The Power of the Dog

Chapter Eight
Days of the Innocents

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

San Diego, California

Guadalajara, Mexico

1992

Art sits on a park bench inTegucigalpa and watches a man in a maroon Adidas tracksuit leave his building across the street.

Ramon Mette has seven of the suits-one for each day of the week. Every day he puts on a fresh one and leaves his mansion in suburban Tegus for a three-mile jog, flanked by two security guards in matching outfits, except theirs are bulging in unusual places to allow for the Mac-10s they carry to keep him safe on his jogs.

So Mette goes out every morning. Runs a three-mile round-trip and returns to the mansion and takes a shower while one of the bodyguards whips up a fruit smoothie in the blender. Mango, papaya, grapefruit and, this beingHonduras, bananas. Then he takes his drink out onto the patio and sips it while he reads the paper. Makes some phone calls, conducts a little business, then goes to his private gym to pump some iron.

That’s his routine.

By the clock, every day.

For months.

Except this one morning, the bodyguard opens the door, a sweaty, puffing Mette goes in, and a pistol butt slams into the side of his head.

He slides onto his knees in front of Art Keller.

His bodyguard stands helplessly with his hands up as a black-clad Honduran secret-service trooper points an M-16 at his head. There have to be fifty troopers standing there. Which is odd, Mette thinks through a haze of pain and dizziness, because don’t I own the secret service?

Apparently not, because none of them do shit as Art Keller kicks Mette square in the teeth. Stands over him and says, “I hope you enjoyed your jog because it’s the last you’re ever going to get.”

So Mette’s drinking his own blood instead of a fruit smoothie as Art slips the old black hood over his head, ties it tight and frog-marches him to a waiting van with tinted windows. And this time there’s no one there to object as they haul him onto an Air Force plane for a flight to the Dominican Republic, where he’s taken to the American embassy, arrested for the murder of Ernie Hidalgo, taken to another plane and flown to San Diego, where he’s promptly arraigned, denied bail and put in a solitary cell in the federal holding facility.

All of this touches off riots in the streets ofTegucigalpa, where thousands of angry citizens, incited and paid for by Mette’s lawyers, burn the American embassy in protest against Yanqui imperialism. They want to know where this American cop gets the huevos to come into their country and snatch one of their prominent citizens.

A lot of people inWashington are wondering the same thing. They would also like to know where Art Keller, the disgraced former RAC of the closedGuadalajara office, gets the balls to create an international incident. And not just the balls, but the package to pull it off.

How the hell did that happen?

Quito Fuentes is a small-time operator.

He is now, and he was in 1985 when he drove the tortured Ernie Hidalgo from the safe house inGuadalajara to the ranch in Sinaloa. Now he lives inTijuana, where he does small-time dope deals with small-time Americans coming across the border for a quick score.

You do that kind of business, you don’t want to show up light, in case one of the Yanqui kids decides he’s a real bandito and tries to take your dope and make a run for the border. No, you want some weight on your hip, andQuito ’s current piece is, well, a piece of shit.

Quitoneeds a new gun.

Which, contrary to public image, is hard to come by inMexico, where the federales and the state police like to have a monopoly on firepower. Lucky forQuito, living as he does in TJ, he’s right next door to the world’s biggest arms supermarket, Los Estados Unidos, so he’s all ears when Paco Mendez calls fromChula Vista to tell him he’s got a deal for him. A clean Mac-10 he just has to move.

AllQuito has to do is come pick it up.

ButQuito doesn’t like to venture north of the border anymore.

Not since the thing with the Yanqui cop, Hidalgo.

Quitoknows he’s pretty safe from arrest on that thing inMexico, but in theUnited States it might be a different story, so he tells Paco thanks but no thanks, and couldn’t he just bring it down to TJ? It’s more of a hopeful question than a realistic one, because you have to be either (a) very well connected or (b) some kind of fucking moron to try to smuggle any firearm, never mind a machine pistol, intoMexico . If you got caught, the federales would beat you like wet laundry on a dry line, then you’d catch a minimum two-year sentence in a Mexican prison. Paco knows that they don’t feed you in Mexican prisons-that’s your family’s problem, and Paco doesn’t have family inMexico anymore. And as he’s neither well connected nor a fucking moron, he tellsQuito he doesn’t think he can make that trip.

But as Paco has to turn this gun into some quick cash, he tellsQuito, “Let me think about it. I’ll call you back.”

He hangs up and tells Art Keller, “He won’t come over.”

“Then you have a big problem,” Art says.

No shit, a big problem-a cocaine and a gun charge, and just in case Paco isn’t gripping hard enough already, Art adds, “I’ll take it federal and I’ll ask the judge for consecutive sentences.”

“I’m trying!” Paco whines.

“You don’t get points for effort,” Art says.

“You’re a real ball-buster, you know that?”

“I know that,” Art says. “Do you know that?”

Paco slumps in his chair.

“Okay,” Art says. “Just get him to the fence.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ll do the rest.”

So Paco gets back on the horn and arranges to make the deal at the rickety chain-link border fence alongCoyoteCanyon.

No-man's-land.

You go intoCoyoteCanyon at night, you’d better bring a gun, and even that might not be enough, because a lot of God’s children got guns inCoyoteCanyon, a big scar in the rolling hills of barren dirt that flank the ocean along the border. The Canyon runs from the north edge of TJ for about two miles into theUnited States, and it is bandit country. Late in the afternoon, thousands of would-be immigrants start forming up on either side of the canyon on a ridge above the dry aqueduct that is the actual border. When the sun goes down, they make a rush through the canyon, simply overwhelming the outmanned Border Patrol agents. It’s the law of numbers-more get through than get caught. And even if you get caught, there’s always tomorrow.

Maybe.

Because real banditos get into the canyon and lie in wait like predators for the herd of mojados to come through. Pick off the weak and the wounded. Rob, rape and murder. Take what little cash the illegals have, drag their women into the bushes and rape them, then maybe slit their throats.

So you want to come pick oranges in los Estados Unidos, you have to run the gauntlet ofCoyoteCanyon. And in that chaos, in the dust from a thousand running feet, in the darkness amid screams, gunfire and flashing blades, with the Border Patrol vehicles roaring up and down hills like cowboys trying to control a stampede (which they are; which it is), a lot of business gets done along the fence.

Deals for dope, for sex, for guns.

And that’s whatQuito ’s doing as he crouches by a hole cut in the fence.

“Gimme the gun.”

“Gimme the money.”

Quitocan see the Mac-10 glittering in the moonlight, so he’s pretty sure his old cuate Paco’s not going to rip him off. So he reaches through the hole to hand Paco the cash and Paco grabs – not the money, but his wrist.

And holds on.

Quitotries to pull back, but now there are three Yanquis grabbing him, and one of them says, “You’re under arrest for the murder of Ernie Hidalgo.”

AndQuito says, “You can’t arrest me, I’m inMexico.”

“No problem,” Art says.

Then starts to pull him into the United States, just starts yanking him through the hole in the fence, but one of the jagged pieces of the cut fence snags Quito’s pants. But Art keeps pulling, and the sharp wire piercesQuito ’s butt, then pokes out the other side.

So he’s lying there basically impaled through the left butt cheek, and he’s screaming, “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!”

Art doesn’t care-he braces his feet against the American side of the fence and just pulls. The wire rips through Quito’s butt, and now he’s really screaming because he’s hurt and bleeding and in America and the Yanquis are punching the shit out of him, and then they stick a rag in his mouth to shut him up, and handcuff him, and they’re carrying him toward a jeep, and Quito sees a Border Patrol agent and tries to scream for help, but the migra just turns his back like he don’t see nothing.

Quitotells all this to the judge, who looks solemnly down at Art and asks him where the arrest took place.

“The defendant was arrested in theUnited States, Your Honor,” Art says. “He was on American soil.”

“The defendant claims you pulled him through the fence.”

Then, asQuito ’s public defender literally hops up and down with indignation, Art answers, “There’s not a word of truth to that, Your Honor. Mr. Fuentes came into the country of his own volition, to purchase an illegal firearm. We can offer a witness.”

“Would that be Mr. Mendez?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Your Honor,” the PD says, “Mr. Mendez obviously has made a deal with-”

“There was no deal,” Art says. “My hand to God.”

Next.

The Doctor’s not going to be so easy.

Doctor Alvarez has a thriving gynecology practice inGuadalajara, and he isn’t leaving. There’s nothing on earth that’s going to lure him across or even near the border. He knows the DEA is aware of his role in theHidalgo murder, he knows how badly Keller wants him, so the good doctor is staying put inGuadalajara.

“Mexico City’s already screaming about Quito Fuentes,” Tim Taylor tells Art.

“Let them. “

“Easy for you to say.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“I’m telling you, Art,”Taylor says. “We can’t just go in and grab the Doctor, and the Mexicans aren’t going to do it. They’re not going to extradite him, either. This isn’tHonduras, this isn’tCoyoteCanyon . Case closed.”

Maybe for you, Art thinks.

Not for me.

It will never be over until every person involved in Ernie’s murder is dead or behind bars.

If we can’t do it, and the Mexican cops won’t do it, I just have to find someone who will.

Art goes toTijuana.

Where Antonio Ramos owns a little restaurant.

He finds the big ex-cop sitting outside with his feet up on a table, his cigar clenched in his mouth and a cold Tecate at the ready. He sees Art walk up and says, “If you’re on a search for the perfect chile verde, I can tell you this isn’t the place.”

“Not what I’m after,” Art says, sitting down. He orders a cerveza from the waitress who comes over like a shot.

“What, then?” Ramos asks.

“Not what-who,” Art says. “Doctor Humberto Alvarez.”

Ramos shakes his head. “I retired.”

“I remember.”

“Anyway, they broke up the DFS,” Ramos says. “I make one grand gesture in my life, and they render it inconsequential.”

“I still could use your help.”

Ramos swings his legs off the table and sits forward in his chair to bring his face closer to Art’s. “You had my help, remember? I gave you fucking Barrera, and you wouldn’t pull the trigger. You didn’t want revenge, you wanted justice. You got neither.”

“I haven’t quit.”

“You should,” Ramos says. “Because there is no justice, and you’re not serious about revenge. You’re not Mexican. There aren’t many things we take seriously, but vengeance is one of them.”

“I’m serious.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m a-hundred-thousand-dollars serious,” Art says.

“You’re offering me a hundred thousand dollars to kill Alvarez.”

“Not kill him,” Art says. “Kidnap him. Bag him, put him on a plane to the States, where I can bring him to trial.”

“See, this is exactly what I mean,” says Ramos. “You’re soft. You want revenge, but you’re not man enough to just take it. You have to mask it with this 'fair trial’ mierda. It would be a lot easier just to shoot him.”

“I’m not interested in easy,” Art says. “I’m interested in hard, long suffering. I want to put him in some federal hellhole for the rest of his life and hope it’s a long one. You’re the one who’s soft, wanting to put him out of his misery.”

“I don’t know…”

“Soft and bored,” Art says. “Don’t tell me you’re not bored. Sitting here day after day, cranking out tamales for tourists. You’ve kept up with the news. You know I got Mette and Fuentes already. And next I’m going to get the Doctor, with or without you. And then I’m going to get Barrera. With or without you.”

“A hundred grand.”

“A hundred grand.”

“I’ll need a few men…”

“I have a hundred grand for the job,” Art says. “Split it any way you want.”

“Tough guy.”

“You better believe it.”

Ramos takes a long pull on his cigar, exhales in perfect smoke circles and watches them float into the air. Then says, “Shit, I’m not making any money here. Okay. Acuerdate.”

“I want him alive,” Art says. “You bring me a corpse, you can whistle for your money.”

“Si, si, si…”

Doctor Humberto Alvarez Machain finishes with his last patient, gallantly sees her out the door, says good night to his receptionist and steps back into his private office to gather up some papers before going home. He doesn’t hear the seven men come through the outer door. He doesn’t hear anything until Ramos steps into his office, points a stun gun at his ankle and shoots.

Alvarez falls to the floor and rolls in pain.

“You’ve seen your last funciete, Doctor,” Ramos says. “No chocho where you’re going.”

And shoots him again. Ramos says, “Hurts like a bastard, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Alvarez moans.

“If it were up to me I’d put a bullet in your head right now,” Ramos says. “Lucky for you, it isn’t up to me. Now, you’re going to do everything I say, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

They blindfold him, wrap telephone ties around his wrists and take him out the back door to a car waiting in the alley and shove him into the backseat, where they make him lie on the floor. Ramos gets in and sets his feet on Alvarez’s neck, and they drive to a safe house in the suburbs.

They bring him into the darkened living room and take off the blindfold.

Alvarez starts to cry when he sees the tall man stretched out in the chair in front of him.

“Do you know who I am?” Art asks. “Ernie Hidalgo was my close friend. Un hermano. Sangre de mi sangre.”

Alvarez is trembling uncontrollably now.

“You were his torturer,” Art says. “You scraped his bones with metal skewers, you shoved white-hot iron rods inside him. You gave him shots to keep him conscious and alive.”

“No,” Alvarez says.

“Don’t lie to me,” Art says. “It only makes me angrier. I have you on tape.”

A stain emerges on the front of the doctor’s pants and spreads down one leg.

“He’s pissing himself,” Ramos says.

“Strip him.”

They pull his shirt off and leave it dangling around his bound wrists. Jerk his pants and his shorts down to his ankles. Alvarez’s eyes widen in little orbs of terror. All the more so when Kleindeist says, “Take a whiff. What do you smell?”

Alvarez shakes his head.

“From the kitchen,” Kleindeist says. “Think hard-you’ve smelled it before. No? Okay-metal heating. A piece of rebar, over the stove.”

One of Ramos’ men comes in, holding the red-hot, glowing metal in an oven mitt.

Alvarez faints.

“Wake him up,” Art says.

Ramos shoots him in the calf.

Alvarez comes to and screams.

“Bend him over the couch.”

They heave Alvarez over the arm of the couch. Two men hold his arms and spread them wide. Two others pin his feet to the floor. The other man brings over the hot iron and shows it to him.

“No, please… no.”

“I want the names,” Art says, “of everyone you saw in the house with Ernie Hidalgo. And I want them now.”

No problema.

Alvarez starts talking like a comic speed-reader on crank.

“Adan Barrera, Raul Barrera,” he says. “Angel Barrera, Guero Mendez.”

“What?”

“Adan Barrera, Raul Barrera-”

“No,” Art snaps. “The last name.”

“Guero Mendez.”

“He was there?”

“Si, si, si. He was the leader, Senor.” Alvarez takes a gulp of air, then says, “He killed Hidalgo.”

“How?”

“An overdose of heroin,” Alvarez says. “An accident. We were going to free him. I swear. La verdad.”

“Pick him up.”

Art looks at the sobbing doctor and says, “You’re going to write out a statement. Telling all about your involvement. All about the Barreras and Mendez.?De acuerdo?”

“De acuerdo.”

“Then you’re going to write another statement,” Art says, “affirming that you were not tortured or compelled to make this statement in any way.?De acuerdo?”

“Si.” Then, regaining his composure, he starts to deal. “Will you offer me some kind of consideration for my cooperation?”

“I’ll put in a good word for you,” Art says.

They sit him down at the kitchen table with paper and pen. An hour later, both statements are finished. Art reads them, puts them in his briefcase and says, “Now you’re going for a little trip.”

“No, Senor!” Alvarez screams. He knows all about little trips. They usually involve shovels and shallow graves.

“To the United States,” Art says. “We have a plane waiting at the airport. You’re going of your free will, I assume.”

“Yes, of course.”

Goddamn right, of course, Art thinks. The man just dropped a dime on the Barreras and Guero Mendez. His life expectancy in Mexico is approximately nil. Art hopes his longevity in Marion federal penitentiary will be of Old Testament proportions.

Two hours later they have Alvarez, cleaned up and with a fresh pair of pants, on a plane to El Paso, where he is arrested and arraigned in the torture murder of Ernie Hidalgo. At his jailing, he’s photographed, naked, from his head to his knees to show that he hasn’t been tortured.

And Art, faithful to his promise, puts in a good word for Alvarez. Through the federal prosecutors, he doesn’t seek the death penalty.

He wants life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Life without hope.

The Mexican government protested and a squadron of American civil-liberties lawyers joined them, but both Mette and Alvarez are sitting in Marion federal maximum security prison awaiting their appeals, Quito Fuentes is in a San Diego jail cell, and no one has laid a restraining hand on Art Keller.

Those who would, can’t.

And those who can, won’t.

Because he lied.

Art lied his ass off to the Senate committee that investigated rumors that the CIA was somehow complicit with the Contras’ arms-for-drugs dealings. Art still has a transcript of his testimony running in his head like the sound track of a movie you can’t shut off.

Q: Have you ever heard of an air-freight company called SETCO?

A: Remotely.

Q: Are you now or were you ever of the belief that SETCO airplanes were being used to transport cocaine?

A: I have no knowledge on that subject.

Q: Did you ever hear of something called the “Mexican Trampoline”?

A: No.

Q: May I remind you that you’re under oath?

A: Yes.

Q: Have ever heard of TIWG?

A: What’s that?

Q: The Terrorist Incident Working Group.

A: Not until just now.

Q: How about NSD Directive #3?

A: No.

Q: The NHAO?

Art’s lawyer leaned across and said into the microphone, “Counsel, if you just want to go fishing, may I suggest you charter a boat?”

Q: Have you ever heard of NHAO?

A: Only recently, in the newspapers.

Q: Did anyone at NHAO pressure you in regard to your testimony?

“I’m not going to let this go on much longer,” Art’s lawyer said.

Q: Did Colonel Craig, for instance, pressure you?

This question had the intended effect of waking up the press.

Colonel Scott Craig was shoving the American flag, pole and all, right up another committee’s butt as it tried to pin him to the arms-for-hostages deal with the Iranians. In the process Craig was becoming an American folk hero, a media darling, a television patriot. The country focused in on the Iran-Contra sideshow, the shitty guns-for-hostages deal, and never caught on to the real scandal-that the administration had helped the Contras deal drugs for arms. So the suggestion that Colonel Craig, whom Art had last seen at Ilopongo off-loading cocaine, had pressured Keller into silence was a dramatic moment.

“That’s outrageous, counselor,” Art’s lawyer said.

Q: I agree. Will your client answer the question?

A: I came here to answer your questions truthfully and accurately, and that’s what I’m attempting to do.

Q: So would you answer the question?

A: I’ve never met nor had any conversations with Colonel Craig on any subject whatsoever.

The media went back to sleep.

Q: How about something called “Cerberus,” Mr. Keller? Did you ever hear of that?

A: No.

Q: Did something called Cerberus have anything at all to do with the murder of Agent Hidalgo?

A: No.

Althea left the gallery at that answer. Later, at the Watergate, she told him, “Maybe a bunch of senators can’t tell when you’re lying, Art, but I can.”

“Can we just go and have a nice dinner with the kids?” Art asked.

“How could you?”

“What?”

“Align yourself with a bunch of right-wing-”

“Stop.”

He held his hand up and turned his back to her. He’s tired of hearing it.

He’s tired of hearing everything, Althea thought. If he was remote during their last few months in Guadalajara, that was a goddamn honeymoon compared to the man who came home from Mexico. Or didn’t come home, not the man she recognized as her husband. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to listen. Spent most of his long “administrative leave” sitting alone out by her parents’ pool or taking long, lone walks through Pacific Palisades or down on the beach. He’d sit at dinner barely speaking, or worse, launching into an angry diatribe about how politics is all bullshit, then excusing himself to go upstairs, alone, or out for a nocturnal stroll. Late nights he’d lie in bed, thumbing the TV remote like some kind of speed freak, switching from channel to channel, pronouncing everything crap and more crap. On the increasingly rare occasions that they would make love (if you wanted to call it that), he was aggressive and quick, as if he were trying to work out his anger rather than express his love or even his lust.

“I’m not a punching bag,” she said one night as he lay on top of her in one of his spectacular postcoital depressions.

“I’ve never hit you.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He remained a dutiful, if wooden, father. He did all the daddy things he used to do, but now it was more like he was just going through the motions. Like a robot version of Art taking the kids to the park, robot Art showing Michael how to body-board, robot Art playing tennis with Cassie. The kids knew.

Althea tried to get him to see someone.

He laughed. “A shrink?”

“A shrink, a counselor, somebody.”

“All they do is give you drugs,” he said.

Christ, then take them, she thought.

It got worse when the subpoenas came.

The meetings with DEA bureaucrats, administration officials, congressional investigators. And lawyers-God, so many lawyers. She was worried that the legal fees would bankrupt them, but all he would say was not to worry, “It’s taken care of.” She never knew where the money was coming from, but it was coming because she never saw a legal bill, not one.

Art, of course, refused to discuss it.

“I’m your wife,” she’d pleaded one night. “Why won’t you open up to me?”

“There are things you can’t know about,” he said.

He wanted to talk to her, tell her everything, get close again, but he couldn’t. It was like there was this invisible wall, this science-fiction force field-not between them but inside him-that he just couldn’t break through. It was as if he spent all his time walking through water, underwater, looking up at the light of the real world but seeing only the water-distorted faces of his wife and his kids. Unable to reach up, reach through and touch them. Unable to let them touch him.

Instead he dove deeper.

Retreated into silence, the slow poison of a marriage.

That day at the Watergate he looked at Althea and knew that she knew he’d taken a dive-lay down and lied for the administration, helped them cover up a shitty deal that had put crack out onto the streets of American ghettos.

What she didn’t know was why.

This is why, Art thinks now as he peers through the window blinds across the way at 2718 Cosmos Street, where Tio Barrera is holed up.

“I got you now, motherfucker,” Art says. “And no one’s going to snatch you out of it this time.”

Tio’s been switching residences every few days, moving around between his dozen apartments and condos in Guadalajara. Whether it’s a result of his fearing arrest or, as rumor has it, because he’s been smoking his own product, Tio has become increasingly paranoid.

With good reason, Art thinks. He’s been watching Tio in this place for three days now. That’s a long time for Tio to be in any one place. He’ll probably move again this afternoon.

Or thinks he will.

Art has his own plans for Tio’s next move.

But it has to be done right.

His government has promised the Mexican government that it will be done with no fuss, no muss. Above all, with no collateral casualties. And Art has to disappear as soon as possible-this has to look like a Mexican operation all the way, a triumph for the federales.

Whatever, Art thinks.

I don’t care, Tio, as long as it ends with you in a prison cell.

He crouches by the window and peeks out again. The reward for My Years in the Desert, as he came to call that god-awful stretch of ’87, ’88 and ’89, when he maneuvered through the minefield of investigations, sweated out the perjury indictment that never came, watched as one president left office and his vice president-the same man who had run the secret war against the Sandinistas-came in. My Years in the Desert, Art recalls, transferred from one desk job to another as his marriage dried up, as he and Althea retreated into separate rooms and separate lives, as Althea finally demanded a divorce and he fought it every step of the way.

Even now, Art thinks, a fresh set of divorce papers sits unsigned on the kitchenette table of his barren little apartment in downtown San Diego.

“I will never,” Art told his wife, “let you take my kids.”

Eventually peace came.

Not to the Kellers, but to Nicaragua.

Elections were held, the Sandinistas were tossed out, the secret war came to end, and about five minutes later Art went to John Hobbs to claim his reward.

The destruction of every man involved in the murder of Ernie Hidalgo.

A laundry list: Ramon Mette, Quito Fuentes, Doctor Alvarez, Guero Mendez.

Raul Barrera.

Adan Barrera.

And Miguel Angel Barrera.

Tio.

Whatever Art might have thought about the president, John Hobbs, Colonel Scott Craig and Sal Scachi, they were men of their word. Art Keller was given a free hand and all possible cooperation. He went on his tear.

“As a result,” Hobbs had said, “we have a burned embassy in Honduras and a raging civil-liberties battle, and our diplomatic relationship with Mexico is in ashes. To stretch the metaphor to the breaking point, State would like to host an auto-da-fe for you, to which Justice will bring the marshmallows.”

“But I’m confident,” Art says, “that I have the full support of the White House and the president.”

Which was Art reminding Hobbs that before the current president occupied the White House he was busy funding the Contras with cocaine, so let’s not hear any more bullshit about “State” and “Justice.”

The extortion worked; Art got permission to go after Tio.

Not that this had been easy to arrange.

Negotiations at the highest level, and Art hadn’t even been involved.

Hobbs went to Los Pinos, the president’s residence, to make the deal: The arrest of Miguel Angel Barrera would remove one stumbling block to the passage of NAFTA.

NAFTA is the key, the absolutely essential key, to Mexican modernization. With it in place, Mexico can move ahead into the next century. Without it, the economy will stagnate and collapse, and the country will remain a Third World backwater forever, mired in poverty.

So they’ll trade Barrera as part of the deal for NAFTA.

But there’s another, more troublesome condition: This is the last arrest. This closes the books on the Hidalgo murder. Art Keller won’t even be allowed back in the country after this. So he’ll get Barrera, but not Adan, Raul, or Guero Mendez.

That’s okay, Art thinks.

I have plans for them.

But first, Tio.

So now Art watches and waits.

The problem is Tio’s three bodyguards (Cerberus again, Art thinks, the unavoidable three-headed guard dog), armed with 9-mm machine pistols, AK-47s and hand grenades. And willing to use them.

Not that it worries Art overmuch. His team has firepower, too. There are twenty-five special federale officers with M-16s, sniper rifles and the whole SWAT arsenal, not to mention Ramos and his crew of privateers. But the Mexican mandate was “We can absolutely not have a gun battle in the streets of Guadalajara, it just cannot happen,” and Art is determined to live up to the deal.

So they’re trying to find an opening.

It’s the girl who gives it to them.

Barrera’s latest stringy-haired mistress.

She won’t cook.

Art has watched the past three mornings as the bodyguards have trooped out to a local comida to buy their breakfast. Listened through sound detectors at the arguments, her shouting, their grumbling as they go out and come back twenty minutes later, nourished and ready for a long day of guarding Miguel Angel.

Not today, Art thinks.

Going to be a short day today.

“They should be coming out,” he says to Ramos.

“Don’t worry.”

“I worry,” Art says. “What if she gets a sudden attack of domesticity?”

“That pig?” Ramos asks. “Forget it. Now, if she were my woman, she’d cook breakfast. She’d wake up in the morning whistling and wanting to please me. The happiest woman in Mexico.”

But he’s edgy, too, Art sees. His jaws are clamped on the omnipresent cigar, and his fingers are drumming little tattoos on the stock of Esposa, his Uzi, as he adds, “They have to eat.”

Let’s hope so, Art thinks. If they don’t, and we miss this opportunity, the whole fragile arrangement with the Mexican government could fall apart. They’re already nervous, reluctant allies. The secretary of the interior and the governor of Jalisco have literally distanced themselves from the operation; they’re miles out at sea on a three-day “diving excursion” so that they can plead non-involvement to both the nation and the surviving Barrera brothers. And there are so many moving pieces in this operation, all of which have to be coordinated, that the whole thing is extremely time-sensitive.

The team of federales from Mexico City is in place here, waiting to grab Barrera. At the same time, a special unit of army troops is perched on the edge of town, ready to move in and detain the entire Jalisco State Police force, its chief and the governor of the state until Barrera is flown to Mexico City, arraigned and jailed.

It’s a state coup d'etat, Art thinks, planned to the second, and if this moment passes, it will be impossible to maintain secrecy for another day. The Jalisco police will get their boy Barrera out, the governor will plead ignorance, and it will be over.

So it has to be now.

He watches the front door of the house.

Please, God, let them be hungry.

Let them go to breakfast.

He stares at the door of the house as if he could make it open.

Tio is a crackhead.

Hooked on the pipe.

It’s tragic, Adan thinks as he looks at his uncle. What started as a pantomime of disability has become real, as if Tio acted his way into a role that he can’t shake off. Always a slim man, he’s thinner than ever, doesn’t eat, chain-smokes one cigar after another. When he’s not inhaling the smoke, he coughs it up. His once jet-black hair is now silver, and his skin has a yellowish tint. He’s hooked up to a glucose IV on a rolling stand that he drags behind him everywhere like a pet dog.

He’s fifty-three years old.

A young girl-Christ, what is this? the fifth or sixth since Pilar-comes in, plops her ample ass down on the easy chair and clicks the television on with the remote. Raul is shocked at the disrespect, even more shocked when his uncle says meekly, “Calor de mi vida, we are talking business.”

Warmth of my life, my ass, Adan thinks. The girl-he can’t even think of her name-is yet another pale imitation of Pilar Talavera Mendez. Twenty pounds heavier, limp, greasy hair, a face that’s many carnitas away from being pretty, but there is a faint resemblance. Adan could understand the obsession with Pilar-God, what a beauty-but with this segundera, he can’t comprehend. Especially when the girl puts a pout on her gash of a fat mouth and mewls, “You’re always talking business.”

“Make us some lunch,” Adan says.

“I don’t cook.” She sneers and waddles out. They can hear another television come on, loudly, from another room.

“She likes her soap operas,” Tio explains.

Adan has been silent so far, sitting back in his chair and watching his uncle with growing concern. His obvious bad health, his weakness, his attempts to replace Pilar, attempts as persistent as they are disastrous. Tio Angel is fast becoming a pathetic figure and yet he is still the patron of the pasador.

Tio leans over and whispers, “Do you see her?”

“Who, Tio?”

“Her,” Tio croaks. “Mendez’s mujer. Pilar.”

Guero had married the girl. Met her as she got off the plane from her Salvadoran “honeymoon” with Tio, and actually married a girl whom most Mexican men wouldn’t have touched because not only was she not a virgin, she was Barrera’s thing-on-the-side, his segundera.

That’s how much Guero loves Pilar Talavera.

“Si, Tio,” Adan says. “ I see her.”

Tio nods. Looks quickly toward the living room to make sure the girl is still watching television, and then whispers, “Is she still beautiful?”

“No, Tio,” Adan lies. “She is fat now. And ugly.”

But she isn’t.

She is, Adan thinks, exquisite. He goes to Mendez’s Sinaloa ranch every month with their tribute and he sees her there. She’s a young mother now, with a three-year-old daughter and an infant son, and she looks terrific. The adolescent baby fat is gone, and she’s matured into a beautiful young woman.

And Tio is still in love with her.

Adan tries to get back on track. “What about Keller?”

“What about him?” Tio asks.

“He snatched Mette out of Honduras,” Adan says, “and now he’s kidnapped Alvarez right here from Guadalajara. Are you next?”

It’s a real concern, Adan thinks.

Tio shrugs. “Mette got complacent, Alvarez was careless. I’m none of those things. I’m careful. I change houses every few days. The Jalisco police protect me. Besides, I have other friends.”

“You mean the CIA?” Adan asks. “The Contra war is over. What use are you to them now?”

Because loyalty is not an American virtue, Adan thinks, nor is long memory. If you don’t know that, just ask Manuel Noriega in Panama. He had also been a key partner in Cerberus, a touch point on the Mexican Trampoline, and where is he now? Same place as Mette and Alvarez, in an American prison, except it wasn’t Art but Noriega’s old friend George Bush who put him there. Invaded his country, grabbed him and put him away.

So if you’re counting on the Americans to repay you with loyalty, Tio, count on the fingers of one hand. I watched Art’s performance on CNN. There is a price for his silence, and the price might be you, might be all of us.

“Don’t worry, mi sobrino,” Tio is saying. “Los Pinos is a friend of ours.”

Los Pinos, the residence of the president of Mexico.

“What makes him such a friend?” Adan asks.

“Twenty-five million of my dollars,” Tio answers. “And that other thing.”

Adan knows what “that other thing” is.

That the Federacion had helped this president to steal the election. Four years ago, back in ’88, it seemed certain that the opposition candidate, the leftist Cardenas, was going to win the election and topple the PRI, which had been in power since the 1917 Revolution.

Then a funny thing happened.

The computers that counted the votes magically malfunctioned.

The election commissioner appeared on television to shrug and announce that the computers had broken down and that it would take several days to count the votes and determine the winner. And during those several days, the bodies of the two opposition watchdogs in charge of monitoring the computer votes-the two men who could have and would have asserted the truth, that Cardenas had won 55 percent of the vote-were found in the river.

Facedown.

And the election commissioner had gone back on television to announce with a perfectly straight face that the PRI had won the election.

The current presidente took office and proceeded to nationalize the banks, the telecommunications industries, the oil fields, all of which were purchased at below-market prices by the same men who had come to his fund-raising dinner and left twenty-five million dollars apiece on the table as a tip.

Adan knows that Tio hadn’t arranged the murders of the election officials-that had been Garcia Abrego-but Tio would have known about it and given his okay. And while Abrego is thick as thieves with Los Pinos-partners, in fact, with El Bagman, the president’s brother, who owns a third of all the cocaine shipments that Abrego runs through his Gulf cartel-Tio has good reason to believe that Los Pinos has every reason to be loyal to him.

Adan has his doubts.

Now he looks at his uncle and sees that he’s anxious to end the meeting. Tio wants to smoke his crack and won’t do it in front of Adan. It’s sad, he thinks as he leaves, to see what the drug has done to this great man.

Adan takes a taxi to the Cross of Squares and walks toward the cathedral to request a miracle.

God and science, he thinks.

The sometimes cooperative, sometimes conflicting powers to whom Adan and Lucia go to try to help their daughter.

Lucia turns more to God.

She goes to church-prays, offers Masses and benedictions, kneels before a panoply of saints. She buys milagros outside the cathedral and offers them up, she burns candles, she gives money, she sacrifices.

Adan goes to church on Sundays, makes his offerings, says his prayers, takes Communion, but it’s more of a gesture, a nod to Lucia. He doesn’t believe, anymore, that help will come from that direction. So he genuflects, mumbles the words, goes through the motions, but they are empty gestures. On his regular trips to Culiacan to bring his regular offering to Guero Mendez, he stops at the shrine of Santo Jesus Malverde and makes his manda.

He prays to the Narcosanto, but puts more hope in the doctors.

Adan markets drugs; he gets biopharmacology.

Pediatric neurologists, neuropsychologists, psychoneurologists, endocrinologists, brain specialists, research chemists, herbal healers, native healers, charlatans, quacks. Doctors everywhere-in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, England, France, Switzerland and even just across the border, in the USA.

Adan can’t go on those visits.

Can’t accompany his wife and daughter on their sad, futile trudges to specialists at Scripps in La Jolla or Mercy in Los Angeles. He sends Lucia with written notes, written questions, stacks of medical records, histories, tests results. Lucia takes Gloria by herself, crosses the border under her maiden name-she’s still a citizen-and sometimes they are gone for weeks, sometimes months, when Adan aches for his daughter. They always return with the same old news.

That there is no news.

No new miracle has been discovered.

Or revealed.

Not by God or the doctor.

There is nothing more they can do.

Adan and Lucia comfort each other with hope and faith-which Lucia possesses and Adan feigns-and love.

Adan loves his wife and daughter deeply.

He’s a good husband, a wonderful father.

Other men, Lucia knows, might have turned their backs on a deformed child, might have avoided the girl, avoided the home, made a thousand excuses to spend time away.

Not Adan.

He is home almost every night, almost every weekend. He’s in Gloria’s room the first thing every morning to kiss her and give her a hug; then he makes her breakfast before he goes off to work. When he comes home in the evening his first stop is to her room. He reads to her, tells her stories, plays games with her.

Nor does Adan hide his child like something shameful. He takes her for long strolls in the Rio district. Takes her to the park, to lunch, to the circus, anywhere, everywhere. They are a common sight in the better neighborhoods of Tijuana-Adan, Lucia and Gloria. All the shopkeepers know the girl-they give her candy, flowers, small pieces of jewelry, hairpins, bracelets, pretty things.

When Adan has to go away on business-as he is now, on his regular junket to Guadalajara to visit with Tio, then to Culiacan with a briefcase of cash for Guero-he calls every day, several times a day, to speak with his daughter. He tells her jokes, funny things that he has seen. He brings her presents from Guadalajara, Culiacan, Badiraguato.

And those trips to the doctors that he can go on-all of them except in the United States-he goes. He’s become an expert on cystic lymphangioma; he reads, he studies, he asks questions, he offers incentives and rewards. He makes large donations to research, quietly inveighs his business partners to do the same. He and Lucia have nice things, a nice home, but they could have much nicer things, a much bigger home, except for the money they spend on doctors. And donations and pledges and Masses and benedictions and playgrounds and clinics.

Lucia is glad for this. She doesn’t need nicer things, a bigger home. She doesn’t need-and wouldn’t want-the lavish and, frankly, tasteless mansions that some of the other narcotraficantes have.

Lucia and Adan would give anything they have, any parent would, to any doctor or any god, every doctor and every god, who would cure their child.

The more science fails, the more Lucia turns to religion. She finds more hope in a divine miracle than in the hard numbers of the medical reports. A blessing from God, from the saints, from Our Lady of Guadalupe could reverse the tide of those numbers in the blink of an eye, in the flutter of a heart. She haunts the church, becomes a daily communicant, brings their parish priest, Father Rivera, home for dinners, for private prayer and counseling sessions, for Bible study. She questions the depth of her faith (“Perhaps it is my doubt that is blocking a milagro”), questions the sincerity of Adan's. She urges him to attend Mass more often, to pray harder, to give even more money to the Church, to talk with Father Rivera, to “tell him what’s in your heart.”

To make her feel better, he goes to see the priest.

Rivera’s not a bad guy, if a bit of a fool. Adan sits in the priest’s office, across the desk from him, and says, “I hope you’re not encouraging Lucia to believe that it’s her lack of faith that prevents a cure for our daughter.”

“Of course not. I would never suggest or even think such a thing.”

Adan nods.

“But let’s talk about you,” Rivera says. “How can I be of help to you, Adan?”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“It can’t be easy-”

“It isn’t. It’s life.”

“And how are things between you and Lucia?”

“They’re fine.”

Rivera gets this clever look on his face, then asks, “And in the bedroom? May I ask? How are the connubial-”

Adan makes a successful effort to suppress a smirk. It always amuses him when priests, these self-castrated eunuchs, want to give advice on sexual matters. Rather like a vegetarian offering to barbecue your steak for you. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that Lucia has been discussing their sex life with the priest; otherwise, the man would never have had the nerve to raise the subject.

The fact is that there’s nothing to discuss.

There is no sex life. Lucia is terrified of getting pregnant. And because the Church forbids artificial contraception and she will do nothing that might indicate anything other than a total commitment to the laws of the Church…

He has told her a hundred times that the chances of having another baby with a birth defect are a thousand to one, a million to one, really, but logic has no traction with her. She knows he’s right, but she tearfully confesses to him one night that she just can’t bear the thought of that moment in the hospital, that moment when she was told, when she saw…

She can’t bear the thought of reliving that moment.

She has tried to make love with him several times when the rhythms of natural contraception allowed, but she simply froze up. Terror and guilt, Adan observes, are not aphrodisiacs.

The truth, he would like to tell Rivera, is that it isn’t important to him. That he’s busy at work, busy at home, that all his energies are taken up with running a business (the specific nature of that business is never discussed), taking care of a very ill, severely handicapped child, and trying to find a cure for her. Compared with their daughter’s suffering the lack of a sex life is insignificant.

“I love my wife,” he tells Rivera.

“I have encouraged her to have more children,” Rivera says. “To-”

Enough, Adan thinks. This is getting insulting. “Father,” he says, “Gloria is all we can care for now.”

He leaves a check on the desk.

Goes home and tells Lucia that he has spoken with Father Rivera, and the talk strengthened his faith.

But what Adan really believes in are numbers.

It hurts him to see this sad, futile faith of hers; he knows she is hurting herself more deeply every day, because the one thing Adan knows for certain is that numbers never lie. He deals with numbers all day, every day. He makes key decisions based on numbers, and he knows that arithmetic is the absolute law of the universe, that a mathematical proof is the only proof.

And the numbers say that their daughter will get worse, not better, as she gets older, that his wife’s fervent prayers are unheard or unanswered.

So he puts his hopes in science, that someone somewhere will come up with (literally) the right formula, the miracle drug, the surgical procedure that will trump God and His useless entourage of saints.

In the meantime, there is nothing to do but keep putting one foot in front of the other in this futile marathon.

Neither God nor science can help his daughter.

Nora’s skin is a warm pink, flushed from the bath’s steaming water.

She has on a thick white terry-cloth bathrobe, and a towel wrapped in a turban around her hair, and she plops down on the sofa, puts her feet up on the coffee table and picks up the letter.

She asks, “Are you going to?”

“Am I going to what?” Parada asks as her question pulls him out of the sweet reverie of the Coltrane album playing on the stereo.

“Resign.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I suppose so. I mean, a letter from Il Papa himself…”

“But you said it was a request,” Nora says. “He’s asking, not ordering.”

“That’s just a courtesy,” Parada answers. “It amounts to the same thing. One doesn’t refuse a request of the Pope's.”

Nora shrugs. “First time for everything.”

Parada smiles. Ah, for the careless courage of youth. It is, he thinks, a simultaneous flaw and virtue of young people that they have so little regard for tradition, and even less for authority. A superior asks you to do something you don’t wish to do? Easy-just refuse.

But it would be so easy to accede, he thinks. More than easy-tempting. Resign and become a mere parish priest again, or accept an assignment to a monastery-a “period of reflection,” they would probably call it. A time for contemplation and prayer. It sounds wonderful, as opposed to the constant stress and responsibility. The endless political negotiations, the ceaseless efforts to acquire food, housing, medicine. Not to mention the chronic alcoholism, spousal abuse, unemployment and poverty, and the myriad tragedies that spring from them. It’s a burden, he thinks with full realization of his own self-pity, and now Il Papa is not only willing to remove the cup from my hands, he’s requesting that I give it up.

Will, in fact, forcibly rip it from me if I don’t meekly hand it over.

This is what Nora doesn’t understand.

One of the few things that Nora doesn’t understand.

She’s been coming to visit for years now. At first, it was short visits of a few days, helping out at the orphanage outside the city. Then it turned into longer visits, with her staying for a few weeks, and then the weeks turned into months. Then she would go back to the States to do what she does to make her money, and then return, and the stays at the orphanage became longer and longer.

Which is a good thing because she’s invaluable there.

To her surprise, she’s become quite good at doing whatever needs to be done. Some mornings it’s looking after the preschool kids, others it’s supervising repair of the seemingly endless plumbing problems or negotiating with contractors on prices for the new dormitory. Or driving into the big central market in Guadalajara to get the best deal on groceries for the week.

At first, each time a task came up she’d whine the same refrain-“I don’t know anything about that”-just to get the same answer from Sister Camella: “You’ll learn.”

And she did; she has. She’s become a veritable expert on the intricacies of Third World plumbing. The local contractors simultaneously love and hate to see her coming-she’s so beautiful but so relentlessly ruthless, and they’re both shocked and delighted to see a woman walk up to them and pronounce in butchered but effective Spanish the words “No me quiebres el culo.”

Don’t bust my ass.

Other times, she can be so charming and seductive that they give her what she wants at barely a profit. She leans over and looks up at them with those eyes and that smile and tells them that the roof can’t really wait until they have the cash-the rains are coming, don’t you see the sky?

No, they don’t. What they see is her face and body and, let’s be honest, her soul, and they go and fix the condenada roof. And they know she’s good for the money, she’ll get it, because who at the diocese is going to say no to her?

No one, that’s who.

No one has the balls.

And at the market? Dios mio, she’s a terror. Strolls through the vegetable stands like a queen, demanding the best of this, the freshest of that. Squeezing and smelling and asking for samples to test.

One morning a fed-up grocer asks her, “Who do you think you’re buying for? The patrons of a luxury hotel?”

She answers, “My kids deserve as good or better. Or do you disagree?”

She gets them the best food at the best price.

The rumors about her abound. She’s an actress-no, a whore-no… she is the cardinal’s mistress. No, she was a high-priced courtesan, and she is dying of AIDS, she has come to the orphanage to do penance for her sins before she goes to meet God.

But that story loses credence as a year goes by-then two, then five, then seven-and still she comes to the orphanage and her health hasn’t declined and her looks haven’t faded and by that time the speculation on her past has pretty much ended anyway.

She does enjoy the meals on her visits to the city. She eats herself into a near stupor, then takes a glass of wine into the big bathroom with real tiles and soaks in hot water until her skin is a glowing pink. Then she dries herself with the big, fluffy towels (the ones at the orphanage are small and practically transparent), and a maid comes in with the clean clothes that were being washed while she was in the tub, and then she rejoins Father Juan for an evening of conversation, music or movies. She knows he’s taken advantage of her bath to go outside in the garden and sneak cigarettes (the doctors have told him and told him and told him and his response is, “What if I give up the smokes and then get hit by a car? I will have sacrificed all that pleasure for nothing!”), and then he does this funny thing of sucking on a mint before she comes back, as if he’s fooling anybody, as if he needs to fool her.

In fact, they’ve come to measure the length of her baths by cigarettes-“I’m going to have a five-cig bath,” or, if she feels especially grimy and tired, “This is going to be an eight-cig bath”-but he still goes to the trouble to deny by silent implication that that’s what he’s doing, and he always sucks on the mint anyway.

This game has been going on now for almost seven years.

Seven years-she can’t believe it.

On this particular visit she came, unusually, in the morning, having spent all night bringing a sick child into the city hospital and then sitting up with him. When the crisis had passed she’d taken a taxi over to Juan’s residence and availed herself of a bath and a full breakfast. Now she sits in his den and listens to the music.

“Where has it gone?” she asks him as the Coltrane solo rises to a crescendo and then falls again.

“Where has what gone?”

“Seven years.”

“Where it’s always gone,” he says. “Doing what there is to be done.”

“I suppose.”

She’s worried about him.

He looks tired, worn down. And, even though they make a joke of it, he’s lost weight lately, and he seems more susceptible to colds and bouts of flu.

But it’s more than his health.

It’s also his safety.

Nora’s afraid they’re going to kill him.

It’s not only his constant political sermons and labor organizing; for the past few years he’s been spending more and more time in the State of Chiapas, making the church down there a center for indigenous Indian movement, infuriating the local landowners. He’s been increasingly outspoken on a range of social issues, always taking a dangerously left-wing position, even coming out against the NAFTA treaty, which, he argues, will only further dispossess the poor and the landless.

He’s even railed against it from the pulpit, angering his superiors in the Church and the right wing in Mexico.

The writing is, literally, on the wall.

The first time she saw one of the posters she angrily went to tear it down, but he stopped her. He thought it was funny, the cartoonish drawing of him with the legend EL CARDENAL ROJO-The Red Cardinal-and the announcement DANGEROUS CRIMINAL-WANTED FOR BETRAYING HIS COUNTRY. He wanted to have one copied and framed.

It doesn’t scare him-he assures her that even the right-wingers wouldn’t kill a priest. But they murdered Oscar Romero in Guatemala, didn’t they? His robes didn’t deflect those bullets. A right-wing death squad marched into his church as he was saying Mass and gunned him down. So she’s afraid of the Mexican Guardia Blanca, and of these posters that encourage some lone nut to make himself a hero by killing a traitor.

“They’re just trying to intimidate me,” Juan told her when they first saw the posters.

But that’s just what scares her because she knows that he won’t be intimidated. And when they see that he won’t, what will they do? So maybe the “request” to resign is a good thing, she thinks. Which is why she floats the idea of his resigning. She’s too smart to overtly bring up his health, his fatigue and the threats against him, but she wants to leave the door open for him to walk away.

Just walk away.

Alive.

“I don’t know,” she says casually. “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.”

He told her about the argument when the papal nuncio had summoned him to Mexico City to explain his “grave pastoral and doctrinal errors” in Chiapas.

“This 'liberation theology,’ ” Antonucci had started.

“I don’t care about liberation theology.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

“I only care about liberation.”

Antonucci’s little finch-like face darkened as he said, “Christ liberates our soul from hell and death, and I would think that would be sufficient liberation. That is the good news of the gospel, and that is what you are supposed to deliver to the faithful of your diocese. And that, not politics, should be your main concern.”

“My main concern,” Parada said, “is that the gospel becomes good news to the people now, and not after they starve to death.”

“This political orientation was all the rage after Vatican Two,” Antonucci said, “but perhaps it has escaped your notice that we have a different Pope now.”

“Yes,” Parada said, “and he sometimes gets things backwards: Everywhere he goes he kisses the ground and walks on the people.”

Antonucci said, “This is no joke. They’re investigating you.”

“Who is?”

“The Latin Affairs Desk at the Vatican,” Antonucci said. “Bishop Gantin. And he wants you removed.”

“On what grounds?”

“Heresy.”

“Oh, ridiculous!”

“Is it?” Antonucci picked up a file from his desk. “Did you celebrate Mass in a Chiapan village last May garbed in Mayan robes, replete with a feathered headdress?”

“Those are symbols that the indigenous people-”

“So the answer is yes,” Antonucci said. “You were openly engaging in pagan idolatry.”

“Do you think that God only arrived here with Columbus?”

“You’re quoting yourself now,” Antonucci said. “Yes, I have that little tidbit here. Let me see. Yes, here it is, 'God loves all humankind-’ ”

“Do you have an objection to that statement?”

“ '-and therefore has revealed his “Godself” to all cultural and ethnic groups in the world. Before any missionary arrived to speak of Christ, a process of salvation was already there. We know in truth that Columbus did not bring God aboard his ships. No, God is already present in all these cultures, so missionary work has a whole different meaning-announcing the presence of a God who is already there.’ Do you deny saying that?”

“No, I embrace it.”

“They are saved before Christ?”

“Yes.”

“Sheer heresy.”

“No, it isn’t.” It’s pure salvation. That one simple statement, Columbus did not bring God with him, did more than a thousand catechisms to launch a spiritual revival in Chiapas as the indigenous people began to search their own culture for signs of the revealed God. And found them-in their customs, their stewardship of the earth, their ancient laws on how to treat their brothers and sisters. It was only then, when they had found God in themselves, that they could truly receive the good news of Jesus Christ.

And the hope of redemption. From five hundred years of slavery. Half a millennium of oppression, humiliation and dire, desperate, murderous poverty. And if Christ didn’t come to redeem that, then he didn’t come at all.

“How about this, then?” Antonucci asked. “ 'The mystery of the Trinity is not the mathematical riddle of Three in One. It is the manifestation of the Father in politics, the Son in economics, and the Holy Spirit in the culture.’ Does this really reflect your thinking?”

“Yes.”

Yes, it is, because it takes all of that-politics, economics and culture-for God to reveal himself in all his power. That’s why we’ve spent the past seven years building cultural centers, clinics, farming co-ops and, yes, political organizations.

Antonucci said, “You would reduce God the Father to mere politics, and Jesus Christ His Son Our Savior to the level of a chair of Marxist Theoretics in some third-rate economics department?! And I won’t even comment on your blasphemous connection of the Holy Spirit to local pagan culture, whatever that even means.”

“The fact that you don’t know what that means is the problem.”

“No,” Antonucci said, “the problem is the fact that you do.”

“Do you know what an old Indian man asked me the other day?”

“Doubtless you’re going to tell me.”

“He asked me, 'Does this God of yours save just our souls? Or does he save our bodies, too?’ ”

“I tremble to think how you might have answered him.”

“You should.”

They sat there across a desk, staring at each other, then Parada let down a bit and tried to explain, “Look at what we’re achieving in Chiapas: We have six thousand indigenous catechists now, spread through every village, teaching the gospel.”

“Yes, let’s look at what you’ve achieved in Chiapas,” Antonucci said. “You have the highest percentage of converts to Protestantism in all of Mexico. Only a little more than half of your people are even Catholic anymore, the lowest percentage in Mexico.”

“So that’s what this is really about,” Parada snapped. “Coke is worried about losing market share to Pepsi.”

But Parada instantly regretted the quip. It was immature and prideful and killed any chance for a rapprochement.

And Antonucci’s main contention is true, he thinks now.

I went to the countryside to convert the Indians.

Instead, they converted me.

And now this NAFTA horror would throw them off what little land they have left, to make room for the more “efficient” large ranches. To open the way for larger coffee fincas, mining, lumber operations and, of course, oil drilling.

Must everything, he wonders, be sacrificed on the altar of capitalism?

Now he gets up, turns the music down, and searches the room for his cigarettes. He always has to look for them, just like he has to look for his glasses. She doesn’t help, even though she sees them sitting by a side table. He’s smoking way too much. It can’t be helping.

“The smoke really bothers me,” she says.

“I’m not going to light it,” he says, finding the pack. “I’m only going to suck on it.”

“Try the gum.”

“I don’t like the gum.”

He sits back down across from her and says, “You want me to get out.”

She shakes her head. “I want you to do what you want to do.”

“Stop handling me,” he snaps. “Just tell me what you think.”

“You asked,” she says. “You deserve some kind of a life. You’ve earned it. If you decide to resign, no one will blame you. They’ll blame the Vatican, and you can walk away from all this with your head up.”

She gets up from the sofa, walks to the sidebar and pours herself a glass of wine. She wants the wine, but mostly she wants to avoid his eyes. Doesn’t want him looking at her as she says, “I’m selfish, okay? I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”

“Ah.”

The shared, unspoken thought hangs heavily between them: If he were to resign not just the cardinalate, but the priesthood itself, then they could…

But he could never do that, she thinks, and I wouldn’t really want him to.

And you’re being an exceptionally foolish old man, he thinks. She’s forty years your junior and you are, when all is said and done, a priest. So he says, “I’m afraid I’m the one who is being selfish. Perhaps our friendship is keeping you from seeking a relationship-”

“Don’t.”

“-that would meet more of your needs.”

“You meet all my needs.”

The expression on her face is so serious that he is taken aback for a moment. Those startling eyes so intense. He answers, “Certainly not all.”

“All.”

“Don’t you want a husband?” he asks. “A family? Children?”

“No.”

She wants to scream, Don’t leave me. Don’t make me leave you. I don’t need a husband or a family or children. I don’t need sex or money or comfort or safety.

I need you.

And there are probably a billion psychological reasons-indifferent father, sexual dysfunction, fear of committing to a man who’s actually available; a shrink would have a fucking field day-but I don’t care. You are the best man I’ve ever known. The smartest, kindest, funniest, best man I’ve ever known, and I don’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to you, so please don’t go away. Don’t make me go away.

“You’re not going to resign, are you?” she asks.

“I can’t.”

“Okay.”

“Is it?”

“Sure.”

She never really thought he would resign.

A soft knock on the door, and his assistant murmurs that he has an unscheduled visitor who has been told “Who is it?” Parada asks.

“A Senor Barrera,” the assistant answers. “I have told him-”

“I will see him.”

Nora gets up. “I need to get going anyway.”

They embrace and she goes to get dressed.

Parada goes into his private office to find Adan sitting there.

He’s changed, Parada thinks.

He still has the boyish face, but it’s a boy with cares. And little wonder, Parada thinks, what with the sick child. Parada offers his hand to shake. Adan takes it and, unexpectedly, kisses his ring.

“That’s certainly unnecessary,” Parada says. “It’s been a long time, Adan.”

“Almost six years.”

“Then why-”

“Thank you for the gifts you send Gloria,” Adan says.

“You’re welcome,” Parada says. “I also say Masses for her. And offer prayers.”

“They’re appreciated more than you know.”

“How is Gloria?”

“The same.”

Parada nods. “And Lucia?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Parada goes behind his desk and sits down. Leans forward on the desk, clasps his fingers together and looks at Adan with a studied, pastoral expression. “Six years ago I reached out to you and asked for your mercy on a helpless man. You answered by killing him.”

“It was an accident,” Adan says. “It was out of my control.”

“You can lie to yourself and to me,” Parada says. “You cannot lie to God.”

Why not? Adan thinks. He lies to us.

But he says, “On the lives of my wife and my child, I was going to release Hidalgo. One of my colleagues accidentally gave him an overdose, trying to reduce his pain.”

“Which he required because he had been tortured.”

“Not by me.”

“Enough, Adan,” Parada says, waving his hand as if to swat away the evasion. “Why are you here? How can I minister to you?”

“You can’t.”

“Then…”

“I’m asking you to be a pastor to my uncle.”

“Jesus walked on water,” Parada says. “I don’t know that it’s been done since.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” Parada says as he takes a pack of cigarettes from the desktop, shakes one into his mouth and lights it, “that despite the official party line, I have to believe that some people are beyond redemption. What you are asking for is a miracle.”

“I thought you were in the miracle business.”

“I am,” Parada answers. “For instance, right now I am trying to feed thousands of hungry people, provide them with clean water, decent homes, medicine, education and some hope for the future. Any one of these would be a miracle.”

“If it’s a matter of money-”

“Fuck your money,” Parada says. “There, is that plain enough?”

Adan smiles, remembering why he loves this man. And why Father Juan is probably the only priest tough enough to help Tio. He says, “My uncle is in torment.”

“Good. He should be.”

When Adan raises an eyebrow, Parada says, “I’m not sure I believe in a fiery hell, Adan, but if there is one, your uncle is doubtless going there.”

“He’s addicted to crack.”

“I will let the irony of that pass without comment,” Parada says. “You are familiar with the concept of karma?”

“Vaguely,” Adan says. “I know he needs help. And I know that you cannot refuse to help a soul in torment.”

“A soul who comes in true repentance, seeking to change his ways,” Parada says. “Does that describe your uncle?”

“No.”

“Does it describe you?”

“No.”

Parada stands up. “Then what do we have to talk about?”

“Please go see him,” Adan says. He takes a notepad from his jacket pocket and scribbles Tio’s address. “If you could persuade him to go to a clinic, a hospital…”

“There are hundreds in my diocese who want such treatment and can’t afford it,” Parada says.

“Send five of them with my uncle, and send their bills to me.”

“As I said before-”

“Right, fuck my money,” Adan says. “Your principles, their suffering.”

“From the drugs you sell.”

“He says with a cigarette in his mouth.”

Adan drops his head, looks at the floor for a second then says, “I’m sorry. I came to ask you for a favor. I should have checked my attitude at the door. I meant to.”

Parada takes a long pull on the cigarette, walks to the window and looks outside onto the zocalo, where the street vendors have spread their blankets and laid out their milagros to sell.

“I’ll go see Miguel Angel,” he says. “I doubt it will do any good.”

“Thank you, Father Juan.”

Parada nods.

“Father Juan?”

“Yes?”

“There are a lot of people who want to know that address.”

“I’m not a policeman,” Parada says.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Adan says. He walks to the door. “Good-bye, Father Juan. Thank you.”

“Change your life, Adan.”

“It’s too late.”

“If you really believed that,” Parada says, “you wouldn’t have come here.”

Parada walks Adan out the door into the small foyer, where a woman is standing with a small overnight bag over her shoulder.

“I should be going,” Nora says to Parada. She looks at Adan and smiles.

“Nora Hayden,” Parada says, “Adan Barrera.”

“Mucho gusto,” Adan says.

“Mucho gusto.” She turns to Parada. “I’ll be back in a few weeks.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” She turns to leave.

“I’m just going now myself,” Adan says. “May I carry your bag? Do you need a taxi?”

“That would be nice.”

She kisses Parada on the cheek. “Adios.”

“Buen viaje.”

Outside in the zocalo she says, “That sly smile on your face.. .”

“Is there a sly smile on my face?”

“-is misplaced. It’s not what you think.”

“You misunderstand,” Adan says. “I love and respect the man. Any happiness he finds in this world, I would never begrudge him.”

“We’re just friends.”

“As you wish.”

“We are.”

Adan looks across the square. “There’s a good cafe over there. I was about to have breakfast, and I hate to eat alone. Do you have the time and inclination to join me?”

“I haven’t eaten.”

“Come on, then,” Adan says. Crossing the square with her, he adds, “Look, I just have to make one phone call.”

“Go ahead.”

He gets his cell phone out and dials Gloria’s number.

“Hola, sonrisa de mi alma,” he says when she answers. She is the smile of his soul. Her voice is his dawn and his dusk. “How are you this morning?”

“Good, Papa. Where are you?”

“In Guadalajara,” he says. “Visiting Tio.”

“How is he?”

“He’s good, too,” Adan says. He looks out over the square where the street merchants have gathered in strength. “Ensancho de mi corazon, comfort of my heart, they sell songbirds here. Shall I bring one home to you?”

“What songs do they sing, Papa?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I think you have to teach them songs. Do you know any?”

“Papa,” she laughs, delighted, knowing she’s being teased, “I sing to you all the time.”

“I know you do.” Your songs crack my heart.

“Yes, please, Papa,” she says. “I would love to have a bird.”

“What color?”

“Yellow?”

“I think I see a yellow one.”

“Or green,” she says. “Any color, Papa. When will you be home?”

“Tomorrow night,” he says. “I have to go see Tio Guero, then I’ll come home.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” he says. “I’ll call you tonight.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

He ends the call.

“Your girlfriend?” Nora asks.

“The love of my life,” Adan says. “My daughter.”

“Ah.”

They choose an outdoor table. Adan pulls the chair out for her, then sits down. He looks across the table at those remarkable blue eyes. She doesn’t look away or flinch or blush. Just looks right back at him.

“And your wife?” she asks.

“What about her?”

“That’s what I was going to ask,” Nora says.

The door cracks like a gunshot.

Wood shattering on metal.

Angel’s pito slides out of the girl as he turns to see federales coming through the door.

Art thinks it’s almost comical as Tio shuffles with his pants around his ankles into a grotesque imitation of a run, the rolling IV stand following him like a harried servant, trying to reach the guns that are stacked in the corner of the room. Then the stand topples over in a crash, pulling the needle out of his arm, and Tio falls in the corner, on top of the guns, and comes up with a hand grenade and sits there fumbling with the pin until a federale grabs him and jerks the grenade out of his hand.

There’s still a fat, white ass sticking up from the kitchen table like a gigantic pile of dough. And the sound of a thwack as Ramos walks over and whacks it with the butt of his rifle.

She yelps an indignant “Ow.”

“You should have cooked breakfast, you lazy slut.”

He grabs her by the hair and pulls her up. “Get your pants on, no one wants to look at your nalgas grandes.”

Your big ass.

“I’ll give you five million dollars,” Angel is saying to the federale. “Five million dollars American to let me go.” Then he sees Art standing there and knows that five mil isn’t going to do it, that there isn’t enough money. He starts crying. “Kill me. Please, kill me now.”

And this is the face of evil, Art thinks.

A sad burlesque.

The man sitting there in the corner with his pants off, begging me to kill him.

Pathetic.

“Three minutes,” Ramos says.

Before the guards get back.

“Let’s get this piece of shit out of here, then,” Art says. He kneels down so his mouth is right next to his uncle’s ear and whispers, “Tio, let me tell you what you’ve always wanted to know.”

“What?”

“Who Source Chupar was.”

“Who?”

“Guero Mendez,” Art lies.

Guero Mendez, motherfucker.

“He hated you,” Art adds, “for taking that little bitch away from him and ruining her. He knew the only way of getting her back was to get rid of you.”

Maybe I can’t get to Adan, Raul and Guero, Art thinks, so I’ll settle for the next best thing.

I’ll make them destroy each other.

Adan collapses on Nora’s body. She holds his neck and strokes his hair.

“That was incredible,” he says.

“You haven’t had a woman in a long time,” she says.

“Was it that obvious?”

They had left the cafe and gone directly to a nearby hotel. His fingers had trembled, unbuttoning her blouse.

“You didn’t come,” he says.

“I will,” she says. “Next time.”

“Next time?”

An hour later she braces her hands against the windowsill, her legs a muscular V as he pumps into her from behind. The breeze through the open window cools the sweat on her skin as she moans and whimpers a beautiful fake climax until he is satisfied and lets himself come.

Later, lying on the floor, he says, “I want to see you again.”

“That can be arranged,” Nora says.

It’s just a matter of business.

Tio sits in a cell.

His arraignment didn’t go well-not the way it should have gone at all.

“I don’t know why they connect me with the cocaine business,” he said from the dock. “I’m a car dealer. All I know about the drug trade is what I read in the newspapers.”

And the people in the courtroom laughed.

Laughed, and the judge bound him over for trial. No bail-a dangerous criminal, the judge said. A definite risk of flight. Especially in Guadalajara, where the defendant is alleged to have considerable influence in the law enforcement community. So they had put him-shackled-on a military aircraft and flown him to Mexico City. Under a special canopy from the plane to a van with black-painted windows. Then to Almoloya prison and into solitary confinement.

Where the cold makes his bones ache.

And the screaming need for crack gnaws at his bones like a hungry dog. The dog chewing on him, chewing on him, wanting that cocaine.

But worse than any of that is the anger.

The rage of betrayal.

The betrayal of his allies-for there must have been a betrayal at the highest levels for him to be sitting in this cell.

That hijo de puta and his brother in Los Pinos. Whom we bought and paid for and put in office. The election that was stolen from Cardenas using my money and the money I made the cartel give them-and they have betrayed me like this. The motherless whores, the cabrones, the lambiosos.

And the Americans, the Americans whom I helped in their war against the Communists, they have betrayed me, too.

And Guero Mendez, who stole my love. Mendez, who has the woman that should have been mine, and the children that should have been mine.

And Pilar, that cunt who betrayed me.

Tio sits on the floor of the cell, his arms around his legs, rocking back and forth with need and rage. It takes him a day to find a guard to sell him crack. He inhales the delicious smoke and holds it in his lungs. Lets it seep into his brain. Give him euphoria, then clarity.

Then he sees it all.

Revenge.

On Mendez.

On Pilar.

He falls asleep smiling.

Fabian Martinez-aka El Tiburon-is a stone killer.

The Junior has become one of Raul’s key sicarios, his most efficient gunman. That newspaper editor in Tijuana whose investigative journalism got a little too investigative-El Tiburon took him out like a target in a video game. That loser Californian surfer and dope dude who had three tons of yerba dropped off on the beach near Rosarita but didn’t pay his landing fee-El Tiburon popped him like a balloon and then went out to party. And those three totally fucking idiotic pendejos from Durango who did a tombe, a robbery-murder, on a shipment of coke that the Barreras had guaranteed-well, El Tiburon took an AK and hosed them off the street like dogshit, then poured gasoline over their bodies, set them on fire and let them burn like luminarias. The local firemen were afraid, with good reason, to put them out, and the story goes that two of the guys were still breathing when El Tiburon dropped the match on them.

“That’s bullshit,” Fabian would say, denying the story. “I used my lighter.”

Whatever.

He kills without feeling or conscience.

Which is what we need, Raul thinks now as he sits in the car with the kid and asks him to do this favor for the Barrera pasador.

“We want you to take over making the cash deliveries to Guero Mendez,” Raul tells him. “Become the new courier.”

“That’s it?” Fabian asks.

He’d thought it would be something else, something wet, something that involved the sharp, sweet adrenaline high of killing.

Actually, there is something else.

Pilar’s children are the loves of her life.

She’s a young madonna, with a three-year-old daughter and an infant son, her face and body more mature, and there is character around her eyes that wasn’t there before. She sits at the edge of the pool and dangles her bare feet in the water.

“The children are la sonrisa de mi corazon,” she tells Fabian Martinez. Then adds pointedly, sadly, “Not my husband.”

Fabian thinks that Guero Mendez’s estancia is totally gross.

“Traficante chic” is how Pilar privately describes it to him, her tone not even attempting to hide her contempt. “I am trying to change it, but he has this image in his head…”

Narcovaquero, Fabian thinks.

Drug cowboy.

Instead of running from his rural roots, Guero flaunts them. Creates a grotesque, modern version of the great landowners of the past-the dons, the ranchers, the vaqueros who wore wide-brimmed hats and boots and chaps because they needed them out in the mesquite, herding cattle. Now the new narcos are turning the image on its head: black polyester cowboy shirts with fake mother-of-pearl buttons, polyester chaps in bright pastels-lime greens, canary yellows and coral pinks. And high-heeled boots. Not practical walking boots, but pointed-toe Yanqui cowboy boots, made from all kinds of materials, the more exotic the better-ostrich, alligator-dyed in bright reds and greens.

The old vaqueros would have laughed.

Or would spin in their graves.

And the house…

Pilar’s embarrassed by it.

It’s not the classic estancia style-one-floor, tile roof, gentle, gracious porch-but a three-story monstrosity of yellow brick, pillars and ironwork railing. And the interior-leather chairs with cattle horns as wings, and hooves for feet. Sofas made from red and white cattle hide. Barstools with saddles for seats.

“With all his money,” she sighs, “what he could do…”

Speaking of money, Fabian has a briefcase of it in his hand. More money for Guero Mendez to commit to his war against taste. Fabian’s the courier now, the pretext being that it’s too dangerous for the Barrera brothers to move around, with all that’s happened to Miguel Angel.

They have to lie low.

So Fabian will make the monthly cash deliveries and report from the front.

They’re having a weekend party at the ranch. Pilar is playing the gracious hostess, and Fabian is surprised to find himself thinking that she is gracious-lovely and charming and subtle. He’d expected some frumpy housewife, but she’s not that. And at dinner that night, in the large formal dining room now crowded with guests, he sees her face in candlelight, and her face is exquisite.

She glances over and sees him looking.

This movie-star-handsome boy with the good, stylish clothes.

Pretty soon, he finds himself walking out by the pool with her, and then she tells him that she doesn’t love her husband.

He doesn’t know what to say, so he shuts his mouth. He’s surprised when she continues, “I was so young. So was he, and muy guapo, no? And, forgive me, he was going to rescue me from Don Angel. Which he did. Make me into a grand lady. Which he has. An unhappy grand lady.”

Fabian says, stupidly, “You’re unhappy?”

“I don’t love him,” she says. “Isn’t that terrible of me? I am a terrible person. He treats me well, gives me everything. He has no other women, doesn’t go with whores… I am the love of his life, and that’s what makes me feel so guilty. Guero worships me, and I have contempt for him because of that. When he is with me, I don’t feel.. . I don’t feel. And then I start to make a list of the things I dislike about him: He’s crass, he has no taste, he’s a hick, a hillbilly. I hate it here. I want to go back to Guadalajara. Real restaurants, real shops. I want to go to museums, concerts, galleries. I want to travel-see Rome, Paris, Rio. I don’t want to be bored-with my life, with my husband.”

She smiles, then looks back at the guests gathered around the enormous bar at the other end of the pool. “They all think I’m a whore.”

“They don’t.”

“Of course they do,” she says evenly. “But none of them is brave enough to say it out loud.”

Of course not, Fabian thinks-they all know the story of Rafael Barragos.

He wonders if she does.

“Rafi” had been at a barbecue at the ranch, shortly after Guero and Pilar were married, and was standing around with some cuates when Guero came out of the house with Pilar on his arm. And Rafi chuckled, and under his breath made a wisecrack about Guero hitching his cart to Barrera's puta. And one of his good buddies went to Guero and told him, and that night Rafi was grabbed from his guest room and the silver plate that he had given them for a wedding present was melted down in front of him and a funnel was stuck in his mouth and the molten silver poured into it.

As Guero watched.

That’s how Rafi’s body was found-hanging upside down from a telephone pole on a roadside twenty miles from the ranch, his eyes widened in agony, his open mouth filled with hardened silver. And no one dared to take the body down, not the police, not even the family, and for years the old man who herded goats by that place told about the strange sound the crows’ beaks made as they pecked through Rafi’s cheeks and struck silver.

And that spot along the road became known as “Donde los Cuervos son Ricos”-where crows are rich.

So yes, Fabian thinks as he looks at her, the reflected water from the pool glimmering gold on her skin, Everyone is afraid to call you a puta.

They’re probably afraid to even think it.

And, Fabian thinks, if Guero did that to a man who merely insulted you, what would he do to the man who seduces you? He feels a stab of fear, but then feels it turn into excitement. It turns him on; it makes him proud of his own cool courage, his prowess as a lover.

Then she leans close to him and, to his shock and excitement, whispers, “Yo quiero rabiar.”

I want to burn.

I want to rage.

I want to go crazy.

Adan screams his orgasm.

He collapses on Nora’s soft breasts, and she holds him tightly with her arms and squeezes him rhythmically inside herself.

“My God,” he gasps.

Nora smiles.

“Did you come?” he asks.

“Oh, yes,” she lies. “It was beautiful.”

She doesn’t want to tell him that she never comes with a man, that later, alone, she will use her own fingers to give herself relief. It would be pointless to tell him, and she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. She actually likes him, feels a certain sort of affection for him, and besides, it’s just not something you tell a man you’re trying to please.

They’ve been meeting regularly for some months since their first encounter in Guadalajara. Now, like today, they usually take a hotel room in Tijuana, which is an easier commute for her from San Diego and, obviously, convenient for him. So once a week or so he disappears from one of his restaurants and meets her in a hotel room. It’s the cliched “love in the afternoon”; he’s always home in the evening.

Adan made this clear from the very start.

“I love my wife.”

She’d heard this a thousand times. They all love their wives. And most of them really do. This is about sex, not love.

“I don’t want to hurt her,” Adan stated as if he were laying out a business policy. Which, Nora thought, he was. “I don’t want her to be embarrassed or humiliated in any way. She’s a wonderful person. I will never leave her or my daughter.”

“Good,” Nora said.

Both of them businesspeople, they come to an arrangement quickly and without any emotional fuss. She never wants to see any actual money. He opens a bank account for her and deposits a certain amount every month. He chooses the dates and times for their assignations, and she will be there, but he has to provide a week’s notice. If he wants to see her more than once a week, that’s fine, but he still has to let her know in advance.

Once a month, the results of a blood test, certifying her sexual health, will discreetly arrive at his office. He’ll do the same for her, and they can dispense with the annoying condom.

One other thing they agree on-Father Juan cannot know about them.

In a crazy way they each feel as if they’re cheating on him-she on their platonic friendship, Adan on their former relationship.

“Does he know what you do for a living?” he’d asked her.

“Yes.”

“And does he approve?”

“We’re friends anyway,” Nora said. “Does he know what you do for a living?”

“I’m a restaurateur.”

“Uh-huh.”

She didn’t believe it then, and she certainly doesn’t believe it now, after months of meeting with him. The name had rung a faint bell anyway, from a night almost ten years ago at the White House when Jimmy Piccone had so brutally inaugurated her into the trade. So when she returned from Guadalajara she called Haley, asked her about Adan Barrera and got the whole rundown.

“Be careful,” Haley advised. “The Barreras are dangerous.”

Maybe, Nora thinks now as Adan falls into a postcoital slumber. But she hasn’t seen that side of Adan and doubts that it even exists. He’s been only gentle to her, even sweet. She admires his loyalty to his sick daughter and his frigid wife. He has needs, is all, and he’s trying to get them met in the most ethical way possible.

For a relatively sophisticated man he’s remarkably unsophisticated in bed. She’s had to ease him into certain practices, teach him positions and techniques; the man is startled by the depth of pleasure she can make him feel.

And he’s unselfish, she thinks. He doesn’t come to bed with the consumer mentality that so many johns have, the sense of entitlement that comes with their platinum cards. He wants to please her, wants her to be as satisfied as he is, wants her to feel the same joy.

He doesn’t treat me, she thinks, like a vending machine. Put in your quarter, pull the knob and get the candy.

Goddamn it, she thinks, I like the man.

He’s started to open up, sexually and personally. They spend the interstitial moments talking. Not about drug business, of course-he knows she knows what he does, and they leave it at that-but about the restaurant business, the multitude of problems associated with putting food in the mouths and smiles on the lips of the consuming public. They talk about sports-he’s delighted to find that she can discuss boxing in depth and knows the difference between a slider and a curveball-and about the stock market; she’s a shrewd investor who starts her day the same way he does, with The Wall Street Journal beside her morning coffee. They discuss menu items, debate the rankings of middleweights, dissect the relative strengths and weaknesses of mutual funds versus municipal bonds.

She knows it’s another cliche, just as hackneyed as love in the afternoon, but men do come to hookers to talk. The wives of the world would take a chunk out of her business if they glanced at the sports pages, spent a few minutes watching ESPN or Wall Street Week. Their husbands would willingly spend a few hours discussing feelings if the wives were willing to just talk about stuff a little more.

So it’s part of her job, but she really enjoys her conversations with Adan. She’s interested in the topics and she likes talking about them with him. She’s used to intelligent, successful men, but Adan is really smart. He’s an unrelenting analyst; he thinks things through, performs intellectual surgery until he cuts to the bottom line.

And face it, she tells herself, you’re attracted to his sorrow. To the sadness he carries with such quiet dignity. You think you can ease his pain, and you like that. It’s not about the usual shallow satisfaction of leading a man around by the dick, but about taking a man who’s in pain and making him forget his sadness for a little while.

Yeah, Nurse Nora, she thinks.

Florence Fucking Nightingale with a blow job instead of a lantern.

She leans over and gently touches his neck until his eyes pop open. “You have to get up,” she says. “You have an appointment in an hour, remember?”

“Thanks,” he says sleepily. He gets up and goes into the shower. Like most things he does, it’s brisk and efficient-he doesn’t luxuriate under the spray of hot water, but washes up, towels off, comes back into the room and starts to get dressed.

But today, as he buttons his shirt, he says, “I want us to be exclusive.”

“Oh, Adan, that would be very expensive,” she says, a little disconcerted, caught off-guard. “I mean, if you want all my time, you’d have to pay for all my time.”

“I assumed as much.”

“Can you afford that?”

“Money is not my problem in life.”

“Adan,” she says, “I don’t want you taking money from your family.”

She instantly regrets saying it because she can see he’s offended. He looks up from his shirt, stares at her in a way she’s never seen before and says, “I think you already know that is something I would never do.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll get you a condo here in Tijuana,” he says. “We can agree on annual compensation and renegotiate it at the end of every year. Other than that, we never have to discuss the money. You would simply be my-”

“Mistress.”

“I was thinking more of the word 'lover,’ ” he says. “Nora, I do love you, I want you in my life, but there’s only so much of my life to go around and most of it is already taken up.”

“I understand.”

“I know you do,” he says. “And I appreciate that, more than you can know. I know you don’t love me, but I think I’m more than just a customer to you. The arrangement I’m proposing isn’t ideal, but I think it can give us the most we can have with each other.”

He’s prepared for this, she thinks. He thought it through, chose his exact words and practiced them.

I should probably think that’s pathetic, she tells herself, but I’m actually touched.

That he took the time and the thought.

“Adan, I’m flattered,” she says, “and tempted. It’s a lovely offer. Can I take a little time to think about it?”

“Of course.”

She thinks hard after he leaves.

Takes stock.

You’re twenty-nine years old, she tells herself, a young twenty-nine, a good twenty-nine, but nevertheless, just on the edge of over-the-hill. The breasts are still firm, the ass is still tight, the stomach flat. None of that will change for a while, but every year it will be harder to maintain, even with the workout fanaticism. Time will take its toll.

And there are younger girls coming up, girls with long legs and high breasts, girls to whom gravity is still an ally. Girls who have the bodies without hours on the stationary bicycle and the treadmill, without the sit-ups and the weight lifting, without the diets. And increasingly, those are the girls the platinum johns are going to want.

So how many years do you have left?

Years at the top, because the middle is not where you want to be and the bottom is a place you don’t want to go. How many years before Haley starts sending you out to the B-list clients, then stops sending you at all?

Two, three, five at the outside?

Then what?

Will you have banked enough money to retire?

Depends on the market, on the investments. In two or three or five years I might have enough money to live in Paris, or I might have to work, in which case, what’s the work?

There are two broad streams in the sex industry.

Prostitution and porn.

Sure, there’s stripping, but that’s where most girls start, and they don’t stay for long. They either get out or go into prostitution or porn. You skipped the dancing phase-thank you, Haley-and went straight to the top end of the prostitution business, but what happens next?

If you don’t take Adan’s offer and the market doesn’t perform?

Porn?

God knows she’s had offers. The money is good, if the work is hard. And she hears that they’re careful about the health issues, but God… there’s something about doing it in front of a camera that puts her off.

And again, how long could it last?

Six or seven years, tops.

Then it would be a steep slide to the low-budget video quickies. Fucking on a mattress in the backyard of some house in the Valley. Girl-girl scenes; orgy scenes; being the hot, horny housewife; the nympho mother-in-law; the sex-starved, cock-hungry, grateful, eager older woman.

You’d kill yourself in a year.

A razor along the wrists or a drug overdose.

Same with the inevitable slide as a call girl. You’ve seen it, cringed at it, pitied the women who stayed too long, didn’t save their money, didn’t get married, didn’t hook up with a long-term john. You’ve watched as their faces became bed-worn, their bodies old, their spirits crushed, and pitied them.

Pity.

Self or otherwise, you couldn’t stand that.

Take this man’s offer.

He loves you, he treats you well.

Take his offer while you’re still beautiful, while he still wants you, while you can still give him more pleasure than he ever dreamed possible. Take his money and put it away and then when he gets tired of you, when he starts looking harder at the younger girls, starts looking at them the way he looks at you now, then you can leave with your dignity intact and a decent life in front of you.

Retire from the business and just live.

She decides to tell Adan yes.

Guamuchilito, Sinaloa, Mexico

Tijuana, Mexico

Colombia

1992

Fabian burns.

With what Pilar had whispered to him.

“Yo quiero rabiar.”

Was she telling me, he wonders, what I think she was telling me? Leads to other thoughts, about her mouth, her legs, her feet dangling in the water, the outline of her sex beneath the bathing suit. And fantasies-of reaching his hand beneath that suit and feeling her breasts, of stroking her chocho, of hearing her moan, of being inside her and…

And did she mean rabiar? Spanish is a subtle tongue, in which each word can take many meanings. Rabiar can mean to thirst, to burn, to rage, to go crazy, all of which he thinks she meant. And it can also refer specifically to S amp;M, and he wonders if she could have possibly meant that she wants to be tied up, whipped, fucked roughly-and that gives him yet more tantalizing fantasies. Surprising fantasies that he’s never had before about anyone. He pictures himself tying her down with silk scarves, spanking her beautiful ass, whipping her. Sees himself behind her, she on her hands and knees, fucking her doggie-style and she yelling at him to pull her hair. And he grabs a handful of that thick, black, shiny hair and yanks it back like the reins of a horse, so her long neck arches and stretches and she screams with pain and pleasure.

“Yo quiero rabiar.” ?Ay, Dios mio!

The next time he goes to Rancho Mendez (weeks later-endless weeks later), he can barely breathe as he gets out of the car. There’s a tightness in his chest and he feels light-headed. And guilty. Wonders, as Guero greets him with an embrace, if his wanton lust for the man’s wife isn’t visible on his face. And he’s sure it must be when she comes out the door of the house and smiles at him. She is carrying the baby and has her arm around the little girl, to whom she says, “Mira, Claudia, Tio Fabian esta aqui.”

Uncle Fabian.

He feels a twinge of shame, like, Hello Claudia, Uncle Fabian wants to fuck Mommy.

Badly.

He kisses her that night.

Fucking Guero leaves them alone again in the living room to take a phone call, and they’re standing by the fire and she smells like mimosa flowers and his heart feels like it’s going to explode and they’re looking at each other and then they’re kissing.

Her lips are amazingly soft.

Like overripe peaches.

He feels dizzy.

The kiss ends and they step back from each other.

Amazed.

Scared.

Stimulated.

He walks to the other side of the room.

“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” she says.

“Neither did I.”

But he did.

It’s the plan.

The plan that Raul told him, but Fabian is certain that it came from Adan. And perhaps from Miguel Angel Barrera himself.

And Fabian is carrying out the plan.

So pretty soon they’re sneaking kisses, embraces, brushes of the hands, significant glances. It’s an insanely dangerous game, insanely exciting. Flirting with sex, and death, because Guero would surely kill them both if he ever found out.

“I don’t think so,” Pilar tells Fabian. “Oh, I think he would kill you, but then I think he would yell and cry and forgive me.”

She says it almost sadly.

She doesn’t want to be forgiven.

She wants to burn.

Nevertheless, she says, “Nothing can ever happen between us.”

Fabian agrees. In his words. In his head, he is thinking, Yes, it can. Yes, it will. It’s my job, my task, my assignment: Seduce Guero’s wife. Take her away with you.

He starts with the magic words, What if.

The two most powerful words in any language.

What if we’d met each other first? What if we were free? What if we could travel together-Paris, Rio, Rome? What if we ran away? What if we took enough money with us to start a new life?

What if, what if, what if.

They’re like two children playing a game. (What if these rocks were gold?) They start imagining the details of their escape-when they would go, how, what they would take with them. How could they get away without Guero knowing? What about his bodyguards? Where could they meet? What about her children? She wouldn’t leave them behind. Could never leave them behind.

All this shared fantasy done in snatches of conversations, moments stolen from Guero-she’s already unfaithful to Guero in her mind and her heart. And in the bedroom-when he’s on top of her, she’s thinking about Fabian. Guero is so pleased with himself when she screams out her orgasm (this is new, this is fresh), but she’s thinking about Fabian. She’s started stealing even that from him.

The infidelity is complete-all that remain are the physical details.

Possibility shifts to fantasy, fantasy becomes speculation, speculation turns to planning. It’s delicious, planning this new life. They go after it in minute detail. Each of them a clotheshorse, they spend entire precious minutes discussing what they will pack, what they can buy there (“there” being, variously, Paris, Rome or Rio).

Or more serious details: Should we leave Guero a note? Or just disappear? Should we go together or meet somewhere? If we rendezvous, where? Or maybe we can go separately, on the same flight. Exchange meaningful looks across the aisle-a long, sexually torturous overnight flight, then put the children to bed and meet in his room in a Paris hotel.

Rabiar.

No, I couldn’t wait, she tells him. I will go to the washroom on the plane. You will follow. The door will be unlocked. No, they will meet in a bar in Rio. Pretend they are strangers. He’ll follow her into an alley, shove her against a fence.

Rabiar.

Will you hurt me?

If you want.

Yes.

Then I’ll hurt you.

He’s everything that Guero isn’t: sophisticated, handsome, well dressed, stylish, sexy. And charming. So charming.

She’s ready.

She asks him when.

“Soon,” he says. “I want to run away with you, but…”

But.

The terrible counterweight to What if. The intrusion of reality. In this case…

“We’ll need money,” he says. “I have some money, but not enough to hide us for as long as we’ll need to hide.”

He knows this is delicate. This is the fragile moment in which the bubble could burst. It floats now on the light air of romance, but the mundane, gross financial details could pop it in a flash. He puts on his face a mask of sensitivity, mixed with a dash of shame, and looks down at the ground as he says, “We will have to wait until I can make more money.”

“How long will that be?” she asks. She sounds hurt, disappointed, on the verge of tears.

He has to be careful. So careful. “Not long,” he says. “A year. Maybe two.”

“That’s too long!”

“I’m sorry. What can I do?”

He leaves the question in the air as if there is no other answer. She provides the response that he wants and expects. “I have money.”

“No,” he says firmly. “Never.”

“But two years-”

“It’s out of the question.”

Just as their flirting was once out of the question, just as their kissing was out of the question, just as their running away…

“How much would we need?” she asks.

“Millions,” he says. “That’s why it will take-”

“I can withdraw that much from the bank.”

“I couldn’t.”

“You’re just thinking of yourself,” she says. “Your male pride. Your machismo. How could you be so selfish?”

And that’s the key, Fabian thinks. It’s a done deal now that he’s flipped the equation. Now that his taking her money would be an act of generosity and unselfishness on his part. Now that he loves her so much he would sacrifice his pride, his machismo.

“You don’t love me,” she pouts.

“I love you more than life.”

“You don’t love me enough to-”

“Yes,” he says. “I do.”

She throws her arms around him.

When he goes back to Tijuana he finds Raul and tells him it’s a done deal.

It’s taken months, but the Shark’s about to feed.

It’s good timing, Raul thinks.

Because it’s time to start the war with Guero Mendez.

Pilar carefully folds and packs a little black dress.

Along with black brassieres and panties and other lingerie.

Fabian likes her in black.

She wants to please him. She wants it to be perfect, her first time with him. Pues, a menos que la fantasia sea mejor que e acto-well, unless the fantasy is better than the actual fuck. But she doesn’t think it will be. No man can talk the way he does, use the words he uses, have the ideas he has, and not be able to back up at least some of them. He makes her wet talking to her-what will he do when he has her in his arms?

I’ll let him do anything he wants to me, she thinks.

I want him to do anything he wants.

Will you hurt me?

If you want.

Yes.

Then I’ll hurt you.

She hopes so, she hopes he means it, that he won’t be intimidated by her beauty and lose his nerve.

About any of it-because she wants a new life, away from this Sinaloan backwater with her husband and his hillbilly friends. She wants a better life for her children-a good education, some culture, some sense that the world is wider and better than a grotesque fortress tucked away on the outskirts of an isolated mountain town.

And Fabian has that sense-they’ve talked about it. He’s talked to her about making friendships outside the narrow circle of narcotraficantes, about creating relationships with bankers, investors, even artists and writers.

She wants that for herself.

She wants that for her children.

So when, at breakfast, Guero had excused himself and Fabian had leaned over and whispered, “Today,” she’d felt a thrill that fluttered her heart. It was almost like a little orgasm.

“Today?” she whispered back.

“Guero is going out into the countryside,” Fabian said, “to inspect his fields.”

“Yes.”

“So when I go to the airport, you will go with me. I’ve booked us a flight to Bogota.”

“And the children?”

“Of course,” Fabian said. “Can you pack a few things? Quickly?”

Now she hears Guero coming down the hall. She slips the suitcase under the bed.

He sees the clothes scattered around. “What are you doing?”

“I’m thinking of getting rid of a few of these old things,” she says. “I will bring them to the church.”

“Then go shopping?” he asks, smiling, teasing her. He likes when she goes shopping. Likes it when she spends money. He encourages it.

“Probably.”

“I’m going,” he says. “I’ll be gone all day. I might even stay overnight.”

She kisses him warmly. “I will miss you.”

“I will miss you,” he says. “Maybe I will grab una nena to keep me warm.”

I wish you would, she thinks. Then you wouldn’t come to our bed with such desperation. But she says, “Not you. You are not one of those old gomeros.”

“And I love my wife.”

“And I love my husband.”

“Has Fabian left yet?”

“No, I think he’s packing.”

“I’ll go say good-bye to him.”

“And kiss the children.”

“Aren’t they still alseep?”

“Of course,” she says. “But they like to know that you kissed them before you left.”

He reaches for her and kisses her again. “Eres toda mi vida.”

You are all my life.

As soon as he goes out, she closes the door and gets the suitcase out from under the bed.

Adan says good-bye to his family.

Goes into Gloria’s room and kisses her on the cheek.

The girl smiles.

Despite everything, she smiles, Adan thinks. She’s so cheerful, so brave. In the background, the bird he brought her from Guadalajara chirps.

“Have you given the bird a name?” he asks her.

“Gloria.”

“After yourself?”

“No,” she giggles. “Gloria Trevi.”

“Ah.”

“You’re going away, aren’t you?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Papaaaa…”

“Only for a week or so,” he says.

“Where?”

“A bunch of places,” he says. “Costa Rica, maybe Colombia.”

“Why?”

“To look at coffee to buy,” he says. “For the restaurants.”

“Can’t you buy coffee here?”

“Not good enough for our restaurants.”

“Couldn’t I come with you?”

“Not this time,” he says. “Maybe next time.”

If there is a next time, he thinks. If everything goes right in Badiraguato, in Culiacan and on the bridge over the Rio Magdalena, where he is going to meet the Orejuelas.

If everything goes well, my love.

If not, he has always made sure that Lucia knows where the life-insurance policies are, and how to access the bank accounts in the Caymans, the securities in safe-deposit boxes, the investment portfolios. If things go badly on this trip, if the Orejuelas toss his body off the bridge, then his wife and child will be taken care of for the rest of their lives.

So will Nora.

He’s left a bank account and instructions with his private banker.

If he doesn’t come back from this trip, Nora will have sufficient funds to start a small business, a new life.

“What can I bring back for you?” he asks his daughter.

“Just come back,” she says.

The intuition of small children, he thinks. They read your mind and your heart with uncanny accuracy.

“I’ll make it a surprise,” he says. “Give Papa a kiss?”

He feels her dry lips on his cheek and then her thin arms around his neck in a lock that won’t let go. It breaks his heart. He never wants to leave her, and for a moment he considers not going. Just getting out of the pista secreta and running the restaurants. But it’s much too late for that-the war with Guero is coming, and if they don’t kill him, Guero will kill them.

So he steels his heart, breaks her grip and straightens up.

“Good-bye, mi alma,” he says. “I’ll call you every day.”

Turns quickly so she won’t see the tears in his eyes. They would frighten her. He walks out of her room, and Lucia is waiting in the living room with his suitcase and a jacket.

“About a week,” he says.

“We’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss you.” He kisses her on the cheek, takes his jacket and walks to the door.

“Adan?”

“Yes?”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he says. “A little tired.”

“Maybe you can sleep on the plane.”

“Maybe.” He goes to open the door, then turns around and says, “Lucia, you know I love you.”

“I love you, too, Adan.”

She says it like it’s an apology. It sort of is. An apology for not making love to him, for making their bed a cold place, for her helplessness to make it any different. To tell him that it doesn’t mean she doesn’t still love him.

He smiles sadly and leaves.

On the way to the airport he phones Nora to tell her he won’t be seeing her this week.

Maybe never, he thinks as he hangs up.

It depends on what’s happening in Culiacan.

Where the banks have just opened.

Pilar withdraws seven million dollars.

From three different banks in Culiacan.

Two of the bank managers start to object and want to contact Senor Mendez first-to Fabian’s horror, one even picks up the phone-but Pilar’s insistent, informing the cowed managers that she’s Senora Mendez, not some housewife overspending her allowance.

The receiver is replaced on the hook.

She gets her money.

Before they even get on the plane, Fabian has her wire-transfer two million to accounts set up in a dozen banks around the world. “Now we can live,” Fabian tells her. “He can’t find us, he can’t find the money.”

They bundle the kids into her car and drive toward the airport for a private flight to Mexico City.

“How did you arrange this?” Pilar asks Fabian.

“I have influential friends,” Fabian answers.

She’s impressed.

Guerito’s too young to know what’s happening, of course, but Claudia wants to know where Daddy is. “We’re playing a game with Daddy,” Pilar explains. “Like hide-and-go-seek.” The girl accepts the explanation, but Pilar can see she’s still concerned.

The drive to the airport is terrifying and exciting; they are always looking behind them, wondering if Guero and his sicarios are coming. Then they are at the airport itself, driving out onto the tarmac where the private plane is waiting. Sitting and waiting for permission to take off, Fabian looks out the window and sees Guero and a handful of men roll up in two jeeps.

The bank manager must have phoned after all.

Pilar is staring at him, her eyes wide with terror.

And excitement.

Guero jumps out of the jeep, and Pilar watches him argue with a security cop and then he’s looking right at her through the little window of the plane, he’s pointing at the plane, then Fabian coolly leans over and kisses her on the lips and then leans toward the cockpit and snaps, “Vamonos.”

The plane starts rolling down the runway. Guero jumps back into the jeep and races down the runway after the jet, but Pilar feels the wheels lift off and they’re airborne and Guero and the whole small world of Culiacan get smaller.

Pilar feels as if she could take Fabian into the little bathroom on the plane and fuck him right there, but the children are looking at her, so she has to wait, and the frustration and excitement only build.

They fly first to Guadalajara to refuel. Then they fly to Mexico City, where they leave the private plane and get on a tourist flight to Belize, where she thinks surely they will stop and go to some resort on the beach and then she will get some release, but in the small Belize airport they change planes again and take another flight to San Jose, Costa Rica, where she thinks surely they will stop for a day or so at least, but then they check in for a flight to Caracas but don’t board it.

Instead, they get on another commercial flight, to Cali in Colombia.

With different passports and false names.

It’s all so stimulating and exciting, and when they finally get to Cali, Fabian tells her that they are going to stay for a few days. They take a taxi to the Hotel Internacional, where Fabian gets them two adjoining rooms under yet different names and she feels as if she’s going to explode as they all sit in one room until the exhausted children fall asleep.

He takes her by the wrist and leads her into his room.

“I want to take a shower,” she says.

“No.”

“No?”

Not a word she’s used to hearing.

He says, “Get your clothes off. Now.”

“But-”

He slaps her across the face. Then he sits in a chair in the corner and watches as she unbuttons her blouse and slides it off. She kicks off her shoes and slides her pants down and stands there in her black lingerie.

“Off.”

God, his prick is pounding. Her white breasts against the black brassiere are tantalizing. He wants to touch them, caress her, but he knows it isn’t what she wants, and he doesn’t dare disappoint her.

She unhooks the bra and her breasts drop, but just a little. Then she takes the panties off and looks at him. She’s blushing furiously as she asks, “Now what?”

“On the bed,” he says. “On your hands and knees. Present yourself to me.”

She’s trembling as she climbs onto the bed and lowers her head to her hands.

“Are you wet for me?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You want me to fuck you?”

“Yes.”

“Say 'Please.’ ”

“Please.”

“Not yet.”

He takes his belt off. Grabs her hands, lifts them-God, her breasts are beautiful as they quiver-wraps it around her wrists and then around the railing at the head of the bed.

Now he has a handful of her hair, jerking her head back, arching her neck. Riding her like a horse, whipping her rump, racing her to a finish. She loves the sharp sound of his slaps, the sting; she feels it deep inside her, a throb pushing her orgasm out.

It hurts.

Rabiar.

Pilar is burning. Her skin is burning, her ass is burning, her pussy is burning as he strokes her, spanks her, fucks her. She twists on the bed, on her knees, her wrists bound together, tied to the head of the bed.

It hurts so good because she’s waited so long. Months, yes, of the flirting, then the fantasizing, then the planning, but also the excitement of the escape itself.

Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.

He hits her in rhythm with her grunts.

Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack.

She moans, “?Voy a morir!?Voy a morir!”

I’m going to come! I’m going to die!

And yells, “?Voy a volar!”

I’m flying! Exploding!

Then she screams.

A long, inchoate, tremulous scream.

Pilar comes out of the bathroom and sits on the bed. Asks him to zip the back of her dress. He does. Her skin is beautiful. Her hair so beautiful. He strokes her hair with the back of his hand and kisses her neck.

“Later, mi amor,” she purrs. “The children are waiting in the car.”

He strokes her neck again. Reaches around with his other hand and brushes her nipple. She sighs and leans back. Soon she is on all fours again, presenting, waiting for him (he makes her wait; she loves him making her wait) to come inside her. He grabs her hair and pulls her head back.

Then she feels the pain.

Around her throat.

At first she thinks it’s another S amp;M game, him choking her, but he doesn’t stop and the pain is She twists.

She burns.

Rabiar.

She struggles and her legs kick out involuntarily.

Fabian hisses in her ear, “This is for Don Miguel Angel, bruja. He sends you his love.”

He squeezes and pulls until the wire slices through her throat, then her vertebrae, and then her head itself pops up before it falls face-first on the floor with a hollow thump.

Blood sprays the ceiling.

Fabian picks the head up by its shiny black hair. Her lifeless eyes stare at him. He puts it in a cooler, locks it, then puts the cooler inside a box that has already been addressed. He wraps the box tightly with several layers of packing tape.

Then he takes a shower.

Her blood dances on his feet before spiraling down the drain.

He dries off, puts on fresh clothes and carries the box out to the street, where a car is waiting.

The children sit in the backseat.

Fabian slides in with them and nods for Manuel to drive.

“Where is Mommy? Where is Mommy?” Claudia asks.

“She’s going to meet us there.”

“Where?” Claudia starts to cry.

“A special place,” Fabian says. “A surprise.”

“What is the surprise?” Claudia asks. Seduced, she stops crying.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”

“Is the box a surprise, too?”

“What box?”

“The box you put in the trunk,” Claudia says. “I saw you.”

“No,” Fabian says. “That’s just something I have to mail.”

He goes into the post office and hefts the box onto the counter. It’s surprisingly heavy, he thinks, her head. He remembers the thickness of her hair, its heaviness in his hands as he would play with it, stroke it, part of his seduction. She was marvelous in bed, he thinks. Feeling-to his slight horror, considering what he has just done, what he’s about to do-a frisson of sexual desire.

“How do you want this sent?” the postal clerk asks.

“Overnight.”

The clerk puts it on a scale and asks, “Do you want it insured?”

“No.”

“It’s going to be expensive anyway,” the clerk says. “Are you sure you don’t want it sent priority? It will be there in two or three days.”

“No, it has to be there tomorrow,” Fabian says.

“A gift?”

“Yes, a gift.”

“A surprise?”

“I hope so,” Fabian says. He pays for the postage and goes back to the car.

Claudia has gotten scared again in the interval of waiting.

“I want Mommy.”

“I am taking you to her,” Fabian says.

The Santa Ysabel Bridge spans a gorge of the same name, through which, seven hundred feet below, the Rio Magdalena rushes over jagged rocks on its long, tortured trip from its source in the Cordillera Occidental to the Caribbean Sea. On the way, it traverses most of central Colombia, passing near, but not through, the cities of Cali and Medellin.

Adan can see why the Orejuela brothers chose this place-it is isolated, and from either end of the bridge you could detect an ambush from hundreds of yards away. Or I hope so anyway, Adan thinks. The truth is that they could be cutting off the road behind me even now and I wouldn’t know it. But it’s a chance that has to be taken. Without a source of cocaine from the Orejuelas, the pasador can’t hope to win a war against Guero and the rest of the Federacion.

A war which, by now, ought to have been irrevocably declared.

El Tiburon should have already run off with Pilar Mendez, convinced her to steal millions of dollars from her husband. He should be showing up here anytime with the cash to seduce the Orejuelas away from the Federacion. All part of Tio’s plan to get his revenge on Mendez by making him a cuckold, then compounding the humiliation by having his wife provide the cash to wage the war against him.

Or maybe Fabian is hanging from a telephone pole with his mouth full of silver and the Orejuelas are coming to assassinate me.

He hears the sound of another car coming up from behind him on the road. Bullets in the back, he wonders, or Fabian with the money? He turns around to see Fabian Martinez with a driver and, in the backseat, Guero’s children. What the hell is that about? Adan gets out of his car and walks over. Asks Fabian, “Do you have the money?”

Fabian smiles his movie-star smile. “With a bonus.”

He hands Adan the suitcase with the five million.

“Where’s Pilar?” Adan asks.

“On her way home,” Fabian says with a twisted grin that gives Adan the creeps.

“She left without her children?” Adan asks. “What are they doing here? What-”

“I’m just following Raul’s instructions,” Fabian says. “Adan-”

He points to the other side of the bridge, where a black Land Rover is slowly rolling up.

“Wait here,” Adan says. He takes the suitcase and starts to walk across the bridge.

Fabian hears the little girl’s voice ask, “Is this where Mommy’s meeting us?”

“Yes,” Fabian says.

“Where is she? Is she with those people?” Claudia asks, pointing to the car on the other side of the bridge, from which the Orejuelas are just now getting out.

“I think so, yes,” Fabian says.

“I want to go there!”

“You have to wait a few minutes,” Fabian says.

“I want to go now!”

“We have to talk with those men first.”

Adan walks toward the center of the bridge, as agreed. His legs feel wooden from fear. If they have a sniper in the hills, I am dead, that’s all, he tells himself. But they could have killed me anytime I was in Colombia, so they must want to hear what I have to say.

He gets to the middle of the bridge and waits as the Orejuelas walk toward him. Two brothers, Manuel and Gilberto, short, dark and squat. They all shake hands and then Adan asks, “Shall we get to business?”

“It’s why we’re here,” Gilberto says.

“You asked for this meeting,” says Manuel.

Brusquely, Adan thinks. Rudely. And he doesn’t care. So the dynamic appears to be that Gilberto is leaning toward making the deal, and Manuel is resisting. All right, then. Let’s get started.

“I will be taking our pasador out of the Federacion,” Adan says. “I want to ensure that we will nevertheless have a relationship here in Colombia.”

“Our relationship is with Abrego,” says Manuel, “and the Federacion.”

“Just so,” Adan says, “but for every kilo of your cocaine the Federacion handles, it handles five kilos from Medellin.”

He can see he’s hit a chord, especially with Gilberto. The brothers are jealous of their bigger Medellin rivals, and ambitious. And with the American DEA pounding so hard on the Medellin cartel and its Florida outlets, there is opportunity here for the Orejuelas to make a move.

Gilberto asks, “And you’re offering us an exclusive arrangement?”

“If you agree to allow me to handle your cocaine,” Adan says, “we would handle only product from Cali.”

“That would be a very generous offer,” Manuel says, “except that Don Abrego would resent our keeping you in business, and deny us his.”

But Gilberto is looking for an answer to that, Adan thinks. He’s tempted.

“Don Abrego is the past-we’re the future,” Adan says.

“That’s hard to believe,” says Manuel, “when the head of your pasador sits in prison. It would appear that the powers-that-be in Mexico think that Abrego is their future. And after him… Mendez.”

“We’ll beat Mendez.”

“What makes you think you can?” asks Manuel. “You will have to fight Mendez for it, and Abrego will line up behind Mendez, as will all the other pasadores. And the federales. Truly, no offense, Adan Barrera, but I think I am looking at a dead man, standing here offering me an exclusive, if I dump my business with the living to do business with the dead. How much cocaine can you handle from your grave?”

“We are the Barrera pasador,” Adan says. “We’ve won before, we will-”

“No,” Manuel says. “Again, pardon me, but you are not the Barrera pasador anymore. Your uncle, I agree, could have beaten Abrego and Mendez and the whole Mexican government, but you are not your uncle. You are very smart, but brains alone are not enough. How tough are you? I will tell you the truth, Adan-you look soft to me. I do not think that you are a hard enough man to do what you say you will do, what you will have to do.”

Adan nods, then asks permission to open the suitcase at his feet. He gets their okay, then bends over, flips open the lid, shows them the money inside and says, “Five million of Guero Mendez’s money. We fucked his wife in the ass and made her give us his money. Now, if you still think we can’t beat him, take this money, shoot me, toss my body off the bridge and keep collecting your tip money from the Federacion. If you decide that we can beat Mendez, then please accept this as our goodwill gesture and a down payment on the many millions we’re going to make together.”

He puts a look of calm on his face, but he can tell from their expressions that this could go either way.

So can Fabian.

And El Tiburon’s instructions in this case are clear. Orders from Raul that came straight down from the legendary M-1.

“Vengan,” Fabian says to the kids. “Come on.”

“Are we going to see Mommy now?” Claudia asks.

“Si.” Fabian takes her hand and hefts Guerito to his shoulder and starts walking back to the middle of the bridge. ?Mi esposa, mi esposa linda!

Guero’s cries echo through the large, empty house.

The servants are hiding. The bodyguards outside are lying low, as Guero staggers through the house, throws furniture, smashes glass, throws himself on the cowhide sofa and buries his face in a pillow as he sobs.

He has found her simple note: I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE. I HAVE LEFT WITH FABIAN AND TAKEN THE CHILDREN. THEY ARE ALL RIGHT.

His heart is broken. He’d do anything to get her back. Would take her back, too, and make it up to her. He tells all this to the pillow. Then lifts his head and wails, “?Mi esposa, mi esposa linda!”

The bodyguards, the dozen sicarios manning the estancia walls and gates, can hear him from outside. It spooks them, and they were already on edge, ever since the arrest of Don Miguel Angel Barrera, knowing that a war might be coming. Certainly a shake-out, and that is usually accompanied by the shedding of blood.

And now the jefe is in his house bawling like a woman for everyone to hear.

It is inquietante-unsettling.

And it’s been going on all day.

A FedEx truck comes down the road.

A dozen AK-47s train on it.

The guards stop the truck well short of the gate. One holds a machine gun on the driver as the other looks in the back of the truck. Asks the shaken driver, “What do you want?”

“A package for Senor Mendez.”

“Who from?”

The driver points to the return address on the label. “His wife.”

Now the guard is worried-Don Guero said he was not to be disturbed, but if this is from Senora Mendez he had better take it in.

“I’ll take it to him,” the guard says.

“I have to have his signature.”

The guard points the gun barrel at the driver’s face and says, “I can sign for him, yes?”

“Certainly. Of course.”

The guard signs, carries the package to the house and rings the bell. A maid comes to the door. “Don Guero is not to be-”

“A package from the senora. Federal Express.”

Guero appears behind the maid. His eyes are swollen, his face red, his nose running.

“What is it?” he snaps. “Goddamnit, I said-”

“A package from the senora.”

Guero takes it and slams the door shut.

Guero tears the box open.

After all, it is from her.

So he rips the box open and inside is the little cooler. He unlatches it and flips the lid open and sees her shiny black hair.

Her dead eyes.

Mouth open.

And in her teeth, a card.

He screams and screams.

The panicked guards kick the door in.

Burst into the room, and there is el jefe, standing back from a box, screaming and screaming. The guard who brought the package looks inside the box, then leans over and vomits. Pilar’s severed head sits on a bed of dried blood, her teeth clenched on a calling card.

Two other guards take Guero by the arms and try to pull him away, but he digs in his feet and just keeps screaming. The other guard wipes his mouth, recovers himself and takes the note from Pilar’s mouth.

The message makes no sense: