The Power Of The Dog (10 page)

And Güero cannot shut up about his miraculous survival of the federale ambush that killed his boss, Don Pedro. “Santo Jesús Malverde shielded me from the bullets,” Güero was saying. “I tell you, brothers, I walked through the rain. For hours afterward I didn’t know I was alive. I thought I was a ghost.” On and on and fucking on about how he emptied his pistola at the federales, then jumped from the car and ran—“between the bullets, brothers”—into the brush from where he made his escape. And how he worked his way back to the city, “thinking every moment was my last, brothers.”

Adán lets his eyes move over the rest of the guests: Jaime Herrera, Rafael Caro, Chapo Montana, all Sinaloa gomeros, all wanted men now, all on the run. Lost and windblown ships that Tío has brought into safe harbor.

Tío has called this meeting, and in the very act of calling it has established his superiority. He’s made them all sit down together over huge buckets of chilled shrimp, platters of thinly sliced carne and cases of the ice-cold beer that real Sinaloans prefer over wine.

In the next room, young Sinaloan musicians are warming up to sing bandas—songs praising the exploits of famous traficantes, many of them sitting at the table. In a private room farther in the back are gathered a dozen high-priced call girls who have been called in from Haley Saxon’s exclusive brothel in San Diego.

“The blood that has been spilled has dried,” Tío says. “Now is the time to put away all grudges, to wash the bitter taste of venganza from our mouths. These things are gone, like the water of yesterday’s river.”

He takes a swallow of beer into his mouth, swills it around, then spits it on the floor.

He pauses to see if anyone objects.

No one does.

He says, “Gone also is the life we led. Gone in poison and flame. Our old lives are like the fragile dreams we dream in the waking hours, floating away from us like a wisp of smoke in the wind. We might like to call the dream back, to go on sweetly sleeping, but that is not life, that is a dream.

“The Americans wanted to scatter us Sinaloans. Burn us off our land and scatter us to the winds. But the fire that consumes also makes way for new growth. The wind that destroys also spreads the seeds to new ground. I say if they want us to scatter, so be it. Good. We will scatter like the seeds of the manzanita, which grow in any soil. Grow and spread. I say we spread out like the fingers of a single hand. I say if they will not let us have our Sinaloa, we take the whole country.

“There are three critical territories from which to conduct la pista secreta: Sonora, bordering Texas and Arizona; the Gulf, just across from Texas, Louisiana and Florida; and Baja, next door to San Diego, Los Angeles and the West Coast. I ask Abrego to take the Gulf as his plaza, to have as his markets Houston, New Orleans, Tampa and Miami. I ask El Verde, Don Chalino, to take the Sonoran plaza, to base himself in Juárez, to have New Mexico, Arizona and the rest of Texas for his market.”

Adán tries without success to read their reactions: the Gulf plaza is potentially rich, but fraught with difficulties as American law enforcement finishes with Mexico and concentrates on the eastern Caribbean. But Abrego should make millions—no, billions—if he can find a source for the product to sell.

He glances at El Verde, whose campesino face is impenetrable. The Sonoran plaza should be lucrative. El Verde should be able to move tons of drugs into Phoenix, El Paso and Dallas, not to mention the route going north from those cities to Chicago, Minneapolis and especially Detroit.

But everyone is waiting for the other shoe to fall, and Adán watches their eyes as they realize that Tío has saved the plum for himself.

Baja.

Tijuana provides access to the enormous markets of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose. And to the transportation systems able to move product to the even richer markets of the northeast United States: Philadelphia, Boston and the gem of gems—New York City.

So there is a Gulf Plaza and a Sonora Plaza, but Baja is the Plaza.

La Plaza.

So no one’s real thrilled, and no one is real surprised, when Barrera says, “Myself, I propose to …

“… move to Guadalajara.”

Now they’re surprised.

None more so than Adán, who can’t believe that Tío is giving up the most potentially lucrative piece of real estate in the Western world. If the Plaza isn’t going to the family, then who—

“I ask,” Barrera says, “Güero Méndez to take the Baja Plaza.”

Adán watches Güero’s face break into a grin. Then he gets it. Has an epiphany that explains the miracle of Güero’s survival in the ambush that killed Don Pedro. Knows now that the Plaza is not a surprise gift but a promise fulfilled.

But why? Adán wonders. What is Tío up to?

And where is my place?

He knows better than to open his mouth and ask. Tío will tell him in private, when he’s ready.

García Abrego leans forward and smiles. His mouth is small under his white mustache. Like a cat’s mouth, Adán thinks. Abrego says, “Barrera divides the world into three pieces, then takes a fourth for himself. I cannot help but wonder why.”

“Abrego, what crops grow in Guadalajara?” Barrera asks. “What border does Jalisco sit on? None. It is a place to be, that’s all. A safe place from which to serve our Federación.”

It’s the first time he’s put a word to it, Adán thinks. The Federation. With himself as its head. Not by title, but by positioning.

“If you accept this arrangement,” Barrera says, “I will share what is mine. My friends will be your friends, my protection your protection.”

“How much will we pay for this protection?” Abrego asks.

“A modest fee,” Barrera says. “Protection is expensive.”

“How expensive?”

“Fifteen percent.”

“Barrera,” Abrego says. “You divide the country into plazas. All very well and good. Abrego will accept the Gulf. But you have forgotten something—in slicing up the fruit, you slice up nothing. There is nothing left. Our fields are burned and poisoned. Our mountains are overrun with policía and Yanquis. So you give us markets—there is no opium for us to sell in these new markets of ours.”

“Forget opium,” Barrera says.

“And the yerba—” Güero begins.

“Forget the marijuana, too,” Barrera says. “It’s small stuff.”

Abrego holds his arms out and says, “So, Miguel Ángel, El Ángel Negro, you tell us to forget la mapola and la yerba. What would you have us grow?”

“Stop thinking like a farmer.”

“I am a farmer.”

“We have a two-thousand-mile land border with the United States,” Barrera says. “Another thousand miles by sea. That’s the only crop we need.”

“What are you talking about?” Abrego snaps.

“Will you join the Federación?”

“Sure, yes,” Abrego says. “I accept this Federation of Nothing. What choice do I have?”

None, Adán thinks. Tío owns the Jalisco State Police and is partners with the DFS. He’s staged an overnight revolution through Operation Condor and come out on top. But—and Abrego is also right about this—on top of what?

“El Verde?” Barrera asks.

“Sí.”

“Méndez?”

“Sí, Don Miguel.”

“Then, hermanos,” Barrera says. “Let me show you the future.”

They repair to a heavily guarded room in the hotel that Barrera owns next door.

Ramón Mette Ballasteros is waiting for them.

Mette is a Honduran, Adán knows, usually connected with the Colombians in Medellín, and the Colombians do little if any business through Mexico. Adán watches him dissolve powder cocaine into a beaker containing a mixture of water and bicarbonate of soda.

He watches as Mette fixes the beaker over a burner and turns the flame up high.

“It’s cocaine,” Abrego says. “So what?”

“Watch,” Barrera says.

Adán watches as the solution starts to boil and listens as the coke makes a funny crackling sound. Then the powder starts to come together into a solid. Mette carefully removes it and sets it out to dry. When it does, it forms a ball that looks like a small rock.

Barrera says, “Gentlemen, meet the future.”

Art stands in front of Santo Jesús Malverde.

“I made you a manda,” Art says. “You kept your part of the deal, I’ll keep mine.”

He leaves the shrine and takes a taxi to the edge of the city.

Already the shantytown is going up.

The refugees from Badiraguato are turning cardboard boxes, packing crates and blankets into the makings of new homes. The lucky and the early have found sheets of corrugated tin. Art even sees an old movie billboard—True Grit—being raised as a roof. A sun-faded John Wayne looks down at the group of families building walls from old sheets, odd bits of plywood, broken cinder blocks.

Parada has found some old tents—Art wonders, Did he browbeat the army?—and has set up a soup kitchen and a makeshift clinic. Some boards laid on sawhorses make a serving table. A tank of propane feeds a flame that heats a thin sheet of tin on which a priest and some nuns are heating soup. Some women are making tortillas on a grill set over an open fire a few feet away.

Art goes into a tent where nurses are washing children, swabbing their arms in preparation for the tetanus shots the doctor is administering for small cuts and wounds. From another part of the big tent, Art hears kids screaming. He moves closer and sees Parada cooing softly to a little girl with burns on her arms. The girl’s eyes are wide with fear and pain.

“The richest opium soil in the Western world,” says Parada, “and we have nothing to ease a child’s pain.”

“I’d change places with her if I could,” Art says.

Parada studies him for a long moment. “I believe you. It’s a pity that you can’t.” He kisses the girl’s cheek. “Jesus loves you.”

A little girl in pain, Parada thinks, and that’s all I have to say to her. There are worse injuries as well. We have men beaten so badly the doctors have had to amputate arms, legs. All because the Americans can’t control their own appetite for drugs. They come to burn the poppies, and they burn children. Let me tell you, Jesus, we could use you in person right now.

Art follows him through the tent.

“ ‘Jesus loves you,’ ” Parada mutters. “Nights like this make me wonder if that’s just crap. What brings you here? Guilt?”

“Something like that.”

Art takes money from his pocket and offers it to Parada. It’s his last month’s salary.

“It will buy medicine,” Art says.

“God bless you.”

“I don’t believe in God,” Art says.

“Doesn’t matter,” Parada says. “He believes in you.”

Then He, Art thinks, is a sucker.

Wild Irish

Where e’er we go, we celebrate

The land that makes us refugees,

From fear of priests with empty plates

From guilt and weeping effigies.

—Shane MacGowan,
“Thousands Are Sailing”

Hell’s Kitchen

New York City
, 1977