The Queen of the South by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Read Free Book Online

of the comedian Pedro Valdez—who'd been preceded by the ventriloquist Enrique and his cokehead dummy Chechito—Elmer Mendoza leaned over the table and pointed to a heavyset, dark-skinned man in glasses who was drinking at a table in one corner, surrounded by a large group of the kind of guys that leave their sport coats or jackets on, as though they were cold no matter where they were—snake- or ostrich-skin boots, thousand-dollar belts with leather-laced edging, panama hats or baseball caps with the insignia of the Culiacan Tomateros, and a lot of heavy gold at their necks and wrists. We'd seen them get out of two Ram Chargers and walk in like they owned the place, right past the bouncer, who greeted them obsequiously, forgoing the ritual pat-down that all the other customers were subjected to.
    "That's Cesar 'Batman' Guemes," Elmer said softly. "A famous narco."
    "Got any corridos to him?"
    "Several." My friend laughed in mid-sip. "He killed Güero Dávila."
    My jaw dropped as I looked at the group: brown faces and hard features, lots of moustache and obvious danger. There were eight of them; they'd been there fifteen minutes and had already downed a case of beer—twenty-four tall ones. Now they'd just ordered two bottles of Buchanan's and two of Remy Martin, and the dancers—this was unheard-of in the Don Quijote— were coming over to sit with them when they left the runway. A group of botde-blond gays—the place filled with gays late at night, and the two worlds mixed without any problems—had been giving the table insinuating looks, and Güemes smiled sarcastically, very macho, and called the waiter over to pay for their drinks. Pure peaceful coexistence.
    "How do you know?" I asked.
    "Me? Everybody in Culiacan knows."
    Four days later, thanks to a friend of Julio Bernal's who had a nephew in the business, Batman Guemes and I had a strange and interesting conversation. I was invited to a cookout at a house in San Miguel, in the hills above the city. There, the junior narcos—the second-generation guys, less ostentatious than their fathers who'd come down from the sierra, first to the barrio of Tierra Blanca and later assaulting the spectacular mansions of Colonia Chapultepec—began to invest in more discreet houses, in which the luxury was reserved for the family and guests, inside. The nephew of this friend of Julio's was the son of a historic narco from San Jose de los Hornos—one of those legendary bandidos who in his youth had traded bullets with the police and rival bands and was now serving a comfortable sentence in the prison at Puente Grande, Jalisco; the son was twenty-eight, and his name was Ernesto Samuelson. Five of his cousins and an older brother had been killed by other narcos, or the Federales, or soldiers, and he had quickly learned the lesson: law school in the United States; businesses abroad, never on Mexican soil; money laundered through a respectable Mexican company whose holdings included big transport rigs and Panamanian shrimp farms. He lived in an unassuming house with his wife and two children, drove a sober Audi, and spent three months a year in a simple apartment in Miami, with a Golf in the garage. You live longer that way, he would say. In this business, envy kills.
    It was Ernesto Samuelson who, under the bamboo-and-palm palapa in his garden, introduced me to Batman Guemes, who was standing with a beer in one hand and a plate of burnt meat in the other. "He writes novels and movies," Ernesto told Batman, by way of introduction, and then he left us.
    Batman Guemes spoke softly, with long pauses that he employed so he could study you from head to toe. He'd never read a book in his life, but he loved movies. We talked about Al Pacino (Scarface was his favorite movie of all time) and Robert De Niro (Goodfellas, Casino), and how Hollywood directors and scriptwriters, those hijos de la chingada, never portrayed a blond, blue-eyed, gringo drug dealer; they all had to be named Sanchez