Bettina is aware of Godoy watching her. She can see him just at the edge of her vision, expressionless, his eyes rarely straying from her. She glances at him as she removes the camera from the stand, catches a hint of a smile.
Strickland strides between them to talk to Leonarda in his good Spanish, giving Bettina a brief cautionary look on the way. He’s as on edge as I am, she thinks. She’s not surprised he’s this protective.
Next, El Gordo shows her the new church he’s built near Divisadero (La Luz Sierra); the school in Batopilas (Universidad Godoy); the restaurant just outside Creel (Buen Vaquero) where they have a late lunch. Bettina continues her interview in the quaint cantina, where Godoy tells her his plans for the Hospital Godoy in Los Mochis, Godoy Primary school in Alamos, and a Thoroughbred training center outside San Bernardo.
Bettina changes the subject abruptly when she sees that Godoy isn’t going to volunteer the part of his story that many Coastal Eddy readers want to hear most.
“Alejandro, some people in the United States say that money from the Sinaloa Cartel has paid for all these things. That the Sinaloa Cartel is one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world.”
She sees the flash of anger in his eyes, quickly muted into a warm smile.
“The appetite of norteamericanos for illegal substances is renowned worldwide,” he says. “They flood our country with dollars. They flood us with guns. The Mexican cartels are greatly exaggerated. It is the police and the government who control the narcotics and the guns and the money.”
“The Mexican government and police?” asks Bettina.
“Working with American government! Americans speak of corruption in Mexico, but look around you, here in the Sierra Madre, where the great Sinaloa Cartel is supposed to be all-powerful. Where is this cartel? Where?”
“With all respect, Alejandro, it is sitting right in front of me and my camera.”
“Señorita Blazak, I have surrendered myself to you and your camera so the world can see the truth. I have taken you into my home and shown you the life of El Gordo. A life that began in poverty. A life of hard work. Yes, I have done business in the narcotics trade. I have sold illegal products to the United States. I have negotiated with Americans who are policemen in the day and traffickers at night. I have seen the slaughter their guns bring to Mexico. I have used those guns to defend myself. But I have always given much of my earnings to the poor of my country. As you have seen today. The clinic. The school and church. The cantina in which we now sit, where profits go to charity. I will build the hospital and the majestic Thoroughbred training facility.”
Bettina knows that she’s taken the accusations as far as she can go without pissing off Godoy and losing her chance to return home with Felix. Part of her responsibility is to please her subject. His breathtaking lies are walls that she can scale only at great peril to Felix, Daniel Strickland, and herself.
And yet there’s some truth in them, she thinks. If you see things through his eyes. Through what he was given at birth and what he’s done with it.
Either way, she’s angry at herself for not digging in and getting the darker truths about this story — a story that matters. She’s downsizing her professional integrity for ownership of a dog. For her dog, which means, for herself.
She looks out the window at the dirt street and the late daylight.
Realizes it’s now or never to ask the biggest question she’s wanted to ask Godoy since she agreed to profile him in Coastal Eddy. It’s a way to rescue this story from being a one-sided puff piece. And to make it something that will matter to her readers and watchers.
She feels her heart beating fast and takes off on the wave:
“Alejandro, my brother Keith was twenty years old when he overdosed on a fentanyl-laced vape pen. So, what do you say to Keith, and the thousands of others who have been killed by that deadly drug you sell in huge quantities? Do you have anything you’d like him to know about why you do what you do?”
Strickland, arms crossed, looks down at the table, shaking his head.
“Do you have proof that this substance came from me?” Godoy asks.
“No, I do not.”
“Or maybe from China, where fentanyl has for years been produced?”
“I can only prove that he died from fentanyl under a freeway in San Diego.”
Godoy squints into the camera, his expression hard to read. Calm, certainly, but what else? Cold? Thoughtful? Measuring his words?
Then he nods and places his right hand over his heart. “I am sorry for what you did, Mr. Keith. I do what I do to provide for my family. That is all.”
Bettina senses no falsehood in Godoy’s words or voice or gestures. “But there must be more, Mr. Godoy. Can you apologize to him?”
“I am sorry what happened, Keith, but I will apologize for nothing. We choose our own roads. I am finished with this interview now, Bettina.”
“May I ask you three more questions? One about giving and taking. One about killing and one about God.”
He agrees to three more questions.
And answers them with a blunt honesty, his charm spent and his vanity exhausted.
When she’s finished, she turns off the camera and returns El Gordo’s troubled stare.
“I have enough for the story and the video,” she says. “I’ll need some time and privacy to write and edit them.”
“I have an office in one of my homes. It is warm and quiet and you can work.”
“When will I get Felix?” she asks.
“When I approve the story and video.”
“Get me to that office, Señor Godoy. I need a shot of bourbon to get me started.”
“You will have all the bourbon you need.”
“One shot of bourbon is what I said.”
“You loved this brother very much.”
“Very much. He was my twin. The other half of me.”
True to her word, it takes Bettina one shot of bourbon to get her through the five-thousand-word feature story on Alejandro “El Gordo” Godoy. Once she has that first line: He was born on Christmas Day, so his mother was certain that Alejandro would become the light of the world, Bettina is off and running on her laptop, fingers flying to keep up with the words racing into her. The story tells itself, as the good ones sometimes do. The layers build from Godoy’s impoverished nativity, and he becomes a hero in his own eyes. She lets him supply the hyperbole and vanity, the braggadocio and narcissism. And the charm, too, his boyish pride in the illegal empire he’s built from almost nothing, his self-promoting pro bono investment here in the Sierra Madre: Clínica Godoy, La Luz Sierra church, Universidad Godoy, the restaurant Buen Vaquero.
The piece is sympathetic and subtly flattering. Well written. But her last few questions — especially about Keith — keep it from being a puff piece about a self-righteous peddler of deadly drugs, a stone-cold killer.
But what will El Gordo think of it?
She saves and sends it to her desktop in Laguna for safekeeping, uses a cruddy old printer to make a copy for Godoy. Not much of an office, she thinks, but everything seems to work.
Her video, edited right there on the laptop, is also to her liking. The fashionably dressed Godoy loves the camera as much as Strickland hates it. Bettina’s good eye for locations helps Sinaloa come alive — its rugged mountains and vast canyons, the humble, brightly painted houses, the towns, the silent regard of the Indigenous Tarahumara, who labor on foot on the dusty roads.