Don winslow Don winslow - The Border

Keller isn’t surprised—he’s seen the same signs in Juárez and heard that they’re all over the place in Sinaloa and Durango. “What can I tell you? The man has a following.”

“He’s becoming Che Guevara,” O’Brien says.

“I guess absence does make the heart grow fonder.”

“You heard anything more?” O’Brien asks. “About his death?”

“I don’t follow that world anymore.”

“Bullshit.”

Keller shrugs—it’s true.

“Do you read the American papers?” O’Brien asks.

“The sports pages,” Keller says.

“Then you don’t know what’s been happening up here?” O’Brien asks. “With heroin?”

“No.”

“A lot of people in the law enforcement community have been celebrating Barrera’s alleged demise,” O’Brien says, “but the truth is that it hasn’t slowed the flow of drugs at all. In fact, it’s only gotten worse. Especially with heroin.”

From the year 2000 to 2006, O’Brien tells him, fatal heroin overdoses stayed fairly stable, about 2,000 a year. From 2007 to 2010, they rose to about 3,000. But in 2011, they rose to 4,000. Six thousand in 2012, 8,000 in 2013.

“To put it in perspective,” O’Brien says, “from 2004 to now we lost 7,222 military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.”

“To put it in perspective,” Keller says, “in the same period of time, over a hundred thousand Mexicans were killed in drug violence, with another twenty-two thousand missing. And that’s a conservative estimate.”

“You’re making my argument,” O’Brien says. “The loss of life you cite in Mexico, the heroin epidemic here, the millions of people we have behind bars. Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working.”

“If you asked me here to tell me that,” Keller says, “you’ve wasted both our time. Thanks for the beer, but what do you want?”

“I represent a group of senators and congressmen who have the power and influence to fire the current DEA administrator and appoint a new one,” O’Brien says. “We want that to be you.”

Keller has never been easily shocked, but he is now. “With all respect, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”

“The country is flooded with heroin, use is up over eighty percent, and most of it’s coming from Mexico,” O’Brien says. “I have constituents who go to cemeteries to visit their children.”

“And I’ve seen Mexican kids buried with bulldozers,” Keller says. “Nobody up here gave a damn. There’s a ‘heroin epidemic’ now because white kids are dying.”

“I’m asking you to give a damn now,” O’Brien says.

“I fought my war,” Keller says.

“Kids are dying out there,” O’Brien says. “And I don’t think you’re a guy who can just take your pension, sit on your ass and let it happen.”

“Watch me.”

“Think about it.” O’Brien slides off the barstool and hands Keller his card. “Call me.”

“I won’t be calling.”

“We’ll see.”

O’Brien leaves him sitting there.

Keller does the math—O’Brien said that heroin deaths rose slightly in 2010, but then spiked in 2011. Then rose again by half in 2012.

All while Adán was alive.

Motherfucker, Keller thinks. Barrera put it in place—his last malignant gift to the world. Keller remembers his Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them.”

Ain’t that the truth.

The ghost and the monster.

They eat at Garufa, an Argentine place on Bulevar Tomás Fernández. It’s expensive as hell but he wants to take her someplace nice. Keller has steak, Marisol has salmon and eats with an unabashed appetite, something he’s always liked about her.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Marisol asks, setting down her fork.

“Why do you think there’s something I’m not telling you?”

“Because I know you,” Marisol says. “So what is it? Spill.”

When he tells her about his meeting with O’Brien, she sits back in her chair. “Arturo, oh my God. I’m stunned.”

“Right?”

“I thought you were persona non grata,” Marisol says.

“So did I.” He tells her what O’Brien said and how he’d responded.

Marisol is quiet.

“Christ, you don’t think I should accept, do you?” Keller asks.

She’s still quiet.

“ Do you?” Keller asks.

“Art, think of the power you’d have,” Marisol says. “The good you could do. You could actually effect change.”

Keller sometimes forgets her political activism. Now he remembers the woman who had camped out in the Zócalo in Mexico City to protest election fraud, her marches down the Paseo de la Reforma to protest police brutality. All part of the woman he fell in love with.

“You’re completely opposed to virtually everything DEA does,” he says.

“But you could change policies.”

“I don’t know,” Keller says.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s play it the other way. Why wouldn’t you?”

Keller lays out the reasons for her. One, he’s done with the war on drugs.

“But maybe it’s not done with you,” she says.

Forty years is more than enough, he tells her. He’s not a bureaucrat, not a political animal. He’s not sure he can even live in the US anymore.

She knows that Keller’s mother was Mexican, his father an Anglo who brought them to San Diego and then abandoned them. But he grew up as an American—UCLA, the US Marines—then the DEA took him back to Mexico and he’s spent more of his adult life there than in the States. Marisol knows that he’s always been torn between the two cultures—Arturo has a love/hate relationship with both countries.

And Marisol knows that he moved to Juárez almost out of guilt—that he thought he owed something to this city that had suffered so much from the US war on drugs, that he had a moral obligation to help its recovery—even if it was as small a contribution as paying taxes, buying groceries, keeping a house open.

And then taking care of Chuy, his personal cross to bear.

But Chuy is gone.

Now she asks him, “Why do you want to live in Juárez? And tell the truth.”

“It’s real.”

“It is that,” she says. “And you can’t walk a block without being reminded of the war.”

“Meaning what?”

“There’s nothing for you here now but bad memories and—”

She stops.

“What?” Keller asks.

“All right— me, ” she says. “Proximity to me. I know you still love me, Arturo.”

“I can’t help what I feel.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Marisol says. “But if you’re turning this down to be near me, don’t.”

They finish dinner and then go for a walk, something they couldn’t have done a couple of years ago.

“What do you hear?” Marisol asks.

“Nothing.”

“Exactly,” Marisol says. “No police sirens, ambulances screaming. No gunshots.”

“The Pax Sinaloa.”

“Can it last?” she asks.

No, Keller thinks.

This isn’t peace, it’s a lull.

“I’ll drive you home,” Keller says.

“It’s a long drive,” Marisol says. “Why don’t I just stay at your place?”

“Chuy’s room is free,” Keller says.

“What if I don’t want to stay in Chuy’s room?” Marisol asks.

He wakes up very early, before dawn, with a cold Juárez wind whipping the walls and rattling the windows.

It’s funny, he thinks, how the big decisions in your life don’t always follow a big moment or a big change, but just seem to settle on you like an inevitability, something you didn’t decide at all but has always been decided for you.

Maybe it was the sign that decided it.

ADÁN VIVE.

Because it was true, Keller thinks that morning. The king might be gone, but the kingdom he created remains. Spreading suffering and death as surely as if Barrera were still on the throne.