The fact is that los chacalosos—the big bosses—lost control.

They couldn’t stop it now if they wanted, and Barrera doesn’t care. He has his bridges and the violence is wiping the local gangs off the street. So to hell with the city—he’d be just as happy if there was nothing left except his damn bridges.

Wouldn’t care if the city dies.

Which it is.

So it’s chaos here now, and the people who pay the price for it are the people who always do, and who can least afford it—the poor, the powerless, the ones who can’t lock themselves up in gated communities, or commute from El Paso.

No one is in charge.

The killing now commands the killing, because no one knows anything else to do. That’s the truth that Pablo would like to tell. Like to scream to the country, scream to the U.S., scream to the world.

But he can’t.

They won’t let him.

Yesterday morning the man who brought Pablo his envelope brought him an order as well.

“The attack on La Médica Hermosa,” he said.

“That was months ago.” Pablo felt a surge of fear.

“You’re going to write that the Zetas were behind it.”

“I don’t know that,” Pablo said. He heard his voice quivering.

“You do know that,” the man said. “I just told you that.”

He knows why they care. Giorgio’s photo essay of Marisol Cisneros’s wounds had caused a major outcry across the country, maybe even more than the attack itself. And now he knows who’s giving him the money—the Sinaloans, the New People.

Pablo summoned up all his nerve. “Do you have proof?”

“The money in your bank account,” the man said, “is all the proof you need.”

“I haven’t spent it,” Pablo says. “I’ll give it back.”

“What do you think this is?” the man asks. “Marbles? A kid’s game? You took the money—there’s no ‘giving back.’ I don’t care if you stuck it up your ass. I don’t care if you stuck it up your friend’s ass—the Zetas did it, that’s the truth. You want to write the truth, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

He pushes Pablo up against the wall. “Let me ask you something. Your friends, the people you work with. Do you love them?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“If you do,” the man said, “then do the right thing here.”

The man let him go and walked away.

Pablo stood there, trembling. His legs felt like they were going to give out under him. He walked to the nearest bar and had a whiskey, then another, his mind whirling.

What am I going to do? he asked himself.

What am I going to do?

When Pablo went in to file the story, saying that he had it from unidentified sources on deep background that the Zetas were responsible for the attacks on the Chihuahua women, Óscar called him into the office.

“Unidentified sources?” El Búho asked.

Pablo nodded.

“Who are they? Your Azteca connections?”

“Yeah.”

Óscar tapped his cane on the floor. “We need more than that. Go out and get it.”

Ramón found him that night, drinking beer at Fred’s. The Azteca slid up to the bar beside him. “I don’t have a lot of time here, so I’ll get right to it. You working on a story about those shootings in the valley?”

“Maybe.”

“Don’t get fucking cute with me,” Ramón snapped. “I’m here to tell you, you write anything, you write that those Sinaloan cocksuckers did it.”

“I heard differently.”

“Yeah? What did you hear? What did you hear, ’mano?”

“Zetas.”

“Who told you that?”

Pablo shook his head.

“You’re taking Sinaloa money,” Ramón said, “okay. Nobody gave a shit. Until now. Now we give a very big shit.”

“ ‘We’? You’re working for the Zetas now?”

“The Zs are taking over,” Ramón said. “We’re all in the Z Company now. You, too.”

Ramón grabbed him by the shoulder. “They sent me, ’mano. They sent me to tell you that you write what they want. If I have to come see you again, it won’t be to talk. Don’t make me do that, ’Blo. Please.”

Ramón tossed a few bills on the bar and walked out.

Pablo felt like he could piss himself.

He was trapped—caught between the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas. He left the bar and found Ana and Giorgio at the Kentucky.

For a man who’d just had a professional triumph, Giorgio was uncharacteristically subdued. Then again, seeing Marisol’s wounds was heartbreaking. Such a beautiful woman, such a good person, disfigured and in pain. So it was tasteful of Giorgio not to celebrate, Pablo thought.

Maybe he has some sensitivity after all.

“You’re quiet tonight,” Ana said to Pablo.

“Just tired.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

They had a few drinks, then Giorgio left to go to El Paso to sleep with his current girlfriend, an American sociologist who was doing her doctoral dissertation on “the phenomenon of violence in Ciudad Juárez.”

“Is that what we are?” Ana asked. “A phenomenon?”

“Apparently,” Giorgio answered.

“Can you use photographs in a dissertation?”

“I’m sort of deep background,” Giorgio answered. “See you tomorrow.”

Pablo didn’t sleep that night. There seemed to be no way out of the trap he was in. When he went into the office, Óscar asked him if he’d made any progress on the story. Pablo was evasive, and when he went out to his car there was a note on the seat—“Where is our story? Don’t fuck with us, cabrón.”

I’m shrinking with my city, Pablo thinks as he bunches up the torta wrapper and tosses it on the floor of the car. The once thriving mercado is almost deserted because the tourists don’t come anymore; one famous bar or club after another has closed; even the Mariscal, the red-light district just by the Santa Fe Bridge, has been shut down because men won’t take the risk of going, even for whores.

Now he forces himself to get out of the car for yet another corpse. Just one more malandro, one more piece of garbage swept up in la limpieza.

The cleansing.

Usually Giorgio beats him to the scene, but he’s probably still in bed with the North American.

Then he spots Giorgio.

—

It’s Pablo who tells Ana.

He goes into the city room, holds her tight, and tells her, and she screams and her knees buckle and she falls into him and he almost tells her. It’s my fault. It’s my fault, if I had said something, told him, maybe…

But you didn’t, Pablo thinks.

And you still don’t.

Because you’re a coward.

And because you’re so ashamed.

Óscar writes an editorial about Giorgio’s murder, a classic El Búho piece full of moral outrage and grief mixed with erudition.

Giorgio’s funeral is a horror show.

The whole Juárez journalist community is there, and Cisneros and Keller. The service at the cemetery goes about as usual, then Pablo notices a car parked just outside the gates.

He walks over.

A severed head, its mouth fixed in a macabre grin, is set on its hood.

With Óscar’s editorial pinned to its neck.

There’s a subdued gathering at Ana’s that night. Pablo, Óscar, Marisol, and her North American. A few others. A shrunken group, Pablo thinks, with our shrunken souls.

People drink sadly, sullenly.

A few attempts are made to tell funny stories about Giorgio, but the effort falls flat.

The gathering breaks up early. Marisol, looking tired and in pain, says that she has to be getting back to Valverde, and the others quickly use the opportunity to make their escapes.

When people were gone, Ana, in her cups, says, “Make love to me. Take me to bed.”

“Ana.”

“Just fuck me, Pablo.”

Their lovemaking is angry and afterward she sobs.

The day after Giorgio’s funeral, Óscar shows Pablo and Ana an editorial he intends to publish.

“Señores of the organizations disputing the plaza of Ciudad Juárez,” he reads, “we would like to bring to your attention that we are reporters, not fortune-tellers. Thus, we would like you to explain what is it that you want from us? What do you want us to publish or refrain from publishing? You are, at present, the de facto authorities in this city, due to the fact that the legally established rulers have not been able to do anything to keep our colleagues from falling, despite our repeated demands that they do so. And it is for this reason that, faced with this unquestionable reality, we are forced to pose this question, because what we least want is for another of our colleagues to fall victim.