“Ah.”

“I barely see him anymore,” Laura says with a pout. “I live at Yvette’s house more than I do at mine.”

“Can you come to the house after?” Yvette asks.

“There’s nothing stopping me,” Laura says. “Maybe Benjamín can join us.”

“Call him and say that I insist,” Yvette says.

“Well, that should scare him.”

They walk around, replacing divots and talking. Then Yvette points out a striking woman chatting with a tall, broad-smiling man in an impeccably cut Italian suit.

“Do you recognize the woman?” Yvette asks.

“No.”

“The president’s wife,” Yvette says. “The first lady.”

“Do you want to go over?”

Yvette shakes her head. “I’m not there yet. Anyway, there’ll be a new first lady soon, won’t there? God send her husband is PAN.”

Halftime ends and they go back to their seats.

The second half is more intense than the first. The sporting atmosphere becomes more competitive, the play more physical. Once, when it looks like Martín’s horse is about to topple, Yvette reaches over and grabs Keller’s hand.

She keeps it there for several seconds, squeezes, and then lets go.

The match is a 6–6 tie when Martín bursts his gray horse forward, “hooks” the mallet of the opposing player, and blocks it. Shouldering the other player aside, he takes the ball and drives down the field.

Keller sees the intensity in Yvette’s eyes as her husband gallops ahead.

One opponent stands between him and the goal.

Martín raises his mallet over his head, swings it down, and, at the last second, passes to his teammate, who scores the winner.

—

Laura Amaro’s overworked husband doesn’t show up at dinner, so Yvette sits Keller next to her at dinner as her “date.”

“Benjamín books the president’s travel,” Laura explains, “so it’s a seven-day-a-week job.”

“Important, though,” Keller says.

“Oh, yes, we’re all very important,” Laura answers. “Just ask us. Of course he might be out of a job soon.”

“Do you really think PRD can win?” Keller asks. PRD is a left-wing coalition that basically replaced PRI as the main opposition party. Its presidential candidate, Manuel López Obrador, was the mayor of Mexico City and had seen a commanding lead in the polls fade against the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón.

“I think it’s going to be close,” Laura says. “So does Benjamín. It would be a disaster for the country, though, if we lose. I think your people in Washington share this opinion, don’t they?”

“I think so, yes.”

Keller also thinks this—the center of the Mexican drug trade isn’t in the frontline border cities of Tijuana, Juárez, or Laredo.

Or even in the heartland of Sinaloa.

It’s here, in Mexico City.

—

“You’re kissing a cobra,” Martín Tapia says as he climbs into bed next to his wife.

“But it’s so much fun.”

“If Adán knew that Keller was a guest here…”

“ ‘Adán, Adán, Adán,’ ” Yvette says, “ ‘Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?’ ”

“Diego is devoted to him.”

“I know,” Yvette says, turning to her husband, “they were boys together. Diego’s problem is that he doesn’t see his own worth.”

“He’s loyal.”

“Loyalty should extend both ways.”

“Meaning?”

“Adán’s getting closer and closer to Nacho Esparza,” Yvette says. “First he gives him Tijuana, now he’s sniffing around the daughter.”

“She’s seventeen.”

“There’s no harm in keeping Keller close,” Yvette says. “He might come in handy for us, and if not, he’s always worth two million on the hoof, isn’t he? Not to mention the Emperor’s undying gratitude.”

Yvette slides down in the bed.

“Let me show you,” she says, “how much fun it is kissing the cobra.”

—

Keller waits outside the Marriott in a rented car.

Arroyo comes out with the case and gets into his Lexus. Up Paseo de la Reforma into Colonia Polanco, then onto Avenida Rubén Dario, flanking Chapultepec Park.

The Lexus pulls over by the park.

A woman walks out, the passenger door opens, and she takes the suitcase. Keller doesn’t have to risk following the woman to learn her identity, because he’s already had dinner with her.

He watches Laura Amaro walk away.

Jesus Christ, he thinks. Laura hands the money to her husband, Benjamín, who takes it to Los Pinos.

—

Three weeks later, on election night, Keller and Marisol join thousands of people gathered in the Zócalo to await the results.

The Zócalo is Mexico City’s main square, one of the largest in the world. The Palacio Nacional, built on the grounds of Moctezuma’s palace, flanks the square to the east, and on the west is the Portal de Mercaderes. The mundane Federal District office buildings are on the southern edge, while the north of the square is dominated by the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary, the largest church in the Americas, the construction of which began in 1573. It’s said that Cortés himself laid the cornerstone. Its twin bell towers made of red tezontle stone loom over the Zócalo like sentries.

The square itself is huge and empty, save for the actual zócalo, the base for a column that was never built which now supports a flagpole with a giant Mexican flag. It has been a gathering place for centuries, and Keller has learned that the Aztec center of the universe was said to have been just northeast of here, at the old Templo Nachor.

Standing in the Zócalo makes you feel very small; as an American, it makes you feel that your country is very young.

Marisol is a political animal, Keller has discovered, a passionate leftist. She wept during Pan’s Labyrinth, first from anger at the Spanish Fascists and afterward with pride that such a beautiful film had been made by a Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro.

As the election neared, her conversation became more and more obsessed with politics, to the point where she would apologize, change the subject, and then get back to politics a few minutes later.

Keller didn’t mind—he liked her passion, and the truth was that he couldn’t help but compare her to Althea, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal for whom Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were demonic figures.

“You don’t know what poverty is in the U.S.,” Marisol said to him one night over dinner at an Argentine place.

“Have you seen the South Bronx?”

“Have you seen the colonias of Juárez?” Marisol countered. “Or the rural poverty out in the valley, where I come from? I’m telling you, Arturo, the conflict between right and left is different in Mexico.”

So she detests PAN, is wholeheartedly and hopefully PRD, and the night before the election, she asked Keller out for a date.

To watch the results in the Zócalo.

Keller isn’t a very political person, more wearily cynical after his experiences with Washington. Marisol knew this, and was very pleased when he agreed to go to the Zócalo, because she knew he was doing it for her.

Now they stand in the enormous public square with a crowd that Keller guesses to be about fifty thousand. The mood is tense, and all day they have heard rumors of voter fraud—ballot boxes stuffed, ballots tossed away, small rural communities threatened with the loss of government benefits if they vote PRD.

Everyone knows it’s going to be close, so the air is electric as they wait for the results of a peculiar Mexican procedure known as the Cuenta Rápida—the “Quick Count.” The election commission takes a sampling of votes from some seven thousand districts when the polls close at 10:00 p.m. If the margin for one candidate is greater than .06 percent, a winner would be predicted; if less, the election would be determined “too close to call” until a complete counting of the votes.

At 11:00 that night, the election commissioner goes on television to an-nounce that the Quick Count showed that the results are “too close to call,” but he refuses to give the actual numbers.