The Power Of The Dog (24 page)

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 Medellín 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 Ramón 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 résumé 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 Bogotá,” Conti says. “I can’t get near the area to check it out.”

“The Medellín 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 Medellín 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 Ramón 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 Federación, 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 Tío while pretending that he’s not. Leaving his family late at night, keeping his activities secret, keeping his past secret, waiting for Tío to track it back to him and then come to remind him that they have a past relationship.

Tío 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.

Tío’s lying awake nights trying to figure out who the soplón—the informer—is. The Federación patrónes—Abrego, Méndez, 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, Méndez, El Verde all insist that there must be a soplón 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 corazón—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 soplón.

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 soplón in his organization.

Abrego wants to be patrón of the Federación 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 soplón.

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 Tío’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 Tapatía toward the cathedral, where a small stage has been set up and a play is about to start.

Then he sees Adán.

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.”

Adán’s leaning against the wall when Art comes in. Art starts to check the stalls to make sure they’re empty, but Adán 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,” Adán 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,” Adán says. “When a man turns on his friends it is very fucking personal.”

“We’re not friends anymore.”