The Cartel (47 page)

“I’m aware of that, yes.”

Pablo feels anger welling up inside him. “Then you’re also ‘aware,’ ” he says, “that I have certain paternal rights.”

“I was hoping you’d be reasonable.”

“That
I’d
be reasonable?! You’re talking about taking my son to live a thousand miles away!”

“Please keep your voice down.”

“I’ll yell if I want!”

“So mature.”

“You’re not taking Mateo away from me.”

“I’m not staying in this…border town,” she spits. “Not when I have the opportunity to go someplace else. And think of Mateo. Better schools, better friends…”

“His school and his friends are just fine.”

“The problem with you—”

“Oh, just
one
problem today?”

“
One
of the problems with you,” she says, “is that you can’t see beyond this backwater. Nothing happens here, Pablo. No one who lives here makes any decisions about what happens here, because the people with the power all live somewhere else. This is a colony and you’re a hopeless colonial. I don’t want that for Mateo and I don’t want it for me.”

It’s quite a speech and he’s sure that she carefully rehearsed it. “But you’re all right with him growing up without a father.”

“You’re a wonderful father. But—”

“Not a phrase generally followed by a ‘but.’ ”

“—you have no ambition. And Mateo sees that.” She looks down, and then makes herself look back up at him. “You can come on weekends—”

“I can’t afford that.”

“—or I’ll bring him here,” Victoria says. “When he’s a little older, he can fly himself—”

“He’s four!”

“The flight attendants take very good care of children,” Victoria says. “I see it all the time.”

“This is not going to happen,” Pablo says.

“I’ve already accepted the position.”

“Without talking with me first.”

“You see what happens when we try to talk,” Victoria says. “You won’t listen to reason, you get emotional—”

“You’re goddamn right I get emotional about losing my child!”

“You’re not losing him!”

“Then let him stay here with me,” Pablo says. “This is the only home he knows.”

“That’s part of the problem,” Victoria says. “He can’t live with you, Pablo. You’re out half the night. Covering stories, drinking, doing God knows what…”

“I’m always there, sober, when he’s with me!”

“Yes, I know.”

“You’re the one who’s leaving, not me,” Pablo says. “It isn’t fair.”

“You sound like a child.”

“See if I sound like a child in court.”

“You will,” she says, because she can’t help herself. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. But I have spoken to an attorney—”

“Of course you have.”

“—and she tells me that I will have no trouble retaining custody of Mateo when I explain how this will improve the quality of his life—”

“You bitch.”

“You could always move to Mexico City,” Victoria says. “Get a job there and then you’d be close. I could talk to some people…”

“There are thousands of journalists in Mexico City,” he says. “Natives. I know Juárez. I cover Juárez.”

“And that’s all you want.”

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“And there we are.”

She turns and walks away, leaving him standing there.

—

Victoria goes inside and lets herself cry for a minute before she calls Mateo for his bath.

Poor Pablo, she thinks.

Poor lost Pablo, adrift in a sea of his own sorrow.

He was never the same after the
feminicidio,
never the same and never even knew it. Day after day—more often night after night, or dawn after dawn—he would come home depressed, angry, tired, and sad.

As, one after another, young women disappeared and his beloved city became an abattoir. He could never understand it, never account for it, never explain it—to himself or to his readers—and when the killings faded away it seemed that he had faded away with them.

His drive, his ambition, his fierce love of life.

All muted or gone.

She tried to talk to him about it but he wouldn’t talk, became angry if she even brought it up. He went out all the time, seeking answers, and if she complained then she was the heartless bitch.

The
feminicidio
killed their marriage.

Killed, to some extent, the woman inside her.

Because she could never understand, can still not understand, how he could love a city where that could happen.

—

If Sundays are the worst, Sunday nights somehow manage to achieve a less-than-zero, a negative “quality of life” number, especially when your ex-wife tells you that she’s taking your son, and you decide to get a lawyer of your own and fight it, but when you know that you can’t afford a really good lawyer and that she’s going to win anyway.

And that a court fight will tear your kid apart.

And that there’s no good answer.

He thinks of seeking Giorgio out to commiserate, or Ana, or even Ramón. Ramón would be good to drink with tonight, because he wouldn’t intellectualize it, he’d just say, “Fuck that
segundera
” and “No one can take a man’s son away from him” and things that Pablo wants to hear.

But he doesn’t call Giorgio or Ana (would they fall into bed together on this sad night, him needing, her needing to offer, consolation) or Ramón. He just goes alone from bar to bar in old downtown, in Old Juárez, and has a whiskey in each, even though he knows it won’t help his financial situation at all. He gets miserably, soddenly drunk, but at least manages to refrain from phoning Victoria and begging.

He makes it home, flops down on the bed, and sobs.

—

“You look horrible,” Ana says the next morning at the café.

“That good?” Pablo asks.

“May I ask what…”

He tells her about Victoria and Mateo.

“That’s terrible, Pablo. I’m so sorry.”

He nods.

“Listen,” she says, “Óscar has very good connections in the national media. I’m sure he’d put in a few calls. He wouldn’t want to lose you, but—”

“Let’s not kid ourselves, okay?” Pablo asks. “At least let’s not start doing that.”

—

A week later, Pablo stands in front of the monument to fallen police officers at the corner of Juan Gabriel and Avenida Sanders.

The bronze policeman has his eyes closed in prayer; at his feet is the cap of a brother officer. By the cap, held down by a rock, is a cardboard placard with big letters written in black magic marker:
FOR THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE—CHAIREZ, ROMO, BACA, GÓMEZ, AND LEDESMA
.

The five Juárez cops shot to death earlier in the month.

Another banner reads
FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE NOT BELIEVING
, and lists seventeen more Juárez police officers by name.

“You getting this?” Pablo asks.

Giorgio’s too busy snapping away to give the obvious answer but, without taking his eye from the viewfinder, asks back, “Who do you think put this up?”

“The ‘New People,’ ” Pablo answers. “Telling the Juárez cops—specifi-cally, seventeen of them—that either they get on the Sinaloa cartel bus or get run over by it.”

“It confirms your story,” Giorgio says.

It does that, Pablo thinks. His story about the cop killings and the Sinaloa cartel has caused a stir. Some people believed it, others thought it was pure paranoid fantasy, something that Pablo Mora made up.

Apparently not, Pablo thinks as he copies the names down in his notebook.

The sixth on the list is his old source from the bad old days, Victor Abrego, who just a few days before told Pablo to get lost.

Shit, Pablo thinks.

The banners, which appeared overnight, have drawn a crowd of curious onlookers as well as media—television news trucks and stand-up radio announcers. Oscar will want the story filed quickly.

It will present El Búho with an ethical conundrum, Pablo thinks—whether to publish the names of police officers threatened with the choice between collusion and death, the old
plata o plomo,
“silver or lead,” dilemma.

In a way, though, Pablo thinks, the New People have already published the names, haven’t they? It’s the new face of narco gang war, isn’t it? They’re becoming media savvy. They used to hide their crimes, now they publicize them. I wonder if they haven’t taken a page from Al Qaeda. What good is an atrocity if no one knows you did it?

And maybe that’s the lede on my story. “The crimes that used to lurk in shadows now seek the sunlight,” or is that a little too “pulp”?

Óscar will decide.

—

Pablo goes out to Galeana to talk to Abrego. But what the hell am I going to ask him? Pablo wonders.
Are you worried about the threat on your life? Is the Sinaloa cartel threatening you because you’re an honest cop causing them problems, or because you’re La Línea?
Stupid questions that Abrego won’t answer anyway. But maybe he’ll give me something on deep background.

Yeah, except Pablo can’t find him.

Not on the corner, not on the street, not in any of the restaurants, cafés, or bars that the cop usually hangs out in.

Abrego is in the wind.

—

Out of habit, Pablo checks his watch to see if it’s time to pick up Mateo, then remembers that Mateo isn’t here anymore, but in Mexico City with his mother.

A month has gone by, and the day that Victoria took his son away is as raw as a razor cut.

“Will you pick me up at school,
Papi
?” Mateo asked.

“No,
m’ijo,
” Pablo said, kneeling in front of him. “Not every day.”

“Who’ll pick me up?”

“You’ll have a very nice nanny,” Victoria said.

“I don’t want a nanny,” Pablo cried. “I want my
papi.
”

Pablo picked him up and hugged him tight. When he finally set him down, Pablo whispered into Victoria’s ear, “I hate you for this. Do you understand? I hate you and I hope you die.”

“Stay classy, Pablo.” Then she put Mateo in the car seat of her Jetta and drove away.

Mateo waved at him.

It broke his heart.

It broke his goddamn heart.

Mateo has flown back to Juárez once, a frightened little boy getting off the plane with a flight attendant taking his hand. The weekend with Mateo was wonderful, but Pablo has to wonder if it’s worth it, or if he’s just being selfish, because the Sunday parting was so hard on Mateo, who started feeling anxious in the morning—he was sick to his stomach and didn’t want to eat his breakfast—and was crying by afternoon.

And Pablo has come to
hate
the words “
Papi
will see you soon.”

Pablo has given up his apartment—that money goes to the custody lawyer and to the visits to Mexico City. He crashes on Giorgio’s couch, or, if the photographer is “entertaining” at home, on the sofa in Ana’s living room, fifty feet and a thousand miles from her bedroom.

The police scanner squawks,
“Motivo 59.”

“Shit,” Pablo says.

Fifty-nine is the code for a killing. He listens for another second and hears the dispatcher add,
“Two 92s.”

Two males.

He heads for the address.

The two corpses are out in Colonia Córdoba Américas in the middle of Vía Río Champotón, their hands bound behind their backs with adhesive tape.

“I’m getting nostalgic,” Giorgio says, snapping away, “for the days I used to shoot
live
people.”

“Do we have names?” Pablo asks. Óscar always wants names. (“We aren’t going to yield to the cheap grotesquerie of the ‘nameless dead,’ ” he says.)

“I’m just the photographer.”

Pablo tracks them down through the cops who took their wallets and IDs. Their names are Jesús Duràn and Fernando González, twenty-four and thirty-two years old respectively.

“They’re Sinaloans,” Pablo tells Giorgio. “
New People.
”

“Not anymore they’re not,” Giorgio answers. It’s hard, he complains, coming up with fresh angles.

Tell me about it, Pablo thinks as he hears the dispatcher:
“Motivo 59. One 92.”

The last body is in the back of a pickup truck in Galeana.

It’s Abrego.

His hands are plastic-tied, a filthy rag is stuffed in his mouth, and he’s been shot in the back of the head.

What a lesser writer than Pablo would call “execution style.”

—

Two days later, Pablo covers an army raid on a house in the Pradera Dorada neighborhood where the soldiers seize twenty-five assault rifles, five pistols, seven fragmentation grenades, 3,494 rounds of ammunition, bulletproof vests, eight radios, and five vehicles with Sinaloa plates.

The very next day the army raids another house, arrests twenty-one men, and seizes ten AK-47s, 13,000 hits of cocaine, 2.1 kilos of cocaine paste, 760 grams of marijuana, 401 rounds of ammunition, uniforms of the Mexican army and AFI, and three vehicles.

And a helicopter.

Pablo is in the city room the next morning when Óscar announces that they’ve received a press release from the Juárez Municipal Police Department.

“The police are no longer going to answer calls,” Óscar says, “but stay in the station houses.”

“So the people we pay to protect us,” Ana says, “can’t protect themselves.”

But the retreat to the station houses doesn’t do much good. The day after the press release, two Juárez police officers are kidnapped in separate incidents. Two days later, a Juárez police
comandante
is shot in the head in Chihuahua City.

The next day, Óscar sends Pablo and Giorgio out to Cocoyoc Street.

The house in the Cuernavaca neighborhood had been seized three weeks ago when the army found almost two tons of marijuana inside. Then an anonymous phone tip told them to dig under the patio.

When Pablo gets out there he gags and struggles not to throw up.

Three trunks of bodies, their arms and legs hacked off, are lined up on the lawn.

Beside them are two decapitated heads.

Throughout the course of a long day, the soldiers find a total of nine dismembered bodies under the concrete.