Gun Work

Condorito, his gunshot feet padded in rags wrapped outside his sneakers, proved to be an adroit navigator once the right stimulus was applied. He even suggested shortcuts and alternate routes to avoid the worst of the traffic. From Barney’s dim memory of road-bumps, halts and sudden turns taken while he was hooded and blind, they seemed to be on the right track. If they deviated due to trickery, he would smell it and gift Condorito with another bullet.

Karlov was in the back of the van drawing and holstering, trying to coax his injured arm up to specs. He had adopted one of the neck slings he had designed for Barney’s aim and stayed busy adjusting it.

Armand was riding shotgun, and Sirius was next back, propping Condorito up between the seats to plot the course.

The Iztapalapa district west of Mexico City is a working class barrio ringed with shantytowns competing with monolithic, cinderblock industry, a fast lane in the superhighway of narcotrafico and crime, double-stuffed to bursting with overpopulation and violence-by-the-minute. Razed to the ground in the 16th Century by Hernan Cortez in a genocidal war against the Aztecs memorialized as the Sad Night, Iztapalapa was also the locale of Mexico’s first school shooting spree by a student, in 2001. It is not found on the usual checklists of things to see and do in Mexico, yet paradoxically it becomes the locus for hundreds of thousands of visitors on Good Friday, when the populace goes mad reliving Golgotha — a reenactment of the Passion that has been going on since the 1830s, when the area was decimated by cholera. Fake Christs lug crosses; others tart up in a kind of Busby Berkley approximation of Roman centurions, and amid religious chants and simulated flagellation the crucifixion is dramatized on a southern hill that later turned out to be a lost pre-Columbian pyramid covered in dirt, with squatters encamped at its base.

Good Friday was months distant, though, and today Iztapalapa was just another urban war zone into which Condorito, wounded emissary, led warriors.

The building he called the palacio was a half-block-sized brick rectangle with — as Barney had correctly guessed a year earlier — a large interior courtyard accessed through armored doors. It was an old factory fortressed up similarly to the crackhouse they had invaded: bars, metal plating, no window entry, razorwire ringing the roof. The north wall was a gigantic, faded beer advertisement that was decades old and buried in graffiti.

They circled the building for a look-see, and half the circumference was on dirt roads with no names.

“That’s where they go in,” said Condorito, pointing to a gated archway in the south wall. It was well back from the street inside its own stone tunnel.

“Can we drive through that gate?” said Barney.

Condorito mulled this over. “You hit it at about forty, you probably knock it down, sí, but then a lot of guys be shooting at you.”

“Sirius, how’re those smoke grenades?”

“They’ll do the job, like I said. But what I didn’t get to say is that they’re LZ markers.”

Karlov said, “What is he talking about?”

“It’s colored smoke,” said Barney.

Armand lifted one out of the pouch and examined it. “Look, we’ve got flavors: red, orange, green, violet, blue, yellow.”

“They’re fine,” protested Sirius. “Five vents, 50- to 90-second discharge, one-point-five second fuse.”

“But they’re in colors,” Barney said with a slightly pained expression.

“Oh, climb outta my butt,” Sirius said, his dander riled. “Look, we can even launch these out of the shotguns. See? Adapter. Click, bang, just like a TL-1.”

“Okay, all right, as long as we’ve got coverage.”

“In color,” Armand said, refusing to turn loose of the joke.

“Well, this oughta be festive,” said Barney. He turned to Condorito, who looked strung-out, but maintaining. “You positive this van can crash through that gate?”

“Yesss,” he said, drawing the consonant out, which meant pretty sure. “It swings open.” He demonstrated with his hands.

“Bueno,” said Barney, “Because you’re going to drive.”

Picture the gate to the Palacio as the crossbar of the letter H, with the entry through the lower half. Inside that staple-shape a surveillance camera monitored the tunnel, which was arched, almost Moorish, from a tamper-proof mount high on the left. Dark inside. There was no security door cut into the gate; it was not designed to admit pedestrians. This was for deliveries.

Outside on the street, two men walked past the tunnel entryway, the bottom of the H. One paused, apparently to light a cigarette. The other continued walking.