The Cartel (33 page)

Martín does look like a good player, a graceful rider, and aggressive in going after the ball. Keller learns that he’s a “number two” on his team, responsible for feeding passes to the leading scorer and also for defense. It’s the most “tactical” role on the team, Yvette tells Keller, who’s not surprised.

The score is tied 4–4 at the end of two chukkers—halftime.

Yvette stands up. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a tradition.”

With the rest of the crowd they walk onto the playing field for the “divot-stamping,” replacing the sod that the horses’ hooves kicked up. Everyone does it to make the field clean and safe for the second half, but also to socialize.

Yvette introduces him.

Keller meets bankers and their wives, diplomats and their wives, he meets Laura Amaro.

Laura and Yvette are good friends.

“Where is your husband today?” Yvette asks.

“Working.”

“Poor man.”

“The president keeps him busy.” She turns to Keller. “My husband, Benjamín, works in the administration.”

“Ah.”

“I barely see him anymore,” Laura says with a pout. “I live at Yvette’s house more than I do at mine.”

“Can you come to the house after?” Yvette asks.

“There’s nothing stopping me,” Laura says. “Maybe Benjamín can join us.”

“Call him and say that I insist,” Yvette says.

“Well, that should scare him.”

They walk around, replacing divots and talking. Then Yvette points out a striking woman chatting with a tall, broad-smiling man in an impeccably cut Italian suit.

“Do you recognize the woman?” Yvette asks.

“No.”

“The president’s wife,” Yvette says. “The first lady.”

“Do you want to go over?”

Yvette shakes her head. “I’m not there yet. Anyway, there’ll be a new first lady soon, won’t there? God send her husband is PAN.”

Halftime ends and they go back to their seats.

The second half is more intense than the first. The sporting atmosphere becomes more competitive, the play more physical. Once, when it looks like Martín’s horse is about to topple, Yvette reaches over and grabs Keller’s hand.

She keeps it there for several seconds, squeezes, and then lets go.

The match is a 6–6 tie when Martín bursts his gray horse forward, “hooks” the mallet of the opposing player, and blocks it. Shouldering the other player aside, he takes the ball and drives down the field.

Keller sees the intensity in Yvette’s eyes as her husband gallops ahead.

One opponent stands between him and the goal.

Martín raises his mallet over his head, swings it down, and, at the last second, passes to his teammate, who scores the winner.

—

Laura Amaro’s overworked husband doesn’t show up at dinner, so Yvette sits Keller next to her at dinner as her “date.”

“Benjamín books the president’s travel,” Laura explains, “so it’s a seven-day-a-week job.”

“Important, though,” Keller says.

“Oh, yes, we’re all very important,” Laura answers. “Just ask us. Of course he might be out of a job soon.”

“Do you really think PRD can win?” Keller asks. PRD is a left-wing coalition that basically replaced PRI as the main opposition party. Its presidential candidate, Manuel López Obrador, was the mayor of Mexico City and had seen a commanding lead in the polls fade against the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón.

“I think it’s going to be close,” Laura says. “So does Benjamín. It would be a disaster for the country, though, if we lose. I think your people in Washington share this opinion, don’t they?”

“I think so, yes.”

Keller also thinks this—the center of the Mexican drug trade isn’t in the frontline border cities of Tijuana, Juárez, or Laredo.

Or even in the heartland of Sinaloa.

It’s here, in Mexico City.

—

“You’re kissing a cobra,” Martín Tapia says as he climbs into bed next to his wife.

“But it’s so much fun.”

“If Adán knew that Keller was a guest here…”

“ ‘Adán, Adán, Adán,’ ” Yvette says, “ ‘Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?’ ”

“Diego is devoted to him.”

“I know,” Yvette says, turning to her husband, “they were boys together. Diego’s problem is that he doesn’t see his own worth.”

“He’s loyal.”

“Loyalty should extend both ways.”

“Meaning?”

“Adán’s getting closer and closer to Nacho Esparza,” Yvette says. “First he gives him Tijuana, now he’s sniffing around the daughter.”

“She’s seventeen.”

“There’s no harm in keeping Keller close,” Yvette says. “He might come in handy for us, and if not, he’s always worth two million on the hoof, isn’t he? Not to mention the Emperor’s undying gratitude.”

Yvette slides down in the bed.

“Let me show you,” she says, “how much fun it is kissing the cobra.”

—

Keller waits outside the Marriott in a rented car.

Arroyo comes out with the case and gets into his Lexus. Up Paseo de la Reforma into Colonia Polanco, then onto Avenida Rubén Dario, flanking Chapultepec Park.

The Lexus pulls over by the park.

A woman walks out, the passenger door opens, and she takes the suitcase. Keller doesn’t have to risk following the woman to learn her identity, because he’s already had dinner with her.

He watches Laura Amaro walk away.

Jesus Christ, he thinks. Laura hands the money to her husband, Benjamín, who takes it to Los Pinos.

—

Three weeks later, on election night, Keller and Marisol join thousands of people gathered in the Zócalo to await the results.

The Zócalo is Mexico City’s main square, one of the largest in the world. The Palacio Nacional, built on the grounds of Moctezuma’s palace, flanks the square to the east, and on the west is the Portal de Mercaderes. The mundane Federal District office buildings are on the southern edge, while the north of the square is dominated by the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary, the largest church in the Americas, the construction of which began in 1573. It’s said that Cortés himself laid the cornerstone. Its twin bell towers made of red
tezontle
stone loom over the Zócalo like sentries.

The square itself is huge and empty, save for the actual
zócalo,
the base for a column that was never built which now supports a flagpole with a giant Mexican flag. It has been a gathering place for centuries, and Keller has learned that the Aztec center of the universe was said to have been just northeast of here, at the old Templo Nachor.

Standing in the Zócalo makes you feel very small; as an American, it makes you feel that your country is very young.

Marisol is a political animal, Keller has discovered, a passionate leftist. She wept during
Pan’s Labyrinth,
first from anger at the Spanish Fascists and afterward with pride that such a beautiful film had been made by a Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro.

As the election neared, her conversation became more and more obsessed with politics, to the point where she would apologize, change the subject, and then get back to politics a few minutes later.

Keller didn’t mind—he liked her passion, and the truth was that he couldn’t help but compare her to Althea, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal for whom Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were demonic figures.

“You don’t know what poverty is in the U.S.,” Marisol said to him one night over dinner at an Argentine place.

“Have you seen the South Bronx?”

“Have you seen the
colonias
of Juárez?” Marisol countered. “Or the rural poverty out in the valley, where I come from? I’m telling you, Arturo, the conflict between right and left is different in Mexico.”

So she detests PAN, is wholeheartedly and hopefully PRD, and the night before the election, she asked Keller out for a date.

To watch the results in the Zócalo.

Keller isn’t a very political person, more wearily cynical after his experiences with Washington. Marisol knew this, and was very pleased when he agreed to go to the Zócalo, because she knew he was doing it for her.

Now they stand in the enormous public square with a crowd that Keller guesses to be about fifty thousand. The mood is tense, and all day they have heard rumors of voter fraud—ballot boxes stuffed, ballots tossed away, small rural communities threatened with the loss of government benefits if they vote PRD.

Everyone knows it’s going to be close, so the air is electric as they wait for the results of a peculiar Mexican procedure known as the
Cuenta Rápida
—the “Quick Count.” The election commission takes a sampling of votes from some seven thousand districts when the polls close at 10:00 p.m. If the margin for one candidate is greater than .06 percent, a winner would be predicted; if less, the election would be determined “too close to call” until a complete counting of the votes.

At 11:00 that night, the election commissioner goes on television to an-nounce that the Quick Count showed that the results are “too close to call,” but he refuses to give the actual numbers.

“We’re being robbed,” Marisol says as they make the slow walk through the crowd from the Zócalo. “Everyone knows that the people want the PRD. They’re going to cook the books.”

“You don’t know that,” Keller answers, although he’s worried. Worried for her, that she’ll be hurt and disappointed; worried for himself, that PAN will take the election—fairly or unfairly—and that it will be business as usual for the Tapia money network.

He’s in a quandary about what to do with the information he has about the money pipeline going to Los Pinos.

If he tells Aguilar or Vera, he could be instantly expelled from the country.

Worse, he doesn’t know if one or both are implicated.

He should take the information to Taylor, let DEA and the rest of the alphabet soup take over the investigation, then deal with its consequences on the highest level.

But who in DEA is going to take on Los Pinos? The issue would be kicked up to Justice, then over to State, and probably die a slow death in the hallways. Because Laura Amaro is right—the current conservative administration in the White House wants PAN to win this election. They’d do nothing to rock that boat and risk the Mexican election going to the left wing.

So the smartest thing to do for the time being is nothing.

Continue the investigation and keep it from his colleagues and superiors until after the election.

Everything depends on the election.

The official count starts three days later.

The election commission collects all the sealed ballot packages from the districts and examines them for signs of alterations. Representatives from the various parties are present and can make objections.

Marisol sits up all night by the television in her condo.

Keller waits with her. They drink coffee and make nervous conversation as the numbers start to come in and López Obrador jumps out to an early lead.

“I told you,” Marisol says. “The country wants PRD.”

Then the erosion begins. It’s like watching a riverbank collapse under a slow flood of water. The lead dwindles and then collapses as results from the northern districts are slow arriving.

“That’s me,” Marisol says. “That’s my home.”

When the northern votes finally come in, they’re strongly for Calderón.

“I don’t believe it,” Marisol says. “I know the people there, they’re poor and they’re not PAN.”

Early the next morning, the official result is announced.

Calderón has won by a mere 243,934 votes.

0.58 percent.

A hanging chad, Keller thinks.

Marisol cries.

Then she gets angry.

—

They take to the streets.

Two days after the official tally, almost three hundred thousand people demonstrate in the Zócalo and listen to PRD speakers talk about voter fraud. A week later, the crowd swells to half a million people who demand that the courts order a recount.

Marisol is one of them.

Keller another.

He goes to protect her, but he also goes because it’s just such a spectacle. When was the last time, if ever, that half a million Americans gathered to fight for democracy? He doesn’t know if the accusations of voter fraud are right or wrong, but he’s impressed—no,
moved
—that they care in those numbers, that it means something to them. He’d watched an American election stolen with barely a whimper.

The ambassador would shit bricks if he knew that Keller was there, Tim Taylor would probably hemorrhage through the nose, but Keller doesn’t care. It’s an historic moment and he’s not going to miss it, and of course he’s aware that there’s something else.

He might be falling in love.

It seems unlikely at his age and place in life. Marisol is twenty years younger (although she would be the first to say that she has an “old soul”) and a loyal citizen of a country he might get tossed out of any day.

They haven’t slept together yet—their physical contact has been confined to kisses—but the physical attraction is there. He certainly feels it, and thinks she does as well, from the nature of those kisses and her sighs when they say good night.

But she’s a Mexican woman of a certain class, and a Mexican woman of a certain class doesn’t go to bed on the first date or the third. He knows that if it happens it won’t be casual for her—she’s been through the demise of a marriage and now she’s going to take her time.

Art Keller is no lovestruck fool, no victim of a midlife crisis. He knows that there are problems, problems he hasn’t talked to her about. How do you tell a woman you’re reluctant to get involved because it puts her in danger? How do you deliver the melodramatic, surreal news that there’s a multimillion-dollar price on your head that someone might try to collect any moment, and that you don’t want her to be in range of an errant bullet?

It’s surreal, like so much of the narco-world—and yet, like so much of the narco-world, all
too
real.

So Keller knows he shouldn’t be seeing her at all.

Her, or anyone else.

But being with her feels too good, too natural, too “right,” to employ a cliché from pop music. He likes Marisol, he respects her, he admires her (okay, yes, he lusts after her), he might be falling in love.