He was trapped-caught between the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas. He left the bar and found Ana and Giorgio at the Kentucky.

For a man who'd just had a professional triumph, Giorgio was uncharacteristically subdued. Then again, seeing Marisol's wounds was heartbreaking. Such a beautiful woman, such a good person, disfigured and in pain. So it was tasteful of Giorgio not to celebrate, Pablo thought.

Maybe he has some sensitivity after all.

"You're quiet tonight," Ana said to Pablo.

"Just tired."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

They had a few drinks, then Giorgio left to go to El Paso to sleep with his current girlfriend, an American sociologist who was doing her doctoral dissertation on "the phenomenon of violence in Ciudad Jurez."

"Is that what we are?" Ana asked. "A phenomenon?"

"Apparently," Giorgio answered.

"Can you use photographs in a dissertation?"

"I'm sort of deep background," Giorgio answered. "See you tomorrow."

Pablo didn't sleep that night. There seemed to be no way out of the trap he was in. When he went into the office, scar asked him if he'd made any progress on the story. Pablo was evasive, and when he went out to his car there was a note on the seat-"Where is our story? Don't fuck with us, cabrn."

I'm shrinking with my city, Pablo thinks as he bunches up the torta wrapper and tosses it on the floor of the car. The once thriving mercado is almost deserted because the tourists don't come anymore; one famous bar or club after another has closed; even the Mariscal, the red-light district just by the Santa Fe Bridge, has been shut down because men won't take the risk of going, even for whores.

Now he forces himself to get out of the car for yet another corpse. Just one more malandro, one more piece of garbage swept up in la limpieza.

The cleansing.

Usually Giorgio beats him to the scene, but he's probably still in bed with the North American.

Then he spots Giorgio.

- It's Pablo who tells Ana.

He goes into the city room, holds her tight, and tells her, and she screams and her knees buckle and she falls into him and he almost tells her. It's my fault. It's my fault, if I had said something, told him, maybe...

But you didn't, Pablo thinks.

And you still don't.

Because you're a coward.

And because you're so ashamed.

scar writes an editorial about Giorgio's murder, a classic El Bho piece full of moral outrage and grief mixed with erudition.

Giorgio's funeral is a horror show.

The whole Jurez journalist community is there, and Cisneros and Keller. The service at the cemetery goes about as usual, then Pablo notices a car parked just outside the gates.

He walks over.

A severed head, its mouth fixed in a macabre grin, is set on its hood.

With scar's editorial pinned to its neck.

There's a subdued gathering at Ana's that night. Pablo, scar, Marisol, and her North American. A few others. A shrunken group, Pablo thinks, with our shrunken souls.

People drink sadly, sullenly.

A few attempts are made to tell funny stories about Giorgio, but the effort falls flat.

The gathering breaks up early. Marisol, looking tired and in pain, says that she has to be getting back to Valverde, and the others quickly use the opportunity to make their escapes.

When people were gone, Ana, in her cups, says, "Make love to me. Take me to bed."

"Ana."

"Just fuck me, Pablo."

Their lovemaking is angry and afterward she sobs.

The day after Giorgio's funeral, scar shows Pablo and Ana an editorial he intends to publish.

"Seores of the organizations disputing the plaza of Ciudad Jurez," he reads, "we would like to bring to your attention that we are reporters, not fortune-tellers. Thus, we would like you to explain what is it that you want from us? What do you want us to publish or refrain from publishing? You are, at present, the de facto authorities in this city, due to the fact that the legally established rulers have not been able to do anything to keep our colleagues from falling, despite our repeated demands that they do so. And it is for this reason that, faced with this unquestionable reality, we are forced to pose this question, because what we least want is for another of our colleagues to fall victim.

"This is not a surrender on our part, but an offer of a truce. We need to know, at least, what the rules are, for even in a war, there are rules."

The editorial itself makes headlines internationally. It resonates among the journalistic community in Mexico because so many journalists have been murdered in Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Len, and Michoacn.

The Zetas, especially, have established a virtual silence born of terror in the areas that they control, with media in Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa having stopped running stories on the narcotics trade at all, and average people in the street afraid even to speak their names, referring to them instead as "the last letter."

The paper receives hundreds of letters and e-mails.

No answer, however, comes from the cartels.

No rules, no stated expectations.

Pablo knows what the expectations are; he doesn't need a rulebook to know the rules: Write what we tell you, and only what we tell you, or we'll kill you. Take the sobre, or we'll kill you. Sell us your soul, or we'll kill you.

It's a bitter lesson-you think you can rent your soul, but it's always a sale, and all sales are final.

That night, the envelope man Pablo finds him on the street.

"Tomorrow, pendejo, we see that story or-" He smiles, sticks his two fingers out like a gun, and squeezes the "trigger."

Ana's in bed when Pablo gets back. He doesn't want to wake her so he sleeps on the couch. Or tries to, without a lot of success. He thinks of writing Mateo a goodbye letter, but decides that's too melodramatic.

He decides to write the Sinaloa article.

Then the Zeta one.

Then neither.

In the morning, he decides, I'll go into the office and hand scar my resignation.

Then I'll cross the bridge.

- In the morning Pablo tries to find a way to tell Ana what he's going to do.

But he can't find the words.

Or, face it, he tells himself, the courage.

Maybe that's the way, though, Pablo thinks. Just tell her that you're afraid, that you don't want to end up like Armando or Giorgio. She'll think less of you, but she won't hate you the way she will if she knows you took money.

Just tell her that you're afraid.

She'll believe that.

Five times he tries to open his mouth, but nothing comes out. He tries again as they drive to the office together. He feels like he's on a conveyor belt headed inexorably for the blades of an abattoir, but can't yell to stop it.

They get to the office and park the car, cross the street to get a coffee.

Pablo can picture the crushed, disappointed look on El Bho's face.

He thought about simply typing up his resignation and e-mailing it, but decided that would be too cowardly. scar deserves a face-to-face explanation, and an apology, and somehow Pablo feels that he deserves it, too. Deserves to look into scar's hurt eyes and remember his expression. Deserves to hear scar's disappointed words and have them replay in his head. Deserves to walk out of the office in shame, clean out his desk, feel the stares on his back, and then (try to) explain things to Ana.

And then what? he thinks as he sips his cafe con leche and looks across the street at the office building that's been the only professional home he's ever known. You're done in journalism-no decent paper will hire you. The best you can hope for is to freelance for la nota roja, circling the city like a vulture, picking at its bones.

A creature that makes its living from corpses.

Can't do it, he thinks.

Can't and won't.

Then again, you might not have the chance-you might be one of those corpses, if the narcos get angry that they've wasted their money on you and decide to do something about it. Face it, there's no future for you in journalism and there's no future for you in Jurez.

Or anywhere in Mexico, for that matter.

You're going to have to cross the bridge.

Become a pocho.

"You're particularly uncommunicative this morning," Ana says.

"Ummm."

"That's more like it."

He sets his cup down and gets up. "I'm going in."

"I'll go with you."

He crosses the street and shows his ID badge to the security officers at the front door, who know him anyway. Getting into the elevator, he acknowledges that this might be the last time and almost changes his mind, but knows he can't.

He has to say something now, before he goes into scar's office.

"Ana-"

"What?"

"I-"

scar appears in the doorway and announces that he wants to see the entire reportorial staff in the conference room immediately.

"I am no longer willing to risk the lives of the people for whom I am professionally and personally responsible," he says when they've assembled, "to report upon a situation that even the best of journalists-and that's what you are-cannot affect. We will no longer report on the drug situation."

Ana objects. Red in the face, almost tearful, she asks, "We're just going to give in to them? Knuckle under? Allow them to intimidate us?"

scar has tears in his eyes as well. His cane taps on the floor and his voice quivers as he answers, "I don't feel that I have a viable choice, Ana."

"But how is this going to work?" Pablo asks. "Say there's a murder. We just don't report it?"

"You report the fact of an apparent homicide," scar says, "but leave it at that. You make no connection to the drug situation."

"That's absurd," Ana says.

"I agree," scar answers. "Our civic life, however, has become an absurdity. This is not a suggestion, this is an instruction. I will wield a heavy editorial pen and simply delete anything you write that might jeopardize the safety of anyone on this paper. Do you understand?"

"I understand that it's the death of a great newspaper," Ana says.

"Which I will cheerfully bury," scar says, "before I will bury another one of you. I will announce our new policy in tomorrow's edition so that the narcos will be notified."

"What about Giorgio?" Ana presses.

El Bho raises an eyebrow.

"Are we going to investigate it?" Ana asks. "Or just let it go?"

Because the police have let it go, Pablo thinks. Of the over five thousand murders in Jurez since the cartel war began, not a single one has resulted in a conviction. They all know the reality-no one has investigated Giorgio's murder, and no one is going to. And now scar is telling them that they're not going to, either.

This man, this hero, who once took a narco gun blast and wouldn't let it stop him, now leans on his cane, and looks tired and old, and says with his silence that he, and they, have been silenced.

Not Ana.