The Power Of The Dog (46 page)

Only that’s not what Sal Scachi and the rest of the family had in mind.

You deal, you die, but if you don’t deal you die anyway, because that’s where the money and the power are. And if you let the other families get all the money and the power, you’re just on a slow road to suicide. That was Scachi’s reasoning, and it was correct.

So Calabrese had to go.

And Johnny Boy had to become king.

“It’s a generational thing,” Sal had explained on their long walk in Riverside Park. “Out with the old, in with the new.”

Of course, it will take a while for it all to shake out.

Johnny Boy will deny any involvement because the heads of the other Four Families, or what’s left of them, would never accept his doing this without their permission, which they would never have given. (“A king,” Scachi had lectured him, “will never sanction the assassination of another king.”) So Johnny Boy will swear that he’ll track down the drug-dealing cocksuckers who killed his boss, and there’ll be a few recalcitrant Calabrese loyalists who’ll have to follow their boss to the next world, but it will all shake out in the end.

Johnny Boy will reluctantly allow himself to be chosen as the new boss.

The other bosses will accept him.

And the dope will flow again.

Uninterrupted from Colombia, to Honduras, to Mexico.

To New York.

Where it’s going to be a White Christmas after all.

But I won’t be here to see it, Callan thinks.

He opens the canvas bag on the floor.

As agreed, a hundred thousand dollars in cash, a passport, airline tickets. Sal Scachi set it all up. A ride to South America and a new gig.

The car makes it onto the Triborough Bridge.

Callan looks out the window and, even through the rain, can see the Manhattan skyline. Somewhere in there, he thinks, was my life. The Kitchen, Sacred Heart, the Liffey Pub, the Landmark, the Glocca Morra, the Hudson. Michael Murphy and Kenny Maher and Eddie Friel. And Jimmy Boylan, Larry Moretti and Matty Sheehan.

And now Tommy Bellavia and Paulie Calabrese.

And the living ghosts—

Jimmy Peaches.

And O-Bop.

Siobhan.

He looks back at Manhattan and what he sees is their apartment. Her coming to the table for breakfast on Saturday mornings. Her hair mussed, no makeup, so beautiful. Sitting there with her over a cup of coffee and the newspaper, mostly unread, and looking out over the gray Hudson with Jersey on the other side.

Callan grew up on fables.

Cuchulain, Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, Roddy McCorley, Pádraic Pearse, James Connelly, Sean South, Sean Barry, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Bloody Sunday, Jesus Christ.

They all ended bloody.

NAFTA

Days of the Innocents

In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, for they are not.

—Matthew 2:18

Tegucigalpa
, Honduras

San Diego
, California

Guadalajara
, Mexico

1992

Art sits on a park bench in Tegucigalpa and watches a man in a maroon Adidas tracksuit leave his building across the street.

Ramón Mette has seven of the suits—one for each day of the week. Every day he puts on a fresh one and leaves his mansion in suburban Tegus for a three-mile jog, flanked by two security guards in matching outfits, except theirs are bulging in unusual places to allow for the Mac-10s they carry to keep him safe on his jogs.

So Mette goes out every morning. Runs a three-mile round-trip and returns to the mansion and takes a shower while one of the bodyguards whips up a fruit smoothie in the blender. Mango, papaya, grapefruit and, this being Honduras, bananas. Then he takes his drink out onto the patio and sips it while he reads the paper. Makes some phone calls, conducts a little business, then goes to his private gym to pump some iron.

That’s his routine.

By the clock, every day.

For months.

Except this one morning, the bodyguard opens the door, a sweaty, puffing Mette goes in, and a pistol butt slams into the side of his head.

He slides onto his knees in front of Art Keller.

His bodyguard stands helplessly with his hands up as a black-clad Honduran secret-service trooper points an M-16 at his head. There have to be fifty troopers standing there. Which is odd, Mette thinks through a haze of pain and dizziness, because don’t I own the secret service?

Apparently not, because none of them do shit as Art Keller kicks Mette square in the teeth. Stands over him and says, “I hope you enjoyed your jog because it’s the last you’re ever going to get.”

So Mette’s drinking his own blood instead of a fruit smoothie as Art slips the old black hood over his head, ties it tight and frog-marches him to a waiting van with tinted windows. And this time there’s no one there to object as they haul him onto an Air Force plane for a flight to the Dominican Republic, where he’s taken to the American embassy, arrested for the murder of Ernie Hidalgo, taken to another plane and flown to San Diego, where he’s promptly arraigned, denied bail and put in a solitary cell in the federal holding facility.

All of this touches off riots in the streets of Tegucigalpa, where thousands of angry citizens, incited and paid for by Mette’s lawyers, burn the American embassy in protest against Yanqui imperialism. They want to know where this American cop gets the huevos to come into their country and snatch one of their prominent citizens.

A lot of people in Washington are wondering the same thing. They would also like to know where Art Keller, the disgraced former RAC of the closed Guadalajara office, gets the balls to create an international incident. And not just the balls, but the package to pull it off.

How the hell did that happen?

Quito Fuentes is a small-time operator.

He is now, and he was in 1985 when he drove the tortured Ernie Hidalgo from the safe house in Guadalajara to the ranch in Sinaloa. Now he lives in Tijuana, where he does small-time dope deals with small-time Americans coming across the border for a quick score.

You do that kind of business, you don’t want to show up light, in case one of the Yanqui kids decides he’s a real bandito and tries to take your dope and make a run for the border. No, you want some weight on your hip, and Quito’s current piece is, well, a piece of shit.

Quito
needs a new gun.

Which, contrary to public image, is hard to come by in Mexico, where the federales and the state police like to have a monopoly on firepower. Lucky for Quito, living as he does in TJ, he’s right next door to the world’s biggest arms supermarket, Los Estados Unidos, so he’s all ears when Paco Méndez calls from Chula Vista to tell him he’s got a deal for him. A clean Mac-10 he just has to move.

All Quito has to do is come pick it up.

But Quito doesn’t like to venture north of the border anymore.

Not since the thing with the Yanqui cop, Hidalgo.

Quito
knows he’s pretty safe from arrest on that thing in Mexico, but in the United States it might be a different story, so he tells Paco thanks but no thanks, and couldn’t he just bring it down to TJ? It’s more of a hopeful question than a realistic one, because you have to be either (a) very well connected or (b) some kind of fucking moron to try to smuggle any firearm, never mind a machine pistol, into Mexico. If you got caught, the federales would beat you like wet laundry on a dry line, then you’d catch a minimum two-year sentence in a Mexican prison. Paco knows that they don’t feed you in Mexican prisons—that’s your family’s problem, and Paco doesn’t have family in Mexico anymore. And as he’s neither well connected nor a fucking moron, he tells Quito he doesn’t think he can make that trip.

But as Paco has to turn this gun into some quick cash, he tells Quito, “Let me think about it. I’ll call you back.”

He hangs up and tells Art Keller, “He won’t come over.”

“Then you have a big problem,” Art says.

No shit, a big problem—a cocaine and a gun charge, and just in case Paco isn’t gripping hard enough already, Art adds, “I’ll take it federal and I’ll ask the judge for consecutive sentences.”

“I’m trying!” Paco whines.

“You don’t get points for effort,” Art says.

“You’re a real ball-buster, you know that?”

“I know that,” Art says. “Do you know that?”

Paco slumps in his chair.

“Okay,” Art says. “Just get him to the fence.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ll do the rest.”

So Paco gets back on the horn and arranges to make the deal at the rickety chain-link border fence along Coyote Canyon.

No-man’s-land.

You go into Coyote Canyon at night, you’d better bring a gun, and even that might not be enough, because a lot of God’s children got guns in Coyote Canyon, a big scar in the rolling hills of barren dirt that flank the ocean along the border. The Canyon runs from the north edge of TJ for about two miles into the United States, and it is bandit country. Late in the afternoon, thousands of would-be immigrants start forming up on either side of the canyon on a ridge above the dry aqueduct that is the actual border. When the sun goes down, they make a rush through the canyon, simply overwhelming the outmanned Border Patrol agents. It’s the law of numbers—more get through than get caught. And even if you get caught, there’s always tomorrow.

Maybe.

Because real banditos get into the canyon and lie in wait like predators for the herd of mojados to come through. Pick off the weak and the wounded. Rob, rape and murder. Take what little cash the illegals have, drag their women into the bushes and rape them, then maybe slit their throats.

So you want to come pick oranges in los Estados Unidos, you have to run the gauntlet of Coyote Canyon. And in that chaos, in the dust from a thousand running feet, in the darkness amid screams, gunfire and flashing blades, with the Border Patrol vehicles roaring up and down hills like cowboys trying to control a stampede (which they are; which it is), a lot of business gets done along the fence.

Deals for dope, for sex, for guns.

And that’s what Quito’s doing as he crouches by a hole cut in the fence.

“Gimme the gun.”

“Gimme the money.”

Quito
can see the Mac-10 glittering in the moonlight, so he’s pretty sure his old cuate Paco’s not going to rip him off. So he reaches through the hole to hand Paco the cash and Paco grabs—

—not the money, but his wrist.

And holds on.

Quito
tries to pull back, but now there are three Yanquis grabbing him, and one of them says, “You’re under arrest for the murder of Ernie Hidalgo.”

And Quito says, “You can’t arrest me, I’m in Mexico.”