Текст книги "The Cartel"

Автор книги: Don Winslow

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

Or something like that.

You’d think that there would be a breaking point—a decisive moment—but there is no single moment or event that you can put your finger on. No, it’s not that dramatic—it’s the dull, monotonous process of erosion.

Maybe it was the day when twenty-five people were killed in a single afternoon. With one of the now tedious narcomantas hung by the bodies: ADÁN BARRERA, YOU ARE KILLING OUR SONS. NOW WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOUR FAMILIES.

Maybe it was the next slaughter at a birthday party—fourteen machine-gunned to death. Or the two decapitated bodies of the shooters found the next day.

Or maybe it’s just the dull, predictable sameness of it all, that the bizarre has become the norm, like the way Juarenses now unconsciously step over bodies in the street on their way to work.

The unrelenting radio calls, which have now taken on an even more perverse twist as first the cartels took to playing narcocorridos over the police band to celebrate the assassination of a rival cop. So now you could tell which side had done the killing by the anthem they played.

Then, in that way that had become the strange normality, the cartels took to playing the songs before the killings—just to spread terror through the potential ranks of the victims.

Maybe it was the rituals that now attended the coverage of the killings. The reporters would arrive first, but if the narcos were waiting around for the victim to die, the reporters had to hang back. If the victim was dead, the narcos would either give the okay to cover the story and take photos, or tell them to píntate—beat it. Or sometimes the killers would leave a note for reporters on the corpse, telling them what they could write and what they couldn’t.

The next on the scene would be the funeral home directors, there to drum up business, dressed in black and looking for all the world like ravens at a roadkill.

Then the police might arrive, depending on the identity of the victim, and then the EMTs, who would only come now once they knew that the police were already there. More than once, Pablo had sat with the EMTs as the killers kept them away at gunpoint until the victim bled out. Then the narcos would wave them in with the words, “Come and get him.” Other times, the narcos would get on the EMT radio frequency and simply order the medics not to come to the aid of certain victims.

Maybe it was the sorry fact that he could no longer feel anything when he watched the wife, the mother, the sister, the child, scream and weep. Or that he no longer felt shock or even revulsion at the shattered or dismembered or decapitated bodies. Heads and limbs scattered around his city like so much offal, dogs in the rougher colonias slinking away with bloody jowls and guilty looks.

Six bodies…

Four bodies…

Ten bodies…

The army arrested four La Línea members who confessed to a combined tally of 211 murders.

The “New Police,” carefully vetted and polygraphed, were mustered in Juárez to great fanfare. One of them—a policewoman—was shot to death on a bus as she rode to her first day of work.

Eleven more people were killed the next day.

Eight the day after.

Everything apparently was going so well in Chihuahua that its state attorney general was promoted to be Mexico’s new federal drug czar.

Erosion, Pablo thinks.

Erosion of morality.

Erosion of the soul.

It brings up the question, why?

Not in any grand existential sense—Pablo is beyond thinking he’ll get an answer to those questions—but as a practical matter.

After all, the war is supposed to be over.

That’s what the politicos have told us—their operations have been so successful that they withdrew the army from the city and handed it over to the “New Police.” So if the war is over, why does the killing continue?

Even when you look at the more realistic explanation as to why the war is over—that the Sinaloa cartel won and now controls the Juárez plaza, why does the slaughter continue unabated? Why is there no peace dividend of a day without killing?

And why, again, are the victims mostly the little guys—the poor, the street dealers, the beggars, the driftwood?

Pablo knows the answer.

He just hates what it is.

It has to do not with the cross-border drug trade, but with the internal market. It’s not good enough to just blame the U.S. market anymore. The sale of drugs in Juárez is small compared with the volume that goes across the border, but it’s still significant.

Most of the killing now is to control the domestic market, especially in heroin and cocaine. It isn’t that Barrera wants or needs the money—chump change to him—it’s that he can’t let the remnants of the Juárez cartel have it. If they’re allowed to still dominate the sale of drugs in El Centro, La Cima, and the other colonias, the money would be a source of power that might fuel a comeback.

Barrera isn’t going to allow that.

When he has his foot on your throat, he isn’t going to lift it.

So the killing now is a mopping-up operation.

And the little guy, the nickel-bag street puchador, is caught in a vise between Los Aztecas and Sinaloa—if he sells for one, the other kills him. The tiny drug stands—the picaderos—are caught in the same vise. Even the addicts are trapped—buy from a Sinaloan and the Juarenses kill you, buy from a Juarense and the Nueva Gente wipe you out. The kids on the corners who are lookouts, the winos and the homeless, the beggars and the buskers, are all there to be killed just in case they’re helping the other side.

And the cops? They don’t give a fuck, Pablo thinks. Since when has anyone cared about these losers? No, the cops, the pols, the businessmen see it as almost an opportunity to sweep the streets of undesirables and tote it up to the “cartel wars.”

The mainstream media love it—they draw neat battle lines with colored zones of which cartel controls which plaza, which colonia. It’s easier that way, nice and neat and followable—you can even root for one side or the other—but it’s bullshit, at least in Juárez.

The truth is that there are no neat lines anymore.

When Barrera, the feds, and the army destroyed La Línea and Los Aztecas, they also destroyed any control over the hundreds of cartelitos, the small street gangs in the city, gangs who still are going to fight to sell drugs and practice small-time extortion, extracting the cuota from shopkeepers, bus drivers, cabbies, or even just women, children, and the old for the right to walk down the street.

Half the people out there doing the killing now are low-level kids who don’t even know which cartel they’re killing for. They just get an order from a boss one level up and they follow that order if they want to live. That boss might be Juárez, Azteca, Sinaloa, even Zeta. He might be one thing one day and another thing the next.

The killings might not even be drug-related—the violent chaos covers up murders that might come from an old feud, a jealousy, a lovers’ triangle, an unpaid cuota, anything.

So they go out and kill, and then they are killed, and then they retaliate, and the killing has a momentum of its own and the grim truth is that there are no generals in command rooms moving colored pins around a map as they direct a grand strategy.

The fact is that los chacalosos—the big bosses—lost control.

They couldn’t stop it now if they wanted, and Barrera doesn’t care. He has his bridges and the violence is wiping the local gangs off the street. So to hell with the city—he’d be just as happy if there was nothing left except his damn bridges.

Wouldn’t care if the city dies.

Which it is.

So it’s chaos here now, and the people who pay the price for it are the people who always do, and who can least afford it—the poor, the powerless, the ones who can’t lock themselves up in gated communities, or commute from El Paso.

No one is in charge.

The killing now commands the killing, because no one knows anything else to do. That’s the truth that Pablo would like to tell. Like to scream to the country, scream to the U.S., scream to the world.

But he can’t.

They won’t let him.

Yesterday morning the man who brought Pablo his envelope brought him an order as well.

“The attack on La Médica Hermosa,” he said.

“That was months ago.” Pablo felt a surge of fear.

“You’re going to write that the Zetas were behind it.”

“I don’t know that,” Pablo said. He heard his voice quivering.

“You do know that,” the man said. “I just told you that.”

He knows why they care. Giorgio’s photo essay of Marisol Cisneros’s wounds had caused a major outcry across the country, maybe even more than the attack itself. And now he knows who’s giving him the money—the Sinaloans, the New People.

Pablo summoned up all his nerve. “Do you have proof?”

“The money in your bank account,” the man said, “is all the proof you need.”

“I haven’t spent it,” Pablo says. “I’ll give it back.”

“What do you think this is?” the man asks. “Marbles? A kid’s game? You took the money—there’s no ‘giving back.’ I don’t care if you stuck it up your ass. I don’t care if you stuck it up your friend’s ass—the Zetas did it, that’s the truth. You want to write the truth, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

He pushes Pablo up against the wall. “Let me ask you something. Your friends, the people you work with. Do you love them?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“If you do,” the man said, “then do the right thing here.”

The man let him go and walked away.

Pablo stood there, trembling. His legs felt like they were going to give out under him. He walked to the nearest bar and had a whiskey, then another, his mind whirling.

What am I going to do? he asked himself.

What am I going to do?

When Pablo went in to file the story, saying that he had it from unidentified sources on deep background that the Zetas were responsible for the attacks on the Chihuahua women, Óscar called him into the office.

“Unidentified sources?” El Búho asked.

Pablo nodded.

“Who are they? Your Azteca connections?”

“Yeah.”

Óscar tapped his cane on the floor. “We need more than that. Go out and get it.”

Ramón found him that night, drinking beer at Fred’s. The Azteca slid up to the bar beside him. “I don’t have a lot of time here, so I’ll get right to it. You working on a story about those shootings in the valley?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t get fucking cute with me,” Ramón snapped. “I’m here to tell you, you write anything, you write that those Sinaloan cocksuckers did it.”

“I heard differently.”

“Yeah? What did you hear? What did you hear, ’mano?”

“Zetas.”

“Who told you that?”

Pablo shook his head.

“You’re taking Sinaloa money,” Ramón said, “okay. Nobody gave a shit. Until now. Now we give a very big shit.”

“ ‘We’? You’re working for the Zetas now?”

“The Zs are taking over,” Ramón said. “We’re all in the Z Company now. You, too.”

Ramón grabbed him by the shoulder. “They sent me, ’mano. They sent me to tell you that you write what they want. If I have to come see you again, it won’t be to talk. Don’t make me do that, ’Blo. Please.”

Ramón tossed a few bills on the bar and walked out.

Pablo felt like he could piss himself.

He was trapped—caught between the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas. He left the bar and found Ana and Giorgio at the Kentucky.

For a man who’d just had a professional triumph, Giorgio was uncharacteristically subdued. Then again, seeing Marisol’s wounds was heartbreaking. Such a beautiful woman, such a good person, disfigured and in pain. So it was tasteful of Giorgio not to celebrate, Pablo thought.

Maybe he has some sensitivity after all.

“You’re quiet tonight,” Ana said to Pablo.

“Just tired.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

They had a few drinks, then Giorgio left to go to El Paso to sleep with his current girlfriend, an American sociologist who was doing her doctoral dissertation on “the phenomenon of violence in Ciudad Juárez.”

“Is that what we are?” Ana asked. “A phenomenon?”

“Apparently,” Giorgio answered.

“Can you use photographs in a dissertation?”

“I’m sort of deep background,” Giorgio answered. “See you tomorrow.”

Pablo didn’t sleep that night. There seemed to be no way out of the trap he was in. When he went into the office, Óscar asked him if he’d made any progress on the story. Pablo was evasive, and when he went out to his car there was a note on the seat—“Where is our story? Don’t fuck with us, cabrón.”

I’m shrinking with my city, Pablo thinks as he bunches up the torta wrapper and tosses it on the floor of the car. The once thriving mercado is almost deserted because the tourists don’t come anymore; one famous bar or club after another has closed; even the Mariscal, the red-light district just by the Santa Fe Bridge, has been shut down because men won’t take the risk of going, even for whores.

Now he forces himself to get out of the car for yet another corpse. Just one more malandro, one more piece of garbage swept up in la limpieza.

The cleansing.

Usually Giorgio beats him to the scene, but he’s probably still in bed with the North American.

Then he spots Giorgio.

–

It’s Pablo who tells Ana.

He goes into the city room, holds her tight, and tells her, and she screams and her knees buckle and she falls into him and he almost tells her. It’s my fault. It’s my fault, if I had said something, told him, maybe…

But you didn’t, Pablo thinks.

And you still don’t.

Because you’re a coward.

And because you’re so ashamed.

Óscar writes an editorial about Giorgio’s murder, a classic El Búho piece full of moral outrage and grief mixed with erudition.

Giorgio’s funeral is a horror show.

The whole Juárez journalist community is there, and Cisneros and Keller. The service at the cemetery goes about as usual, then Pablo notices a car parked just outside the gates.

He walks over.

A severed head, its mouth fixed in a macabre grin, is set on its hood.

With Óscar’s editorial pinned to its neck.

There’s a subdued gathering at Ana’s that night. Pablo, Óscar, Marisol, and her North American. A few others. A shrunken group, Pablo thinks, with our shrunken souls.

People drink sadly, sullenly.

A few attempts are made to tell funny stories about Giorgio, but the effort falls flat.

The gathering breaks up early. Marisol, looking tired and in pain, says that she has to be getting back to Valverde, and the others quickly use the opportunity to make their escapes.

When people were gone, Ana, in her cups, says, “Make love to me. Take me to bed.”

“Ana.”

“Just fuck me, Pablo.”

Their lovemaking is angry and afterward she sobs.

The day after Giorgio’s funeral, Óscar shows Pablo and Ana an editorial he intends to publish.

“Señores of the organizations disputing the plaza of Ciudad Juárez,” he reads, “we would like to bring to your attention that we are reporters, not fortune-tellers. Thus, we would like you to explain what is it that you want from us? What do you want us to publish or refrain from publishing? You are, at present, the de facto authorities in this city, due to the fact that the legally established rulers have not been able to do anything to keep our colleagues from falling, despite our repeated demands that they do so. And it is for this reason that, faced with this unquestionable reality, we are forced to pose this question, because what we least want is for another of our colleagues to fall victim.

“This is not a surrender on our part, but an offer of a truce. We need to know, at least, what the rules are, for even in a war, there are rules.”

The editorial itself makes headlines internationally. It resonates among the journalistic community in Mexico because so many journalists have been murdered in Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Michoacán.

The Zetas, especially, have established a virtual silence born of terror in the areas that they control, with media in Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa having stopped running stories on the narcotics trade at all, and average people in the street afraid even to speak their names, referring to them instead as “the last letter.”

The paper receives hundreds of letters and e-mails.

No answer, however, comes from the cartels.

No rules, no stated expectations.

Pablo knows what the expectations are; he doesn’t need a rulebook to know the rules: Write what we tell you, and only what we tell you, or we’ll kill you. Take the sobre, or we’ll kill you. Sell us your soul, or we’ll kill you.

It’s a bitter lesson—you think you can rent your soul, but it’s always a sale, and all sales are final.

That night, the envelope man Pablo finds him on the street.

“Tomorrow, pendejo, we see that story or—” He smiles, sticks his two fingers out like a gun, and squeezes the “trigger.”

Ana’s in bed when Pablo gets back. He doesn’t want to wake her so he sleeps on the couch. Or tries to, without a lot of success. He thinks of writing Mateo a goodbye letter, but decides that’s too melodramatic.

He decides to write the Sinaloa article.

Then the Zeta one.

Then neither.

In the morning, he decides, I’ll go into the office and hand Óscar my resignation.

Then I’ll cross the bridge.

–

In the morning Pablo tries to find a way to tell Ana what he’s going to do.

But he can’t find the words.

Or, face it, he tells himself, the courage.

Maybe that’s the way, though, Pablo thinks. Just tell her that you’re afraid, that you don’t want to end up like Armando or Giorgio. She’ll think less of you, but she won’t hate you the way she will if she knows you took money.

Just tell her that you’re afraid.

She’ll believe that.

Five times he tries to open his mouth, but nothing comes out. He tries again as they drive to the office together. He feels like he’s on a conveyor belt headed inexorably for the blades of an abattoir, but can’t yell to stop it.

They get to the office and park the car, cross the street to get a coffee.

Pablo can picture the crushed, disappointed look on El Búho’s face.

He thought about simply typing up his resignation and e-mailing it, but decided that would be too cowardly. Óscar deserves a face-to-face explanation, and an apology, and somehow Pablo feels that he deserves it, too. Deserves to look into Óscar’s hurt eyes and remember his expression. Deserves to hear Óscar’s disappointed words and have them replay in his head. Deserves to walk out of the office in shame, clean out his desk, feel the stares on his back, and then (try to) explain things to Ana.

And then what? he thinks as he sips his café con leche and looks across the street at the office building that’s been the only professional home he’s ever known. You’re done in journalism—no decent paper will hire you. The best you can hope for is to freelance for la nota roja, circling the city like a vulture, picking at its bones.

A creature that makes its living from corpses.

Can’t do it, he thinks.

Can’t and won’t.

Then again, you might not have the chance—you might be one of those corpses, if the narcos get angry that they’ve wasted their money on you and decide to do something about it. Face it, there’s no future for you in journalism and there’s no future for you in Juárez.

Or anywhere in Mexico, for that matter.

You’re going to have to cross the bridge.

Become a pocho.

“You’re particularly uncommunicative this morning,” Ana says.

“Ummm.”

“That’s more like it.”

He sets his cup down and gets up. “I’m going in.”

“I’ll go with you.”

He crosses the street and shows his ID badge to the security officers at the front door, who know him anyway. Getting into the elevator, he acknowledges that this might be the last time and almost changes his mind, but knows he can’t.

He has to say something now, before he goes into Óscar’s office.

“Ana—”

“What?”

“I—”

Óscar appears in the doorway and announces that he wants to see the entire reportorial staff in the conference room immediately.

“I am no longer willing to risk the lives of the people for whom I am professionally and personally responsible,” he says when they’ve assembled, “to report upon a situation that even the best of journalists—and that’s what you are—cannot affect. We will no longer report on the drug situation.”

Ana objects. Red in the face, almost tearful, she asks, “We’re just going to give in to them? Knuckle under? Allow them to intimidate us?”

Óscar has tears in his eyes as well. His cane taps on the floor and his voice quivers as he answers, “I don’t feel that I have a viable choice, Ana.”

“But how is this going to work?” Pablo asks. “Say there’s a murder. We just don’t report it?”

“You report the fact of an apparent homicide,” Óscar says, “but leave it at that. You make no connection to the drug situation.”

“That’s absurd,” Ana says.

“I agree,” Óscar answers. “Our civic life, however, has become an absurdity. This is not a suggestion, this is an instruction. I will wield a heavy editorial pen and simply delete anything you write that might jeopardize the safety of anyone on this paper. Do you understand?”

“I understand that it’s the death of a great newspaper,” Ana says.

“Which I will cheerfully bury,” Óscar says, “before I will bury another one of you. I will announce our new policy in tomorrow’s edition so that the narcos will be notified.”

“What about Giorgio?” Ana presses.

El Búho raises an eyebrow.

“Are we going to investigate it?” Ana asks. “Or just let it go?”

Because the police have let it go, Pablo thinks. Of the over five thousand murders in Juárez since the cartel war began, not a single one has resulted in a conviction. They all know the reality—no one has investigated Giorgio’s murder, and no one is going to. And now Óscar is telling them that they’re not going to, either.

This man, this hero, who once took a narco gun blast and wouldn’t let it stop him, now leans on his cane, and looks tired and old, and says with his silence that he, and they, have been silenced.

Not Ana.

They’re drinking at Oxido that night, one of the clubs still open in the PRONAF Zone, and she has a couple more than she usually does.

“I might as well have taken the money,” she says.

“What do you mean?” Pablo asks.

“When the narcos offered me a bribe,” Ana says, “I should have taken it. They’re our bosses now, right? So they should pay us.”

Pablo drains his beer.

“I’m not letting it go,” Ana says. “They killed our friend and our colleague and I’m not letting it go.”

“Ana, you heard Óscar. What are you going to do?”

“Push,” Ana said. “Push the authorities until they do something about it.”

“Like they did something about Jimena’s murder?” Pablo asks. “Like they did something about the attack on you and Marisol? How about those two women up in the valley? Or the dozens of murders we see every week? Are those the authorities you’re going to?”

“I’ll shame them,” Ana says.

“Ana, they’re shameless.”

He’s scared. If she pushes on this, she could be next.

“Well, I’m not,” Ana mutters. “I’m not shameless.”

“Óscar won’t print what you write.”

“I know,” Ana says.

A little while later Pablo pours Ana into a taxi and takes her home. Puts her to bed and then he goes out again.

Pablo is not by nature heroic.

He knows this about himself and he’s okay with it. But tonight he goes back out because he has to do something to prevent Ana from running headlong off the edge of the cliff. If I can get an answer, he thinks, about who killed Giorgio and why, maybe I can get the story published in a North American paper under a phony byline. Maybe that would satisfy Ana, or even pressure the police to do something about it.

Nor does Pablo look particularly heroic, and he knows that, too. He wears a black, somewhat soiled T-shirt under a black, somewhat soiled untucked shirt with a light windbreaker and a red Los Indios ball cap, and he’s aware that his stomach hangs over his belt.

Now he rings Ramón’s doorbell. It takes a few minutes, then some lights come on and the door cracks open behind the security chain.

“Ramón, it’s me.”

The door opens and Ramón has a pistol pointed at Pablo’s face. “Mierdito, ’mano, what the fuck?”

“I have to talk to you.”

Ramón lets him in. “Don’t wake up the kids, okay?”

They walk into the kitchen. The house is a mini McMansion out in the new suburbs and looks like the generic home of any midlevel manager.

“I haven’t seen our fucking story, Pablo,” Ramón says.

Pablo tells him about Óscar’s decision.

“I guess you’re off the hook, then,” Ramón says. “That’s good—spares us both a lot of pain.”

“Why was Giorgio Valencia killed?”

“Fuck, you just got out of the hot water—”

“Why?”

“He took the wrong pictures.”

“Which wrong pictures?”

“That Cisneros chocha,” Ramón says. “You tapping that, Pablo? You know her, right? Jesus shit, I would like to bang that, I mean before she got, you know, fucked up. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Pablo, it could have been you.”

“Why wasn’t it?” Pablo asks.

“You weren’t on the Zs’ payroll.”

Pablo feels his head spinning. “What are you saying?”

“Your boy Giorgio was sucio,” Ramón says. “Dirty. Like you. Only he was taking the Zs’ money and then he fucked them by doing those pictures of the broad showing off her scars. You want to see my scars, ’Blo? I have some beauties.”

“You have names? Who did it?”

“Fuck, you want to get me killed with you?” Ramón asks. Then he shuts up because he hears Karla coming down the stairs. His wife comes into the kitchen and looks blearily at Pablo.

“Hi, Pablo.”

“Hello, Karla. Nice to see you.”

“Nice to see you.” She looks curiously at Ramón.

“Go back to bed, baby,” Ramón says. “I’ll be back up in a few minutes.”

“Come by sometime for dinner,” Karla says to Pablo.

“I will.”

She walks back upstairs.

“Names?” Ramón asks. “Names? Grow up. What the fuck difference does it make? They’re all the same cat. I’m telling you, Pablo, leave this the fuck alone. Leave it all the fuck alone. Me, I’ve decided to get out of here. Karla’s pregnant again, I got some money set aside on el otro lado. A few little things to take care of and then I’m out of here. You should do the same.”

“I’m a Juarense.”

“Yeah, that’s great,” Ramón says. “Except there ain’t no more Juárez. The Juárez we knew is gone.”

–

When Pablo gets back to Ana’s she’s still up. “Where did you go?”

“We’re not married, Ana.”

“I just asked.”

“Ana, leave this thing with Giorgio alone, okay?”

“What do you know about it?”

“Just leave it be.” It will only break your heart, if it doesn’t get you killed first.

“Pablo, what do you know?”

“I know that Sinatra’s not coming back.”

“What does that mean?”

He doesn’t answer.

There are no answers.

Victoria, Tamaulipas

October 2010

Don Pedro Alejo de Castillo hears a commotion outside his hacienda and goes to see what is happening.

His cook, Lupe, looks terrified, and Don Pedro doesn’t like people upsetting Lupe. She’s been with him for over thirty years, the only woman in his household since his wife, Dorotea, passed away six years ago.

Don Pedro is seventy-seven, still tall and straight-spined. He goes to the door to see men driving around the front of the house in trucks and SUVs, firing AK-47s and AR-15s into the air, honking their horns and shouting obscenities.

Don Pedro doesn’t like that either.

Only a malandro uses obscenity in front of a woman.

Three of the men get out of an SUV and walk up to his front porch. They’re dressed like vaqueros, but he sees right away that they’ve never worked a day in their lives on a ranch.

His has five hundred acres, not large by local standards, but perfectly suited to him. And it sits on the edge of a beautiful lake with ducks and geese and good fishing. He goes out there just before dawn most mornings.

“Are you Alejo de Castillo?” one of the men demands.

Rudely.

“I am Don Pedro Alejo de Castillo, yes.”

“This is your ranch?”

“Yes.”

“We are the Zetas,” the man says, as if it’s supposed to frighten him.

It doesn’t.

Don Pedro has a vague notion that the Zetas are some sort of drug gang that has been causing trouble in the cities, but he is not frightened. He has little to do with the cities, and less to do with drugs.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“We are confiscating this property,” the man says.

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Old man, we’re not asking you. We’re telling you. You have until tonight to leave, or we’ll kill you.”

“Get off my land.”

“We’ll be back.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Don Pedro has an aristocratic manner and bearing, but he is not an aristocrat. His father ran a sawmill, and Pedro grew up working very hard. He turned the one sawmill into two, then five, then twelve, and eventually became a rich man. Don Pedro didn’t inherit this ranch, he earned it the same way he earned the “Don,” from his own hard work.

And he is not going to give it to anyone.

He built the two-story hacienda himself, with the help of local men, and lovingly supervised each detail. The walls are of thick, mud-colored adobe, with deep-set windows. The front door, of heavy wood, is shaded by a deep portal supported by hand-carved zapatas from his own sawmills.

Inside, large log roof beams, called vigas, stretch across the large, whitewashed living room, jointed to the walls with hand-carved corbel brackets. Thin latillas are laid crosshatched across the ceiling. The floors are polished terra-cotta tiles, with Indian carpets laid out. A clay fireplace sits in one corner.

The house is beautiful, understated, and dignified.

Don Pedro is impeccably dressed, as always. Dorotea always dressed well, like a lady, and he would never let her down by dressing as anything other than a gentleman. When he goes to put flowers on her grave, on consecrated ground on the little knoll overlooking her beloved lake, he wears a suit and a tie.

Today he wears a tweed shooting jacket, knit tie, khaki trousers, and hunting boots. Don Pedro is a founding member of the Manuel Silva Hunting and Fishing Club and the ranch will go to the club when he dies, on the stipulation that Lupe and Tomás, who has worked for him for thirty-eight years, can live their lives out here.

He has no children to leave his land to. When Dorotea tried to apologize to him once for not being able to give him children, he put his finger to her lips and said, “You are the sunrise of my life.”

Now Lupe is crying.

She must have heard everything, and Don Pedro doesn’t like this, because he does not like to see a woman cry, and it makes him have even less respect for these “Zetas,” because gentlemen do not conduct business in front of women.