The Power of the Dog

Chapter Four
The Mexican Trampoline

Guadalajara

Mexico, 1984

Art Keller watches the DC-4 land.

He and Ernie Hidalgo sit in a car on a bluff overlooking theGuadalajara airport. Art continues to watch as Mexican federales help off-load the cargo.

“They don’t even bother to change out of their uniforms,” Ernie says.

“Why should they?” Art answers. “They’re on the job, aren’t they?”

Art has his night-vision binoculars trained on a cargo airstrip that juts sideways from the main runway. On the near side of the strip a number of cargo hangars and a few small shacks serve as offices for the airfreight companies. Now trucks are parked outside the hangars and the federales carry crates from the plane into the backs of the trucks.

He says to Ernie, “You getting this?”

“Say cheese,” Ernie answers. The electric motor of his camera whirs. Ernie grew up among the gangs inEl Paso, saw what dope did to his barrio and wanted to do something about it. So when Art offered him theGuadalajara job, he jumped at it. Now he asks, “And what do we think might be in the crates?”

“Oreo cookies?” Art suggests.

“Bunny slippers?”

“One thing we know it isn’t,” Art says. “It isn’t cocaine, because

…”

They both finish the line, “… there is no coke inMexico!”

They laugh at this shared joke, a ritual chant, a sarcastic rendering of the official line given to them by their bosses at the DEA. According to the suits in Washington, the planes full of coke that’ve been coming in more regularly and more often than United Airlines are a figment of Art Keller’s imagination.

The received wisdom is that the Mexican drug trade was destroyed back in the Operation Condor days. The official reports say so, the DEA says so, the State Department says so, and the attorney general says so-and none of the aforementioned needs Art Keller to create fantasies about Mexican drug “cartels.”

Art knows what they say about him. That he’s becoming a genuine pain in the ass, firing off monthly memos, trying to create a Federacion from a gaggle of Sinaloan hillbillies who were chased out of the mountains nine years ago. Bugging everyone with a bunch of Frito Banditos who are running a little marijuana and maybe a little heroin, when what he needs to realize is that there’s a freaking crack epidemic ripping through the streets ofAmerica, and the cocaine is coming fromColombia, not goddamnMexico.

They even sent Tim Taylor over fromMexico City to tell him to shut the fuck up. The man in charge of the whole DEA operation inMexico gathered Art, Ernie Hidalgo and Shag Wallace in the back room of the DEA office inGuadalajara and said, “We’re not where the action is. You guys need to face that instead of inventing-”

“We’re not inventing anything,” Art said.

“Where’s the proof?”

“We’re working on it.”

“No,”Taylor said. “You’re not working on it. There is nothing for you to work on. The attorney general of theUnited States has announced to Congress-”

“I read the speech.”

“-that the Mexican drug problem is all but over. Are you trying to make the AG look like an asshole?”

“I think he can manage that without any help from me.”

“I’ll be sure to tell him you said that, Arthur,”Taylor said. “You are not, I repeat not, to go running aroundMexico chasing snow that doesn’t exist. Do we have an understanding here?”

“Sure,” said Art. “If anyone tries to sell me Mexican cocaine, I should just say no.”

Now, three months later, he’s watching nonexistent federales loading nonexistent cocaine into nonexistent trucks that will deliver the cocaine to nonexistent members of the nonexistent Federacion.

It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences, Art thinks as he watches the federales. Operation Condor was intended to cut the Sinaloan cancer out ofMexico, but what it did instead was spread it through the entire body. And you have to give the Sinaloans credit-their response to their little diaspora was pure genius. Somewhere along the line they figured out that their real product isn’t drugs, it’s the two-thousand-mile border they share with the United States, and their ability to move contraband across it. Land can be burned, crops can be poisoned, people can be displaced, but that border-that border isn’t going anywhere. A product that might be worth a few cents one inch on their side of the border is worth thousands just one inch on the other side.

The product-DEA, State, and Mexican government notwithstanding-is cocaine.

The Federacion made a very simple and profitable deal with the Medellin andCali cartels: The Colombians pay $1,000 for every kilo of cocaine the Mexicans can safely deliver to them inside theUnited States. So, basically, the Federacion got out of the drug-growing business and into the transportation business. The Mexicans take delivery of the coke from the Colombians, transport it to staging areas along the border, move it across into safe houses in the States and then give it back to the Colombians and get their thousand bucks per kilo. The Colombians move it to their labs and process it into crack, and the shit is on the streets weeks-sometimes just days-after leavingColombia.

Not throughFlorida -the DEA has been pounding those routes like a rented mule-but through the neglected Mexican “back door.”

The Federacion, Art thinks-when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.

But how? he wonders. Even he has to admit there are some problems with his theory. How do you fly a plane under the radar fromColombia toGuadalajara, across a Central American terrain that is swarming not only with DEA but, thanks to the presence of the Communist Sandinista regime inNicaragua, with CIA as well? Spy satellites, AWACS-none of them is picking up these flights.

And then there’s the fuel problem. A DC-4, like the one he’s looking at right now, doesn’t have the fuel capacity to make that flight in one shot. It would have to stop and refuel. But where? It doesn’t seem possible, as his bosses have cheerfully pointed out to him.

Yeah, well, it may not be possible, Art thinks. But the plane is sitting there, fat with cocaine. Just as real as the crack epidemic that’s causing so much pain in the American ghettos. So I know you’re doing it, Art thinks, looking at the plane. I just don’t know how you’re doing it.

But I’m going find out.

And then I’m going to prove it.

“What’s this?” Ernie asks.

A black Mercedes pulls up to the office shack. Some federales trot up and open the back door of the car and a tall, thin man in a black suit gets out. Art can see the glow from a cigar as the man walks through the cordon of federales into the office.

“I wonder if that’s him,” Ernie asks.

“Who?”

“The mythical M-1 himself,” Ernie says.

“M-1” is the Mexican sobriquet for the nonexistent head of the non-existent Federacion.

The intelligence that Art has managed to gather over the past year is that M-1’s Federacion, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts: the Gulf States, Sonora, and Baja. Together they cover the border with the United States. Each of these three territories is run by a Sinaloan who was forced out of the home province by Operation Condor, and Art has managed to put a name to all three.

The Gulf: Garcia Abrego.

Sonora: Chalino Guzman, aka El Verde, “The Green.”

Baja: Guero Mendez.

At the top of this triangle, based in Guadalajara: M-1.

But they can’t put a name or a face to him.

But you can, can’t you, Art? he asks himself. You know in your gut who’s the patron of the Federacion. You helped put him in office.

Art peers through his night scope into the little office, focuses on the man who now sits down behind a desk. He wears a conservative black business suit, a white button-down shirt open at the neck, no tie. His black hair, flicked with a little silver, is combed straight back. His thin, dark face sports a pencil mustache, and he smokes a thin, brown cigar.

“Look at them,” Ernie is saying. “They’re acting like this is a papal visit. I mean, I haven’t seen this guy before, have you?”

“No,” Art says, setting the binoculars down, “I haven’t.”

Not for nine years, anyway.

But Tio hasn’t changed much.

Althea’s asleep when Art gets home to their rented house in the Tlaquepaque district, a leafy suburb of single-family homes, boutiques and trendy restaurants.

Why shouldn’t she be asleep, Art thinks. It’s three o’clock in the morning. He’s spent the last two hours in the charade of tailing M-1 to find out his identity. Well, it was skillfully done, anyway, Art thinks. He and Ernie had laid way off the black Mercedes as it pulled out onto the highway that led back into downtown Guadalajara. They tailed the car through the old Centro Historico district and past the Cross of Squares-Plaza de Armas, Plaza de la Liberacion, Plaza de la Rotonda de los Hombres and Plaza Tapatia-that has the cathedral at its center. Then into the modern business district and back out toward the suburbs, where the black Mercedes finally pulled off at a car dealership.

German imports. Luxury cars.

They’d stayed a block away and waited while Tio let himself into the office, then came out a few minutes later with a set of keys and got into a new Mercedes 510-no driver this time, no guards. They followed him out to the wealthy garden district, where Tio pulled into a driveway, got out of the car and went into his house.

Just another businessman coming home after a late night’s work.

So, Art thinks, in the morning I’ll go through another charade, entering the car dealership and the home address into the system to come up with the identity of our alleged M-1.

Miguel Angel Barrera.

Tio Angel.

Art goes into the dining room, opens the liquor cabinet and pours himself a Johnnie Walker Black. He takes his drink and walks down the hallway and looks in on his kids. Cassie is five and looks, thank God, like her mother. Michael is three and also favors Althea, although he has Art’s thicker build. Althea is thrilled that, due to a Mexican housekeeper and a Mexican nanny, both kids are on their way to being bilingual. Michael doesn’t ask for bread anymore, he asks for pan; water has become agua.

Art sneaks into each of their rooms, kisses them softly on the cheeks and then goes back down the long hallway, through the master bedroom and into the attached bathroom, where he takes a long shower.

If Althie was a crack in Art’s Doctrine of YOYO, the kids were a hydrogen bomb. The moment he saw his daughter born, and then lying in Althie’s arms, he knew his shell of “himself alone” had been blown to bits. When his son came along, it wasn’t better, it was just different, looking down at that little version of himself. And an epiphany-the only redemption for having a bad father is being a good one.

And he’s been a good one. A warm, loving father to his kids; a faithful, warm husband to his wife. So much of the anger and bitterness of his youth has faded away, leaving only this-this thing with Tio Barrera.

Because Tio used me, back in the Condor days. Used me to take out his rivals so he could set up his Federacion. Played me for a sucker, let me think I was destroying the drug network, when all I was doing was helping him set up a bigger and better one.

Face it, he thinks as he lets the hot spray hit his tired shoulders, it’s why you came here.

It had seemed an odd assignment request, a backwater like Guadalajara, especially for the hero of Operation Condor. Bringing down Don Pedro put his career on a bullet. He went from Sinaloa to Washington, then to Miami, then to San Diego. Art Keller, the Boy Wonder, was about to be, at thirty-three, the youngest RAC-Resident Agent in Charge-in the agency. He could pick his spot.

Everyone was stunned when he picked Guadalajara.

Took his career off the fast track and derailed it.

Colleagues, friends, ambitious rivals asked why.

Art wouldn’t say.

Even to himself, really.

That he had unfinished business.

And maybe I should leave it that way, he thinks as he gets out of the shower, grabs a towel from the rack and dries off.

It would be so easy to back off and toe the company line. Just take the small-time marijuana dealers the Mexicans want to give you, dutifully file reports that the Mexican anti-drug effort is going swimmingly (which would be a good joke, given that the U.S.-funded Mexican defoliation planes are dropping mostly water-they’re actually watering the marijuana and poppy crops) and sit back and enjoy your tour here.

No investigation of M-1, no revelations about Miguel Angel Barrera.

It’s in the past, he thinks. Leave it there.

You don’t have to kiss the cobra.

Yes, you do.

It’s been eating away at you for nine years. All the destruction, all the suffering, all the death brought by Operation Condor, all so Tio could set up his Federacion with himself as its head. The Law of Unintended Consequences, bullshit. It was exactly what Tio intended, what he planned, what he set up.

He used you, set you like a dog on his enemies, and you did it.

Then you kept your mouth shut about it.

While they lauded you as a hero, slapped you on the back, finally let you on the team. You pathetic son of a bitch, that’s what it’s been about, hasn’t it? Your desperation to finally belong.

You sold your soul for it.

Now you think you can buy it back.

Let it go-you have a family to take care of.

He slips into bed, trying not to wake Althea, but it doesn’t work.

“Time is it?” she asks.

“Almost four.”

“In the morning?”

“Go back to sleep.”

“What time’re you getting up?” she asks.

“Seven.”

“Wake me,” she says. “I have to go to the library.”

She has a reader’s ticket at the University of Guadalajara, where she’s working on a post-doc thesis: “The Agricultural Labor Force in Pre-Revolutionary Mexico-A Statistical Model.”

Then she says, “You want to mess around?”

“It’s four in the morning.”

“I didn’t ask for time and temperature,” she says. “I asked you to do me. C'mon.”

She reaches for him. Her hand feels warm and in a few seconds he’s inside her. It always feels like coming home to him. When she climaxes she grabs his ass and pushes him in tight. “That was beautiful, baby,” she says. “Now let me sleep.”

He lies awake.

In the morning, Art looks at the pictures of the airplane, of the federales off-loading the coke, then opening the car door for Tio, then Tio sitting at the desk in the office.

Then he listens to Ernie brief him on what he already knows.

“I got on EPIC,” Ernie says, referring to the El Paso Intelligence Center, a computer databank that coordinates DEA, Customs and Immigration information. “Miguel Angel Barrera was a former Sinaloa state policeman, in fact, the bodyguard to the governor himself. Heavy connections with the Mexican DFS. Now get this: He played on our team-he was one of the state cops who ran Operation Condor back in ’77. Some EPIC reports credit Barrera with single-handedly dismantling the old Sinaloan heroin operation. He left the force and disappeared off the EPIC radar after that.”

“No hits post-'75?” Art asks.

“Nada,” Ernie answers. “You pick up his story here in Guadalajara. He’s a very successful businessman. He owns the car dealership, four restaurants, two apartment buildings and considerable real-estate holdings. He sits on the boards of two banks and has powerful connections in the Jalisco state government and in Mexico City.”

“Not exactly the profile of a drug lord,” Shag says.

Shag is a good old boy out of Tucson, a Vietnam vet who found his way from military intelligence into the DEA, and is in his own quiet way as much of a hard-ass as Ernie is. He uses his “aw-shucks” cowboy persona to disguise his smarts, and a number of drug dealers are now in prison because they underestimated Shag Wallace.

“Until you see him supervising a shipment of coke,” Ernie says, pointing at the photographs.

“Could he be M-1?”

Art says, “Only one way to find out.”

Taking, he thinks, one more step toward the edge of the cliff.

“There will be no investigation of the Barrera cocaine connection,” he says. “Is that clear?”

Ernie and Shag look a little stunned, but they both nod.

“I want to see nothing on your logs, no paperwork of any kind,” he says. “We’re just chasing marijuana. In that connection: Ernie, work your Mexican sources, see if the Barrera name rings any alarms. Shag, work the airplane.”

“What about surveillance on Barrera?” Ernie asks.

Art shakes his head. “I don’t want to stir him up before we’re ready. We’ll bracket him. Work on the street, work on the plane, work in toward him. If that’s where it leads.”

But shit, Art thinks. You know it does.

The DC-4’s serial number is N-3423VX.

Shag works through the tangled paper chase of holding corporations, shell companies and DBAs. The trail ends at an airfreight company called Servicios Turisticos-SETCO-operating out of Aguacate Airport in Tegu-cigalpa, Honduras.

Someone running drugs out of Honduras is about as surprising as someone selling hot dogs in Yankee Stadium. Honduras, the original “banana republic,” has an old and distinguished history in the drug trade, dating back to the turn of the twentieth century when the country was out-and-out owned by the Standard Fruit and United Fruit companies. The fruit companies were based in New Orleans, and the city’s docks were out-and-out owned by the New Orleans Mafia through its control of the dockworkers’ union, so if the fruit companies wanted their Honduran bananas off-loaded, the boats had better be carrying something else under those bananas.

So much dope came into the country in those banana boats that Mafia slang for heroin became banana. The Honduran registry isn’t surprising, Art thinks, and it answers the question of where the DC-4s are refueling.

The ownership of SETCO is likewise enlightening.

Two partners-David Nunez and Ramon Mette Ballasteros.

Nunez is a Cuban ex-pat now living in Miami. Nothing extraordinary there. What is extraordinary is that Nunez was with Operation 40, a CIA op in which Cuban expatriates were trained to go in and take political control after the successful Bay of Pigs invasion. Except the Bay of Pigs was, conspicuously, not a success. Some of the Operation 40 guys ended up dead on the beach, others went to firing squads. The lucky ones made it back to Miami.

Nunez was one of the lucky.

Art doesn’t really need to read the file on Ramon Mette Ballasteros. He already knows the book. Mette was a chemist for the gomeros back in the heroin heyday. Got out just before Condor and went back to his native Honduras and into the cocaine business. The word is that Mette personally financed the coup that recently overthrew the Honduran president.

Okay, Art thinks, the two profiles actually walk the company line. A major coke dealer owns an airline that he’s using to fly coke to Miami. But at least one of SETCO’s planes is flying to Guadalajara, and that doesn’t conform to the official line.

The next normal step would be to call the DEA office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but he can’t do that because it was closed last year due to “lack of business.” Honduras and El Salvador are now both being handled out of Guatemala, so Art gets on the horn to Warren Farrar, the RAC in Guatemala City.

“SETCO,” Art says.

“What about it?” Farrar asks.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Art says.

There’s a pause that Art is tempted to describe as “pregnant,” then Farrar says, “I can’t come out and play with you on this, Art.”

Really? Art wonders. Why the hell not? We only have about eight thousand conferences a year, just so we can come out and play with each other, on things exactly like this.

So he takes a shot. “Why was the Honduras office closed, Warren?”

“What are you fucking around with, Art?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

Because I’m wondering if the quid pro quo for Mette financing a presidential coup was the new government tossing out the DEA.

In response, Farrar hangs up.

Well, thanks a bunch, Warren. What’s got you so nervous?

Next, Art phones the State Department’s Drug Assist Desk, a title so pungent with irony it makes him want to weep, because they tell him in polite bureaucratese to please go fuck himself.

Next Art calls the CIA Liaison Desk, puts in his request and gets a call back that same afternoon. What he doesn’t expect is a call back from John Hobbs.

Himself.

Back in the day, Hobbs was the head of Operation Phoenix. Art had briefed him a few times. Hobbs had even offered him a job after his year in-country, but by that time the DEA had beckoned and Art went.

Now Hobbs is the CIA’s station chief for Central America.

Makes sense to me, Art thinks. A cold warrior goes where there’s a cold war.

They make small talk for a few minutes (How are Althea and the kids? How do you like Guadalajara?), then Hobbs asks, “What can we do to be of assistance, Arthur?”

“I was wondering if you could help me get a handle on an airfreight company called SETCO,” Art says. “It’s owned by Ramon Mette.”

“Yes, my people passed along your request,” Hobbs says. “That has to be a negative, I’m afraid.”

“A negative.”

“Yes,” Hobbs says. “A no.”

Yes, we have no bananas, Art thinks. We have no bananas today.

Hobbs continues, “We don’t have anything on SETCO.”

“Well, thanks for giving me the call.”

Then Hobbs asks, “What have you got going on down there, Arthur?”

“I’m just getting some radar pings,” Art lies, “that SETCO might be moving some marijuana around.”

“Marijuana.”

“Sure,” Art says. “That’s about all that’s left in Mexico these days.”

“Well, good luck with that, Arthur,” Hobbs says. “Sorry we couldn’t be of any help.”

“I appreciate the effort,” Art says.

He hangs up wondering why the Company’s chief of Latin American operations would take time out from his busy day of trying to overthrow the Sandinistas to call him personally and lie to him.

Nobody wants to talk about SETCO, Art thinks, not my colleagues in the DEA, not the State Department, not even CIA.

The whole inter-agency alphabet soup just spells out YOYO.

You’re On Your Own.

Ernie reports pretty much the same thing.

You put the name Barrera out to any of the usual sources and they clam up. Even the most loquacious snitches develop a case of lockjaw. Barrera’s one of the most prominent businessmen in town, except no one ever heard of him.

So drop it, Art tells himself. This is your chance.

Can’t.

Why not?

Just can’t.

At least be honest.

Okay. Maybe because I just can’t let him win. Maybe because I owe him a beating. Yeah, except he’s beating you. And he’s not even showing up. You can’t lay a glove on him.

It’s true-they can’t get near Tio.

Then the damnedest thing happens.

Tio comes to them.

Colonel Vega, the ranking federale in Jalisco and the man whom Art is supposed to be liaising with, comes into Art’s office, sits down and says sadly, “Senor Keller, I will be frank. I have come here to ask you politely but firmly-please cease your harassment of Don Miguel Angel Barrera.”

He and Art stare at each other, then Art says, “As much as I’d like to help you, Colonel, this office isn’t conducting an investigation of Senor Barrera. Not that I know about, anyway.”

He yells out into the main office, “Shag, are you investigating Senor Barrera?”

“No, sir.”

“Ernie?”

“No.”

Art raises his arms in a shrug.

“Senor Keller,” Vega says, glancing out the door at Ernie, “your man is tossing Don Miguel’s name about in a very irresponsible fashion. Senor Barrera is a respected businessman with many friends in government.”

“And, apparently, in the Municipal Judicial Federal Police.”

“You’re Mexican, aren’t you?” Vega asks.

“I’m American.” But where are you going with this?

“But you speak Spanish?”

Art nods.

“Then you’re familiar with the word intocable,” Vega says, getting up to leave. “Senor Keller, Don Miguel is intocable.”

Untouchable.

With that concept imparted, Vega leaves.

Ernie and Shag come into Art’s office. Shag starts to speak, but Art signals for him to shut up and gestures for them all to go outside. They follow him for about a block before he says, “How did Vega know we’re running an op on Barrera?”

Back inside, it takes them just a few minutes to find the little mike under Art’s desk. Ernie goes to rip it out but Art grabs his wrist and stops him. “I could use a beer,” Art says. “How about you guys?”

They go to a bar downtown.

“That’s beautiful,” Ernie says. “In the States, the cops bug the bad guys. Here, the bad guys bug the cops.”

Shag shakes his head. “So they know everything we know.”

Well, Art thinks, they know we suspect Tio is M-1. They know that we’ve tracked the plane to Nunez and Mette. And they know we can’t get shit after that. So what’s making them nervous? Why send in Vega to shut down an investigation that’s going nowhere?

And why now?

“Okay,” Art says. “We’ll broadcast to them. Let them think they’ve backed us off. You guys stand down for a while.”

“What are you going to do, boss?”

Me? I’m going to touch the untouchable.

Back in the office, he regretfully tells Ernie and Shag that they’re going to have to shut down the Barrera investigation. Then he goes to a phone booth and calls Althea. “I’m not going to make it home for dinner.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” he says. “Kiss the kids good night for me.”

“I will. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Every man has a weakness, Art thinks, a secret that could drag him down. I should know. I know mine, but what’s yours, Tio?

Art doesn’t make it home that night, or the next five.

I’m like an alcoholic, Art thinks. He’s heard reformed drunks talk about how they would drive to the liquor store, all the time swearing they weren’t going to go, then go in swearing they weren’t going to buy, then buy swearing they weren’t going to drink the booze they’d just bought.

Then they’d drink it.

I’m that guy, Art thinks, drawn toward Tio like a drunk to the bottle.

So instead of going home at night he sits in his car on the broad boulevard, parked a block and a half from Tio’s car dealership, and watches the office through the rearview mirror. Tio must be selling a lot of cars, because he’s there until eight or eight-thirty in the evening, and then he gets into his car and drives home. Art sits at the bottom of his road, the only way in or out of the housing development, until midnight or one, but Tio doesn’t come out.

Finally, on the sixth night, Art gets lucky.

Tio leaves the office at six-thirty and drives not to the suburbs but back downtown. Art stays back in the rush-hour traffic but manages to stay with the Mercedes as it drives through the Centro Historico and pulls up beside a tapas restaurant.

Three federales, two Jalisco state policemen and a couple of guys that look like DFS agents are on guard outside, and the sign on the restaurant door reads CERRADO-closed. One of the federales opens Tio’s door. Tio gets out and the federale drives the Mercedes away like a parking valet. A Jalisco state cop opens the closed restaurant door and Tio walks in. Another Jalisco cop waves to Art to keep his car moving.

Art rolls his window down. “I want to grab a bite.”

“Private party.”

Yeah, I guess, Art thinks.

He parks the car two blocks away, takes his Nikon camera with the 70-300 lens and sticks it under his coat. He crosses the street and walks half a block up, then takes a left into the alley and walks until he figures he’s at the back of the building across the street from the restaurant, then hops the fire-escape ladder and pulls it down. He climbs up the metal ladder, bolted to the bricks, until he makes it the three stories up to the roof.

DEA RACs aren’t supposed to be doing this kind of work-they’re supposed to be office creatures, liaising with their Mexican counterparts. But seeing as how my Mexican counterparts are across the street guarding my target, Art thinks, the liaison thing isn’t going to work out.

He ducks and crosses the roof, then lies down behind the low parapet that edges the building. Surveillance work is hell on the dry-cleaning bill, he thinks as he stretches out on the dirty roof, rests the lens on the parapet and focuses on the restaurant. And you can’t turn it in on your expense account, either.

He settles down to wait but he doesn’t have to wait long before a parade of cars pulls up alongside Talavera’s tapas place. The drill is the same-the Jalisco police stand guard while the federales play valet, and a major player in the Mexican drug trade gets out and goes into the restaurant.

It’s like a Hollywood opening for drug stars.

Garcia Abrego, head of the Gulf cartel, gets out of his Mercedes. The older man looks distinguished with his silver hair, trim mustache and businessman’s gray suit. Guero Mendez, Baja cartel, looks like the narco-cowboy he is. His blond hair-hence the nickname Guero, “Blondie”-hangs long under his white cowboy hat. He wears a black silk shirt, open to the waist, black silk pants and black cowboy boots with pointed toes capped with silver. Chalino Guzman looks more like the peasant he is in an ill-fitting old suit jacket, mismatched pants and green boots.

Jesus, Art thinks, it’s a fucking Apalachin meeting, except these guys don’t look too worried about police interference. It would be like the godfathers of the Cimino, Genovese and Colombo families getting together for a sit-down guarded by the FBI. Except if this was the Sicilian Mafia, I’d never get this close. But these guys are complacent. They think they’re safe.

And they’re probably not wrong.

What’s curious, though, Art wonders, is, Why this restaurant? Tio owns half a dozen places in Guadalajara, but Talavera’s isn’t one of them. Why wouldn’t he hold this summit meeting in one of his own joints?

But I guess this dispels any doubt about Tio being M-1.

The traffic stops out front and Art settles in for the long wait. There is no such thing as a quick Mexican dinner, and these boys probably have an agenda. Jesus, what I wouldn’t give to have a microphone in there.

He pulls a Kit Kat bar out of his pants pocket, unwraps it, breaks off two sections and puts the rest back, not knowing when he’ll get a chance to grab more food. Then he rolls onto his back, crosses his arms over his chest for warmth and takes a nap, bagging a couple of hours of uneasy sleep before car doors and voices wake him up.

Showtime.

He rolls back over and sees them all coming out on the sidewalk. If there’s no such thing as a Federacion, he thinks, they’re doing a damn good imitation of one. They’re absolutely brazen, all standing out on the sidewalk, laughing, shaking hands and lighting each other’s Cuban cigars as they wait for the federale valets to bring their cars around.

Shit, Art thinks, you can practically smell the smoke and the testosterone overload.

The atmosphere changes suddenly when the girl comes out.

She’s stunning, Art thinks. A young Liz Taylor, but with olive skin and black eyes. And long lashes, which she’s batting at all the men while an older man who has to be her father stands in the doorway, smiling nervously and waving adios to the gomeros.

But they’re not leaving.

Guero Mendez is all over the girl. He even takes off his cowboy hat, Art notices. Maybe not your best move, Guero, at least until you wash your hair. But Guero bows-actually bows-sweeps his hat along the sidewalk and smiles up at the girl.

His silver teeth flash in the streetlights.

Yeah, Guero, that’ll get her, Art thinks.

Tio rescues the girl. Comes over, puts an almost paternal arm around Guero’s shoulders and smoothly walks him back toward his car, which has just pulled up. They hug and do their good-bye thing, and Guero looks over Tio’s shoulder at the girl before he gets into his car.

Must be true love, Art thinks. Or at least true lust.

Then Abrego leaves, with a dignified handshake instead of an embrace, and Art watches as Tio walks back to the girl, bends over, and kisses her hand.

Latin chivalry? Art wonders.

Or…

No…

But Art eats lunch at Talavera’s the next day.

The girl’s name is Pilar, and sure enough, she’s Talavera’s daughter.

She sits in a booth in the back, pretending to study a textbook, every now and again performing a self-conscious turn of the hip as she looks up from under those long lashes to see who might be checking her out.

Every guy in the place, Art thinks.

She doesn’t look fifteen except for a remaining trace of baby fat and the perfected adolescent pout on her precociously full lips. And even though it makes him feel a little like a child molester, Art can’t help but notice that she has a figure that is definitely very post-adolescent. The only thing that tells Art she’s fifteen is the ongoing argument she’s having with her mother, who sits down in the booth and loudly reminds her several times that she’s only fifteen.

And Papa glances up anxiously every time the door opens. The hell is he so nervous about? Art wonders.

Then he finds out.

Tio walks through the door.

Art has his back to the door and Tio walks right past him. Doesn’t even notice his long-lost nephew, Art thinks, he’s so focused on the girl. And he has flowers in his hand-honest to God, he has flowers clutched in his long, thin fingers-and honest to God has a box of candy under his other arm.

Tio has come courting.

Now Art gets why Talavera’s so freaked out. He knows that Miguel Angel Barrera is accustomed to the droit de seigneur of rural Sinaloa, in which girls her age and younger are routinely deflowered by the dominant gomeros.

And that’s their concern. That this powerful man, this married man, is going to turn their precious, beautiful, virginal daughter into his segundera, his mistress. To use her and then throw her aside, her reputation ruined, her chances for a good marriage destroyed.

And there’s not a goddamn thing they can do about it.

Tio won’t rape the girl, Art knows. He won’t take her by force. That might happen up in the hills of Sinaloa, but it won’t happen here. But if she accepts him, if she goes with him willingly, the parents are helpless. And what fifteen-year-old’s head wouldn’t be turned by attention from a rich and powerful man? This kid isn’t stupid-she knows it’s flowers and candy now, but it could be jewelry and clothes, trips and vacations. She’s at the base of an arc, but she can’t see the downside from where she’s standing-that one day the jewelry and clothes will slide back to flowers and candy, and then it won’t even be that anymore.

Tio’s back is turned to Art, who leaves some pesos on the table, gets up as quietly as he can, goes to the counter and pays the check.

Thinking, She may look like a young piece of strange to you, Tio.

To me she looks like a Trojan horse.

Nine o’clock that night, Art climbs into a pair of jeans and a sweater and goes into the bathroom where Althea is taking a shower. “Babe, I gotta go out.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

She’s too smart to ask where he’s going. She’s a cop’s wife, she’s been in the DEA with him for the past eight years, she knows the drill. But knowing doesn’t stop her from worrying. She slides the glass door open and kisses him good-bye. “I’m guessing I shouldn’t wait up?”

“Good guess.”

What are you doing? he asks himself as he drives toward the Talaveras’ house in the suburbs.

Nothing. I’m not going to drink.

He finds the address and pulls over a half-block away on the other side of the street. It’s a quiet neighborhood, solidly upper-middle-class, just enough streetlights to make it safe, not enough to be obtrusive.

He sits in his dark spot and waits.

That night, and the next three.

He’s there each night as the Talavera family comes home from the restaurant. As a light goes on in a room upstairs, then goes off a little while later when Pilar turns in for the night. Art gives it another half-hour and then goes home.

Maybe you’re wrong, he thinks.

No, you’re not. Tio gets what he wants.

Art’s about to go home on the fourth night when a Mercedes comes down the street, kills its headlights and pulls up in front of the Talavera house.

Ever gallant, Art thinks, Tio sends a car and driver. No taxicab for this underage piece of ass. It’s fucking pathetic, he thinks as he watches Pilar come out the front door and scurry into the backseat of the car.

Art gives it a good head start, then pulls out.

The car pulls up in front of a condo on a little knoll in the west suburbs. It’s in a nice, quiet neighborhood, fairly new, individual units nestled among the city’s trademark jacaranda trees. The address is new to Art, not any of the properties he’s traced to Tio. How sweet, Art thinks-a brand-new love nest for a brand-new love.

Tio’s car is already there. The driver gets out and opens the door for Pilar. Tio meets her at the door and ushers her in. They’re in each other’s arms before the door is even shut.

Jesus, Art thinks, if I were fucking a fifteen-year-old girl, I’d at least pull the curtains.

But you think you’re safe, don’t you, Tio?

And the most dangerous place on earth Is where you’re safe.

He’s back at La Casa del Amor (as he styles it) late that morning, when he knows that Tio will be at the office and Pilar in, well, ahem, school. He’s wearing the overalls he uses to work in his own garden and he carries a pair of clippers. In fact, he does trim a couple of unruly jacaranda branches as he makes his reconnaissance, noting the color of the exterior paint and plaster, the location of the phone lines, the windows, the pool, the spa, any outbuildings.

A week later, after visits to a hardware store and a model-supply shop and a call to a mail-order techno warehouse in San Diego, he goes back, wearing the same outfit, and clips a few more branches on his way to ducking behind the shrubs that have been thoughtfully planted outside the bedroom wall. He likes this location not for prurient reasons-he’d actually rather not hear that part of it-but because the telephone lines go into the bedroom. He pulls a small flathead screwdriver from his pocket and, delicate as a surgeon, pries a minuscule opening behind the aluminum windowsill. He inserts the tiny FX-101 bug into the opening, removes a small tube of caulking from his pocket and reseals the opening, then takes the little bottle of green paint that closely matches the original color and, with a tiny brush meant for painting model airplanes, paints over the caulk. He blows gently on the paint to dry it, then leans back to assess his work.

The bug, illegal and unauthorized, is also undetectable.

The FX-101 can pick up any sound within ten yards and throw it for another sixty, so Art has some flexibility. He goes outside the complex to the sewer opening. He takes the unit that contains the receiver and a voice-activated tape recorder and duct-tapes it to the top of the sewer. Now it will be a simple matter of swinging by, taking out one cassette and replacing it with a fresh one.

He knows it’s going to be hit-and-miss, but he needs only a few hits. Tio will use La Casa del Amor mostly as a spot for his assignations with Pilar, but he’ll also use the phone. He might even use the condo for meetings. Even the most cautious criminal, Art knows, can’t separate his business from his personal life.

Of course, he admits, neither can you.

He lies to Ernie and Shag.

They take jogs together now. Ostensibly, it’s Art’s mandate for his team to stay in shape, but in reality it’s a cover for them to have the conversations they can’t have in the office. It’s hard to listen in on a moving target, particularly in the open plazas of downtown Guadalajara, so every day before lunch they change into sweats and Nikes and go out for their run.

“I have a CI,” he tells them. A Confidential Informant.

He feels bad about lying to them, but it’s for their own protection. If this goes sick and wrong, as it almost has to, he wants to take it all on his own shoulders. If his guys know that he’s running an illegal tap, they’re obliged by regulations to inform their superiors. Otherwise, they’re concealing “guilty knowledge,” which would ruin their careers. He knows that they would never rat him out, so he makes up a confidential informant.

An imaginary friend, Art thinks. At least it’s consistent-a nonexistent source for nonexistent coke, et cetera…

“That’s great, boss,” Ernie says. “Who-”

“Sorry,” Art says. “It’s early. We’re just dating.”

They get it. A relationship with a snitch is like a relationship with the opposite sex. You flirt, you seduce, you tempt. You buy them presents, you tell them how much you need them, you can’t live without them. And if they do get in bed with you, you don’t tell, even-especially-the boys in the locker room.

At least not until it’s a done deal, and by the time it becomes common knowledge, it’s usually about over anyway.

So this becomes Art’s day: He puts in his hours at the office, goes home, leaves the house late at night to retrieve his daily tape, then comes home and listens to it in his study.

This goes on for two useless weeks.

What he hears is mostly love talk, sex talk, as Tio woos his young inamorata and gradually instructs her in the finer points of lovemaking. Art fast-forwards through most of this, but he gets the idea.

Pilar Talavera is growing up fast as Tio starts introducing some interesting grace notes into the music of love. Well, interesting if you’re into that sort of thing, which Art is decidedly not. In fact, it makes him want to puke.

You’ve been a bad girl.

Have I?

Yes, and you need to be punished.

It’s a commonplace of surveillance-you hear so much shit that you never wanted to hear.

Then, albeit rarely, the rose in the manure pile.

One night Art brings his tape home, makes himself a scotch and sips on it while he goes through that evening’s sick tedium, and hears Tio confirm the delivery of “three hundred wedding gowns” to an address in Chula Vista, a neighborhood that sits between San Diego and Tijuana.

Now that you’ve got it, Art thinks, what do you do with it?

The SOP requires that you turn the info over to your Mexican colleagues, and simultaneously to the DEA office in Mexico City, for transferral to the San Diego office. Well, if I turn it over to my Mexican counterpart it goes straight to Tio, and if I turn it in to Tim Taylor he’ll just repeat the official line that there are no “wedding gowns” moving through Mexico. And he’ll demand to know who my source is.

Which I ain’t about to give him.

They talk it over on the morning jog.

“We’re fucked,” Ernie says.

“No, we’re not,” Art answers.

Time to take the next step toward the cliff.

He leaves the office after lunch and goes to a phone booth. In the States, he thinks, it’s the criminals who have to sneak around and use pay phones. Here, it’s the cops.

He phones a guy he knows on the San Diego Police narco squad. He met Russ Dantzler at some inter-agency conference a few months ago. Seemed like a decent guy, a player.

Yeah, and what I need now is a definite player.

With a set of stones.

“Russ? Art Keller, DEA. We had a couple of beers together, what was it, last July?”

Dantzler remembers him. “What’s up, Art?”

Art tells him.

“This might be bullshit,” he finishes, “but I don’t think so. You might want to hit it.”

Hell yes, he might want to hit it. And there’s nothing the attorney gen-eral of the United States or the State Department or the entire federal government can do about it. The Feds come down on San Diego PD, San Diego PD is just going to tell them to go fuck themselves sideways with something jagged.

With a proper regard to cop etiquette, Dantzler asks, “What do you want from me?”

“You keep me out of it and you keep me in it,” Art answers. “You forget I gave you the tip, and you remember to share any intel you get with me.”

“Deal,” Dantzler says. “But I need a warrant, Art. Just in case you’ve forgotten how things work in a democracy that scrupulously protects the rights of its citizens.”

“I have a CI,” he lies.

“Gotcha.”

They don’t need to say anything more. Dantzler will take the info to one of his own guys, who will tell it to one of his CIs, who’ll then turn around and tell it to Dantzler, who will take it to a judge and presto-probable cause.

The next day Dantzler calls Art back at the phone booth at a prearranged time and screams, “Three hundred pounds of cocaine! That’s six million dollars in street value! Art, I’ll make sure you get a lot of the credit!”

“Forget I gave you anything,” Art says. “ Just remember you owe me.”

Two weeks later, the El Paso police also owe Art for the seizure of a trailer-truck full of cocaine. A month after that, Art goes back to Russ Dantzler with another tip, about a house in Lemon Grove.

The subsequent raid yields a paltry fifty pounds of cocaine.

Plus $4 million in cash, three money-counting machines, and stacks of interesting documents that include bank deposit slips. The deposit slips are so interesting that when Dantzler takes them into federal court the judge freezes an additional $15 million in assets deposited under several names in five San Diego County banks. Although none of the names is Miguel Angel Barrera, every penny of the money belongs either to him or to cartel members who are paying him a fee to keep their assets safe.

And Art can hear from the phone traffic that none of them is very happy.

Neither is Tim Taylor.

The DEA boss is looking at a faxed copy of The San Diego Union-Tribune, its headline screaming MASSIVE DRUG BUST IN LEMON GROVE,

with references to a “federacion,” and at another fax, from the AG’s office, screaming, Just what the fuck is going on? He gets on the horn to Art.

“Just what the fuck is going on?!” he yells.

“What do you mean?”

“Goddammit, I know what you’re doing!”

“Then I wish you’d share it with me.”

“You have a CI! And you’re running it through other agencies and goddamn it, Arthur, you’d better not be the one leaking this shit to the press!”

“I’m not,” Art answers truthfully. I’m leaking it to other agencies so they can leak it to the press.

“Who’s the CI?!”

“There is no CI,” Art answers. “I have nothing to do with this.”

Yeah, except three weeks later he gives the LAPD a 200-pound bust in Hacienda Heights. The Arizona state cops get a trailer-truck with 350 pounds rolling up I-10. Anaheim PD pops a house for cash and prizes totaling ten mil.

They all deny getting anything from him, but they all speak his gospel: La Federacion, La Federacion, La Federacion, forever and ever, world without end, amen.

Even the RAC Bogota comes to the altar.

Shag answers the phone one day and holds it into his chest as he tells Art, “It’s the Big Man himself. Straight from the front lines of the War on Drugs.”

Even two months ago, Chris Conti, the RAC in Colombia, wouldn’t have touched his old friend Art Keller with the proverbial ten-foot pole. But now even Conti has apparently gotten religion.

“Art,” he says, “I ran across something I think you might be interested in.”

“You coming up here?” Art asks. “Or do you want me to come down there?”

“Why don’t we split the difference? You been to Costa Rica lately?”

What he means is that he doesn’t want Tim Taylor or anyone else to know he’s sitting down with Art Keller. They meet in Quepos. Sit in a palm-frond cabana on the beach. Conti comes bearing gifts: He spreads a series of deposit slips out on the rough table. The slips match up with the cashier-check receipts from the Bank of America in San Diego that were captured in the last raid. Documentary proof linking the Barrera organization with Colombian cocaine.

“Where’d you get these?” Art asks.

“Small-town banks in the Medellin area.”

“Well, thanks, Chris.”

“You didn’t get them from me.”

“Of course not.”

Conti lays a grainy photograph on the table.

An airstrip in the jungle, a bunch of guys standing around a DC-4 with the serial numbers N-3423VX. Art recognizes Ramon Mette right away, but one of the other men rings a fainter bell. Middle-aged, he has a short, military haircut and wears fatigues over highly polished black jump boots.

Been a long time.

A long time.

Vietnam. Operation Phoenix.

Even then, Sal Scachi liked polished boots.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Conti asks.

Well, if you’re thinking the man looks Company, you’re thinking right. Last time I heard, Scachi had been a bird colonel in Special Forces, then pulled the pin. Which is a Company resume all the way.

“Look,” Conti says. “I’ve heard some rumors.”

“I trade in rumors. Go ahead.”

“Three radio towers in the jungles north of Bogota,” Conti says. “I can’t get near the area to check it out.”

“The Medellin people are easily capable of that kind of technology,” Art says. And it would explain the mystery of how the SETCO planes are flying under the radar. Three radio towers emitting VOR signals could guide them out and back.

“The Medellin cartel has the technology to build them,” Conti says. “But does it have the technology to make them disappear?”

“What do you mean?”

“Satellite photos.”

“Okay.”

“They don’t show up,” Conti says. “Not three radio towers, not two, not one. We can read license plates off those photos, Art. A VOR tower’s not going to show up? And what about the planes, Art? I get the AWACS gen, and they don’t show up. Any plane flying from Colombia to Honduras has to go over Nicaragua, Sandinista Land, and that, my friend, we definitely have the Eye in the Sky on.”

That’s no shit, Art thinks. Nicaragua is the bull's-eye in the Reagan administration’s Central American scope, a Communist regime right in the heart of the Monroe Doctrine. The administration was sponsoring the Contra forces that surround Nicaragua from Honduras to the north and from right here in Costa Rica on the south, but then the U.S. Congress passed the Boland Amendment, banning military aid to the Contras.

Now you have a former Special Forces guy and ardent anti-Communist (They’re atheists, aren’t they? Fuck 'em) in the company of Ramon Mette Ballasteros and a SETCO plane.

Art leaves Costa Rica more freaked out than when he got there.

Back in Guadalajara, Art sends Shag to the States on a mission. The cowboy huddles up with every narco squad and DEA office in the Southwest and in his soft cowboy drawl tells them, “This Mexican thing is for real. It’s going to blow up, and when it does, you don’t want to be caught with your pants down trying to explain why you didn’t see it coming. Shit, you can toe the company line in public, but in private, you might want to be playing ball with us because when the trumpets blow, amigos, we’re gonna remember who are the sheep and who are the goats.”

There’s nothing that the boys in Washington can do about it. What are they going to do-tell American cops not to make drug busts on American soil? The Justice Department wants to crucify Art. They suspect that he’s disseminating this shit, but they can’t touch him, even when the State Department calls up screaming about “irreparable damage to our relationship with an important neighbor.”

The AG’s office would like to flog Art Keller up Pennsylvania Avenue then nail him to a pole on Capitol Hill, except he hasn’t done anything they can prove. And they can’t transfer him out of Guadalajara because the media has picked up on La Federacion, so how would that look?

So they have to sit by in mounting frustration as Art Keller builds an empire based on pronouncements from the invisible, unknowable, nonexistent CI-D0243.

“CI-D0243 is kind of impersonal, isn’t it?” Shag asks one day. “I mean, for a guy who’s contributing as much as he is.”

“What do you want to call him?” Art asks.

“Deep Throat,” suggests Ernie.

“It’s been done,” Art says. “But he is sort of a Mexican Deep Throat.”

“Chupar,” Ernie says. “Let’s call him Source Chupar.”

Blow job.

Source Chupar gives Art a bank account with every other law enforcement agency on the border. They deny getting anything from the guy, but they all owe him. Owe him? Shit, they love him. The DEA can’t function without local cooperation, and if they want that cooperation, they better not fuck with Art Keller.

No, Art Keller is fast becoming intocable.

Except he’s not.

It’s wearing him down, running an op against Tio while pretending that he’s not. Leaving his family late at night, keeping his activities secret, keeping his past secret, waiting for Tio to track it back to him and then come to remind him that they have a past relationship.

Tio to sobrino.

Art’s not eating, he’s not sleeping.

He and Althea rarely make love anymore. She chides him for being irritable, secretive, closed.

Untouchable.

Art thinks, as he sits on the edge of his bathtub at four in the morning. He’s just thrown up the leftover chicken mole that Althea left in the fridge for him and that he ate at three-thirty. No, the past isn’t catching up with you, you’re marching toward it. Resolutely, step by step, walking toward the abyss.

Tio’s lying awake nights trying to figure out who the soplon-the informer-is. The Federacion patrones-Abrego, Mendez, El Verde-have taken serious shots, and they’re putting enormous pressure on him to do something.

Because it’s obvious that the problem is right here in Guadalajara. Because all three plazas have been hit. Abrego, Mendez, El Verde all insist that there must be a soplon in M-1’s organization.

Find him, they are saying. Kill him. Do something.

Or we will.

Pilar Talavera lies beside him, breathing evenly and easily in the deep, untroubled sleep of youth. He looks down at her shiny black hair, her long black eyelashes, now closed, her full upper lip moist with sweat. He loves the fresh, young smell of her.

He reaches out to the night table, grabs a cigar and lights it. The smoke won’t wake her. Neither will the smell. He’s gotten her used to it. Besides, he thinks, nothing could wake the girl after such a session as we have had. How odd, to have found love at this age. How odd and how wonderful. She is my happiness, he thinks, la sonrisa de mi corazon-the smile of my heart. I will make her my wife within a year. A quick divorce, then a quicker marriage.

And the Church? The Church can be bought. I will go to the cardinal himself and offer him a hospital, a school, an orphanage. We will marry in the cathedral.

No, the Church will be no problem.

The problem is the soplon.

Condenado “Source Chupar.”

Costing me millions.

Worse, making me vulnerable.

I can just hear Abrego now, the jealous zorro viejo, the old fox, whispering against me, M-1 is losing it. He’s charging us fortunes for protection he can’t deliver. There is a soplon in his organization.

Abrego wants to be patron of the Federacion anyway. How long before he thinks he’s strong enough to act? Will he come at me directly, or will he use one of the others?

No, he thinks, they’ll all act together if I can’t find the soplon.

It starts at Christmas.

The kids have been bugging Art to take them to see the big Christmas tree in the Cross of Squares downtown. He had hoped they’d be satisfied with the posadas, the nightly parades of children who go house to house through the Tlaquepaque neighborhood dressed as Mary and Joseph looking for a place to stay. But the little processions only fired the kids up to go see the tree and the pastorelas, the funny, slapstick plays about the birth of Christ that are performed outside the cathedral.

It isn’t the time for funny plays. Art has just listened in on one of Tio’s conversations about sixteen hundred pounds of cocaine in eight hundred boxes, all brightly wrapped in Christmas paper, with ribbons and bows and the whole holiday nine yards.

Thirty million dollars’ worth of Christmas cheer at a safe house in Arizona, and Art hasn’t decided yet whom he’s going to take it to.

But he knows he’s been neglecting his family, so on the Saturday before Christmas he takes Althea, the kids and the extended household of the cook, Josefina, and the maid, Guadalupe, shopping in the open market in the old district.

He has to admit that he’s having a wonderful time. They go Christmas shopping for each other and buy little handcrafted ornaments for the tree back at the house. They have a long, wonderful lunch of freshly sliced carnitas and black-bean soup, then sweet, honied sopaipillas for dessert.

Then Cassie spots one of the fancy horse-drawn carriages, enamel-black with red velvet cushions, and she has to have a ride, Please, Daddy, please, and Art negotiates a price with the driver in his bright gaucho suit and they all get under a blanket in the back and Michael sits on Art’s lap and falls asleep to the steady clop-clop of the horses’ hooves on the cobblestones of the plaza. Not Cassie; she’s beside herself with excitement, looking at the white caparisoned horses with the red plumes in their harnesses, and then at the sixty-foot tree with its bright lights, and as Art feels his son’s deep breathing against his chest he knows that he’s happier than it’s possible to be.

It’s dark by the time the ride ends, and he gently wakes Michael and hands him down to Josefina and they walk through the Plaza Tapatia toward the cathedral, where a small stage has been set up and a play is about to start.

Then he sees Adan.

His old cuate wears a rumpled business suit. He looks tired, like he’s been traveling. He sees Art and walks into a public rest room at the edge of the plaza.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Art says. “Michael, do you need to go?”

Say no, kid, say no.

“I went in the restaurant.”

“Go see the show,” Art says. “I’ll catch up with you.”

Adan’s leaning against the wall when Art comes in. Art starts to check the stalls to make sure they’re empty, but Adan says, “I already did that. And no one will be coming in. Long time no see, Arturo.”

“What do you want?”

“We know it’s you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play games with me,” Adan says. “Just answer me a question-what do you think you’re doing?”

“My job,” Art says. “It’s nothing personal.”

“It’s very personal,” Adan says. “When a man turns on his friends it is very fucking personal.”

“We’re not friends anymore.”

“My uncle is very unhappy about this.”

Art shrugs.

“You called him Tio,” Adan says. “Just like I do.”

“That was then,” Art says. “Things change.”

“That doesn’t change,” Adan says. “That’s forever. You accepted his patronage, his counsel, his help. He made you what you are.”

“We made each other.”

Adan shakes his head. “So much for an appeal to loyalty. Or gratitude.”

He reaches into his lapel pocket and Art takes a step toward him to check him from pulling the gun.

“Easy,” Adan says. He takes out an envelope, sets it on the edge of a sink. “That’s a hundred thousand U.S. dollars, cash. But if you prefer, we can make deposits for you in the Caymans, Costa Rica…”

“I’m not for sale.”

“Really? What’s changed?”

Art grabs him, pushes him against the wall and starts to pat him down. “You wearing a wire, Adan? Huh? You setting me up? Where are the fucking cameras?”

Art lets him go and starts searching the room. In the top corners, the stalls, under the sinks. He doesn’t find anything. He stops searching and, exhausted, leans against the wall.

“A hundred thousand right now for good faith,” Adan says. “Another hundred for the name of your soplon. Then twenty a month just for doing nothing.”

Art shakes his head.

“I told Tio you wouldn’t take it,” Adan says. “You prefer a different kind of coin. Okay, we’ll give you enough marijuana busts to make you a star again. That’s Plan A.”

“What’s Plan B?”

Adan walks over, wraps his arms around Art and holds him tightly. Says quietly into his ear, “Arturo, you’re an ungrateful, inflexible, guero-wannabe prick. But you’re still my friend and I love you. So take the money, or don’t take the money, but back off. You don’t know what you’re fucking around with here.”

Adan leans back so he’s face-to-face with Art. Their noses are practically touching as he looks him in the eyes and repeats, “You don’t know what you’re fucking around with here.”

He steps back, takes the envelope and holds it up. “No?”

Art shakes his head. Adan shrugs and puts the envelope back into his pocket. “Arturo?” he says. “You don’t even want to know about Plan