The Cartel

by Don Winslow

  Adán agrees to do what he was going to do anyway—continue to fight the Zetas.

  —

  Eva lets herself into the condo in Bosques de las Lomas and flops down on the bed.

  Her bodyguard Miguel brings in her bag. “Where do you want this?”

  “On the bed,” Eva says. “Where I want you.”

  Miguel smiles. He sets the bag at the foot of the bed and then lies down on top of Eva.

  She unzips the fly of his tight blue jeans. “This is what I want, right here. Hurry. I thought the flight would never end.”

  Eva makes him hard with her hand, although it doesn’t take much. She uses her other hand to unzip her own jeans and then she wriggles out of them. She’s already wet and he slides into her easily.

  “That’s good,” she says. “That’s so good.”

  Miguel is twenty-five and strong and lithe and muscled and impatient for his own pleasure, but she likes that. She wants to be taken, and as she feels him near his climax and start to pull out, she grabs his shoulders and holds him inside her and says, “It’s all right, you can come in me.”

  “You sure?”

  “The pill.”

  After, she lies beside him and starts to laugh.

  “What?” Miguel asks.

  “Do you know what my husband would do to you,” she says, “would do to that beautiful cock, if he knew where it had just been?”

  “I don’t want to think.”

  “But you’re the one who’s supposed to tell him these things,” Eva said. “You’re his spy, aren’t you? Are you going to tell him?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” Eva says, “because I like this beautiful cock right where it is.”

  She rolls over and takes him in her mouth.

  “Can you go again,” she asks, sitting up. “Can you?”

  “If you keep doing that.”

  Eva keeps doing that.

  She needs a baby.

  Ciudad Juárez

  September 2010

  Pablo shoves the rest of the torta into his mouth and wipes the smear of avocado off his lips with the back of his hand.

  The torta—chicken, pineapple, and avocado in a bun—used to be one of his favorite things about living in Juárez, one of the small local joys that make a city a city. Now he can barely taste it—it’s just cheap food to keep the body going.

  He needs it, he’s tired.

  Exhausted, really.

  If anyone would ask how Pablo Mora is these days—not that anyone does—he’d say that he’s physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted.

  And morally, maybe, if there’s such a thing as moral exhaustion.

  There is such a thing, he decides.

  You start by being idealistic, morally strong if you will, but then the rock of your moral strength is eroded, bit by bit, until you’re, well, exhausted, and you do things that you never thought you would. Or you do things that you always feared you would.

  Or something like that.

  You’d think that there would be a breaking point—a decisive moment—but there is no single moment or event that you can put your finger on. No, it’s not that dramatic—it’s the dull, monotonous process of erosion.

  Maybe it was the day when twenty-five people were killed in a single afternoon. With one of the now tedious narcomantas hung by the bodies: ADÁN BARRERA, YOU ARE KILLING OUR SONS. NOW WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOUR FAMILIES.

  Maybe it was the next slaughter at a birthday party—fourteen machine-gunned to death. Or the two decapitated bodies of the shooters found the next day.

  Or maybe it’s just the dull, predictable sameness of it all, that the bizarre has become the norm, like the way Juarenses now unconsciously step over bodies in the street on their way to work.

  The unrelenting radio calls, which have now taken on an even more perverse twist as first the cartels took to playing narcocorridos over the police band to celebrate the assassination of a rival cop. So now you could tell which side had done the killing by the anthem they played.

  Then, in that way that had become the strange normality, the cartels took to playing the songs before the killings—just to spread terror through the potential ranks of the victims.

  Maybe it was the rituals that now attended the coverage of the killings. The reporters would arrive first, but if the narcos were waiting around for the victim to die, the reporters had to hang back. If the victim was dead, the narcos would either give the okay to cover the story and take photos, or tell them to píntate—beat it. Or sometimes the killers would leave a note for reporters on the corpse, telling them what they could write and what they couldn’t.

  The next on the scene would be the funeral home directors, there to drum up business, dressed in black and looking for all the world like ravens at a roadkill.

  Then the police might arrive, depending on the identity of the victim, and then the EMTs, who would only come now once they knew that the police were already there. More than once, Pablo had sat with the EMTs as the killers kept them away at gunpoint until the victim bled out. Then the narcos would wave them in with the words, “Come and get him.” Other times, the narcos would get on the EMT radio frequency and simply order the medics not to come to the aid of certain victims.

  Maybe it was the sorry fact that he could no longer feel anything when he watched the wife, the mother, the sister, the child, scream and weep. Or that he no longer felt shock or even revulsion at the shattered or dismembered or decapitated bodies. Heads and limbs scattered around his city like so much offal, dogs in the rougher colonias slinking away with bloody jowls and guilty looks.

  Six bodies…

  Four bodies…

  Ten bodies…

  The army arrested four La Línea members who confessed to a combined tally of 211 murders.

  The “New Police,” carefully vetted and polygraphed, were mustered in Juárez to great fanfare. One of them—a policewoman—was shot to death on a bus as she rode to her first day of work.

  Eleven more people were killed the next day.

  Eight the day after.

  Everything apparently was going so well in Chihuahua that its state attorney general was promoted to be Mexico’s new federal drug czar.

  Erosion, Pablo thinks.

  Erosion of morality.

  Erosion of the soul.

  It brings up the question, why?

  Not in any grand existential sense—Pablo is beyond thinking he’ll get an answer to those questions—but as a practical matter.

  After all, the war is supposed to be over.

  That’s what the politicos have told us—their operations have been so successful that they withdrew the army from the city and handed it over to the “New Police.” So if the war is over, why does the killing continue?

  Even when you look at the more realistic explanation as to why the war is over—that the Sinaloa cartel won and now controls the Juárez plaza, why does the slaughter continue unabated? Why is there no peace dividend of a day without killing?

  And why, again, are the victims mostly the little guys—the poor, the street dealers, the beggars, the driftwood?

  Pablo knows the answer.

  He just hates what it is.

  It has to do not with the cross-border drug trade, but with the internal market. It’s not good enough to just blame the U.S. market anymore. The sale of drugs in Juárez is small compared with the volume that goes across the border, but it’s still significant.

  Most of the killing now is to control the domestic market, especially in heroin and cocaine. It isn’t that Barrera wants or needs the money—chump change to him—it’s that he can’t let the remnants of the Juárez cartel have it. If they’re allowed to still dominate the sale of drugs in El Centro, La Cima, and the other colonias, the money would be a source of power that might fuel a comeback.

  Barrera isn’t going to allow that.

  When he has his foot on your throat, he isn’t going to lift it.

  S
o the killing now is a mopping-up operation.

  And the little guy, the nickel-bag street puchador, is caught in a vise between Los Aztecas and Sinaloa—if he sells for one, the other kills him. The tiny drug stands—the picaderos—are caught in the same vise. Even the addicts are trapped—buy from a Sinaloan and the Juarenses kill you, buy from a Juarense and the Nueva Gente wipe you out. The kids on the corners who are lookouts, the winos and the homeless, the beggars and the buskers, are all there to be killed just in case they’re helping the other side.

  And the cops? They don’t give a fuck, Pablo thinks. Since when has anyone cared about these losers? No, the cops, the pols, the businessmen see it as almost an opportunity to sweep the streets of undesirables and tote it up to the “cartel wars.”

  The mainstream media love it—they draw neat battle lines with colored zones of which cartel controls which plaza, which colonia. It’s easier that way, nice and neat and followable—you can even root for one side or the other—but it’s bullshit, at least in Juárez.

  The truth is that there are no neat lines anymore.

  When Barrera, the feds, and the army destroyed La Línea and Los Aztecas, they also destroyed any control over the hundreds of cartelitos, the small street gangs in the city, gangs who still are going to fight to sell drugs and practice small-time extortion, extracting the cuota from shopkeepers, bus drivers, cabbies, or even just women, children, and the old for the right to walk down the street.

  Half the people out there doing the killing now are low-level kids who don’t even know which cartel they’re killing for. They just get an order from a boss one level up and they follow that order if they want to live. That boss might be Juárez, Azteca, Sinaloa, even Zeta. He might be one thing one day and another thing the next.

  The killings might not even be drug-related—the violent chaos covers up murders that might come from an old feud, a jealousy, a lovers’ triangle, an unpaid cuota, anything.

  So they go out and kill, and then they are killed, and then they retaliate, and the killing has a momentum of its own and the grim truth is that there are no generals in command rooms moving colored pins around a map as they direct a grand strategy.

  The fact is that los chacalosos—the big bosses—lost control.

  They couldn’t stop it now if they wanted, and Barrera doesn’t care. He has his bridges and the violence is wiping the local gangs off the street. So to hell with the city—he’d be just as happy if there was nothing left except his damn bridges.

  Wouldn’t care if the city dies.

  Which it is.

  So it’s chaos here now, and the people who pay the price for it are the people who always do, and who can least afford it—the poor, the powerless, the ones who can’t lock themselves up in gated communities, or commute from El Paso.

  No one is in charge.

  The killing now commands the killing, because no one knows anything else to do. That’s the truth that Pablo would like to tell. Like to scream to the country, scream to the U.S., scream to the world.

  But he can’t.

  They won’t let him.

  Yesterday morning the man who brought Pablo his envelope brought him an order as well.

  “The attack on La Médica Hermosa,” he said.

  “That was months ago.” Pablo felt a surge of fear.

  “You’re going to write that the Zetas were behind it.”

  “I don’t know that,” Pablo said. He heard his voice quivering.

  “You do know that,” the man said. “I just told you that.”

  He knows why they care. Giorgio’s photo essay of Marisol Cisneros’s wounds had caused a major outcry across the country, maybe even more than the attack itself. And now he knows who’s giving him the money—the Sinaloans, the New People.

  Pablo summoned up all his nerve. “Do you have proof?”

  “The money in your bank account,” the man said, “is all the proof you need.”

  “I haven’t spent it,” Pablo says. “I’ll give it back.”

  “What do you think this is?” the man asks. “Marbles? A kid’s game? You took the money—there’s no ‘giving back.’ I don’t care if you stuck it up your ass. I don’t care if you stuck it up your friend’s ass—the Zetas did it, that’s the truth. You want to write the truth, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He pushes Pablo up against the wall. “Let me ask you something. Your friends, the people you work with. Do you love them?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “If you do,” the man said, “then do the right thing here.”

  The man let him go and walked away.

  Pablo stood there, trembling. His legs felt like they were going to give out under him. He walked to the nearest bar and had a whiskey, then another, his mind whirling.

  What am I going to do? he asked himself.

  What am I going to do?

  When Pablo went in to file the story, saying that he had it from unidentified sources on deep background that the Zetas were responsible for the attacks on the Chihuahua women, Óscar called him into the office.

  “Unidentified sources?” El Búho asked.

  Pablo nodded.

  “Who are they? Your Azteca connections?”

  “Yeah.”

  Óscar tapped his cane on the floor. “We need more than that. Go out and get it.”

  Ramón found him that night, drinking beer at Fred’s. The Azteca slid up to the bar beside him. “I don’t have a lot of time here, so I’ll get right to it. You working on a story about those shootings in the valley?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t get fucking cute with me,” Ramón snapped. “I’m here to tell you, you write anything, you write that those Sinaloan cocksuckers did it.”

  “I heard differently.”

  “Yeah? What did you hear? What did you hear, ’mano?”

  “Zetas.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Pablo shook his head.

  “You’re taking Sinaloa money,” Ramón said, “okay. Nobody gave a shit. Until now. Now we give a very big shit.”

  “ ‘We’? You’re working for the Zetas now?”

  “The Zs are taking over,” Ramón said. “We’re all in the Z Company now. You, too.”

  Ramón grabbed him by the shoulder. “They sent me, ’mano. They sent me to tell you that you write what they want. If I have to come see you again, it won’t be to talk. Don’t make me do that, ’Blo. Please.”

  Ramón tossed a few bills on the bar and walked out.

  Pablo felt like he could piss himself.

  He was trapped—caught between the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas. He left the bar and found Ana and Giorgio at the Kentucky.

  For a man who’d just had a professional triumph, Giorgio was uncharacteristically subdued. Then again, seeing Marisol’s wounds was heartbreaking. Such a beautiful woman, such a good person, disfigured and in pain. So it was tasteful of Giorgio not to celebrate, Pablo thought.

  Maybe he has some sensitivity after all.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” Ana said to Pablo.

  “Just tired.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  They had a few drinks, then Giorgio left to go to El Paso to sleep with his current girlfriend, an American sociologist who was doing her doctoral dissertation on “the phenomenon of violence in Ciudad Juárez.”

  “Is that what we are?” Ana asked. “A phenomenon?”

  “Apparently,” Giorgio answered.

  “Can you use photographs in a dissertation?”

  “I’m sort of deep background,” Giorgio answered. “See you tomorrow.”

  Pablo didn’t sleep that night. There seemed to be no way out of the trap he was in. When he went into the office, Óscar asked him if he’d made any progress on the story. Pablo was evasive, and when he went out to his car there was a note on the seat—“Where is our story? Don’t fuck with us, cabrón.”

  I’m shrinkin
g with my city, Pablo thinks as he bunches up the torta wrapper and tosses it on the floor of the car. The once thriving mercado is almost deserted because the tourists don’t come anymore; one famous bar or club after another has closed; even the Mariscal, the red-light district just by the Santa Fe Bridge, has been shut down because men won’t take the risk of going, even for whores.

  Now he forces himself to get out of the car for yet another corpse. Just one more malandro, one more piece of garbage swept up in la limpieza.

  The cleansing.

  Usually Giorgio beats him to the scene, but he’s probably still in bed with the North American.

  Then he spots Giorgio.

  —

  It’s Pablo who tells Ana.

  He goes into the city room, holds her tight, and tells her, and she screams and her knees buckle and she falls into him and he almost tells her. It’s my fault. It’s my fault, if I had said something, told him, maybe…

  But you didn’t, Pablo thinks.

  And you still don’t.

  Because you’re a coward.

  And because you’re so ashamed.

  Óscar writes an editorial about Giorgio’s murder, a classic El Búho piece full of moral outrage and grief mixed with erudition.

  Giorgio’s funeral is a horror show.

  The whole Juárez journalist community is there, and Cisneros and Keller. The service at the cemetery goes about as usual, then Pablo notices a car parked just outside the gates.

  He walks over.

  A severed head, its mouth fixed in a macabre grin, is set on its hood.

  With Óscar’s editorial pinned to its neck.

  There’s a subdued gathering at Ana’s that night. Pablo, Óscar, Marisol, and her North American. A few others. A shrunken group, Pablo thinks, with our shrunken souls.

  People drink sadly, sullenly.

  A few attempts are made to tell funny stories about Giorgio, but the effort falls flat.

  The gathering breaks up early. Marisol, looking tired and in pain, says that she has to be getting back to Valverde, and the others quickly use the opportunity to make their escapes.

  When people were gone, Ana, in her cups, says, “Make love to me. Take me to bed.”