. One of them, a former whore herself, runs to find Pedro.

  “Are you Flor?” the boss asks.

  Terrified, Flor nods.

  “Take off that dress.”

  “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “You’re a whore,” he says, “and you’ll do what I tell you. You still owe us money.”

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “Yes, you will. Right now.”

  He nods and the four men grab her, strip the dress from her, and pin her onto one of the tables.

  —

  “Pedro! Pedro!”

  Chuy sees the girl running toward him.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Flor! Come quick!”

  He runs.

  —

  Chuy lifts Flor’s body off the table and cradles her
corpse on his lap. She’s still warm, her skin is still warm.

  People say that you could hear Chuy’s howl through the whole colonia.

  They say they can never forget the sound.

  —

  Chuy stands outside the yonke, the auto shop where the Zeta peces gordos—the big bosses—hang out.

  He hears them laughing inside.

  The clink of bottles and glasses.

  Well trained, Chuy checks the clip on his erre. Then he kicks the door in and sprays the five of them before they can as much as move.

  Crouching beside the wounded Zeta chaca, Chuy takes the man’s hair in one hand, like Ochoa did with the man that night. He takes out his knife, like the one the Kaibile handed him that night, pulls the boss’s head back so that his neck is taut, and presses the serrated blade against his throat.

  He’s lived this over and over again.

  More than the times that the boys hurt him, raped him, made him their girl. More than those things, his nightmares are of that night, when they handed him the knife and told him what to do—

  —so now he knows and as if in a dream he saws the blade back and forth as the Zeta boss who raped and murdered Flor screams just as the man screamed that night and the blood spurts out in hot jets as Chuy saws through the arteries, and then the boss is quiet, just gurgling as Chuy saws through cartilage and bone like he did that night, and the bone and cartilage and skin pop as he severs the head.

  He sets it down and starts in on the other four. Two are already dead. One tries to crawl away, but Chuy grabs his hair and pulls him back. The last man cries and slobbers and begs but Chuy tells him, “Shut up, bitch.”

  Chuy is sitting on the floor with the five decapitated bodies when Hugo bursts in. “Dios mío, Pedro, what did you do?!”

  “My name is Jesús,” Chuy says numbly. Over Hugo’s shoulder he sees Nazario, with several men behind him. “Kill me.”

  Hugo pulls his gun, ready to oblige. The fallout from one of theirs killing five of the Zeta overlords will be horrific. If they can at least turn over a corpse…He points the gun at Chuy’s head.

  “Stop!” Nazario yells, knocking Hugo’s hand down.

  “The calf and the yearling will be safe with the lion,” Nazario quotes from scripture, “and a little child shall lead them all.”