The Cartel

by Don Winslow

  “Adán’s getting closer and closer to Nacho Esparza,” Yvette says. “First he gives him Tijuana, now he’s sniffing around the daughter.”

  “She’s seventeen.”

  “There’s no harm in keeping Keller close,” Yvette says. “He might come in handy for us, and if not, he’s always worth two million on the hoof, isn’t he? Not to mention the Emperor’s undying gratitude.”

  Yvette slides down in the bed.

  “Let me show you,” she says, “how much fun it is kissing the cobra.”

  —

  Keller waits outside the Marriott in a rented car.

  Arroyo comes out with the case and gets into his Lexus. Up Paseo de la Reforma into Colonia Polanco, then onto Avenida Rubén Dario, flanking Chapultepec Park.

  The Lexus pulls over by the park.

  A woman walks out, the passenger door opens, and she takes the suitcase. Keller doesn’t have to risk following the woman to learn her identity, because he’s already had dinner with her.

  He watches Laura Amaro walk away.

  Jesus Christ, he thinks. Laura hands the money to her husband, Benjamín, who takes it to Los Pinos.

  —

  Three weeks later, on election night, Keller and Marisol join thousands of people gathered in the Zócalo to await the results.

  The Zócalo is Mexico City’s main square, one of the largest in the world. The Palacio Nacional, built on the grounds of Moctezuma’s palace, flanks the square to the east, and on the west is the Portal de Mercaderes. The mundane Federal District office buildings are on the southern edge, while the north of the square is dominated by the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary, the largest church in the Americas, the construction of which began in 1573. It’s said that Cortés himself laid the cornerstone. Its twin bell towers made of red tezontle stone loom over the Zócalo like sentries.

  The square itself is huge and empty, save for the actual zócalo, the base for a column that was never built which now supports a flagpole with a giant Mexican flag. It has been a gathering place for centuries, and Keller has learned that the Aztec center of the universe was said to have been just northeast of here, at the old Templo Nachor.

  Standing in the Zócalo makes you feel very small; as an American, it makes you feel that your country is very young.

  Marisol is a political animal, Keller has discovered, a passionate leftist. She wept during Pan’s Labyrinth, first from anger at the Spanish Fascists and afterward with pride that such a beautiful film had been made by a Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro.

  As the election neared, her conversation became more and more obsessed with politics, to the point where she would apologize, change the subject, and then get back to politics a few minutes later.

  Keller didn’t mind—he liked her passion, and the truth was that he couldn’t help but compare her to Althea, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal for whom Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were demonic figures.

  “You don’t know what poverty is in the U.S.,” Marisol said to him one night over dinner at an Argentine place.

  “Have you seen the South Bronx?”

  “Have you seen the colonias of Juárez?” Marisol countered. “Or the rural poverty out in the valley, where I come from? I’m telling you, Arturo, the conflict between right and left is different in Mexico.”

  So she detests PAN, is wholeheartedly and hopefully PRD, and the night before the election, she asked Keller out for a date.

  To watch the results in the Zócalo.

  Keller isn’t a very political person, more wearily cynical after his experiences with Washington. Marisol knew this, and was very pleased when he agreed to go to the Zócalo, because she knew he was doing it for her.

  Now they stand in the enormous public square with a crowd that Keller guesses to be about fifty thousand. The mood is tense, and all day they have heard rumors of voter fraud—ballot boxes stuffed, ballots tossed away, small rural communities threatened with the loss of government benefits if they vote PRD.

  Everyone knows it’s going to be close, so the air is electric as they wait for the results of a peculiar Mexican procedure known as the Cuenta Rápida—the “Quick Count.” The election commission takes a sampling of votes from some seven thousand districts when the polls close at 10:00 p.m. If the margin for one candidate is greater than .06 percent, a winner would be predicted; if less, the election would be determined “too close to call” until a complete counting of the votes.

  At 11:00 that night, the election commissioner goes on television to announce that the Quick Count showed that the results are “too close to call,” but he refuses to give the actual numbers.

  “We’re being robbed,” Marisol says as they make the slow walk through the crowd from the Zócalo. “Everyone knows that the people want the PRD. They’re going to cook the books.”

  “You don’t know that,” Keller answers, although he’s worried. Worried for her, that she’ll be hurt and disappointed; worried for himself, that PAN will take the election—fairly or unfairly—and that it will be business as usual for the Tapia money network.

  He’s in a quandary about what to do with the information he has about the money pipeline going to Los Pinos.

  If he tells Aguilar or Vera, he could be instantly expelled from the country.

  Worse, he doesn’t know if one or both are implicated.

  He should take the information to Taylor, let DEA and the rest of the alphabet soup take over the investigation, then deal with its consequences on the highest level.

  But who in DEA is going to take on Los Pinos? The issue would be kicked up to Justice, then over to State, and probably die a slow death in the hallways. Because Laura Amaro is right—the current conservative administration in the White House wants PAN to win this election. They’d do nothing to rock that boat and risk the Mexican election going to the left wing.

  So the smartest thing to do for the time being is nothing.

  Continue the investigation and keep it from his colleagues and superiors until after the election.

  Everything depends on the election.

  The official count starts three days later.

  The election commission collects all the sealed ballot packages from the districts and examines them for signs of alterations. Representatives from the various parties are present and can make objections.

  Marisol sits up all night by the television in her condo.

  Keller waits with her. They drink coffee and make nervous conversation as the numbers start to come in and López Obrador jumps out to an early lead.

  “I told you,” Marisol says. “The country wants PRD.”

  Then the erosion begins. It’s like watching a riverbank collapse under a slow flood of water. The lead dwindles and then collapses as results from the northern districts are slow arriving.

  “That’s me,” Marisol says. “That’s my home.”

  When the northern votes finally come in, they’re strongly for Calderón.

  “I don’t believe it,” Marisol says. “I know the people there, they’re poor and they’re not PAN.”

  Early the next morning, the official result is announced.

  Calderón has won by a mere 243,934 votes.

  0.58 percent.

  A hanging chad, Keller thinks.

  Marisol cries.

  Then she gets angry.

  —

  They take to the streets.

  Two days after the official tally, almost three hundred thousand people demonstrate in the Zócalo and listen to PRD speakers talk about voter fraud. A week later, the crowd swells to half a million people who demand that the courts order a recount.

  Marisol is one of them.

  Keller another.

  He goes to protect her, but he also goes because it’s just such a spectacle. When was the last time, if ever, that half a million Americans gathered to fight for democracy? He doesn’t know if the accusations of voter fraud are right or wrong, but he’s impressed—no, moved—
that they care in those numbers, that it means something to them. He’d watched an American election stolen with barely a whimper.

  The ambassador would shit bricks if he knew that Keller was there, Tim Taylor would probably hemorrhage through the nose, but Keller doesn’t care. It’s an historic moment and he’s not going to miss it, and of course he’s aware that there’s something else.

  He might be falling in love.

  It seems unlikely at his age and place in life. Marisol is twenty years younger (although she would be the first to say that she has an “old soul”) and a loyal citizen of a country he might get tossed out of any day.

  They haven’t slept together yet—their physical contact has been confined to kisses—but the physical attraction is there. He certainly feels it, and thinks she does as well, from the nature of those kisses and her sighs when they say good night.

  But she’s a Mexican woman of a certain class, and a Mexican woman of a certain class doesn’t go to bed on the first date or the third. He knows that if it happens it won’t be casual for her—she’s been through the demise of a marriage and now she’s going to take her time.

  Art Keller is no lovestruck fool, no victim of a midlife crisis. He knows that there are problems, problems he hasn’t talked to her about. How do you tell a woman you’re reluctant to get involved because it puts her in danger? How do you deliver the melodramatic, surreal news that there’s a multimillion-dollar price on your head that someone might try to collect any moment, and that you don’t want her to be in range of an errant bullet?

  It’s surreal, like so much of the narco-world—and yet, like so much of the narco-world, all too real.

  So Keller knows he shouldn’t be seeing her at all.

  Her, or anyone else.

  But being with her feels too good, too natural, too “right,” to employ a cliché from pop music. He likes Marisol, he respects her, he admires her (okay, yes, he lusts after her), he might be falling in love.

  And the odds of anyone trying to collect Barrera’s bounty are slim right now. In a strange way, the disputed election affords him a level of protection, because Adán is too cautious to rock the boat in the middle of a storm.

  Still, Keller knows that his getting involved with anyone is a bad idea.

  Two weeks later he joins her at the biggest demonstration yet—a march down Paseo de la Reforma to demand a recount. It’s impossible to judge the number of marchers from inside the march—some observers put it at two hundred thousand—but the Mexico City police estimate that almost two and a half million people march that day to demand a fair election.

  Two and a half million people, Keller thinks as he walks beside Marisol, who chants along with the crowd. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington was about a quarter of a million strong; a protest against the Vietnam War in ’69 might have had six hundred thousand.

  Despite himself, Keller finds it compelling. Anyone who says that Mexicans don’t care about democracy should be here today, he thinks, as the marchers file pass the statue to Los Niños Héroes and El Ángel de la Independencia, past the American embassy and the stock exchange.

  It’s stirring.

  “They’ll have to give us a recount now!” Marisol shouts happily to him over the chanting. “They’ll have to!”

  The march ends in the Zócalo, but this time people don’t leave as thousands of them start a plantón, an encampment, refusing to vacate until a recount is announced. Keller is against Marisol staying. “It’s dangerous. What if the police try to clear you out? You could get hurt.”

  “Go home if you don’t want to stay,” she says.

  “It’s not that—”

  “After all, it’s not your country.”

  It isn’t but it is.

  Keller has spent more of the past twenty years in Mexico than he has in the United States, and even his time at “home” was consumed with Mexico. He’s shed blood here, had friends die here.

  He stays.

  The first night he spends with Marisol Cisneros is on a sleeping bag in the Zócalo with a thousand other people around them.

  Things start to turn ugly the next day as the protestors snarl traffic on Paseo de la Reforma and other major thoroughfares. Fights break out with commuters, police make arrests. Keller urges Marisol not to get involved—she has a practice to protect, patients to see, he urges caution—but she won’t quit. She reschedules her regular patients and only leaves the protest to make her clinic hours in Iztapalapa. That afternoon, the judges decide that there is enough doubt as to the legitimacy of the voting to justify a recount in 155 disputed districts. The recount will start in four days and take weeks, at least.

  A celebration breaks out in the Zócalo. Guitars play, people hug and kiss, some cry in joy.

  “Will you go home now?” Keller asks Marisol.

  “Only if you come with me,” she says.

  —

  “I want to take a shower,” she says when they get to her condo. “I’m a filthy mess.”

  Keller waits on a sofa in the small living room. The condo is nice but not elaborate and has the barely lived-in look of the divorced person who spends little time at home. Through the thin walls, he can hear the water running. It finally stops and he thinks that she’ll come out, but it takes forever.

  It’s worth the wait.

  Marisol’s amber hair hangs over her bare shoulders, above a black negligee that shows tantalizing glimpses of the body underneath. “Shall we go to bed?”

  Keller thought that she’d be tentative, he thought they both would be. But their bodies take over and she quickly lets him know that she wants him inside her, and when he is she’s surprisingly unladylike.

  Later, her head on his shoulder, her hair splayed on his chest, Marisol says, “Well, you worry that the fantasy is going to be better than the actual event, but in this case…no.”

  “You fantasized?” Keller asks.

  “You didn’t?”

  “I did.”

  “I should hope so.”

  A few minutes later Marisol sighs. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Me, too.”

  “No,” she says, “I meant since I’ve loved someone.”

  And that’s it—una locura de amor, that’s what they have.

  A crazy love.

  —

  “I’m looking at some interesting intel photos,” Taylor says over the phone, “of you at a demonstration. Some people aren’t happy, Art. They’re wondering whose side you’re on.”

  “I don’t give a fuck who’s happy,” Keller says. “As for sides, I’m on my side.”

  “Same old Keller.”

  “Don’t call me anymore with this bullshit.”

  He clicks off.

  —

  August in Mexico City is wet.

  The rains usually come in the afternoon, and many of those afternoons find them in bed together, when her practice and his work allow. They meet at Marisol’s and make love as the rain spatters against the bedroom window, then they get up, make coffee, and wait for the shower to pass before venturing out.

  The protests against the election continue during the recount. There are marches out to the airport, marches downtown—demonstrations break out in other parts of the country, including Marisol’s beloved Juárez.

  Keller keeps up his surveillance of the Tapia money machine—it rarely varies as money finds its way to Los Pinos, or at least to its senior staff. And he keeps playing his dangerous game, socializing with the Tapias, provoking a response.

  The Zetas don’t contact him again, but he figures that they’re doing what everyone else is doing—waiting for the election results, which might render their government problem moot.

  Mexico is holding its collective breath, and then on August 28, the election commission releases the final count. By the slimmest of margins, virtually identical to the original results, Calderón is declared the winner and PAN retains Los Pinos.

  New president, same party.
r />   Marisol is devastated.

  “They stole the election,” she tells Keller, citing the various allegations of fraud, voter intimidation, miscounts, and no-counts. “They stole it.”

  The confirmation of the election results is also the confirmation of everything she’s feared about her country, that it’s hopelessly corrupt, that power will always protect power.

  The rain keeps coming down.

  Marisol becomes depressed, morose. Keller sees a person he didn’t know was in there—quiet, uncommunicative, remote. Her disappointment turns to bitterness, her bitterness to anger, and with no legitimate outlet to turn it on, she turns it on him.

  She’s sure “his” government is pleased with the results, maybe even complicit. “His” politics are a little further to the right than hers, aren’t they? He’s a man (Keller pleads guilty), and no man can really be a feminist, can he? Does he have to hang his shirt on the bathroom hook, does he have to read her the headlines from the paper (she can read herself, can’t she?), can a North American man really understand a Mexican woman?

  “My mother was Mexican,” Keller reminds her.

  “Do I remind you of your mother?” she asks, deliberately taking the argument sideways.

  “Not remotely.”

  “Because I don’t care to be a mommy figure to—”

  “Marisol?”

  “You interrupted me.”

  “Fuck off.” He takes a breath and then says, “I didn’t steal the election, if, in fact, it was stolen—”

  “It was.”

  “—so don’t take it out on me.”

  Marisol knows she’s doing it. Knows it but can’t seem to stop doing it, and she’s not proud of herself for it. She did the same thing to her ex, blamed him for things that he couldn’t do anything about—for her own dissatisfaction, her own anger, her rage that life isn’t what it should be, when she doesn’t even know what it should be.

  And Arturo—this beautiful, wonderful, loving man—is just so…North American. He’s not only a North American, he’s a North American law enforcement official, a drug cop who does God knows what and now somehow he’s come to embody her…

  …anger.

  She tries to be reasonable. “What I’m saying is that there are a thousand years of history here that you North Americans don’t comprehend and you come here stumbling around in ignorance and—”