The Power Of The Dog (58 page)

Gilberto asks, “And you’re offering us an exclusive arrangement?”

“If you agree to allow me to handle your cocaine,” Adán says, “we would handle only product from Cali.”

“That would be a very generous offer,” Manuel says, “except that Don Abrego would resent our keeping you in business, and deny us his.”

But Gilberto is looking for an answer to that, Adán thinks. He’s tempted.

“Don Abrego is the past—we’re the future,” Adán says.

“That’s hard to believe,” says Manuel, “when the head of your pasador sits in prison. It would appear that the powers-that-be in Mexico think that Abrego is their future. And after him … Méndez.”

“We’ll beat Méndez.”

“What makes you think you can?” asks Manuel. “You will have to fight Méndez for it, and Abrego will line up behind Méndez, as will all the other pasadores. And the federales. Truly, no offense, Adán Barrera, but I think I am looking at a dead man, standing here offering me an exclusive, if I dump my business with the living to do business with the dead. How much cocaine can you handle from your grave?”

“We are the Barrera pasador,” Adán says. “We’ve won before, we will—”

“No,” Manuel says. “Again, pardon me, but you are not the Barrera pasador anymore. Your uncle, I agree, could have beaten Abrego and Méndez and the whole Mexican government, but you are not your uncle. You are very smart, but brains alone are not enough. How tough are you? I will tell you the truth, Adán—you look soft to me. I do not think that you are a hard enough man to do what you say you will do, what you will have to do.”

Adán nods, then asks permission to open the suitcase at his feet. He gets their okay, then bends over, flips open the lid, shows them the money inside and says, “Five million of Güero Méndez’s money. We fucked his wife in the ass and made her give us his money. Now, if you still think we can’t beat him, take this money, shoot me, toss my body off the bridge and keep collecting your tip money from the Federación. If you decide that we can beat Méndez, then please accept this as our goodwill gesture and a down payment on the many millions we’re going to make together.”

He puts a look of calm on his face, but he can tell from their expressions that this could go either way.

So can Fabián.

And El Tiburón’s instructions in this case are clear. Orders from Raúl that came straight down from the legendary M-1.

“Vengan,” Fabián says to the kids. “Come on.”

“Are we going to see Mommy now?” Claudia asks.

“Sí.” Fabián takes her hand and hefts Güerito to his shoulder and starts walking back to the middle of the bridge.

¡Mi esposa, mi esposa linda!

Güero’s cries echo through the large, empty house.

The servants are hiding. The bodyguards outside are lying low, as Güero staggers through the house, throws furniture, smashes glass, throws himself on the cowhide sofa and buries his face in a pillow as he sobs.

He has found her simple note: I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE. I HAVE LEFT WITH FABIAN AND TAKEN THE CHILDREN. THEY ARE ALL RIGHT.

His heart is broken. He’d do anything to get her back. Would take her back, too, and make it up to her. He tells all this to the pillow. Then lifts his head and wails, “¡Mi esposa, mi esposa linda!”

The bodyguards, the dozen sicarios manning the estancia walls and gates, can hear him from outside. It spooks them, and they were already on edge, ever since the arrest of Don Miguel Ángel Barrera, knowing that a war might be coming. Certainly a shake-out, and that is usually accompanied by the shedding of blood.

And now the jefe is in his house bawling like a woman for everyone to hear.

It is inquietante—unsettling.

And it’s been going on all day.

A FedEx truck comes down the road.

A dozen AK-47s train on it.

The guards stop the truck well short of the gate. One holds a machine gun on the driver as the other looks in the back of the truck. Asks the shaken driver, “What do you want?”

“A package for Señor Méndez.”

“Who from?”

The driver points to the return address on the label. “His wife.”

Now the guard is worried—Don Güero said he was not to be disturbed, but if this is from Señora Méndez he had better take it in.

“I’ll take it to him,” the guard says.

“I have to have his signature.”

The guard points the gun barrel at the driver’s face and says, “I can sign for him, yes?”

“Certainly. Of course.”

The guard signs, carries the package to the house and rings the bell. A maid comes to the door. “Don Güero is not to be—”

“A package from the señora. Federal Express.”

Güero appears behind the maid. His eyes are swollen, his face red, his nose running.

“What is it?” he snaps. “Goddamnit, I said—”

“A package from the señora.”

Güero takes it and slams the door shut.

Güero tears the box open.

After all, it is from her.

So he rips the box open and inside is the little cooler. He unlatches it and flips the lid open and sees her shiny black hair.

Her dead eyes.

Mouth open.

And in her teeth, a card.

He screams and screams.

The panicked guards kick the door in.

Burst into the room, and there is el jefe, standing back from a box, screaming and screaming. The guard who brought the package looks inside the box, then leans over and vomits. Pilar’s severed head sits on a bed of dried blood, her teeth clenched on a calling card.

Two other guards take Güero by the arms and try to pull him away, but he digs in his feet and just keeps screaming. The other guard wipes his mouth, recovers himself and takes the note from Pilar’s mouth.

The message makes no sense:

HOLA, CHUPAR.

The other guards try to lead Güero to the sofa but he snatches the note, reads it, turns, if possible, even paler and then yells, “¡Dios mío, mis nenes! ¡¿Dónde están mis nenes?!”

Oh, my God, my children!

Where are my children?!

“¿Dónde está mi madre? ¡Yo quiero mi madre!”

“Where is my mommy? I want my mommy!” Claudia howls because she doesn’t see her mother on the bridge, just a bunch of strange men staring at them. Güerito sees her panic and picks up her cry. And Claudia doesn’t want to be held now. She twists and fights in Fabián’s arms and cries, “¡Mi madre! ¡Mi madre!”

But Fabián keeps walking toward the center of the bridge.

Adán sees him coming.

Like a nightmare, a vision from hell.

Adán feels paralyzed, his feet nailed to the wood of the bridge, and he just stands there as Fabián smiles at the Orejuela brothers and says, “Don Miguel Ángel Barrera assures you that his blood flows through the veins of his nephew.”

Adán believes in numbers, in science, in physics. It is at this precise moment that he understands the nature of evil, that evil has a momentum of its own, which, once started, is impossible to stop. It’s the law of physics—a body at rest tends to stay at rest; a body set in motion tends to stay in motion.

Unless something stops it.

And Tío’s plan is, as usual, brilliant. Even in its total, crack-inspired depravity it is deadly accurate in its perception of individual human nature. This is Tío’s genius—he knows that a man who would never have the weakness to set a great evil into motion doesn’t have the strength to stop it once it’s moving. That the hardest thing in the world isn’t to refrain from committing an evil, it’s to stand up and stop one.

To put one’s life in the way of a tidal wave.

Because that is what it is, Adán thinks, his mind whirling. If I put a stop to this now it will show weakness to the Orejuelas—a weakness that will immediately or eventually prove fatal. If I show the slightest disunity with Fabián, that, too, will guarantee our demise.

Tío’s genius—putting me in exactly this position, knowing that I have no real choice.

“I want Mama!” Claudia screams.

“Shh,” Fabián whispers, “I am taking you to her.”

Fabián looks to Adán for a signal.

And Adán knows that he’s going to give it to him.

Because I have a family to protect, Adán thinks, and there is no other choice. It’s Méndez’s family or mine.

Had Parada been there he would have phrased it differently. He would have said that in the absence of God there’s only nature, and nature has its cruel laws. That the first thing the new leaders do is kill the offspring of the old. Without God, that’s all there is: survival.

Well, there is no God, Adán thinks.

He nods.

Fabián throws the girl off the bridge. Her hair lofts up like futile wings and she plummets as Fabián grabs the little boy and in one easy swing tosses him over the railing.

Adán forces himself to look.

The children’s bodies plunge seven hundred feet, then smash onto the rocks below.

Then he looks at the Orejuela brothers, whose faces are white with shock. Gilberto’s hand shakes as he shuts the suitcase, picks it up and walks shakily back across the bridge.

Below, the Río Magdalena washes away the bodies and the blood.

Days of the Dead

Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?

—Henry II

San Diego
. 1994

It’s the Day of the Dead.

Big day in Mexico.

The tradition goes back to Aztec times and honors the goddess Mictecacihuatl, “Lady of the Dead,” but the Spanish priests cleaned it up and moved it from midsummer to autumn to make it coincide with All Hallow’s Eve and All Souls’ Day. Yeah, okay, Art thinks, the Dominicans can call it what they want—it’s still about La Muerte.

The Mexicans, they don’t mind talking about death. They have lots of names for it—The Fancy Lady, The Skinny, The Bony, or just plain old La Muerte. They don’t try to keep it at arm’s length. They’re tight with death, intimate with it. They keep their dead close to them. On El Día de los Muertos, the living go to visit the dead. They cook elaborate dishes and take them to the cemeteries and sit down and share a nice meal with their dearly departed.

Shit, Art thinks, I’d like to share a nice meal with my living family. They live in the same city, occupy the same physical space and time, and yet somehow we’re all on separate planes of existence.

He’d signed the divorce papers shortly after getting word of the murders of Pilar Méndez and her two children. A simple acknowledgment of an inevitable reality, he wondered, or a form of penance? He knew that he shared some responsibility for the children’s deaths, that he’d helped to set that hideous train in motion the moment he whispered into Tío’s ear the false information that Güero Méndez was the imaginary Source Chupar. So when the word came through intelligence channels—the rumors that the Barreras had decapitated Pilar and thrown her children off a bridge in Colombia—Art finally picked up a pen and signed the divorce papers that been on his desk for months.