And there was more.
The Hellhound had a new dog as his alter ego. The second generation.
The exchange would be taking place at the village meeting place. A group of Pashtuns, none of them Pakistani citizens, was waiting there for the Hellhound and his associates. And for the dog. They were holding automatic rifles and a sample of the product. The latter wasn’t out in plain view, it was inside a metal briefcase. The dog would be able to evaluate the quality of the drugs through the metal. The Pashtuns hadn’t believed the rumors until they actually saw the dog do its stuff. They had lived all their lives in the hills, and the only dogs they were familiar with were strays and half-pets that they treated like strays. As far as they were concerned, dogs were unclean. It was as simple as that. But not this one. This dog had huge power over their livelihoods. When he growled, he might as well have been speaking in dog language: THIS IS INFERIOR, WE CAN’T BUY SHIT LIKE THIS. He had never once made a mistake. He noted the slightest decline in purity, whether it was an intentional effort to play fast and loose with the Hellhound and his group or not. He noted it and pointed it out.
In dog language.
They had learned their lesson. You couldn’t fool this dog’s nose.
The Hellhound greeted the Pashtuns. The Samoan greeted the Pashtuns. He was interpreting for the Hellhound. The men sat down in a circle in the meeting place, and the Samoan conveyed his boss’s words to the Pashtuns. An old Pashtun whose beard was going white nodded.
Guitar padded over to the briefcase and sniffed it.
Four years earlier, on Tutuila Island, the Hellhound had lost his first alter ego. Cabron, the mongrel the Don had given him as proof of his status as a member of La Familia. He had lost the dog, but not his mongrel seed. Cabron’s six-month-old son had survived. He had emerged unscathed from the accident that instantly killed both his father and his brother. The Hellhound hadn’t been on the scene of the accident. He had sent the dogs out on their own to get a bit of fresh air after the successful conclusion of the summit. “Go on, boys,” he said. “You were the stars of the show. Take a break.” He thought they might like to go to the beach and horse around, a father and his two sons doing the “dog family taking it easy in the South Seas” thing—what a scene, just like a postcard. But it had ended in tragedy. Fortunately, there had been a witness, so he was able to learn in detail what had happened. The Hellhound rushed to the scene and burst out wailing. At least one dog had been saved, though—that moved him profoundly. It was a miracle: according to the witness, a German shepherd that had been wandering around in the area had sprinted over and saved Cabron’s son in a manner that was all but suicidal. The German shepherd had recently been rescued. She’d come from Oahu, up in the North Pacific, and ended up adrift on the ocean… The puppy and the dog who saved him were still there at the scene of the accident—or rather just beside it, at the side of the road. The puppy, the son of now-dead Cabron, was pressed against his savior’s stomach, and the German shepherd was letting him suck on her teats. Oooaaoo, aaoooooh, the Hellhound moaned. The scene tugged almost violently at his heartstrings. It was a miracle, a true miracle. He was convinced of it. A dog who had drifted across the sea from Hawaii had saved the child of his alter ego, here in Samoa? Without realizing what he was doing, he was kneeling on the ground before the German shepherd, crossing himself. “I swear to you I’ll never forget this!” he cried. “So long as I live!” And he kept his promise.
On December 21, 1975, the German shepherd entered Mexico. She arrived in Mexico City and became a dog of the twentieth parallel north. Yes, her: Goodnight.
Finally she had left that enormous space called “America.”
Two months and ten days had passed since she had stopped being a dog of the twenty-first parallel north.
And then there was the other dog, Cabron’s child, who had also returned alive to Mexico City. Yes, Guitar.
Guitar knew. He understood that Goodnight was his second mother.
And the Hellhound knew. He understood that he should keep the two dogs together, treat them as mother and son.
Guitar had lost his true mother, lost his father, and acquired a second mother. There on a roadside on Tutuila Island he had regressed into an infantile state, lost all memory of his first six months. He believed his second mother had suckled him, and she, too, believed that he was her true child, the true fruit of her womb. It had seemed unlikely, given the shocks Guitar had endured—two sudden deaths in just six months—that the profound psychological wounds he had suffered would ever heal, but they did. The love of mother number two, pure and overflowing, enabled him to forget those two traumas. Two minus two equals zero. At the same time, Guitar never did forget the special ability he had learned. That ability, that power, had been pounded into him, and he clung to it. It was his father who taught him that, his father Cabron—no longer of this world, no longer present even in Guitar’s memory—who had himself acquired the ability as a sort of trick only because of his fixation on a certain bitch. The bitch, a Labrador retriever who belonged to the Mexican Federal Police, and whose talents as a drug-sniffing dog were without peer. How sad to think of that poor bitch, her life snuffed out on the first Sabbath of August 1975, then erased as well from Guitar’s memory. And yet that power of hers lived on.
Guitar didn’t just keep this power, he honed it. There was no surprise in that. All sorts of drugs—marijuana, heroine, cocaine, speed, and various new products—were constantly being carted into the estate and then whisked back out. Guitar smelled them all as a matter of course. And identified them. Because the custom was the same at home: Guitar would smell the drugs, tell the pure from the impure, and when he was right his master would praise him.
His master. The Hellhound.
So Guitar became two. The Hellhound’s second alter ego. Cabron’s son, a drug-sniffing dog like his father. His talent in this department was an undeniable sign of his twoness. And as it happened, two was better than one—in very little time, he had surpassed his father. Indeed, he even surpassed his true mother. 1976. Guitar was the Hellhound’s alter ego, and the Hellhound was Guitar’s alter ego.
The Hellhound’s business was growing. First, things started happening with his associates. The Asian organization, whose boss the younger of the Samoan twins was still serving as a “secretary,” was active across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Its operations were based in the so-called “Islamic world.” But of course not all Islamic countries were brothers. Far from it. Take Pakistan, for instance. Pakistan’s western border ran up against Afghanistan. The line had been drawn by the British in 1893, splitting the traditional homeland of the Pashtuns in two. The British had completely ignored the history and distribution of local ethnic groups. So Afghanistan insisted that the rest of the Pashtun area, in Pakistan, was really Afghan territory as well, and this led to all kinds of disputes. Pakistan was first established—after its independence from Britain—in 1947, and within two years the countries had broken off diplomatic relations. The fact that both nations were Islamic didn’t help anything. Something else thawed the ice, though: in 1973, Afghanistan ended its monarchy and emerged as the Republic of Afghanistan.