The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Reading the story, Pablo feels his bowels turn to water. He’d like to ascribe it to the too-many beers along with the fiery aguachile he consumed last night, but he knows that it’s really fear.

  No, not fear.

  Terror.

  He logs off quickly when he hears Ana walk up behind him.

  “You know the paper monitors your downloads,” she says. “You could get fired for ‘Backdoor Mamacitas.’ ”

  “Research,” Pablo says.

  “That’s what they all say.”

  Pablo has spent more time in the office lately because there’s been less crime on the streets. The violence in Juárez is by no means over, but the crest seems to have receded.

  Some attribute it to the new police chief, a retired army officer named Leyzaola who came in a year ago now after “cleaning up” Tijuana. His first day on the job he was greeted by a bound, duct-taped body left on his doorstep with a note of greeting from the narcos, followed by the usual threat that one of his men would be killed every day until he resigned.

  But Leyzaola didn’t flinch when the first five officers were gunned down. He ordered his men to leave their homes and he got them hotel rooms. Then he held a press conference and said, “In the end, the criminal needs to be overpowered. There’s all this legend, this mystique, around the narcos, that they are invincible, omnipotent. We need to dispel that and treat them like what they are—criminals.”

  Of course they tried to kill him, ambushing his motorcade, opening fire and killing one officer, but not even winging Leyzaola. He responded with another press conference, announcing that he was going to clean up Juárez one neighborhood at a time, starting with El Centro.

  He did. He put “boots on the pavement” and those cops survived. Some say it was because the narcos were afraid of Leyzaola—stories about his torture of narcos and corrupt police in Tijuana hit the street faster than his cops—others say that the violence was receding because Adán Barrera had already won the war. Some went a little further, claiming that Leyzaola had made a separate peace with Barrera to tame Tijuana and was simply doing the same now in Juárez, although he once publicly claimed that he had turned down an $80,000-a-week bribe from El Señor.

  Pablo was more cynical. If there was less killing, he opined, it was probably because there was no one left to kill.

  Other theories had it that the narco-war had merely changed fronts, and was now being fought more in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Veracruz.

  To most, it didn’t matter.

  The killing, if not stopped, was slowing down. Slowly, very slowly, businesses that were shuttered up were starting to return to El Centro and other neighborhoods. Juárez, “the most murderous city in the world,” was showing signs of life.

  There were other signs of hope.

  An army general in Ojinaga was actually arrested and charged with the murder and torture of civilians, a major victory for the “Woman’s Rebellion” in the Juárez Valley, although Pablo wishes that Jimena Abarca, Erika Valles, and the others had lived to see it.

  But still, a sign of hope, and people were starting to quietly talk about a “Juárez spring.”

  Even Pablo—cynical, chronically depressed Pablo—secretly harbored a delicate seed of hope that the worst was over and his city was going to come back. Not the same, of course, it could never be the same, but come back as something different and at least survive.

  “What are you working on?” Ana asks.

  “Pirated DVD sellers,” Pablo answers. “In El Centro. Human-interest, color kind of piece. You?”

  “The elections,” she says, as if the answer is obvious.

  It is.

  The elections are on everyone’s mind.

  Victoria is thrilled about the PAN candidate.

  “A conservative and a woman,” she chirped during Pablo’s last visit to Mexico City, a sop from Óscar to write a story about a literary festival. “As I’ve always tried to tell you, PAN is the progressive party, not PRI or PRD.”

  “You like her mostly because of the title of her book,” Pablo answered. The PAN candidate, Josefina Vázquez Mota, had written a self-help bestseller entitled God, Make Me a Widow.

  “At least she writes.” Veronica chuckled. “Your guy can’t even read. My God, Pablo, he’s Rick Perry!”

  The PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, had stumbled when a reporter asked him which three books had influenced him most. He couldn’t come up with three, and finally muttered something about the Bible. And he has Perry’s carefully coiffed hair, not a strand out of place, and he couldn’t tell another reporter the price of a pack of tortillas.

  “He’s a serial adulterer,” Victoria went on cheerfully, “has fathered not one but two children out of wedlock, and then he has an affair with that actress.”

  “He married her,” Pablo responded weakly. And a little jealously—Peña Nieto scored a gorgeous soap opera star, the aptly named Angélica Rivera. “Anyway, he’s not my guy.”

  “No, of course not,” Victoria said. “You’re going for the lefty. López Obrador is only running because he thinks he was robbed the last time.”

  “He was robbed the last time.”

  “So he’s Al Gore?”

  “And your choice is, who, Sarah Palin?” If we’re going to play the American comparison game.

  “She’s much smarter than Palin.”

  “Well, don’t set the bar too high.”

  He kind of enjoyed bickering with Victoria over politics, and it was indicative of a thaw in their relationship. Pablo had come to accept her getting remarried, even accept that Mateo had a “stepfather,” who seems, actually, to have had a good influence on Victoria. She’s become much more liberal about Mateo’s visits and is even open to Mateo coming to see him, maybe on a holiday to Cabo or Puerto Vallarta or even El Paso.

  The last option is more in Pablo’s budget, and he’s already started planning the trip. He’d pick Mateo up in El Paso and take him to Western Playland Park for the waterslide and the roller coaster, and then drive out to Big Bend and go camping.

  He can’t decide whether to ask Ana to come with them.

  Victoria, with her unerring radar, had brought that up, too. “So you and Ana are a thing now?”

  “I don’t know what a ‘thing’ is,” Pablo answered disingenuously.

  “Sleeping together,” Victoria prompted. “Having sex. It’s all right, Pablo, we’re divorced. You have every right. I get it. I like Ana, actually.”

  “So do I.”

  “Well, I should hope so. If you’re doing her.”

  “For God’s sake, Victoria.”

  “And you’ve lost a little weight, too,” Victoria said. “Men only become conscious of their waistlines when they’re doing someone, although you didn’t bother with me.”

  “I was thin when we met.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  Victoria was always nagging him to eat better, drink less, and go to the gym, but then again, Pablo has long felt that she (barely) sublimates her innate fascism with exercise and diet regimens and has recently taken to attending weekly “boot camp” sessions where she probably achieves orgasms as some steroid-enraged instructor screams at her.

  Ana doesn’t nag him about anything, another of their many unspoken understandings. Pablo recognizes that they have a common survivor’s mentality, something that can only be shared by people who have lived together in a war zone. The resultant attitude is one of “whatever gets you through the day.”

  For Pablo that’s usually beer and junk food. For Ana, it’s wine and cigarettes and the occasional blunt. And work. She’s always been diligent, but for the past year Ana has brought an almost demonic energy to her reporting. When she’s not at the desk in the office, she’s on her laptop, and it’s harder and harder for Pablo to get her out to a bar for a drink.

  They see each other in the city room and late at night at her place (okay, their place), when he rolls in from the bars and Ana is just back from
covering whatever it is she’s covering. She has a glass of wine and a cig, maybe a puff or two on a joint, and then they go to bed and have what can only be described as “desperate sex.”

  Victoria was a machine in bed. Not at all the ice maiden that one might expect, but an orgasm-producing mechanism of staggering efficiency, both for him and herself. Ana is nothing like that—Ana in bed is chaos. She approaches climax like a galloping, out-of-control horse that suddenly sees the cliff ahead but can’t stop running.

  Victoria’s orgasm was usually announced with a triumphant shout (another item on her checklist successfully ticked off), Ana’s with an “oh-no” whimper followed by tears and a desperate clutching at him as if he were all that kept her from falling into the abyss.

  That’s all that Ana seems to want from the relationship. She doesn’t want to “improve” him, doesn’t ask “where this is all going.” She seems satisfied with the companionship at night, the friendship, the love, if that’s what you can call it.

  For Pablo, sex is more of a delay of sleep.

  He used to love to sleep, relish sleep, bury himself in the blankets and roll in sleep.

  Now he hates and fears it.

  Because with sleep comes dreams.

  Not a good thing for a man who has covered thousands of murders. That’s not a figure of speech or hyperbole, he realized one night while doing the math. He has literally attended thousands of killings. Well, not the actual killings—although a few he missed only by moments—but the aftermaths. The dead, the dying, the grieving. The dismembered, the decapitated, the flayed.

  He doesn’t need a website to see these images.

  Doesn’t need Esta Vida because this is his life and he has his own vid-clips running on the insides of his eyelids, which is why he hates to close his eyes and yield to sleep.

  So Pablo looks perpetually tired, but then again, Pablo has always looked perpetually tired. And he is trying to get into better shape, eat a little better, drink a little less, and while he will never get his ass into a gym, he is going out to the park one or two times a week to kick the fútbol around a little bit.

  Now Óscar comes out of his office, his cane clicking on the floor. “What are you working on?”

  “I thought I’d go to Mexico City to do a piece on Peña’s hairdresser,” Pablo answers. “The hours, the stress…”

  “That is a joke.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mildly amusing.”

  “No, I thought I’d do a classic on-the-street survey,” Pablo says. “Slice-of-life interviews from various barrios. What people are thinking, who they support and why. Give the Juarense point of view.”

  The election promises to be close, at least vis-à-vis Lopez Obrador and Peña Nieto. The polls have Peña Nieto with a five-point lead as of two weeks ago, although the other parties have complained bitterly and loudly about perceived media bias toward the PRI. PAN is far behind, in the 20 percent range.

  “Go to El Paso, too,” Óscar tells Pablo. “See what they’re thinking el otro lado.”

  “Do they even know we’re having an election?” Pablo asks.

  “Find out,” Óscar says. “It’s a story either way.”

  “Got it.” Pablo sighs. He hates crossing the border. The traffic, the lines, the waiting at the checkpoints…

  “Be careful to write your story in a neutral way, please,” Óscar says. “No slant that one party or the other has a bias toward a cartel.”

  “All the parties have a bias toward Sinaloa,” Ana says. “I mean, the Zetas practically declared themselves their own government.”

  “We don’t need to print that,” Óscar says.

  “Esta Vida will,” Ana says.

  “Let them,” Óscar snaps. “It’s irresponsible ‘journalism’ as its worst. Unedited rumors and innuendo pandering to the basest instincts.”

  Pablo understands his bitterness. El Búho has spent his life in mainstream newspapers producing quality journalism, believing that a free press is the lifeline of a democracy. Now he has to sit and watch as the public turns to websites and blogs to get real information on the narcos.

  It has to be galling.

  “I would like to give ‘Wild Child’ a good spanking,” Óscar adds before he limps back to his office.

  “Well, there’s an image,” Ana says.

  “If we knew who El Niño Salvaje is,” Pablo answers.

  “Did you see this morning’s post?”

  “Horrible,” Pablo says.

  Horrible.

  —

  Pablo hits the streets in his fronterizo, which has maybe one more year in it. The air-conditioning is shot, more of a wheezing protest against the heat than any true cooling, so he keeps the windows rolled down and just sweats as he makes his way from El Centro to Anapra, Chaveña, and Anáhuac.

  He could already predict the favored candidate by the relative wealth of the neighborhood. The rich sections of Campestre and Campo Eliseos will vote their wallets for PAN. The working-class—or unemployed-class—colonias will vote PRD, while some of the older, more genteel neighborhoods like Colonia Nogales and Galeana will likely go PRI.

  Some of the neighborhoods don’t exist anymore, he thinks sadly as he drives around. Riviera del Bravo, for instance, once a thriving new section of apartments and strip malls, is a virtual ghost town of abandoned houses and graffiti-sprayed walls, the inhabitants having fled from the incessant violence. The old Mariscal red-light district has been bulldozed, scraped clean, if you will. His route takes him past Benito Juárez Stadium, where his beloved Indios used to play until the city’s financial demise caused the owners to shut them down.

  Another casualty, Pablo thinks, of the war on drugs.

  He goes back downtown, buys a torta from a truck, and eats his lunch in Chamizal Park as he watches kids play fútbol in the bone-dry canal or taunt the Border Patrol agents on the other side of the fence.

  There’s no putting it off, Pablo thinks. He gets back in his car and drives across the bridge. The line in the express lane isn’t too bad, and he’s in the U.S. before he wants to be.

  Just another Juarense on the way to El Paso, he thinks.

  The mayor lives in El Paso now, for safety. So do the chief of police and the editors of two of the city’s newspapers.

  Not Óscar, Pablo thinks with some pride.

  You couldn’t pry El Búho out of his Chaveña house with a crowbar, and the editor views El Paso as a redneck backwater with no cultural life. Óscar is anclado, “anchored,” a Juárez fixture, but a lot of people who can afford to move have and now drive across the bridge in the morning and back before dark in modest cars that hopefully won’t draw the attention of potential kidnappers. They’ve started social clubs, restaurants, country clubs, private schools, and fueled an El Paso real estate boom.

  Pablo can’t help but think of them as traitors.

  He knows it’s a stupid attitude—El Paso and Juárez are and always have been joined at the hip, and most people in both cities have family on the other side. A lot of Juárez women go el otro lado to have their babies, so the child will have dual citizenship and better choices. If you sneeze in Juárez, someone in El Paso will say, “Gesundheit,” and for a lot of people the border doesn’t exist as a reality but more a mere annoyance, a technicality.

  For Pablo, the border exists.

  As a reality and a state of mind.

  For one thing, the reality is that the border is the raison d’être of the cartels. No border, no profit, no “plaza.” No violence.

  For another, the border is the reason for the maquiladoras. The largest consumer market in the world is a mile north, over that border, so what better place to make those consumer goods?

  Well, China now, but the mushrooming of the maquiladoras changed the landscape of Juárez forever, creating the vast colonias where the people who can find jobs now struggle to survive on a third of what they used to make. Their poverty makes them targets for narco recruitment, their despai
r makes them customers for the narcos’ product.

  And their lives are cheap.

  That’s the reality.

  And the reality is that there’s a different state of mind on the other side of the border. You live in El Paso, you’re a pocho, an Americanized Mexican, and no one can tell Pablo that it doesn’t change you. You shop in malls instead of mercados, you watch football instead of fútbol, you become another consumer in a giant machine that consumes consumers.

  Dios mío, Pablo thinks, Óscar would throw that sentence in the garbage, but it’s true nevertheless. There’s a different state of mind in the States—no, it’s more than that—there’s a different state of soul.

  As he expected, outside El Paso’s barrios no one gives a shit who’s going to be the new president, and when he asks the question in the affluent West El Paso neighborhoods with names like “The Willows” and “Coronado Hills,” the answer is usually, “Romney.”

  I don’t think so, Pablo said to himself, primarily because the “Latino” vote will be almost as crucial in the United States as it will be in Mexico. Being in the U.S. always makes Pablo feel vaguely uncomfortable, like an unwanted guest at a party whom everyone wishes would leave. He knows how North Americans feel about Mexicans, and it’s the same way that many Mexicans feel about Juarenses.

  We’re the “Mexicans” of Mexico.

  Well, fuck ’em all.

  He drives into Barrio El Segundo, the original breeding grounds of the Aztecas, and finds a congenially dark bar where he can sit and have a beer without feeling that he doesn’t belong. The anxiety that he’s felt since reading Esta Vida this morning won’t leave him, and the three cold beers don’t chase it away.

  It only gets worse as he leaves and crosses the bridge back into Juárez.

  Call it paranoia, or the insecurity from being el otro lado, but Pablo can’t escape the feeling that someone is following him. It’s ridiculous, he thinks as he looks into the rearview mirror, but he can’t help but think of the other reporters ambushed in their cars, in their driveways, outside their offices. Murdered on the spot or driven off somewhere to be tortured and killed, and now the sweat is not just from the heat, it comes from fear as well and smells different—a detail he thinks that he should put in a story somewhere.