Russell Blake: Night of the Assassin

Then, in the late 1970s, the dynamics had shifted; the smuggling networks that had been engaged in this relatively benign trade took on the burden of moving cocaine through Mexico for the Colombian cartels, and then the money got much bigger as the Cali and Medellin cartels grew increasingly reliant on their Mexican smugglers to get the product to the U.S.. This naturally led to a situation where the Mexicans began getting paid in product, versus cash, driving them to become distributors, as opposed to transporters – and the money involved took another quantum jump. By the early 1990s, the Mexican cartels were handling much of the distribution for the Colombians, whose cartels had disintegrated in the late 1980s with their survivors now focused mainly on manufacturing.

Within a little over a decade, a small business had become a multi-billion dollar industry and the various factions fought it out for the rights to their geographical areas. By 1990, the Sinaloa cartel was the most powerful in all Mexico – in all the world, in fact – primarily because the ‘Godfather’ of the Mexican drug trade, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, was from Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. It was he who ran a hundred percent of the trade through Mexico during the Seventies and Eighties, and he who had the relationships with the Colombians. In the mid-Eighties, he decided to divide up Mexico into regions, so the power that was naturally concentrated in Sinaloa remained there, with the other cartels acting as satellites to that main central group.

That changed when Gallardo went to prison in the late Eighties, which created a vacuum in the leadership and opened the door for the smaller, less important cartels to assert a better foothold. In particular, the Tijuana cartel and the Juarez cartel had jockeyed for greater sway and a larger chunk of the profits, leading to often bloody wars with their Sinaloa brethren.

The group of men watching the horses laughed easily together, cans of Tecate tempering the worst of the mid-day heat. It was fall, the storm season was largely over, but the temperatures could still reach the high nineties during the day, bringing with it substantial humidity. The oldest of the men, Don Miguel Lopez, a tall, lean man with the leathery complexion that came from a lifetime outdoors, had his left hand resting on the shoulder of a ten year old boy, already lanky from the summer’s growth spurt that had left him all arms and legs, an alien in an unfamiliar body. It was his birthday and, at ten, it was time for him to begin learning the skills he’d require to survive in an ever-competitive world. In Mexico, with a head of the household who was one of the original ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel, that translated into more than reading, writing and arithmetic. Don Miguel, the elder statesman of the group, smoothed his mustache and lifted his cowboy hat, wiping away the sweat from his brow with a soiled red cloth handkerchief he carried for that purpose, and then patted the boy’s shoulder.

“It’s time for you to learn about the way of the world. As part of your birthday, I’m handing you over to Emilio here, who will teach you everything you’ll need to know about maintaining a healthy body and mind, as well as about horses and weapons. And who knows; maybe when you’re older, he can even teach you a thing or two about women,” Don Miguel joked. The surrounding men laughed delightedly at his playful sense of fun. “My business will be demanding an increasing amount of my time and I’ll be traveling much of the year, so I’m entrusting you to Emilio’s capable hands. You’re to treat him with the same respect you would afford me. Are we clear on that? He’s your mentor, which is a position of honor, but it’s also one of responsibility, and if you fail to apply yourself it will reflect poorly on him.”

The boy nodded his understanding. He didn’t talk much – had never seen much point to it. Even at his tender age he’d discovered that it wasn’t what people said, it was what they did that counted, so engaging in what he viewed as meaningless banter served no purpose. He looked up at Emilio’s wizened face, battered by the cruel vagaries of a fickle universe, and fixed the man with his gaze – remarkable in its intensity, especially given that he was just a boy.

Emilio regarded him and then grunted, gesturing with his head for the boy to follow him. The pair walked toward the stables and, once out of view of the men, Emilio got down on one knee so as better to get his point across.

“My job is to make you a man. I know your history, and I’m here to tell you nothing matters but the present and the future. Where you’ve been? That’s meaningless. Nobody cares. The only reason the past matters is so you can learn from it. That’s the whole reason making mistakes and surviving them matters. Experience is what we call the mistakes we survive.” Emilio grinned, and tussled the boy’s hair. “And I’ve got a lot of experience. So you’re going to stick with me, eh? Every day, before you go to school, we will spend an hour together learning how to discipline your body. Every afternoon after school, you’ll spend three hours with me, learning how to discipline your mind. Once you have both under total control, we’ll proceed to the fun stuff – learning how to shoot, ride, swim, hunt, and how to stay hidden. But I can’t teach you anything until you have control over yourself.”

The boy glared at him dubiously, his dislike of the situation and his new mentor obvious. Emilio swatted him on the side of the head, just enough to get his attention.

“You see? You don’t have control. You can’t hide your emotions, so you are an open book to anyone who wants to read you. You don’t like me, and it’s obvious; so I now have power over you. You’ve given me that power by failing to contain your feelings, and I can use it to hurt you. So your first lesson is to control your emotions. If not, they’ll control you, and you’ll be blown around like a leaf, always reacting to whatever storm is taking place in your head.”

Even at ten years old, the boy had learned to listen. Emilio could see the wheels turning in his small head as he absorbed what the older man had said.

“It doesn’t matter to me whether we do this the easy way or the hard way. Either will work. If you’re interested in proving you’re stubborn, save your energy for something that matters. You want to prove something, show me you’re determined; you’ll have plenty of chances. My job is to build you into a leader, a man others will look up to, who makes smart decisions with a level head, and who never, ever loses his cool. You’ll soon figure out that it’s better to put some effort into learning what I’m teaching rather than fighting it. In the end, resisting the lessons will just be delaying the inevitable, which is getting to the fun parts. So decide. Make a choice, then eliminate all other possible outcomes. That will be your road. I hope you select a good one,” Emilio concluded, and then opened the barn door and moved inside to the bales of hay. He studied the pile and motioned with his hand to the old pitchfork leaning against the far wall.

“Happy birthday. Starting today, and every day until I tell you that you can stop, I want you to move the hay from these bales, over to this pile by the feeding trough. Spend one hour per day doing it, every morning before school.” Emilio glanced at the boy, who now regarded him impassively. The old man reached into his pocket, and produced a new stainless steel wrist watch, tearing off the tags as he examined the clasp. He looked at the time and then tossed it to the boy, who snatched it out of the air with ease.

“That’s my birthday gift to you. It’s always important to give, in order to get. I see you’re right-handed by your catch. That can be a liability over time. We’ll work together so that you can do any task with either hand, equally comfortably. If you’re ever wounded in one arm, you can use the other, and that edge could be the difference between you living or dying on the floor. Everything I do has a reason. But for now, start on the hay. Do you know how to read a clock? How to tell time on that watch?”