And that doesn’t include the thousands fleeing gang violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, passing through Mexico to try to find sanctuary in the United States. A lot of them don’t make it.
Chuy is now both a monster and a ghost.
Senator Ben O’Brien calls.
He’s in El Paso, phones Keller and asks for a meeting. What he actually says is “Keller, let me buy you a beer.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Indigo. On Kansas Street. You know it?”
Keller knows it. He drives up to the city and meets O’Brien at the hotel bar. The senator has gone back to his roots, wearing a denim shirt and Lucchese boots. His Stetson is perched on his lap. Good as his word, he brings a pitcher of beer, pours one for Keller and says, “I saw something interesting driving through El Paso today—a homemade sign that read ‘Adán Vive.’”
Keller isn’t surprised—he’s seen the same signs in Juárez and heard that they’re all over the place in Sinaloa and Durango. “What can I tell you? The man has a following.”
“He’s becoming Che Guevara,” O’Brien says.
“I guess absence does make the heart grow fonder.”
“You heard anything more?” O’Brien asks. “About his death?”
“I don’t follow that world anymore.”
“Bullshit.”
Keller shrugs—it’s true.
“Do you read the American papers?” O’Brien asks.
“The sports pages,” Keller says.
“Then you don’t know what’s been happening up here?” O’Brien asks. “With heroin?”
“No.”
“A lot of people in the law enforcement community have been celebrating Barrera’s alleged demise,” O’Brien says, “but the truth is that it hasn’t slowed the flow of drugs at all. In fact, it’s only gotten worse. Especially with heroin.”
From the year 2000 to 2006, O’Brien tells him, fatal heroin overdoses stayed fairly stable, about 2,000 a year. From 2007 to 2010, they rose to about 3,000. But in 2011, they rose to 4,000. Six thousand in 2012, 8,000 in 2013.
“To put it in perspective,” O’Brien says, “from 2004 to now we lost 7,222 military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.”
“To put it in perspective,” Keller says, “in the same period of time, over a hundred thousand Mexicans were killed in drug violence, with another twenty-two thousand missing. And that’s a conservative estimate.”
“You’re making my argument,” O’Brien says. “The loss of life you cite in Mexico, the heroin epidemic here, the millions of people we have behind bars. Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working.”
“If you asked me here to tell me that,” Keller says, “you’ve wasted both our time. Thanks for the beer, but what do you want?”
“I represent a group of senators and congressmen who have the power and influence to fire the current DEA administrator and appoint a new one,” O’Brien says. “We want that to be you.”
Keller has never been easily shocked, but he is now. “With all respect, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”
“The country is flooded with heroin, use is up over eighty percent, and most of it’s coming from Mexico,” O’Brien says. “I have constituents who go to cemeteries to visit their children.”
“And I’ve seen Mexican kids buried with bulldozers,” Keller says. “Nobody up here gave a damn. There’s a ‘heroin epidemic’ now because white kids are dying.”
“I’m asking you to give a damn now,” O’Brien says.
“I fought my war,” Keller says.
“Kids are dying out there,” O’Brien says. “And I don’t think you’re a guy who can just take your pension, sit on your ass and let it happen.”
“Watch me.”
“Think about it.” O’Brien slides off the barstool and hands Keller his card. “Call me.”
“I won’t be calling.”
“We’ll see.”
O’Brien leaves him sitting there.
Keller does the math—O’Brien said that heroin deaths rose slightly in 2010, but then spiked in 2011. Then rose again by half in 2012.
All while Adán was alive.
Motherfucker, Keller thinks. Barrera put it in place—his last malignant gift to the world. Keller remembers his Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them.”
Ain’t that the truth.
The ghost and the monster.
They eat at Garufa, an Argentine place on Bulevar Tomás Fernández. It’s expensive as hell but he wants to take her someplace nice. Keller has steak, Marisol has salmon and eats with an unabashed appetite, something he’s always liked about her.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Marisol asks, setting down her fork.
“Why do you think there’s something I’m not telling you?”
“Because I know you,” Marisol says. “So what is it? Spill.”
When he tells her about his meeting with O’Brien, she sits back in her chair. “Arturo, oh my God. I’m stunned.”
“Right?”
“I thought you were persona non grata,” Marisol says.
“So did I.” He tells her what O’Brien said and how he’d responded.
Marisol is quiet.
“Christ, you don’t think I should accept, do you?” Keller asks.
She’s still quiet.
“Do you?” Keller asks.
“Art, think of the power you’d have,” Marisol says. “The good you could do. You could actually effect change.”
Keller sometimes forgets her political activism. Now he remembers the woman who had camped out in the Zócalo in Mexico City to protest election fraud, her marches down the Paseo de la Reforma to protest police brutality. All part of the woman he fell in love with.
“You’re completely opposed to virtually everything DEA does,” he says.
“But
