Devil's Mark

“You speak excellent English, J.W.”

“Texas A&M, business. Take a load off.”

Everyone took a seat. Wang made a vague gesture at the chef and a waiter with shot glasses and beers appeared almost instantaneously. Wang didn’t appear to believe in frivolous excesses like lime or salt. He raised his glass. “Salud.”

Everyone drank. The smooth tequila blossomed into warmth in Bolan’s stomach and he chased it with a slug from a sweating bottle of Pacífico beer. Bolan motioned for another round of shots and raised his. “Gan bei.”

Wang drank to the traditional Chinese toast “dry glass” and grinned. “Check out the culture on Cooper!” Bolan shrugged.

Wang looked Bolan up and down with renewed interest. “So my old buddy Israel is FIA, the señorita is DEA, what does that make you muchacho?”

“Concerned citizen?” Bolan ventured.

“Well, what’s concerning you today, Citizen Cooper?”

“Milanesas?” Bolan asked.

Wang sighed happily at Bolan’s request for fried, breaded steak. “Oh, we got that, and oh! And I have surprise delicacy!” Smiley squirmed visibly in her chair. Wang fired off a rapid string of orders in Cantonese, and the waiter and the chef made for the kitchen at the double. “What else is concerning you, Cooper?”

“Silencio.”

Wang leaned back in the booth in thought. “Well, you know we inscrutable Chinese practically invented the concept.”

“True, and as the inspector pointed out earlier, by comparison cartel guys talk about silence a hell of a lot more than they practice it.”

“They’re a bit loose-lipped compared to some,” Wang conceded. “What’s that to me?”

“Well, in Tijuana the silencio is starting to get enviable even by Chinese standards.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“How’s it here in Mexicali?”

Wang smiled as the waiter staggered over beneath a mountain of plates and a bucket of beer on ice. “Ah.”

The plates of beans, rice and tortillas and fried steaks were plentiful; however, the biggest point of interest were the heaping plates of fire-roasted red mezcal worms. Smiley eyed the mystery-meat milanesas with suspicion. She regarded the roasted caterpillars in open horror. Wang was throwing the gringos an open culinary challenge. Villaluz sighed with pleasure at the seasonal Mexican delicacy and dived in with aplomb. Bolan followed suit.

Bolan squeezed a wedge of lemon over his milanesa and tucked in. Despite the fact that it was delicious, he privately hoped no canine gladiator had given its life for it. Bolan finished his beer and the waiter stopped just short of doing a baseball slide to fetch him a fresh one. Bolan and the inspector ate heartily and waited politely for Wang to pick up the ball again. Smiley picked at her beans and rice.

“Well, speaking of silencio,” Wang stated, “I expect it might sound like something of a contradiction, but it’s gotten a tad more violent and more silent here in ol’ Mexicali.”

The inspector speared himself another steak from the pile. “It is the same in Tijuana.”

“It’s my experience,” Bolan said, “that Mexico isn’t a very quiet place, and when it does get quiet it means something very bad is about to happen.”

“That’s pretty astute there, Coop.”

Villaluz polished off his beer. “My friend is feeling somewhat light.”

“Well, I reckon if I were him I’d want to go heeled.” Wang pushed away from the table. “Follow me.”

Bolan, Smiley and Villaluz followed Wang back into the kitchen and down the stairs into the cellar. Sacks of beans, rice and flour formed pyramids that nearly brushed the ceiling. Wang went to a steel security door and punched in a code.

Bolan stepped into the candy store.

Small arms of all descriptions were racked on the walls and covered tables. Wooden crates of weapons were palleted in piles like the beans and rice next door. “So what can I do you for?” Wang asked proudly.

“Tell me a story,” Bolan said.

Wang chewed his lip for a moment in thought. “I’ll tell you a story about the old days. Most yanquis don’t know it, but the Chinese tongs used to run a lot of the crime on the border. When the U.S. had their anti-Chinese movements in the 1800s, many Chinese moved south across the border. In the end the Mexicans had their own night of the long-knives, but we still stayed. People still wanted opium and a place to do it. Men wanted Chinese prostitutes and places to do them. Mexico until recently was never the land of gunfighters the U.S. was, so if you wanted someone dead and didn’t have men of your own? A tong hatchet man was a good bet.”

“And then you got pushed out.”

“Yep, in the 1980s Mexican brown heroin became cheap, plentiful and of higher quality than ever before. Our China white couldn’t compete. Cocaine was the other drug of choice, and we were not a natural conduit for it. The Chinese criminal web in Mexico contracted. But if there is one thing we Chinese have it’s worldwide connections. Mexican criminals have always gotten most of their weapons by stealing them or buying them black market from the Mexican military or smuggling them in from the United States. However, we Chinese have always been a secondary, shadow-conduit. AK-47s and light support weapons to revolutionaries in the south. PRC, Taiwanese and Philippine knockoffs of MAC-10s, Uzis and M-16s to the drug cartels. We Chinese never cared, business was business.”

“And what’s your relationship with the cartels?” Bolan probed.

“For the most part we have always had a wary truce with the cartels. We are a source of guns, and the Chinese laundries these days launder money into Asian offshore banks in the Pacific.”

“And now?” Bolan asked.

“Now?” J.W. frowned. “Now, things are…”

“Beginning to take an alarming turn?” Bolan suggested.

Wang walked over to a crate and opened it with a small crowbar. “You know what those are.”

Bolan looked at a dozen AK-47s packed in straw. “Kalashnikovs.”

“You betcha. Weapon of the people. Used to be every cartel asshole wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt had to have one. I couldn’t keep them in stock. Now? Now I can hardly give them away. The cartels took the high hat and consider them peasant weapons, used by barefoot illiterate assholes. Now they want M-4 carbines like your boys use. The weapons of the world conquerors.”

Bolan was aware of this. “And?”

Wang pulled a pistol out from under his jacket. “You know what this is?”

Bolan eyed the large, uniformly gray, space-gun-looking Belgian weapon. “FN Five-seveN.”

“No, it’s a mata policias.”

“Cop killer.”

Wang nodded. “Every Mexican criminal wants one of these. Now me? I’m a .45-caliber man, give me that 12.5 mm slug any day. But the little 5.7 mm rounds this baby squirts out? Rumor is they slide right through bulletproof vests. The U.S. war on drugs? Well, in Mexico it’s starting to look like a civil war. The cops are arming up, the government is sending in the army, and the bad guys want a solution to all these assholes in body armor. They love the mata policia, and they all want that Belgian carbine that fires the same cartridge. But you know what the problem is?”

“Supply and demand,” Bolan stated.

“That’s right. Belgian guns have always been expensive, and trying to smuggle Belgian guns into Mexico, well, that’s a very interesting proposition. It takes a U.S. buyer. Five-seveNs are legal up north, but it throws in another middleman. If a U.S. citizen buys five or ten or fifty of them, he risks attracting a lot of unwanted attention, so the price goes way up. So they only come in at a very slow drip. They’re also status symbols. I heard of them going for 10k a pop down here on the border and the supply just cannot meet the demand.”

“So what’s the solution?”