7

Just as Panda had promised, the key slipped easily into the lock, but Margarito still had to throw his weight into the wooden door, which had been warped by the humidity. A fine layer of sand covered the floor.

A large dining room led to the kitchen and laundry room. The wooden furniture was painted white and upholstered in fabrics that were quick to dry, a practical choice for the beaches of La Eternidad. He wanted to lie down right there, but the living room had too many windows and was accessed by two doors: one that opened to the garage and the other to the street. He could easily see the car that just pulled up and parked in front of the house across the way; assuming he could be seen as well, he decided to head upstairs.

His body felt so heavy on the way up it could have been made of cement. It took him a while to reach the second floor, but when he eventually did, he examined the hallway and counted four doors. He chose the fourth and stepped into what was probably the master bedroom.

Whoever owned the place had good taste. There was a kingsize bed with cotton sheets and half a dozen pillows under a mosquito net, two nightstands complete with reading lamps and piles of books, a sofa, and a small desk with a record player and a few LPs on it. The finishing touches to this room and its views of the Gulf were a wooden ceiling fan and the requisite industrial-strength air conditioner that could freeze a whole regiment to death.

Because the room was on the second floor, he could see over the wall surrounding the gated community. The dunes and the sea peeked out to the east, and to the north he could see the highway that brought him there, where the only sign of life was a little grocery store brimming with activity. A few children played around a big dog; a group of people, maybe a family or a crew of fishermen, huddled around a small television intermittently broadcasting a soccer match. Little by little, he was able to make out a metal table emblazoned with the Corona logo, innumerable empty bottles resting on its surface, and three men sitting around it, motionless. Inside the compound, two teenagers started up a game of basketball in front of the house across the street.

I’ll be damned, he thought. He couldn’t turn the light on without attracting their attention.

I wonder how La Muda is doing with her wards, he wondered. She’s been on edge ever since they iced the Bus. I hope she doesn’t slip up. He was dying to listen to the news.

He opened every door along the hallway in search of a television set—Jesus! This guy doesn’t own a TV?—until he finally found a room dedicated to the purpose. He drew the curtains and turned on the set with the volume all the way down. A banner running along the screen announced that it was ten to six in the evening and that the news was about to come on with updates on what happened earlier that day.

Then he went back to the bedroom and dug around in his bag until he found the opiates. He examined the translucent, amber-colored pill bottle the anesthesiologist had given him: the six white pills inside were either poison or a miracle cure. And if he stopped breathing? It didn’t matter; the pain in his arm was unbearable. He opened the bottle and took one of the pills.

He didn’t feel anything right away. This arm could take a long time to heal, he thought. How the hell was he supposed to defend himself? He pictured the man who’d shot at him with an Uzi coming closer, closer. He managed to focus on the man’s features and was surprised by the icy look on his face. He was going to kill me like a dog. He remembered his surprised expression when he shot him in the leg and how frustrated he’d seemed when he was forced to drop his weapon and run. He remembered his son’s body, and the bitch named Sorrow returned to wrap him in a warm embrace.

Jesus, he thought. They killed my son, but I was the one who was supposed to die.

A fresh wave of pain in his arm forced him to lie down on the sofa. In the time it took him to recover, he convinced himself that the kid who’d sold him the pills was bad at math and took another. And then another.

He waited for some indeterminate length of time, then turned off the television because he thought he heard a car coming. There were no cars outside, and night was falling.

Driven by a strange feeling of lucidity, he thought back on his life over the past few years. He asked himself which of the two groups vying for control of the port would benefit more from his death. He couldn’t reach any conclusions, but he told himself the answer was there; it was just that sleep was clouding his vision. He sensed the blood moon rising again and heard people talking nearby, so he went to peek out the window.

He saw a fisherman tying up to a float. For a moment, as the medicine began to flow through the policeman’s veins, the boat rose and fell, alone in the middle of the bay, and the chief thought how he was like that too: floating in limbo.

His eyes fell on two men walking toward him along the beach. Aware that he was visible where he stood, he hid behind the curtain and observed them cautiously, weapon in hand. When they were even with his hideout, the men looked around and seemed to argue about something, staring at the gated community as if it were an immense pyramid, surprised that someone had built it there. Or maybe they were looking at him, figuring out how to get in.

It was so dark already he couldn’t tell if they had weapons. He thought they might just be a distraction, that an armed crew was about to burst through the front door. He struggled to release the safety on his gun: either the pills or the exhaustion had left his fingers clumsy.

He saw one of the men pull some kind of microphone out of his jacket, bring it to his lips, then hold it under the other man’s chin. They were obviously communicating with someone. He was about to shoot them both, but then he saw the glow of two red points in the night and realized they were smoking.

A few minutes later, they tossed their cigarettes with an irritated gesture, like they were being forced from their private paradise. Then they took off their shoes and walked toward the water’s edge, where a third man was already tossing a small net into the sea. More fishermen.

Toward the other end of the bay, a sizable black rock seemed to be moving across the sand. It was a huge turtle, coming to rest. Then he saw the three men run toward the animal, and he realized their plan was to butcher it.

Before he could scream in horror, a door suddenly opened at the end of the hall. A child, or something that had adopted the appearance of a child, stepped out. When he saw the policeman, he smiled and vanished as quickly as he’d come.

After he managed to close his jaw, Margarito walked haltingly into the corridor, his eyes wide with shock.

With every step, the feeling that what he’d seen hadn’t been a child but rather was something else made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

To his surprise, a door he hadn’t noticed earlier stood open at the end of the hall. Its frame was bathed in an intense light, as if it were on fire. He pushed through his inertia and stepped inside.

He found himself in what looked to be a storeroom or a studio, where the master of the house must have dedicated himself to strange pastimes. Aside from a few shelving units as tall as him and full of books and knickknacks that seemed vaguely familiar somehow, the only furniture in the room was a large wooden table. On it was a glass fish tank with a scale model of a boat inside. Nice, he thought. It looks like the Bella Italia—his first cabin cruiser, purchased back in his jackpot days—and he went over to take a closer look.

What he saw nearly knocked him off his feet.

There, in that fish tank, was an exact replica of the Bella Italia, the only boat that had ever meant anything to him. (He’d had two: the first sank in a hurricane and Los Nuevos took the second from him.) He’d bought the twenty-foot Bella Italia with somewhat ill-gotten gains early in his marriage: a white boat just like the one in front of him, with a small cabin where he and his wife and son could rest when the sun got too strong. Every weekend for almost six months they’d go out fishing for a few hours and eat their catch for dinner that night. Those days, before their marriage soured, were the happiest of his life. It was his wife who’d painted the name on the side of the boat, at his suggestion, and there it was, right there on the scale model. The boat rested on a wooden board painted to look like the sea, and there was something else: three little pieces of fabric, one with yellow and white stripes, like the Italian bathing trunks his wife had given him long ago, which he always felt so ridiculous in, and the bright yellow bikini she used to wear. That was it, he thought. It was all downhill from there.

He realized something terrible was happening. He rubbed his eyes, but the little boat was real and it remained right there in front of him: a scale model of reality, sinister in its perfection. Jesus, he thought. Why did Panda send me here? Who owns this place? Who lives here?

A flash inside the fish tank caught his eye: a hand span away from the boat stood an action figure the size of a tin soldier, holding a shiny pistol. The miniature had white hair and pitch-black eyebrows; was wearing a white shirt, gray pants, and boots; and had his arms and legs fixed in a combative pose. He recognized the figure as Elijah, the man who’d brought him to the force. He felt a chill run up his spine when he noticed that up close there were several vertical slashes in the man’s guayabera, right at the chest, and he was holding a coin between his teeth, as if the artists who built the model had gone to great lengths to reproduce the man’s horrible death. It can’t be. It can’t be, he thought. Only a few of us knew those details.

There was another figure to the man’s right, a woman. It took him a long time to realize it was meant to be his mother: a fortune-teller everyone called La Santa. The doll looked like a Barbie, with tan skin and long dark hair, long legs, and a fiery gaze. She was draped in a flowing white dress that ballooned up like a flower in bloom. In her hands, she held a cross and a bundle of herbs. La Santa, he thought. It’s been a long time. She sat in a chair that looked just like the one she’d used in life to read her followers’ fortunes. Whoever made the model had gone to the trouble of leaving a miniature bottle of tequila at her feet; it looked just like the ones his mother had emptied day after day when he was a child. There was a suitcase on the floor next to her, and off to the side he saw the old Jeep from the precinct, the one he’d driven when he was just starting out. A black case rested on the passenger seat: he remembered right away where he’d found it, and what he’d done with it. A wave of nausea overtook him.

There were three tiger cubs, too, playing with what looked like a rag but turned out, on closer inspection, to be part of a human torso, rib cage and all, belonging to a fat man with a bushy mustache. The rest of him lay on the ground between the paws of two bigger tigers going to town on the remains.

A buzzing in his ears broke his concentration. The final element in the fish tank was a tanker truck just like the one that had blocked the road in front of his son. And with that, he was sure that some sinister being was observing and distilling his life.

He wanted to defend himself, but he had no ammunition. To be defensible, he needed to have lived a different life.

An intense light shimmering in the fish tank forced him to look away. He had to blink several times before it began to fade and he was able to feel his way to the door.

He made his way down the hall and didn’t look back, not wanting to know who lived in that house. He stretched out in the master bedroom, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply until he calmed down.

When he finally awoke, it took him a long time to remember where he was. When he saw the sinuous, fleeting tendrils of light that intermittently played across the room, he thought he’d been thrown to the bottom of a swimming pool. He felt something vibrate in his pocket and realized it was his cell phone: someone had been calling him.

He felt heavy, like he’d been tied to a block of cement. His neck hurt so much he wondered if he’d been run over by a Jeep, and his arm was so unresponsive it didn’t seem to be attached to him anymore. From what he could tell, the horse tranquilizer he’d ingested was having contradictory effects on his body: one minute, he felt like a lead glove tossed into the corner of the room, and the next like a fizzy beverage made of equal parts anger, sadness, and a beast driven by furious longing, though he didn’t know for what.

He was still trying to understand what was going on when something hard and pointy walked across his right hand, which was resting on the floor. He pulled it back with a jerk, picturing a scorpion, but the threat proved to be only a small, pink crab that scurried backward, its pincers at the ready, toward the half-open drain grate on the floor of the adjoining bathroom in an attempt to save its little life.

For a moment as long as an Olympic pool, Margarito was a body without a brain stretched out at the bottom of the ocean. As he tried to recall who he was and how he’d gotten there, he felt the sleep leave his body, as if by sitting up in bed he’d spilled a delicious liqueur that could never be recovered. The bitch Sorrow immediately came and sat by his side; moving her huge, dark form, she clasped her jaws around the policeman’s head until he hated the whole world. Then, since there was no way around it, he went back to being himself.

I feel like I’ve been looted, like a car that’s been stripped.

The warped wooden doors, the rust clinging to windows and furniture, and above all, the layers of sand scattered across the floor seemed to suggest that the world had ended the night before and no one had thought to inform him.

He didn’t know how long he’d slept, but he could tell from the tendrils of light pushing their way through the slats of the blinds that the sun was setting. With a heavy sigh, he decided it was probably best to wait a while longer before contacting La Gordis or the general.

He looked at his cell phone. His battery was down to ten percent, and he had fourteen messages and thirty missed calls, four of which came from the public phone La Muda used for emergencies.

Shit. The girl. His plan had been to let her go that afternoon after turning in his resignation, but the afternoon was almost over. Jesus, he thought. Her father must be beside himself, waiting to hear how he was supposed to pay the ransom. By that hour, the handoff should have happened already, but he hadn’t counted on La Tonina, his assistant in the deal, getting killed in a firefight.

He was fucked. He couldn’t call La Muda from his cell phone, much less from the house where he was hiding out, without implicating himself in the kidnapping. He had to get out of there and find a public phone.

He tucked his gun into his waistband, stood, and opened the blinds halfway. The strange light was the result of an intense electrical storm punctuated from time to time by waterspouts. It was an unusual storm, with bursts of light in the clouds looming over the port city answered moments later by lightning on the other side of the bay, not far from the gated community where he found himself. Sometimes lightning would strike two or three times in the same area with varying degrees of intensity before striking once on the other side, so that one lightning bolt in the city would spark frenetic calligraphy across the sky above the open sea; it seemed like an ongoing conversation or the transcription of an urgent message. Or as if two gigantic beings were playing a game of tennis well beyond the grasp of human minds.

Margarito didn’t believe in divine beings. Except for that time he was sure he’d met the devil himself.

Margarito would never forget how, during one of the worst crises of poverty he’d experienced as a teenager, when for weeks it had seemed as if things couldn’t get any worse but they managed to anyway, he went to police headquarters. He asked for Lieutenant Elijah Cohen, because his mother had told him Elijah was a friend of his father’s—back when his father was still alive. They told Margarito he was busy and sent him away, but he tried again every other day or so for a week until he got tired and gave up. When he’d lost all hope, one Monday around midnight a man in a gray suit knocked on the door of the shack where he and his mother lived back then.

His first reaction was confusion: with his goatee and his coyote eyes, the visitor reminded him of the devil, as depicted by the Catholic Church. If the devil was an unusually lively person in constant movement, like a spring.

The newcomer studied him for a moment, then asked if he was La Santa’s kid and why he’d been looking for him. Margarito explained that he’d gone looking for him, yes, to ask for work. When the man asked about his mother, he replied that she was on some retreat with her followers, that she’d been gone for ten days already and he didn’t know when she’d be back. Then the man with the goatee asked if he could speak to him for a moment out in the street, as if some strange law kept him from setting foot inside without an invitation. Margarito wasn’t the type to chicken out, so he went. Out there, on a bench, without so much as shaking his hand first, the visitor began to speak.

“I’m Lieutenant Elijah Cohen. Your father and I worked together a long time ago, down at the shipyard. He was a good man, but gullible. I see he didn’t manage his money too well, either, even though he made quite a bit. It’s a shame, his son living in poverty like this. Do you want to come work for me?”

Margarito didn’t like being around this strange character, who skipped every pleasantry and had the nerve to speak badly or, rather, candidly, about his family’s troubles. Then he saw the precinct’s famous Jeep parked on the corner.

He was about to make a run for it: he’d stolen a television earlier that day, and he thought they’d come to arrest him. Anyone who worked on the force in La Eternidad during that rough stretch in the eighties would remember Lieutenant Elijah Cohen. It was a tough decade, but headquarters had the right team for the job: Chief Albino was there to lead the force and make nice with mayors, congressmen, and other politicians, while Lieutenant Cohen was there to solve the mysteries of La Eternidad. Cohen was the eldest son and black sheep of a wealthy family of entrepreneurs. He was famous for his intelligence, but even more so for his impatience. Though the people of La Eternidad weren’t generally known for their candor, Cohen grew up in a Jewish family that never beat around the bush. While most locals took great pains to surround themselves in a cloud of niceties, Elijah preferred to blow right through them. His life’s passion and greatest talent was studying people. He liked to talk with people from all walks of life and hypothesize about their inner workings, their desires, how they pursued them, what resources they had, how they tended to behave.

The years he’d spent needing to work all sorts of jobs to stay alive had given him both an understanding of a wide range of human temperaments and an edge of caustic irony that tended to emerge at the worst possible moment. Unsurprisingly, he’d never had many friends.

“I know you have a criminal record. You steal, either to live or for fun. Aside from that, is there anything I should know?”

“No, sir,” Margarito lied.

“I also know you’re a man and can handle yourself in a fight. I was standing near you last Carnaval, when you laid those ranchers out. I was going to step in, but then I realized you didn’t need the help, that you could manage those three on your own. The one you knocked out was a boxer. Who taught you to fight?”

“Dunno. Picked it up on the street.”

Elijah flashed a bitter smile.

“I used to be just like you: a hothead with no one to guide me. It might be that I’m getting old, but I’m tired and need someone around who can jump in when it’s time to put on some pressure. If you think you’re that person, you just hit the jackpot.”

Margarito’s life up to that moment had been no picnic. His relationship with his mother had consisted of the following: he would make all sorts of mischief to get her attention, like the time he stole her savings, then she would yell and try to hit him, and he’d run into the street. The more ferocious her insults and her urge to hit him grew, the longer he steered clear of Los Coquitos. No one should have to feel like his own mother hates him. For Margarito, it was the worst feeling imaginable, even worse than knowing his father was dead. That didn’t get any easier, either, and it didn’t help to hear: But if you barely even knew your father, why do you care?

For a while, he made money cleaning windshields along the highway to the airport, until the owner of a grocery store gave him permission to wash cars out front of his place. He’d had to run from the police more often than he would’ve liked. In those days, it was hard to say who Margarito’s friends were; most of the time he’d beat up any kid who went near him. The only one who stuck with him was Flaco Ibarra, who back then was a fat kid with a permanent grin. Margarito would knock him around until he was blue in the face, but El Flaco just kept smiling. Then, because a government inspector—unfazed by her threats to put a hex on him—threatened to report her if she didn’t, La Santa agreed to finally send Margarito to school.

“It won’t do him any good. Just look at how his brothers ended up: one of them’s dead; the other dresses like a woman. I don’t know how this one’s going to turn out, but he’s no angel. None of my children turned out well.”

His first days at school were a nightmare. The older kids made fun of his name: Margarita, Margarita, small and round like a gordita. They laughed at his threadbare clothes, calling him names like Dumpster and Handouts. They made fun of his mother, calling her La Bruja, the witch. Margarito would shove, scratch, or give them a black eye in response—when he wasn’t being pinned down, that is, kicking and biting in self-defense.

The school principal wasn’t surprised by the anger little Margarito carried inside him or how often he beat the other boys up. It was pretty much a daily occurrence; you might say it was the only way he knew how to interact with his classmates, as if hitting them were his way of introducing himself. By the end of the first month, he’d already beaten up nearly every one of the boys, even the ones who were bigger than him, and he had started to hassle the girls who made fun of him. He would tug at their dresses, call them names, and shove them as he passed by. What will become of this child? the principal would wonder. It can’t be easy to have La Santa for a mother.

Once, just once, it looked as though his life might go a different way. It was when he met Miss Lupita. Already alerted to the problem child in her classroom by the school principal, instead of punishing him for stealing food from his classmates, Miss Lupita observed him throughout her first day and stayed on the sidelines when he’d get into fights. The next day she asked him to stay behind during recess.

“All right, Margarito. Come share my lunch and let’s chat a bit.”

Miss Lupita was a very pretty young woman with curly black hair who’d just finished her degree in education. It was the first time anyone had treated him like an adult, and Margarito was so startled by it that he actually acted like one and answered his teacher’s questions more clearly than he’d thought he could. When the boy finished telling her about his brothers and how his mother treated him, she seemed to grow very sad.

“You’re one of those angry young men,” said Elijah, locking him in that blue stare of his that always made Margarito uncomfortable. “I was just like you, at your age. Until Albino handpicked me to work at headquarters. If you want to make a good career for yourself, there are some things you have to learn, and fast. Anyone can learn this stuff by trial and error, but I’m going to show you a shortcut. I only ask one thing: stay loyal. Don’t be like those other deadbeats, and you’ll make a lot more than they do. More importantly, you’ll live a lot longer.”

They were regulars at his favorite bar, a little spot with a palm-thatched roof across from the malecón where people would gather to enjoy the seafood, empanadas, and soup. It was one of the only places Margarito always felt at home.

Three months after hiring him, Elijah was already passing him the toughest cases, and everyone said he’d be chief one day. After spending his early years running from the police, he was about to become one of La Eternidad’s finest.

Elijah taught him a lot and demanded a lot from him, but what Margarito made working for him was barely enough to live on. His prospects finally started looking up one day when he was out on assignment.

Someone had killed a smuggler known as El Gato just as he was getting home. They were examining the scene of the crime when El Dorado, who’d been assigned as his partner that day, pointed to a briefcase hidden behind a few plants in the entryway.

“Hey, check it out! Look what I found!”

Officer Margarito set the briefcase on his knees and opened it. Inside was an overstuffed manila envelope, and inside that …

“Holy shit!”

Stacks of hundred-dollar bills with the bank’s currency bands still on them.

“There must be … I don’t know … at least a hundred grand here.”

“Son of a bitch, no wonder he tried to run.”

Margarito had never seen that much cash in his life.

When they lifted the envelope, out fell a couple of documents and a business card with a message written on it. As soon as he saw the insignia on the card, Margarito knew they couldn’t keep the money.

“Are you crazy?” El Dorado asked.

“I might be crazy, but I’m not high. I know who this belongs to. Don’t know him well, but I know him.”

When he went to return the case to its rightful owner, the men guarding the door of the mansion scoffed at his threadbare pants and worn-out boots. It took him a good forty minutes to convince them he needed to deliver the case to its owner in person, and then another half hour went by before the union leader’s right-hand man, a congressman named Camacho, could be bothered to see him. Margarito was sick of counting the palm trees in the garden, but he wouldn’t open the briefcase for anyone else. Camacho removed his dark glasses at the sight of the money.

“Did Elijah Cohen send you?” he asked.

“No, sir,” said Margarito, swallowing hard. He knew how much of a risk he was taking. “I haven’t told anyone about this.”

The congressman still didn’t trust him.

“You say you’re from here, from the port. You’re not related to the González family that had that notary’s office on Calle Morelos?”

“I don’t know them, sir. We’re from out on a ranch but we moved here, to Los Coquitos.”

“Wait here.”

He showed Margarito to a room, from which the young officer could hear him talking loudly on the phone with someone, erupting from time to time in good- and ill-natured laughter. He came out fifteen minutes later, visibly more relaxed.

“So you’re La Santa’s kid?” he asked. “You should’ve led with that.”

Camacho had put two and two together and couldn’t believe what had come out. Under his mustache, his grin nearly reached his sideburns.

“El Gato’s dead? Makes no difference to us. The union has nothing to do with smuggling or crime. Nothing, you hear? Our leader is a man of great moral stature.”

Based on the stench wafting his way, Margarito guessed that the man had been drinking since the night before. So he answered more shrewdly than he’d thought he could. As if he had no ulterior motive.

“That’s exactly why I brought this here, sir. It seemed crucial to remove these papers from the scene of the crime. To protect the union’s image,” he added, handing him the papers and the business card he’d found at the bottom of the envelope.

The smile faded from the man’s face. His eyes moved between the papers and Margarito for a long while. Then he got to his feet.

“Wait here.”

Margarito watched uneasily as two bodyguards showed up to secure the room, then patted him down and asked for his weapon, but he didn’t put up a fight. No way is he going to have me killed in his own home. Who’d ever heard of a major public figure hiding a corpse in his living room? He’d have to be stupid. Five minutes later, he was invited into the union leader’s office.

Camacho, holding a Cuba libre, sat next to the man in charge. The briefcase was on a table next to the desk. When he saw Margarito, the great Agustín Fernández Vallarta stood and extended his hand.

“Come in, young man. Come in.”

He’d only seen him in photos before, always wearing those iconic dark glasses. As usual, he’d grown his mustache out in a thin horizontal line just above his upper lip, which made his wide mouth look even bigger and gave him a vaguely simian appearance overall. But what surprised Margarito most were the man’s stature and the size of his hands. It was easy to imagine him starting out as a longshoreman and working his way up the ladder before jumping over to the administrative side of things and into the leadership of the petroleros, not letting anyone get in his way.

Margarito knew he was face-to-face with one of the most powerful men in the country. All he needed to do was call a strike among his workers, and the price of gas would go up around the world. But this was not a man who often looked beyond his nation’s borders, unless it was to survey one of the mansions he’d bought in Las Vegas, Padre Island, or Houston—his favorite cities, where he’d go to get away from it all whenever he got the chance. He traveled whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted. It wasn’t unusual to hear of his arrival from Paris, Rome, Spain, or New York—always under the pretext of union business, and always with his mistress and entourage at his side.

He’d read in Proceso that the leader of the oil workers had founded the union with the president’s support in the 1940s, had traded bullets with Communists bankrolled by foreign interests, and had enjoyed the gratitude and support of the Mexican government until the union grew so strong that the same government suddenly needed to bow down to it.

All the while he was sending his enemies to the funeral home behind the scenes, in public the union leader spent his time taking meetings and weaving a tight web of favors granted in exchange for absolute loyalty and obedience. Nothing more, nothing less. He would treat his most trusted staff to an extravagant meal once a month and meet with the engineers that designed the oil wells, the architects in charge of building the workers’ houses, and senators and congressmen from around the country. He would ask each of them what they needed, and they would request personal gifts: money to pay for a daughter’s quinceañera, a new car for the wife, a home loan. They almost never asked for the machinery, specialists, or jobs needed in the poorest areas of the state. Inviting his contacts on one of his international trips, paying for their family vacations, giving them cars or even houses—it was all a drop in the bucket for him. Millions of dollars passed through his hands every day. There wasn’t a single job in the union that didn’t require his approval. No matter how qualified or well-intentioned candidates were, no matter how strong their desire to serve their country, they first had to convince one of the man’s inner circle to give them a chance.

He was very impressed with Margarito’s sense of ethics, the union leader said, underscoring the word ethics.

“I hear you’re La Santa’s boy. Is your mother still alive?”

Good question.

“The last time I saw her, she was still living in the same neighborhood.”

“I see. And your brother was a member of the Caracol collective, no?”

“Yes, sir.” Margarito didn’t know what to say. How did this man know so much about his family? “That was my brother Antonio, but he’s dead now.”

“And you have another brother, the son of a Protestant pastor?”

Margarito wasn’t sure how to respond without completely humiliating himself.

“That’s my brother Enrique.”

“Who goes by Raquel these days and works as a dancer out on the docks in Veracruz. Who’s your father?”

Margarito shrugged. The union leader and his representative exchanged a glance. It was just a flash, but Margarito caught it. The leader turned, walked behind his desk, and went on from there.

“All right, kid. The union appreciates your support. If this had fallen into the wrong hands, it could have damaged a reputation that was years in the making. What am I saying, years? A lifetime. The life of the union. I won’t forget this. Here.”

The moral leader handed him half the smuggler’s money. The policeman refused to take it at first, but the leader insisted. Then the congressman indicated it was time for him to leave and closed the door gently behind him.

To Margarito’s surprise, they reached out to him three times over the next few weeks, always through one of the congressman’s bodyguards. Margarito, go find a dancer they call the Russian and bring her to the beach house; Margarito, a few associates in town from Mexico City are looking for boys and a little something to sniff, go pick them up three grams. And, of course, the king of them all: Margarito, there’s a file sitting on the police chief’s desk: a report on those guys that ended up dead on Las Peras bridge. That file’s better off here. Go bring us whatever your boss has on the case. Obviously, he did. When he’d completed this last assignment, the leader surprised him by calling him in at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. He barely noticed how icy the water was as he showered that morning. He shaved, ironed his best shirt, and splashed himself with the last drops in his bottle of Old Spice. He had a date with destiny.

As had been the case every day since Mr. Agustín Fernández Vallarta took over the leadership of the union, there were vehicles stationed at strategic points along the blocks surrounding his mansion. There were no bodyguards inside, though, because the leader didn’t employ any. No sir, not a single one. The people lining the streets were just close friends and associates concerned about his health and well-being, a few of whom might have carried a badge or passed through a state prison at some point. They didn’t miss a thing behind their dark glasses—courtesy of the leader—as they showed off their shot- and submachine guns, bought by them for their own personal use. The leader never paid for a single gun. You couldn’t tie him to the sale of so much as a firecracker. Anyway, there they were, standing on the corners, keeping an eye on everyone who went into and out of that neighborhood, just as they had done every day since Agustín Fernández Vallarta decided there was no reason to go to the union offices when he could work just as well at home. And especially since the union leader became something more like a spiritual leader, always ready with a warm handshake and a word of advice. Every morning, a long line formed in front of his home under the sun’s first rays: people begging for an audience, hoping to ask him for a favor, or returning to thank him for a favor bestowed. This son of a bitch makes more miracles than San Martín de Porres, Margarito thought. And, lo, a miracle occurred: they did not make him wait.

“The mayor,” began the leader, as soon as he saw Margarito, “asked me what it would take to make me happy again. And I said to him: ‘You miserable filthy rat, a blind man could see the con you’re trying to run a mile away. Don’t think for a minute you can buy me. You can’t buy me with your little favors. I could end you with a phone call. You can’t buy me, but I’ll give you a chance. I’ll take you at your word, you mangy dog, because I’m smarter and more experienced than you, and I know what this port needs, so listen up: we need a new chief of police in this city.’ And the blood drained from his face, because he’s a nobody, and he’s been a nobody as long as I’ve known him: he used to shine shoes outside my office, and that’s all he deserves. He knows he’s on his way out, that he’s got his back against the wall, so I say to him: ‘The new chief has got to be Margarito González.’ What a sigh of relief that bastard gave. You’re all right by him, you know that? Actually, it made me wonder about you a little, the sigh of relief that bastard gave. When I said your name, I saw his soul return to his body. He smiled and said, ‘Yes, sir, right away.’ So there you have it. They fired Albino at two o’clock this morning; he should be down at the office now clearing out his things.”

It took Margarito a moment to react. The leader looked at him impatiently.

“What’s the matter, kid? Cat got your tongue?”

Margarito leaned forward to shake his hand.

“I won’t disappoint you, sir.”

“You already are. Look at those clothes. You can’t go to work like that. Stop off and see Camacho before you go. He’ll help you with whatever you need and give you a little something extra for incidentals. What year is that revolver from? Because that thing’s definitely not a pistol.”

“It’s a Smith and Wesson.”

“It looks like it fell out of last century. Buy yourself one of those new ones. No, wait. Fellas!”

Three of his entourage rushed into the room. The leader whispered something to one of them, who ran off and came back carrying a wooden case that he handed to Don Agustín. Without even looking at it, he walked over to where Margarito was standing and handed him the Colt .38 automatic. Margarito had heard of these guns, imagined them—even dreamed of them—but he’d never seen anything like it: solid metal, a real miniature cannon. The alloy on the grip was pleasant to the touch and textured with that famous crosshatch: once you wrapped your fingers around it, you didn’t want to let go. Against the pitch-black steel, a silver stud on either side of the manufacturer’s imprint gave the piece the elegant look of a cobra. The new chief of police lifted the weapon; it was as heavy as his mother’s old-fashioned iron, and he thought to himself, noticing the sharp protrusion on the grip: I bet this thing would be good for giving someone a knock on the head. It had a nine-round magazine and a hair trigger: with the safety off, it would take only a sneeze. From the other side of the desk, the union leader seemed pleased by the impression he’d made.

“It’s the same one police officers use in the United States. Standard issue.”

“Don Agustín,” said Margarito, practically on his knees. “I’m at your service.”

“I should hope so, my boy. If anyone challenges me, I want you to take care of him. Don’t forget who your leader is.”

The first thing he did was drive the Jeep back to Los Coquitos, in his civilian clothes. He had an envelope with a thousand pesos in small bills in his shirt pocket and a bottle of good tequila in his right hand. He parked the Jeep in front of the kiosk and took the long way around the block to avoid drawing attention. When he walked up to the wooden house with the sheet metal roof, his old lady was chatting with a neighbor out front, and there was a black cat sitting with them. Both the neighbor and the cat ran off when they saw him coming, but the statuesque old woman dressed in white didn’t budge. She simply furrowed her brow as he approached.

“I didn’t know I had any children. What? They don’t give you my messages?”

“Mother.” The chief swallowed hard. “I need to talk to you.”

“I don’t see why. You’ve got a roof over your head. I know you’re shacked up with that floozy upstairs from Don Cristóbal’s bar. That you drink every day and put that powder up your nose.”

“Mother,” he said. “I’m the new chief of police.”

The witch known as La Santa stared at him with eyes as wide as saucers; took another look at the Jeep parked in front of the lottery kiosk, paying special attention to its turret lights; and realized her son wasn’t lying—not about this at least. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Margarito saw his mother’s face brighten, even if only for a second. She quickly went back to her look of displeasure and her crocheting, which she had set aside when he arrived; just as quickly, her expression softened again and she looked Margarito in the eye.

“You still offering a reward for El Tilapia?”

The new chief of police nodded, stunned.

And that was how Margarito’s relationship with his mother was restored, and how her legend continued to grow.

Margarito’s working relationship with his mother lasted until shortly before she died. After months on bad terms over something that was said one liquor-soaked night, she asked him through several different channels to pay her a visit. She wouldn’t walk again, not on her own, anyway. Margarito remembered how much trouble she’d had moving around those last few months.

“I walk like a parakeet,” she would say. All the aches and pains of old age had come crashing down on her at once.

The day he’d gone to see her on her deathbed, La Santa had ordered him to sit down and listen. Convinced she was going to put a curse on him or criticize him with her last breath, Margarito was unprepared for what he heard.

“You’ll be put to three brutal tests before your time runs out. And you will understand what you’ve sown. Why we’re put on this earth.”

Margarito looked at the neighbors surrounding his mother, who shook their heads.

“She’s delirious.”

“I’m not delirious. There’s something else.”

She lay back and took Margarito’s hand.

“You have another son out there. You have to find him—and acknowledge him,” she said and immediately added: “Strange. I feel a wave pulling me backward. Am I being carried off by a wave?” Her house was six miles from the beach, but no one rushed to correct her.

When it was all over, her faithful neighbor Ubalda and nearly a dozen girls between twelve and fifteen years old, all of whom his mother had taken under her wing, stood around her bed and wept. When Margarito got to his feet, he handed Ubalda an envelope.

“Here. Make the arrangements how she would have wanted.”

He stood there like a zombie while the neighbor and girls tended to his mother’s body. As he was about to leave, he noticed a flash of red between the dead woman’s fingers. He hesitated a moment before going over to pry them open. Of course he would have liked for her to reach out all of a sudden, for her death to have been some kind of mistake (who wouldn’t, in his place?). But La Santa’s strange journey through this life had reached its end, so Margarito opened her hand and turned it over. How funny. Now I’m the one reading your palm, mi Santa. His mother had one last surprise in store for him: clasped in her palm was one of the little prayer cards she’d had made up when she was younger and people still believed in her powers of divination. Scrawled across it in a shaky hand was: For Margarito. That, he definitely didn’t expect. He took one last look at La Santa, tucked the prayer card away, and hightailed it out of there.

First, they brought in the head of Nuevo León’s police force. No one liked that, so he got killed one night as he walked through his front door. Then they made a general from San Luis named Aragón the chief of police, but the little angel only arrested Mr. Obregón’s men and didn’t hit the new guys with so much as a feather duster, so Obregón’s people had him executed on the beach. Next came Chief Albino, then Lieutenant Elijah, sad memories both: the first one forced into retirement, and the second murdered in his own home. And now it was Margarito’s turn.

The murder of Elijah Cohen marked Margarito’s life as few things had. It’s not every day you’re called on to identify the mutilated body of your mentor. The crime, which was never solved—yet another of the precinct’s many disgraces—was exceptionally vicious, and it gradually became a point of reference. Whenever a cop was about to piss off the oldest criminal organization operating in the port—one that had managed to operate under the radar for decades—whenever anyone was about to act against the best interest of that group, there was always some helpful colleague nearby, ready to repeat the mantra: “Remember what they did to Elijah?”

Of course Margarito remembers. It was 1981, and he’d made a long weekend for himself and gone on a three-day bender. When he got back to the precinct, everyone had seemed nervous around him. No one would talk to him or make eye contact. Cops always know when one of their own is in a bad way. They don’t need evidence; their intuition is more than enough.

“What happened?” he asked one of the secretaries.

“Ask the chief,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.”

And the girl hurried off to deal with some urgent imaginary business at the other end of the office, never taking her eyes off him.

“Where were you last weekend?” asked Chief Albino, who was accompanied that day by the two most trusted members of his security detail. One sat on either side of Margarito.

“I was on a little getaway with a young woman.”

“Does this young woman have a name and telephone number? Can she corroborate your story?”

Margarito, surprised, raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve even got receipts, if you like.”

“Let me see them,” said the chief, holding out his hand. “And while we’re at it, might as well give me your gun.”

Margarito obeyed both orders. He was well aware that involving the gorgeous Italian girl he was seeing would be disastrous for the relationship, but the young police officer had no choice but to give up her phone number and address.

“Right now, she’s at my place.”

The chief sent someone in a patrol car over to check out Margarito’s alibi, took the gun, and asked, “So you really don’t know what they did to Elijah?”

“What happened?”

The chief explained to Margarito that a bus driver had found his body where it was dumped on the outskirts of the city and had called it in as soon as he got back to the depot. Barefoot, naked from the waist down, blood-soaked shirt, arms and fingers broken, his torso looking like ground meat from all the stab wounds, an expression of intense pain on his face. His arms were outstretched, and a heavy rag had been shoved down his throat to muffle his screams. It almost looked as if his corpse was still fighting against the inevitable. They didn’t hack off his tongue or genitals, the way they did with rats and rapists, but they did take his eyes.

Margarito never forgot the image of the man who’d taught him so much. He’d seen something he shouldn’t have seen or refused to cooperate with someone, and that was the end of him. To be honest, though, Margarito had seen it coming.

Lieutenant Elijah’s lucky star had begun to fade when he started distancing himself from his friends in the criminal underworld. He didn’t trust Margarito anymore, so he’d taken to giving him assignments that were total wastes of time: patrolling neighborhoods where nothing happened, serving as a messenger or driver for one politician or another, following up on reports filed by mischievous kids or little old ladies with nothing better to do.

He knew trouble was brewing when Elijah’s informants—the skittish, untrusting types he’d meet with in bars—vanished from the piers. They were all on the run. One time, on an errand for a politician in the bar of the port’s fanciest hotel, Margarito realized he was somewhere he shouldn’t be when he saw Elijah sitting at a table in the back, chatting casually but without a smile on his face with one of the port’s better-known dealers: Antonio Gray, who sold marijuana on the malecón. It was him, no question about it: the thick beard, the crisp checked shirt that looked fresh off the rack, the designer pants and fancy shoes. He’d realized that his boss and mentor was into some serious shit when he saw the look on the other man’s face. Elijah had pretended not to see him, and a little while later they found his body.

He knew no one was going to step up to investigate Elijah’s death. The lieutenant’s murder was so shocking that the newspapers treated it with absolute discretion, publishing only an obituary and a notice paid for by the family, indicating where the funeral would be held. That was all. It was the kind of thing the government kept quiet.

He spent the next few weeks searching his soul and wondering which, of all the cases Elijah was working at the time of his death, could have made his mentor as nervous and irritable as he’d been in his final days. Honestly, he’d been unbearable. Margarito questioned the officers who worked with Elijah while he’d been off duty, but all he got was the sense that none of them had anything resembling a lead. He spoke with El Tigre Obregón, who was still alive back then and had gone to the funeral, but the man swore up and down he had nothing to do with it.

“Whoever did this is a monster.”

In this general climate of suspicion, Margarito kept a close eye on the officers around him for the next few weeks. Hell if he didn’t miss the old man.

He had only one fight with Elijah in more than ten years that he could remember, but it was decisive. Elijah had told him how an organization that had recently arrived from the other side of the country had killed two men in the trade with unprecedented brutality down near the beach. He’d never seen anything like it, he said; it was totally unacceptable. Then he cracked a wry smile.

“You think your buddy El Tigre Obregón was a little angel all those years? He iced his share of enemies and traitors too. We just haven’t figured out where he buried them yet. I’m not holding my breath, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a tip one day and discovered a bunch of missing persons in a secret graveyard out there on one of his ranches in the sierra. The only difference between the guys who were already here and the ones arriving now is that the old guard liked to do things quietly, keep clear of the rest of society, and the new guys are in a hurry. They want to make their presence felt, mark their territory. They want to rule by fear. Like we were all born yesterday.”

Elijah leaned toward him.

“Don’t forget Mr. Baldomero’s ranch—or the one they said belonged to him. Ten years ago, we got a report that there’s people buried out there, and we went out to investigate: twelve bodies we found, killed execution-style. Just as we were checking to make sure they weren’t people from the port who’d gone missing, an order comes in from the higher-ups: Leave it alone. So we did.”

“What are you proposing?”

“We’ve put up with these bastards long enough. Let’s get rid of the problem.”

“You’re nuts, Elijah.”

“We’ve always gone at this thing half-assed. We’ll do it right this time. There’s an airplane arriving from Bolivia on Tuesday: we take out the pilot, seize the coke, and use what we get for it to buy weapons. Then we run those assholes out.”

“Not interested.”

“But that’s just the beginning. We need to get a group together, people we trust, and go after Los Nuevos and the people close to your godson. Otherwise Los Nuevos are going to gather some serious fucking momentum, and there’ll be no stopping them. We need to hit them now.”

Margarito hesitated, beer in hand. Long enough that old Elijah saw his window and took it: “So? You in?”

Margarito set the bottle on the table.

“You don’t take advice, so I won’t bother giving you any.”

“I trust you’ll keep quiet. Otherwise, you’re dead.”

“Don’t threaten me.”

“It’s not a threat; it’s the truth.”

Margarito stood and left without another word. And that was the end of that friendship.

There’s a little room deep down inside Margarito, a little room he keeps locked with a dead bolt, where he mourns the way his relationship with his mentor fell apart. He went to see the old man later that night, after several tequilas. La Tonina was with him. When he saw Margarito, Elijah had said, “So it’s you they sent.”

It went so badly for him because he tried to defend himself. He almost got away a couple of times. Like when he tried to sneak out the kitchen window. If La Tonina hadn’t grabbed him by the legs and used those knives, he would have been long gone. It’s true: his body ended up in pretty bad shape, so in a gesture of goodwill toward the family, Margarito decided it would be best to dump it somewhere deserted. So it wouldn’t be found. His only mistake was leaving the job to La Tonina. It didn’t take them more than a half hour to find him, out there on the outskirts of the city.

So, whenever someone asks if he remembers what happened to Elijah, Margarito has to be careful not to give the answer he desperately wants to: “No, not really. I was pretty drunk that night.”