The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “Ven aquí, chola,” he called from the car.

  “I’m not a chola,” Ester called back and kept walking. So many of the girls in La Polvorilla were in the gangs, but it wasn’t for her to give her love and her body to some boy that would be dead soon.

  “They will give you a disease or a baby,” her mother warned. “Hook you on drugs, turn you out in the street.”

  Her mother would know, Ester thought, not unkindly.

  This had been her mother’s life.

  It wouldn’t be hers.

  She was pretty and she knew it. She saw how boys looked at her, how men looked at her, she looked at herself in the dirty broken mirror in the shack that was her home when everyone else was asleep. She looked at her breasts and her stomach and her face and knew that men wanted her. One night when she was looking, she saw her older brother pretending to be asleep looking at her, and knew he wanted her, too.

  Living in La Polvorilla, she had heard of such things.

  Ester was a virgin but not a silly girl—she knew all about sex, had lain on her mattress and heard her mother with the men she brought home. Heard her mother’s moans and the men’s grunts and the whispered words. She had touched herself and known that pleasure, she had talked with girls who had done it, traded jokes and jibes with boys, but she knew she didn’t want a boy but a man.

  “Where are you going, little mamacita?” the policeman asked, driving the car slowly beside her.

  She knew he was a policeman because only policemen drove cars like that in La Polvorilla.

  “To get some goat,” she said, and she and her cousin laughed, because “goat” in Spanish is the same as “cuckold.”

  The policeman laughed, too, and that’s when she began to like him.

  “From that thief, the butcher over there?” he asked.

  “He’s no thief.”

  “All butchers are thieves,” he said. “You’d better let me come with you so he doesn’t cheat you.”

  “You do what you want,” Ester said, because a pretty girl can say things like that to men and get away with them.

  “You want a ride?” he asked.

  “In a cop car?” Ester answered. “What would the neighbors think?”

  “ ‘Lucky girl’!”

  “I don’t think so,” Ester said. “They’d think I was in trouble or I was telling tales.”

  “What tales could you tell?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  By this time they were across the street from the butcher’s. The policeman got out of the car and his partner took the wheel and parked it. He came in and stood there while Ester asked for two pounds of cabra. When the butcher put the meat on the scale the policeman said, “And keep your thumb off it, ’mano.”

  The butcher, Señor Padilla, whom Ester had known all her life, frowned but said nothing until he told Ester the price.

  “Wrap it up and give her my price,” the policeman said.

  Señor Padilla frowned but again said nothing, wrapped the meat in brown paper, and handed it to Ester. Confused, she started to hand him the money her mother gave her, but Señor Padilla shook his head and wouldn’t take it.

  The policeman stepped up to the counter. “Once a week, every Friday, you give her my price. Understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Chido.”

  Outside on the street, the policeman asked, “Aren’t you going to say thank you?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Un besito.”

  A little kiss.

  She pecked him on the cheek.

  The partner in the car laughed and then honked the horn. “We have work to do, lover boy!”

  “What’s your name?” the policeman asked.

  “Ester.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask mine?”

  “If you want me to,” she said. “What is it?”

  “They call me Chido,” he said, “because I say ‘cool’ a lot. Enjoy your dinner. I hope I see you again, Ester.”

  Walking away, her cousin said, “Ester, he has to be thirty!”

  Ester knew.

  She went home and they had their party. When Ester gave her mother the money back and she asked why Padillo didn’t charge her, Ester said it was a present for Ernesto’s communion. Her mother looked at her funny but didn’t ask any more. When Ester touched herself that night, she thought of Chido.

  He took her to dinner, he took her to clubs, he took her dancing. He introduced her to his police friends and they’d all go out together, her and Chido and the other cops and their girlfriends.

  Chido bought her clothes so that she would look nice (“Your clothes should be as pretty as you”), and one of the other girlfriends took her out to buy makeup and taught her how to use it and how to fix her hair.

  Every Friday she would go to Padillo’s and he would have the package wrapped in brown paper and hand it to her and she would bring home the goat, or the chicken, even pork, and one time steak. And three times a week a man would come to their place with big blue bottles of clean water.

  No charge.

  “Have you fucked him yet?” her mother asked.

  “Mama, no.”

  “When you do, make sure he uses something or he comes on your belly,” her mother said. “He won’t want you if you’re fat with a baby.”

  A month after they met, he took her to what he called his “crash pad,” an apartment that he shared with his partners.

  “We come here in the day to get out of the heat,” Chido explained. “You can’t work all the time, and we need to relax.”

  He walked her into the bedroom.

  It was clean, with nice sheets on the bed.

  He laid her down and unbuttoned her blouse and she let him kiss her and his hand slid down and touched her where she had only touched herself and his lips touched lightly on her breasts and then her stomach and soon she spoke his name, Chido Chido, and he slid up and came into her.

  He felt good, he felt so good, she wrapped her legs around him to keep him there forever but when he was close he pulled free and later he went into the bathroom and came out with a damp washcloth and wiped her stomach off and it felt cool and nice.

  “We’ll get you on the pill,” he said. “I hate condoms.”

  “I got blood on your sheets.”

  Chido shrugged. “We’ll get new sheets.”

  They had a woman who came in once a week to clean.

  He got up again and came back with two bottles of beer and they lay on the bed looking out the widow at the sunbaked street and drank the beers and fell asleep and woke up and made love again.

  When she got home that night her mother looked at her and said nothing, but her mother knew, because women know.

  Ester was at a party at the crash pad when she found out Chido was married. This was about a year after she started going with him, and she was in the bathroom with Gerardo’s girlfriend, sharing the mirror to put on makeup, when Silvia casually mentioned Chido’s wife and kids, then saw Ester’s expression in the mirror and said, “You didn’t know, did you?”

  Ester shook her head.

  “Sobrina,” Silvia said, “they’re all married.”

  Ester went back out into the party and pretended nothing had happened, but when she confronted Chido about it later, in his car as he was taking her home, he said, “So? You have a good life, don’t you? Don’t I take care of you? Your family? Don’t I give you nice things? Take you nice places?”

  She had to agree these things were true, but she also said, “I thought we were going to get married someday.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” Chido said. “You want to go back to waiting in line for water, eating posole, go ahead and marry some street cleaner. I’ll send a nice gift to the wedding.”

  Ester went inside and lay down on her mattress, knowing that she wasn’t a girlfriend but a segundera, a mistress.


  —

  “You treat me like a whore,” she said to Chido one day.

  Chido slapped her, grabbed her black hair in his fist, hauled her off the couch, lifted her face up, and said, “You want me to treat you like a whore, I will. I’ll put you out on the street and then you’ll know what it’s like to feel like a whore. Now get dressed and try to look decent for a change. We’re going out and I don’t want you to embarrass me.”

  Ester fell asleep—passed out—at the crash pad that night and he left her there because he had night duty. He told her to go home and she said she would but then lay down for just a minute and fell asleep. She woke up to the sound of someone crying and cracked the bedroom door open to see Chido, Gerardo, and Luis and a fourth man she knew as a local car thief.

  It was the fourth man who was crying—his clothes were torn, his face was bruised and bloody—and as Luis shoved him down into a chair, she heard Gerardo ask, “What did you bring him here for?”

  “It’s cool,” Chido said. “No one saw us.”

  “Now we’ll need a new pad,” Luis said.

  “Good,” Chido answered. “I’m sick of this one anyway.”

  The man in the chair cried and Ester saw piss run down his leg onto the floor.

  “Now we’ll really need a new pad,” Chido said.

  “How many times did we tell you,” Gerardo said to the crying man, “that you have to pay us?”

  Ester wanted to shut the door but she was afraid to make a sound.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. “I will, I will.”

  “Too late,” Gerardo said.

  Ester watched as Chido held the man’s wrist so his hand was flat on the table, and then Gerardo took a hammer and brought it down on the man’s hand. The man screamed and Ester thought she was going to be sick as she saw his bones stick up through his skin.

  “Try stealing cars now,” Gerardo said.

  The man screamed again.

  “Jesus, shut up,” Chido said.

  But the man wouldn’t. He bellowed. Chido looked at Gerardo, who nodded. Chido grabbed the hammer and brought it down on the man’s head.

  Again and again.

  They picked the man up and started to carry him out, and then Chido glanced back and saw Ester.

  “I’ll be right down,” he said. He pushed Ester back into the bedroom, closed the door, and said, “What did you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right,” Chido said. “You saw nothing.”

  After that she didn’t see him for three weeks.

  That first Friday, she went to Padillo’s for her package, and when he told her how much it cost she said, “I don’t have that much,” and he shrugged and took the package back. And when no water in the big blue bottles appeared, her mother said, “No wonder he dumped you. You look like shit. Go wait for the trucks—we need water to live.”

  She handed Ester a plastic bucket.

  Three weeks later, Ester went looking for Chido. She knew the restaurant where he’d be on Friday nights and she got high on viesca and wine and walked into the restaurant and saw him at a table with Gerardo and Silvia.

  And some other woman.

  Ester went up to the table and asked Chido, “Can I speak with you?”

  Chido looked surprised, angry. “Get out of here. Now.”

  “I just want to speak with you.” Then she broke down crying. “I’m sorry. I love you, I love you. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re drunk,” Chido said. “High.”

  Silvia got up, took her by the elbow, and tried to walk her away. “Don’t embarrass yourself, sobrina.”

  But Ester got mad and jerked her arm away, looked at the pretty girl sitting next to Chido, and asked, “Who’s this cunt?”

  “Enough,” Chido said.

  “They kill people, you know,” Ester said to the girl, who sat there with her red-lipsticked mouth in a shocked O. “I saw them—”

  Then Chido and Gerardo had her by the arms and she couldn’t shake away and they walked her out of the restaurant into the alley and she saw Chido’s face and it was red and angry and she saw his eyes and knew he was high on coke and she was suddenly sober and very afraid as they pushed her against the wall.

  “What did you see?” Gerardo asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you see?”

  When Ester didn’t answer, Gerardo said to Chido, “You know what we have to do.”

  Ester started to run, but Chido grabbed her and pushed her back against the wall. Then he saw the bottle at their feet. A green bottle that had once been full of cheap wine. He smashed it against the wall and held the jagged neck to her face.

  “I told you,” he said, “that you saw nothing.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Lying bitch,” Chido said. “Now you won’t see anything.”

  He dragged the glass across her dark eyes and held his other hand over her mouth as she screamed and screamed.

  When he let her go she slid down the wall and collapsed, pressed her hands against her eyes and felt nothing but blood. Then she heard Chido say, “She can’t identify what she can’t see. It’s cool.”

  She heard them walk away.

  They must have called a squad car, because a few minutes later two cops arrived, picked her up, put her in the backseat, and drove her to the hospital. The doctors did the best they could, but she would never see again, and she became the blind whore of La Polvarilla. As her mother said, you don’t need to see a man’s hard dick to put it inside you, and men came for the cheap thrill of getting done by a girl who couldn’t see them, and when she went to the trucks to get water, some people, boys mostly, were mean and tripped her so the water spilled, but most people were kind and helped her.

  She never heard from Chido Palacios again.

  But that, she tells Keller, was when she was young and not a whore.

  —

  Javier “Chido” Palacios takes coffee at the same café just a few blocks away from AFI headquarters every day at four o’clock.

  In nice weather, such as this May afternoon, he sits at a table outside, sips his espresso, and watches the world go by on the boulevard in front. His three bodyguards stand at various places by the iron fence or the door to the café.

  Keller watches this for three days.

  After a long debate with Aguilar, it was decided that it was Keller who would make the first approach.

  “You can’t,” Keller told the prosecutor. “If he turns you down, he blows our cover. Besides, you don’t have anything to offer him at this point. You can’t protect him in Mexico.”

  Aguilar reluctantly agreed and Keller started his surveillance on Palacios, trying to find a time and place where he would be sufficiently alone. On this third afternoon, Keller walks in and takes a table next to Palacios. The bodyguards notice and watch, then apparently decide that he’s not a threat.

  If Palacios is nervous about his situation, he doesn’t show it. His custom-made suit is pressed and clean, his black hair—with just flecks of silver at the temple—is carefully combed back. He looks cool, sophisticated, a man in charge of his world.

  Keller sits and looks at him.

  Palacios breaks first. “Do I know you?”

  “You should, Chido.”

  Palacios flinches slightly at the old aporto. “Why is that?”

  “Because I can save your life,” Keller says. “May I join you?”

  Palacios hesitates for a second, then nods. Keller gets up, the bodyguards start to close in, but Palacios waves them off.

  “I’ll bet you thought you left ‘Chido’ behind in La Polvorilla,” Keller says when he sits down.

  “I haven’t heard it in years,” Palacios says calmly. “Who are you?”

  “I’m with DEA.”

  Palacios shakes his head. “I know all the DEA guys.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You said something about saving my life?” Palacios says. “I wasn’t
aware it needed saving.”

  “Seriously?” Keller asks. “You just buried three of your buddies. The Tapias want to kill you. If they don’t, Adán Barrera will. You have to know you’re on the endangered species list.”

  “Your DEA colleagues would say that you’re talking out of your ass,” Palacios says.

  I can’t lose him now, Keller thinks. I can’t make this cast and let him off the hook, because if I do he goes straight to Vera. So he says, “You were at a meeting last spring with Diego and Martín Tapia. During that meeting you agreed to provide protection to the Zetas and target La Familia instead. Also present at that meeting were Gerardo Vera, Roberto Bravo, and José Aristeo.”

  Palacios reverts a little to his La Polvorilla days. “You’re full of shit.”

  “I have you on tape, motherfucker.”

  Palacios literally starts to sweat. Keller sees the beads of perspiration pop on his forehead, just below his carefully cut hair. He presses: “Think about it—you’ve got one foot on the Tapia dock and the other in the Barrera boat, and they’re drifting apart. You’re going to have to choose, and your guards can’t protect you in Puente Grande, which is where you’re going. The only question is, do they fuck you in the ass before they slit your throat?”

  “I was at that meeting,” Palacios says, “to gather evidence against—”

  “Save it,” Keller says. “You think Vera is going to protect you? I know you’re boys and all that from the old barrio, but if you think Vera’s going to put the life he has now on the line for old times’ sake, you don’t know your old friend.”

  “Maybe he’s on that tape, too.”

  “Maybe he is,” Keller says. “So that puts you in a little race with him, doesn’t it, because the first one of you to cut a deal gets a snitch visa to the States and the other gets ass-raped. Which do you want to be?”

  Palacios glares at him.

  Keller gets up. “I came to you first because you can trade up, for Vera. I’m going to go to him in exactly twenty-four hours, unless I hear from you first.”

  He lays a slip of paper with a phone number on the table.

  “Beautiful day for scoping the women, isn’t it?” Keller asks. “By the way, Ester Almanza sends her regards, you piece of shit.”