Triple Crossing (5 page)

“I am Leobardo Méndez, the chief of this unit,” he said, looking up at last. “I understand you wanted to talk to me, Mr. Chen.”

The interpreter winced as he listened to the response. “He say he glad you finally here. Best thing you can do is let him
go. He say this can all be take care of right now.”

“Explain that he was arrested under suspicion of smuggling immigrants, criminal association, and weapons possession. Serious
federal crimes.”

The smuggler spat out sentences.

“He say this can be take care of with money.”

“No.”

The smuggler leaned forward, sneering. He gestured with his head toward the front of the house as he spoke.

“He say he the boss here. If I give word, all those people in other room will rise up and attack you, he said.”

“In Mexico it’s considered rude to threaten someone when you are their guest,” Méndez said, looking directly at Chen. “You
supposedly lived in Paraguay for three years, no? You must speak some Spanish. What do you do in those far-off latitudes?”

The interpreter listened, blushed, and looked down. “He say… he pay fifty thousand dollar to you. The money comes here in
a hour if you say yes.”

“Tell him to stop insulting us. Tell him he’s lucky this is a modern police unit. Otherwise we would treat him to a traditional
Mexican interrogation.”

The interpreter gave Méndez a beseeching look. The smuggler spoke dismissively to Méndez in words he more or less understood.
“Yo no quiero falar mais con você. Você no sabe que esto es demasiado grande p’ra você.”

Athos detached himself from the wall, squinting. “What is that gibberish, Brazilian?”

“It’s half Spanish, half Portuguese: Portuñol,” Méndez said. “Border language, but a border far from this one. Mr. Chen, do
you have a statement to make? Too bad, I’d love to hear about these exotic places you’ve been to. Alright, you are being charged
with the crimes I mentioned. And also assaulting police officers and resisting authority.”

“Você no comprende con quien esta metiendo,”
the smuggler said in a chiding tone. More or less: You don’t understand who you are messing with.

Méndez and Athos left. They glanced through the thin rectangular window in the door of the second interview room. The state
police detective who had been caught harboring the illegal immigrants slumped in his chair, a caricature of dejection. Abe
lardo Tapia, the second deputy chief of the Diogenes Group, sat across from the prisoner. He was scribbling industriously
on a legal pad. The bearded Tapia was all shoulders and belly and—despite his reputation as a bone-crusher—good cheer. So
Méndez called him Porthos.

“Who is the state policeman?” Méndez asked.

“De Rosa,” Athos answered. “One of Mauro’s protégés in the homicide squad. Fat and sleazy. This monkey always liked making
money. He owns the safe house.”

As they watched through the window, De Rosa leaned forward over the legal pad, which his interrogator turned at an angle so
the prisoner could read it. De Rosa nodded morosely and scribbled on the pad with his right hand. His left hand was chained
to the leg of the table. Porthos beamed and wrote, chatting all the while.

“What is Porthos doing with the pad?” Méndez asked.

“De Rosa is terrified that we are wired for sound,” Athos muttered. “But they go way back from when Porthos worked on the
homicide unit. Porthos convinced him to give us information off the record. They are writing down the real questions and answers
while they talk about trivialities. They’ve been at it for a while.”

The headquarters of the Diogenes Group was a prime eavesdropping target for other Mexican police forces, intelligence agencies
and drug mafias. After the discovery of phone taps, Isabel Puente, an American federal agent who worked with Méndez, had recommended
a San Diego private investigation firm that did contract work for her government. The Americans did periodic electronic sweeps
free of charge. If anyone was bugging the Diogenes Group, it was with the help of the gringos.

“What will De Rosa want for his cooperation?” Méndez asked.

“I think the fat slob would like to avoid the state penitentiary.”

“Alright. Put him in the Eighth Street Jail instead. Special federal custody.”

Méndez went into the adjoining house and upstairs to his office, which had once been the master bedroom. The walls held a
portrait of the current president of Mexico, a portrait of former president Lázaro Cárdenas, a crucifix, diplomas, a poster
of Salvador Allende, and a poster from a concert by Carlos Santana at the seaside bullring in Playas de Tijuana. The bookshelves
contained a mix of English and Spanish titles about organized crime, law enforcement, politics and sociology, as well as literature:
Arriaga, Benedetti, Borges, García Márquez, Paz, Poniatowska, Vargas Llosa, Volpi. There was a row of books about the border.
There were caps, mugs, plaques and other trinkets from U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agencies. And a matchstick sculpture
of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The bay window behind Méndez’s desk offered a view of Mexican territory just south of the port of entry: an epic convergence
of legal and illegal commerce and migration. Vendors hawked ceramic Bart Simpsons and Porky Pigs and Virgins of Guadalupe.
Buses loaded up with legal crossers bound for California’s far-flung Mexican-American strongholds. Armed with binoculars and
cell phones, smuggling lookouts posted on the multicolored pedestrian bridge spanning the crowded car lanes scanned the U.S.
inspectors in their booths to see whom they could outwit—or which of their paid-off
yanqui
allies was on the job today.

Méndez turned from the window and picked up the phone. His secretary told him the state attorney general’s office wanted to
discuss the arrest of the state police detective as soon as possible. There was also a message to call Araceli Aguirre, the
state human rights commissioner.

Méndez went into the bathroom and washed his face. He looked tired; the lines slanting from the base of his nose to the corners
of his mouth seemed especially pronounced. Back at his desk, he took a breath and dialed the number of the apartment in Berkeley,
California, where his wife and five-year-old son now
lived. As the phone rang, he remembered the last conversation: the long silences with his wife, his son’s distractedness.
He thought back to the grim good-bye at the airport. He hung up without waiting to see if anyone answered.

For the next hour or so, he made phone calls, read reports and scanned newspapers. He listened to the group Molotov and Silvio
Rodríguez, the Cuban singer-composer, on his computer’s compact disc player. At eleven-thirty, two American journalists arrived
for an interview.

Their visit was the idea of a friend at City Hall who had worked with Méndez at a newspaper long ago. The friend wanted the
Americans to meet Méndez, to learn about a group of police in Tijuana who were fighting the good fight. Contacts in the U.S.
press could be helpful, a shield for Méndez and his officers. On the other hand, they could also cause him grief.

Here’s a yanqui who is going to waste my time, Méndez grumbled to himself as he welcomed a television reporter with a Captain
America jaw, a beefy frame in a tan sport coat, and a silver helmet of hair that looked labor-intensive. The newspaper reporter,
a bright-eyed young woman with frizzy blond hair, wore a shaggy sweater, jeans and hiking boots. She greeted him in confident
Spanish, then stayed quiet and watchful while the TV guy made small talk. Her name was Steinberg. Méndez’s friend at City
Hall had said that she was not the typical American reporter who talked instead of listening and confused being aggressive
with being obnoxious.

His secretary served coffee. The TV reporter, whose first or last name was Dennis, appraised the diplomas on the wall.

“I see you went to Michigan,” he said in an Olympian broadcast voice.

“Just a year. Graduate studies in Latin American literature. I did the work in Spanish, fortunately or no, so my English is
not so good. In reality, it was exile: I had political problems here at those times.”

“Go, Blue,” Dennis said, pumping a genial fist at him. “Primo football up there, right?”

Méndez’s smile wavered. He wondered if the man really thought he had ever attended a football game. For Méndez, Michigan had
been an icy wasteland full of fraternity-house brutes, spoiled suburbanites and addled drug users who united on fall Saturdays
for a fascistic spectacle.

Méndez told the reporters the history of the Diogenes Group. How it had formed a year earlier because of pressure from Mexico
City and Washington to do something about lawlessness in Mexico in general and in Tijuana in particular. How big shots in
Mexico City had surprised Méndez by asking him to resign as state human rights commissioner and lead the new unit. How Méndez
had resisted because of his aversion to the country’s new ruling coalition, which he had derisively called “Jurassic Park”
in public statements. How he had reluctantly accepted because of his respect for the Secretary, the high-ranking security
official who had proposed the anticorruption initiative with him in mind. The unit consisted of thirty carefully selected
officers from the federal, state and city forces, as well as investigators from his human rights commission. U.S. federal
agents had helped screen and train the officers.

“As you know, in Mexico the journalists and people of human rights often do the job that should be of the police and prosecutors.
So we are not newcomers.”

Dennis asked the predictable question about the unit’s name.

“Our formal name is the Unidad Especial Contra Corrupción Pública y Crimen Organizado. A horrible acronym. The Special Unit
Against Public Corruption and Organized Crime. When we presented ourselves to the press, a reporter said: ‘Listen, Licenciado,
let’s speak clearly: Your mission is to hunt bad policemen, correct?’ And I said the first thing that occurred to me. I said
that in this city, unfortunately, I look at it another way: We are like Diogenes. We are hunting for honest policemen. We
hope to help them, encourage them. And while we do that, since honest ones are hard to find, we will arrest as many dishonest
ones as we can. There was a lot of complaints about my declarations. But everybody calls us the Diogenes Group.”

Dennis returned his grin briefly. “How can you be sure the cops you chose aren’t corrupt?”

“Well, that is relative, no? They came from a corrupt system. Anyway, I would put my hands in the fire for my comandantes.
When I was a reporter like you, they were my best….
fuentes.
”

“Sources,” the blond woman said. Méndez nodded gratefully. She left off chewing her pen and picked up the pace. “Licenciado
Méndez. The case that made your group famous is still pretty interesting to those of us north of the border. I mean when you
arrested the chief of the state police in October with the two tons of cocaine and the dead bodies. Could you tell me where
that stands?”

The arrest of Chief Regino Astorga of the state police, also known as the Colonel, had been something of a fluke, Méndez explained.
Acting on a tip, the unit raided a warehouse, found the cocaine—and the Colonel and his state police detectives standing over
three freshly tortured bodies, one of them a boss in a powerful cartel.

“We have confidence that he will be convicted, no matter how influential he is,” Méndez said. “That case shows that this city,
this country, is capable of change. We came close to war between police forces, but it was worth it.”

“One thing,” Steinberg said cautiously. “Supposedly the Colonel worked for a new cartel that is pushing out the old groups.
What exactly is this new mafia?”

“As well as drugs, we think they are connected to the increase in illegal immigrants from other nations, especially Asiatics
and Arabs. In recent years in Mexico we have had an era of drug lords who were vicious, politically connected businessmen,
then
drug lords who were crazy
pistoleros.
This mafia combines both traditions. It also has unusual international connections. Including elements of American agencies,
I should tell you. The new mafia is opening the valves of corruption and violence in a way I have not seen before.”

Steinberg gulped coffee, fueling herself. Dennis watched her with mixed resentment and interest. Méndez could picture the
interview from her perspective, gauging how hard to push, the questions building on each other.

“But is it really a big mystery who this mafia is? What about the allegations that the Ruiz Caballero family is aligned with
them?”

Méndez wished that they were talking one-on-one. He reminded her they were off the record. He said: “Drug lords come and go.
But certain elites have enduring power, both legitimate and criminal. They have alliances with gangsters. I can say nothing
right now, responsibly, about the names you mention. But that family definitely belongs to the super-elites.”

“Listen, I give you credit,” Dennis interjected, interrupting the blonde’s rhythm, her blue eyes jumping at him in annoyance.
“How can you do what you do?”

Méndez wasn’t sure he understood the question. “It was difficult to change mentality when I began the job. There was a time
when I believed, as Bakunin said, that society organizes crimes, and people only execute them. That all police were repressive
and corrupt.”

“Yeah,” said Dennis, whose eyes had glazed until the word “corrupt.” “It’s such a cesspool. The police running dope, the government
stealing elections—”

“Excuse me, elections?” Méndez said.

“Um, yes.”

“Pardon me,” Méndez said. “Elections are one thing here that is
not
corrupt. Even despite the recent crisis of government.”

“That’s well known,” Steinberg said forlornly, hoping to get back on track.

“Is it? What does television show Americans about Mexico? It amazes me to watch the news of San Diego. They start: a story
about animals in distress. An important topic in the United States. Some dogs got mistreated in La Jolla. A fire burned a
stable in, eh, Carlsbad. And by the way, seven Mexicans were shot in Baja. Fifteen Mexicans killed in bus crash. Corrupt Mexicans
steal elections. But first, the sports.”