The Power of the Dog

Chapter Six
The Lowest Bottom Shook

Mexico City September 19, 1985

The bed shakes.

The shaking merges into her dream, then her waking thoughts: The bed is shaking.

Nora sits up in bed and looks at the clock but has a hard time focusing on the digital numbers because they seem to be vibrating, almost liquefying, in front of her eyes. She reaches over to steady the clock-it’s 8:18 in the morning. Then she realizes that it’s the side table that’s shaking, that everything is-the table, the lamps, the chair, the bed.

She’s in a room on the seventh floor of theRegisHotel, the gracious old landmark on Avenida Juarez near La Alameda Park in the heart of the city. The guest of a cabinet minister, she was brought down to help him celebrate Independence Day, and she’s still here three days later. The minister goes home to his wife in the evenings. In the afternoons he comes to the Regis to celebrate his independence.

Nora thinks she might still be asleep, still dreaming, because now the walls are pulsing.

Am I sick? she wonders. She does feels dizzy, nauseated, all the more so when she gets out of bed and can’t walk or even stand, as the floor seems to be rolling beneath her.

She looks over to the large wall mirror across from the bed, but her face doesn’t look pale. It’s just that her head keeps moving around in the mirror, and then the mirror bows and shatters.

She throws her arm up in front of her eyes and feels little shards of glass hit her. Then she hears the sound of a hard rain, but it isn’t rain-it’s debris falling from the higher floors. Then the floor seems to slide like one of those metal plates in a funhouse, but this isn’t fun-it’s terrifying.

She’d be more terrified if she could see outside the building. See it literally waving, see the top of the hotel bend and sway and actually smack the top of the building next door. She hears it, though. Hears the wicked, dull crack, then the wall behind the bed falls in and she opens the door and runs into the hallway.

Outside, Mexico City is shaking to death.

The city is built on an old lake bed, soft soil, which in turns sits on the large Cocos Tectonic Plate, which is constantly shifting under the Mexican landmass. The city and its soft, loose foundation sit just two hundred miles from the edge of the plate, and one of the world’s largest faults, the giant Middle American Trench, which runs under the Pacific Ocean from the Mexican resort town ofPuerto Vallarta all the way toPanama.

For years there have been small quakes along the northern and southern edges of this plate, but not near the center, not nearMexico City, which the scientists refer to as a “seismic gap.” The geologists compare it to a string of firecrackers that have exploded along both ends but not in the center. They say that sooner or later, the center has to catch fire and explode.

The trouble starts about thirty kilometers beneath the earth’s surface. For countless eons the Cocos Plate has been trying to sink, to slide under the plate to the east of it, and on this morning it succeeds. Forty miles off the coast, 240 miles west ofMexico City, the earth cracks, sending a giant quake through the lithosphere.

If the city had been closer to this epicenter, it might have held up better. The high-rise buildings might have survived the high-frequency, rapid jolting that happens near the actual quake. The buildings might have jumped and landed and cracked, but held up.

But as the quake moves from the center its energy dissipates, which, counterintuitively, makes it more dangerous because of that soft soil. The quake fades into long, slow rolling motions-a set of giant waves, if you will, that get under that soft lake bed, that bowl of Jell-O the city is built on-and that Jell-O just rolls, rolling the buildings with it, shaking the buildings not so much vertically as horizontally, and that’s the problem.

Each floor of the high-rises moves farther sideways than the floor below. The now top-heavy buildings literally slide out into the air, knock heads and slide back again. For two long minutes the tops of these buildings slide sideways, back and forth in the air, and then they just break.

Concrete blocks fall off and tumble down onto the street. Windows burst; huge, jagged pieces of glass fly into the air like missiles. Interior walls collapse, support beams with them. Rooftop swimming pools crack, sending tons of water to collapse the roofs beneath them.

Some buildings just snap off at the fourth or fifth floors, sending two, three, eight, twelve stories of stone, concrete and steel slamming into the street below, thousands of people falling with them, buried under them.

Building after building-250 of them in four minutes-collapses in the quake. The government literally falls-the Secretariat of the Navy, the Secretariat of Commerce and the Secretariat of Communications all topple. The city’s tourist center reads like a roll of casualties, name after name-the Hotel Monte Carlo, the Hotel Romano, the Hotel Versailles, the Roma, theBristol, the Ejecutivo, the Palacio, the Reforma, the Inter-Continental and the Regis all go down. The top half of the Hotel Caribe snaps off like a stick, dumping mattresses, luggage, curtains and guests through the crack and onto the street. Whole neighborhoods virtually disappear-Colonia Roma, Colonia Doctores, Unidad Aragon and the Tlatelolco Housing Project, where a twenty-story apartment tower collapses on its occupants. In a particularly cruel twist, the quake destroys the General Hospital of Mexico and theJuarezHospital, killing and trapping patients and desperately needed doctors and nurses.

Nora doesn’t know any of this. She runs into the hallway, where room doors that have fallen in look like cards in a sophisticated house of cards that has started to collapse. A woman runs ahead of her and presses for the elevator.

“No!” Nora yells.

The woman turns and looks at her, wide-eyed with fear.

“Don’t take the elevator,” Nora says. “Take the stairs.”

The woman stares at her.

Nora tries to remember the words in Spanish, but can’t.

Then the elevator doors slide open and water pours out, like a scene from a bad, grotesque horror film. The woman turns around, looks at Nora, laughs and says, “Agua.”

“Vamos,” Nora says. “Vamonos, whatever. Let’s go. Come on.”

She grabs the woman by the hand to try to pull her down the hall but the woman won’t budge. She yanks her hand back and starts to press the elevator’s Down button again and again.

Nora leaves her and finds the exit door to the stairwell. The floor ripples and rolls under her feet. She gets into the stairway and it’s like being in a long, swaying box. The force knocks her from side to side as she runs down the stairs. There are people in front of her now, and behind; the stairwell is getting crowded. Sounds, horrible sounds, echo in the confined space: cracking, breaking, the noises of a building tearing itself apart-and screams-women’s screams and, worse, the shrill keening of children. She grabs on to the handrail to steady herself, but it’s moving, too.

One floor, two, she tries to count by the landings, then gives up. Is it three floors, four, five? She knows she has to go seven. Idiotically, she can’t remember how they number their floors inMexico . Do they start on ground and go first, second? Or is the ground floor the first, then second, third, fourth…?

What does it matter? Just keep moving, she tells herself, then an awful lurch, like a ship rolling, slams her into the left wall. She keeps her balance, gets her feet under her again. Just keep moving, just keep moving, get out of this building before it comes down on top of you. Just keep going down these stairs.

She thinks, oddly, of the steep stairs going down fromMontmartre through the Place Willette, how some people take the cable car but she always takes the steps because it’s good for her calves but also because she just enjoys it, and if she walks instead of rides it justifies a chocolat chaud at that pretty cafe at the bottom. And I want to go back there again, she thinks, I want to sit at a sidewalk table again and have the waiter smile at me and watch the people, see the funny cathedral, the Basilique du Sacre Coeur at the top, the one that looks like it was made from spun sugar.

Think about that, think about that, don’t think about dying in this trap, this crowded, swaying, rolling deathtrap. God, it’s getting hot in here, God, stop screaming, it doesn’t do any good, shut up, there’s a breath of air, now people are jammed in front of her and then the jam breaks up and she moves behind the people in the lobby.

Chandeliers drop from the ceiling like rotten fruit from a shaken tree, falling and shattering on the old tile floor. She steps over the broken glass toward the revolving doors. So jammed-she waits her turn-she gets in. No need to push, it’s being more than pushed from behind. She gets a scent of air-wonderful air, she sees dim sunlight, she’s almost out Then the building comes down on her.

He’s saying Mass when it hits.

Ten miles from the epicenter, in the Cathedral of Ciudad Guzman, Archbishop Parada holds the host above his head and offers a prayer to God. It’s one of the perks and privileges of being archbishop of the Guadalajara Archdiocese, that he gets to come out here to say the occasional Mass in the little town. He loves the cathedral’s classic churrigueresque architecture, Mexico ’s unique adaptation of the European Gothic into the pagan Aztec and Mayan. The cathedral’s two Gothic towers are rounded into pre-Columbian polyforms, flanking a dome decorated with a panoply of multicolored tiles. Even now, as he faces the retablo behind the altar, he can see the gilded wood carvings-European cherubs and human heads, but also native scrolls of fruit and flowers and birds.

The love of color, of nature, the joy of life-this is what makes him revel in the Mexican brand of Christianity, the seamless blending of indigenous paganism with an emotional, unshakable faith in Jesus. It is not the dry, spare religion of European intellectualism, with its hatred of the natural world. No, the Mexicans have the innate wisdom, the spiritual generosity-how shall he put this?-arms long enough to wrap themselves around this world and the next in a warm embrace.

That’s pretty good, he thinks as he turns back toward the congregation. I should find a way to work that into a sermon.

The cathedral is crowded with worshippers this morning-even though it’s a Thursday-because he is there to celebrate the Mass. I have, he thinks, enough of an ego to enjoy that fact. The truth is that he’s an enormously popular archbishop-he gets out among the people, shares their concerns, their thoughts, their laughs, their meals. Oh, God, he thinks, how I share their meals. He knows that it’s a village joke in whatever town he visits, and he visits all of them: “Widen the chair at the head of the table-Archbishop Juan is coming to dinner.”

He takes a host and starts to place it on the tongue of the worshipper kneeling in front of him.

Then the floor bounces beneath him.

That’s exactly what it feels like, a bounce. Then another and another until the bounces blend into one constant series of jolts.

He feels something wet on his sleeve.

Looks down to see wine hopping out of the cup held by the acolyte beside him. He puts his arm around the boy’s shoulders.

“Move first under the arches,” he says, “then outside. Everyone go now, calmly, quietly.”

He gently pushes the altar boy. “Go on.”

The boy steps down from the altar.

Parada waits. He will wait there until the rest of the crowd in the church has filed out. Be calm, he tells himself. If you are calm, they will be calm. If there’s panic, people might crush one another to get out.

So he stays and looks around.

The carved animals come to life.

They hop and quiver.

The carved faces nod up and down.

A frenzied agreement, Parada thinks. On what, I wonder?

Outside, the two towers tremble.

They are made of old stone. Beautifully handcrafted by local artisans. So much love went into them, so much care. But they stand in the town of Ciudad Guzman, in the province of Jalisco, a name that comes from the original Tarascan inhabitants and means “sandy place.” The stones in the tower are fine, strong and level, but the mortar was made from that sandy soil.

It could hold firm against many things, wind and rain and time, but it was never meant to hold up against a 7.8 earthquake, thirty kilometers deep and just ten miles away.

So as the worshippers patiently file out, the towers quiver, the mortar holding them together shakes loose, and they collapse on top of the great-grandchildren of the men who carved them and set them in place. The towers crash through the tiled dome and come down on twenty-five worshippers.

Because the church is crowded this morning.

For the love of Bishop Juan.

Who stands on the altar, untouched, in shock and horror as the people in front of him just disappear in a cloud of yellow dust.

The host still in his hand.

The body of Christ.

Nora is pulled from the dead.

A steel support beam saved her life. It fell diagonally onto a broken piece of wall and stopped another column from crushing her. Left a crack of space, a little air, as she lay buried beneath the rubble of the Regis Hotel, so she could at least breathe.

Not that there’s much to breathe, the air is filled with so much dust.

She chokes on it, she coughs, she can’t see a thing, but she can hear. Is it minutes later, hours? She doesn’t know, but in that time she wonders if she’s dead. If this is what hell is-trapped in a small, hot space, unable to see, choking on dust. I’m dead, she thinks, dead and buried. She hears the sounds of moans, cries of pain, and wonders if this will last forever. If this is her eternity. Where a whore goes when she dies.

She has just enough space to lay her head on her arm. Maybe I can sleep through hell, she thinks, sleep through eternity. It hurts. She finds that her arm is caked with moist blood, then she remembers the mirror shattering and the glass flying into her arm. I’m not dead, she thinks, feeling the wet blood. Dead people don’t bleed.

I’m not dead, she thinks.

I’m buried alive.

Then she starts to panic.

Starts to hyperventilate, knowing that she shouldn’t, that she’s only using up the small supply of oxygen more quickly, but she can’t help it. The thought of being buried alive, in this coffin under the ground-she remembers some stupid Poe story they made her read in high school. The scratch marks on the top of the coffin…

She wants to scream.

No point in using up my air freaking out, she thinks. There’s better things to do with it. She yells, simply, “Help!”

Over and over again. At the top of her lungs.

Then she hears sirens, footsteps, the sound of feet right above her.

“Help!!”

A beat, then, “?Donde estas?”

“Right here!” she yells. Then thinks, then yells, “?Aqui!”

She hears and feels things being lifted above her. Orders being given, cautions issued. Then she reaches her hand up as far as it will go. A second later feels the incredible warmth of another hand grabbing hers. Then she feels herself being pulled, out and up, and then, miraculously, she’s standing in open space. Well, sort of open. There’s a ceiling of sorts above. Walls and columns slanting crazily. Like standing in a museum of ruins.

A rescue worker holds her by the arms, looks curiously at her.

Then she smells something. A sweet, sickly smell. God, what is that?

A spark hits the gas and sets it off.

Nora hears a sharp crack, then a bass boom that rattles her heart and she falls over the hole. When she looks up again, there’s fire everywhere. It’s like the freaking air is on fire.

And moving toward her.

The men yell, “?Vamonos!?Ahorita!”

Let’s go! Right now!

One of the men grabs Nora’s arm again and pushes her, and they’re running. Flames are all around them, and burning debris falls on their heads, and she hears a crackling sound, smells an acrid, sour smell, and a man is slapping at her head and she realizes that her hair is on fire, but she doesn’t feel it. The man’s sleeve catches on fire but he keeps pushing her, pushing her, and then suddenly they’re in the open air and she wants to fall down but the man won’t let her, he keeps pushing her and pushing her because, behind them, what’s left of the Regis Hotel tumbles and burns.

The other two men don’t make it. They join the other 128 heroes who will die trying to rescue people trapped in the earthquake.

Nora doesn’t know this yet as she trots across Avenida Benito Juarez into the relative safety of the open space of La Alameda Park. She drops to her knees as a policewoman, a traffic warden, throws a coat over her head and pats out the fire.

Nora looks around her-the Regis Hotel is a pile of burning rubble. Next door, the Salinas y Rocha department store looks like it’s been cut in half. Red, green and white streamers, decorations from Independence Day, are floating in the air above the truncated shell of the building. All around her, as far as she can see through the clouds of dust, buildings lie toppled or cut in half. Huge chunks of stone, concrete and twisted steel lie in the streets.

And the people. All over the park, people are on their knees praying.

The sky is dark from smoke and dust.

Blocking out the sun.

And over and over again, she hears the same muttered phrase: “El fin del mundo.”

The end of the world.

The right side of Nora’s hair is scorched black; her left arm is bloody and studded with tiny shards of glass. The shock and adrenaline are wearing off and the pain is starting to come in for real.

Parada kneels over the corpses.

Giving them, posthumously, the last rites.

A line of corpses awaits his attention. Twenty-five bodies wrapped in makeshift shrouds-in blankets, towels, tablecloths, anything that could be found. Lying in a neat line in the dirt outside the fallen cathedral while frantic townspeople comb the ruins for more. Search for their loved ones, missing, trapped under the old stone. Desperately, hopefully listening for any signs of life.

So his mouth mumbles the Latin words, but his heart…

Something has broken inside him, has cracked as surely and lethally as the earth has cracked. There is now a fault line between me and God, he thinks.

The God that is, the God that isn’t.

He can’t tell them that-it would be cruel. They’re looking to him to send the souls of their dearly departed to heaven. He can’t disappoint them, not at this time, maybe never. The people need hope and I can’t take it away. I’m not as cruel as You, he thinks.

So he says the prayers. Anoints them with oil and goes on with the ritual.

Behind him a priest approaches.

“Padre Juan?”

“Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“You’re wanted in Mexico City.”

“I’m needed here.”

“They are orders, Padre Juan.”

“Whose orders?”

“The papal nuncio,” the priest says. “Everyone is being summoned, to organize the relief. You have done such work before, so-”

“I have dozens of dead here-”

“There are thousands dead in Mexico City,” the priest says.

“Thousands?”

“No one knows how many,” says the priest. “And tens of thousands homeless.”

So, Parada thinks, there it is-the living must be served.

“As soon as I’m done here,” Parada says.

He goes back to giving the last rites.

They can’t get her to leave.

A lot of people try-police, rescue workers, paramedics-but Nora won’t go to get medical help.

“Your arm, Senorita, your face-”

“Bullshit,” she says. “There are a lot of people hurt a lot worse. I’m okay.”

I’m in pain, she thinks, but I’m okay. It’s funny, a day ago I would have thought that those two things couldn’t go together, but now I know they can. So her arm hurts, her head hurts, her face, scorched from the fire like a very bad sunburn, hurts, but she feels okay.

In fact, she feels strong.

Pain?

Fuck pain-there are people dying.

She doesn’t want help now-she wants to help.

So she sits down and carefully picks the glass out of her arm, then washes it in a broken water main. Rips a sleeve off the linen pajamas she’s still wearing (glad that she’s always opted for linen over some flimsy silk thing) and ties it around the wound. Then she tears the other sleeve and uses it as a kerchief over her nose and mouth because the dust and smoke are choking, and the smell…

It’s the smell of death.

Unimaginable if you’ve never smelled it, unforgettable once you have.

She tightens the kerchief on her face and goes in search of something to put on her feet. Not hard to do, seeing as how the department store has basically exploded its contents onto the street. So she appropriates a pair of rubber flip-flops, doesn’t consider it looting (there is no looting-despite the overwhelming poverty of many of the city’s residents, there is no looting), and joins a volunteer rescue crew digging up the rubble of the hotel, searching for survivors. There are hundreds of these crews, thousands of volunteers digging through fallen buildings all over the city, working with shovels, picks, tire irons, broken rebar and bare hands to get to the people trapped underneath. Carrying the dead and wounded out in blankets, sheets, shower curtains, anything to help the hopelessly overextended emergency personnel. Other volunteer crews help remove the rubble from the streets to clear the way for ambulances and fire trucks. Fire department helicopters hover over burning buildings, lowering men on winches to pluck out people who can’t be reached from the ground.

All the while, thousands of radios drone a litany, pierced by screams of grief or joy from the listeners as the announcer reads the names of the dead and the names of the survivors.

There are other sounds-moans, whimpers, prayers, screams, cries for help-all muffled, all from deep within the ruins. Voices of people trapped under tons of rubble.

So the workers keep working. Quietly, doggedly, the volunteers and professionals search for survivors. Digging beside Nora is a troop of Girl Scouts. They can’t be more than nine years old, Nora thinks, looking at their serious, determined faces, already carrying, literally, the weight of the world. So there are Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, soccer clubs, bridge clubs, and just individuals like Nora, who form themselves into teams.

Doctors and nurses, the few who are left after the collapse of the hospitals, comb the rubble with stethoscopes, lowering the instruments to the rocks to listen for any faint signs of life. When they do, the workers holler for quiet, the sirens stop, the vehicles turn off their motors and everyone remains perfectly still. And then a doctor might smile or nod, and the crews move in, carefully, gently but efficiently moving the rock and steel and concrete, and sometimes there’s a happy ending with someone plucked from the rubble. Other times it is sadder-they just can’t move the rubble fast enough; they are too late and find a lifeless body.

Either way, they keep working.

All that day and through the night.

Nora stops once during the night. Takes a break and gets a cup of tea and a slice of bread from a relief station set up in the park. The park is crowded with the newly homeless and with people afraid to stay in their houses and apartment buildings. So the park resembles a giant refugee center, which, Nora thinks, I guess it is.

What’s different about it is the quiet. Radios are turned on low, people whisper prayers, talk quietly to their children. There’s no arguing, no pushing or shoving for the small supply of food or water. People wait patiently in line, bring the spare meals to the old and the children, help one another carry water, set up makeshift tents and shelters, dig latrines. Those whose homes weren’t damaged bring blankets, pots and pans, food, clothing.

A woman hands Nora a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt.

“Take these.”

“I couldn’t.”

“It’s getting cold.”

Nora takes the clothing.

“Thank you. Gracias.”

Nora goes behind a tree to change. Clothes never felt so good. The flannel feels wonderful and warm on her skin. She has closets full of clothes at home, she thinks, most of which she’s worn once or twice. She’d give a lot right now for a pair of socks. She’s known that the elevation of the city is more than a mile high, but now she feels it as the night gets cold. She wonders about the people still trapped beneath the buildings, if they can stay warm.

She finishes her tea and bread, then ties her kerchief back on and walks back to the ruins of the hotel. Gets on her knees beside a middle-aged woman and starts to move more rubble.

Parada walks through hell.

Fires burn crazily, rampantly, from broken gas lines. Flames glow from inside the shells of ruined buildings, lighting the Stygian darkness outside. The acrid smoke stings his eyes. Dust fills his nose and mouth and makes him cough. He gags on the smell. The sickening stench of decomposing bodies, the stink of burned flesh. Underneath those sharp smells, the duller but still pungent scent of human feces, as the sewer systems have failed.

It gets worse as he moves along, encounters child after child, wandering, crying for their mothers and fathers. Some of them in just underwear or pajamas, others in full school uniforms. He gathers them up as he goes along. He has a little boy in one arm and he’s holding the hand of a little girl with the other, and she’s holding another child’s hand, who is holding another…

By the time he gets to La Alameda Park he has over twenty children with him. He wanders until he finds where Catholic Relief has set up a tent.

Parada finds a monsignor and asks, “Have you seen Antonucci?”

Meaning Cardinal Antonucci, the papal nuncio, the Vatican’s highest representative in Mexico.

“He’s saying Mass at the cathedral.”

“The city doesn’t need a Mass,” Parada says. “It needs power and water. Food, blood and plasma.”

“The spiritual needs of the community-”

“Si, si, si, si,” Parada says, walking away. He needs to think, to get his head together. There’s so much to be organized, so many people with so many needs. It’s overwhelming. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and starts to light one.

A voice-a woman’s voice-bites out of the darkness. “Put that out. Are you nuts?”

He snuffs the match out. Shines his flashlight and finds the woman’s face. An extraordinarily pretty face, even under all the dust and grime.

“Broken gas lines,” she says. “Do you want to blow us all up?”

“There are fires all over,” he says.

“Then I guess we don’t need another one, huh?”

“No, I suppose not,” Parada says. “You’re American.”

“Yeah.”

“You got here quickly.”

“I was here,” Nora says, “when it happened.”

“Ah.”

He looks her over. Feels the faint ghost of a long-forgotten stirring. The woman is small, but there’s something of the warrior about her. A real chip on her shoulder. She wants to fight, but she doesn’t know what or how.

Like me, he thinks.

He puts a hand out.

“Juan Parada.”

“Nora.”

Just Nora, Parada observes. No last name.

“Do you live in Mexico City, Nora?”

“No, I came down on business.”

“What kind of business are you in?” he asks.

She looks him square in the eye. “I’m a call girl.”

“I’m afraid I don’t-”

“A prostitute.”

“Ah.”

“What do you do?”

He smiles. “I’m a priest.”

“You’re not dressed like a priest.”

“You’re not dressed like a prostitute,” he says. “Actually, I’m even worse than a priest, I’m a bishop. An archbishop.”

“Is that better than a bishop?”

“If you’re judging solely by rank,” he says. “I was happier as a priest.”

“Then why don’t you go back to being a priest?”

He smiles again, and nods, and says, “I’m going to wager that you’re a very successful call girl.”

“I am,” Nora says. “I’ll bet you’re a very successful archbishop.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of quitting.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure I believe anymore.”

Nora shrugs and says, “Fake it.”

“Fake it?”

“It’s easy,” she says. “I do it all the time.”

“Oh. Ohhhh, I see.” Parada feels himself blushing. “But why should I fake anything?”

“Power,” Nora says. Seeing Parada’s puzzled look, she goes on. “An archbishop must be pretty powerful, right?”

“In some ways.”

Nora nods. “I sleep with a lot of powerful men. I know that when they want something done, it gets done.”

“So?”

“So,” she says, pointing her chin at the park around her, “there’s a lot that needs to get done.”

“Ah.”

From the mouths of babes, Parada thinks. Not to mention prostitutes.

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” he says. “We should stay in touch.”

“A whore and a bishop?” Nora says.

“Clearly, you’ve never read the Bible,” Parada says. “The New Testament? Mary Magdalene? Ring a bell?”

“No.”

“In any case, it would be all right for us to be friends,” he says, then quickly adds, “I don’t mean that kind of friends, of course. I took a vow… I simply mean… I would like it if we were friends.”

“I think I’d like that, too.”

He takes a card from his pocket. “When things calm down, would you call me?”

“Yeah, I will.”

“Good. Well, I’d better get going. Things to do.”

“Me, too.”

He walks back to the Catholic Relief tent.

“Start getting these kids’ names,” he orders a priest, “then compare them with the roll of dead, missing, and survivors. Someone somewhere must be keeping a list of parents looking for children. Cross-index their names against that.”

“Who are you?” the priest asks.

“I’m the Archbishop of Guadalajara,” he says. “Now, get moving. And put someone else to getting these children food and blankets.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“And I’ll need a car.”

“Your Grace?”

“A car,” Parada says. “I’ll need a car to take me to the nunciate.”

The papal nunciate, Antonucci’s residence, is in the south of the city, far from the most damaged areas. The electricity will be running, the lights on. Most importantly, the phones will be working.

“Many of the streets are blocked, Your Grace.”

“And many of them aren’t,” Parada says. “You’re still standing there. Why?”

Two hours later, Papal Nuncio Cardinal Girolamo Antonucci returns to his residence to find an upset staff and Archbishop Parada in his office, his feet up on the desk, sucking on a cigarette, snapping orders into the telephone.

Parada looks up when Antonucci comes in.

“Can you get us some more coffee?” Parada asks. “It’s going to be a long night.”

And a longer day tomorrow.

Guilty pleasures.

Hot, strong coffee. Fresh warm bread.

And thank God Antonucci is Italian and smokes, Parada thinks as he draws into his lungs that guiltiest of all guilty pleasures, at least among the ones available to a priest.

He exhales the smoke and watches it rise to the ceiling, listening as Antonucci sets his cup down and says to the minister of the interior, “I have spoken to His Holiness personally, and he wishes me to assure the government of his beloved people of Mexico that the Vatican stands ready to offer whatever aid it can, despite the fact that we still do not enjoy formal diplomatic relations with the government of Mexico.”

Antonucci looks like a bird, Parada thinks.

A tiny bird with a small, neat beak.

He was dispatched from Rome eight years ago with the mission of bringing Mexico formally back into the fold after over one hundred years of official government anti-clericism, since the Ley Lerdo of 1856 had seized the vast church-owned haciendas and other lands and sold them off. The revolutionary constitution of 1857 had stripped the power of the Church in Mexico, and the Vatican retaliated by excommunicating any Mexican who took the constitutional oath.

So for a century an uneasy truce has existed between the Vatican and the Mexican government. Formal relations have never been resumed, but not even the most rabid socialists of the PRI-the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has ruled Mexico in a one-party, pseudo-democratic government since 1917-would try to totally abolish the Church in this land of faithful peasants. So there have been petty harassments such as the ban on clerical garb, but mostly there has been a grudging accommodation between the government and the Vatican.

But it has always been a goal of the Vatican to regain formal status in Mexico, and as a politician from the Church’s arch-conservative wing, Antonucci has lectured Parada and the other bishops that “we must not lose the faithful of Mexico to godless Communism.”

So it’s natural, Parada thinks, that Antonucci would view the earthquake as an opportunity. See the deaths of ten thousand of the faithful as God’s way of bringing the government to its knees.

Necessity will force the government to eat a lot of crow over the next few days; it has yet to humble itself by accepting aid from the Americans, but it will. And it has yet to crawl to the Church for help, but here it is.

And we’ll give them the money.

Money that we’ve collected from the faithful, rich and poor, for centuries. The coin in the collection plate, untaxed, invested at great profit. So now, Parada thinks, we will extract a price from a prostrate country to give it back the money we took from it in the first place.

Christ would weep.

Money changers in the temple?

We are the money changers in the temple.

“You need money,” Antonucci says to the minister. “You need it quickly, and you’re going to have a hard time borrowing it, given your government’s already precarious credit ratings.”

“We’ll issue bonds.”

“Who’ll buy them?” Antonucci asks, a hint of a satisfied sneer playing at the corners of his mouth. “You can’t offer enough interest to tempt investors for that kind of money. You can’t even service, never mind repay, the debts you already have. We should know; we already hold a stack of Mexican paper.”

“Insurance,” the minister says.

“You’re underinsured,” Antonucci says. “Your own Department of the Interior has turned a blind eye to all the hotels’ practice of underinsurance, to encourage tourism. The stores, the apartment buildings-same thing. Even the government ministries that collapsed were grossly underinsured. Or self-insured, I should say, without the funds to back it up. It’s a bit of a scandal, I’m afraid. So while your government might hold the Vatican in official disdain, the financial institutions have a somewhat better opinion of us. I believe it’s referred to in the jargon as 'Triple A.’ ”

Machiavelli could only have been an Italian, Parada thinks.

If it weren’t such a hideously cynical piece of extortion, you’d almost have to admire it.

But there’s too much work to be done, and it’s urgent, so Parada says, “Let’s cut through the shit, shall we? We will gladly bring whatever aid we can, financial and material, on an informal basis. You, in return, will allow our clergy to wear the cross and clearly label any material aid as coming from the Holy Roman Catholic Church. You will guarantee that the next administration, within thirty days of taking office, will commence good-faith negotiations on establishing formal relations between the state and the Church.”

“That’s in 1988,” Antonucci snaps. “Almost three years away.”

“Yes, I did the math,” Parada says. He turns back to the minister. “Do we have a deal?”

Yes, they do.

“Just who do you think you are?” Antonucci asks after the minister leaves. “Don’t you ever supersede me in a negotiation again. I had him on the run.”

“Is that our role now?” Parada asks. “To keep needy people on the run?”

“You do not have the authority to-”

“Am I being taken to the woodshed?” Parada asks. “If so, please be quick about it. I have work to do.”

“You seem to forget that I am your direct superior.”

“You can’t forget what you don’t acknowledge in the first place,” Parada says. “You’re not my superior. You’re a politician sent by Rome to conduct politics.”

Antonucci says, “The earthquake was an act of God-”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

“-which provides an opportunity to save the souls of millions of Mexicans.”

“Don’t save their souls!” Parada yells. “Save them!”

“That is sheer heresy!”

“Good!”

It isn’t just the earthquake victims, Parada thinks. It’s the millions living in poverty. The literally countless millions in the slums of Mexico City, the people living on garbage dumps in Tijuana, the landless peasants in Chiapas who are in reality little more than serfs.

“This 'liberation theology’ doesn’t fly with me, “ Antonucci says.

“I don’t care,” Parada says. “I don’t answer to you-I answer to God.”

“I can pick up this phone and have you transferred to a chapel in Tierra del Fuego.”

Parada grabs the phone and hands it to him.

“Do it,” he says. “I’d be very happy being a parish priest at the ends of the earth. Why aren’t you dialing? Shall I do it for you? I’m calling your bluff. I’ll call Rome, and then I’ll call the newspapers to tell them exactly why I’m being transferred.”

He watches little red spots appear on Antonucci’s cheeks. The bird is upset, Parada thinks. I have ruffled his smooth feathers. But Antonucci regains his calm, his placid exterior, even his self-satisfied smile, as he sets down the receiver.

“Good choice,” Parada says with a confidence he doesn’t feel. “I’ll head up this relief effort, I’ll launder the Church’s money so as not to embarrass the government, and I’ll help bring the Church back to Mexico.”

“I’m waiting for the quid,” Antonucci says, “in the pro quo.”

“The Vatican will make me a cardinal.”

Because the power to do good can come only with, well, power.

Antonucci says, “You have become something of a politician yourself.”

It’s true, Parada thinks.

Good.

Fine.

So be it.

“So we have an understanding,” Parada says.

Suddenly he’s become more of a cat than a bird, Parada thinks. Thinking he’s swallowed the canary. That I’ve sold my soul to him for the sake of my ambition. A transaction that he can understand.

Good, let him think it.

Fake it, the lovely American prostitute had said.

She’s right-it’s easy.

Tijuana

1985

Adan Barrera contemplates the deal he just made with the PRI.

It was really quite simple, he thinks. You go into breakfast with a briefcase full of cash and you leave without it. It stays under the table by your feet, never mentioned but assumed, a tacit understanding: Despite American pressure to the contrary, Tio will be allowed to come home from his exile in Honduras.

And retire.

Tio will live quietly in Guadalajara and manage his legitimate businesses in peace. That’s the upside of the arrangement.

The downside is that Garcia Abrego will realize his longtime ambition of replacing Tio as El Patron. And perhaps this is not such a bad thing. Tio’s health is precarious and, face it, he’s changed since that Talavera bitch betrayed him. God, he actually loved the little segundera, wanted to marry her, and he’s not the same man he was.

So Abrego will assume the leadership of the Federacion from his base in the Gulf states. El Verde will continue to run Sonora; Guero Mendez will still have the Baja Plaza.

And the Mexican federal government will look the other way.

Thanks to the earthquake.

The government needs cash to rebuild, and right now there are only two sources-the Vatican and the narcos. The Church has already kicked in, Adan knows, and so will we. But there will be a quid pro quo, and the government will honor it.

In addition, the Federacion will also foot the bill to make certain that the ruling party, the PRI, wins the upcoming elections, as it has since the revolution. Even now, Adan is helping Abrego organize a $25 million-a-plate fund-raising dinner, to which every major narco and businessman in Mexico will be expected to contribute.

If, that is, they want to do business.

And do we ever need to do business, Adan thinks. The Hidalgo fiasco was a major disruption, and even with Arturo out of the country and things settling down, there is a lot of money to be made up. Now, with our relationship with Mexico City on firm footing again, we can get back to business as usual.

Which means stealing the Baja Plaza from Guero.

It had been Tio’s idea for his nephews to infiltrate Tijuana.

Like cuckoo birds.

Because the long-term plan is to slowly grow rich in power and influence, and then throw Guero out of his nest. He’s an absentee landlord anyway, trying to run the Baja Plaza from his ranch outside Culiacan. Guero relies on lieutenants to run the day-to-day in La Plaza, narcos loyal to him, like Juan Esparagoza and Tito Mical.

And Adan and Raul Barrera.

It had been Tio’s idea for Adan and Raul to ingratiate themselves with the scions of the Tijuana establishment. “Become part of the fabric, so if they want to rip you out, they can’t do it without ripping the whole blanket. And that, they will not do.” Do it slowly, do it carefully, do it without Guero taking notice, but do it.

“Start with the kids,” he’d advised. “Senior will do anything to protect Junior.”

So Adan and Raul had launched a charm offensive. Bought expensive homes in the exclusive Colonia Hipodromo, and suddenly they were just there. Actually, everywhere. Like one day there was no Raul Barrera, and the next day he’s everywhere you go. Go to a club, Raul is there picking up the tab; go to the beach, Raul is out there doing karate katas; go to the races, Raul is there laying down piles of bills on long shots; go to a disco, Raul is there flooding the place with Dom Perignon. He starts to gather a following around him, the scions of Tijuana society, the nineteen- and twenty-year-old sons of bankers, lawyers, doctors and government officials, who like to park their cars alongside a wall by a huge, ancient oak tree and talk shit with Raul.

Pretty soon, the tree becomes just “the tree”-and everyone who’s anyone hangs out at El Arbol.

Like Fabian Martinez.

Fabian is movie-star handsome.

He doesn’t resemble his namesake-some old singer/beach-movie guy-he looks like a young, Hispanic Tony Curtis. Fabian is a handsome kid and knows it. Everyone’s been telling him this since he was six years old, and the mirror is just a confirmation. He’s tall, with copper skin and a wide, sensuous mouth. His black hair is full and worn slicked straight back. He has bright, white teeth-created by years of expensive orthodontics-and a smile that is seductive.

He knows this because he’s practiced it-a lot.

Fabian is hanging out one day when he overhears someone say, “Let’s go kill somebody.”

Fabian looks at his cuate Alejandro.

This is just too cool.

This is right out of Scarface.

Although Raul Barrera doesn’t look anything like Al Pacino. Raul is tall and well-built, with big heavy shoulders and a neck that goes along with the karate moves he’s always demonstrating. Today he’s wearing a leather jacket and a San Diego Padres baseball cap. The jewelry, though-that’s like Pacino. Raul is dripping in it-thick gold chains around his neck, gold bracelets on his wrists, gold rings and the inevitable gold Rolex watch.

Actually, Fabian thinks, Raul’s older brother looks more like Al Pacino, but there the resemblance to Scarface ends. Fabian’s met Adan Barrera only a few times: at a nightclub with Ramon, at a boxing match, another time at “El Big”-Ted’s Big Boy hamburger joint on Avenida Revolucion. But Adan looks more like an accountant than a narcotraficante. No mink coats, no jewelry, very quiet and soft-spoken. If nobody pointed him out to you, you wouldn’t know he was there.

Raul you know is there.

Today he’s leaning against his bright red Porsche Targa, talking casually about killing somebody.

Anybody.

“Who has a grudge?” Raul asks them. “Who do you want hosed off the street?”

Fabian and Alejandro exchange another glance.

They’ve been cuates-buddies-a long time, almost from birth, seeing as how they were born just a few weeks apart in the same hospital-Scripps in San Diego. This was a common practice among Tijuana’s upper class back in the late ’60s: They went across the border to have their children so that the kids would have the advantage of dual citizenship. So Fabian and Alejandro and most of their cuates were born in the States, went to kindergarten and preschool together in the exclusive Hipodromo neighborhood in the hills above downtown Tijuana. Around the time they were ready to go into the fifth or sixth grade, their mothers moved back to San Diego with the children so that the kids could attend middle and high school in the States, learn English, become totally bicultural and make the trans-national contacts that would become so important to success in later life. Their parents recognized that while Tijuana and San Diego might be in two different countries, they’re in the same business community.

Fabian, Alejandro and all their buddies went to the Catholic all-boy Augustine High School in San Diego; their sisters went to Our Lady of Peace. (Their parents took a quick look at the San Diego public schools and decided they didn’t want their children to be that bicultural.) They spent their weekdays with the priests and their weekends back in Tijuana, partying at the country club or hitting the beach resorts of Rosarito and Ensenada. Or sometimes they stayed in San Diego, doing the same shit that American teenagers do on the weekend-shopping for clothes in the mall, going to movies, heading out to Pacific Beach or La Jolla Shores, partying at the house of whichever friend’s parents were away for the weekend (and they’re away a lot-one of the bonuses of being a rich kid is that your parents have the money to travel), drinking, screwing, smoking dope.

These boys have cash in their pockets and dress well. They always did-junior high, high school. Fabian, Alejandro and their crowd wore the latest styles, shopped at the best stores. Even now, both of them in college back in Baja, they have the pocket money to put the best threads on their backs. A lot of the time they don’t spend in discos and clubs or hanging out here under El Arbol they spend shopping. They spend a hell of a lot more time shopping than they do studying, that’s for sure.

It’s not that either of them is stupid.

They’re not.

Particularly Fabian-he’s one smart kid. He could ace a business course with his eyes closed-which they are in class about half the time. Fabian can figure compound interest in his head by the time you’ve punched the numbers into your calculator. He could be a terrific student.

But there’s no need. It isn’t part of the plan.

The plan is this: You go to high school in the States, you come back and get gentlemen’s C’s at college, your daddy puts you into business, and with all the connections you’ve made on both sides of the border, you make money.

That’s the life plan.

But the plan didn’t figure on the Barrera brothers moving into town. It wasn’t anywhere on the chart that Adan and Raul Barrera would move into Colonia Hipodromo and rent a big white mansion on the hill.

Fabian met Raul at a disco. He’s sitting at a table with a bunch of friends and this amazing guy walks in-full-length mink coat, bright green cowboy boots and a black cowboy hat, and Fabian looks at Alejandro and says, “Will you look at this?”

They think the dude is a joke, except the joke looks at them, shouts for a waiter and orders thirty bottles of champagne.

Thirty bottles of champagne.

And not some cheap shit, either-Dom.

For which he pays cash.

Then he asks, “Who’s partying with me?”

Everybody, as it turns out.

The party is on Raul Barrera.

The party is on, period, man.

Then one day he’s not just there, he’s taking you there.

Like, they’re sitting around El Arbol one day, smoking a little weed and doing some karate, and Raul starts talking about Felizardo.

“The boxer?” Fabian asks. Cesar Felizardo-only about the biggest hero in Mexico.

“No, the farmworker,” Raul answers. He finishes a spinning back kick, then looks at Fabian. “Yes, the boxer. He’s fighting Perez next week here in town.”

“You can’t get tickets,” Fabian answers.

“No, you can’t get tickets,” Raul says.

“You can?”

“He’s from my town,” Raul says. “Culiacan. I used to manage him-he’s my viejo. You guys want to go, I’ll hook it up.”

Yes, they want to go, and yes, Raul hooks it up. Ringside seats. The fight doesn’t last long-Felizardo knocks Perez out in the third round-but still it’s a kick. The bigger kick is that Raul takes them into the dressing room afterward-they actually get to meet Felizardo. He stands around talking with them like they’re old buddies.

Fabian notices something else here, too: Felizardo treats them like buddies, and Raul he treats like a cuate, but the boxer treats Adan differently. There’s an air of deference in the way he talks to Adan. And Adan doesn’t stay long, just comes in and quietly congratulates the boxer and then leaves.

But everything stops for the few minutes he’s in the room.

Yeah, Fabian gets the idea that the Barrera brothers can take you places, and not just grandstand seats at the soccer match (Raul takes them there); or box seats at the Padres games (Raul takes them there); or even to Vegas, where they all fly a month later, stay at the Mirage, lose all their fucking money, watch Felizardo pound the shit out of Rodolfo Aguilar for six rounds to retain his lightweight title, then party with a platoon of high-priced call girls in Raul’s suite and fly home-hungover, fucked-out and happy-the next afternoon.

No, he gets the idea that the Barreras can take you places in a hurry that you might not get in years, if ever, working fourteen-hour days in your daddy’s office.

You hear things about the Barreras-the money they throw around comes from drugs (yeah, like, duh)-but you especially hear things about Raul. One of the stories they’ve heard whispered about Raul goes like this:

He’s sitting in his ride outside the house, bandera music blasting on the speakers and the bass turned up to sonic-boom level, when one of the neighbors comes out and knocks on the car window.

Raul lowers the window. “Yeah?”

“Could you turn it down?!” the guy screams over the music. “I can hear it inside! It’s rattling the windows!”

Raul decides to fuck with him a little.

“What?!” he yells. “I can’t hear you!”

The man’s in no mood to be messed with. He is macho, too. So he hollers, “The music! Turn it down! It’s too fucking loud!”

Raul takes his pistol from his jacket, sticks it in the man’s chest and pulls the trigger.

“It’s not too fucking loud now, is it, pendejo?”

The man’s body disappears, and no one complains about Raul’s music after that.

Fabian and Alejandro have talked about that story and decided that it must be bullshit, right, it can’t be true, it’s too Scarface to be real, but now here is Raul finishing up a roach and suggesting, “Let’s go kill somebody,” like he’s suggesting going to Baskin-Robbins for an ice cream cone.

“Come on,” Raul says, “there must be somebody you want to get even with.”

Fabian smiles at Alejandro and says, “All right…”

Fabian’s dad had given him a Miata; Alejandro’s parents had kicked forth with a Lexus. They were out racing the cars the other night, like they do a lot of nights. Except this one night Fabian goes to pass Alejandro on a two-lane road and there’s another car coming the other way. Fabian just tucks it back into his lane, missing a head-on crash by a pelo del chocho. Turns out the other driver is a guy who works in his father’s office building and recognizes the car. He calls Fabian’s dad, who has a shit fit and jerks the Miata for six months, and now Fabian is without a ride.

Fabian tells this tale of woe to Raul.

It’s a joke, right? It’s a goof, a laugh, stoner talk.

It is until a week later, when the man disappears.

One of those rare nights that Fabian’s dad comes home for dinner, Fabian’s there, and his dad starts talking about how a man in his building is missing, just dropped off the face of the earth, and Fabian excuses himself from the table and goes into the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face.

He meets Alejandro later at a club and they talk about it under the cover of the booming music. “Shit,” Fabian says, “do you really think he did it?”

“I don’t know,” Alejandro says. Then he looks at Fabian, laughs and says, “Noooooo.”

But the man never comes back. Raul never says word one about it, but the man never comes back. And Fabian is, like, freaked out. It was just a joke, he was just testing, just bouncing off Raul’s bullshit, and now because of it a man is dead?

And how, as a school counselor might ask, does that make you feel?

Fabian’s surprised by the answer.

He feels freaked, guilty and Good.

Powerful.

You point your finger and Adios, motherfucker.

It’s like sex, only better.

Two weeks later he works up the nerve to talk to Raul about business. They get into the red Porsche and go for a drive.

“How do I get in?” Fabian asks.

“In what?”

“La pista secreta,” Fabian says. “I don’t have a lot of money. I mean, not a lot of my own money.”

“You don’t need money,” Raul says.

“I don’t?”

“You have a green card?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s your starter kit.”

Easy as that. Two weeks later Raul gives Fabian a Ford Explorer and tells him to drive it across the border at Otay Mesa. Tells him what time to cross and what lane to use. Fabian’s scared as shit, but it’s a weird, good scared-it’s a shot of adrenaline, a kick. He crosses the border like it doesn’t exist; the man waves him right through. He drives to the address Raul gives him, where two guys get into his Explorer and he gets into theirs and then drives back to TJ.

Raul lays ten grand American on him.

Cash.

Fabian hooks Alejandro up, too.

They’re cuates, dig, buddies.

Alejandro makes a couple of runs as his wingman and then he’s in business for himself. It’s all good, they’re making money, but “We’re not making real money,” he tells Alejandro one afternoon.

“Feels real to me.”

“But the real money is in moving coke.”

He goes to Raul and says he’s ready to move up.

“That’s cool, bro,” Raul says. “We’re all about upward mobility.”

He tells Fabian how it works and even sets him up with the Colombians. Sits with him while they make a pretty standard contract-Fabian will take delivery of fifty kilos of coke, dropped off a fishing boat at Rosarito. He’ll take it across the border at a thousand a key. A hundred of that g, though, goes to Raul for protection.

Bam.

Forty g's, just like that.

Fabian does two more contracts and buys himself a Mercedes.

Like, you can keep the Miata, Dad. Park that Japanese lawn mower, and keep it parked. And while you’re at it, you can lay off busting my chops about grades because I’ve already aced Marketing 101. I am already a commodities broker, Dad. Don’t worry about whether you can bring me into the firm because the last thing in this world I want is a J-O-B.

Couldn’t afford the pay cut.

You think Fabian was pulling chicks before, you should see him now.

Fabian has M-O-N-E-Y.

He’s twenty-one years old and living large.

The other guys see it, the other sons of doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers. They see it and they want it. Pretty soon, most of the guys who hang around Raul’s little circle at El Arbol-doing karate and blowing yerba-are in the business. They’re driving the shit into the States, or they’re making their own contracts and kicking up to Raul.

They’re in it-the next generation of the Tijuana power structure-up to their necks.

Pretty soon, the group gets a nickname.

The Juniors.

Fabian becomes, like, the Junior.

He’s hanging loose down in Rosarito one night when he bumps into a boxer named Eric Casavales and his promoter, an older guy named Jose Miranda. Eric’s a pretty good boxer, but tonight he’s drunk and completely miscomprehends this soft yuppie pup he jostles in the street. Drinks are spilled, shirts are stained, words exchanged. Laughing, Casavales whips a pistol out of his waistband and waves it at Fabian before Jose can walk him away.

So Casavales staggers off, laughing at the scared look on rich boy’s face when he saw the pistol barrel, and he’s still laughing as Fabian goes to his Mercedes, takes his own pistol out of the glove box, finds Casavales and Miranda standing out in front of the boxer’s car and shoots them both to death.

Fabian throws the pistol into the ocean, gets back into his Mercedes and drives back to TJ.

Feeling pretty good.

Pretty good about himself.

That’s one version of the story. The other-popular at Ted’s Big Boy-is that Martinez’s confrontation with the boxer wasn’t accidental at all, that Casavales’s promoter was holding up a fight that Cesar Felizardo needed in order to move up and just wouldn’t budge on it, even after Adan Barrera approached him personally with a very reasonable offer. Nobody knows what the real reason is, but Casavales and Miranda are dead, and later that year, Felizardo gets his fight for the lightweight championship and wins it.

Fabian denies killing anyone for any reason, but the more he denies it, the more the stories gain credence.

Raul even gives him a nickname.

El Tiburon.

The Shark.

Because he moves like a shark through the water.

Adan doesn’t work the kids-he works the grown-ups.

Lucia is an enormous help, with her pedigree and old-school style. She takes him to a good tailor, buys him conservative, expensive business suits and understated clothes. (Adan tries, but fails, to make Raul undergo the same transformation. If anything, his brother becomes more flamboyant, adding to his Sinaloan narco-cowboy wardrobe, for instance, a full-length mink coat.) She takes him to the private power clubs, to the French restaurants in the Rio district, to the private parties at the private homes in the Hipodromo, Chapultepec and Rio neighborhoods.

And they go to church, of course. They’re at Mass every Sunday morning. They leave large checks in the collection plate, make large contributions to the building fund, the orphans’ fund, the fund for aged priests. They have Father Rivera to the house for dinner, they host backyard barbecues, they serve as godparents for an increasing number of the young couples just starting their families. They’re like any other young upwardly mobile couple in Tijuana-he’s a quiet, serious businessman with first one restaurant, then two, then five; she’s a young businessman’s wife.

Lucia goes to the gym, to lunch with the other young wives, to San Diego to shop at Fashion Valley and Horton Plaza. She understands this as her duty to her husband’s business, but limits it to her duty. The other wives understand-poor Lucia must spend time with the poor child, she wants to be home, she is devoted to the Church.

She’s a godmother now to half a dozen babies. It hurts her-she feels that she’s doomed to stand with a stricken smile on her face, holding someone else’s healthy child by the baptismal font.

Adan, when he’s not at home, can be found in his office or in the back of one of his restaurants, sipping coffee and doing the numbers on a yellow manuscript pad. If you didn’t know what business he was really in, you would never guess it. He looks like a young accountant, a numbers-cruncher. If you couldn’t see the actual figures scratched in pencil on the manuscript pad, you would never think that they are calculations of x kilos of cocaine times the delivery fee from the Colombians, minus the transport costs, the protection costs, the employee wages and other overhead, Guero’s 10 percent cut, Tio’s ten points. There are more prosaic calculations as to the cost of beef tenderloin, linen napkins, cleaning supplies and the like for the five restaurants he now owns, but most of his time is taken up with the more complicated accounting of moving tons of Colombian cocaine as well as Guero’s sinsemilla, and a small bit of heroin just to keep their hand in the market.

He rarely, if ever, sees the actual drugs, the suppliers or the customers. Adan just handles the money-charging it, counting it, cleaning it. But not collecting it-that’s Raul’s business.

Raul handles his business.

Take the case of the two money mules who take $200K of Barrera cash, drive it across the border and keep driving toward Monterrey instead of Tijuana. But Mexican highways can be long, and sure enough, these two pendejos get picked up near Chihuahua by the MJFP, who hold them long enough for Raul to get there.

Raul is not pleased.

He has one mule’s hands stretched across a paper cutter, then asks him, “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to keep your hands to yourself?”

“Yes!” the mule screams. His eyes are bulging out of his head.

“You should have listened to her,” Raul says. Then he leans all his weight on top of the blade, which crunches through the mule’s wrists. The cops rush the guy to the hospital because Raul has been quite clear that he wants the handless man alive and walking around as a human message board.

The other errant mule does make it to Monterrey, but he’s chained and gagged in the trunk of a car that Raul drives to a vacant lot, douses with gasoline and sets on fire. Then Raul drives the cash to Tijuana himself, has lunch with Adan and goes to a soccer match.

No one tries to expropriate any Barrera cash for a long time.

Adan doesn’t get involved with any of this messy stuff. He’s a businessman; it’s an export/import for him-export the drugs, import the cash. Then handle the cash, which is a problem. It’s the sort of problem a businessman wants to have, of course-What do I do with all this money?-but it’s still a problem. Adan can wash a certain amount of it through the restaurants, but five restaurants can’t handle millions of dollars, so he’s on a constant search for laundry facilities.

But it’s all numbers to him.

He hasn’t seen any drugs in years.

And no blood.

Adan Barrera has never killed anybody.

Never as much as thrown a fist in anger. No, all the tough-guy stuff, all the enforcement, goes Raul’s way. He doesn’t seem to mind; quite the contrary. And this division of labor makes it easier for Adan to deny what really brings the money into the household.

And that’s what he needs to get back to doing, bringing the money in.