When Pablo gets out there he gags and struggles not to throw up.

Three trunks of bodies, their arms and legs hacked off, are lined up on the lawn.

Beside them are two decapitated heads.

Throughout the course of a long day, the soldiers find a total of nine dismembered bodies under the concrete.

“I’m beginning to feel like a pornographer,” Giorgio says as he takes the photographs.

Violence porn, Pablo thinks. He wonders if Óscar will really put these images on the pages of his newspaper.

A lot of papers do. It’s become a new industry, la nota roja, tabloids with pictures of the dead—the bloodier the better—hawked by newsboys from street corners and traffic islands. You can make a lot of money taking photos for la nota roja, and Pablo wonders if Giorgio is tempted.

Now Pablo tries to get identifications of the dead, but the soldiers look at him like he’s crazy. They haven’t even matched the heads to the bodies; something, Pablo learns, that the coroner will try to do by matching the cut marks on the trunks and the necks.

“Decapitations?” Pablo asks Ana over a drink (okay, drinks) at San Martín that night. “When did we start doing that, cutting off heads?”

“It’s not new,” Ana said. “Remember that thing in Michoacán last year? Five heads rolled into a nightclub?”

“But that’s Michoacán,” Pablo answered. “Religious whack jobs.”

“So to speak.”

“Not funny.”

“Sorry.” It’s not funny, Ana thinks. It’s horrific, disgusting, and traumatic, and she worries about Pablo. Since Victoria took Mateo away, Pablo’s treating himself like a refugee—staying out half the night, drinking too much, crashing on couches.

Including yours, Ana reminds herself. She’s thought of going out there and inviting him into her bed, but it’s a bad idea. Pablo is a train wreck waiting to happen—it would be simply self-destructive to get on board the Mora Express now. But she feels for him and worries about him, just as she worries about her city and, well, herself.

Admit it, Ana thinks.

You’re scared.

Journalists have already been killed in Nuevo Laredo, and now the war has come here, and she feels this sense of threat that she can’t seem to shake off. It’s annoying—she’s a tough “hard-bitten” reporter of the old school, and she’s seen and reported plenty.

But this seems different.

Cops hiding in the station houses…

Decapitated, dismembered bodies under patios…

It’s surreal, like one of those dreams you have after too much booze chased with spicy food.

The difference here is that the alarm clock doesn’t seem to ring.

But the next morning, Pablo actually whoops with laughter.

The same press release in which the Juárez mayor’s office announces that ninety-five people have been killed in the first two months of 2008 also announces a major crackdown on jaywalking.

—

Then the army comes in. The Juárez mayor didn’t want them in the city but felt that he had no choice. With the police department dysfunctional he was simply out of men, and not only were the murders stacking up, but “ordinary” street crime was out of control.

So he made a deal with the federal government—Los Pinos would send in troops in exchange for a complete remaking of the city police department. The government launches “Operation Chihuahua” and sends 4,000 troops with 180 armored vehicles and an air wing that includes a helicopter gunship.

At first it does little good.

A city policewoman is struck with thirty-two bullets as she opens the door to her house. A police chief in the small town of El Carrizo on the Texas border is killed in his car as he pulls into his driveway. The army has to take over the town because every police officer quit or just ran off after that.

When police bring four narcos into a Juárez hospital, other narcos come in and execute them on their gurneys. Hospital staffers call police for three hours, but nobody comes.

It gets worse and worse.

A twenty-four-year-old woman is killed in a crossfire at the car wash where she works. Two Juárez cops are gunned down as they drop their kids off at school. A twelve-year-old girl is killed when narcos in a gun battle use her as a human shield.

The mayor of Juárez tells Ana in an interview that he knew “the killing season” was coming, had been informed that it would start in January, and that it was just a conflict between two rival gangs.

The governor announces that of the five hundred—five hundred—people killed in Chihuahua so far in the year, the mayor said, “only five” were “innocents.”

Only five, Pablo thinks.

Does that count the baby in the young woman’s womb?

It infuriates him, this killing, this death.

Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs.

And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants.

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground.

And for what?

So North Americans can get high.

Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption.

It’s not the “Mexican drug problem,” Pablo thinks now, it’s the North American drug problem.

As for corruption, who’s more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors?

Corrupt to the soul.

That’s the big story, he thinks.

That’s the story someone should write.

Well, maybe I will.

And no one will read it.

—

Pablo is holding up pretty well under all this until the Casas murder.

Police captain Alejandro Casas was also named on the placard. He’s leaving his house to drop his eight-year-old son at school on his way to work when five men with AKs attack his Nissan pickup truck in the driveway.

Casas is killed immediately.

A dozen 7.62 rounds shatter the boy’s left arm.

The EMTs manage to get to him quickly, but he bleeds to death in the ambulance.

Pablo comes back from the emergency room, dutifully types up the story, and then leaves the office with the intention of getting very drunk. Out on the sidewalk, a man he doesn’t know comes up to him and slips an envelope into the inside pocket of his rumpled khaki blazer.