Baccarat, Bally, Balenciaga, Bang & Olufsen, Bank of America, Banana Republic (you can’t make this shit up)
Bloomingdale’s, Borders, Brooks Brothers, Brookstone, Bulgari
Caché, (speaking of which) Cartier, Céline, Chanel, Chloé, Christian Dior
Claim Jumper
De Beers, Del Taco (what the fuck is that doing in there), the Disney Store, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana
Emilio Pucci, Ermenegildo Zegna, Escada
Façonnable, Fendi, Fossil, Fresh (no, seriously)
Godiva, Gucci, Guess
Hermès, Hugo Boss
J.Crew, J. Jill, Jimmy Choo, Johnston & Murphy, Justice (uh-huh)
La Perla, Lacoste, Lalique, Limited (sans irony)
Louis Vuitton
Macy’s, McDonald’s (see Taco, Del), Miu Miu (what the fuck?), Montblanc
New Balance, Nike, Nordstrom
Oilily, Optica, Origins, Oscar de la Renta
Piaget, Pioneer, Porsche Design, Prada, Pure Beauty (yup)
Quiksilver (surfing sells out; ambiguity intentional)
Ralph Lauren, Rangoni Firenze, Restoration Hardware, Rolex, Room and Board (again, without irony)
Saks, Salvatore Ferragamo, Sassoon, Sears (Sears?), Smith & Hawken, Sony, Sunglass Hut, Sur La Table, Swatch
Talbots, Teen Vogue, The Territory Ahead, Tiffany, Tinder Box (no shit, the fire this time)
Valentino, Van Cleef, Versace, Victoria’s Secret, Victoria’s Secret Beauty
Wahoo’s Fish Taco (see “surfing sells out”), Williams-Sonoma, Wolfgang Puck
Yves Saint Laurent
Zara
And a score of lesser saints.
63
O is one of the worshippers.
Would be a daily communicant if she had the cash. Did we say the girl loves to shop? Did we say that the girl maybe lives to shop? We’re not slamming O; she’d tell you so herself.
“I shop,” she said to Ben one time after maxing out her card, “because there is nothing else to do. I have no job, no serious interests, no purpose in life, really. So I buy stuff. It’s something that I can do and it makes me feel better.”
“You’re filling the internal void with external things,” Ben said.
(Sanctimonious Baddhist.)
“There you go,” O said. “I don’t adore myself, so I adorn myself.”
“You can’t replace your absent father’s love or gain your suffocating mother’s approval with material acquisitions,” Ben said.
(Annoying child of two psychotherapists.)
“That’s what the paid shrink said,” O responded. “But I can’t seem to locate the Absent Father’s Love and Suffocating Mother’s Approval Boutique. Which one is it?”
“All of them,” Ben answered.
O changes therapists like some people change hairstyles. Well, like O changes hairstyles. And she’s covered the whole fucking thing with all the shrinks—how Paqu feels guilty for not having provided her little girl with a stable home so tries to make up for it by supporting her and at the same time crippling her by enabling her blah blah; how Paqu is appalled by the idea of getting old and so has to keep her daughter a dependent child because having a truly adult daughter would mean that she is old blah blah blah, so—
“It’s Paqu’s fault,” O told Ben.
“It’s Paqu’s fault, your responsibility,” Ben answered.
(Patronizing moralist.)
He’s tried. He’s offered to set O up in her own small business, but O isn’t interested in any business. He said he’d support her trying art, photography, music, acting, film, but O doesn’t have a passion for any of that. He even invited her to join him overseas doing aid work, but—
“That’s you, Ben. Not me.”
“It’s immensely satisfying, if you can tolerate the absence of creature comforts.”
“I can’t.”
“You could learn.”
“Maybe,” O said. “How’s the shopping in Darfur?”
“Shitty.”
“See …” O looked at her reflection in the store window. “I’m the person a person like you should hate, Ben. But you don’t because I’m so lovable. I have a great twisted sense of humor, I’m loyal like a dog, I have a cute face, small tits but I’m a freak in bed, and you’re a loyal dog, too, B, so you love me.”
Ben had no argument.
It was all accurate.
Another time, O did hit on something she could do.
As a career.
“Cool,” Ben said. “What?”
The freaking suspense killing him.
“Reality TV show star,” O said. “I could have my own reality TV show.”
“What would the show be about?”
“Me,” O said, like, duh.
“Yeah, I know, but what would you do on the show?”
“Do,” like, as in a verb.
“The cameras just follow me around my day,” O said. “Me being me. It would be like the Really Real Laguna Beach. A Girl Trying Not To Become A Real Housewife of Orange County.”
(O has more than once suggested they do a show about her mother and friends, The Real Cunts Of Orange Housewifies.)
“But what do you do all day?” Ben asked. He knew, for one thing, that said camera crews wouldn’t be complaining about early calls, anyway.
“You’re a real buzzkill, Ben.”
Among other things, I do you, don’t I.
“Okay, what’s the show called?”
Again—
Duh—
O.
64
Now O whips out Paqu’s black plastic and spanks it like a male dancer in a Madonna concert. Then she cruises over to José Eber and uses Mom’s name to get an appointment for a cut, color, and styling. After that, it’s off to the spa for a facial, then a redo on the makeup situation.
A One-Woman Stimulus Package.
65
Ben and Chon go to the volleyball nets at Main Beach, right by the old Hotel Laguna.
Figure it will feel good to bat the ball around a little. Alleviate their anger, clear their heads, help them decide what to do.
Your basic Fight v. Flight moment.
Guess who goes for which?
“I say we send Alex and Jaime back in a cereal box,” says Chon, if you haven’t guessed.
Set, spike, kill.
“I say we just go away for a while.”
Volley.
“Where can we go where they can’t reach out?”
Volley.
“I know places.”
Volley.
Ben does. There are dozens of villages in the remote Third World where they could hide and have a good time doing it, but what he really has in mind is this sweet little village on an Indonesian island called Sumbawa.
(Where they could be vewy vewy quiet.)
Clean beaches and green jungles.
Sweet people.
Chon says, “You start running you never stop.”
Kill.
“Bad movie clichés notwithstanding,” Ben counters, “running is fun and good for the cardiovascular system. You should never stop.”
Volley.
Chon isn’t ready to give it up. “There are some guys around from my old team. Some other guys I know. It would take some money …”
Volley.
“And only prolong the inevitable,” Ben says. “They can’t force us to do anything if we’re not here and they can’t find us. We go away for a while. By the time we’re tired of traveling they’ll probably have all killed each other off and we’ll have a new set of people to deal with.”
Kill.
Chon leaves the ball in the sand.
Ben will never get it.
He thinks he’s being Ben-evolent when in fact he’s not doing enemies a favor, he’s really hurting them. Because—
—lesson learned in I-Rock-and-Roll and Stanland—
66
If you let people believe that you’re weak, sooner or later you’re going
to have to kill them.
67
The patron of the Baja Cartel agrees with Chon on this.
Except the patron of the BC is actually the matron.
68
When Elena Sanchez Lauter first took over leadership of the Baja Cartel, a lot of the men assumed that, being a woman, she was weak.
Most of those men are now dead.
She didn’t want to kill them, but she had to, and for this she blames herself. Because she allowed the first man who disrespected her to get away with it. And the second, and the third. Rebellions, fighting, and internecine warfare broke out soon after. The other two cartels—Sinaloa and the Gulf—started to intrude on her territory. She blamed all of them for the burgeoning violence.
It was Miguel Arroyo, “El Helado,” who set her straight.
Lado told her candidly, “You have let people think that it’s all right to defy you, that nothing will happen. You are therefore responsible for the bloodshed and the chaos. If you had displayed that first man’s head on a stake, you would be feared and respected.”
She knew that he spoke the truth. She accepted her responsibility. “But what do I do now?” she asked him.
“Send me.”
She did.
The story goes that Lado went straight to a bar in Tijuana owned by a narcotraficante called “El Guapo.” Lado sat down at a table with his old buddy and drank half a beer before saying, “What kind of men are we, we let a woman be in charge?”
“You, maybe,” El Guapo said. He looked around at the eight or so of his bodyguards. “But that puta can suck my cock.”
Lado shot him in the stomach.
Before the shocked bodyguards could react ten men armed with machine guns came through the door.
The bodyguards dropped their guns to the floor.
Lado took a knife from his belt, leaned over the writhing El Guapo, pulled down his blood-soaked trousers, and asked, “This cock, cabrón?”
A swift swipe of the blade, then Lado asked the room, “Anyone else want their cocks sucked?”
No one did.
Lado stuck it in El Guapo’s mouth, paid for his beer, and left.
That’s the story, anyway.
True, partly true, apocryphal, whatever—the point is that people believed it. What is recorded fact is that within the next two weeks seven more bodies were found with their genitals stuffed in their mouths.
And Elena got a new name.
Elena La Reina.
Queen Elena.
It’s a shame, though, she thinks now, that—
Men teach you how they must be treated.
69
The bitch of it (yeah, yeah) is, she didn’t want this.
Elena never wanted to head the cartel.
But as the only Lauter left standing it was her duty, her responsibility.
You want to see a busy woman, check out Elena Sanchez Lauter on the Day of the Dead, because she has to leave gifts on a lot of graves. A husband, two brothers, five nephews, uncounted cousins, friends beyond number, all killed in the Mexican drug wars.
Two other brothers in prison, one in Mexico, the other just over the border in a federal prison in San Diego.
The only male left was her then twenty-two-year-old son, Hernan, an engineer by training and profession, who would come to the throne by virtue of his mother’s family name. Hernan was willing, in fact eager, to assume control, but Elena knew that he wasn’t suited for it, didn’t have the ambition, the ruthlessness—let’s face it—the brains for the job.
Elena admits that he inherited his lack of character and intellect from his father, whom she had married at age nineteen because he was handsome and charming, and she wanted to get out of her parents’ house and out from under her brothers’ thumbs. She’d had a brief period living in San Diego, a tantalizing whiff of freedom, a truncated teenage rebellion that her family quickly sniffed (snuffed?) out before hauling her back to Tijuana, where the only escape was marriage.
And—face it—she wanted sex.
Which is the one thing at which Filipo Sanchez was competent.
He could make the rain fall for her.
Filipo knocked her up quickly, gave her Hernan, Claudia, and Magdalena, and got himself killed by carelessly and stupidly walking into an ambush. They sing songs about him now, beautiful narcocorridos, but Elena—if she was to be honest with herself—was almost relieved.
She was tired of his financial incompetence, his gambling, his other women, most of all his weakness. She misses him in bed, but nowhere else.
Hernan is his father’s son.
Even if he managed to take the seat at the head of the table he would not be there for long before they killed him.
So she took the job instead, to save her son’s life.
That was ten years ago.
And now they respect and fear her.
They don’t think her weak, and, until recently, she didn’t have to kill so many.
70
Elena has a lot of houses.
Right now she occupies the home in Rio Colonia, in Tijuana, but she also has three others in various parts of the city, a finca in the country near Tecate, a beach house south of Rosarito, another in Puerto Vallarta, a thirty-thousand-acre ranch in southern Baja, four condos in Cabo, and that’s just Mexico. She owns another ranch in Costa Rica and two more houses on the Pacific side, an apartment in Zurich, another in Sète (she prefers Languedoc; Provence is too obvious), a flat in London she has stayed in exactly once.
Through shell corporations and DBAs she’s purchased several properties in La Jolla, Del Mar, and Laguna Beach.
The Rio Colonia house is known as El Palacio. It’s a compound, really, with outer walls and explosive-resistant gates. Squads of sicarios man the walls, patrol the grounds, and cruise the streets outside in armor-plated cars that bristle with guns. Other squads of gunmen guard the first set of gunmen against potential treason. The leaded windows now have grenade screens over them.
The “master bedroom” is bigger than many Mexican homes.
She has furniture imported from Italy, a massive bed, a Renaissance-era mirror from Florence, and a flat-screen plasma television on which she secretively watches lurid soap operas. Her bathroom has a rain shower, a whirlpool bath, and magnifying mirrors that show every new line and wrinkle in what is still, at fifty-four, a pretty face.
In the U.S., Elena would be called a definite MILF.
She maintains her tight little body with rigid discipline in a private gym at the house and the finca. Men still sneak glances at her boobs; she knows she has a nice ass. But for what?
Elena’s lonely in the big house.
Hernan, miserably married to a bruja of a harridan, has his own place now; Claudia is a new bride to a nice, dull factory manager; and then there’s Magdalena.
Elena’s wild child.
Her youngest, her baby, the unexpected.
Who seems to have intuited that her advent was unpredicted and responded by becoming unpredictable. It was as if Magda was always saying, through her actions, if you think I surprised you then, wait until you see what I have in store for you next.
A bright child who shocked with her miserable performance in school, and then, just when you had given up on her academic life (“Please, Maria, find her a patient husband”), she became a scholar. A talented dancer who decided that gymnastics were “more her thing,” then quit abruptly to pursue horsemanship (as it were), then gave it up to return to the ballet. (“But I have always loved it, Mama.”)
With her father’s face and her mother’s body, Magda broke a parade of boys on the wheel of her willfulness. Casually cruel, intentionally dismissive, a shameless tease—even her mother felt badly for a few of the tortured (“You will take it too far one day, Magda.” “I have geldings harder to handle, Mama.”)—Magda quickly intimidated the pool of available suitors in Tijuana.
No matter, she wanted to leave.
There were student trips to Europe, summe
rs with family friends in Argentina and Brazil, frequent outings up to L.A. to go to clubs and shop. And then just when Elena had become resigned to the fact that her baby was just a party girl … surprise—Magda returns from Peru with a serious desire to become an archaeologist. And Magda being Magda, there was not a college in Mexico that could satisfy her ambitions. No, it had to be the University of California, Berkeley or Irvine, although Elena was reasonably sure that her daughter threatened the faraway former to smooth the way for the relatively nearby latter.
Relatively close, yes, but Magda rarely makes the trip home. She’s busy with her studies, and her video messages home show her in big eyeglasses, her hair pulled back into a plain ponytail, her body hidden in formless sweaters. As if, Elena thinks, she fears her sexuality diminishes her intellect. Maybe she has the same concern about too-frequent visits home. So, except for holidays, Elena is left alone in her houses with only bodyguards, the soap operas, and her power for company.
It isn’t enough.
It isn’t what she wanted but it’s what she has, and life has made her a realist. Still, she would like someone in her bed, someone at the breakfast table in the morning, someone to hold her, kiss her, make love to her. Sometimes she would like to open a window and yell out—
I’m not a monster
I’m not a bitch
(She knows they joke about her cock and balls, has heard the opposite punch line, “When Elena gets her monthly, blood really flows.”) I’m not—
Lady Macbeth
Lucrezia Borgia
Catherine the Great. I am
—a woman doing what she has to do. I am
—the woman you made me.
Elena is at war.
71
It’s chaos now.
Where there used to be three cartels—Baja, Sonora, the Gulf—now there are at least seven, all fighting for turf.
And the Mexican government has launched a war on all of them.