The Power of the Dog

Badiraguato District

State ofSinaloa

Mexico, 1975

The poppies burn.

Red blossoms, red flames.

Only in hell, Art Keller thinks, do flowers bloom fire.

Art sits on a ridge above the burning valley. Looking down is like peering into a steaming soup bowl-he can’t see clearly through the smoke, but what he can make out is a scene from hell.

Hieronymus Bosch does the War on Drugs.

Campesinos-Mexican peasant farmers-trot in front of the flames, clutching the few possessions they could grab before the soldiers put the torch to their village. Pushing their children in front of them, the campesinos carry sacks of food, family photographs bought at great price, some blankets, some clothes. Their white shirts and straw hats-stained yellow with sweat-make them ghost-like in the haze of smoke.

Except for the clothes, Art thinks, it could beVietnam.

He’s half-surprised, glancing at the sleeve of his own shirt, to see blue denim instead of army green. Reminds himself that this isn’t Operation Phoenix but Operation Condor, and these aren’t the bamboo-thick mountains of I Corps, but the poppy-rich mountain valleys of Sinaloa.

And the crop isn’t rice, it’s opium.

Art hears the dull bass whop-whop-whop of helicopter rotors and looks up. Like a lot of guys who were inVietnam, he finds the sound evocative. Yeah, but evocative of what? he asks himself, then decides that some memories are better left buried.

Choppers and fixed-wing planes circle overhead like vultures. The airplanes do the actual spraying; the choppers are there to help protect the planes from the sporadic AK-47 rounds fired by the remaining gomeros-opium growers-who still want to make a fight of it. Art knows too well that an accurate burst from an AK can bring down a chopper. Hit it in the tail rotor and it will spiral down like a broken toy at a kid’s birthday party. Hit the pilot, and, well… So far they’ve been lucky and no choppers have been hit. Either the gomeros are just bad shots, or they’re not used to firing on helicopters.

Technically, all the aircraft are Mexican-officially, Condor is a Mexican show, a joint operation between the Ninth Army Corps and the State of Sinaloa-but the planes were bought and paid for by the DEA and are flown by DEA contract pilots, most of them former CIA employees from the old Southeast Asia crew. Now there’s a tasty irony, Keller thinks-AirAmerica boys who once flew heroin for Thai warlords now spray defoliants on Mexican opium.

The DEA wanted to use Agent Orange, but the Mexicans had balked at that. So instead they are using a new compound, 24-D, which the Mexicans feel comfortable with, mostly, Keller chuckles, because the gomeros were already using it to kill the weeds around the poppy fields.

So there was a ready supply.

Yeah, Art thinks, it’s a Mexican operation. We Americans are just down here as “advisers.”

LikeVietnam.

Just with different ball caps.

The American War on Drugs has opened a front inMexico. Now ten thousand Mexican army troops are pushing through this valley near the town of Badiraguato, assisting squadrons of the Municipal Judicial Federal Police, better known as the federales, and a dozen or so DEA advisers like Art. Most of the soldiers are on foot; others are on horseback, like vaqueros driving cattle in front of them. Their orders are simple: Poison the poppy fields and burn the remnants, scatter the gomeros like dry leaves in a hurricane. Destroy the source of heroin here in the Sinaloan mountains of westernMexico.

The Sierra Occidental has the best combination of altitude, rainfall and soil acidity in theWestern Hemisphere to grow Papaver somniferum, the poppy that produces the opium that is eventually converted to Mexican Mud, the cheap, brown, potent heroin that has been flooding the streets of American cities.

Operation Condor, Art thinks.

There hasn’t been an actual condor seen in Mexican skies in over sixty years, longer in the States. But every operation has to have a name or we don’t believe it’s real, so Condor it is.

Art’s done a little reading on the bird. It is (was) the largest bird of prey, although the term is a little misleading, as it preferred scavenging over hunting. A big condor, Art learned, could take out a small deer; but what it really liked was when something else killed the deer first so the bird could just swoop down and take it.

We prey on the dead.

Operation Condor.

AnotherVietnam flashback.

Death from the Sky.

And here I am, crouched in the brush again, shivering in the damp mountain cold again, setting up ambushes.

Again.

Except the target now isn’t some VC cadre on his way back to his village, but old Don Pedro Aviles, the drug lord of Sinaloa, El Patron himself. Don Pedro’s been running opium out of these mountains for half a century, even before Bugsy Siegel himself came here, with Virginia Hill in tow, to nail down a steady source of heroin for the West Coast Mafia.

Siegel made the deal with a young Don Pedro Aviles, who used that leverage to make himself patron, the boss, a status he’s maintained to this day. But the old man’s power has been slipping a little lately as some young up-and-comers have started to challenge his authority. The law of nature, Art supposes-the young lions eventually take on the old. Art has been kept awake more than one night in his Culiacan hotel room by the sound of machine-gun fire in the streets, so common lately that the city has gained the nickname Little Chicago.

Well, after today, maybe they won’t have anything to fight about.

Arrest old Don Pedro and you put an end to it.

And make yourself a star, he thinks, feeling a little guilty.

Art is a true believer in the War on Drugs. Growing up inSan Diego ’s Barrio Logan, he saw firsthand what heroin does to a neighborhood, particularly a poor one. So this is supposed to be about getting drugs off the streets, he reminds himself, not advancing your career.

But the truth of it is that being the guy to bring down old Don Pedro Aviles would make your career.

Which, truth be told, could use a boost.

The DEA is a new organization, barely two years old. When Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs, he needed soldiers to fight it. Most of the new recruits came from the old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs; a lot of them came from various police departments around the country, but not a few of the early start-up draft into the DEA came from the Company.

Art was one of these Company Cowboys.

That’s what the police types call any of the guys who came in from the CIA. There’s a lot of resentment and mistrust of the covert types by the law enforcement types.

Shouldn’t be, Art thinks. It’s basically the same function-intelligence gathering. You find your assets, cultivate them, run them and act on the intelligence they give you. The big difference between his new work and his old work is that in the former you arrest your targets, and in the latter you just kill them.

OperationPhoenix, the programmed assassination of the Vietcong infrastructure.

Art hadn’t done too much of the actual “wet work.” His job back inVietnam was to collect raw data and analyze it. Other guys, mostly Special Forces on loan to the Company, went out and acted on Art’s information.

They usually went out at night, Art recalls. Sometimes they’d be gone for days, then reappear back at the base in the small hours of the morning, cranked up on Dexedrine. Then they’d disappear into their hooches and sleep for days at a time, then go out and do it again.

Art had gone out with them only a few times, when his sources had produced info about a large group of cadres concentrated in the area. Then he’d accompany the Special Forces guys to set up a night ambush.

He hadn’t liked it much. Most of the time he was scared shitless, but he did his job, he pulled the trigger, he took his buddies’ backs, he got out alive with all his limbs attached and his mind intact. He saw a lot of shit he wishes he could forget.

I just have to live with the fact, Art thinks, that I wrote men’s names down on paper and, in the act of doing so, signed their death warrants. After that, it’s a matter of finding a way to live decently in an indecent world.

But that fucking war.

That goddamn motherfucking war.

Like a lot of people, he watched the last helicopters taking off fromSaigon rooftops on television. Like a lot of vets, he went out and got good and stinking drunk that night, and when the offer came to move over to the new DEA, he jumped at it.

He talked it over with Althie first.

“Maybe this is a war worth fighting,” he told his wife. “Maybe this is a war we can actually win.”

And now, Art thinks as he sits and waits for Don Pedro to show up, we might be close to doing it.

His legs ache from sitting still but he doesn’t move. His stint inVietnam taught him that. The Mexicans spaced in the brush around him are likewise disciplined-twenty special agents from the DFS, armed with Uzis, dressed in camouflage.

Tio Barrera is wearing a suit.

Even up here in the high brush, the governor’s special assistant is wearing his trademark black suit, white button-down shirt, skinny black tie. He looks comfortable and serene, the image of Latino male dignity.

He reminds you of one of those matinee idols from an old ’40s movie, Art thinks. Black hair slicked back, pencil mustache, thin, handsome face with cheekbones that look like they’re cut from granite.

Eyes as black as a moonless night.

Officially, Miguel Angel Barrera is a cop, a Sinaloa state policeman, the bodyguard to the state governor, Manuel Sanchez Cerro. Unofficially, Barrera is a fixer, the governor’s point man. And seeing how Condor is technically a Sinaloa state operation, Barrera is the guy who’s really running the show.

And me, Art thinks. If I really want to be honest about it, Tio Barrera is running me.

The twelve weeks of DEA training weren’t that hard. The PT was a breeze-Art could easily run the three-mile course and play basketball, and the self-defense component was unsophisticated compared with Langley. The instructors just had them wrestle and box, and Art had finished third in the San Diego Golden Gloves as a kid.

He was a mediocre middleweight with good technique but slow hands. He found out the hard truth that you can’t learn speed. He was just good enough to get into the upper ranks, where he could really get beat up. But he showed he could take it, and that was his ticket as a mixed-race kid in the barrio. Mexican fight fans have more respect for what a fighter can take than for what he can dish out.

And Art could take it.

After he started boxing, the Mexican kids pretty much left him alone. Even the gangs backed off him.

In the DEA training sessions he made it a point to take it easy on his opponents in the ring, though. There was no point in beating someone up and making an enemy just to show off.

The law enforcement-procedure classes were tougher, but he got through them all right, and the drug training was pretty easy, questions like, Can you identify marijuana? Can you identify heroin? Art resisted the impulse to answer that he always could at home.

The other temptation he resisted was to finish first in his class. He could have, knew he could have, but decided to fly under the radar. The law enforcement guys already felt that the Company types were trespassing on their turf, so it was better to walk lightly.

So he took it a little easy in the physical training, kept quiet in class, punted a few questions on the tests. He did enough to do well, to pass, but not enough to shine. It was a little harder to be cool in the field training. Surveillance practice? Old hat. Hidden cameras, mikes, bugs? He could install them in his sleep. Clandestine meetings, dead drops, live drops, cultivating a source, interrogating a suspect, gathering intelligence, analyzing data? He could have taught the course.

He kept his mouth shut, graduated, and was declared a Special Agent of the DEA. They gave him a two-week vacation and sent him straight to Mexico.

Right to Culiacan.

The capital of the Western Hemisphere drug trade.

Opium’s market town.

The belly of the beast.

His new boss gave him a friendly greeting. Tim Taylor, the Culiacan RAC (Resident Agent in Charge) had already perused Art’s shield and seen through the transparent screen. He didn’t even look up from the file. Art was sitting across from his desk and the guy said, “Vietnam?”

“Yup.”

“ 'Accelerated Pacification Program’…”

“Yup.” Accelerated Pacification Program, aka Operation Phoenix. The old joke being that a lot of guys got peaceful in a hurry.

“CIA,” Taylor said, and it wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

Question or statement, Art didn’t answer it. He knew the book on Taylor-he was an old BNDD guy who’d lived through the low-budget bad days. Now that drugs were a fat priority, he didn’t intend to lose his hard-earned gains to a bunch of new kids on the block.

“You know what I don’t like about you Company Cowboys?” Taylor asked.

“No, what?”

“You aren’t cops,” Taylor said. “You’re killers.”

And fuck you, too, Art thought. But he kept his mouth shut. Kept it firmly clamped while Taylor launched into a lecture about how he didn’t want any cowboy shit from Art. How they’re a “team” here and Art better be a “team player” and “play by the rules.”

Art would have been happy to be a team player if they would have let him on the team. Not that Art cared one hell of a lot. You grow up in the barrio as the son of an Anglo father and a Mexican mother, you’re not on anybody’s team.

Art’s father was a San Diego businessman who seduced a Mexican girl while on vacation in Mazatlan. (Art often thought it was funny that he was conceived, albeit not born, in Sinaloa.) Art Senior decided to do the right thing and marry the girl-not too painful an option, as she was a raving beauty; Art gets his good looks from his mother’s side. His father brings her back to the States, only to decide that she’s like a lot of things you get in Mexico on vacation-she looked a lot better on a moonlit beach in Mazatlan than in the cold, Anglo light of the American day-to-day.

Art Senior dumped her when Art was about a year old. She didn’t want to throw away the one advantage her son had in life-U.S. citizenship-so she moved in with some distant relations in Barrio Logan. Art knew who his father was-sometimes he’d sit in the little park on Crosby Street and look at the tall glass buildings downtown and imagine going into one of them to see his father.

But he didn’t.

Art Senior sent checks-faithfully at first and then sporadically-and he’d get occasional bouts of paternal urges or guilt and show up to take Art to dinner or maybe a Padres game. But their father-son time was awkward and forced, and by the time Art was in junior high the visits had stopped altogether.

Ditto the money.

So it was no easy thing when the seventeen-year-old Art finally made the trip downtown, marched into one of those tall glass buildings, strode into his father’s office, laid his killer SAT scores and UCLA acceptance letter on his desk and said, “Don’t freak out. All I want from you is a check.”

He got it.

Once a year for four years.

He got the lesson, too: YOYO.

You’re On Your Own.

Which was a good lesson to learn because the DEA just chucked him into Culiacan, virtually on his own. “Just get the lay of the land” is what Taylor told him at the start of a cliche-fest that also included “Get your feet wet,” “Easy does it” and, honest to God, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

It should have included “And go fuck yourself,” because that was the thrust of it. Taylor and the cop types totally isolated him, kept info from him, wouldn’t introduce him to contacts, froze him out on meetings with the local Mexican cops, didn’t include him in the morning coffee-and-doughnut bullshit or the sundown beer sessions where the real information was passed.

He was fucked from jump street.

The local Mexicans weren’t going to talk to him because as a Yanqui in Culiacan he could only be one of two things-a drug dealer or a narc. He wasn’t a drug dealer because he wasn’t buying anything (Taylor wouldn’t free up any money; he didn’t want Art fucking up anything they already had going), so he had to be a narc.

The Culiacan police wouldn’t have anything to do with him because he was a Yanqui narc who should stay home and mind his own business, and besides, most of them were on Don Pedro Aviles’s payroll anyway. The Sinaloa state cops wouldn’t deal with him for the same reasons, with the additional rationale that if Keller’s own DEA wouldn’t work with him, why should they?

Not that the team was doing much better.

The DEA had been hammering on the Mexican government for two years, trying to get them to move against the gomeros. The agents brought evidence-photos, tapes, witnesses-only to have the federales promise to move right away and then not move, only to hear, “This is Mexico, senores. These things take time.”

While the evidence grew stale, the witnesses got scared and the federales rotated posts so that the Americans had to start all over again with a different federal cop, who told them to bring him solid evidence, bring him witnesses. Who, when they did, looked at them with perfect condescension and told them, “Senores, this is Mexico. These things take time.”

While the heroin flowed down from the hills into Culiacan like mud in a spring thaw, the young gomeros slugged it out with Don Pedro’s forces on a nightly basis until the city sounded to Art like Danang or Saigon, only with a lot more gunfire.

Night after night, Art would lie on the bed in his hotel room, drinking cheap scotch, maybe watching a soccer game or boxing match on TV, pissed off and feeling sorry for himself.

And missing Althie.

God, how he missed Althie.

He had met Althea Patterson on Bruin Walk in his senior year, introducing himself with a lame line: “Aren’t we in the same Poli Sci section?”

Tall, thin and blond, Althea was more angular than curvy; her nose was long and hooked, her mouth a little too wide, and her green eyes set a little too deep to be considered classically pretty, but Althea was beautiful.

And smart-they actually were in the same Poli Sci section, and he’d listened to her talk in class. She argued her viewpoint (a little to the left of Emma Goldman) ferociously, and that turned him on, too.

So they went out for pizza and then they went to her apartment in Westwood. She made espresso and they talked and he found out that she was a rich girl from Santa Barbara, her family Old California Money and her father a very big deal in the state Democratic Party.

To her, he was madly handsome, with that shock of black hair that fell over his forehead, that rugged broken nose that saved him from being a pretty boy, and the quiet intelligence that had brought a kid from the barrio to UCLA. There was something else, too-a loneliness, a vulnerability, a hurt, an edge of anger-that made him irresistible.

They ended up in bed, and in the postcoital darkness he asked, “So, can you cross that off your liberal checklist now?”

“What?”

“Sleeping with a spic.”

She thought about this for a few seconds, then answered, “See, I always thought that spic referred to a Puerto Rican. What I can cross off is sleeping with a beaner.”

“Actually,” he said, “I’m only half a beaner.”

“Well then, Jesus, Art,” she said. “What good are you?”

Althea was the exception to Art’s Doctrine of YOYO, an insidious infiltrator into the self-sufficiency that was already well ingrained in him by the time he met her. Secrecy was already a habit, a protective wall he had carefully constructed around himself as a kid. By the time he fell in love with Althie, he’d had the added advantage of professional instruction in the discipline of mental compartmentalization.

The Company’s talent-spotters had lamped him in his sophomore year, picked him like low-hanging fruit.

His International Relations professor, a Cuban expatriate, took him out for coffee, then started advising him on what classes to take, what languages to study. Professor Osuna brought him home to dinner, taught him which fork to use when, which wine to select with what, even which women to date. (Professor Osuna loved Althea. “She’s perfect for you,” he said. “She gives you sophistication.”)

It was more of a seduction than a recruitment.

Not that Art was hard to seduce.

They have a nose for guys like me, Art thought later. The lost, the lonely, the bicultural misfits with a foot in two worlds and a place in neither. And you were perfect for them-smart, street-tough, ambitious. You looked white but you fought brown. All you needed was the polish, and they gave you that.

Then came the small errands: “Arturo, there’s a Bolivian professor visiting. Could you escort him around the city?” A few more of those, then, “Arturo, what does Dr. Echeverria like to do in his leisure time? Does he drink? Does he like the girls? No? Perhaps the boys?” Then, “Arturo, if Professor Mendez wanted some marijuana, could you get it for him?” “Arturo, could you tell me who our distinguished poet friend is speaking to on the telephone?” “Arturo, this is a listening device. If you could perhaps insinuate it into his room…”

Art did it all without blinking, and did it all well.

They handed him his diploma and a ticket to Langley practically at the same time. Explaining this to Althie was an interesting exercise. “I can sort of tell you, but I can’t really,” was about the best he could manage. She wasn’t stupid; she got it.

“Boxing,” she told him, “is the perfect metaphor for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“The art of keeping things out,” she said. “You’re so skilled at it. Nothing touches you.”

That’s not true, Art thought. You touch me.

They got married a few weeks before he shipped out to Vietnam. He’d write her long, passionate letters that never included anything about what he actually did. He was changed when he got home, she thought; of course he was, why wouldn’t he be? But the insularity that had always been there was intensified. He could suddenly put oceans of emotional distance between them and deny that he was doing it. Then he would revert to being that sweet, intensely affectionate man with whom she had fallen in love.

She was relieved when he said he was thinking about changing jobs. He was enthused about the new DEA; he thought he could really do some good there. She encouraged him to take the job, even though it meant he was going to leave for another three months, even when he came home just long enough to get her pregnant and left again, this time for Mexico.

He wrote her long, passionate letters from Mexico that never included anything about what he actually did. Because I don’t do anything, he wrote her.

Not a goddamn thing except feel sorry for myself.

So get off your ass and do something, she wrote back. Or quit and come home to me. I know Daddy could get you a job on a senator’s staff in no time, just say the word.

Art didn’t say the word.

What he did was get off his ass and go see a saint.

Everyone in Sinaloa knows the legend of Santo Jesus Malverde. He was a bandito, a daring robber, a man of the poor who gave back to the poor, a Sinaloan Robin Hood. His luck ran out in 1909 and the federales hanged him on a gallows just across the street from where his shrine now stands.

The shrine was spontaneous. First some flowers, then a picture, then a small building of rough-hewn planks, put up by the poor at night. Even the police were afraid to tear it down because the legend grew that the soul of Malverde lived in the shrine. That if you came here and prayed, and lit a candle and made a manda-a devotional promise-Jesus Malverde could and would grant favors.

Bring you a good crop, protect you from your enemies, heal your illnesses.

Notes of gratitude detailing the favors that Malverde has bestowed are stuck into the walls: a sick child cured, rent money magically appeared, an arrest evaded, a conviction overturned, a mojado returned safely from El Norte, a murder avoided, a murder avenged.

Art went to the shrine. Figured it was a good place to start. He walked down from his hotel, waited patiently in line with the other pilgrims and finally got inside.

He was used to saints. His mother had faithfully dragged him to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Barrio Logan, where he took catechism classes, made his First Communion, was confirmed. He had prayed to saints, lit candles at the statues of saints, sat as a child and looked at paintings of saints.

Actually, Art was a pretty faithful Catholic even during college. He was a regular communicant in Vietnam at first, but his devotion waned and he stopped going to confession. It was like, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, Forgive me, Father, for I have- Oh, fuck it, what’s the point? Every day I mark men for death, every other week I kill them myself. I’m not going to come in here and tell you that I’m not going to do it again, when it’s on the schedule, regular as Mass.

Sal Scachi, one of the Special Forces guys, used to go to Mass every Sunday he wasn’t out killing people. Art used to marvel how the perceived hypocrisy didn’t faze him. They even talked about it one drunken night, Art and this very Italian guy from New York.

“It don’t bother me,” Scachi said. “Shouldn’t bother you. The VC don’t believe in God, anyway, so fuck 'em.”

They got into a ferocious debate, Art appalled that Scachi actually thought they were “doing God’s work” by assassinating Vietcong. Communists are atheists, Scachi repeated, who want to destroy the Church. So what we’re doing, he explained, is defending the Church, and that isn’t a sin, it’s a duty.

He reached under his shirt and showed Art the Saint Anthony’s medal he kept around his neck on a chain.

“The saint keeps me safe,” he explained. “You should get one.”

Art didn’t.

Now, in Culiacan, he stood and stared into the obsidian eyes of Santo Jesus Malverde. The saint’s plaster skin was stark white and his mustache a sable black, and a garish circle of red had been painted around his neck to remind the pilgrim that the saint had, like all the best saints, been martyred.

Santo Jesus died for our sins.

“Well,” Art said to the statue, “whatever you’re doing, it’s working, and whatever I’m doing, it’s not, so…”

Art made a manda. Knelt, lit a candle, and left a twenty-dollar bill. What the hell.

“Help me bring you down, Santo Jesus,” he whispered in Spanish, “and there’s more where that came from. I’ll give money to the poor.”

Walking back to the hotel from the shrine, Art met Adan Barrera.

Art had walked past this gym a dozen times. He had been tempted to check it out and never had, but on this particular evening a fairly large crowd was inside, so he walked in and stood at the edge.

Adan was barely twenty then. Short, almost diminutive, with a thin build. Long black hair combed straight back, designer jeans, Nike running shoes, and a purple polo shirt. Expensive clothes for this barrio. Smart clothes, smart kid-Art could see that right away. Adan Barrera just had a look like he always knew what was going on.

Art put him at about 5'5?, maybe 5'6?, but the kid standing beside him had to go 6'3” easy. And built. Big chest, sloping shoulders, lanky. You wouldn’t make them for brothers except for their faces. Same face on two different bodies-deep brown eyes, light coffee-colored skin, more Spanish-looking than Indian.

They were standing on the edge of the ring looking down at an unconscious boxer. Another fighter stood in the ring. A kid, really, certainly not out of his teens, but with a body that looked like it had been chiseled out of living stone. And he had those eyes-Art had seen them before in the ring-that had the look of a natural killer. Except now he seemed confused and a little guilty.

Art got it right away. The fighter had just knocked out a sparring partner and now had no one to work out with. The two brothers were his managers. It was a common enough scene in any Mexican barrio. For poor kids from the barrio, there were two routes up and out-drugs or boxing. The kid was an up-and-comer, hence the crowd, and the two middle-class Mutt-and-Jeff brothers were his managers.

Now the short one was looking around the crowd to find someone who could step into the ring and go a few rounds. A lot of guys in the crowd suddenly found something very interesting on the tops of their shoes.

Art didn’t.

He caught the short guy’s eye.

“Who are you?” the kid asked.

His brother took one look at Art and said, “Yanqui narc.” Then he looked over the crowd, straight at Art, and said, “?Vete al demonio, picaflor!”

Basically, “Get the hell out of here, faggot.”

Art instantly answered, “Pela las nalgas, perra.”

Shove it up your ass, bitch.

Which was a surprise coming out of the mouth of a guy who looked very white. The lanky brother started to push his way through the crowd to get at Art, but the smaller brother grabbed him by the elbow and whispered something to him. Tall brother smiled, then the smaller one said to Art, in English, “You’re about the right size. You want to go a few rounds with him?”

“He’s a kid,” Art answered.

“He can take care of himself,” the short brother said. “In fact, he can take care of you.”

Art laughed.

“You box?” the kid pressed.

“Used to,” Art said. “A little bit.”

“Well, come on in, Yanqui,” the kid said. “We’ll find you some gloves.”

It wasn’t machismo that made Art accept the challenge. He could have laughed it off. But boxing is sacred in Mexico, and when people you’ve been trying to get close to for months invite you into their church, you go.

“So who am I fighting?” he asked one of the crowd as they were taping his hands and getting him into gloves.

“El Leoncito de Culiacan,” the man answered proudly. “The Little Lion of Culiacan. He’ll be champion of the world one day.”

Art walked into the center of the ring.

“Take it easy on me,” he said. “I’m an old man.”

They touched gloves.

Don’t try to win, Art told himself. Take it easy on the kid. You’re here to make friends.

Ten seconds later, Art was laughing at his own pretensions. Between taking punches, that is. You couldn’t be much less effective, he told himself, if you were wrapped in telephone wire. I don’t think you have to worry about winning.

Worry about surviving, maybe, he told himself ten seconds later. The kid’s hand speed was awesome. Art couldn’t even see the punches coming, never mind block them, never mind counterpunch.

But you have to try.

It’s about respect.

So he launched a straight right behind a left jab and collected a wicked three-punch combination in return. Boom-boom-boom. It’s like living inside a fucking timpani drum, Art thought, backing away.

Bad idea.

The kid came rushing in, threw two lightning jabs and then a straight shot to the face, and if Art’s nose wasn’t broken, it was doing a damn good imitation. He swiped the blood off his nose, covered up, and took most of the subsequent drubbing on his gloves until the kid switched tactics and went downstairs, digging rights and lefts into Art’s ribs.

It seemed like an hour later when the bell rang and Art went back to his stool.

Big Brother was right there. “You had enough, picaflor?”

Except this time the “faggot” wasn’t quite so hostile.

Art answered in a friendly tone, “I’m just getting my wind, bitch.”

He got the wind knocked out of him about five seconds into round two. A wicked left hook to the liver dropped Art right to one knee. He had his head down, and blood and sweat dripped off his nose. He was gasping for air, and out of the corners of his teary eyes he could see men in the crowd exchanging money, and he could just hear the smaller brother counting to ten with a tone of foregone conclusion.

Fuck you all, Art thought.

He got up.

Heard cursing from some in the crowd, cheers from a few.

Come on, Art, he told himself. Just getting the shit beat out of you isn’t going to get you anywhere. You have to put up some kind of a fight. Neutralize this kid’s hand speed, don’t let him get off punches so easy.

He charged forward.

Took three hard shots for his trouble but kept going forward and worked the kid into the ropes. Stayed toe to toe with him and started throwing short, chopping punches, not hard enough to really hurt, but enough to make the kid cover up. Then Art ducked down, hit him twice in the ribs, and then leaned forward and tied him up.

Take a few seconds off the round, Art thought, get a blow. Lean on the kid, maybe wear him out a little. But even before Little Brother could come in and break the clinch, the kid slipped under Art’s arms, spun out, and hit him with two punches in the side of the head.

Art kept coming forward.

Absorbing punches the whole time, but it was Art who was the aggressor, and that was the point. The kid was backing off, dancing, hitting him at will, but nevertheless going backwards. He dropped his hands and Art hit him with a hard left jab in the chest, driving him back. The kid looked surprised, so Art did it again.

Between rounds, the two brothers were too busy giving their boxer hell to give Art any shit. He was grateful for the rest. One more round, he thought. Just let me get through one more round.

The bell rang.

A lot of dinero changed hands when Art got off his stool.

He touched gloves with the kid for the last round, looked into his eyes and instantly saw that he’d wounded the kid’s pride. Shit, Art thought, I didn’t mean to do that. Rein in your ego, asshole, and don’t take a chance on winning this thing.

He needn’t have worried.

Whatever the brothers had told the kid between rounds, the kid made the adjustment, constantly moving to his left, in the direction of his own jab, keeping his hands high, pretty much hitting Art at will, then getting out of the way.

Art was moving forward, hitting at air.

He stopped.

Stood in the center of the ring, shook his head, laughed and waved the kid to come on in.

The crowd loved it.

The kid loved it.

He shuffled into the center of the ring and started raining punches down on Art, who blocked them the best he could and covered up. Art would shoot a jab or counterpunch back every few seconds, and the kid would fire over it and nail him again.

The kid wasn’t going for knockout punches now. There was no anger in him anymore. He was truly sparring, just getting in his workout and showing that he could hit Art anytime he wanted, playing to the crowd, giving them the show they’d come to see. By the end, Art was down on one knee with his gloves tight to his head and his elbows tucked into his ribs, so he was taking most of the shots on his gloves and arms.

The final bell rang.

The kid picked Art up and they embraced.

“You are going to be champ one day,” Art said to him.

“You did okay,” the kid said. “Thank you for the match.”

“You got yourself a good fighter,” Art said as Little Brother was taking his gloves off.

“We’re going all the way,” Little Brother said. He stuck out his hand, “My name is Adan. That’s my brother, Raul.”

Raul looked down at Art and nodded. “You didn’t quit, Yanqui. I thought you’d quit.”

No “faggot” this time, Art noted.

“If I had any brains, I’d have quit,” he said.

“You fight like a Mexican,” Raul said.

Ultimate praise.

Actually, I fight like half a Mexican, Art thought, but he kept it to himself. But he knew what Raul meant. It was the same in Barrio Logan-it isn’t so much what you can dish out as what you can take.

Well, I took plenty tonight, Art thought. All I want to do now is go back to the hotel, take a long, hot shower and spend the rest of the night with an ice pack.

Okay, several ice packs.

“We’re going out for some beers,” Adan said. “You want to come?”

Yeah, Art thought. Yeah, I do.

So he spent the night downing beers in a cafetin with Adan.

Years later, Art would have given anything in the world to have just killed Adan Barrera on the spot.

Tim Taylor called him into the office the next morning.

Art looked like shit, which was an accurate external reflection of his internal reality. His head was pounding from the beers and the yerba he’d ended up smoking in the after-hours club Adan had hauled him to. His eyes were black and there were still traces of dark, dried blood under his nose. He’d showered but hadn’t shaved because one, he hadn’t had time; and two, the thought of dragging anything across his swollen jaw was just unacceptable. And even though he lowered himself into the chair slowly, his bruised ribs screamed at him for the offense.

Taylor looked at him with undisguised disgust. “You had quite a night for yourself.”

Art smiled sheepishly. Even that hurt. “You know about that.”

“You know how I heard?” Taylor said. “I had a meeting this morning with Miguel Barrera. You know who that is, Keller? He’s a Sinaloan state cop, the special assistant to the governor, the man in this area. We’ve been trying to get him to work with us for two years. And I have to hear from him that one of my agents is brawling with the locals-”

“It was a sparring match.”

“Whatever,” Taylor said. “Look, these people are not our pals or our drinking buddies. They’re our targets, and-”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Art heard himself say. Some disembodied voice that he couldn’t control. He’d meant to keep his mouth shut, but he was just too fucked-up to maintain the discipline.

“What’s the problem?”

Fuck it, Art thought. Too late now. So he answered, “That we look at 'these people’ like 'targets.’ ”

And anyway, it pissed him off. People as targets? Been there, done that. Besides that, I learned more about how things work down here last night than I did in the last three months.

“Look, you’re not in an undercover role here,” Taylor said. “Work with the local law enforcement people-”

“Can’t, Tim,” Art said. “You did a good job of queering me with them.”

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Tim said. “I want you off my team.”

“Start the paperwork,” Art said. He was sick of this shit.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Taylor said. “In the meantime, Keller, try to conduct yourself like a professional?”

Art nodded and got up out of the chair.

Slowly.

While the Damoclean sword of bureaucracy was dangling, Art thought he might as well keep working.

What’s the saying, he asked himself. They can kill you but they can’t eat you? Which isn’t true-they can kill you and eat you-but that doesn’t mean you go easy. The thought of going to work on a senatorial staff depressed the hell out of him. It wasn’t so much the work as it was Althie’s father setting it up, Art having a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward father figures.

It was the idea of failure.

You don’t let them knock you out, you make them knock you out. You make them break their fucking hands knocking you out, you let them know that they’ve been in a fight, you give them something to remember you by every time they look in a mirror.

He went right back to the gym.

“?Que noche bruta!” he said to Adan. “Me mata la cabeza.”

“Pero gozamos.”

We enjoyed ourselves all right, Art thought. My head is splitting, anyway. “How’s the Little Lion?”

“Cesar? Better than you,” Adan said. “Better than me.”

“Where’s Raul?”

“Probably out getting laid,” Adan said. “Es el cono, ese. You want a beer?”

“Hell, yes.”

Damn, it tasted good going down. Art took a long, wonderful swig, then laid the ice-cold bottle against his swollen cheek.

“You look like shit,” Adan said.

“That good?”

“Almost.”

Adan signaled the waiter and ordered a plate of cold meats. The two men sat at the outdoor table and watched the world go by.

“So you’re a narc,” Adan said.

“That’s me.”

“My uncle is a cop.”

“You didn’t go into the family business?”

Adan said, “I’m a smuggler.”

Art raised an eyebrow. It actually hurt.

“Blue jeans,” Adan said, laughing. “My brother and I go up to San Diego, buy blue jeans and sneak them back across the border. Sell them duty-free off the back of a truck. You’d be surprised how much money there is in it.”

“I thought you were in college. What was it, accounting?”

“You have to have something to count,” Adan said.

“Does your uncle know what you do for beer money?”

“Tio knows everything,” Adan said. “He thinks it’s frivolous. He wants me to get 'serious.’ But the jeans business is good. It brings in some cash until the boxing thing takes off. Cesar will be a champion. We’ll make millions.”

“You ever try boxing yourself?” Art asked.

Adan shook his head. “I’m small, but I’m slow. Raul, he’s the fighter in the family.”

“Well, I think I fought my last match.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

They both laughed.

It’s a funny thing, how friendships are formed.

Art would think about that years later. A sparring match, a drunken night, an afternoon at a sidewalk cafe. Conversation, ambitions shared over shared dishes, bottles and hours. Bullshit tossed back and forth. Laughs.

Art would think about that, the realization that until Adan Barrera, he’d never really had a friend.

He had Althie, but that was different.

You can describe your wife, truthfully, as your best friend, but it’s not the same thing. It’s not that male thing, that brother-you-never-had, guy-you-hang-out-with thing.

Cuates, amigos, almost hermanos.

Hard to know how that happens.

Maybe what Adan saw in Art was what he didn’t find in his own brother-an intelligence, a seriousness, a maturity he didn’t have himself but wanted. Maybe what Art saw in Adan… Christ, later he’d try for years to explain it, even to himself. It was just that, back in those days, Adan Barrera was a good guy. He really was, or at least it seemed that way. Whatever it was that was lying dormant inside him…

Maybe it lies in all of us, Art would later think.

It sure as hell did in me.

The power of the dog.

It was Adan, inevitably, who introduced him to Tio.

Six weeks later, Art was lying on his bed in his hotel room, watching a soccer match on TV, feeling shitty because Tim Taylor had just received the okay to reassign him. Probably send me to Iowa to check if drugstores are complying with regulations on prescribing cough medicine or something, Art thought.

Career over.

There was a knock at the door.

Art opened it to see a man in a black suit, white shirt and skinny black tie. Hair slicked back in the old-fashioned style, pencil mustache, eyes black as midnight.

Maybe forty years old, with an Old World gravitas.

“Senor Keller, forgive me for disturbing your privacy,” he said. “My name is Miguel Angel Barrera. Sinaloa State Police. I wonder if I might have a few moments of your time.”

No shit you can, Art thought, and asked him in. Luckily, Art had most of a fifth of scotch left over from a bunch of lonely nights, so he could at least offer the man a drink. Barrera accepted it and offered Art a thin black Cuban cigar in return.

“I quit,” Art said.

“Do you mind, then?”

“I’ll live vicariously through you,” Art answered. He looked around for an ashtray and found one, then the two men sat down at the small table next to the window. Barrera looked at Art for a few seconds, as if considering something, then said, “My nephew asked if I’d stop in and see you.”

“Your nephew?”

“Adan Barrera.”

“Right.”

My uncle is a cop, Art thought. So this is “Tio.”

Art said, “Adan conned me into getting in the ring with one of the best fighters I’ve ever seen.”

“Adan fancies himself a manager,” Tio said. “Raul thinks he's a trainer.”

“They do all right,” Art said. “Cesar could take them a long way.”

“I own Cesar,” Barrera said. “I’m an indulgent uncle, I let my nephews play. But soon I will have to hire a real manager and a real trainer for Cesar. He deserves no less. He’ll be a champion.”

“Adan will be disappointed.”

“Learning to deal with disappointment is part of becoming a man,” Barrera said.

Well, that’s no shit.

“Adan relates that you are in some sort of professional difficulty?”

Now, how do I answer that? Art wondered. Taylor would no doubt employ a cliche about “not washing our dirty laundry in public,” but he’d be right. He’d shit jagged glass anyway if he knew that Barrera was even here, going under his head, as it were, to talk with a junior officer.

“My boss and I don’t always see eye to eye.”

Barrera nodded. “Senor Taylor’s vision can be somewhat narrow. All he can see is Pedro Aviles. The trouble with your DEA is that it is, forgive me, so very American. Your colleagues do not understand our culture, how things work, how things have to work.”

The man isn’t wrong, Art thought. Our approach down here has been clumsy and heavy-handed, to say the least. That fucked-up American attitude of “We know how to get things done,” “Just get out of our way and let us do the job.” And why not? It worked so well in 'Nam.

Art answered in Spanish, “What we lack in subtlety, we make up for with a lack of subtlety.”

Barrera asked, “Are you Mexican, Senor Keller?”

“Half,” Art said. “On my mother’s side. As a matter of fact, she’s from Sinaloa. Mazatlan.”

Because, Art thought, I’m not above playing that card.

“But you were raised in the barrio,” Barrera said. “In San Diego?”

This isn’t a conversation, Art thought, it’s a job interview.

“You know San Diego?” he asked. “I lived on Thirtieth Street.”

“But you stayed out of the gangs?”

“I boxed.”

Barrera nodded, and then started speaking in Spanish.

“You want to take down the gomeros,” Barrera said. “So do we.”

“Sin falta.”

“But as a boxer,” Barrera said, “you know that you just can’t go for the knockout right away. You have to set your opponent up, take his legs away from him with body punches, cut the ring off. You do not go for the knockout until the time is right.”

Well, I didn’t have a lot of knockouts, Art thought, but the theory is right. We Yanquis want to swing for the knockout right away, and the man is telling me that it isn’t set up yet.

Fair enough.

“What you’re saying makes great sense to me,” Art said. “It’s wisdom. But patience is not a particularly American virtue. I think if my superiors could just see some progress, some motion-”

“Your superiors,” Barrera said, “are difficult to work with. They are…”

He searches for a word.

Art finishes it for him. “Falta gracia.”

“Ill-mannered,” Barrera agrees. “Exactly. If, on the other hand, we could work with someone simpatico, un companero, someone like yourself…”

So, Art thinks, Adan asked him to save my ass, and now he’s decided it’s worth doing. He’s an indulgent uncle, he lets his nephews play; but he’s also a serious man with a definite objective in mind, and I might be useful in achieving that objective.

Again, fair enough. But this is a slippery slope. An unreported relationship outside the agency? Strictly verboten. A partnership with one of the most important men in Sinaloa and I keep it in my pocket? A time bomb. It could get me fired from the DEA altogether.

Then again, what do I have to lose?

Art poured them each another drink, then said, “I’d love to work with you, but there’s a problem.”

Barrera shrugged. “?Y que?”

“I won’t be here,” Art said. “They’re reassigning me.”

Barrera sipped his whiskey with a polite pretense of enjoyment, as if it were good whiskey, when they both knew that it was cheap shit. Then he asked, “Do you know the real difference between America and Mexico?”

Art shook his head.

“In America, everything is about systems,” Barrera said. “In Mexico, everything is about personal relationships.”

And you’re offering me one, Art thought. A personal relationship of the symbiotic nature.

“Senor Barrera-”

“My given names are Miguel Angel,” Barrera said, “but my friends call me Tio.”

Tio, Art thought.

“Uncle.”

That’s the literal translation, but the word implies a lot more in Mexican Spanish. Tio could be a parent’s brother, but he could also be any relative who takes an interest in a kid’s life. It goes beyond that; a Tio can be any man who takes you under his wing, an older-brother type, even a paternal figure.

Sort of a godfather.

“Tio…” Art began.

Barrera smiled and accepted the tribute with a slight bow of his head. Then he said, “Arturo, mi sobrino…”

Arthur, my nephew…

You’re not going anywhere.

Except up.

Art’s reassignment was canceled the next afternoon. He was called back into Taylor’s office.

“Who the fuck do you know?” Taylor asked him.

Art shrugged.

“I just had my leash jerked all the way from Washington,” Taylor said. “Is this some CIA shit? Are you still on their payroll? Who do you work for, Keller-them or us?”

Me, Art thought. I work for myself. But he didn’t say it. He just ate his ration of shit and said, “I work for you, Tim. Say the word, I’ll have 'DEA’ tattooed on my ass. If you want, it can be a heart with your name across it.”

Taylor stared across the desk at him, obviously unsure of whether Art was fucking with him or not, and of how to respond. He settled on a tone of bureaucratic neutrality and said, “I have instructions to let you alone to do your own thing. Do you know how I choose to view this, Keller?”

“As giving me enough rope to hang myself?”

“Exactly.”

How did I know?

“I’ll produce for you, Tim,” Art said, getting up to leave the room. “I’ll produce for the team.”

But on the way out he couldn’t help singing, albeit softly, “I’m an old cowhand, from the Rio Grande. But I can’t poke a cow, 'cuz I don’t know how…”

A partnership made in hell.

This is how Art would later describe it.

Art Keller and Tio Barrera.

They met rarely and secretly. Tio chose his targets carefully. Art could see it building-or, more accurately, deconstructing, as Barrera used Art and the DEA to remove one brick after another from Don Pedro’s structure. A valuable poppy field, then a cookery, then a lab, then two junior gomeros, three crooked state policeman, a federale who was taking the mordida-the bite, the bribe-from Don Pedro.

Barrera stayed aloof from it all, never getting directly involved, never taking any credit, just using Art as his knife hand to gut the Aviles organization. Art wasn’t just a puppet in all this, either. He used the sources Barrera gave him to work other sources, to establish leverage, to create assets in the metastasizing algebra of intelligence gathering. One source gets you two, two gets you five, five gets you…

Well, among the good things, it also gets endless servings of shit from the cop types in the DEA. Tim Taylor had Art on the carpet a half-dozen times. Where are you getting your info, Art? Who’s your source? You got a snitch? We’re a team, Art. There’s no I in team.

Yeah, but there is in win, Art thought, and that’s what we’re finally doing-winning. Creating leverage, playing one rival gomero against another, showing the Sinaloan campesinos that the days of the gomero overlords are really coming to an end. So he told Taylor nothing.

He had to admit there was an element of Fuck you, Tim, and your team.

While Tio Barrera maneuvered like a master technician in the ring. Always pressing forward, but always with his guard up. Setting up his punches and throwing them only when there was minimal risk to himself. Knocking the wind and the legs out from under Don Pedro, cutting off the ring, then The knockout punch.

Operation Condor.

The mass sweep of troops and supporting aircraft, with bombing and defoliants, but still it was Art Keller who could direct them where to hit, almost as if he had a personal map of every poppy field, cookery and lab in the province, which was almost literally true.

Now Art crouches in the brush, waiting for the big prize.

With all the success of Condor, the DEA is still focused on one goal: Get Don Pedro. It’s all Art has heard about: Where is Don Pedro? Get Don Pedro. We have to get El Patron.

As if we have to hang that trophy head on the wall, or the whole operation is a failure. Hundred of thousands of acres of poppies destroyed, the entire infrastructure of the Sinaloan gomeros devastated, but we still need that one old man as a symbol of our success.

They’re out there, running around like crazy, chasing every rumor and tidbit of intelligence; but always a step behind, or, as Taylor might say, a day late and a dollar short. Art can’t decide what Taylor wants more-to get Don Pedro or for Art not to get Don Pedro.

Art was out in a Jeep, inspecting the charred ruins of a major heroin lab, when Tio Barrera came rolling up out of the smoke with a small convoy of DFS troops.

The fucking DFS? Art wondered. The Direccion Federal de Seguridad-Federal Security Directorate-is like the FBI and CIA rolled into one, except more powerful. The DFS boys virtually have carte blanche for whatever they do in Mexico. Now, Tio is a Jalisco state cop-what the hell is he doing with a squad of the elite DFS, and in command, no less? Tio leaned out of his open Jeep Cherokee and simply said, with a sigh, “I suppose we had better go pick up old Don Pedro.”

Handing Art the biggest prize in the War on Drugs as if it were a bag of groceries.

“You know where he is?” Art asked.

“Better,” Tio said. “I know where he’s going to be.”

So now Art sits crouched in the brush, waiting for the old man to walk into the ambush. He can feel Tio’s eyes on him. He looks over to see Tio pointedly looking at his watch.

Art gets the message.

Anytime now.

Don Pedro Aviles sits in the front seat of his Mercedes convertible as it slowly rumbles over the dirt back road. They’ve driven out of the burning valley, up onto the mountain. If he gets down the other side, he’ll be safe.

“Be careful,” he tells young Guero, who’s driving. “Watch the holes. It’s an expensive car.”

“We have to get you out of here, patron,” Guero tells him.

“I know that,” Don Pedro snaps. “But did we have to take this road? The car will be ruined.”

“There will be no soldiers on this road,” Guero tells him. “No federales, no state police.”

“You know this for a fact?” Aviles asks.

Again.

“I have it straight from Barrera,” Guero says. “He has cleared this route.”

“He should clear a route,” Aviles says. “The money I pay them.”

Money to Governor Cerro, money to General Hernandez. Barrera comes as regular as a woman’s curse to collect the money. Always, the money to the politicians, to the generals. It has always been this way, since Don Pedro was a boy, learning the business from his father.

And there will always be these periodic sweeps, these ritual cleansings coming down from Mexico City at the behest of the Yanquis. This time it’s in exchange for higher oil prices, and Governor Cerro sent Barrera to give Don Pedro the word: Invest in oil, Don Pedro. Sell off opium and put the money in oil. It’s going up soon. And the opium…

So I let the young fools buy into my poppy fields. Took their money and put it into the oil. And Cerro let the Yanquis burn the poppy fields. Doing work that the sun would do for them.

For that’s the great joke: Operation Condor timed to happen just before the drought years come. He has seen it in the sky the past two years. Seen it in the trees, the grass, the birds. The drought years are coming. Five years of bad crops before the rains come back.

“If the Yanquis did not burn the fields,” Don Pedro tells Guero, “I would have. Refresh the soil.”

So it is a farce, this Operation Condor; a play, a joke.

But still he has to get out of Sinaloa.

Aviles has not stayed alive for seventy-three years by being careless. So he has Guero driving and five of his most trusted sicarios-gunmen-in a car behind. Men whose families all live in Don Pedro’s compound in Culiacan, who would all be killed if anything should happen to Don Pedro.

And Guero-his apprentice, his assistant. An orphan whom he took off the streets of Culiacan as a manda to Santo Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of all Sinaloan gomeros. Guero, whom he raised in the business, to whom he taught everything. A young man now, his right-hand man, cat smart, who can do monumental figures in his head in a flash, who is nevertheless driving the Mercedes too fast on this rough road.

“Slow down,” Aviles orders.

Guero-“Blondie,” because of his light hair-chuckles. The old man has millions and millions, but he will cluck like an old hen over a repair bill. He could throw this Mercedes away and not miss it, but will complain about the few pesos it will cost to wash the dust off.

It doesn’t bother Guero; he’s used to it.

He slows down.

“We should make a manda to Malverde when we get to Culiacan,” Don Pedro says.

“We can’t stay in Culiacan, patron,” Guero says. “The Americans will be there.”

“To hell with the Americans.”

“Barrera advised us to go to Guadalajara.”

“I don’t like Guadalajara,” Don Pedro says.

“It’s only for a little while.”

They come to a junction, and Guero starts to turn left.

“To the right,” Don Pedro says.

“To the left, patron,” Guero says.

Don Pedro laughs. “I have been smuggling opium out of these hills since your father’s father was tugging at your grandmother’s pants. Turn right.”

Guero shrugs and turns right.

The road narrows and the dirt gets soft and deep.

“Keep going, slowly,” Don Pedro says. “Go slow but keep going.”

They come to a sharp right curve through thick brush and Guero takes his foot off the gas.

“?Que cono te pasa?” Don Pedro asks.

What the hell’s the matter with you?

Rifle barrels peak out from the brush.

Eight, nine, ten of them.

Ten more behind.

Then Don Pedro sees Barrera, in his black suit, and knows that everything is all right. The “arrest” will be a show for the Americans. If he goes to jail at all, he will be out in a day.

He slowly stands up and raises his arms.

Orders his men to do the same.

Guero Mendez slowly sinks to the floor of the car.

Art starts to get up.

He looks at Don Pedro, standing in his car with his hands in the air, quivering in the cold.

The old man looks so frail, Art thinks, like a strong wind could blow him over. White stubble on his unshaven face, his eyes sunken with obvious fatigue. Just a weak old man near the end of the road.

It seems almost cruel to arrest him, but…

Tio nods.

His men open fire.

The bullets shake Don Pedro like a thin tree.

“What are you doing?!” Art yells. “He’s trying to-”

His voice goes unheard under the roar of the guns.

Guero crouches deep on the car’s floor, his hands over his ears because the noise is incredible. The old man’s blood falls like soft rain on his hands, the side of his face, his back. Even over the roar of the rifles he can hear Don Pedro’s screams.

Like an old woman chasing a dog from the chicken coop.

A sound from his early childhood.

Finally it stops.

Guero waits for ten long moments of silence before he dares to get up.

When he does he sees the police emerge from the cover of the thick green brush. Behind him, Don Pedro’s five sicarios are slumped dead, blood running from the bullet holes in the side of their car like water from a downspout.

And beside him, Don Pedro.

The patron’s mouth and one eye are open.

The other eye is gone.

His body looks like one of those cheap puzzles where you try to roll the little balls into the holes, except there are many, many more holes. And the old man is coated with shattered glass from the windshield, like spun sugar coating the groom on an expensive wedding cake.

Foolishly, Guero thinks of how angry Don Pedro would be at the damage to the Mercedes.

The car is ruined.

Art opens the car door, and the old man’s body falls out.

He’s amazed to see that the old man’s chest is still heaving with breath. If we can air-evac him out, Art thinks, there’s just a chance that Tio walks over, looks down at the body and says, “Stop, or I’ll shoot.”

He draws a. 45 from his holster, points it at the back of the old patron’s head, and pulls the trigger.

Don Pedro’s neck jerks off the ground, then drops again.

Tio looks at Art and says, “He reached for his gun.”

Art doesn’t answer.

“He reached for his gun,” Tio repeats. “They all did.”

Art looks around at the corpses strewn on the ground. The DFS troops are picking up the dead men’s weapons and firing into the air. Red flashes burst from the gun barrels.

This wasn’t an arrest, Art thinks, it was an execution.

The skinny blond driver crawls out of the car, kneels on the blood-soaked ground and puts his hands up. He’s trembling-Art can’t tell if it’s fear, or cold, or both. You’d be shaking, too, he tells himself, if you knew you were about to be executed.

Enough is fucking enough.

Art starts to step between Tio and the kneeling kid. “Tio-”

Tio says, “Levantate, Guero.”

The kid shakily gets to his feet. “Dios le bendiga, patron.”

God bless you.

Patron.

Boss.

Then Art gets it-this wasn’t an arrest or an execution.

It was an assassination.

He looks at Tio, who has holstered his pistol and is now lighting one of his skinny black cigars. Tio looks up to see Art staring at him, nods his chin toward Don Pedro’s body and says, “You got what you wanted.”

“So did you.”

“Pues…” Tio shrugs. “Take your trophy.”

Art walks back to his Jeep and hauls out his rain poncho. He comes back and carefully rolls Don Pedro’s body up in it, then hefts the dead man in his arms. The old man feels like he weighs practically nothing.

Art carries him to the Jeep and lays him across the backseat.

Drives off to take the trophy back to base camp.

Condor, Phoenix, what’s the difference?

Hell is hell, whatever you name it.

A nightmare wakes Adan Barrera.

A booming, rhythmic bass.

He runs out of the hut to see giant dragonflies hovering in the sky. He blinks and they turn into helicopters.

Swooping down like vultures.

Then he hears shouting and the sounds of trucks and horses. Soldiers running, guns firing. He grabs a campesino and orders “Hide me!” and the man takes him into a hut, where Adan hides under the bed until the thatched roof bursts into flames and he runs out to face the bayonets of the soldiers.

A disaster-what the fuck is going on?

And his uncle-his uncle will be furious. He had told them to stay away this week-to stay in Tijuana or even San Diego, to be anyplace but here. But his brother Raul had to see this Badiraguato girl he was lusting after, and there was going to be a party, and Adan had to go with him. And now Raul is God knows where, Adan thinks, and I have bayonets pointed at my chest.

Tio has basically raised the two boys since their father died, when Adan was four. Tio Angel was barely a man himself then, but he took on a man’s responsibility, bringing money to the household, talking to the boys like a father, seeing that they did the right thing.

The family’s standard of living rose with Tio’s progress in the force, and by the time Adan was a young teen he had a solidly middle-class lifestyle. Unlike the rural gomeros, the Barrera brothers were city kids-they lived in Culiacan, went to school there, to pool parties in town, to beach parties in Mazatlan. They spent parts of the hot summers at Tio’s hacienda in the cool mountain air of Badiraguato, playing with the children of the campesinos.

The boyhood days in Badiraguato were idyllic, riding bikes to mountain lakes, diving from quarry rock faces into the deep emerald water of the granite quarries, lazing on the broad porch of the house while a dozen tias-aunties-fussed over them and made them tortillas, and albondigas, and, Adan’s favorite-fresh, homemade flan blanketed with thick caramel.

Adan came to love los campesinos.

They became a large, loving family to him. His mother had been distant since his father’s death, his uncle all business and seriousness. But the campesinos had all the warmth of the summer sun.

It was as his childhood priest, Father Juan, endlessly preached: “Christ is with the poor.”

They work so hard, young Adan observed-in the fields, in the kitchens and the laundry rooms, and they have so many kids, but when the adults come back from work they always seem to have time to hold the children, bounce them on knees, play games and jokes.

Adan loved the summer evenings more than anything, when the families were together and the women cooked and the kids ran around in mad giggling swarms and the men drank cold beer and joked and talked about the crops, the weather, the livestock. Then they all sat down and ate together at large tables under ancient oak trees, and it got quiet as people first settled into the serious business of eating. Then, as hunger faded, the chatter started again-the jokes, the familiar teasing, the laughter. After the meal, as the long summer day eased into night and the air cooled, Adan would sit down as close as he could get to the empty chairs that would be filled when the men came back with their guitars. Then he sat literally at the feet of the men as they sang the tambora, listened rapt as they sang of the gomeros and bandidos and revolucionarios, the Sinaloan heroes who made up the legends of his boyhood.

And after a while the men tired, and talked about how the sun would be up early, and the tias shooed Adan and Raul back to the hacienda, where they slept on cots on the screened-in balcony, on the sheets the tias had sprinkled with cool water.

And on most nights, the abuelas-the old women, the grandmothers-would tell them stories of the brujas-witches-stories of ghosts and spirits that took the forms of owls, of hawks and eagles, snakes, lizards, foxes and wolves. Stories of naIve men enchanted by amor brujo-bewitchment-crazed, obsessive love, and how the men fought battles with pumas and wolves, with giants and ghosts, all for the love of beautiful young women, only to find out too late that their beloved was really a hideous old hag, or an owl, or a fox.

Adan fell asleep to these stories and slept like the dead until the sun struck him in the eyes and the whole long, wonderful summer day started again with the smell of fresh tortillas, machaca, chorizo, and fat, sweet oranges.

Now the morning smells of ash and poison.

Soldiers are storming through the village, lighting thatched roofs on fire and smashing adobe walls with their rifle butts.

Federale Lieutenant Navarres is in a very bad mood. The American DEA agents are unhappy-they are tired of busting the “little guys”; they want to go up the chain and they’re giving him a hard time about it, implying that he knows where the “big guys” are and that he’s deliberately leading them away.

They’ve captured a lot of small-fry, but not the big fish. Now they want Garcia Abrego, Chalino Guzman, aka El Verde, Jaime Herrera and Rafael Caro, all of whom have so far slipped the net.

Mostly they want Don Pedro.

El Patron.

“We’re not on a 'search-and-avoid’ mission here, are we?” one of the DEA men in his blue baseball cap actually asked him. It made Navarres furious, this endless Yanqui slander that every Mexican cop takes la mordida, the bribe, or, as the Americans say, is “on the arm.”

So Navarres is angry, and humiliated, and that makes a proud man a dangerous man.

Then he sees Adan.

One look at the designer jeans and Nike running shoes tells the lieutenant that the short young man, with his city haircut and his fancy clothes, is no campesino. He looks exactly like some mid-level young gomero punk from Culiacan.

The lieutenant strides over and looks down at Adan.

“I am Lieutenant Navarres,” the officer says, “of the Municipal Judicial Federal Police. Where is Don Pedro Aviles?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Adan says, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “I’m a college student.”

Navarres smirks. “What do you study?”

“Business,” Adan answers. “Accounting.”

“An accountant,” Navarres is saying. “And what do you count? Kilos?”

“No,” Adan says.

“You just happen to be here.”

“My brother and I came up for a party,” Adan says. “Look, this is all a mistake. If you will talk to my uncle, he will-”

Navarres draws his pistol and backhands Adan across the face. The federales toss the unconscious Adan and the campesino who hid him into the back of a truck and drive away.

This time Adan wakes to darkness.

He realizes that it’s not night, but that a black hood is tied over his head. It’s hard to breathe and he starts to panic. His hands are tied tightly behind his back and he can hear sounds-motors running, helicopter rotors. We must be at some kind of base, Adan thinks. Then he hears something worse-a man’s moans, the solid thunks of rubber and the sharp crack of metal on flesh and bone. He can smell the man’s piss, his shit, his blood, and he can smell the disgusting stink of his own fear.

He hears Navarres’s smooth, aristocratic voice say, “Tell me where Don Pedro is.”

Navarres looks down at the peasant, a sweating, bleeding, quivering mess curled up on the tent floor, lying between the feet of two large federale troopers, one holding a length of heavy rubber hose, the other clutching a short iron rod. The DEA men are sitting outside, waiting for him to produce. They just want their information; they don’t want to know the process that produces it.

The Americans, Navarres thinks, do not like to see how sausages are made.

He nods to one of his federales.

Adan hears the whoosh of the rubber hose and a scream.

“Stop beating him!” Adan yells.

“Ah, you’ve joined us,” Navarres says to Adan. He stoops over, and Adan can smell his breath. It smells like mint. “So you tell me, where is Don Pedro?”

The campesino yells, “Don’t tell them!”

“Break his leg,” Navarres says.

A terrible sound as the federale smashes the bar down on the campesino’s shin.

Like an ax on wood.

Then screaming.

Adan can hear the man moaning, choking, puking, praying but saying nothing.

“Now I believe,” Navarres says, “that he doesn’t know.”

Adan feels the comandante coming close. Can smell the coffee and tobacco on the man’s breath as the federale says, “But I believe you do.”

The hood is jerked from Adan’s head, and before he can see anything, it’s replaced with a tight blindfold. Then he feels his chair being tipped backward so that he’s almost upside down, his feet at a forty-five-degree angle toward the ceiling.

“Where is Don Pedro?”

“I don’t know.”

He doesn’t. That’s the problem. Adan has no idea where Don Pedro is, although he profoundly wishes that he did. And he’s confronted with a harsh truth-if he did know, he would tell. I am not as tough as the campesino, he thinks, not as brave, not as loyal. Before I let them break my leg, before I heard that awful sound on my bones, felt that unimaginable pain, I would tell them anything.

But he doesn’t know, so he says, “Honestly. I have no idea… I am not a gomero-”

“Hm-mmm.”

This little hum of incredulity from Navarres.

Then Adan smells something.

Gasoline.

They jam a rag into Adan’s mouth.

Adan struggles, but large hands hold him down as they pour the gasoline up his nostrils. He feels as if he’s drowning and, in fact, he is. He wants to cough, to gag, but the rag in his mouth won’t let him. He feels the vomit rising in his throat and wonders if he’s going to suffocate in a mixture of puke and gasoline as the hands let him go and his head thrashes violently from side to side, and then they pull the rag out and tip the chair back up.

When Adan stops vomiting, Navarres asks him the question again.

“Where is Don Pedro?”

“I don’t know,” Adan gasps. He feels the panic rise in his throat. It makes him say a stupid thing. “I have cash in my pockets.”

The chair is tilted back, the rag shoved back in his mouth. A flood of gas goes up his nose, fills his sinuses, feels like it’s flooding his brain. He hopes it does, hopes it kills him, because this is unbearable. Just when he thinks he’s going to black out, they tilt the chair back up and take out the rag and he vomits on himself.

As Navarres screams, “Who do you think I am?! Some traffic cop who stops you for speeding?! You offer me a tip?!”

“I’m sorry,” Adan gasps. “Let me go. I will contact you, pay you what you want. Name the price.”

Back down again. The rag, the gasoline. The awful, horrible feeling of the fumes penetrating his sinuses, his brain, his lungs. Feeling his head thrashing, his torso twisting, his feet kicking uncontrollably. When it finally stops, Navarres lifts Adan’s chin between his thumb and forefinger.

“You little traficante garbage,” Navarres says. “You think everyone is for sale, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, you little shit-you can’t buy me. I’m not for sale. There’s no bargaining here-there’s no deal. You will simply give me what I want.”

Then Adan hears himself say something very stupid.

“Comemierda.”

Navarres loses it. Screams, “I should eat shit? I should eat shit?! Bring him.”

Adan is yanked to his feet and dragged out of the tent to a latrine, a filthy hole with an old toilet seat thrown across. Filled almost to the top with shit, bits of toilet paper, piss, flies.

The federales lift the struggling Adan and hold his head over the hole.

“I should eat shit?!” Navarres is screaming. “You eat shit!”

They lower Adan until his head is completely immersed in the filth.

He tries to hold his breath. He twists, squirms, struggles, again tries to hold his breath, but finally has to breathe in the shit. They lift him out.

Adan coughs the shit out of his mouth.

He gulps for air as they lower him again.

Closes his eyes and mouth tightly, vowing to die before he swallows shit again, but soon he’s thrashing, his lungs demanding air, his brain threatening to explode, and he opens his mouth again and then he’s drowning in filth and they lift him out and toss him on the ground.

“Now who eats shit?”

“I do.”

“Hose him off.”

The blast of water stings, but Adan is grateful. He’s on all fours, gagging and vomiting, but the water feels wonderful.

Navarres’s pride restored, he’s fatherly now as he leans over Adan and asks, “Now… where is Don Pedro?”

Adan cries, “I… don’t… know.”

Navarres shakes his head.

“Get the other one,” he orders his men. A few moments later the federales come out of the tent dragging the campesino. His white pants are bloody and torn. His left leg drags at an odd, broken angle and a jagged piece of bone sticks through the flesh.

Adan sees it and pukes on the spot.

He feels even sicker when they start to drag him toward a helicopter.

Art pulls a kerchief tightly over his nose.

The smoke and ash are getting to him, stinging his eyes, settling in his mouth. And God knows, Art thinks, what toxic shit I’m sucking into my lungs.

He comes to a small village perched on a curve in the road. The campesinos stand on the other side of the road and watch as soldiers get ready to put the torch to the thatched roofs of their casitas. Young soldiers nervously hold them back from trying to get their belongings out of the burning houses.

Then Art sees a lunatic.

A tall, stout man with a full head of white hair, his unshaven face rough with white stubble, wearing an untucked denim shirt over blue jeans and tennis shoes, holds a wooden crucifix in front of him like a bad actor in a B-level vampire movie. He pushes his way through the crowd of campesinos and brushes right past the soldiers.

The soldiers must think he’s crazy, too, because they stand back and let him pass. Art watches as the man strides across the road and gets between two torch-bearing soldiers and a house.

“In the name of your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” the man yells, “I forbid you to do this!”

He’s like somebody’s dotty uncle, Art thinks, who’s usually kept in the house but got out in the chaos and is now wandering around with his messiah complex unleashed. The two soldiers just stand there looking at the man, unsure of what to do.

Their sergeant tells them; he walks over and screams at them to quit staring like two fregados and set fire to the chingada house. The soldiers try to move around the crazy man but he slides over to block them.

Quick feet for a fat man, Art thinks.

The sergeant takes his rifle and raises its butt toward the crazy man as though he’s going to crack the man’s skull if he doesn’t move.

The lunatic doesn’t move. He just stands there invoking the name of God.

Art sighs, stops the Jeep, and gets out.

He knows he has no business interfering, but he just can’t let a crazy guy get his melon smashed without at least trying to stop it. He walks over to the sergeant, tells him that he’ll take care of it, then grabs the lunatic by the elbow and tries to walk him away.

“Come on, viejo,” Art says. “Jesus told me he wants to see you across the road.”

“Really?” the man answers. “Because Jesus told me to tell you to go fuck yourself.”

The man looks at him with amazing gray eyes. Art sees them and knows right away that this guy is no nut job, but something altogether different. Sometimes you see a person’s eyes and you know, you just know, that the bullshit hour is over.

These eyes have seen things, and not flinched or looked away.

Now the man looks at the DEA on Art’s cap.

“Proud of yourself?” he asks.

“I’m just doing my job.”

“And I’m just doing mine.” He turns back to the soldiers and once again orders them to cease and desist.

“Look,” Art says, “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“Then close your eyes.” Then the man sees the concerned look on Art’s face and adds, “Don’t worry, they won’t touch me. I’m a priest. A bishop, actually.”

A priest?! Art thinks. Go fuck yourself? What the hell kind of priest-excuse me, bishop-uses that kind of…

The thought is interrupted by gunfire.

Art hears the dull pop-pop-pop of AK-47 fire and throws himself to the ground, hugging the dirt as tightly as he can. He looks up to see the priest still standing there-like a lone tree on a prairie now, everyone else having hit the deck-still holding his cross up, shouting at the hills, telling them to stop shooting.

It’s one of the most incredibly brave things Art has ever seen.

Or foolish, or just crazy.

Shit, Art thinks.

He gets to his knees, and then lunges for the priest’s legs, knocks him over and holds him down.

“Bullets don’t know you’re a priest,” Art says to him.

“God will call me when he calls me,” the priest answers.

Well, God damn-near just reached for the phone, Art thinks. He lies in the dirt next to the priest until the shooting stops, then risks another look up and sees the soldiers starting to move away from the village, toward the source of the gunfire.

“Would you happen to have an extra cigarette?” the priest asks.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Puritan.”

“It’ll kill you,” Art says.

“Everything I like will kill me,” the priest answers. “I smoke, I drink, I eat too much. Sexual sublimation, I suppose. I’m Bishop Parada. You can call me Father Juan.”

“You’re a madman, Father Juan.”

“Christ needs madmen,” Parada says, standing up and dusting himself off. He looks around and smiles. “And the village is still here, isn’t it?”

Yeah, Art thinks, because the gomeros started shooting.

“Do you have a name?” the priest asks.

“Art Keller.”

He offers his hand. Parada takes it, asking, “Why are you down here burning my country, Art Keller?”

“Like I said, it’s-”

“Your job,” Parada says. “Shitty job, Arturo.”

He sees Art react to the “Arturo.”

“Well, you’re part Mexican, aren’t you?” Parada asks. “Ethnically?”

“On my mother’s side.”

“I’m part American,” Parada says. “I was born in Texas. My parents were mojados, migrant workers. They took me back to Mexico when I was still a baby. Technically, though, that makes me an American citizen. A Texan, no less.”

“Yee-haw.”

“Hook 'em, Horns.”

A woman runs up and starts talking to Parada. She’s crying, and speaking so quickly Art has a hard time understanding her. He does pick up a few words, though: Padre Juan and federales and tortura-torture.

Parada turns to Art. “They’re torturing people at a camp near here. Can you put a stop to it?”

Probably not, Art thinks. It’s SOP in Condor. The federales tune them up, and then they sing for us. “Father, I’m not allowed to interfere in the internal matters of-”

“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” the priest says. He has a tone of authority that makes even Art Keller listen. “Let’s get going.”

He walks over and gets into Art’s Jeep. “Come on, get your ass in gear.”

Art gets in, starts the motor and rips it into gear.

When they get to the base camp, Art sees Adan sitting in the back of an open chopper with his hands tied behind his back. A campesino with a hideous greenstick fracture lies beside him.

The chopper is about to take off. The rotors are spinning, kicking dust and pebbles in Art’s face. He jumps out of the Jeep, ducks below the rotors and runs up to the pilot, Phil Hansen.

“Phil, what the hell?!” Art shouts.

Phil grins at him. “Two birds!”

Art recognizes the reference: You take two birds up. One flies, the other sings.

“No!” Art says. He jabs a thumb toward Adan. “That guy is mine!”

“Fuck you, Keller!”

Yeah, fuck me, Art thinks. He looks in the back of the chopper, where Parada is already tending to the campesino with the broken leg. The priest turns to Art with a look that is both question and demand.

Art shakes his head, then pulls his. 45, cocks it and sticks it in Hansen’s face. “You’re not taking off, Phil.”

Art can hear federales lift their rifles and chamber rounds.

DEA guys come running out of the mess tent.

Taylor yells, “Keller, what the hell you think you’re doing?!”

“This what we do now, Tim?” Art asks. “We toss people out of choppers?”

“You’re no virgin, Keller,” Taylor says. “You’ve jumped into the backseat lots of times.”

I can’t say anything to that, Art thinks. It’s the truth.

“You’re done now, Keller,” Taylor says. “You’re finished this time. I’ll have your goddamn job. I’ll have you thrown in jail.”

He sounds happy.

Art keeps his pistol trained on Hansen’s face.

“This is a Mexican matter,” Navarres says. “Stay out of it. This is not your country.”

“It’s my country!” Parada yells. “And I’ll excommunicate your ass so fast-”

“Such language, Father,” Navarres says.

“You’ll hear worse in a minute.”

“We are trying to find Don Pedro Aviles,” Navarres explains to Art. He points to Adan. “This little piece of shit knows where he is, and he’s going to tell us.”

“You want Don Pedro?” Art asks. He walks back to his Jeep and unrolls the poncho. Don Pedro’s body spills onto the ground, raising little puffs of dust. “You got him.”

Taylor looks down at the bullet-riddled corpse.

“What happened?”

“We tried to arrest him and five of his men,” Art says. “They resisted. They’re all dead.”

“All of them,” Taylor says, staring at Art.

“Yeah.”

“No wounded?”

“No.”

Taylor smirks. But he’s pissed, and Art knows it. Art has just brought in the Big Trophy and now there’s nothing Taylor can do to him. Nothing at fucking all. Still, it’s time to make a peace offering. Art nods his chin toward Adan and the injured campesino and says softly, “I guess we both have things to keep quiet about, Tim.”

“Yeah.”

Art climbs into the back of the helicopter and starts to untie Adan. “I’m sorry about this.”

“Not as sorry as I am,” Adan says. He turns to Parada. “How’s his leg, Father Juan?”

“You know each other?” Art asks.

“I christened him,” Parada says. “Gave him his First Communion. And this man will be fine.”

But he gives Adan and Art a look that says something different.

Art yells to the front, “You can take off now, Phil! Culiacan hospital, and step on it!”

The chopper lifts off.

“Arturo,” Parada says.

“Yeah?”

The priest is smiling at him.

“Congratulations,” Parada says. “You’re a madman.”

Art looks down at the ruined fields, the burned villages, the refugees already forming a line on the dirt road out.

The landscape is scorched and charred as far as he can see.

Fields of black flowers.

Yeah, Art thinks, I’m a madman.

Ninety minutes later, Adan lies between the clean white sheets of Culiacan’s best hospital. The wound on his face from Navarres’s pistol barrel has been cleaned and treated and he’s been shot up with antibiotics, but he’s refused the proffered painkillers.

Adan wants to feel the pain.

He gets out of bed and walks the corridors until he finds the room where, at his insistence, they have taken Manuel Sanchez.

The campesino opens his eyes and sees Adan.

“My leg…”

“It’s still there.”

“Don’t let them-”

“I won’t, “ Adan says. “Get some sleep.”

Adan seeks out the doctor.

“Can you save the leg?”

“I think so,” the doctor says. “But it will be expensive.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“I know who you are.”

Adan doesn’t miss the slight look or the slighter inflection: I know who your uncle is.

“Save his leg,” Adan says, “and you will be chief of a new wing of this hospital. Lose the leg, you’ll spend the rest of your life doing abortions in a Tijuana brothel. Lose the patient, you will be in a grave before he is. And it won’t be my uncle who will put you there, it will be me. Do you understand?”

The doctor understands.

And Adan understands that life has changed.

Childhood is over.

Life is serious now.

Tio slowly inhales a Cuban cigar and watches the smoke ring float across the room.

Operation Condor could not have gone any better. With the Sinaloan fields burned, the ground poisoned, the gomeros scattered and Aviles in the dirt, the Americans believe they have destroyed the source of all evil, and will go back to sleep as far as Mexico is concerned.

Their complacency will give me the time and freedom to create an organization that, by the time the Americans wake up, they will be powerless to touch.

A federacion.

There’s a soft knock on the door.

A black-clad DFS agent, Uzi slung over his shoulder, enters. “Someone here to see you, Don Miguel. He says he’s your nephew.”

“Let him in.”

Adan stands in the doorway.

Miguel Angel Barrera already knows all about what happened to his nephew-the beating, the torture, his threat to the doctor, his visit to Parada’s clinic. In one day, the boy has become a man.

And the man gets right to the point.

“You knew about the raid,” Adan says.

“In fact, I helped to plan it.”

Indeed, the targets had been carefully chosen to eliminate enemies, rivals and the old dinosaurs who would be incapable of understanding the new world. They wouldn’t have survived anyway, and would only have been in the way.

Now they’re not.

“It was an atrocity,” Adan says.

“It was necessary,” Tio says. “It was going to happen anyway, so we might as well take advantage. That’s business, Adan.”

“Well…” Adan says.

And now, Tio thinks, we will see what kind of man the boy has become. He waits for Adan to continue.

“Well,” Adan says. “I want in the business.”

Tio Barrera rises at the head of the table.

The restaurant has been closed for the night-private party. I’ll say it is, Adan thinks; the place is surrounded by DFS men armed with Uzis. All the guests have been patted down and relieved of firearms.

The guest list would be a veritable wish list for the Yanquis. Every major gomero whom Tio selected to survive Operation Condor is here. Adan sits beside Raul and scans the faces at the table.

Garcia Abrego, at fifty years old an ancient man in this trade. Silver hair and a silver mustache, he looks like a wise old cat. Which he is. He sits and watches Barrera impassively, and Adan can’t read his reaction from his face. “Which,” Tio has told Adan, “is how he got to be fifty years old in this trade. Take a lesson from him.”

Sitting next to Abrego is the man Adan knows as El Verde, “The Green,” so called because of the green ostrich-skin boots he always wears. Besides that conceit, Chalino Guzman looks like a farmer-denim shirt and jeans, straw hat.

Sitting next to Guzman is Guero Mendez.

Even in this urbane restaurant Guero is wearing his Sinaloa cowboy outfit: black shirt with mother-of-pearl snap buttons, tight black jeans with huge silver and turquoise belt buckle, pointed-toe boots and a large white cowboy hat, even inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pauses to see if anyone objects.

No one does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baja.

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

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

La Plaza.

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

“… move to Guadalajara.”

Now they’re surprised.

None more so than Adan, who can’t believe that Tio is giving up the most potentially lucrative piece of real estate in the Western world. If the Plaza isn’t going to the family, then who “I ask,” Barrera says, “Guero Mendez to take the Baja Plaza.”

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

But why? Adan wonders. What is Tio up to?

And where is my place?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How expensive?”

“Fifteen percent.”

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

“Forget opium,” Barrera says.

“And the yerba-” Guero begins.

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

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

“Stop thinking like a farmer.”

“I am a farmer.”

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

“What are you talking about?” Abrego snaps.

“Will you join the Federacion?”

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

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

“El Verde?” Barrera asks.

“Si.”

“Mendez?”

“Si, Don Miguel.”

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

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

Ramon Mette Ballasteros is waiting for them.

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

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

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

“Watch,” Barrera says.

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

Barrera says, “Gentlemen, meet the future.”

Art stands in front of Santo Jesus Malverde.

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

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

Already the shantytown is going up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art follows him through the tent.

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

“Something like that.”

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

“It will buy medicine,” Art says.

“God bless you.”

“I don’t believe in God,” Art says.

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

Then He, Art thinks, is a sucker.