He writes mostly about crime, although if he can talk Óscar into it he’ll do “color” features, human interest, travel stories, film critiques, and the occasional restaurant review—because it’s a free and usually good meal—and all these extra stories pay him a few more pesos. If he’s really in Óscar’s good graces, the editor will send him to cover his beloved Indios fútbol matches out at Benito Stadium.

Pablo does American stories for his own paper—making the tedious slog across the border into El Paso for material—then freelances stories that are basically recirculated rumors about the narco-world back to American papers, which have a seemingly insatiable appetite for scary tales about the looming threat that is Mexico. Adán Barrera is usually good for an overdue utility bill. (We all, in our own way, he thinks now, profit off the pista secreta.)

Pablo drives by the statue of newsboys hawking papers (he admits to sentimentality over that), parks in the paper’s lot, and crosses the square to the café, where Ana is hunched over the zinc-top counter by the window, nursing her hangover with shots of espresso.

He plops onto the stool next to her and she grunts a hello. Her face seems pained but otherwise she looks good. Then again, she always does. Ana is meticulous about her clothes, which are neat, stylish, and always pressed.

She’s a trim, small woman who sometimes compares herself to a bird. No one would call her pretty—she has a bird’s beak of a nose, her mouth is wide but thin-lipped, and she has no “figure” to speak of (“If you’re looking for ‘boobage,’ you’ll have to look elsewhere,” she’ll tell prospective lovers), but her short-cut black hair is thick, glossy, and, to Pablo, beautiful, and her brown eyes are warm (well, not this morning—they look like they ache) and intense.

Ana is interesting-looking, and Pablo never gets tired of seeing her, although he can get tired of listening to her because she can be something of a nag and she can get overly intense, especially about politics, which she covers with an energy and devotion that Pablo finds both incomprehensible and somewhat demonic.

This is where their professional worlds merge, because covering crime and politics in Mexico is, sadly, often the same thing, so they rely on each other’s expertise and often share sources. With Giorgio giving images to their words, they make up what Óscar calls—inevitably—“Los Tres Amigos.”

Ricardo gently sets a café con leche by Pablo’s hand and just as quietly withdraws.

“You’re a saint,” Pablo says. He pours a stream of sugar from the glass container set on the counter.

“That’s not going to help your waistline,” Ana says.

Pablo knows he could stand to lose twenty pounds—okay, thirty—and that his muscle tone is the consistency of flan, but he’s not going to start today. What he should do is go back to his former thrice-weekly evening fútbol sessions in the park.

That’s what he should do.

“I blame you for this, by the way,” he says.

“You’re a big boy,” Ana observes, staring blankly into her cup. “You could have said no.”

“I stand with Oscar Wilde on the subject of temptation.”

—

You seem quite able to resist me, Ana thinks sourly, then quickly attributes her sudden bitterness to the foul hangover. She’d invited him out last night with the full intention of finally seducing him into the sack, and then the alcohol took over.

Probably intentional, she thinks.

I mean, seriously, she asks herself, would you have? Even if he was, shall we say, persuadable? Would you have gone through with it or chickened out as you have in the past?

Probably the latter, she decides now. Still, it would have been nice of him to give you the choice. But probably better it didn’t happen. Lovers are a dime a dozen, good friendships rare. No sense in literally screwing this one up.

Besides, Pablo goes for beautiful women, witness his ex-wife—a tall, thin, blond Sinaloan with a body honed in the gym. Hurrah for her discipline, anyway. Pablo was smitten, and pursued her with the relentlessness he would only normally devote to a good story, and all his friends could have told him (they certainly told each other) that it wouldn’t work out, that Victoria was emotionally slumming, trying to find in him the warmer parts of herself, and that, for his part, he simply lacked the ambition that she would eventually need in a mate.

Ana likes Victoria. She’s a damn fine journalist and actually very nice, even funny, once you cut beneath the frost layer. She’s a wonderful mother to Mateo and has been very generous to Pablo on the visitation thing.

It just wasn’t a match, that’s all.

Victoria’s career is rising with a bullet, and Pablo’s…

Well, Pablo writes about itinerant poets who leave snatches of their verse under people’s windshield wipers. He writes about the ambulantes—the street vendors. It’s what makes him so lovable, like a big, ugly dog that you just can’t keep from jumping up on the sofa.

“Do you want to come over tonight?” she asks. “I’m making a paella and having a few people in.”

“I might have Mateo.”

“Bring him,” Ana says. “Jimena would love to see him. She’s coming, and Tomás. Giorgio, probably. First we’re going round to Cafebrería for Tomás’s reading.”

Cafebrería is one of Pablo’s regular haunts—a bookstore-cum-coffeehouse where the city’s artists and intellectuals gather. Pablo was going to hit Tomas’s reading anyway, Ana’s paellas are justly famous, and maybe Jimena will bring some polvorones from her bakery out in Valverde.

“I’ll bring a bottle of wine,” Pablo says.

“Just bring Mateo,” Ana answers. She takes a last sip of her espresso and looks at her watch. “We don’t want to keep El Búho waiting.”

Pablo gulps down his coffee, wishing he’d left time for a bite to eat. He leaves money on the counter and, with Ana, crosses the street into the offices of El Periódico.

—

Óscar Herrera is the dean of Mexican journalism.

The last of the old-school editors, “El Búho”—the Owl—scans the city room looking for the red meat of a factual error, the scent of a stylistic sin, or the very whiff of literary pretentiousness.

His aporto is perfect, Pablo has always thought. El Búho’s thick, heavy-framed glasses make his eyes large, he blinks at slow intervals, and the hair on the top of his ears makes him look—well, owlish.

Pablo has progressed from, as a new reporter, sheer terror of El Búho to now, ten years later, just vague anxiety in his presence. And vast admiration and respect. Óscar Herrera—Dr. Óscar Herrera, to be accurate—is a figure of courage and probity who has stood up to presidents, generals, and drug lords who tried to influence his coverage of their respective and unfortunately intertwined activities.

Nine years ago they tried to kill him.

Narcos (although Pablo has always suspected it was the army acting on behalf of the PRI, and Óscar’s editorial colleagues joked that it was his own reporters) ambushed his car at a stoplight, killed his driver, and put three bullets into Óscar’s left leg and hip.

Now he walks with a cane, which he famously brandished at the television cameras as he left the hospital, growling about the incompetence of bad marksmen. Then he went back to the office and brutally edited the stories about the attack, correcting trivial factual errors and improper syntax.

Not that Óscar is merely a hard man.

He’s written three published volumes of poetry, as well as a critical appreciation of the novels of Élmer Mendoza, and Pablo knows that the man’s Saturday morning ritual is to go out to breakfast and then sit in his living room listening to Mahler symphonies on vinyl.

Now he sits with his stiff leg propped up on the table beside his cane and blinks at Pablo. “And why do you think that story about itinerant musicians who play at bus stops might be of interest to our readers?”