The Queen of the South (3 page)

I finished off the taco and we discussed the pros and cons. I hesitated until the coffee and the Don Julian No. 1 came, just when Rene was threatening to call the mariachis over. But his little stratagem backfired on him: The story for
Reforma
had turned into a private book project, although our friendship didn't suffer on that account. Quite the contrary: The next day he put at my disposal all his best contacts on the Pacific coast and in the federal police force so I could fill in the dark years—the stage of Teresa Men-doza's life that was unknown in Spain, and not in the public domain even in Mexico.

"At least we'll review it," Rene said,
"cabron."

At that time, about the only things known publicly about Teresa Men-doza were that she had lived in Las Siete Gotas, a poor barrio in Culiacan, and that she was the daughter of a Spanish father and a Mexican mother. Some people also knew that she'd dropped out after elementary school and a few years later gone to work as a salesgirl in a sombrero store in the Buelna
mercado,
then become a money changer on Calle Juarez. Then, one Day of the Dead afternoon—life's little ironies—fate set her in the path of Raimundo Dávila Parra, a pilot for the Juarez cartel. In that world, he was "Güero" Dávila. "Güero" was Mexican slang for a blue-eyed, blond-headed gringo, which Güero wasn't, exactly, since he was a Chicano from San Antonio, but the name stuck.

All this latter stuff was known more from the legend woven around Teresa Mendoza than from documented sources, so to throw some light on that part of her life story I went to the capital of the state of Sinaloa, on the west coast of Mexico, at the mouth of the Gulf of California, and wandered through its streets and into its cantinas. I even followed the exact, or almost exact, route taken by Teresa on that last afternoon (or first, depending on how you look at it), when the telephone rang and she fled the apartment she'd shared with Güero Dávila. I started at the love nest they had lived in for two years: a comfortable, discreet two-story house with a patio in back, crepe myrtle and bougainvillea at the door, located in the southeast part of Las Quintas, a neighborhood that had become a favorite of middle-class drug dealers, the ones who were doing okay, but not well enough to afford a luxurious mansion in Colonia Chapultepec.

Then I walked along under the royal palms and mango trees to Calle Juarez, and in front of the little grocery store I stopped to watch the girls who, holding a cell phone in one hand and a calculator in the other, were changing money right out in the open. Or to put it another way, taking stacks of American dollars fragrant with cocaine or high-quality hashish from the sierra, and laundering it into Mexican pesos. In that city where breaking the law is often a social convention and a way of life—
It's a family tradition,
says one famous corrido,
to break the law
—Teresa Mendoza was one of those girls for a while. Until a black Bronco stopped one afternoon, and Raimundo Dávila Parra lowered the smoked-glass window and sat there and stared at her from the driver's seat. And her life changed forever.

"Now she was walking down that same sidewalk, a sidewalk she knew

every inch of, with her mouth dry and fear in her eyes. She dodged the girls standing around in little groups talking, or pacing back and forth, waiting for customers in front of the El Canario fruit stand, and as she did so she glanced mistrustfully at the bus-and-tram station, the taquerias in the
mercado
—the street swarming with women carrying baskets and moustached men in baseball caps and sombreros. From the music store behind the jeweler's on the corner came the words and melody of "Pacas de a Kilo"—"Kilo Bricks"—sung by Los Dinamicos. Or maybe Los Tigres—from that distance she couldn't be sure, but she knew the song.
Chale,
she knew it all too well— it had been Güero's favorite, and that
hijo de su madre
used to sing it when he shaved, with the window open to annoy the neighbors, or whisper it in her ear, just to infuriate her:

My father's friends and colleagues

Admire me and respect me

And in two or three hundred yards

I can get planes off the ground.

I can hit any bull's-eye

With a pistol or machine gun... .

Pinche Güero cabron,
she thought again—fucking asshole prick, and she almost said it out loud, to control the sob that suddenly rose within her.

Then she looked right and left. She was looking for a face, a presence that meant danger. They would send somebody who knew her, she thought, somebody who could recognize her. So her hope lay in recognizing him before he recognized her. Or in recognizing
them.
Because there were usually two, so one could back the other one up, and also so they could keep an eye on each other, because this was a business where nobody trusted even his own shadow.

Somebody will smile at you,
she remembered.
And a second later, you'll be a dead woman.
If you're lucky, she added for him, imagining the desert and the blowtorch that Güero had mentioned.

On Juarez, the traffic was coming from behind her. She realized this as she passed the San Juan monument, so she turned left, heading for Calle General Escobedo. Güero had explained that if you ever thought you were being followed, you should take streets where the cars come toward you, so you could see them coming. She walked on down the side street, turning from time to time to look back. She came to the center of the city, passed the white edifice of City Hall, and mingled with the masses of people crowding the bus stops and the area around the Garmendia
mercado.

Only then did she feel a little safer. The sky in the west was intense orange over the buildings—a beautiful sunset—and the store windows were beginning to light the sidewalks. They almost never kill you in places like this, she thought. Or even kidnap you. Cars and other vehicles passed by in both directions, and two brown-uniformed police officers stood on one corner. One of them had a vaguely familiar face, so she turned her own face away and changed direction. Many local cops were in the narcos' pay, as were a lot of the Judiciales and Federates and so many others, with their dime bags of smack in their wallets and their free drinks in the cantinas. They did protection work for the bosses or abided by the healthy principle of Live, collect your paycheck, and let live, if you want to stay alive. Three months earlier, a police chief who'd been brought in from outside tried to change the rules of the game. He had been shot seventy times at point-blank range with a
cuerno de chivo
—the narcos' name for the AK-47—at the door of his house, in his own car.
Rat-a-tat-a-tat.
There were already CDs out with songs about it. "Seventy Before Seven" was the most famous.
Chief Ordonez was shot dead,
the lyrics recounted,
at six in the morning. A lot of bullets for such an early hour.
Pure Sinaloa. The album photographs of popular singers like El As de la Sierra—the Ace of the Sierra—often showed them with a small plane behind them and a .45 in their hand, and Chalino Sanchez, a local singing idol who'd been a hit man for the narcomania before becoming a famous singer, had been shot dead over a woman or for god knew what other reason. If there was anything the guys who wrote the narcocorridos had no need for, it was imagination—the ideas for the songs came ready-made.

At the corner where La Michoacana ice cream store stood, Teresa left the area of the
mercado
and the shoe and clothing stores behind and took a side street. Güero's safe house, his refuge in case of emergency, was just a few yards away, on the second floor of an unassuming apartment building. Across the street was a cart that sold seafood during the day and
tacos de came asada
at night. In principle, no one knew of the existence of this place except the two of them. Teresa had been here only once, and Güero himself hardly came, so as not to burn it.

She climbed the stairs, trying not to make any noise, put the key in the lock, and turned it carefully. She knew nobody could be inside, but even so, she walked through the apartment nervously, checking to make sure everything was all right. Not even that crib is completely safe, Güero had said. Somebody may have seen me, or know something, or whatever—in this fucking city, everybody knows everybody else. And even if it doesn't go down that way, say they catch me—if I'm alive, I'll only be able to keep my mouth shut for so long before they beat it out of me and I start singing rancheras. So keep one eye open,
mi chula.
I hope I can take it long enough for you to grab the money and run, because sooner or later they'll be there. But no promises,
prietita
—he kept smiling as he said that,
pinche cabron—
I can't promise you a thing.

The little crib's walls were bare, and the only furniture was a table, four chairs, and a couch in the living room, and in the bedroom a big bed with a night table and a telephone. The bedroom window was at the back of the building, overlooking an open lot with trees and shrubs that was used for parking, and behind that were the yellow cupolas of the Iglesia del Santuario. One of the closets had a false back wall, and when she pulled the panel out, Teresa found two thick packages with stacks of hundred-dollar bills. About twenty thousand, she figured, drawing on her experience as a money changer on Calle Juarez. There was also Güero's notebook: a large one with a brown leather cover—
Don't even open it,
she remembered—a stash of white powder that weighed about three hundred grams, she estimated, and a huge Colt Double Eagle, chrome with mother-of-pearl handles. Güero didn't like weapons, and he never carried even a revolver—
What the fuck good would it do me,
he would say;
when they look for you, they find you
—but he had put this one away for emergencies.
Why should I tell you no if the answer's yes.
Teresa didn't like guns, either, but like almost every man, woman, and child in Sinaloa, she knew how to use them. And since we're talking about emergencies, this is one, she thought. So she checked to make sure the gun's clip was loaded, pulled back the slide, and released it. With a loud, sinister click a .45-caliber round was loaded into the chamber. Her hands were shaking with anxiety as she put the money, the dope, and the gun in the gym bag she had brought with her.

Halfway through the operation, she was startled by a backfire from a car down in the street. She stood very quiet for a while, listening, before she went on. With the dollars were two valid U.S. passports—hers and Güero's. She studied his photo: his hair cropped short, those gringo eyes gazing out serenely at the photographer, the beginnings of that eternal smile on one side of his mouth. After hesitating a second, she put just her passport in the bag, and it was only when she leaned over and felt tears dripping off her chin and wetting her hands that she realized she'd been crying for a long time now.

She looked around, her eyes blurry with tears, trying to think whether she was forgetting something. Her heart was beating so hard she thought it was about to burst through her chest. She went to the windows, looked down at the street that was beginning to grow dark with the shadows of nightfall, the taco cart illuminated by a naked lightbulb and the coals in the brazier. She lit a Faro and took a few indecisive steps through the apartment, puffing nervously. She had to get out of there, but she didn't know where to go. The only thing that was clear was that she had to leave.

She was at the door of the bedroom when she noticed the telephone, and a thought flashed through her head: don Epifanio Vargas. He was a nice guy, don Epifanio. He'd worked with Amado Carrillo in the golden years of runs between Colombia, Sinaloa, and the United States, and he'd always been a good padrino to Güero, always a man of his word, a man you could trust, a real professional. After a while, he invested in other businesses and got into politics, stopped needing planes. Don Epifanio had offered Güero a place with him, but Güero liked to fly, even if it was for other people. Up there you're somebody, he would say, and down here you're just a mule driver. Don Epifanio didn't take offense, and in fact he even lent Güero the money for a new Cessna when Güero's old one got fucked up in a violent touchdown on a landing strip up in the sierra, with three hundred kilos of Miss White inside, all wrapped up in masking tape, and two Federales planes circling overhead, highways green with soldiers, AR-15s firing, sirens wailing, bullhorns booming—one bad fucking afternoon, no doubt about it. Güero had escaped that one by the short hairs, with just a broken arm—broken once by the law and then again by the owners of the cargo, to whom he had to prove with newspaper clippings that everything had been nationalized, that three of the eight men on the reception team had been killed defending the landing strip, and that the one who'd fingered the flight was a guy from Badiraguato that squawked on retainer for the Federales. The loudmouth had wound up with his hands tied behind his back, suffocated with a plastic bag over his head, as had his father, his mother, and his sister—the narcomafia tended to
mochar parejo,
as they put it, wipe the slate clean. They took out the whole family, as an object lesson for anybody else who might get ideas.

Güero, cleared of suspicion, bought himself a new Cessna with don Epifanio Vargas' loan.

Teresa put out the cigarette, left the gym bag open on the floor by the headboard, and pulled out the notebook. She laid it on the bed and stared at it for a long time.
Don't even look at it.
The fucking notebook belonged to the fucking
cabron
who was probably dancing with La Pelona right about now, and she was sitting there like a
pendeja,
docile, obedient, idiotic, not opening it.
Nor should you,
said a voice inside.
Just a little peek,
whispered another;
if this could cost you your life, you ought to see what your life's worth.
To work up the courage she took out the package of powder, stuck a fingernail through the plastic, and brought a hit to her nose, breathing deep.