Triple Crossing (4 page)

A tired-looking little woman in sweat clothes had stepped out of the shadows behind the armchair. On her hip she cradled a
baby boy, who was bare-chested in miniature overalls. The woman’s mouth opened soundlessly. Pulpo had one thick leg splayed
over an armrest, the bandanna skewed down, almost obscuring his eyes. They looked as if they were posing for a portrait: the
Pulpo family at home.

Silver spots swam in front of Pescatore’s eyes. The baton, held high like an executioner’s axe, weighed a hundred pounds.
He heard scratchy voices on his radio. Agents called his name. A search was in progress on the other side. In San Diego.

Pulpo’s narrow eyes were locked on Pescatore’s. The smuggler’s chest heaved. He remained in the armchair, cringing from the
anticipated blow, a goofy incredulous expression smeared across his face. He looked younger up close; the facial hair was
scraggly.

Pescatore lowered the baton. He had regained his breath somewhat.

His voice sounded pretty calm, given the circumstances. He enunciated carefully:
“Ahora sé donde vives, hijo de la chingada.”

Now I know where you live, you son of a bitch.

Pulpo’s face rearranged into a mask of contempt.

“Bienvenido a tu casa,”
he growled. The standard deferential greeting of a Mexican host: Welcome to your home.

Pescatore turned and ran.

As he sprinted with long chopping strides, wiping clumsily at
the blood that was obscuring the vision in his left eye, Pescatore thought about the time when two PAs had tackled a belligerent
drunk in the middle of the riverbed. During the struggle, the agents had rolled across the international boundary, a moment
recorded, to their misfortune, by a Mexican news photographer. There were internal investigations, angry headlines in Tijuana,
diplomatic protests. The agents got heavy suspensions; one resigned. And their invasion had gone a couple of yards. At most.
If Pescatore got caught, nothing short of crucifixion would satisfy the Mexicans this time.

Dogs announced his flight back down the street, noisy escorts loping alongside. Horns blasted when he darted north through
the traffic on Calle Internacional. The troop of migrants on the concrete median had not moved; a sun-darkened gnome in a
straw hat shook his head at Pescatore. He heard a distant siren. Could the
judiciales
be coming for him already? The only way those bastards were getting his gun would be to pry it out of his cold dead hand.

The fence looked much taller from this angle. He could not find the hole through which he had gone south. There were no apparent
handholds, no hint at how people scaled the barrier so fast every day. He spotted a junked refrigerator propped against the
metal. He clambered onto it, tossing his baton and flashlight over the fence into the darkness. He heard hoots, insults and
whistles behind him: The lynch mob was gathering. The top of the fence scraped skin off his hands, dug into his armpit. He
heard a tearing sound as his uniform shirt ripped on the metal edge. A bottle hurled from behind shattered next to him, showering
glass.

With a sob, he flopped over. He dangled one-handed for a few flesh-gouging seconds, then let go. He landed, sprawling face-first,
in the United States of America.

Border Patrol vehicles converged on him in the darkness. A helicopter swooped, circling low, the wind and sound magnify
ing his headache. He rolled to his feet, started to his right, changed direction. A semicircle of flashlights, headlights
and spotlights impaled him. An amplified, distorted voice barked at him.

Pescatore sagged back against the fence for a moment. Finally, he stepped forward, into the light. He raised his hands above
his head.

A
S THE RADIO PLAYED
the intermezzo from
Cavalleria Rusticana,
Méndez gazed north across the border.

After the night’s fog and drizzle, the morning had brought a cold sun. The old maroon Crown Victoria crested the hill before
Calle Internacional dipped east out of the canyons toward the Zona Norte and Zona Río. Leobardo Méndez, the commander of a
Mexican law enforcement unit known as the Diogenes Group, sat in the backseat of the Crown Victoria. The butt of a pistol
protruded from beneath a newspaper next to him. Méndez felt suspended over the panorama, everything clean and sharp and glistening
below him.

The road sloped between clumps of migrants and vendors along the fence on the left and palm trees on the right. Farther ahead,
the river levee slanted across the border, the remnants of the night’s crowds and a few vendors grouped around the ashes of
bonfires. Past the levee, a northbound network of ramps, lanes and bridges wound like a knot of snakes into the two dozen
lanes of the San Ysidro crossing. The traffic was backed up for a mile from the concrete hulk of the U.S. inspection station:
mainly Tijuana commuters bound for jobs in San Diego. The hill of the Colonia Libertad neighborhood, with its terraced streets
and rows of tumbledown houses, rose beyond the port of entry.

From his radio came the soundtrack: the wistful strings of the intermezzo.

As the Crown Victoria started down the incline, Méndez spotted Tiburcio the Ragpicker on the U.S. side. Tiburcio advanced—blue
cap, duffel bag, Quasimodo gait—across flatland near a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle north of the fence. Tiburcio was a sociological
category unto himself: a self-employed transborder scavenger with a green card. He lived in Tijuana. He crossed legally into
San Diego at dawn and scoured the terrain for valuable items left behind by the night’s influx of illegal immigrants.

It was like an abandoned battlefield, like the desert after the Exodus, the gap-toothed Tiburcio had once told him, red-eyed
from fatigue and alcohol. The things I find, Licenciado. Cash, coins, more than you would think. Luggage. Food. Shoes. Sometimes
underwear, and that causes me great sadness, Licenciado, because it is often a lady’s underwear, and it is often torn, and
that means the smugglers and bandits have struck again. I find identification cards, textbooks, letters. Strange things: a
trumpet. A toolbox with a beautiful complete set of tools, what kind of poor
naco
thinks he can outrun the
Migra
hauling that thing, Licenciado?

Tiburcio was a feature article waiting to be written. But Méndez never got around to publishing anything about him in his
days as a journalist. When Méndez became the head of the state human rights commission, Tiburcio had been full of tips about
renegade police, smugglers and narcos. Now that Méndez was a kind of policeman himself, he still checked in occasionally with
Tiburcio for news from no-man’s-land.

Tiburcio the Ragpicker disappeared below the top of the fence as Calle Internacional leveled off. The violins were building
to the whispery finale of the intermezzo when Méndez caught sight of two vehicles of the Diogenes Group parked on a side street
in the Zona Norte. He told his driver to pull over. Four of his officers stood around a burly, handcuffed youth seated on
the curb,
wearing overalls and a red bandanna. As Méndez’s window slid down, his deputy commander approached with a quick salute.

“Good morning, Athos,” Méndez said. “What are you up to at this uncivilized hour?”

Athos wore a goatee, a black fatigue jacket with the Diogenes Group emblem, and black pants tucked into jump boots. He was
not particularly big, but his corded neck, steel-gray mustache and steady stare gave him an air of quiet menace.

“Good morning, Licenciado,” Athos said. “I was about to call you. We had an invasion.”

“An invasion?”

Athos allowed himself a grin, the web of wrinkles around his eyes creasing.

“A Border Patrol agent crossed into the Zona Norte near the PRI headquarters chasing an individual last night. It sounds like
this monkey got all the way across Calle Internacional.”

Athos had a habit of calling suspects, witnesses and just about everyone else, except friends and co-workers, “this monkey.”
It was not exactly an insult; his tone was dispassionate and weary, just acknowledging reality. He was a weathered street
warrior who had dedicated thirty years to tactics and training: commanding SWAT teams, teaching at the police academy, guarding
public officials. He lived a life of barracks solitude, haunting the headquarters of the Diogenes Group around the clock.
His real name was Ramón Rojas. Méndez had a weakness for the works of Alexandre Dumas and considered the Diogenes Group to
be his musketeers; he had nicknamed his deputy Athos because of his wisdom and solemnity.

“Incredible,” Méndez said. “And your prisoner?”

“Pulpo. A hoodlum and smuggler. Apparently he is the one the
gabacho
was chasing.”

Pulpo looked up at the sound of his name, feral and alert. He caught sight of Méndez and became animated.

“Listen, Licenciado, with all respect, this is a clear case of a
violation of human rights,” Pulpo drawled, his chiseled shoulders and arms straining against the cuffs. “That American is
a madman. He almost killed me in front of my family. An international incident! And now these gentlemen, with all respect,
are abusing my rights as well. I am the victim, not—”

Athos turned his head to give him a look, teeth gritted, and Pulpo shut up fast.

“Very good, Athos,” Méndez said. “We should call Isabel Puente in San Diego right away. Let’s continue this at headquarters.”

A few minutes later, the three vehicles arrived at the headquarters of the Diogenes Group, a compound on a bluff at the base
of Colonia Libertad with a view of the San Ysidro border crossing. Sentries with AK-47s and sunglasses stepped back as an
iron gate slid open. The compound was a former safe house that had been confiscated from a drug trafficker. It contained a
drab two-story house, garage and a storage building. A Mexican flag flew in the courtyard.

Méndez led the way into the box-shaped storage building, which had been converted into a command center, squad room and lockup.
At thirty-nine, Méndez had gray tufts in his hair, angular features that tightened into a melancholy grimace. When he wore
glasses, he looked professorial. When he wore contact lenses, like today, his face hardened. He was thin and tended to coil
forward when he walked. He had a lupine profile. His attire was typical of Tijuana cops, reporters, academics and public officials
all the way up to the governor: brown leather jacket, blue button-down shirt, and jeans.

Opening the door for Méndez, Athos told him the unit had raided a safe house in Otay Mesa overnight and captured a Chinese
smuggler with a group of non-Mexican migrants waiting to cross.

“Eighteen Chinese, five Brazilians, two Ecuadorans,” Athos said. “And we caught a state policeman who worked with the smugglers.”

“Wonderful. Another battle with the state police in the making.”

“We found some interpreters at the Chinese place near Sanborns,” Athos said. “We are talking separately to the policeman and
to the Chinese smuggler. A heavyweight gangster from the looks of him.”

The squad room, where the unit held roll calls and meetings, was noisy and busy. Interpreters and plainclothes officers in
black fatigue jackets, armed with legal pads, clustered around captured migrants. The migrants sat in chairs with arm-desks
that made them look like disheveled college students. The prisoners regarded their questioners in a daze, as if watching another
reel in a nightmare. The migrants’ clothes were frayed and soiled. Most of the Chinese had short, shapelessly cut hair. The
Mexican officers rose or saluted Méndez as he passed.

“Did you get them something to eat?” Méndez asked. The migrants had clearly realized he was in charge; he attempted a reassuring
smile in their direction.

“Chinese food.”

“Good. Call the priests at the Scalabrini shelter, see if they can house these people until someone decides what to do with
them. They have probably spent months cooped up in one miserable safe house or another. Is this batch from Fujian too? Headed
for New York?”

“Nobody’s saying much, but they definitely came through South America. Like the last group, and the one before them.”

A hallway led past two small interrogation rooms. In the first, the Chinese smuggler sat with his hands cuffed in back. The
interpreter sat opposite him, a slender Chinese youth in a waiter’s white shirt and black pants. His nervous smile suggested
he would have much preferred to be waiting tables. No doubt his immigration status was also problematic. Méndez imagined the
look on his face when Athos had marched into the Chinese restaurant frequented by the officers of the Diogenes Group and recruited
him as an interpreter.

“This is Mr. Chen, Licenciado,” Athos said with sarcastic formality, nodding at the prisoner. “He kept saying he wanted to
talk to the boss. Mr. Chen, this is the boss.”

Looking elaborately bored, Chen swiveled his head toward them. He had a tapered torso under a burgundy sweater that was torn
along one sleeve, exposing a snake tattoo. There were bruises on his forehead. His hair was spiked and gelled and he had hipster
sideburns. A city-hardened version of the country boys in the next room.

Athos said that the smuggler had resisted arrest, putting on a martial-arts display. There was a note of grudging admiration
in Athos’s voice. “He was throwing fancy kicks, using his elbows, spinning. The
muchachos
say it took five minutes to subdue him.”

Méndez slid into the chair next to the interpreter, who looked increasingly unenthusiastic. Méndez thanked the interpreter
for his help. He examined the passport on the table. It identified the smuggler as Tomas Chen, thirty-four, naturalized citizen
of Paraguay, born in Fuzhou, China, and residing in the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este. The passport contained entry and
exit stamps from Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba and Mexico, as well as Asian and European
nations. Méndez turned the pages one at a time, making it clear he was in no hurry.