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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Josh Barkan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “The Kidnapping” was first published as the winner of the Lightship International Short Story Prize 2013, in Lightship Anthology 3, Alma Books, U.K., 2014.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101906293

  Ebook ISBN 9781101906309

  Frontispiece photograph by Frederick Bertrand

  Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

  Cover illustration by Alexander Henry Fabrics

  v4.1

  ep

  FOR MARIANA

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Titles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Chef and El Chapo

  The God of Common Names

  I Want to Live

  Acapulco

  The Kidnapping

  The Plastic Surgeon

  The Sharpshooter

  The Painting Professor

  The American Journalist

  Everything Else Is Going to Be Fine

  The Prison Breakout

  The Escape from Mexico

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE CHEF AND EL CHAPO

  How the hell “El Chapo” Guzmán chose my restaurant to come into, I’ll never know. It was just like the stunt he’s done in a few other cities—Nuevo León and Culiacán. Guzmán—“Shorty”—it was him, with all his narco clothing. He had on a baseball cap with some of that digitalized camouflage the U.S. Army invented for Iraq, and a beige down parka. It was one of those cold days in June, after the rainy season has started, and the most badass narco in the country must have felt just a touch of a chill. Crazy! In my restaurant. With fifteen bodyguards swarming around him. The guards came in first. They all had AK-47s swinging in their arms. They came in fast and polite, rushing past the maître d’. The leader of the guards, a tall guy with a neatly trimmed thin mustache and a diamond earring, swooped into the center of the dining room and yelled out, “The Boss will be coming soon. Everyone give us your purses and cell phones and continue with your meal. Nobody leaves before The Boss is done. If you cooperate, everything will be fine. You’ll get your purses and phones returned when The Boss is done. Leave your check. The Boss will pay for your meal.”

  I knew Shorty was short, of course, but when he came in, it was surprising to see just how small the biggest drug kingpin was. He walked in quickly, like he knew where he was going. He turned to the first table, to the left, and introduced himself. He removed his cap and said in polite Spanish, “Hello, my name is El Chapo Guzmán. Nice to meet you.” He smiled and extended his hand to shake with one of the customers, an old man in a blue blazer who, fortunately, had the presence of mind to shake back. The customer looked like he’d just seen a ghost.

  Guzmán went from table to table shaking hands like a politician asking for votes of approval. But the way he smiled, with a permanent grin and his eyes a little too focused on the clients, he seemed to be saying: You will like me! I’m not so fucking bad, right? After he reached the last table, he chuckled, cracking himself up. He was the most badass jokester in the world. He was the biggest gentleman, extending his hand of courtesy to every diner, after he’d killed hundreds.

  Every day, I drive from the neighborhood of Santa Fe, in Mexico City, to the restaurant, and I pass guys selling tabloid newspapers in the morning. They run up and down the street, at the stoplights, trying to find clients, waving papers in the air, and the covers always have a narco like Guzmán with some gory detail like the bodies El Chapo dissolved in acid on a farm after he got pissed off at some other narcos, or like the photos of headless and handless bodies dumped in the middle of the streets of Veracruz. El Chapo killed the son of his brother-in-law. He’s fifty-five and head of the Sinaloa Cartel, and he’s one smart narco, because he not only escaped from prison—with the help of dozens of people he bought off, pushed out of a maximum-security prison in a laundry cart—he’s managed to live to the age of fifty-five when most narcos never make it even close to being a grandpa.

  Everyone in Mexico knows about him: how he married yet another young woman, some beauty queen, and how she had twins in a hospital in Los Angeles. How the guy controls all the cocaine, pot, and most of the meth and heroin that’s going into the U.S. I’ve only been in Mexico two years, building the restaurant up, but anyone who’s spent time down here knows the names of all these narcos like they’re the heroes and devils of the soap operas that are on all day in every housewife’s home and in every cantina.

  So it didn’t take a genius to know the guy who’d just walked into my restaurant was capable of killing me and every one of my clients, and I was the head chef.

  —

  El Chapo asked to be escorted to a private room, in back, where we sometimes have lunches for important business people. My restaurant is in the neighborhood of Polanco, on the border with the most expensive neighborhood of Las Lomas, where all the international banks are located. The food in my restaurant is a mix of French with new American cuisine—meaning anything is OK, fusion with Asian touches, wasabi with bourbon crab, pork with chanterelle mushrooms in a ginger cream sauce with Beluga caviar sprinkled on top, arugula salad with truffle shavings and Cointreau sauce.

  I wake up early in the morning and go to the San Juan market, in the center of Mexico City, to buy the freshest produce I can find. The market looks typical, at first, in a wide concrete warehouse, but the stalls are full of the latest vegetables trucked in pickups from small farmers, and there are even a few Korean stands where you can find Asian vegetables that are less common in Mexico City. Fusion cooking has been the rage in the U.S. for thirty years, but in Mexico it’s a new thing, so I’ve received more attention than a comparable chef would get in the U.S. That’s one of the reasons I came to Mexico. A friend of mine, who was living in Mexico, came into a restaurant where I was the head chef in Pittsburgh, he tasted some cured duck breast I was preserving in the cellar of the restaurant, he slurped up the homemade vinegars we were using in the salad dressings and to pickle baby carrots and peas, and he told me I could be an instant hit in Mexico City.

  My body is covered with tattoos, with bright oranges and blues swirling in sci-fi flames up my legs and arms, and the thought of going to somewhere new, out of the U.S., appealed to me. I had already done the “successful chef” thing in the U.S. I found myself staying after work with adoring clients who had watched too many episodes of Iron Chef, who thought I could throw knives in the air and prepare delicious meals in half an hour or less. The reality is, it takes time to make good food. Those shows are bunk. It takes hours of planning and experimenting. It was nice to ride the wave of the food obsession in the U.S., but I wanted to see if I could go somewhere out of my comfort zone, somewhere where food was not synonymous with pornography, where people still loved the food for how it tasted and not for what it said about them. So I jumped at the chance to open the new restaurant in Mexico City.

  I needed clients with money to do the kind of food I wanted. But I was looking for clients who needed their palettes awakened, who hadn’t already read about everything in some glossy magazine.
I was looking for new markets in which to hunt down ingredients, for new adventures.

  El Chapo was led into the back room, and he sent one of his guards to summon me. If it was adventure I’d been looking for, ironically I was going to get more of it than I’d bargained for.

  There’s a fine leather bench along the walls of the back room, and El Chapo was perched on the bench, leaning back, his legs so short I had the sense he was swinging his feet beneath the table when I came in to meet him. A guard blocked the door, to the left, to the main dining room. Another stood pointing an AK-47 my way. El Chapo sat, alone, waiting to speak to me.

  “Sit down,” he said. He spoke in Spanish.

  I sat in front of him. He looked me over and then spat on the polished wood top of the table.

  “What kind of chef’s costume is that?” he said. “Don’t you have any self-respect? I thought you were supposed to be the latest hot chef in this town. Fucking Mexico City. Everyone thinks they’re so fucking important in this city. They don’t know anything.”

  I never wear a white chef’s hat. That seems ridiculously pretentious to me. I usually have on some T-shirt with a retro rock band that I like. I tend to wear bicycle riding pants and clogs in the kitchen, under my apron. I like to ride, whenever I get a little bit of time, and I tend to wear a bicycle cap or a baseball cap with some heavy metal logo. I had on a baseball cap, with the letters AC/DC on the black front. The truth is, El Chapo and I looked a little similar, each in our baseball cap.

  “What kind of outfit do you want me to wear?” I asked, politely.

  “Oh, have some self-respect, man. If this is the getup you have to make yourself feel important then don’t try to change what you do for me. But you look like some kind of wannabe athlete, not a chef. Everyone wants to be something other than what they are. Politicians pretend to be saints. Crooks act like they love their wives. I would have thought a chef was something different…But I see you’re a phony, just like all the rest.”

  “I’ll try to do my best,” I said.

  This was going to be harder than I thought. I knew that if El Chapo Guzmán was coming into my restaurant, he was probably doing it for PR, to let everyone in the city know this was his territory, that he could come and go at will, that they could have a five-million-dollar bounty on his head and he could still make a mockery of every counter-narco cop in the country. If he could come into a fancy restaurant and pay for everyone in broad daylight, then it would be enough to strike terror into every last person in the city. I had heard this was the effect of his stunts like this in other cities. He seemed like a god who could come and go as he pleased, invulnerable to any human boundaries. But if he was coming into my restaurant, in particular, I guessed it wasn’t just to make a statement. If he was coming into my specific joint, it was to see if the food was any good. My job then, like any great chef, was to be a magician. A chef who’s truly great sits a person down at a table, makes them wait longer than they want until they’re beginning to salivate—to be a little cranky, to doubt the abilities of the kitchen—and then comes out with plate after plate of unexpected wonders, with flavor combinations that pop and surprise in perfect ecstasy, until the patron willingly pulls out their wallet, pays much more than they think they should, but without any regret, with a clamoring, in fact, for the next opportunity to eat more of the food. And all the while, the chef has to come up with just a few dishes on the menu that will please everyone. Each person eating thinks the magic has been made just for them, but it’s been made for the eighty to a hundred clients of the day.

  Reluctance, I was used to. Someone who was already saying I looked like a pansy was another thing. It was going to take more than the usual tricks to win El Chapo over. It didn’t seem like he was the kind who would want to kill me if I failed to charm him, but it was always an option.

  “Would you like something from the menu, today?” I asked El Chapo. I used reverse psychology. I knew if I asked him this way, he would say he wanted something made just for him.

  “Do I look like the kind of guy who eats what all the other pigs out there are eating?” El Chapo said. He pointed to the door to the main dining room. Normally, there’s a hum of patrons talking, eating, ordering fine wines, and privately licking their knives, even though that’s gauche. You can tell how much your patrons like the food by how much sauce they leave on their plates. I always inspect the plates as they come into the kitchen. Where there are marks where people have been sopping up the sauce with bread, I take note and try to make those sauces more frequently, though you always have to try something new.

  There was barely a sound from the other side of the door to the dining room.

  “Something special, just for you, then?” I said.

  “Do you know how I became the jefe?” El Chapo said. “It wasn’t just killing people. Anyone can kill people. Anyone can be the baddest badass around. That will get you about twenty percent of what you need to be the capo.” He leaned in closer to me, as if he were about to give me the secret key to the universe. “What made me the jefe was coming up with a better plan. What made me the jefe was someone else telling me what I had to do, and me coming back to them with something better than what they asked for. You want fifteen tons of the product in Chicago, by Monday? OK, I’ll get it there. But I’m also going to build a tunnel under the border so we can ship over three hundred tons next week. And I’m going to ship two kinds of product on the same planes into LA. Those idiots. They were just shipping pot on the planes, when they could have been shipping coke.” He looked under the table, as if he wanted to be sure there were no bugs in the restaurant recording what he was saying.

  “It’s making do with less to make more,” he said. “So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to give me something that tastes so good I almost cum in my pants, that makes me and my compadres slap you on the back and give you an extra million-dollar tip for cooking so well. And I want you to do that without salt, without pepper, and with no more than two ingredients. And if you can do that, then I’m serious. You’re going to get some unexpected tip. And if you can’t…” He gave his chuckle again, the same jokester laugh he’d given to the patrons, outside, when he’d introduced himself to them, the great El Chapo shaking their hands. “If you can’t,” he said as he put his right hand up to his head in the shape of a pistol, cocked his thumb, pointed into his ear, and released. “Pow!” he said, and he started laughing.

  —

  I came down to Mexico City with my wife. We have a four-year-old son, and one of the pleasures of Mexico City has been seeing how kid-friendly, how kid-obsessed, the place is. Mexicans love their kids more than just about any place I’ve ever been. There’s a big park in Polanco, not too far from my restaurant, called Chapultepec, and on Sundays I walk with my wife and son, Jimmy, through the park. I leave the cooking up to the sous chefs on Sunday. I close the restaurant on Monday. It was because of Jimmy that I opened a gourmet hot dog restaurant in Pittsburgh, before moving down to Mexico City. He loves hot dogs. He takes a dog in both fists and shoves it in. There’s something primal about the way kids eat food, shoving the good things into their mouths, tossing what they don’t like onto the floor. Behind the hidden-flavor sophistication in a fine restaurant I want the patrons to feel that primal energy, to feel like they’re pushing food in and tossing it out on the floor, all as they constrain themselves to holding a fork delicately in front of their mouth and then popping it in.

  I like to watch the patrons eat like animals. I like to see them roll their eyes upward in delight, just as Jimmy does when he eats a hot dog with mustard and all the fixings.

  A couple days before El Chapo came into the restaurant, Jimmy was in Chapultepec Park, next to one of the big artificial lakes where the fountains spout water into the air, and he dashed away from my wife and clambered over the lip of the stone border around the water before I could grab him. He went straight into the water. I thought he could drown, even though the water is no more than a
couple feet deep. I had my riding pants on, since I’d gone into the restaurant earlier in the day to check up on how everything was going. (Sundays are a day off, but sometimes I pop in, unexpectedly, to make sure everything is keeping up to standards.) With all my clothes on and shoes, I jumped straight over the lip of the lake into the water and grabbed Jimmy, and threw him up into the air, out of the water. “Never do that again, Jimmy,” I said. He’d scared the living daylights out of me and my wife. Jimmy thought the whole thing was hilarious. He laughed and spit water out of his mouth, into my eyes. He had no sense of the danger he was in.

  So this wasn’t about me anymore, I realized, as I went back into the kitchen to cook for El Chapo. This was about me and my wife and Jimmy and all the patrons out in the restaurant. Going to a restaurant is putting trust in the chef. A chef is meant to do more than delight. He’s meant to block out the pressures of the world, for a few minutes. For a couple hours, the patron sits at the table, with a nice white tablecloth, and they’re allowed to forget about the outside world, to forget about their business deal going sour or their dying grandmother, or the problem they’re having with their spouse. Food, at its best, can be like an amulet, something that wards off evil like a magic shaman. I could feel the weight of the magic that I needed to perform as I went into the kitchen.

  It may sound crazy, but people like to eat what they are. If they have voracious habits they can’t change, they like sweet foods. If they are tight with their money, they prefer to eat bread and mashed potatoes. If they are flamboyant they like elaborately thin vegetables, fried and piled up high like a fancy hat. We are all cannibals, eating ourselves, eating the secrets we have within. There’s a reason the pedophile has poor dental work, teeth that have eaten too many sweets.