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thinks he’s a trainer.”
     
    “They do all right,” Art said. “Cesar could take them a long way.”
     
    “I own Cesar,” Barrera said. “I’m an indulgent uncle, I let my nephews play. But soon I will have to hire a real manager and a real trainer for Cesar. He deserves no less. He’ll be a champion.”
     
    “Adán will be disappointed.”
     
    “Learning to deal with disappointment is part of becoming a man,” Barrera said.
     
    Well, that’s no shit.
     
    “Adán relates that you are in some sort of professional difficulty?”
     
    Now, how do I answer that? Art wondered. Taylor would no doubt employ a cliché about “not washing our dirty laundry in public,” but he’d be right. He’d shit jagged glass anyway if he knew that Barrera was even here, going under his head, as it were, to talk with a junior officer.
     
    “My boss and I don’t always see eye to eye.”
     
    Barrera nodded. “Señor Taylor’s vision can be somewhat narrow. All he can see is Pedro Áviles. The trouble with your DEA is that it is, forgive me, so very American. Your colleagues do not understand our culture, how things work, how things have to work.”
     
    The man isn’t wrong, Art thought. Our approach down here has been clumsy and heavy-handed, to say the least. That fucked-up American attitude of “We know how to get things done,” “Just get out of our way and let us do the job.” And why not? It worked so well in ‘Nam.
     
    Art answered in Spanish, “What we lack in subtlety, we make up for with a lack of subtlety.”
     
    Barrera asked, “Are you Mexican, Señor Keller?”
     
    “Half,” Art said. “On my mother’s side. As a matter of fact, she’s from Sinaloa. Mazatlán.”
     
    Because, Art thought, I’m not above playing that card.
     
    “But you were raised in the barrio,” Barrera said. “In San Diego?”
     
    This isn’t a conversation, Art thought, it’s a job interview.
     
    “You know San Diego?” he asked. “I lived on Thirtieth Street.”
     
    “But you stayed out of the gangs?”
     
    “I boxed.”
     
    Barrera nodded, and then started speaking in Spanish.
     
    “You want to take down the gomeros,” Barrera said. “So do we.”
     
    “Sin falta.”
     
    “But as a boxer,” Barrera said, “you know that you just can’t go for the knockout right away. You have to set your opponent up, take his legs away from him with body punches, cut the ring off. You do not go for the knockout until the time is right.”
     
    Well, I didn’t have a lot of knockouts, Art thought, but the theory is right. We Yanquis want to swing for the knockout right away, and the man is telling me that it isn’t set up yet.
     
    Fair enough.
     
    “What you’re saying makes great sense to me,” Art said. “It’s wisdom. But patience is not a particularly American virtue. I think if my superiors could just see some progress, some motion—”
     
    “Your superiors,” Barrera said, “are difficult to work with. They are …”
     
    He searches for a word.
     
    Art finishes it for him. “Falta gracia.”
     
    “Ill-mannered,” Barrera agrees. “Exactly. If, on the other hand, we could work with someone símpático, un compañero, someone like yourself …”
     
    So, Art thinks, Adán asked him to save my ass, and now he’s decided it’s worth doing. He’s an indulgent uncle, he lets his nephews play; but he’s also a serious man with a definite objective in mind, and I might be useful in achieving that objective.
     
    Again, fair enough. But this is a slippery slope. An unreported relationship outside the agency? Strictly verboten. A partnership with one of the most important men in Sinaloa and I keep it in my pocket? A time bomb. It could get me fired from the DEA altogether.
     
    Then again, what do I have to lose?
     
    Art poured them each another drink, then said, “I’d love to work with you, but there’s a problem.”
     
    Barrera shrugged. “¿Y qué?”
     
    “I won’t be