Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“You ever try boxing yourself?” Art asked.

Adan shook his head. “I’m small, but I’m slow. Raul, he’s the fighter in the family.”

“Well, I think I fought my last match.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

They both laughed.

It’s a funny thing, how friendships are formed.

Art would think about that years later. A sparring match, a drunken night, an afternoon at a sidewalk cafe. Conversation, ambitions shared over shared dishes, bottles and hours. Bullshit tossed back and forth. Laughs.

Art would think about that, the realization that until Adan Barrera, he’d never really had a friend.

He had Althie, but that was different.

You can describe your wife, truthfully, as your best friend, but it’s not the same thing. It’s not that male thing, that brother-you-never-had, guy-you-hang-out-with thing.

Cuates, amigos, almost hermanos.

Hard to know how that happens.

Maybe what Adan saw in Art was what he didn’t find in his own brother-an intelligence, a seriousness, a maturity he didn’t have himself but wanted. Maybe what Art saw in Adan… Christ, later he’d try for years to explain it, even to himself. It was just that, back in those days, Adan Barrera was a good guy. He really was, or at least it seemed that way. Whatever it was that was lying dormant inside him…

Maybe it lies in all of us, Art would later think.

It sure as hell did in me.

The power of the dog.

It was Adan, inevitably, who introduced him to Tio.

Six weeks later, Art was lying on his bed in his hotel room, watching a soccer match on TV, feeling shitty because Tim Taylor had just received the okay to reassign him. Probably send me to Iowa to check if drugstores are complying with regulations on prescribing cough medicine or something, Art thought.

Career over.

There was a knock at the door.

Art opened it to see a man in a black suit, white shirt and skinny black tie. Hair slicked back in the old-fashioned style, pencil mustache, eyes black as midnight.

Maybe forty years old, with an Old World gravitas.

“Senor Keller, forgive me for disturbing your privacy,” he said. “My name is Miguel Angel Barrera. Sinaloa State Police. I wonder if I might have a few moments of your time.”

No shit you can, Art thought, and asked him in. Luckily, Art had most of a fifth of scotch left over from a bunch of lonely nights, so he could at least offer the man a drink. Barrera accepted it and offered Art a thin black Cuban cigar in return.

“I quit,” Art said.

“Do you mind, then?”

“I’ll live vicariously through you,” Art answered. He looked around for an ashtray and found one, then the two men sat down at the small table next to the window. Barrera looked at Art for a few seconds, as if considering something, then said, “My nephew asked if I’d stop in and see you.”

“Your nephew?”

“Adan Barrera.”

“Right.”

My uncle is a cop, Art thought. So this is “Tio.”

Art said, “Adan conned me into getting in the ring with one of the best fighters I’ve ever seen.”

“Adan fancies himself a manager,” Tio said. “Raul thinks he's a trainer.”

“They do all right,” Art said. “Cesar could take them a long way.”

“I own Cesar,” Barrera said. “I’m an indulgent uncle, I let my nephews play. But soon I will have to hire a real manager and a real trainer for Cesar. He deserves no less. He’ll be a champion.”

“Adan will be disappointed.”

“Learning to deal with disappointment is part of becoming a man,” Barrera said.

Well, that’s no shit.

“Adan relates that you are in some sort of professional difficulty?”

Now, how do I answer that? Art wondered. Taylor would no doubt employ a cliche about “not washing our dirty laundry in public,” but he’d be right. He’d shit jagged glass anyway if he knew that Barrera was even here, going under his head, as it were, to talk with a junior officer.

“My boss and I don’t always see eye to eye.”

Barrera nodded. “Senor Taylor’s vision can be somewhat narrow. All he can see is Pedro Aviles. The trouble with your DEA is that it is, forgive me, so very American. Your colleagues do not understand our culture, how things work, how things have to work.”

The man isn’t wrong, Art thought. Our approach down here has been clumsy and heavy-handed, to say the least. That fucked-up American attitude of “We know how to get things done,” “Just get out of our way and let us do the job.” And why not? It worked so well in 'Nam.

Art answered in Spanish, “What we lack in subtlety, we make up for with a lack of subtlety.”

Barrera asked, “Are you Mexican, Senor Keller?”

“Half,” Art said. “On my mother’s side. As a matter of fact, she’s from Sinaloa. Mazatlan.”

Because, Art thought, I’m not above playing that card.

“But you were raised in the barrio,” Barrera said. “In San Diego?”

This isn’t a conversation, Art thought, it’s a job interview.

“You know San Diego?” he asked. “I lived on Thirtieth Street.”

“But you stayed out of the gangs?”

“I boxed.”

Barrera nodded, and then started speaking in Spanish.

“You want to take down the gomeros,” Barrera said. “So do we.”

“Sin falta.”

“But as a boxer,” Barrera said, “you know that you just can’t go for the knockout right away. You have to set your opponent up, take his legs away from him with body punches, cut the ring off. You do not go for the knockout until the time is right.”

Well, I didn’t have a lot of knockouts, Art thought, but the theory is right. We Yanquis want to swing for the knockout right away, and the man is telling me that it isn’t set up yet.

Fair enough.

“What you’re saying makes great sense to me,” Art said. “It’s wisdom. But patience is not a particularly American virtue. I think if my superiors could just see some progress, some motion-”

“Your superiors,” Barrera said, “are difficult to work with. They are…”

He searches for a word.

Art finishes it for him. “Falta gracia.”

“Ill-mannered,” Barrera agrees. “Exactly. If, on the other hand, we could work with someone simpatico, un companero, someone like yourself…”

So, Art thinks, Adan asked him to save my ass, and now he’s decided it’s worth doing. He’s an indulgent uncle, he lets his nephews play; but he’s also a serious man with a definite objective in mind, and I might be useful in achieving that objective.

Again, fair enough. But this is a slippery slope. An unreported relationship outside the agency? Strictly verboten. A partnership with one of the most important men in Sinaloa and I keep it in my pocket? A time bomb. It could get me fired from the DEA altogether.

Then again, what do I have to lose?

Art poured them each another drink, then said, “I’d love to work with you, but there’s a problem.”

Barrera shrugged. “?Y que?”

“I won’t be here,” Art said. “They’re reassigning me.”

Barrera sipped his whiskey with a polite pretense of enjoyment, as if it were good whiskey, when they both knew that it was cheap shit. Then he asked, “Do you know the real difference between America and Mexico?”

Art shook his head.

“In America, everything is about systems,” Barrera said. “In Mexico, everything is about personal relationships.”

And you’re offering me one, Art thought. A personal relationship of the symbiotic nature.

“Senor Barrera-”

“My given names are Miguel Angel,” Barrera said, “but my friends call me Tio.”

Tio, Art thought.

“Uncle.”

That’s the literal translation, but the word implies a lot more in Mexican Spanish. Tio could be a parent’s brother, but he could also be any relative who takes an interest in a kid’s life. It goes beyond that; a Tio can be any man who takes you under his wing, an older-brother type, even a paternal figure.