Savages

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.
    Worse, she’s faced with a rebellion in her own Baja Cartel. A faction has remained loyal to her and the old family name but another answers to El Azul, an enforcer who used to work for her brothers but would now be
patron.
    It has quickly evolved into open warfare. Baja averages five killings a day now. Bodies lie in the streets, or, as is El Azul’s predilection, stuffed alive into barrels of acid. Elena has lost a dozen soldiers in the past month alone.
    Of course, she has retaliated in kind.
    And been smart—allying herself with the Zetas, formerly an elite antinarcotic police unit that went into business for itself as killers-for-hire. It was the Zetas who started the beheadings.
    Killing people certainly causes fear, but decapitation seems to inspire a certain kind of primal terror. There’s just something about the idea of having your head lopped off that really gets to people. Recently they had the idea of going to the IT people and getting it to go viral—old-school leadership technique meets modern marketing—and it has been an effective tool.
    But the Zetas are expensive—cash on the barrelhead and their own drug turf as payment—so Elena has to acquire more territory just to stay even.
    And El Azul has allies of his own.
    The Sinaloa Cartel, perhaps now the most powerful in the country, adding money, soldiers, and political clout to Azul’s rebellion. Putting yet more pressure on Elena to acquire more territory, make more money to hire more men, purchase more weapons, buy more political protection. Government officials have to be paid, police and army bribed … money, money, and always more money … so she has to expand.
    But the only place left to go is north.
    El Norte.
    Thank God she had the foresight to send Lado up there, what is it now, eight years ago? To quietly prepare the ground, recruit soldiers,infiltrate turf. So when she decided it was time for the Baja Cartel to take over the drug trade in California, Lado was established and ready.
    Azul, of course, had followed suit—it was the obvious move—but so far Lado has him outmanned, outgunned, and outprepared up there.
    It was Lado who decapitated the seven men.
    Lado who will oversee the new marijuana market.
    But now these two
Yanquis
want to play games?
    She can’t afford their foolishness. She’s at war, she needs the income. It’s a life-and-death matter for her.
    Don’t let yourself think that they won’t kill a woman. They have—she’s seen the photos, the women with their mouths duct-taped, their hands tied behind their backs, always stripped, often raped first.
    Men teach you how to treat them.

72
     
    “‘Fuck you’?” she asks now. “He said that? In those words?”
    Chinga te?
    She talks to Alex and Jaime over the phone.
    “I’m afraid so,” Alex says reluctantly.
    “‘Fuck you’ ultimately means ‘Fuck me.’”
    Alex isn’t going near that. He has a pretty
dulce
life going in California and he doesn’t want to see it messed up with a drug war. They can keep that shit back in Mexico for all Alex cares. So he tries to make peace.
    “They did agree to get out of the market immediately and totally,” he says.
    Elena La Reina isn’t buying. “We didn’t make them an offer towhich we expected a counteroffer. We made a demand, with which we expected compliance. If we allow them to think that they can negotiate with us, sooner or later that