The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  He makes it home, flops down on the bed, and sobs.

  —

  “You look horrible,” Ana says the next morning at the café.

  “That good?” Pablo asks.

  “May I ask what…”

  He tells her about Victoria and Mateo.

  “That’s terrible, Pablo. I’m so sorry.”

  He nods.

  “Listen,” she says, “Óscar has very good connections in the national media. I’m sure he’d put in a few calls. He wouldn’t want to lose you, but—”

  “Let’s not kid ourselves, okay?” Pablo asks. “At least let’s not start doing that.”

  —

  A week later, Pablo stands in front of the monument to fallen police officers at the corner of Juan Gabriel and Avenida Sanders.

  The bronze policeman has his eyes closed in prayer; at his feet is the cap of a brother officer. By the cap, held down by a rock, is a cardboard placard with big letters written in black magic marker: FOR THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE—CHAIREZ, ROMO, BACA, GÓMEZ, AND LEDESMA.

  The five Juárez cops shot to death earlier in the month.

  Another banner reads FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE NOT BELIEVING, and lists seventeen more Juárez police officers by name.

  “You getting this?” Pablo asks.

  Giorgio’s too busy snapping away to give the obvious answer but, without taking his eye from the viewfinder, asks back, “Who do you think put this up?”

  “The ‘New People,’ ” Pablo answers. “Telling the Juárez cops—specifi-cally, seventeen of them—that either they get on the Sinaloa cartel bus or get run over by it.”

  “It confirms your story,” Giorgio says.

  It does that, Pablo thinks. His story about the cop killings and the Sinaloa cartel has caused a stir. Some people believed it, others thought it was pure paranoid fantasy, something that Pablo Mora made up.

  Apparently not, Pablo thinks as he copies the names down in his notebook.

  The sixth on the list is his old source from the bad old days, Victor Abrego, who just a few days before told Pablo to get lost.

  Shit, Pablo thinks.

  The banners, which appeared overnight, have drawn a crowd of curious onlookers as well as media—television news trucks and stand-up radio announcers. Oscar will want the story filed quickly.

  It will present El Búho with an ethical conundrum, Pablo thinks—whether to publish the names of police officers threatened with the choice between collusion and death, the old plata o plomo, “silver or lead,” dilemma.

  In a way, though, Pablo thinks, the New People have already published the names, haven’t they? It’s the new face of narco gang war, isn’t it? They’re becoming media savvy. They used to hide their crimes, now they publicize them. I wonder if they haven’t taken a page from Al Qaeda. What good is an atrocity if no one knows you did it?

  And maybe that’s the lede on my story. “The crimes that used to lurk in shadows now seek the sunlight,” or is that a little too “pulp”?

  Óscar will decide.

  —

  Pablo goes out to Galeana to talk to Abrego. But what the hell am I going to ask him? Pablo wonders. Are you worried about the threat on your life? Is the Sinaloa cartel threatening you because you’re an honest cop causing them problems, or because you’re La Línea? Stupid questions that Abrego won’t answer anyway. But maybe he’ll give me something on deep background.

  Yeah, except Pablo can’t find him.

  Not on the corner, not on the street, not in any of the restaurants, cafés, or bars that the cop usually hangs out in.

  Abrego is in the wind.

  —

  Out of habit, Pablo checks his watch to see if it’s time to pick up Mateo, then remembers that Mateo isn’t here anymore, but in Mexico City with his mother.

  A month has gone by, and the day that Victoria took his son away is as raw as a razor cut.

  “Will you pick me up at school, Papi?” Mateo asked.

  “No, m’ijo,” Pablo said, kneeling in front of him. “Not every day.”

  “Who’ll pick me up?”

  “You’ll have a very nice nanny,” Victoria said.

  “I don’t want a nanny,” Pablo cried. “I want my papi.”

  Pablo picked him up and hugged him tight. When he finally set him down, Pablo whispered into Victoria’s ear, “I hate you for this. Do you understand? I hate you and I hope you die.”

  “Stay classy, Pablo.” Then she put Mateo in the car seat of her Jetta and drove away.

  Mateo waved at him.

  It broke his heart.

  It broke his goddamn heart.

  Mateo has flown back to Juárez once, a frightened little boy getting off the plane with a flight attendant taking his hand. The weekend with Mateo was wonderful, but Pablo has to wonder if it’s worth it, or if he’s just being selfish, because the Sunday parting was so hard on Mateo, who started feeling anxious in the morning—he was sick to his stomach and didn’t want to eat his breakfast—and was crying by afternoon.

  And Pablo has come to hate the words “Papi will see you soon.”

  Pablo has given up his apartment—that money goes to the custody lawyer and to the visits to Mexico City. He crashes on Giorgio’s couch, or, if the photographer is “entertaining” at home, on the sofa in Ana’s living room, fifty feet and a thousand miles from her bedroom.

  The police scanner squawks, “Motivo 59.”

  “Shit,” Pablo says.

  Fifty-nine is the code for a killing. He listens for another second and hears the dispatcher add, “Two 92s.”

  Two males.

  He heads for the address.

  The two corpses are out in Colonia Córdoba Américas in the middle of Vía Río Champotón, their hands bound behind their backs with adhesive tape.

  “I’m getting nostalgic,” Giorgio says, snapping away, “for the days I used to shoot live people.”

  “Do we have names?” Pablo asks. Óscar always wants names. (“We aren’t going to yield to the cheap grotesquerie of the ‘nameless dead,’ ” he says.)

  “I’m just the photographer.”

  Pablo tracks them down through the cops who took their wallets and IDs. Their names are Jesús Duràn and Fernando González, twenty-four and thirty-two years old respectively.

  “They’re Sinaloans,” Pablo tells Giorgio. “New People.”

  “Not anymore they’re not,” Giorgio answers. It’s hard, he complains, coming up with fresh angles.

  Tell me about it, Pablo thinks as he hears the dispatcher: “Motivo 59. One 92.”

  The last body is in the back of a pickup truck in Galeana.

  It’s Abrego.

  His hands are plastic-tied, a filthy rag is stuffed in his mouth, and he’s been shot in the back of the head.

  What a lesser writer than Pablo would call “execution style.”

  —

  Two days later, Pablo covers an army raid on a house in the Pradera Dorada neighborhood where the soldiers seize twenty-five assault rifles, five pistols, seven fragmentation grenades, 3,494 rounds of ammunition, bulletproof vests, eight radios, and five vehicles with Sinaloa plates.

  The very next day the army raids another house, arrests twenty-one men, and seizes ten AK-47s, 13,000 hits of cocaine, 2.1 kilos of cocaine paste, 760 grams of marijuana, 401 rounds of ammunition, uniforms of the Mexican army and AFI, and three vehicles.

  And a helicopter.

  Pablo is in the city room the next morning when Óscar announces that they’ve received a press release from the Juárez Municipal Police Department.

  “The police are no longer going to answer calls,” Óscar says, “but stay in the station houses.”

  “So the people we pay to protect us,” Ana says, “can’t protect themselves.”

  But the retreat to the station houses doesn’t do much good. The day after the press release, two Juárez police officers are kidnapped in separate incidents. Two days later, a Juárez police comandante is shot
in the head in Chihuahua City.

  The next day, Óscar sends Pablo and Giorgio out to Cocoyoc Street.

  The house in the Cuernavaca neighborhood had been seized three weeks ago when the army found almost two tons of marijuana inside. Then an anonymous phone tip told them to dig under the patio.

  When Pablo gets out there he gags and struggles not to throw up.

  Three trunks of bodies, their arms and legs hacked off, are lined up on the lawn.

  Beside them are two decapitated heads.

  Throughout the course of a long day, the soldiers find a total of nine dismembered bodies under the concrete.

  “I’m beginning to feel like a pornographer,” Giorgio says as he takes the photographs.

  Violence porn, Pablo thinks. He wonders if Óscar will really put these images on the pages of his newspaper.

  A lot of papers do. It’s become a new industry, la nota roja, tabloids with pictures of the dead—the bloodier the better—hawked by newsboys from street corners and traffic islands. You can make a lot of money taking photos for la nota roja, and Pablo wonders if Giorgio is tempted.

  Now Pablo tries to get identifications of the dead, but the soldiers look at him like he’s crazy. They haven’t even matched the heads to the bodies; something, Pablo learns, that the coroner will try to do by matching the cut marks on the trunks and the necks.

  “Decapitations?” Pablo asks Ana over a drink (okay, drinks) at San Martín that night. “When did we start doing that, cutting off heads?”

  “It’s not new,” Ana said. “Remember that thing in Michoacán last year? Five heads rolled into a nightclub?”

  “But that’s Michoacán,” Pablo answered. “Religious whack jobs.”

  “So to speak.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Sorry.” It’s not funny, Ana thinks. It’s horrific, disgusting, and traumatic, and she worries about Pablo. Since Victoria took Mateo away, Pablo’s treating himself like a refugee—staying out half the night, drinking too much, crashing on couches.

  Including yours, Ana reminds herself. She’s thought of going out there and inviting him into her bed, but it’s a bad idea. Pablo is a train wreck waiting to happen—it would be simply self-destructive to get on board the Mora Express now. But she feels for him and worries about him, just as she worries about her city and, well, herself.

  Admit it, Ana thinks.

  You’re scared.

  Journalists have already been killed in Nuevo Laredo, and now the war has come here, and she feels this sense of threat that she can’t seem to shake off. It’s annoying—she’s a tough “hard-bitten” reporter of the old school, and she’s seen and reported plenty.

  But this seems different.

  Cops hiding in the station houses…

  Decapitated, dismembered bodies under patios…

  It’s surreal, like one of those dreams you have after too much booze chased with spicy food.

  The difference here is that the alarm clock doesn’t seem to ring.

  But the next morning, Pablo actually whoops with laughter.

  The same press release in which the Juárez mayor’s office announces that ninety-five people have been killed in the first two months of 2008 also announces a major crackdown on jaywalking.

  —

  Then the army comes in. The Juárez mayor didn’t want them in the city but felt that he had no choice. With the police department dysfunctional he was simply out of men, and not only were the murders stacking up, but “ordinary” street crime was out of control.

  So he made a deal with the federal government—Los Pinos would send in troops in exchange for a complete remaking of the city police department. The government launches “Operation Chihuahua” and sends 4,000 troops with 180 armored vehicles and an air wing that includes a helicopter gunship.

  At first it does little good.

  A city policewoman is struck with thirty-two bullets as she opens the door to her house. A police chief in the small town of El Carrizo on the Texas border is killed in his car as he pulls into his driveway. The army has to take over the town because every police officer quit or just ran off after that.

  When police bring four narcos into a Juárez hospital, other narcos come in and execute them on their gurneys. Hospital staffers call police for three hours, but nobody comes.

  It gets worse and worse.

  A twenty-four-year-old woman is killed in a crossfire at the car wash where she works. Two Juárez cops are gunned down as they drop their kids off at school. A twelve-year-old girl is killed when narcos in a gun battle use her as a human shield.

  The mayor of Juárez tells Ana in an interview that he knew “the killing season” was coming, had been informed that it would start in January, and that it was just a conflict between two rival gangs.

  The governor announces that of the five hundred—five hundred—people killed in Chihuahua so far in the year, the mayor said, “only five” were “innocents.”

  Only five, Pablo thinks.

  Does that count the baby in the young woman’s womb?

  It infuriates him, this killing, this death.

  Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs.

  And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants.

  Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground.

  And for what?

  So North Americans can get high.

  Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption.

  It’s not the “Mexican drug problem,” Pablo thinks now, it’s the North American drug problem.

  As for corruption, who’s more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors?

  Corrupt to the soul.

  That’s the big story, he thinks.

  That’s the story someone should write.

  Well, maybe I will.

  And no one will read it.

  —

  Pablo is holding up pretty well under all this until the Casas murder.

  Police captain Alejandro Casas was also named on the placard. He’s leaving his house to drop his eight-year-old son at school on his way to work when five men with AKs attack his Nissan pickup truck in the driveway.

  Casas is killed immediately.

  A dozen 7.62 rounds shatter the boy’s left arm.

  The EMTs manage to get to him quickly, but he bleeds to
death in the ambulance.

  Pablo comes back from the emergency room, dutifully types up the story, and then leaves the office with the intention of getting very drunk. Out on the sidewalk, a man he doesn’t know comes up to him and slips an envelope into the inside pocket of his rumpled khaki blazer.

  “What are you doing?” Pablo asks, completely taken aback. “Who are you and what are you doing?”

  “Take it,” the man says. He has the face of a cop and the body to match. Barrel chest, wide shoulders that strain his gray sports coat. Pablo has met dozens of cops but he doesn’t know this one.

  “What is this?’ he repeats.

  “El sobre,” the man says.

  The bribe.

  “I don’t want it.”

  The man’s smile turns threatening. “I’m not asking you if you want it, m’ijo. I’m saying take it.”

  Pablo tries to give him the envelope back, but the man traps his wrist against his chest before he can get to it. “Take it. There’ll be another like it every Monday.”

  “From who?”

  “Does it matter?” the man asks.

  Then he walks away.

  Pablo rips the envelope open.

  It’s three times his weekly salary.

  In cash.

  Enough to hire a decent lawyer, if that’s what he wants to do. Enough, if you add it up week by week, to take a flight to Mexico City twice a month and rent a modest room. Enough…

  He recalls an old dicho—

  When the devil comes, he comes on angel’s wings.

  3

  Jolly Coppers on Parade

  Oh, they look so nice

  Looks like the angels have come down from Paradise

  —Randy Newman

  “Jolly Coppers on Parade”

  Mexico City

  2008

  Keller walks down the center aisle to the Altar of Forgiveness.