The Cartel (34 page)

And the odds of anyone trying to collect Barrera’s bounty are slim right now. In a strange way, the disputed election affords him a level of protection, because Adán is too cautious to rock the boat in the middle of a storm.

Still, Keller knows that his getting involved with anyone is a bad idea.

Two weeks later he joins her at the biggest demonstration yet—a march down Paseo de la Reforma to demand a recount. It’s impossible to judge the number of marchers from inside the march—some observers put it at two hundred thousand—but the Mexico City police estimate that almost two and a half million people march that day to demand a fair election.

Two and a half million people, Keller thinks as he walks beside Marisol, who chants along with the crowd. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington was about a quarter of a million strong; a protest against the Vietnam War in ’69 might have had six hundred thousand.

Despite himself, Keller finds it compelling. Anyone who says that Mexicans don’t care about democracy should be here today, he thinks, as the marchers file pass the statue to Los Niños Héroes and El Ángel de la Independencia, past the American embassy and the stock exchange.

It’s stirring.

“They’ll have to give us a recount now!” Marisol shouts happily to him over the chanting. “They’ll
have
to!”

The march ends in the Zócalo, but this time people don’t leave as thousands of them start a
plantón,
an encampment, refusing to vacate until a recount is announced. Keller is against Marisol staying. “It’s dangerous. What if the police try to clear you out? You could get hurt.”

“Go home if you don’t want to stay,” she says.

“It’s not that—”

“After all, it’s not your country.”

It isn’t but it is.

Keller has spent more of the past twenty years in Mexico than he has in the United States, and even his time at “home” was consumed with Mexico. He’s shed blood here, had friends die here.

He stays.

The first night he spends with Marisol Cisneros is on a sleeping bag in the Zócalo with a thousand other people around them.

Things start to turn ugly the next day as the protestors snarl traffic on Paseo de la Reforma and other major thoroughfares. Fights break out with commuters, police make arrests. Keller urges Marisol not to get involved—she has a practice to protect, patients to see, he urges caution—but she won’t quit. She reschedules her regular patients and only leaves the protest to make her clinic hours in Iztapalapa. That afternoon, the judges decide that there is enough doubt as to the legitimacy of the voting to justify a recount in 155 disputed districts. The recount will start in four days and take weeks, at least.

A celebration breaks out in the Zócalo. Guitars play, people hug and kiss, some cry in joy.

“Will you go home now?” Keller asks Marisol.

“Only if you come with me,” she says.

—

“I want to take a shower,” she says when they get to her condo. “I’m a filthy mess.”

Keller waits on a sofa in the small living room. The condo is nice but not elaborate and has the barely lived-in look of the divorced person who spends little time at home. Through the thin walls, he can hear the water running. It finally stops and he thinks that she’ll come out, but it takes forever.

It’s worth the wait.

Marisol’s amber hair hangs over her bare shoulders, above a black negligee that shows tantalizing glimpses of the body underneath. “Shall we go to bed?”

Keller thought that she’d be tentative, he thought they both would be. But their bodies take over and she quickly lets him know that she wants him inside her, and when he is she’s surprisingly unladylike.

Later, her head on his shoulder, her hair splayed on his chest, Marisol says, “Well, you worry that the fantasy is going to be better than the actual event, but in this case…no.”

“You fantasized?” Keller asks.

“You
didn’t
?”

“I did.”

“I should
hope
so.”

A few minutes later Marisol sighs. “It’s been a long time.”

“Me, too.”

“No,” she says, “I meant since I’ve loved someone.”

And that’s it—
una locura de amor,
that’s what they have.

A crazy love.

—

“I’m looking at some interesting intel photos,”
Taylor says over the phone,
“of you at a demonstration. Some people aren’t happy, Art. They’re wondering whose side you’re on.”

“I don’t give a fuck who’s happy,” Keller says. “As for sides, I’m on
my
side.”

“Same old Keller.”

“Don’t call me anymore with this bullshit.”

He clicks off.

—

August in Mexico City is wet.

The rains usually come in the afternoon, and many of those afternoons find them in bed together, when her practice and his work allow. They meet at Marisol’s and make love as the rain spatters against the bedroom window, then they get up, make coffee, and wait for the shower to pass before venturing out.

The protests against the election continue during the recount. There are marches out to the airport, marches downtown—demonstrations break out in other parts of the country, including Marisol’s beloved Juárez.

Keller keeps up his surveillance of the Tapia money machine—it rarely varies as money finds its way to Los Pinos, or at least to its senior staff. And he keeps playing his dangerous game, socializing with the Tapias, provoking a response.

The Zetas don’t contact him again, but he figures that they’re doing what everyone else is doing—waiting for the election results, which might render their government problem moot.

Mexico is holding its collective breath, and then on August 28, the election commission releases the final count. By the slimmest of margins, virtually identical to the original results, Calderón is declared the winner and PAN retains Los Pinos.

New president, same party.

Marisol is devastated.

“They stole the election,” she tells Keller, citing the various allegations of fraud, voter intimidation, miscounts, and no-counts. “They stole it.”

The confirmation of the election results is also the confirmation of everything she’s feared about her country, that it’s hopelessly corrupt, that power will always protect power.

The rain keeps coming down.

Marisol becomes depressed, morose. Keller sees a person he didn’t know was in there—quiet, uncommunicative, remote. Her disappointment turns to bitterness, her bitterness to anger, and with no legitimate outlet to turn it on, she turns it on him.

She’s sure “his” government is pleased with the results, maybe even complicit. “His” politics are a little further to the right than hers, aren’t they? He’s a man (Keller pleads guilty), and no man can really be a feminist, can he? Does he have to hang his shirt on the bathroom hook, does he have to read her the headlines from the paper (she can read herself, can’t she?), can a North American man really understand a Mexican woman?

“My mother was Mexican,” Keller reminds her.

“Do I remind you of your mother?” she asks, deliberately taking the argument sideways.

“Not remotely.”

“Because I don’t care to be a mommy figure to—”

“Marisol?”

“You interrupted me.”

“Fuck off.” He takes a breath and then says, “I didn’t steal the election, if, in fact, it was stolen—”

“It was.”

“—so don’t take it out on me.”

Marisol knows she’s doing it. Knows it but can’t seem to stop doing it, and she’s not proud of herself for it. She did the same thing to her ex, blamed him for things that he couldn’t do anything about—for her own dissatisfaction, her own anger, her rage that life isn’t what it should be, when she doesn’t even know what it should be.

And Arturo—this beautiful, wonderful, loving man—is just so…
North American.
He’s not only a North American, he’s a North American law enforcement official, a drug cop who does God knows what and now somehow he’s come to embody her…

…anger.

She tries to be reasonable. “What I’m saying is that there are a thousand years of history here that you North Americans don’t comprehend and you come here stumbling around in ignorance and—”

“I came down here to—”

“Down here?”
she asks. “Do you even hear the paternalism and condescension implied—”

“I meant ‘down’ as in ‘south.’ ”

“South of the border, down Mexico way.”

“Jesus Christ, Mari, stop being such a—”

“Bitch?” she asks. “That’s what a woman who stand up for her own opinions is, right?”

Keller walks out of the apartment. He’s angry about the election, too, and for reasons he can’t tell her.

The continuation of a PAN administration is going to force his hand vis-à-vis the Tapia money tube. He’ll have to do something—trust Aguilar or Vera—or finally take it to Taylor, who is going to reasonably ask why he wasn’t told sooner.

And pull you out of Mexico, Keller thinks.

And then what?

Do you ask Marisol to come with you? She loves her country, it wouldn’t be fair to ask her. So far, she’s put up with the secret part of his life. She’s smart, she senses that his job is more than “policy liaison,” and she doesn’t ask where he goes or what he does when he’s not with her.

But that can’t last; it’s no kind of life.

In a different life, he’d ask her to marry him, and he thinks she’d say yes. In a different life, he’d leave the agency and settle in Mexico, find something to do—a job in SEIDO, or a private security firm. Maybe he’d open a bookstore or a café.

But that would be a different life.

You’ve been at this for coming on two years now and you’re no closer to getting Barrera than you were when you started. Adán is more entrenched in power than he ever was.

And it’s more than that—the validated election result will free Barrera to come after you.

He’ll hunt you down in the States, or Mexico, or wherever you go, and it isn’t fair to ask Marisol to endure that.

You don’t do that to someone you love.

Keller knows what he should do, and knows that he should do it soon. The holidays will be here soon, and it’s cruel to break off a relationship then. It’s going to be cruel anyway—on both of them—but he doesn’t have a choice.

That night at her place in Condesa, he says, “Marisol, I want to tell you something.”

“I want to tell you something, too.” She walks him over to the sofa and helps him sit down. Then she gently sits down next to him. “I guess this isn’t the best time, but I want to tell you that I’ve moving.”

“Where?”

“Valverde,” Marisol says. “I’ve decided to go home.”

She feels useless here, she says, treating rich patients, when there is so much poverty and need back home. She could do something there, mean something to people there, be part of the struggle instead of just making symbolic gestures at protest marches. She can’t live like this anymore.

“We can still see each other,” she says. “I can come down here, you can come to Juárez…”

“Sure.”

It’s the sort of thing people tell each other when they both know it isn’t really going to happen.

“Arturo, please understand,” she says. “I feel like I’m living a lie here. That we’re living a lie.”

Keller gets that.

He knows about living lies.

—

Adán decides to make peace in the Gulf.

The CDG and their Zeta troops have proved to be a surprisingly tough and resilient enemy, even with Osiel Contreras in jail. There have already been seven hundred killings in Tamaulipas, another five hundred in Michoacán, and the Mexican public is growing tired of the violence.

“Do you think they’d come to the table?” Magda asks. She knows her role—play devil’s advocate to let him test his ideas. So she asks, “Why make peace now?”

“Because we can get what we want now,” Adán says.

“What about La Familia?” Magda asks. “They’ve been good allies, and they’ll never make peace with the Zetas.”

She’s heard the story about the murdered young whore and the boy who loved her.

It’s almost romantic.

“The Zetas can have Michoacán,” Adán answers. “I don’t want it.”

Magda knows what he does want.

—

Eddie sits with Diego and Martín Tapia in the back of a Cessna 182 on its way to the meeting with the CDG and Zetas. After long negotiations, the Sinaloans had agreed to meet at a ranch Ochoa owns between Matamoros and Valle Hermosa.

“Let me teach you what my mother taught me,” Diego says to him. “If you keep your mouth shut, no one can stick his dick into it.”

“Your mom didn’t teach you that, Diego,” Eddie says.

Diego says, “What I’m telling you is, at this meeting, you keep your fucking mouth shut.”

Eddie looks out the window at the sere landscape below. “If you think I’m just going to sit there with the people who tortured my best friend to death—”

“
Sí, m’ijo,
I think you are,” Diego says. “Or you take your money, go back
el norte,
and open a Sizzler’s or whatever.”

“Maybe a Soup Plantation,” Eddie mutters.

“Cheer up,” Diego says. “Things might go bad and then we can kill everybody.”

God knows they have enough firepower to do it. They didn’t come light—four airplanes full of automatic rifles, handguns, grenade launchers, and the people to use them. If this is a trap, they aren’t going to be defenseless.

“Remember, I get Forty and Ochoa,” Eddie says.

Gordo Contreras—aka Jabba the Boss—he could give a shit about either way, although it was Eddie who started the joke: “What happened when Gordo took over the Gulf?” “The water level rose three feet.”

Martín has warned Eddie that if he wants to do jokes, he should find an open mike night at a comedy club, but definitely, definitely not try out his material at the peace table.

The plane lands on a strip on the west side of Ochoa’s ranch. Eddie looks out the window to see a dozen jeeps, three of them with machine guns trained on the aircraft, and Forty on full alert.

“Yeah, I can feel the love here,” he says.