The Border

And it’s air-conditioned.

I doubt, Elena thinks, that Adán will feel the heat.

A Dolby sound system is encased in the columns, running a continuous loop of corridos about Adán; inside the crypt, a flat-screen monitor shows videos of the great man and his good works.

It’s hideous, Elena thinks, but it’s what the people expect.

And it wouldn’t do to let the people down.

The priest had actually hesitated to perform the service for “a notorious drug lord.”

“Look around you, you sanctimonious little prick,” Elena said when they met in his office. “That desk you’re sitting behind? We paid for it. The chair your flabby ass sits in? We paid for it. The sanctuary, the altar, the pews, the new stained-glass windows? All straight from Adán’s pocket. So I’m not asking you, Padre, I’m telling you—you will perform this service. Otherwise—my hand to the Virgin Mary—we will send people in to remove everything from this church, starting with you.”

So now Father Rivera says some prayers, gives a blessing, then a little homily about Adán’s virtues as a dedicated family man, his generosity toward the church and the community, his deep love of Sinaloa and its people, his faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost and God the Father.

Adán had faith in money, power and himself, Elena thinks as the priest moves to wrap it up. That was his Holy Trinity, he didn’t believe in God.

“I do believe in Satan, though,” he had told her once.

“You can’t believe in one without the other,” she said.

“Sure you can,” Adán said. “The way I understand it, God and the devil were in a giant battle to rule the world, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Right,” Adán said. “Look around you—the devil won.”

The whole thing is a joke, Ric thinks.

He’s also thinking about how badly he has to piss and wishes he had before this endless service began, but it’s too late now, he’ll just have to hold it.

And endure Iván’s stink eye.

His friend hasn’t stopped glaring at him since it started. Just as he had glared at him when he came out of his meeting with Ricardo Sr. at the velorio, walked up to Ric at the pool, glared down at him and said, “You knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That Adán made your father the new boss.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Fuck you.”

“I didn’t.”

“You father called me a clown,” Iván said.

“I’m sure he didn’t say that, Iván.”

“No, that bitch Elena did,” Iván said. “But your father repeated it. And you knew, Ric. You knew. You let me talk, go on and on about what I was going to do, and all the time, you knew.”

“Come on, Iván, I—”

“No, you’re the guy now, right?” Iván said. “Your father is the jefe, that makes you what, Mini-Ric, huh?”

“Still your friend.”

“No, you’re not,” Iván said. “We’re not friends. Not anymore.”

He walked away.

Ric called him, texted him, but got no answers. Nothing. Now Iván sits there staring at him like he hates him.

Which maybe he does, Ric thinks.

And maybe I can’t blame him.

After talking to Iván, his father had called Ric in.

Ric read the paper that his old man slid across the glass top. “Jesus Christ.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I was hoping for something more along the lines of ‘Let me know what I can do to help, Dad,’” Núñez said, “or ‘Whatever you need from me, I’m there.’ Or ‘Adán chose wisely, Dad, you’re the man for the job.’”

“All that goes without saying.”

“And yet I had to say it.” Núñez leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together, a gesture Ric had hated since he was a child, as it always meant that a lecture was coming. “I need you to step up now, Ric. Take more of an active role, lend a hand.”

“Iván thought it was going to be him.” Every other word out of Iván’s mouth had been how things were going to be when he took over, and now here was Adán reaching out from the grave to snatch that from him.

“His happiness is not my concern,” Núñez said. “Or, for that matter, yours.”

“He’s my friend.”

“Then perhaps you can help persuade him to be reasonable,” Núñez said. “He’ll still run the Esparza wing of the organization.”

“I think he had something more in mind.”

“We all have to live with our disappointments,” Núñez said.

Ric had an idea he was talking about him.

“Iván will have to run the entire Esparza operation,” Núñez said. “He wouldn’t have time for Baja anyway.”

“He was going to give it to Oviedo.”

“The same Oviedo I saw on Facebook driving a motorcycle with his feet?” Núñez asked.

“I didn’t know you went on Facebook.”

“Aides keep me in touch,” Núñez said. “In any case, you have Elena’s permission to keep selling in Baja.”

“Elena’s or Rudolfo’s?”

“Are you being funny with me?”

“I had an arrangement,” Ric said. “With Iván.”

“Now you have it with Rudolfo,” Núñez said. “Show me some success on the narcomenudeo, I might give you the trasiego. From there, who knows?”

“Show you some success.”

“For God’s sake, Ric,” Núñez said, “show me something. You’re Adán Barrera’s godson. With that comes certain privileges, and with privilege comes responsibility. I have a responsibility to see that his wishes are carried out, and you share in that.”

“Okay.”

“Here’s something else you should think about,” Núñez said. “We’re holding this position for Adán’s sons to come of age, but that will be years from now. Suppose something happens to me in the interim? That leaves you.”

“I don’t want it,” Ric said.

There it was again—that trace of disappointment, even disgust, as his father asked, “Do you want to be ‘Mini-Ric’ your whole life?”

Ric was surprised by his father’s ability to hurt him. He thought he was over it by now, but he felt a stab in his heart.

He didn’t answer.

One of the things Ric is expected to show his father is a speech, a eulogy, at the funeral service.

To which Ric had objected. “Why me?”

“As the godson,” Ricardo said, “it’s expected.”

Well, if it’s expected, Ric thought. He had no idea what he was going to say.

Belinda offered some ideas. “‘My godfather, Adán, was a ruthless cocksucker who killed more men than ass cancer—”

“Nice.”

“—and married a hot chica less than half his age who we would all like to fuck, if we’re being honest with ourselves. What’s not to love about Adán Barrera, a man’s man, a narco’s narco, a godfather’s godfather. Peace. Out.’”

She hadn’t been much more help about his Iván problem.

“You know Iván,” she said. “He runs hot. He’ll get over it, you’ll be doing shots together tonight.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then so be it,” Belinda said. “You got to start looking at the facts. Fact: Barrera named your father the boss, not Iván. Fact: you’re the godson, not him. Maybe you should start acting like it.”

“You sound like my father.”

“He’s not always wrong.”

Now Ric really has to piss. The fucking priest finally gets offstage and then a singer comes on. One of Rudolfo’s older recording hacks who starts in with a corrido he wrote “especially for El Señor,” and it has more downer lyrics than an Adele tune.

After that, a poet comes up.

A poet.

What’s next, Ric thinks, puppets?

Actually, it’s him.

His father gives him what could be called a “significant” nod and Ric walks up to the altar. He’s not stupid—he knows it’s a moment, an announcement of sorts that he has leapfrogged Iván to the head of the line.

Ric leans into the microphone. “My godfather, Adán Barrera, was a great man.”

A general murmur of agreement and the audience waits for him to go on.

“He loved me like a son,” Ric says, “and I loved him like a second father. He was a father to us all, wasn’t he? He—”

Ric blinks when he sees a clown—a full-fledged payaso with white makeup, a red curly wig, a rubber nose, baggy pants and floppy shoes come prancing down the center aisle blowing on a kazoo and carrying a bunch of white balloons in one hand.

Who ordered this up? Ric wonders, thinking he’s seeing things.

It couldn’t have been laugh-a-minute Elena or his old man, neither of whom is exactly known for whimsy. Ric glances over at both of them and neither is laughing.

Elena, in fact, looks pissed.

But, then again, she always does.

Ric tries to pick up his speech. “He gave money to the poor and built …”

But no one is listening as the clown makes his way to the altar, tossing paper flowers and little papel picado animals to the astonished onlookers. Then he turns, reaches inside his patched madras jacket, and pulls out a 9 mm Glock.

I’m going to get killed by a fucking clown, Ric thinks in disbelief. It’s not fair, it’s not right.

But the payaso turns and shoots Rudolfo square in the forehead.

Blood flecks Elena’s face.

Her son falls into her lap and she sits holding him, her face twisted in agony as she screams and screams.

The killer runs back up the aisle—but how fast can a clown run in floppy shoes—and Belinda pulls a MAC-10 from her jacket and melts him.

Balloons rise into the air.

Adán Barrera’s Pax Sinaloa ended before he was even lowered into the ground, Keller thinks, watching the news on Univision.

Reporters outside the walls of the cemetery described a “scene of chaos” as panicked mourners fled, others pulled out a “proliferation” of weapons, and ambulances raced toward the scene. And with that touch of surrealism that so often seems to pervade the Mexican narco world, early reports indicate that Rudolfo Sánchez’s killer was dressed as a clown.

“A clown,” Keller says to Blair.

Blair shrugs.

“Do they have an ID on the shooter?” Keller asks, unwilling to say clown.

“SEIDO thinks it’s this guy,” Blair says, throwing a file up on the computer screen. “Jorge Galina Aguirre—‘El Caballo’—a player in the Tijuana cartel way back in the nineties when Adán and Raúl were first taking over. A midlevel marijuana trafficker with no known enemies, and no known grudges against the Barreras.”

“Apparently he had a grudge against Rudolfo.”

“There’s some shit running around that Rudolfo nailed Galina’s daughter, or maybe his wife,” Blair says.

“Rudolfo was a player.”

“The wages of sin,” Blair says.

Yeah, but Keller doubts it.

The old “honor killing” ethos is rapidly fading into the past, and the insult—the almost unbelievably offensive act of murdering one of Barrera’s nephews in front of his family at his funeral—argues that this is something more.

It’s a declaration.

But of what, and by whom?

By all accounts, Rudolfo Sánchez was a spent force, the juice drained out of him by the stay in Florence. He was involved with nightclubs, restaurants and music management, cash businesses handy for laundering money. Had he fucked someone on a deal, lost someone a serious amount of cash?

Maybe, but you don’t kill a Barrera over something like that, especially not at El Señor’s funeral. You negotiate a settlement or you eat the loss because it’s better for business and your odds for survival. Again, intelligence had it that Rudolfo—or any of the Sánchez family—wasn’t trafficking anymore, so he shouldn’t have been killed over turf.

Unless the intelligence is wrong or things have changed.

Of course things have changed, Keller thinks. Barrera is dead and maybe this was the opening shot in the battle to replace him.

Rudolfo didn’t want to be buried in the cemetery, he wanted to be cremated, his ashes tossed into the sea. There will be no grave, no crypt, no gaudy mausoleum to visit, just the sound of waves and an endless horizon.

His widow—we have so many widows, Elena thinks, we are our own cartel—stands with her son and daughter, ten and seven, respectively. Who saw their father murdered.

They shot my son in front of his wife and children.

And his mother.

She’s heard the joke going around—Did they catch the clown who did it?

They did.

He never made it out of the mausoleum. One of Núñez’s people gunned him down in the aisle. The question, Elena thinks, is how he made it in. There was so much security, so much security. Barrera security, Esparza security, Núñez security, city police, state police—and this man walked right through it all.

The shooter was Jorge Galina Aguirre, a marijuana trafficker with no known enemies, and no known grudges against the Barreras.

Certainly not against Rudolfo.

That night, after she had seen Rudolfo to a funeral home, Elena went to a house on the edge of town where the entire security contingent was held in the basement, sitting on the concrete floor, their hands tied behind their backs.

Elena walked down the row and looked each one in the eye.

Looking for guilt.

Looking for fear.

She saw a lot of the latter, none of the former.

They all told the same story—they saw a black SUV pull up. With just the driver and the clown, in the passenger seat. The clown got out of the car, and the guards let him in because they thought he was some bizarre part of the ceremony. The SUV drove off. So it was a suicide mission, Elena thought. A suicide mission that the shooter didn’t know was a suicide mission. The driver watched him go in and then took off, leaving him there.

To do his job and die.

When they went back upstairs, Ricardo Núñez said, “If you want them all dead, they’re all dead.”

Members of his armed wing were already in place, locked, loaded and ready to perform a mass execution.

“Do what you want with your men,” Elena said. “Release mine.”

“You’re sure?”

Elena just nodded.

She sat in the back of a car, flanked by armed guards, her own people flown in from Tijuana, and watched the local Barrera men walk out of the house.

They looked surprised, stunned to still be alive.

Elena said to one of her men, “Go out there, tell them they’re fired. They’ll never work for us again.”

Then she watched Ricardo’s people go in.

They walked back to their cars an hour later.

Now she watches her daughter-in-law step ankle-deep into the ocean and pour Rudolfo’s ashes out of a jar.

Like instant coffee, Elena thinks.

My son.

Whom I laid on my chest, held in my arms.

Wiped his ass, his nose, his tears.

My baby.

She talked to her other baby, Luis, that morning.

“It was the Esparzas,” she said. “It was Iván.”

“I don’t think so, Mother,” Luis said. “The police say that Gallina was insane. Delusional. He thought Rudolfo had slept with his daughter or something.”

“And you believe that.”

“Why would Iván want to kill Rudolfo?” Luis asked.

Because I took Baja from him, Elena thought. Or thought I did. “They killed your brother and now they’re going to try to kill you. They’ll never let us out alive, so we have to stay in. And if we stay in, we have to win. I’m sorry, but that’s the cold truth.”

Luis turned pale. “I’ve never had anything to do with the business. I don’t want to have anything to do with the business.”

“I know,” Elena said. “And I wish it were possible to keep you out of it, my darling. But it’s not.”

“Mother—I don’t want it.”

“And I didn’t want it for you,” Elena said. “But I’m going to need you. To avenge your brother.”

She watches Luis looking at his brother’s ashes float on the surface of the water and then disappear into the foam of a gentle wave.

Just like that.

The poor boy, she thinks.

Not a boy, a young man, twenty-seven now. Born to this life from which he can’t escape. It was foolish of me to think otherwise.

And that foolishness cost my other son his life.

She watches the wave go out, taking her child with it, and thinks of the song she sang on his birthdays.

The day you were born,

All the flowers were born,

And in the baptismal fountain

The nightingales did sing,

The light of day is shining on us,

Get up in the morning,

See that it has already dawned.

A sharp, heavy blade presses down on her chest.

Pain that will never go away.

Keller sits down on the sofa across from Marisol.

“You look tired,” Marisol says.

“It’s been a day.”

“Barrera,” she says. “It’s been all over the shows. What a scene, huh?”

“Even dead, he’s still getting people killed,” Keller says.

They talk for a few more minutes and then she goes up to bed. He goes into the den and turns the television on. CNN is covering the Barrera story and doing a recap of his life—how he started as a teenager selling bootleg jeans, how he joined his uncle’s drug business, his bloody war with Güero Méndez to take over the Baja plaza, his succeeding his uncle as the head of the Mexican Federación. As the scant photos of Barrera appear on the screen, the reporter goes on to talk about “unconfirmed rumors”—that Barrera was involved in the torture-murder of DEA agent Ernie Hidalgo, that Barrera had thrown the two small children of his rival Méndez off a bridge, that he’d slaughtered nineteen innocent men, women and children in a small Baja village.

Keller pours himself a weak nightcap as the reporter provides “balance”—Barrera built schools, clinics and playgrounds in his home state of Sinaloa, he had forbidden his people to engage in kidnappings or extortion, he was “beloved” by the rural people in the mountains of the Sierra Madre.

The screen shows the signs reading ¡ADÁN VIVE! and the little homebuilt roadside shrines with photos of him, candles, bottles of beer, and cigarettes.

Barrera didn’t smoke, Keller thinks.

The profile relates Barrera’s 1999 arrest by “current DEA head Art Keller,” his transfer to a Mexican prison, his 2004 “daring escape” and subsequent rise back to the top of the drug world. His war with the “hyperviolent” Zetas, and his betrayal at the peace conference in Guatemala.

Then the scene at the funeral.

The bizarre murder.

The lonely lowering of the coffin into the ground, with only his widow, his twin sons and Ricardo Núñez present.

Keller turns off the television.

He thought that putting two bullets into Adán Barrera’s face would bring him peace.

It hasn’t.

Heroin

They left at once and met the Lotus-eaters, who had no thought of killing my companions, but gave them lotus plants to eat, whose fruit, sweet as honey, made any man who tried it lose his desire ever to journey home …

—Homer

The Odyssey, book 9

1

The Acela

This train don’t carry no liars, this train …

—Traditional American folk song

New York City

July 2014

Keller looks out the train window at abandoned factory buildings in Baltimore and wonders if some of them are now shooting galleries. The windows are shattered, gang graffiti is sprayed on the redbrick walls, fence posts lean like drunken sailors, and the chain links have been cut.

It’s the same story all the way up the Amtrak line, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Newark—the factories are shells, the jobs are gone and too many of the former workers are shooting smack.

A huge sign over a decrepit building outside Wilmington says it all. It originally read GOOD BUY WORKS, but someone spray-painted it to GOOD BYE WORK.

Keller’s glad he took the train instead of flying. From the air he would have missed seeing all this. It’s tempting to think that the root causes of the heroin epidemic are in Mexico, because he’s so focused on interdiction, but the real source is right here and in scores of smaller cities and towns.

Opiates are a response to pain.

Physical pain, emotional pain, economic pain.

He’s looking at all three.

The Heroin Trifecta.

Keller is riding the Acela, the three-hour train from Washington, DC, to New York City, from the governmental power center to the financial one, although sometimes it’s hard to know which rules which.

And hard to know what he can do about Mexico from Washington when the real source of the opiate problem might just be on Wall Street. You’re standing on the Rio Grande with a broom, he thinks, trying to sweep back the tide of heroin while billionaires are sending jobs overseas, closing factories and towns, killing hopes and dreams, inflicting pain.

And then they tell you, stop the heroin epidemic.

The difference between a hedge fund manager and a cartel boss?

Wharton Business School.

He looks over to see Hugo Hidalgo lurching down the aisle with a cardboard tray in his hand, bringing back coffee and sandwiches. The young agent plops down in the aisle seat beside him. “I got you a ham and cheese panini. I hope that’s all right.”

“It’s fine. What did you get?”

“A burger.”

“Brave man.”

A good man, actually.

In a few short months, Hidalgo has become a rock star. He’s the first one to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, although Keller suspects that Hugo sometimes sleeps on a cot in the office if he’s monitoring something.

Hugo is immersed in cell phone traffic analysis, email tracking, satellite pickups, field reports, anything he can look at to assemble a picture of the changing, fluid nature of the Sinaloa cartel.

He’s become Keller’s personal briefer, his last report coming before they left this morning to catch the train: three Tijuana street dealers found hanging from a bridge.

“They were Esparza’s people,” Hugo said. “Elena’s answer to her son’s murder.”

“Is he still denying responsibility for Rudolfo’s murder?”

“He is,” Hugo said, “but the street says that he’s using Elena’s hostility as an excuse for not handing over Baja, so she hits his street dealers.”

The Mexican street sales are a relatively small profit center compared to the cross-border trade, but they’re essential to holding the border turf. To hold a plaza, a boss needs local gunmen, and the gunmen make most of their money from local street sales.

Without the street sales, no army.

No army, no plaza.

Hence, no local street sales, no international trade.

So unless Núñez can enforce peace, Elena and Iván will fight it out locally in Baja for control of the border crossings.

“Does Elena have the troops?” Keller asked.

Hugo shrugged. “Hard to say. Some old Barrera loyalists are going back to Elena now that she’s raised her flag. A lot of them were Rudolfo’s friends looking for revenge. Others are holding with the Esparzas, scared shitless Iván will bring Tito Ascensión and his Jalisco people in to keep them in line.”

It’s a reasonable fear, Keller thought. Nacho’s old guard dog El Mastín is as brutal as it gets. “Núñez?”

“Staying neutral,” Hugo said. “Trying to keep the peace.”