The Cartel (72 page)

I wish I had, Keller thinks.

Mexico is a country that produces legends larger than life, and Keller knows that songs will be sung about Don Pedro Alejo de Castillo—not trashy
narcocorridas,
but a genuine
corrida.

A song for a hero.

—

Keller wakes up sweaty.

With Marisol looking at him.

He knows that she’s not stupid. She reads the news, watches television, she has an idea as to what he’s been doing and where he goes when he’s not with her. They don’t talk about it, that’s not their arrangement, but he knows that she’s aware.

Keller came back a mess—filthy, exhausted, stressed.

And quiet.

What was there to talk about?

She has sorrows of her own, Keller thought. Constant pain, constant worry, constant fear, whether she wants to admit it or not. The last thing she needs is to play nursemaid to some basket case.

So he keeps it to himself.

Now Marisol looks at him and says, “I can turn the air conditioner up.”

“It’s okay.”

He gets out of bed and showers.

You’re going to have dreams like that, he tells himself. You just are. He still dreams about the El Sauzal killings, and that was thirteen years ago. Nineteen people lined up and machine-gunned to death.

It was a watershed moment then.

An unimaginable horror.

Now it’s an average day’s body count that would barely make the news. Even Juárez’s Channel 44, “the Agony Station,” has cut down on its lurid coverage. You can turn off the television, Keller thinks, but you can’t turn off your brain, especially when you’re sleeping. So the dreams are going to come and they’re probably always going to come and you’re just going to have to accept that.

Marisol has breakfast ready when he comes out.

He wishes she wouldn’t do that, doesn’t want her to exert herself, but she tells him to stop babying her. When he sits down at the table she asks, “Do you think you should see someone?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” she says, gently sitting down and propping the cane against the table. “I don’t want to be your mother or your therapist, so you need to see someone.”

“I’m fine.”

“No you’re not,” she says.

“Don’t start.”

“Post-traumatic stress—”

“That’s starting.”

“Sorry.”

He digs into the grapefruit, gives up, and takes it to the sink.

A counselor? A therapist? A shrink? What could I say—everything that’s on my mind is classified. And what would I say if I could?

Hey, I tortured someone the other day—hooked him up to a battery until he told me all the horrible things they did. Oh yeah, and that time I turned my back so a colleague could execute a prisoner, that kind of bothers me. There’s the guy I shot in a whorehouse, another outside a hospital after I kidnapped his elderly mother, and oh, and then there was this mass grave…

An American drone located the Zeta camp after Don Pedro’s murder.

It’s top secret that the U.S. is sending drones over Mexico to help track the narcos. The White House knows it, Keller knows it, Taylor knows, Orduña knows it.

The FES hit the camp, on an old ranch, just before dawn.

The grave was bulldozed out of the red earth, and the bodies, now weeks old by Keller’s estimation, were carelessly tossed in.

A Zeta prisoner gave up the story.

The Zetas stopped a bus on Route 1 outside of San Fernando. Most of the passengers were Central American immigrants on their way to the United States. The Zetas came on board and went through the passengers’ cell phones to see if they had called any Matamoros numbers. They suspected that the bus was transporting Central American recruits to the Gulf cartel.

Just to make sure, they shot them all.

Ochoa gave the order. Forty carried it out.

It took over two days to recover all the bodies and separate them into discrete skeletal remains.

Even then, they got only an approximate count.

Fifty-eight men, fourteen women.

The marines didn’t wait for the count, but stayed on the trail. Over the next three days, they hit five ranches that the prisoner gave up and killed twenty-seven Zetas.

The three captured Zetas died of their wounds.

“Post-traumatic stress disorder”? Keller thinks now.

There’s nothing “post” about it. Nothing is over, nothing is in the past.

We live with this shit every day. And “disorder”? It would be a disorder if we
weren’t
stressed.

Marisol is an internist, not a psychologist, he grumbles.

So I break out in a sweat.

I’m a little quiet.

I drink a little more than I should.

I look over my shoulder from time to time.

There’s nothing crazy about that—that’s
sane,
given the circumstances.

It’s amazing, Keller thinks, the human capacity—perhaps born of need—to establish a sense of normalcy in the most abnormal conditions. They live in a virtual war zone, under a constant state of threat, and yet they’ve evolved into doing the little routines that make up a normal life.

They cook dinner, albeit with a pistol on the hip or within easy reach. They sit down and talk about the day’s events, even if those events include the body count in Juárez. They watch television and sometimes doze off, with anti-grenade screens on the windows and the doors triple-bolted.

More evenings than not, Erika comes over, and neither Keller nor Marisol has to point out the obvious to each other—that this is as close as Marisol will ever come to having a daughter. Erika never arrives without some kind of offering—cans of soup, some fruit, a flower, a DVD. Lately she’s taken to sleeping over in the small spare room, so she’s often there when Keller gets up in the morning.

Now Marisol makes a simple steak with rice, Erika contributes a salad, and Keller stopped off for two bottles of decent red on his way back. They eat, drink wine, and then settle in to watch
Modern Family
on a station from El Paso.

Erika is totally into the show and Keller realizes that she’s almost five years younger than his own daughter. Five years younger than Cassie and she’s laid her life on the line no less than if she’d volunteered for Iraq or Afghanistan.

No—more so, far more so.

Here she’s outgunned and outnumbered. She slouches on the sofa in her jeans and sweatshirt, her AR-15 propped against the wall by the door, laughs and looks to Marisol for confirmation that what she’s laughing at is really funny.

It’s a major case of hero worship, Erika for Marisol.

Marisol knows it.

“Do you think,” she asked Keller a few weeks ago, “I should offer her a makeover?”

“A what?”

“A makeover,” Marisol said impatiently. “You know, like on the television. Hair, makeup, clothes…”

“Why not?” Keller asked, still unsure of exactly what she was talking about.

“I don’t know, it might offend her,” Marisol answered. “She’s a pretty girl, but the clothes and the hair—she’s such a
cejona,
a tomboy. A little of the right makeup, if she could lose ten pounds…the boys would come running.”

Keller had assumed that Erika was gay.

“No,” Marisol said. “In fact, she has a crush on this EMT in Juárez. Very cute guy. Nice guy. Sweet.”

“I’m sure coming from you, any suggestions would be welcome.”

“I don’t know, I might bring it up,” Marisol said. “I thought one day we could go into El Paso, do girly things. Hair, spa…lunch.”

“What is it with women and lunch?”

Now he notices that if there hasn’t been a makeover, Marisol has had some influence. Erika’s long straight hair hasn’t been cut, but it has been brushed, and he thinks he detects a trace of eyeliner.

She’s a good kid, Erika, and if people treated her taking the police job as a joke at first, they don’t any longer. You’d expect looting in a town that’s half boarded up, but Erika has kept it to a minimum, and her obsession with enforcing parking regulations has become almost a source of perverse pride in the town.

“Say what you want about Erika,” the talk goes, “she does her job.”

Even the soldiers have started to treat her with grudging respect, no longer whistling or hooting as she walks by. This came about largely as a result, Marisol reported, of one soldier calling Erika a
marimacha
and her stopping, turning around, and punching him so hard in the face that he went down. His buddies laughed at him, and no one called Erika a lesbian or anything else after that.

When the show is over, she gets up from the sofa. “I have to go.”

“Stay and watch another,” Marisol says.

“No. Early morning. But can I help clean up?”

“No, that’s why I have Keller.”

Erika kisses Marisol on both cheeks. “Thank you for dinner.”

“Thank you for the salad.”

“Are you all right walking home?” Keller asks her.

“Sure.” Erika slings her rifle over her shoulder, waves good night, and goes out the door.

“Does the makeover include a different choice of firearm?” Keller asks.

“Some men like that kind of thing.”

Later, in bed, Marisol says, “We haven’t made love since…”

“I haven’t wanted to hurt you.”

“I thought maybe you were…disgusted.”

“No. God, no.”

“If I lie on my side with my back to you…”

She wriggles her butt into him. He holds her by the shoulders or strokes her hair and moves gently inside her, even when she pushes back as if to demand more. When he finishes, she says, “Oh, that’s nice.”

“What about you?”

“Next time. Can you sleep?”

“I think so.” He’s not sure he wants to. “How about you?”

“Oh, yes.”

Keller does fall asleep.

His dreams are bad and bloody.

Ciudad Juárez

Autumn 2010

The blog first appears just before the Day of the Dead.

It’s a national sensation before New Year’s Eve.

Pablo first sees
Esta Vida
when he logs in at the office one morning and calls Ana over. “Have you seen this?”

This Life
has photographs somehow smuggled out of the San Fernando massacre site. It’s grisly, brutal, frank, and asks in red fourteen-point Times New Roman typeface, “Who Are These Zetas and Why Do They Kill Innocent People?”

“Dios mío,”
Ana says. “That’s graphic.”

It’s nothing a newspaper could or would print, even if they were covering the narco-wars anymore. Skulls, parts of skeletons, bits of clothing sticking up from the red earth. The accompanying article gives details of the mass murder that only the police could have known and is signed “El Niño Salvaje.”

“The Wild Child?” Pablo asks.

A new story comes out the next day. Titled “Terror in Tamaulipas,” it’s an in-depth analysis of the war between the CDG and the Zetas.

“Whoever the Wild Child is,” Pablo says, “he knows his stuff.”

“It’s the new journalism,” Óscar opines, looking over their shoulder and wincing at the graphic images. “Some call it the democratization of journalism, others might call it anarchy. The problem is, there’s no accountability. Not only are the articles anonymous, but there is no editing process to separate fact from mere rumor. It’s self-serving, but I still think there’s a role for editors in the media.”

The next article, put out the next day, cuts closer to home.

“Who Killed Giorgio Valencia?” is classic investigative reporting. There are photos of Giorgio on the job, snapping pictures, other photos of his body at the murder scene, even an image of the grinning skull left on the car outside his funeral.

“This is offensive,” Pablo says.

“His murder was offensive,” Ana snaps.

“Jesus…Ana…”

“Don’t look at me, kiddo,” she says. “I ain’t no Wild Child.”

The long article goes on to ask why there has been no investigation into Valencia’s death, excoriates both the state and national government for their “supine neglect” on the issue of murdered journalists, and openly accuses the Zetas of Valencia’s murder, claiming that they had tried to enforce a news blackout on the attack on Marisol Cisneros.

The next post is harsher than anything seen in even
la nota roja,
showing a hacked-up, limbless body on a Juárez street. “The Cleansing” talks about the murderous chaos in Juárez, how it now seems to affect only the poor, and wonders out loud if the government really cares, or whether it is standing by and letting “social outcasts and undesirables” be hosed off the street like so much garbage.

It directly echoes Pablo’s own thoughts on the matter, thoughts that he can no longer write for his own newspaper, thoughts that he has expressed to Ana, who sees the blog and asks him directly, “Are you the Wild Child?”

“I’m anything but a wild child.”

It’s been a grim autumn for him. He’s made one trip to Mexico City to see Mateo—an awkward visit that only highlighted their continuing, gradual estrangement—and have the obligatory quarrel with Victoria, which was only sharpened by her announcement that she’s “seeing someone seriously.”

“Who?”

“He’s an editor here at the paper.”

“Has Mateo met him?”

“Well, I’m not going to keep him a secret, Pablo.”

“Does he stay with you?”

“Of course not,” Victoria said.

“I don’t want Mateo waking up and finding him there.”

“We’re discreet,” Victoria says, ending the discussion with that thin-lipped frown that used to challenge him sexually and that now he just hates.

The violence in Juárez has just gone on and on. Attacks on parties seemed to be the popular theme for the autumn of 2010. Six killed at a party, then four, then five more. Pablo dutifully went out to cover them, then wrote bare-bones articles that barely reach paragraph length—the number of dead, the approximate time of the attack, the rough neighborhood. Not the names, not the exact address, and for God’s sake not who did it or why, because that might upset the narcos.

He’s watched Óscar shrink before his eyes.

Almost literally—El Búho seems to be getting physically smaller, and certainly slower, more dependent on his cane. More and more he stays in his Chaveña home, rarely coming out for parties or even readings.