Not hardly. What he sees are sleazy bars, hookers, their customers, young punks, drunk students, and narco lookouts.

Keller continues on the classic bad-cop routine. "Do I look like a jolly fat man? Am I wearing a red suit? I guess what I'm getting at here, Alejandro-this isn't Christmas. There are no presents under the tree. Do you know what the definition of a present is? Something for nothing. You want me to get you out of Mexico, get you a snitch visa on the other side, you're going to have to give me something I want."

"I can give you a lot of information about Contreras."

Keller stops in front of a window and runs his eyes up and down the body of a young woman in a purple negligee. "I have a lot of information about Contreras. I have warehouses of information about Contreras. I bet I know more about him than you do. You're going to have to do better than that."

"Like what?" Sosa asks. He's scared.

"Look at the woman, not at me," Keller says. "His location."

"I never know," Sosa answers. "He only tells me a few minutes ahead of time. To get the plane ready."

"Well," Keller says, "when he does, you can tell me."

Sosa shakes his head. "I can't go back there. He's going to kill me."

"Then if I were you?" Keller says. "I'd call me at the first possible opportunity."

"I won't do it."

And then there's that moment with an informant where you pull the carrot away and just show him the stick. You have to let him know he's trapped, and the only way out is you.

I am the truth and the way.

"Yeah you will," Keller says, smiling at the woman behind the glass. "Or I'll put it out that you were talking to DEA. Then Contreras won't need any goddamn gypsy to tell him to kill you. He'll turn you over to Ochoa to find out what you told me."

"You evil motherfucker."

"Hey, you could have chosen to fly for the friendly skies," Keller says, walking down the street with Sosa at his side like a puppy. "Now, you have options: The federales arrest you right now and you go to a jail where Contreras's guys kill you; you run until Ochoa finds you and tortures you to death; or you go back, you do your job like nothing happened, you call me when you know where your boss is going to be, and I put you in the 'program.'"

Sosa chooses door number three.

Now they just have to wait for him to call.

Keller flies back to Mexico City.

- Luis Aguilar finally broke down to his wife's imprecations and invited the North American to dinner, albeit not without some rearguard resistance. "It would be unkind."

"How so?" Lucinda asked.

"The man lost his own family," Luis assayed, "and it would be unkind to confront him with our happiness."

"Is that the best you can do?" Lucinda asked. "How do you win any cases?"

"I'll call him."

Keller got the call at his desk and was too surprised to think of an excuse. He showed up that night at Aguilar's with a bottle of wine and flowers, both of which Lucinda graciously accepted.

If Keller expected Luis Aguilar's wife to be, well...dull...he's disappointed. In a word, she's striking. A head taller than her husband, with long chestnut hair and an aquiline nose, subtly but elegantly dressed.

The daughters, luckily, favor their mother. Tall, thin, each resembling a ballerina (which, he learned over dinner, was accurate), Caterina and Isobel, sixteen and thirteen respectively, are lovely, perfect combinations of their father's reserve and their mother's graciousness.

They politely answer Keller's polite questions over a meal that starts with a delicious soup made of cactus tenders, followed by diced chicken in a creamy almond sauce over wild rice, and then a coconut flan.

"You went to a lot of trouble," Keller tells Lucinda.

"Not at all. I love to cook."

At a subtle nod from their mother, the girls excuse themselves after dinner and Lucinda says she's going to "finish up" in the kitchen.

Keller starts to say, "Let me-"

"We have help," Aguilar says as he takes Keller into his study. "Do you play chess?"

"Not very well."

"Oh."

"We can play."

"No," Aguilar says, "not if you don't play well. It wouldn't be a challenge."

A maid-Keller learns that her name is Dolores-brings in coffee, which Aguilar laces with cognac. They sit down, and with nothing else to talk about, the conversation turns to Vera.

"Gerardo runs roughshod on the law," Aguilar complains. "It looks good in the media, I suppose it gets results, but sooner or later it comes back and bites you in the ankle."

Keller is a little skeptical about Aguilar's by-the-book pretense. The lawyer hasn't been exactly reluctant to use the information that Vera's none-too-gentle interrogations produce. Half the time, the suspects actually confess, and Keller hasn't noticed Aguilar asking too many questions as to how those confessions were induced.

He doesn't tell Aguilar about his trip to Nuevo Laredo for Vera.

"And this 'Batman and Robin' business," Aguilar says, "it's silly and demeaning."

"But it gives the media a hook," Keller says.

"I'm not in the media business."

"Sure you are."

Lucinda comes in and rescues them from another debate, steering the conversation to film, sports, and Keller. He finds himself telling them about his background-the absentee Mexican businessman father, his days at UCLA, meeting Althea, Vietnam...Then he sees Aguilar glance at his watch. "And I should be going. Thank you for a wonderful evening."

After he leaves, Lucinda says, "See, he isn't so bad. I like him."

"Hmmmm," Aguilar says.

Gerardo Vera spends the evening with his latest mistress. Good wine, good food, better sex.

Drink, food, and women. What else is there in life?

"God?" Aguilar asked him when he'd spouted this philosophy over lunch.

"That's the next life," Vera said. "I'll worry about that when I get there."

"Then it will be too late."

"Yes, Father Luis."

Luis believes in heaven and hell, Vera knows that there is neither. You die and that's it, so you have to suck the marrow out of life. The American, Keller, he likes to pretend that he's lost his faith, but it's still there, tormenting him with guilt over his supposed sins.

Vera has no such torments.

He doesn't believe in sin.

Right and wrong, yes.

Courage and cowardice, yes.

Duty and dereliction, yes, but these are parts of being a man. A man does the right thing, does his duty and does it bravely.

Then he drinks, eats, and fucks.

The woman tonight is a charmer, her husband a government official too busy with his work to do his duty at home, and Vera is the grateful beneficiary of this neglect, cheerful to hang horns on a fool.

It's an epidemic in Mexico these days, what with these Ivy League technocrats bringing the absurd American "work ethic" back with them. They have volunteered to become cogs in a machine, and they forget why it is that they work.

Vera doesn't forget.

He's ordered a fine meal delivered to this Polanco love nest, has put fine champagne on ice, music on the stereo.

Discreet, trusted sentries stand guard outside.

Vera pours the woman a glass of champagne, just enough now to make her giddy but not sloppy, then savors the perfume of her elegant neck, then reaches down to feel her equally elegant ass.

She freezes but doesn't stop him, and he lifts the silk up and then reaches around to feel the essence of her, and she doesn't object but leans back and lays her head on his shoulder as he strokes her and whispers filth into her ear.

The rich ones, their husbands are too tame, they like to hear words that come from the slums.

Luis hopes for heaven.

Keller fears hell.

Vera fears only death, and that because he takes such pleasure in life.

- Sosa calls that night.

"I'm taking Contreras from Nuevo Laredo to his niece's birthday party in Matamoros tomorrow," he tells Keller. "After that, he's going to have a party of his own at one of his safe houses."

"I need an address."

Sosa gives it to him-a three-story apartment building on Agustn Melgar in the Encantada district.

"Anyone flying with him?"

"Ochoa," Sosa says. "And Forty. And another Zeta named Segura. Crazy guy who wears a grenade on a chain around his neck. Other Zetas are coming to the party. Look, I don't want to stay on the phone too long."

"Okay," Keller says. "Here's what you do. You drop Contreras off. You go downtown. You walk across the Puente Nuevo into Brownsville. A DEA agent will be waiting for you on the other side."

"You promise?"

"You have my word."

Keller gets on the horn to Vera. Thirty minutes later, he's sitting in the SEIDO office with him and Aguilar.

"What do you have to do with this?" Aguilar asks Keller.

"He helped me with the informant," Vera says.

"That's not-"

"You want Contreras or not?" Vera snaps.

"I should have been informed of this operation," Aguilar says. "My God, gypsy fortune-tellers...what's next?"

"What's next is that we take Contreras," Vera says, "and three top Zetas."

Aguilar warns, "They won't give up Contreras without a fight."

"Good," Vera says.

"I want him alive," Aguilar says to Vera.

Keller gets on the phone to Tim Taylor. "I'm going to need an agent to pick up an informant on the New Bridge in Brownsville. And I'm going to need an S-visa for him."

"What the hell, Keller? What are you doing in Matamoros?"

"The op is out of Mexico City."

"What does it have to do with Barrera?"

"Nothing," Keller says. "It has to do with Contreras."

"Keller-"

"You want him or not?" Keller asks, echoing Vera.

"Of course we want him."

"Then get an agent there tomorrow afternoon," Keller says. "He's picking up an Alejandro Sosa and putting him into protective custody. Then get the extradition papers going for Contreras."