“Because it’s our own country’s army,” Óscar answers.

“Still, it’s martial law.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Óscar says. “I’m disputing your notion that it’s an army of occupation and I’m also asking, what are the other options? We have a police force that either cannot or will not enforce the law, that is afraid to come out of its precinct houses for fear of being killed, so what is the city government supposed to do? Just surrender to anarchy?”

“This is anarchy.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Marisol says. “I wanted to introduce you to my friend. Óscar Herrera, this is Arturo Keller.”

“Mucho gusto.”

“The pleasure’s mine.”

“We were just discussing the sad condition of our city,” Óscar says, “but I, for one, am glad to be interrupted. You’re a North American, Señor Keller.”

“Art, please. And yes.”

“But you speak Spanish so well,” Óscar says. “Do you read it, too?”

“Yes.”

“Who do you read?”

Keller mentions Roberto Bolano, Luis Urrea, and Elmer Mendoza, among others.

“Dr. Cisneros!” Óscar exclaims. “You have done it! You have found a civilized North American! Sit down, Arturo, sit down next to me.”

Keller squeezes in next to Óscar, who moves his cane to make room, and they talk about The Savage Detectives, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and Silver Bullets until Óscar gets up and announces that he needs to leave the late night to the young people.

Marisol walks him out to help him find a cab.

Ana wastes no time. “She’s in love with you, you know.”

“I hope she is,” Keller says.

“I’m not sure you’re the man I would have chosen for her,” Ana says. “A North American, and…well, we joke about your being a spy, but the joke isn’t that far off, is it?”

Keller doesn’t answer.

“You be good to her,” Ana says.

“I will,” Keller says. “What about you and Pablo?”

She looks over at the reporter, who is standing and laughing with Giorgio. “I don’t know that there is a ‘me and Pablo.’ ”

“He seems like a nice guy.”

“Which might be his problem,” Ana says. “He’s a nice guy with a soft heart, and he’s carrying a torch for his ex-wife, his son, and Marisol.”

“Just a crush.”

“Oh,” she says, “she’s so far out of his league it isn’t funny. No, the problem with Pablo and me is that we work together and maybe know each other too well.”

“It’s not a bad basis for a relationship.”

Ana’s voice turns serious. “If you have any influence with Mari, get her out of this political stuff. It’s too dangerous.”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“She doesn’t listen.”

“Well, maybe if we both keep trying.”

“Deal.”

They shake hands. Marisol comes back out. “What are we shaking on?”

“A newfound friendship,” Keller says.

“That’s good,” Marisol says. “I was hoping for that.”

She goes back with him to the Candlewood Suites in El Paso, where DEA keeps a room for him, rather than risk a late-night drive back to Valverde. It’s one of those extended-stay hotels, hardly luxurious but not so depressing. As they get into the room, she asks, “By the way, what’s a pochingo?”

“Half pocho, half gringo.”

“I see. Which half would like to make love to me?”

Both, as it turns out.

—

New Year Day 2010 is the bloodiest day in Juárez history.

Twenty-six people are murdered in twenty-four hours.

Sixty-nine across Mexico.

Keller kisses Marisol goodbye and then leaves for Nuevo Laredo.

To hunt Zetas.

Carrejos admitted everything.

Yes, I was the one who bought the weapons from Wagner and turned them over to the Zeta team assigned to kill the Córdovas. Yes, Heriberto Ochoa—Z-1, El Verdugo—personally gave the order for the murders, to set an example. Yes, I was behind the wheel, but I didn’t go in, I swear on my mother’s eyes, didn’t participate in the shootings. I just drove. Please stop!—don’t do it again.

He even gave up the names of the hit squad.

José Silva.

Manuel Torres.

And the commander, the one in charge—Braulio Rodríguez—“Z-20.” They call him El Gigante.

Keller knows the aporto Z-20 means that Rodríguez was one of the original Zetas, one of the first group that Ochoa recruited from the special forces. That means he’s important, a top guy, so the murder of the Córdova family was a high-priority mission.

Rodríguez was in the extensive FES intelligence file. Sure enough, he’d served with Ochoa in Chiapas, so murdering women wasn’t a new thing for him.

Carrejos even gave up the locations of the team.

Silva and Torres were in Nuevo Laredo.

Rodríguez was in Veracruz.

What is he doing in Veracruz? Keller wondered. The port city is a long way from the action, down in territory that had long been a Tapia stronghold, now allegedly being taken over by Crazy Eddie Ruiz.

He relayed the question through the FES guys, who were just wrapping up their interrogation of Carrejos, and he gave them the best answer he knew. It was a promotion, he told them, a reward to Rodríguez for the Córdova mission. Rodríguez would get Veracruz as his own plaza, if he could take it from Ruiz.

Ports are important to the cartels not so much for the product they send out as for the product they bring in—the precursor chemicals needed to fuel their methamphetamine super-factories, the new maquiladoras. Mazatlán, firmly in the hands of the Sinaloa cartel; Lázaro Cárdenas, contested between the Zetas and La Familia Michoacana; and Matamoros, held by the CDG, are all important inlets for the chemicals that come mostly from China. And now Veracruz, which Eddie’s using to supply his operations there, but also in Monterrey and Acapulco, as he tries to reassemble the Tapia operation under his own aegis.

The Z Company has other ideas—they want the port for themselves. And Rodríguez—Z-20, El Gigante—is leading the charge.

But first things first, Keller thinks.

José Silva’s been spotted in Nuevo Laredo, Eddie Ruiz’s old stomping grounds before the Zetas took it for their CDG bosses. He’s a whoremaster, running Central American immigrant girls in Boy’s Town. The small brothel is on the second floor of a building just off the corner of Front Street and Calle Cleopatra.

Keller looks every inch the drunk middle-aged gringo crossing the border to get laid. Yellow polo shirt, jeans, a white golf cap, the stink of booze. He walks from the taxi stand past the cribs of freelance prostitutes and finds Casa Las Nalgas, which has a shabby bar where he has a beer until the women come out for the “lineup.”

There are four of them at this time in the early afternoon. Keller chooses a girl who is maybe seventeen, in an ill-fitting black negligee that barely conceals her thin breasts. She looks drugged as she leads him up the narrow, creaky stairs into a filthy room that looks a little larger than a closet. A mattress sits on old box springs, with a single cover sheet over it.

A button is set in the wall over the bed.

Keller noticed the glance she exchanged with Silva at the bar. He closes the door behind him but doesn’t lock it.

The girl says, “Please, the money.”

“No.”

She looks surprised and scared. “Please.”

“I’ve never paid for it in my life,” Keller slurs. He takes a latex glove from his jeans pocket and slips it on. “C’mere.”

She backs away from him and presses the button.

Keller pulls the clean, suppressed Beretta that the FES gave him from under his shirt and hears the feet coming up the stairs. The door opens and Silva comes in looking annoyed, saying, “Listen, pendejo—”

Keller double-taps him in the chest.

The girl screams.

Standing over Silva, Keller fires another shot into the back of his head, then takes a jack of spades from his pocket—the calling card of the Matazetas—and lays it on the body. He drops the gun, walks down the stairs and out onto Front Street, where an FES work car picks him up.