The Cartel (71 page)

“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.

“I think,” Don Pedro says, “that you should go into town so you can spend the weekend with your grandchildren.”

“Don Pedro—”

“Don’t cry. Everything will be all right.”

“But—”

“I have that beautiful duck that you made me last night,” Don Pedro says. “I can warm that up for dinner. Go pack a few things, now.”

He finds Tomás in the barn, cleaning the heads on the new John Deere tractor that they are both so proud of.

“Who were those men?” Tomás asks.

“Some
malandros.
Idiots.” He tells Tomás to take Lupe into Victoria and to stay there himself, in the hotel where Don Pedro has an account.

“I’m staying with you,” Tomás says. His hair has gone silver, and his strong hands are twisted with arthritis. “I can shoot.”

“I know you can.” He must also have heard everything, Don Pedro thinks. But pigeons and ducks are not men. Not even deer are men. “I need you to take care of the others. I’m sending them, too.”

“You will be alone, Don Pedro.”

That is the idea, Don Pedro thinks. “An old man needs a little solitude from time to time.”

“I won’t leave you,” Tomás says. “I have served you for thirty-eight years—”

“So now is not the time to disobey me,” Don Pedro says. But he knows he has to save this good man’s face, preserve his pride. “You will take my shotgun. The Beretta, the good one. I am counting on you to see that everyone gets safely to town. Go on now, wash up. It is not a drive to make at night.”

He goes into his study and sits in the old, cracked leather chair and reads a book, his habit in the afternoon. Today it is Quevedo’s
The Swindler.
“I come from Segovia; my father was called Clemente Pablo…”

Don Pedro falls asleep reading.

—

He wakes up when Tomás comes in and says that they are ready to leave. Don Pedro walks outside to see Lupe in the front seat of the old International Harvester, gripping her small suitcase on her lap, and Paola and Esteban in the back.

They are all crying.

Esteban is a young fool, a nineteen-year-old who is as lazy as all nineteen-year-olds but still worth a hundred of these Zetas. He takes good care of the horses and will be a good man someday.

Paola is a lovely young creature, a dismally hopeless maid who should get married to a lovestruck young man and have beautiful children.

None of these beloved people should be here tonight.

“Have a good weekend and behave yourselves,” he says to them. “I will see you first thing on Monday morning, and don’t be late.”

Paola says, “Don Pedro—”

“Get going now. I will see you soon.”

He watches the car rumble down the old road.

When they are gone past the turning, he walks down to the lake. How Dorotea loved this lake. He remembers lying down with her in a bed of wild lilacs and the scent that the flowers crushed under her made.

The priest who married them rode across the Río Bravo on the back of a donkey, and fell off in the river and so was an hour late, and wet and grumpy as an old hen, but it didn’t matter.

Don Pedro watches the sun set over the lake.

Watches the ducks swim into the thick green brush at the edge.

Then he walks back to the house.

He unlocks the gun room and carefully selects a .30-40 Krag, a Mannlicher-Schönauer, the Winchester 70, the Winchester 74, and the Savage 99.

Every fine rifle brings a memory with it.

The Savage brings to mind that fine trip to Montana with Julio and Teddy, old friends who have since passed on, and amber whiskeys by the campfire to ward off the chill of night.

The Winchesters recall long slogs in Durango.

The Mannlicher—that was the trip to Kenya and Tanganyika and long slow afternoons under canvas with Dorotea, and her sitting outside the tent reading or painting and the old African cook who made goat better than they do in Mexico.

The Krag…The Krag was a birthday gift from Dorotea, and she was so pleased that he was so pleased…

Don Pedro takes each rifle and leans it by one of the windows cut into the thick adobe walls. Then he sets a box of ammunition by each rifle.

He heats the leftover duck and sits down with it and a bottle of strong red wine and eats contentedly. He shot the duck himself, as he shoots the pigeon that Lupe makes into such a fine meal with wild rice.

After dinner he goes upstairs and takes a long bath, scrubbing his skin to a pink glow, and then shaves slowly and carefully and trims his pencil mustache because it is important that he look his best for Dorotea.

He puts on a fresh white shirt with French sleeves and the cuff links that Dorotea gave him on their tenth anniversary, and then slips on a tweed shooting jacket, wool trousers, and a silk tie in a rich burgundy color that she particularly favored.

Satisfied with his appearance in the mirror, he goes back downstairs and pours himself two fingers of single-malt scotch and sips it as he reads more of Quevedo and falls asleep again in his chair.

Honking horns, shouts, and laughter wake him up, and he looks at the clock on the mantel. It’s a little after four in the morning, just a little earlier than he usually rises. He walks to the window by the Savage and looks out. The idiots are driving around in circles like Indians in a bad North American western film, whooping and shooting into the air and shouting more of their profanity.

They finally stop, and the man who came to his door earlier stands up in the roof hatch of his vehicle and yells, “Alejo de Castillo, you son of a—”

Don Pedro’s shot hits him in the forehead.

Don Pedro moves to the next window.

The cars and trucks have stopped and men are jumping out. Don Pedro aims at one who is running, remembers to lead him less than one would a deer, and brings him down with a single shot from the Krag. Moving to the next window, he looks back to see bullets coming through the window that he just vacated.

These idiots apparently believe that everyone is as idiotic as they are.

He lifts the Mannlicher to his shoulder and picks out a Zeta who seems to be second in charge and shoots the man between the eyes, and then moves to the next window.

One of the idiots has the brains to get down, and is slithering like a snake toward the front door. Don Pedro has never shot a snake with a rifle before—he has shot many rattlesnakes with a pistol—but the principle is the same and he dispatches him with a shot from the Winchester 70 as he sees two more Zetas rush the door.

He keeps the Winchester 70, picks up the 74, and stands ten feet away from the door, a rifle in each hand.

There is a small blast, the door swings open, and Don Pedro fires both rifles, hitting both men in the stomach and gutting them.

They writhe on the front porch, screaming in agony, bleeding all over the wood, which is going to have to be sand-stoned now, which will annoy lazy Esteban to no end and require supervision.

Don Pedro goes back to the first window and sees the Zetas run back and take cover behind their vehicles.

He hears them talk, and then he sees the tubes come out and he knows that they’re grenade launchers, which is annoying because now he knows that there will be no house for Lupe to move back into. But he has left a will with Armando Sifuentes in town, with specific instructions as to what to do if there were a fire, and he is confident that the lawyer will take care of it.

Don Pedro also knows that he will not be there himself to see the house rebuilt and he feels a little sad, but mostly he feels great joy because he will be with Dorotea soon and he’s glad that he shaved.

When the fire starts, he smells not ash but wild lilacs.

—

When Keller and the FES unit get there, Don Pedro’s hacienda is a smoking ruin, four corpses lie in front of the house, and two wounded Zetas in fetal positions twitch on the front porch.

Don Pedro’s man, Tomás, had called the marine post in Monterrey and they’d choppered there as soon as they could, and Keller is dismayed to see that they’re too late.

Tomás finds Don Pedro’s body and kneels by it weeping.

With a little prodding, literally, the wounded Zetas tell the story of what happened. Keller learns that neither of them was involved in the attack on Marisol, but that one of the dead men was.

I owe you one, Don Pedro, Keller thinks.

He must have been a hell of a man. The Zetas were so afraid of him they left behind their dead and wouldn’t even go up to the shell of the house to retrieve their wounded.

Keller knows that they’ll never come back.

“Where are they now?” one of the marines asks.

The wounded Zeta doesn’t want to give it up. “I took an oath.”

“You took an oath never to leave a wounded comrade behind, too,” Keller says. “What happened to that? You think they’ll honor their promise to take care of your families? Those days are over. Tell us where they went and we’ll get you to a hospital. I’m not saying you’ll make it, but you won’t die in agony.”

“We have morphine,” one of the FES says.

The other wounded Zeta groans and says, “They’re in a camp. An hour north of here. Outside San Fernando.”

The marine picks up one of Don Pedro’s Winchesters and puts two shots into each Zeta’s head.

Morphine.

“Don Pedro killed six of them,” the marine says to Keller.

“He was a fine man,” Tomás says. “You should have known him.”