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A “sharp and funny romantic tale”(O, the Oprah Magazine) from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Husband's Secret and Big Little Lies.

Ellen O’Farrell is a professional hypnotherapist who works out of the eccentric beachfront home she inherited from her grandparents. It’s a nice life, except for her tumultuous relationship history. She’s stoic about it, but at this point, Ellen wouldn’t mind a lasting one. When she meets Patrick, she’s optimistic. He’s attractive, single, employed, and best of all, he seems to like her back. Then comes that dreaded moment: He thinks they should have a talk.

Braced for the worst, Ellen is pleasantly surprised. It turns out that Patrick’s ex-girlfriend is stalking him. Ellen thinks, Actually, that’s kind of interesting. She’s dating someone worth stalking. She’s intrigued by the woman’s motives. In fact, she’d even love to meet her.

Ellen doesn’t know it, but she already has.

• Sales Rank: #2339 in Books
• Brand: Berkley Trade
• Published on: 2013-06-04
• Released on: 2013-06-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.20" h x 1.00" w x 5.40" l, .95 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 466 pages

Features

• Berkley Trade

Review
“The Hypnotist’s Love Story is an intensely absorbing, excellently written tale that turns Fatal Attraction on its head—finally! Told with wit, charm, empathy, and plenty of suspense, you’ll regret turning the pages so fast to find out how it ends. Loved it!”—Sarah Strohmeyer, bestselling author of Kindred Spirits and The Cinderella Pact

“Spellbinding! Reading Liane Moriarty is like spending the afternoon with a wise, witty, comforting friend. I could not put it down!”—Beth Harbison, author of Always Something There to Remind Me

“[A] smart romance…a fresh spin on grappling with misplaced passion.”—Good Housekeeping

“A witty modern love story in the age of cohabitation, blended families, and second chances, this is a compassionate, absorbing tale. Moriarty has crafted an incredibly likable heroine in Ellen, the hypnotherapist who can solve her clients’ problems but can’t seem to keep her own life from spiraling into soap opera. Readers who enjoy Jennifer Close and Marian Keyes will adore Moriarty’s wit and warmth.”—Booklist (starred review)

“A warmly humorous, gently poignant, ultimately comforting tale of frustration and redemption...Moriarty writes with both a frisky wit and a generosity of spirit that’s truly disarming…It will make you feel warm all over.”—USA Today

“Simply exquisite, fascinating (and frequently hilarious)…as much of a page-turner as any thriller.”—Bookreporter

“Mesmerizing.”–Family Circle

“This superb novel…examines misunderstandings—not just with lovers, but with friends, families and, perhaps most often, ourselves.”—Parade

About the Author
Liane Moriarty is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Truly Madly Guilty, Big Little Lies, The Husband’s Secret, The Hypnotist’s Love Story, and What Alice Forgot. She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

When people think of hypnosis, they think of swinging pendulums, “You’re getting sleepy” and volunteers clucking like chickens on stage shows. So it’s not surprising that many of my clients are quite nervous when they visit me for the first time! In fact there is nothing unnatural or frightening about hypnosis. Chances are, you’ve already had the experience of going into a “trance-like state” in your day-to-day life. Have you ever driven to a familiar destination and found that you have no memory of the drive? Guess what? You were in a trance!

—From “An Introduction to Ellen O’Farrell,
Hypnotherapist” leaflet

I had never been hypnotized before. I didn’t really believe in it, to be honest. My plan was to lie there and pretend it was working, and try not to laugh.

“Most people are surprised by how much they enjoy it,” said the hypnotist. She was all softness and soap; no makeup or jewelry. Her skin had a polished, translucent look, as if she only ever bathed in mountain streams. She smelled like one of those overpriced crafty shops you find in country towns: sandalwood and lavender.

The room we were in was tiny, warm and strange. It was built on the side of the house like an enclosed balcony. The carpet was musty, with faded pink roses, but the windows were modern: floor-to-ceiling panels of glass like those in an atrium. The room was flooded with light. As I walked in, the light seemed to whoosh through my head, like a brisk breeze, and I could smell old books and the sea.

We stood together, the hypnotist and me, our faces close to the windows. When you stood that close, you couldn’t see the sand below, just the sea, a sheet of flattened, shiny tin that stretched out to the pale blue line of the horizon. “I feel like I’m at the helm of a boat,” I said to the hypnotist, who seemed excessively delighted by this comment and said that was exactly how she always felt, her eyes round and shiny, like a children’s entertainer.

We sat down opposite each other. My chair was a soft, green leather recliner. The hypnotist’s chair was a striped red-and-cream winged armchair. There was a low coffee table in between the chairs with a box of tissues—some people must cry, sobbing away about their past lives as starving peasants—a jug of ice water with two perfectly round slices of lemon floating on top, two tall water glasses, a small silver bowl of shiny wrapped chocolates, and a flat tray filled with tiny colored glass marbles.

I once had a big, old-fashioned marble that belonged to my father when he was a boy. I’d hold it in the palm of my hand for luck during exams and job interviews. I lost it a few years ago, along with all my luck.

As I looked around me, I saw that the light reflected off the ocean and onto the walls: prisms of dazzling, dancing light. It was a bit hypnotic actually. The hypnotist had her hands folded in her lap, her feet placed squarely on the ground. Flat ballet shoes, black tights, embroidered ethnic-looking skirt and cream wraparound cardigan. Hippie but elegant. New age but classic.

I thought, What a beautiful, calm life you must lead. Sitting in this extraordinary room each day, bathed in dancing light. No e-mails filling your computer screen. No irate phone calls filling your head. No meetings or spreadsheets.

I could sense her happiness. It radiated off her, sickly, like cheap perfume; not that she would ever wear cheap perfume.

I tasted sour jealousy in my mouth and helped myself to a chocolate to make it go away.

“Oh good, I’ll have one too,” said the hypnotist, unwrapping the chocolate with warm, girly camaraderie, like we were old friends. She is that sort of girl. She probably has a whole circle of giggly, supportive, lovely girlfriends, the sort that hug each other hello, and have Sex in the City DVD nights and long, shrieky telephone conversations about men.

She opened a notepad on her lap and spoke with her mouth adorably full of chocolate. She said, “Now, before we do anything, I’m going to ask you a few questions. Oh, dear, I shouldn’t have chosen the caramel. Chewy.”

I hadn’t expected so many questions.

For the most part I answered honestly. They were innocuous enough. A bit pathetic even. “What do you do for a living?” “What do you do to relax?” “What’s your favorite food?”

Finally, the hypnotist sat back in her armchair, smiled and said, “And tell me, why are you here today?”

Of course, my answer to that one wasn’t one hundred percent truthful.

He said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

He had placed his knife and fork on the edge of his plate, and now he was sitting up straight, with his shoulders back, as though he was finally ready to face the music. He seemed fearful and slightly ashamed.

Ellen, who had been smiling, instantly felt a painful cramp knot her stomach. (A part of her mind registered this: the way her body responded first. The mind-body-spirit connection in action. So fascinating.)

Her happy, open smile stayed foolishly frozen on her face.

She was thirty-five years old. She knew what this meant. This nice man, this self-employed, suburban surveyor, this single dad who liked camping and cricket and country music, was about to say something that would put her off her barramundi in white wine sauce. He was about to say something that would ruin her day, and it had been such a lovely day, and the barramundi was really very good.

She put down her fork regretfully.

“What’s that?” she said, her tone pleasantly quizzical, and every muscle in her body tightened as if she was preparing to be punched. She would cope. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. It was only their fourth date. She hadn’t invested that much of herself. She barely knew the man. For heaven’s sake, he liked country music. That should have been a red flag from the beginning. Yes, she had been indulging in some hopeful daydreams in the bath tonight, but that was a common pitfall of dating. She was already moving on, working on her recovery. She would be over it by Wednesday. Thursday at the latest. Thank the Lord she hadn’t slept with him.

She couldn’t control what was about to happen, only her response to it.

For a moment she saw her mother, eyes lifted to heaven. Ellen, tell me, my darling, do you truly believe this facile self-help nonsense you spout?

She did, in fact. With all her heart. (Her mother later apologized for her comment. “That may have been patronizing,” she’d said, and Ellen had pretended to faint in shock.)

“Actually, can you excuse me for a minute?” He stood up and his napkin slid to the floor. He picked it up, his face flushed, and carefully laid it on the table next to his plate.

She looked up at him.

“I’ll just…” He gestured at the back of the restaurant.

“All right,” she said soothingly.

“Over there to your left, sir.” A waiter discreetly pointed in the direction of the toilets.

She watched him go.

Patrick Scott.

She didn’t really like the name Patrick anyway. It was a namby-pamby sort of a name. You could imagine your hairdresser being called Patrick. Also, his male friends apparently called him “Scottie,” which was … well, perfectly acceptable really in that Aussie blokey way.

If he ended it, it would definitely hurt. Just a little sting, but a sharp one. There was nothing extraordinarily wonderful about Patrick Scott. He had an ordinary pleasant face (long, thin, slightly receding hairline), an ordinary body (average height, quite broad shoulders, but naturally broad, not look-at-me-I-work-out broad), an ordinary job, an ordinary life. It was just extraordinary how comfortable she’d felt with him, almost straightaway, within minutes of meeting up with him for the very first time in that embarrassingly empty café. She’d suggested the café and had been horrified to find it virtually deserted, so that their nervous first-date voices seemed too loud, and three bored teenage waitresses stood about the room with nothing better to do than eavesdrop on their stilted conversation. They’d been waiting for their cappuccinos, and he was playing with a packet of sugar, turning it around in circles and tapping it on the table, when their eyes met, and they sort of grinned at each other in mutual recognition of the awfulness of the whole situation, and all of a sudden Ellen felt all the tension in her body drift away, as if she’d been given a powerful painkiller. She had the strangest feeling that she already knew this man; she’d known him for years. If she believed in past lives (and she didn’t not believe in them; in her work she’d seen it all, her mind was wide open to all sorts of bizarre possibilities), then she would have said they must have known each other before.

That sort of instant warmth had happened to her many times before with women; oh, she was the star of female friendship—but never with a man.

So yes, she barely knew this nice surveyor called Patrick Scott, but it would hurt if he broke up with her. Probably more than a little sting.

She thought about the hundreds, maybe thousands of stories of rejection she’d heard from her clients over the years. “I cooked a three-course dinner party for thirteen of his relatives, and while I’m doing the washing up, he announces he doesn’t love me anymore.” “We had a fantastic holiday in Fiji, and on the way home we’re drinking champagne and she tells me that she’s moving out! Champagne—as if it’s a celebration!”

Oh, the naked pain that still furrowed their faces, even when they were describing something that happened years ago. Rejection by a lover or even only a potential lover was so tough on the Inner Child. Fears of abandonment, memories of past hurts, feelings of inferiority and self-loathing, all rose to the surface in an unstoppable torrent of feeling.

She was trying to observe her situation, objectively, like a client’s case history, in the hope that she could stay detached from it. It wasn’t working.

Of course, all this panic might be for nothing. Patrick might not be about to dump her at all. There had been no signs, and she was good at reading people. That’s what she did for a living, after all. He had said she looked “gorgeous” when she opened the door for him tonight, with such a pleased expression on his face, as if he’d just been handed a gift, and he wasn’t the smooth, charming type who automatically gave the sort of compliments women liked to hear. There had been a lot of eye contact over dinner, some of which could have qualified as “lingering.” Throughout the meal she had noted that he was leaning forward toward her (although perhaps he was a bit deaf; it was surprising how many men were just a little deaf—she knew this both from dating and from her work).

She had felt that their body language and breathing rhythms were in sync, and that wasn’t because she’d been patterning him, at least not deliberately, the way she would with a client.

There had been no awkward pauses or uncomfortable moments. He had been interested, in a respectful way, about hypnotherapy. He didn’t say, “Show me! Make me cluck like a chicken!” He didn’t sneer, or worse, take a gently condescending tone and say he wasn’t really into “alternative medicine.” He didn’t say, “So do you need any trainingfor that?” or “Is there any money in that?” He didn’t seem afraid. Some men she’d dated seemed genuinely frightened that she might hypnotize them without their knowledge. He just seemed curious.

Also, a few minutes ago, he’d shown her photos of his son! His adorable blond, skinny little eight-year-old son, on a skateboard, playing the trombone in a school band, fishing with his dad. Surely, he wouldn’t have shown her those photos if he’d already decided it wasn’t going to work.

Unless the decision had just hit him with a flash. Now that she thought about it, it had been oddly abrupt, the way he put down his knife and fork to make his announcement, his eyes looking over her shoulder, as if he’d just seen a glimpse of a different future in the distance. She’d been midsentence, for heaven’s sake. (She had been telling him a story about a patient who was obsessed with Jennifer Lopez. The patient was actually obsessed with John Travolta, but she always changed the details for confidentiality reasons. And the story sounded funnier if it was Jennifer Lopez.)

He’d looked so sad. Even if he wasn’t about to dump her, he was definitely about to say something unacceptable or unpleasant.

Perhaps he’d lied about being a widower. He was actually still married and living with his wife, even though they slept in separate rooms.

He wasn’t a surveyor at all; he was a mobster. Now the FBI would come after her and insist she wear a wire. Her body would never be found. (She’d watched the entire series of The Sopranos on DVD last summer.)

Or perhaps he had a terminal disease. That would be terrible, but at least not personally hurtful.

Whatever it was, she was pretty sure that sunshiny feeling she’d been experiencing all day was about to vanish.

She took a large mouthful of her wine, and looked up to see if he was on his way back from the toilets. No. Goodness. He was taking a while. Had he just splashed water on his face and was now standing at the bathroom mirror staring into his own eyes, his hands gripping the sink, breathing heavily?

He was on the run from the law.

Her own breathing was starting to get a bit ragged.

Too much imagination for her own good. Mrs. Pascoe’s comment on her Year Seven report card.

She looked around her. The other diners were all involved in their own conversations, cutlery softly chinking against plates, the occasional not-too-raucous burst of laughter. Nobody was looking at the woman with the empty chair across from her.

Was there time? Was it really necessary? Yes.

She sat up straight in her chair and placed her hands palm down on her thighs. She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nostrils, out through her mouth. With each breath she imagined her body being filled with a powerful gold light. The light gave her energy and strength. The light filled her feet, her legs, her stomach, her arms and, finally,whoosh, it whirled around her head, so that all she could see was a golden glow, as if she was looking directly into a sunset, and for a moment she felt as if she were floating just a few centimeters above her chair.

I will be fine. Whatever he says will not touch the essence of me. I will cope. On the count of three. One … two …

She opened her eyes, refreshed and reinvigorated. She looked around. Nobody was staring at her. Of course, she knew that she hadn’t really levitated above her chair while glowing like a lightbulb, but sometimes the feelings were so astoundingly real she couldn’t believe they hadn’t physically manifested in some way.

Self-hypnosis was such a wonderful tool. She could always tell when a student or client actually got it. They were awestruck by what their minds could achieve. The first time that levitating sensation happened to her it was like she’d discovered she could fly. She could wipe out the drug problem if she could just teach teenagers self-hypnosis.

Patrick still wasn’t back. She looked at the meal in front of her. No point letting it go to waste. A waiter gliding by stopped and refilled her wineglass. Good wine, good fish. Pity she didn’t have a book.

She thought about her day.

Right up until the moment that Patrick put down his knife and fork, it had been perfect. Exquisite, even.

She’d slept deeply and dreamlessly to the rhythm of the rain on the roof and woke late to sunshine on her face. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the branch she’d hung from the ceiling as a reminder of the Buddhist sutra of mindfulness. She’d then inhaled and exhaled three gentle breaths while maintaining the “half smile.”

(Although she wished she’d never mentioned this practice to her friend Julia, who had asked Ellen to demonstrate her half smile. When Ellen finally complied, after much cajoling, Julia had rocked with laughter for ten minutes straight.)

When she got out of bed, the windowpanes were icy against her fingertips, but the new gas heating system her grandparents had installed (thanks to Great-aunt Mary’s lucky lotto ticket!) before they’d died had transformed the house into a cozy cocoon. She ate porridge with brown sugar for breakfast while she listened to the ABC news, which was upbeat and wry. The recent flu pandemic was probably not a pandemic after all. (Her mother, who was a GP, had said all along that this would be the case.) A missing toddler had turned up safe and sound. The latest gangland killing was probably just a family feud. The latest political scandal had fizzled. Traffic was moving well. Winds would be southwesterly and light. For once the world seemed extremely manageable.

After breakfast, she’d rugged up warmly to walk along the beach and come back exhilarated and windblown, licking salt from her lips.

She’d had four appointments that day. She had her last session with a man who had wanted help overcoming his flying phobia so he could take his wife to France for their ruby wedding anniversary. As he left, he shook her hand vigorously and promised to send Ellen a postcard from Paris. She’d also met two new clients. She always enjoyed meeting new clients. One was a woman who had suffered from some sort of debilitating unexplained pain in her leg for the last four years and been to countless doctors, physiotherapists and chiropractors, who were all baffled. The other was a woman who had promised her fiancé that she would give up smoking by their wedding day. Both sessions had gone well.

Her final appointment was with a client who was probably not going to be one of her success stories. She was having trouble pinning down what Mary-Kate really wanted to achieve from hypnotherapy, but she refused to be referred to anyone else and insisted that she wanted to continue treatment. Ellen had decided not to try anything too complicated today and just given her a simple relaxation session. She called it a “soul massage.” Afterward, Mary-Kate said her soul felt exactly the same, thank you, but that was Mary-Kate.

After Mary-Kate had plodded off, Ellen cleaned the house, carefully leaving a few things lying about so it didn’t look like she had cleaned up but was just naturally tidy. She had considered taking down some of the Buddhist quotations she had displayed all around her house on pale purple Post-it notes. Her ex-boyfriend Jon used to make such fun of them—standing at her fridge, reading them out in a stupid voice. But hiding her true self wasn’t the way to start a potential new relationship, was it?

She also remade the bed with her crispest, nicest sheets. It was probably time to sleep with him. Oh, yes, it was a bit clinical, but that’s how it was when you were dating in your thirties. It wasn’t hearts and flowers anymore. They weren’t sixteen. They weren’t religious. They had met on the Internet: a dating website. So it was all very clear and upfront. They were both looking for a long-term relationship. They had ticked corresponding boxes to indicate this.

There had been some kissing (quite lovely), and now it was time for sex. She’d been celibate for almost a year, and Ellen liked sex. It surprised some men, who seemed to develop an ethereal, sweetly innocent image of her in the beginning, which she didn’t mind; she even played up to it a bit. It just wasn’t quite accurate.

(She also liked horror movies, and coffee, and steak cooked medium-rare. A lot of people were convinced she was vegetarian, that, in fact, she should be an herbal-tea drinking vegetarian, even going so far as to prepare special meals for her at dinner parties and then insisting that they “clearly remembered” her saying she didn’t eat meat.)

She had taken her time getting ready for tonight: a long steamy bath with a glass of wine and a Violent Femmes CD. The violent chords and strident voices were so startlingly different from the chiming, bubbling relaxation tapes she played all day that it was like having a bucket of cold water thrown over her head. The Violent Femmes reminded her of the eighties, and being a teenager, and feeling supercharged with hormones and hope. By the time Patrick had knocked on her front door she was in such a deliriously good mood, the thought had actually flitted across her mind,You must be heading for a fall.

She had dismissed that idea. And now … There’s something I need to tell you.

She laid down her fork. Where was that man? She could see one of the waiters giving her a circumspect look, obviously trying to work out if he should offer some form of assistance.

She looked at Patrick’s half-eaten meal. He’d ordered the pork belly. A poor choice, she’d thought, but she hadn’t known him long enough to tease him about it. Pork belly! It sounded disgusting, and now it looked like a big slab of cold, congealing fat.

If he was the sort of man who ordered that sort of artery-clogging meal all the time, perhaps he’d dropped dead of a heart attack in the toilets? Should she send in that concerned-looking waiter to find out? But what if the pork belly had just disagreed with him? He’d be mortified. Well, she’d be mortified in similar circumstances. Maybe a man wouldn’t care.

She was really too old for all this dating angst. She should be at home baking cakes, or whatever it was that parents of primary-school-age children did with their nights.

She looked up again and there he was, walking back toward her. He looked shaken, as if he’d just been in a minor car crash, but he also had a “The game is up” expression, as if he’d been caught robbing a bank and was walking out with his hands in the air.

He sat down opposite her and put the napkin back on his lap. He picked up his knife and fork, looked at the pork belly, sighed and placed them down again.

“You probably think I’m some sort of lunatic,” he said.

“Well, I’m quite curious!” said Ellen in a jolly, middle-aged lady tone.

“I was hoping not to have to tell you about this until we’d … but then I realized that I was going to have to tell you tonight.”

“Just take your time.” Now she was speaking in the calm, slightly singsong voice she used with clients. “I’m sure I’ll be fine—whatever it is.”

“It’s nothing that bad!” said Patrick hastily. “It’s more embarrassing than anything else. It’s just that, OK, I’ll just come out and say it.”

He paused and grinned foolishly.

“I have a stalker.”

For a moment Ellen couldn’t quite understand what he meant. It was as if English had become her second language and she had to translate the words.

I have a stalker.

Finally she said, “Somebody is stalking you?”

“She’s been stalking me for the past three years. My ex-girlfriend. Sometimes she disappears for a while, but then she comes back with a vengeance.”

Glorious relief was washing through Ellen. Now that she wasn’t being dumped it was suddenly clear to her how much she actually liked him, how much she was hoping this would work, how she had actually allowed the words “I could fall in love with him” to cross her mind as she was putting on her mascara. The reason she’d been so deliriously happy today had not been because of the weather or the porridge or the new heating or the news. It was because of him.

A stalking ex-girlfriend was fine!

It was interesting.

Although, then again, stalking …

She saw notes written in letters cut out from magazines and newspapers. Messages written in blood on walls. Crazy fans sitting outside celebrities’ houses. Violent ex-husbands shooting their wives.

But who stalked a surveyor? (Even if he did have an especially lovely jawline?)

“So when you say stalking, what does she actually do? Is she violent?”

“No.” Patrick looked as if he was being forced to answer a series of highly personal medical questions. “Never physically violent. Occasionally she yells. Gets a bit abusive. She makes phone calls in the middle of the night, sends me letters, e-mails, text messages, but mostly she’s just there. Wherever I go, she’s there.”

“You mean she follows you?”

“Yes. Everywhere.”

“So, goodness, this must be horrible for you!” There was that middle-aged lady again. “Have you been to the police?”

He winced, as if at an uncomfortable memory. “Yes. Once. I spoke to a female police officer. I don’t know if she—look, she said all the right things, I just felt like an idiot, like a wuss. She suggested I keep a ‘Stalking Incident Log’ recording everything, and I’ve done that. She said I could take out a restraining order against her, so I was thinking about doing that, but then, when I told my ex that I’d been to the police, she said if I took it any further, she would tell them I’d been harassing her, that I’d hit her—well, you know, I’m the guy, who are they going to believe? Her, of course. So I backed right off. I just keep hoping she’ll stop. And the years keep rolling by. I can’t believe it’s been going on so long.”

“It must be…” Ellen was going to say “frightening,” but that might offend him; it was her belief that the male ego was as delicate as an eggshell. She said instead, “Stressful.” She couldn’t quite keep the undercurrent of joy out of her voice.

“In the beginning I really let it get to me,” he said. “But now I’ve sort of accepted it. It’s just how my life has worked out, but it’s hard on new relationships. Some women get freaked out by the whole thing. Some of them say they’re fine with it at first, but then they can’t handle it.”

“I can handle it,” said Ellen, quickly, as if she was at a job interview and she was proving she was up to the challenge. Hearing about ex-girlfriends’ weaknesses always brought out a competitive urge to prove she was better.

Flustered, she took a mouthful of her wine. She’d just put her cards on the table. She had basically just said: I want a relationship with you.

She pretended to be frowning down at her wineglass, as if she was about to make some disparaging comment on the quality of the wine, and when she finally looked up, Patrick was smiling at her. A big crinkle-eyed smile of pure pleasure. He reached out across the table and took her hand in his.

“I hope you can,” he said. “Because I feel really good about this. I mean, about us. The possibility of us.”

“The possibility of us,” repeated Ellen, savoring the words and the feel of his hand. It was all such rubbish about getting clinical and jaded when you were in your thirties. The feel of his hand was shooting endorphins throughout her bloodstream. She knew all about the science of love, how her brain was currently surging with “love chemicals” (norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine), but that didn’t mean she wasn’t as susceptible as anyone else.

So now all their cards were on the table.

“What made you tell me tonight?” asked Ellen. His thumb was tracing circles in her palm. Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear. “About your stalker?”

His thumb stopped.

“I saw her,” he said.

“You saw her!” Ellen’s eyes darted about the restaurant. “You mean, here?”

“She was sitting at a table under the window.” He gestured with his chin over Ellen’s shoulder. She went to turn around to look but Patrick said, “Don’t worry. She’s gone now.”

“What was she doing? Just … watching us?”

Ellen was aware of her heart rate picking up. She wasn’t sure how she felt: frightened, possibly a little thrilled.

“She was texting on her mobile,” said Patrick wearily.

“Texting you?”

“Probably. I’ve got my phone switched off.”

“Do you want to see what she said?” Ellen wanted to see what she said.

“Not particularly,” said Patrick. “Not at all, actually.”

“When did she leave?” If only Ellen had known earlier, she could have seen her.

“When I stood up to go to the bathroom, she followed me. We had a little chat in the corridor. That’s why I took so long. She said she was just leaving, and she did, thank God.”

So she must have walked right past Ellen! Ellen searched her mind for a memory of a woman walking by but came up blank. It was probably when she was doing her self-hypnosis, damn it.

“What did she say?”

“She always puts on this pathetic act, as if we just happened to run into each other. You’d think she’d look like a crazy bag lady, with, you know, crazy hair, but she looks so normal, so together. It makes me doubt myself, as if I’m imagining the whole thing. She’s a successful career woman. Well respected. Can you believe it? I always wonder what her colleagues would think if they knew what she does in her spare time. Anyway … shall we talk about something more pleasant? How was your fish?”

Are you kidding? There was no other subject Ellen wanted to talk about more. She wanted to know every detail. She wanted to understand what was going through this woman’s head. She normally understood a woman’s perspective in any given situation. She was a girl’s girl. She liked women; it was men who often mystified her. But stalking your ex-boyfriend for three years? Was she a psychopath? Had he treated her badly? Was she still in love with him? How did she justify her own behavior to herself?

“The fish was great,” said Ellen. She tried to suppress her greed for more information. It was a bit unseemly when this was obviously such a distressing part of this man’s life. She knew it was one of her flaws: a ravenous curiosity about other people’s personal lives.

“Who is looking after your son tonight?” she asked, to help him change the subject.

“My mother,” said Patrick. His face softened. “Jack adores his grandma.”

Then he blinked, looked at his watch, and said, “Actually, I promised I’d call him to say good night. He wasn’t feeling that well when I left. Would you mind?” He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket.

“Of course not.”

“I don’t normally call him when I’m out,” he said, as he turned the phone on. “I mean, he’s a pretty independent kid now. He does his own thing.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s just that he’s had this really bad cold and then it turned into a chest infection. He’s on antibiotics.”

“It’s perfectly fine.” She wanted to hear him talking to his little boy.

His phone was beeping, over and over.

Patrick grimaced. “Text messages.”

“From your, ah, your stalker?” Ellen tried not to look too avidly at the beeping phone.

He studied the screen on his phone. “Yes. Mostly I just delete them without even bothering to read them.”

“Right.” She couldn’t help herself. “Because they’re nasty?”

“Sometimes. Mostly they’re just pathetic.” She watched his face as he read the messages, pressing buttons with his thumb. He smiled ironically, as if he was engaged in nasty banter with an enemy. He rolled his eyes. He chewed on the edge of his lip.

“Want to read them?” He held out the phone to her.

“Sure,” said Ellen casually. She leaned forward and read as he scrolled through the messages for her.

Fancy seeing you here! I’m at a table under the window.

You look good in that shirt.

You ordered the pork belly? What were you thinking?

She’s pretty. You two look good together. S xx

Ellen recoiled.

“Sorry,” said Patrick. “I shouldn’t have shown you that one. I promise you, you’re not in any, you know, danger.”

“No, no, it’s fine.” She nodded at the phone. “Keep going.”

Nice running into you tonight. We should do coffee one day soon?

I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you. No, I definitely hate you.

Ellen sat back.

“What’s your professional opinion?” asked Patrick. “Certifiably crazy, right? Remember, this relationship ended three years ago.”

“How long did you go out for?”

“Two years. Well, three years. She was my first relationship after my wife died.”

She wanted to ask how it ended but instead she said, “Why don’t you just change your phone number?”

“I used to change it all the time, but it’s not worth it. I’m self-employed. I need people to be able to track me down. Hey, I’d better call my son. I’ll be quick.”

Ellen watched him as he dialed a number and held the phone to his ear.

“It’s me, mate. How are you going? … What did I have? Oh, pork belly.”

He glanced down ruefully at his plate. “Yeah, it wasn’t that great. Anyway, how are you feeling? You’re OK? You took your antibiotics? What’s Grandma doing? Oh really? That’s good. Yeah. OK. Well, maybe if you just tell me quickly.”

He stopped talking and listened. His eyes met Ellen’s and he winked briefly.

“Is that right? OK, well—right. A volcano? Parachuting? Geez.”

He kept listening, tapping his fingers on the tablecloth.

Ellen watched his hand. It was a lovely hand. Big square-cut fingernails.

“OK, mate. Listen, you might have to tell me the rest tomorrow. I’m being really rude to my … friend. OK. See you in the morning. Waffles, of course. Yep, definitely. Night, kid. Love you.”

He hung up the phone, switched it off and put it back in his pocket.

“Sorry,” he said. “He wanted to tell me every detail of this movie he’d seen. Gets that from me, I’m afraid.”

“Really,” said Ellen.

She was feeling a shot of intense pleasure at the back of her skull. She loved the way he talked to his son, so casual and funny and masculine and loving. She loved the fact that they were going to have waffles tomorrow morning. (She loved waffles!) She loved the way he said “Love you” so unself-consciously.

A waiter took away their plates, balancing them on his forearm. “Was the pork belly all right, sir?”

“It was fine.” Patrick smiled up at him. “Just wasn’t as hungry as I thought.”

“Can I tempt you with the dessert menu? Or coffees?”

Patrick raised his eyebrows at Ellen.

“No thank you,” she said.

“Just the bill then, thanks, mate,” said Patrick.

Ellen looked at her watch. It was only ten o’clock. “I’ve got some nice chocolates at home,” she said. “If you want to have coffee at my place. If you’ve got time.”

“I’ve got time,” said Patrick, and his eyes met hers.

Of course, they never bothered with the coffee and chocolates. As they made love for the first time on the clean sheets, there was a sudden flurry of hard rain on the roof, and Ellen thought briefly of Patrick’s stalker, and wondered where she was right now, imagining her standing under a streetlight in the rain with no umbrella, raindrops sliding heedlessly down her pale, tortured (beautiful?) face, but then all the interesting sensations of a new lover filled every corner of her mind and she forgot all about her.

Chapter 2

At my age most of my friends are in long-term relationships, and in my line of work I don’t have the opportunity to meet many new potential partners. I guess this just seemed like a fun way to make some new friends. I’m a romantic, but I’m also a realist.

—From Internet dating site profile of
username: Ellen68

Ellen walked barefoot along the beach early the next morning, her trousers rolled up to her knees so she could let the waves break around her ankles, thinking about Patrick (she loved the name Patrick, nothing namby-pamby about it at all!) and everything that had happened the previous night.

His son. (So cute!)

His crazy ex-girlfriend. (Intriguing! Although also possibly somewhat frightening. She wasn’t sure.)

His body. Goodness, she had thought, as if she were a swooning heroine in a Regency romance, when he unbuttoned his unassuming striped business shirt. Just thinking about his chest gave her a shot of pure lust and she pressed two fingers to her tender lips, grazed from all that kissing.

He had left right at midnight. Like Cinderella. He said that although his mother was staying at his place to look after his son, and would have gone to bed in the spare room, he always felt as if he was somehow taking advantage of her if he stayed out too late.

“I hate doing this. Of course, if we—you know—I’ll be able to let her know I’m staying overnight,” he’d said as he buttoned his shirt back up over his caveman chest.

“It’s fine,” Ellen had said, her voice thick with sleep. She was happy he was going. She preferred to lie in bed and think about him, rather than have him actually there and worry about what her hair looked like in the morning.

“I’ll call you,” he’d said when he kissed her good-bye.

Her phone had beeped with a text message at six a.m.

When can I see you again, please? I think you’ve got me hypnotized!

Which was cheesy. But extremely lovely.

So it looked like it was happening. She was at the beginning of something new. Here we are again. She took a deep breath of salty air and it caught in her throat. For a moment she felt the weight of all those previous disappointments.

Please let this one work, she thought pathetically.

And then, with more spirit, Come on now, I deserve this!

Ellen had been in three long-term relationships: Andy, Edward and Jon. Sometimes she felt like she was always dragging the memories of these relationships along with her, like three old tin cans on a string.

Andy was a freakishly tall young banker. Their three-year relationship always seemed vaguely fraudulent to Ellen, like they were just pretending to be in love and doing a really excellent job of it. When Andy got an overseas posting, neither of them even mentioned the possibility of Ellen going with him. The whole affair left her with the same sense of grimy regret she felt after eating McDonald’s.

Edward was a sweet, sensitive high school teacher. They fell deeply, profoundly in love and became one of those couples with a clear path ahead of them incorporating children and pets. And then, for complex reasons that were still not clear to her now, and to everyone’s shock, the relationship suddenly imploded. It was quite exquisitely painful.

She met Jon on her thirtieth birthday. So OK, she thought, this is the one. The real grown-up relationship. He was a smart, articulate engineer. She adored him. It wasn’t until after he’d pulverized her heart that she finally noticed he’d never actually adored her back.

She’d always thought of these failed relationships as, well, failures. But it occurred to her now that perhaps they were actually essential steps in a predestined journey leading to this very moment on this very beach. To a green-eyed surveyor called Patrick Scott.

She thought of Patrick’s ex-girlfriend, his stalker. Saskia. An unusual name with its hard, spiky little syllables. Ellen rolled the name around in her mouth, like a strange new fruit. Saskia would not appreciate knowing that Ellen’s heart was filling with tremulous hope right now.

Ellen kicked out at the water in front her, sending up a spray of icy droplets. Well, really, what sort of person was this girl? Had she no pride at all? Ellen cringed at the idea of her ex-partners knowing she ever spared them a thought.

When, in fact, the three of them were always lolling about in the back of her mind. Every time she got out of the car she automatically slid the driver’s seat back for Andy’s long legs, a habit left over from the years they’d shared a car. Every time she cut a tomato she thought of Jon, because he’d once told her cutting crossways made it juicier. Every Boxing Day she remembered it was Edward’s birthday.

Of course, it was to be expected that she thought of them. For a while each had been the person who knew her best, who spoke to her every single day, who knew where she was at any particular time, who would have sat in the front row at her funeral should she have tragically died.

It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with him and wake up with him, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don’t even know his telephone number, or where he’s living or working, or what he did today or last week or last year.

Ellen watched a giant wave on the horizon curl and crash with a distant boom.

That’s why breakups felt like your skin was being torn from your body. It was actually strange that more people weren’t like Saskia, instead of being so well behaved and dignified about it.

“Good morning!” An elderly couple walked by from the opposite end of the beach at a brisk pace, elbows pumping. Ellen picked up her own pace so as not to be outdone by octogenarians.

When her grandparents were alive, they would walk along this beach every night just before the six o’clock news.

They spent sixty-three years together. Sixty-three years of waking up next to the same person, in the very same bedroom, in fact, where she and Patrick had made love last night. (Which, now that she thought about it, was terrible. She liked to think that the spirits of her grandparents still inhabited the house. She hoped her poor grandfather hadn’t been trapped in the bedroom, standing behind the curtains, shielding his eyes.)

Ellen had always assumed she would marry young and have a relationship like theirs. She thought she was that sort of person. Traditional. Nice. As if nice girls always found nice boys. As if “niceness” was all that was necessary to maintain a relationship.

In all honesty (and the achievement of genuine self-awareness was her ongoing goal), it wasn’t her niceness so much as the fact that she believed herself to be nothing like her own mother: her mother who had brought up Ellen alone, with barely a man in sight.

And yet, here she was, thirty-five and looking for men on the Internet. Each time she clicked on to the website she felt like she was doing something vaguely unseemly.

Unseemly for her. That was the crux of it. She didn’t think there was anything unseemly about anyone else doing Internet dating. Oh, no, it was fine for the unwashed masses! But Ellen helped people with their personal lives for aliving.

That was it. She thought she should be the sort of person who was great at relationships, and it seemed she actually wasn’t. Really, she kept telling herself briskly, why shouldn’t she have suffered and had her heart broken like anyone else? Why shouldn’t she have found it hard to meet the right man, like so many other women? Why shouldn’t she be worried about the ticking of her biological clock, even if it was a cliché? Why shouldn’t she be a cliché?

She was ashamed of her shame. As penance she was extremely open about her single status. She told all and sundry that she was Internet dating. She went on each awkward new date with her head held high, her outlook positive and her heart and mind open to all possibilities.

But it was hard work at times.

She reached the rock pool where she always turned back and put her hands on her hips, breathing heavily. She’d been walking faster than she realized.

She looked back along the beach toward her grandparents’ house, now her house, the glass room at the back winking in the morning sun, like a diamond stuck haphazardly to the side of the house. “Fabulous. He’s made it even more of an eyesore,” her mother had said when she saw the new room Ellen’s grandfather had added on, thanks once again to Great-aunt Mary’s lotto win.

Ellen’s grandfather’s childless, unmarried younger sister, Mary, had won half a million dollars in lotto and then died just six weeks later, while she was still pondering what to do with her windfall. (A new TV, perhaps? One of those “flat screens”? But really, Deal or No Deal would still look exactly the same, wouldn’t it? Just bigger.) All her money had gone to Ellen’s grandparents, who had used it to put on the extra glass room, install gas heating and go on a ten-day cruise each year until they died. Great-aunt Mary’s lotto win had also resulted in their decision to leave their house to Ellen when they died, while her mother and Amnesty International had inherited the capital. This suited everyone because Ellen’s mother had no desire to live in her childhood home. “No amount of money could save it,” she liked to say, with sad authority, as if she’d been asked to give her expert opinion.

It was a strange-looking house, built in the seventies and incorporating all the most fashionable design features that decade had to offer: exposed beams and bricks, a stainless-steel spiral staircase, mirrored arches, lime green shag carpet and a bright orange kitchen. But Ellen had always loved it. She thought it had groovy retro charm and she refused to change a thing about it, except for adding an off-street parking spot for her clients. While her career as a hypnotherapist had supported her “quite remarkably” well (as her mother was always telling people, equally disappointed and proud), she had still been renting an apartment and an office when her grandmother died. Inheriting the house and using her grandmother’s sewing room to treat her clients meant that Ellen was now enjoying the most financially secure position of her life.

A white stone on the sand caught her eye and she bent down to pick it up. It had a pleasing shape and feel to it; it might come in useful for one of her clients.

As she straightened back up, she looked out at the ocean and felt a loosening sensation in her chest, as if she’d been released from a corset. You weren’t meant to admit, even to yourself, how badly you wanted love. The man was meant to be the icing, not the cake. She was a bit embarrassed by the depth of her happiness. Thank goodness no one could see the champagne corks popping in her head.

When she got home she would answer Patrick’s text and suggest they see a movie that night. Not very original, but still one of the loveliest things to do with a new boyfriend. She would try not to sound overly eager.

She walked closer to the water and dug her toes deep into the sand. She remembered the feel of Patrick’s back beneath her fingers, his collarbone against her lips.

Sorry, Saskia. I think I’m keeping him.

So, he’s slept with the hypnotist.

I can tell. I knew as soon as I saw his hand pressed to her lower back as they came out of the movie. It was low, you see, and confident, indicating ownership.

He thinks he’s pretty good in bed. It was his wife’s fault. She once told him that he was an “extraordinary lover.” And then she died. So every word she ever said became like the Word of God. The Word of Colleen.

Colleen once told Patrick that the laundry powder should be fully dissolved in the washing machine before you put in the clothes, even though most people just chuck it in on top of the clothes. But Colleen said the clothes wash better if the powder is fully dissolved. And so it was. I still do it, for Christ’s sake. Even though it’s annoying, because you have to wait until the machine fills up with water and sometimes I walk away and forget about it, and then I suddenly realize I’ve done half a load without any clothes in the machine.

He was actually pretty good in bed. He probably still is. Probably still says the same things, makes all the same moves.

I think of him lying in bed with her, breathing in her sandalwood smells, running his hands over her smooth, toxin-free skin.

I would like to see. I would like to be there, sitting at the end of the bed, watching him bend his head toward her nipple. Her breasts are larger than mine. I guess that’s nice for him.

I wonder if she hypnotizes him for free.

Her voice sounds like warm honey dripping off a spoon.

They saw that Russell Crowe movie last night. It was pretty good. He should have known what was going to happen, because the movie was based on the series we used to watch on a Monday night. I wondered if he remembered and I thought, I bet he doesn’t, so I sent him a text reminding him.

Afterward, they went for dinner at that Thai restaurant on the corner where he told me he loved me for the first time.

I wonder if they sat at the same table.

I wonder if he remembered, just for a second. Surely I am worth a fleeting thought.

I couldn’t get a table. They must have had a reservation—she must have done it, he would never bother. So I went to a café and I wrote him a letter, just trying to explain, to make him see, and I left it on the windscreen of his car.

I am looking forward to my next appointment with the hypnotist.

Chapter 3

“As man imagines himself to be, so shall he be, and he is that which he imagines.” So said Paracelsus in the fifteenth century. The idea of the power of the mind is not new, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning.

—Introduction to a speech given by Ellen O’Farrell to
the Northern Beaches Rotary Club August Breakfast,
sadly unheard by the majority of the audience due
to a malfunctioning microphone

We should go,” yawned Ellen.

“We really should,” yawned Patrick.

Neither of them moved.

It was nearly eleven o’clock on a Thursday night and they were lying flat on their backs on a picnic rug on a grassy slope directly under the Harbour Bridge. Earlier, they’d been to the theater in Kirribilli and seen a silly play. They’d eaten dinner at a tiny, crowded noodle bar, and then they’d walked along the boardwalk by the harbor, watching the traffic zoom over the bridge while the lit-up ferries slid beneath. They’d agreed tonight would be an early night, and that Patrick wouldn’t come back to her place, because a teenage neighbor was looking after Patrick’s son, and she had a uni lecture early the next day, so he didn’t want to keep her up too late—but still, neither of them wanted the night to end.

They’d been dating now for three weeks and everything still had that shiny new-car smell. Even the yawny voices they were using right now still had that self-conscious sheen: Look, this is how I sound when I’m tired!

“Have you got a busy day tomorrow?” asked Patrick.

“Just an average day,” said Ellen. “Five appointments. That’s enough for me. I find if I do any more, I get really, well, exhausted.”

She was aware of a feeling of defensiveness left over from her most recent relationship. Jon’s contempt for her profession had always been subtle: a faint fragrance she couldn’t quite identify, and therefore couldn’t ever tackle head-on. He was an even more passionately committed atheist than her mother. (The God Delusion was his favorite book.) “Show me the empirical evidence” was one of his favorite phrases. Whenever Ellen talked about her work, Jon would put his head to one side and give her a patient, avuncular smile, as if she were a charming little girl burbling on about fairy princesses. Then he’d make some humorous, teasing remark that didn’t go quite as far as denying the existence of fairy princesses but was there for the entertainment of any nearby adults. “Ellen has a Bachelor of Hypnotherapy,” he would tell people, which was his sarcastic way of pointing out that Ellen didn’t have a degree, because of course, there was no such thing. (She’d enrolled to do psychology and then dropped out halfway through her second semester to study hypnotherapy. Her mother was still in mourning.)

It wasn’t until after she and Jon had broken up that Ellen saw how she’d struggled to hold on to herself throughout their time together. It was like every time she spoke, she was simultaneously trying not to take herself too seriously—Hey, I can handle a little gentle ribbing!—while at the same time justifying her whole existence: Yes, it is OK to be me. Yes, I do believe in myself and what I’m saying. I am not a frivolous lightweight, except maybe I am.

“Is it draining because…” Patrick scratched the side of his jaw and frowned up at the stars. “Ah, why, that is, how exactly is it draining?”

He was respectfully baffled.

“I guess it’s because I can’t ever just coast,” said Ellen. “I have to be totally focused on the client. I never use prepared scripts. I tailor every induction—”

“Induction?”

“That’s whatever technique I use to induce hypnosis—like, imagining you’re walking down a flight of stairs, or progressively relaxing your body. I tailor it to the client’s interest or background—whether they’re more visual or analytical, or whatever.”

“Do you have some tricky clients?” Patrick rolled over on his side and rested his head in the palm of his hand. “Ones who are hard to hypnotize?”

“Nearly everyone can be hypnotized to some degree,” said Ellen. “But some people have more of a talent for it, I guess, because they’re imaginative and they’ve got the ability to really focus and visualize.”

“Huh,” said Patrick. “I wonder if I’ve got the talent for it.”

“I’ll give you a suggestibility test,” said Ellen. She got up on her knees, mildly exhilarated; she would never have done anything like this with Jon.

Patrick looked up at her. “Like a gullibility test?”

“No, no, it’s just a little exercise to show the power of your imagination. Relax! It’s nothing strange. You’ve probably done it before at a sales conference or something.”

“OK.” Patrick got up on his knees, facing her, with a brave set to his shoulders. The smell of his aftershave was already familiar to her but still new enough to arouse. “Do I close my eyes?”

“No. Just hold your hands like this.”

She interlaced her hands as if in prayer and then lifted her index fingers so they were aligned but not touching. Patrick did the same and looked her straight in the eyes. There was something very sexy about this.

“Now imagine a powerful magnetic force is pulling those two fingertips together. You’re fighting it but you can’t resist. Watch them. It’s getting stronger. Even stronger. It’s too strong—there.”

Patrick’s fingertips closed.

“See! Your subconscious believed the magnets were real.”

Patrick looked at his fingertips still pressed together. “Well. Yes. I mean, I don’t know. I guess it felt real, but that’s just because I was going along with what you were saying.”

Ellen smiled. “Exactly. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. It’s not magic.”

“Do something else.”

“All right. Close your eyes this time, and stretch your arms out in front of you.”

He did so, and she paused for a moment, observing the planes and hollows of his face in the moonlight.

“Hello?” he said.

“Sorry. OK. Imagine that I’m tying a huge helium balloon to your right wrist. It’s tugging it upward. Feel it tug. Now in your left hand I’m giving you a bucket. It’s very heavy because it’s filled with heavy wet sand from the beach.”

Patrick’s right arm floated straight up and his left hand dropped down. Either he was doing this to please her or he was, in fact, an excellent subject for hypnosis.

“Open your eyes,” she said.

Patrick opened his eyes and looked at his arms.

“Huh,” he said. He dropped his arms and put them around her waist. He lowered his head as if to kiss her and then he stopped and suddenly spun around to look behind him.

“What is it?” said Ellen, startled.

“I’m sorry,” said Patrick. “I thought I heard something. I thought it was her.”

There was already no question as to who “her” was. Ellen looked around at the shadowy areas under the bridge for a lurking woman. She noted that she was experiencing a slight buzz: a pleasant burst of adrenaline at the thought of Patrick’s stalker secretly observing them.

“You haven’t seen her tonight, have you?” asked Ellen. The other night they’d been to the movies and dinner and Patrick hadn’t even mentioned he’d noticed Saskia until they got back to the car and found a letter from her sitting on the windscreen.

Patrick glanced around, his eyes narrowed. Then he sat back down again.

“No, I haven’t seen her at all. I think she’s giving us the night off.” He put his arm around her. “I’m sorry. It makes me twitchy sometimes.”

“I can imagine,” said Ellen sympathetically. Was there something moving over by that pylon? No. Trick of the light, damn it.

“So your business is all about the power of the mind,” said Patrick.

“That’s right,” said Ellen. “The power of the subconscious mind.”

“I believe in it, don’t get me wrong,” began Patrick.

Here we go. Ellen’s stomach muscles clenched.

“But there’s a limit to it, isn’t there?”

“What do you mean?” said Ellen. He’s not Jon, she told herself. He’s just stating an opinion. Calm down.

“I just mean, it can’t cure everything. When Colleen—that was my wife—when she got sick, people kept telling her to think positively. As if she could just think the cancer away. After she died I saw a woman on TV saying: ‘I refused to let the cancer beat me. I had two young children, you see. I had to live.’ It infuriated me. As if it was Colleen’s fault that she died. As if she should have tried harder.”

Go carefully, thought Ellen. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again.

Patrick put his hand on her knee. “By the way, I don’t want you thinking you’ve got to walk on eggshells whenever anything comes up about my wife. I’m fine about it. I’m not going to go all weird on you, I promise.”

Hmm, thought Ellen. “My mother is a GP,” she said. “So—” So what? So I have some sort of medical credibility because of her? My mother doesn’t really believe in what I do either. “I have looked after clients with terminal illnesses for pain management or stress relief, but I would never, ever promise I could cure them.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that,” said Patrick. His hand tightened on her knee.

“I know you didn’t.” Ellen put her hand over his, and wondered if he was seeing his wife’s face right now.

She didn’t tell him that she did believe that the mind had miraculous untapped powers.

Show me the empirical evidence, said Jon in her head.

They didn’t speak. The sound of a ferry horn floated across to them from the other side of the harbor. There were footsteps behind them. They both turned to watch a woman wearing a dark business suit and white sneakers walking down the path toward them.

“That’s not—” said Ellen.

“No,” said Patrick, his face clearing as the woman was illuminated by a streetlight.

They were silent. Ellen thought about how she’d closed off such a huge part of her identity during her years with Jon. If this relationship was going to work, she needed to throw open those doors! Let in the light! The air! The— OK, Ellen, enough with the house metaphor.

“I really love what I do,” she said to Patrick. That defensive tone was still there. She made a conscious effort to let it go, to just be. “I’m quite good at it too.”

Patrick gave her an amused sidelong look. “Are you the queen of hypnotherapists?”

“I am.”

“What a coincidence. I am the king of surveyors.”

“Really?”

Patrick sighed. “No, not really. I’m more like the yesterday man of surveyors.”

“Why?”

“I’m not fond of all the new technology. I still prefer to do all my drafting by hand. So that makes me slower. Not as efficient. It’s a competitive disadvantage, as my younger brother likes to remind me.”

“Is he a surveyor too?”

“No, he’s a graphic designer, but he’s very techy. Are you techy?”

“Not really, but I do like to Google. I think I Google every single day. Google is my oracle.”

“What did you Google today?”

Today she’d Googled “dating a widower: avoiding the pitfalls” and “stepchildren—disaster?” followed by “cures for broken capillaries around the nose.”

“Oh, I can’t think.” She waved her hand vaguely. “Something trivial.” She changed the subject back. “Why did you decide to become a surveyor?”

“Maps,” said Patrick immediately. “I’ve always loved the idea of a map, of knowing exactly where I am in relation to everything else. I had an uncle who was a surveyor and when I was a kid he said to me, ‘Patrick, you’ve got good where-ability, you’d make a good surveyor.’ I asked him what a surveyor did and he explained it like this: He said a surveyor determines the location of things on the earth’s surface in relation to every other thing above or below that surface. Those were his exact words. It stuck in my head. And for some reason that just clicked with me. I thought, Yep, that’s what I’ll do.”

“I think I must have terrible where-ability,” commented Ellen. “I don’t have any sense of where I am in relation to anything. Like, right now—I couldn’t point in the direction of home.”

Patrick pointed over her shoulder. “North. That way.”

“If you say so.”

“Have you got any paper?” said Patrick. “I’ll draw you a map.”

Ellen always made a point of having a beautiful hardbound notebook and pen in her bag so she could write down thoughts as they struck her, ideas for her work and so on. She carefully ripped out a page for him. She didn’t want him reading any of her random scribbles; most of them were the very essence of uncool.

Patrick pulled a slim gold fountain pen from his pocket. “My grandfather’s Parker pen. I’d run back into a burning house for it.”

He rested the sheet of paper on top of her notebook, leaned it on his knee and drew an old-fashioned compass in the corner. Then he began to quickly sketch the inlets and curves of the harbor. He added a ferry and yachts, the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House. It was like watching an ancient treasure map appear before her eyes.

“Here’s where we had dinner.” He drew a little illustration of the restaurant. “Here’s where we saw that terrible play. And now we head over to the northern beaches.” He sketched a beach and a two-story house. “Here’s your house.” He wrote: Ellen’s Hypnotic House. “And now we head back over to the leafy North Shore and here’s my house.” He wrote: Patrick and Jack’s Messy Men’s Hovel. He had beautiful handwriting; it evoked another more elegant era.

She hadn’t been to his place yet. She wondered if it was a hovel.

“And this is where we met for the first time.” He continued drawing.

“And I think that’s about everything—oh, except for this.”

He drew a tiny cross next to the harbor and wrote: We are here.

“That’s the most beautiful map I’ve ever seen,” said Ellen truthfully. She had never had any interest in maps before, but she already knew she would keep this forever.

A faint shadow crossed Patrick’s face. It came and went so fast she couldn’t tell if it was sadness or anger, or maybe embarrassment, or if she’d imagined it.

Then he smiled at her. “No charge this time, darlin’.”

Her heart was melting all over the place.

I’ve got this box.

Sometimes I think if I just threw away the box, I might be able to stop. Once, I got as far as carrying it out to the rubbish bin. I opened the lid of the bin and smelled rotting food and heard the buzz of flies, and I thought, This isn’t rubbish, this is my life.

I lost them tonight. They were going somewhere near Milsons Point or Kirribilli. I was hungry, so I didn’t bother driving around looking for his car. I came home and ate sardines on toast while I watched Cold Case with the box on the floor next to me.

Every commercial break I dipped my hand into the box and pulled something out at random. Then I would examine it as if it was a clue or a solution, as if I was one of the detectives on Cold Case trying to unravel the secrets of the past.

A birthday card, the cardboard still stiff and shiny. Not faded at all. It could have been given to me yesterday:

Dear Saskia,

Happy Birthday from your boys.

We love you,

Patrick and Jack xx

A photo of me and Jack with one of our Play-Doh cities. We spent hours making those cities. I’d spread out cardboard across the dining room table and we’d put in roads and roundabouts and traffic lights. Shops and houses. We’d spend days working on the one city: Jacksville, Jackland, JackTown. I loved building those cities as much as he did. It was like being a town planner without the politics or paperwork.

A boarding pass for Queenstown, New Zealand. Patrick and I went snowboarding for a week. His mum looked after Jack. I remember Patrick stopping to kiss me when we walked back inside for a hot chocolate. Warm lips; cold snowflakes falling around us as soft as caresses.

A map that Patrick drew for me when he was giving me directions to a developer’s office near the airport.

I remember I said to him, “That’s the most beautiful map I’ve ever seen.”

Chapter 4

In this Act, “stalking” includes the following of a person about or the watching or frequenting of the vicinity of, or an approach to, a person’s place of residence, business or work or any place that a person frequents for the purposes of any social or leisure activity.

—Section 8 of the Crimes

(Domestic and Personal Violence) Act

So she follows you? Everywhere? How is that even possible?”

“Well, not everywhere. The last time we were at the movies.”

“Maybe she just happened to be there.”

“Maybe, but she tried to get into the same restaurant, and then she left a letter on his car windscreen, which he didn’t read. Apparently she waits around the corner from Patrick’s house and follows his car. He said if he’s going somewhere different, he’ll often lose her, but if it’s a regular place, like the movies at Cremorne, it’s easy for her to work out.”

“Good Lord.”

“I know.”

“This must be awful for you. It’s ruining that wonderful time at the start of your relationship. You should be gazing moonily into each other’s eyes, not keeping a lookout for his crazy ex.”

“I don’t mind. Actually, I find it sort of interesting.”

“You freak.”

Ellen laughed at Julia’s decisive tone and stretched luxuriously. It was a Saturday morning and they’d just been swimming at their local pool. Now they were lying on white towels in the billowing heat of the sauna. Ellen’s legs and shoulders ached from the swim. Julia always made her swim harder and faster than she would if she was on her own. She could feel beads of sweat sliding all over her body: down her back, into her cleavage. She let her hands rest lightly on her thighs, and felt sleek and slippery and sensual. There was no problem practicing mindfulness when you were at the start of a relationship. It happened automatically. All that sex. All those chemicals zipping through your body.

And all that appreciation. That was what was so wonderful about falling in love. Patrick appeared to highly approve of every new thing he learned about her body, her past, her personality. It made Ellen not just sexier but funnier, smarter, nicer, kinder, all round lovelier. She was invincible! Her life seemed to flow and ripple in exquisite harmony, as if she’d achieved enlightenment. Her clients were sweet and grateful, her friends adorable, her mother not at all frustrating. (“So when am I going to meet him?” she said on the phone, her tone warm and pleased, sounding just like a normal mother presumably would.) Whatever grocery items Ellen wanted were always right on the shelf in front of her; traffic lights turned green as she approached; her car keys, sunglasses and purse sat obediently and conveniently on the hall table. This morning she’d had just one hour to go to the bank, the motor registry and the dry cleaners and she’d done it with time to spare, and every person she’d dealt with, even at the motor registry, had been charming. She’d had quite an emotional conversation with the bank teller about the weather. (The teller was from the UK, and thought that Australian winters were “divine,” and Ellen had felt tearily proud, as if she, in her invincible state, was solely responsible for the Australian climate.)

If only she could bottle this feeling and make it last forever. It couldn’t last forever, her rational mind knew that, but her heart, her foolish heart, was chirping, “Oh, yes, it can! Why not? This is who you are now! This is your life from now on!”

“I would never humiliate myself like that,” said Julia.

What? Oh. The stalking thing.

“Well, I guess she just can’t let go,” said Ellen. Right now, she was filled with gentle compassion for all of humanity.

Julia snorted. She was lying on the bench opposite Ellen, a towel wrapped like a turban about her head. She had a long, lean, athletic body and crazy blond curly hair and she hovered right on the edge of being extremely beautiful. Whenever Ellen walked along a street with her, she saw men’s eyes involuntarily flicking back to Julia for a second appraising look. Unfortunately, Julia’s beauty seemed to attract a certain type of man, the sort who appreciated quality and was prepared to pay extra for it. The problem was these men constantly upgraded their computers, their cars and their women. That was their nature. They were dedicated consumers, excellent for the economy. After nearly five years of marriage, Julia’s husband, William, had decided it was high time he upgraded to the latest brand of woman: a twenty-three-year-old brunette.

(Ellen always liked to think that the sort of man she herself attracted was automatically superior to those who chose Julia because they didn’t let the billboards determine what was beautiful. They weren’t superficial; they wereindividuals. Sadly, she couldn’t really back this theory up when her relationship history was just as disastrous as Julia’s.)

(Really, when she dug deep, she saw that her whole theory was just her way of making herself feel better because the majority of men didn’t feel the need to give her that second flick of the eyes.)

(Although William had been a dreadful prat.)

(To be honest, she had been quite fond of him in the beginning.)

“Where’s the woman’s self-respect?” snapped Julia. “Just move on, for God’s sake. She’s making all of us look bad.”

There was a real edge to her voice, as if she was personally offended.

“You mean she’s making women look bad?” said Ellen. “It’s normally men who do the stalking. It’s good. She’s showing women can stalk just as effectively as men.”

Julia made a pfff sound. She sat up, leaned down with one long arm and picked up the ladle lying next to a bucket of water. She threw it on the hot rocks. There was a boiling hiss and the sauna filled with more steam.

“Julia,” gasped Ellen. “I’m suffocating.”

“Toughen up,” said Julia. She lay back down and asked, “What’s this girl’s name?”

“Saskia,” said Ellen, breathing shallow breaths of the hot, heavy air. She felt shy saying it out loud, as if it was a celebrity’s name.

“Have you actually seen her yet? Or have you seen photos?”

“No. He never tells me he’s seen her until after she’s left. I’m desperate to see what she looks like.”

“Maybe she’s a figment of his imagination, and he’s the crazy one.”

“I don’t think so.”

Patrick wasn’t crazy. He was lovely.

“So I assume he ended the relationship.”

“He just said that it ran its course.”

“So he broke her heart,” said Julia sternly.

“Well, I don’t—”

“Still, it’s no excuse. It happens to all of us. Patrick should take a restraining order against her. Has he done that?”

Julia believed there were solutions to everything.

“He says he’s been to the police,” began Ellen, but then she stopped and didn’t bother to go into further detail. She wasn’t entirely convinced that Patrick had told her the whole story about why he hadn’t gone ahead with the restraining order.

“Anyway, the silly woman just needs to pull herself together,” said Julia, as if it was up to Ellen to pass on this instruction.

“Yes.”

Most helpful customer reviews

142 of 149 people found the following review helpful.
Lianne Moriarty Does It Again!
By Lyn Craven
I discovered this author a few months ago (What Alice Forgot) and read all three of her previous books in a row. She writes the most unusual storylines which are completely captivating. "Chick Lit" it may be... but it is GOOD chick lit! Unusually for me, I pre-ordered The Hypnotist's Love Story (thats how confidant I was that I would enjoy this one as much as the others... and it did not disappoint) and read it in two sittings. As previously with this author, I lost sleep because I just HAD to keep reading to see how it all turned out. The trick in this one is how she makes you see the story from every character's point of view (some sooner than others - it took almost to the end to understand where Patrick was coming from) and although you shouldn't like Saskia, somehow you get it and sympathise. Just a great read and I look forward to more from this author.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting and Unusual
By Louisa Livingston
What an interesting, unusual story. It is at times predictable, other times different from what I'd expect, and includes love. Ellen, a hypnotist, and felt really good at helping her patients. Unmarried and without a current boyfriend, she meets Patrick and to her surprise, they really get along well. What makes this story especially interesting with a few twists is that a woman who had been in love with Patrick and was with him for awhile, begins stalking them. That infuriates Patrick, though Ellen doesn't particularly mind it and is rather intrigued by the stalker. In some ways, the stalker is the most interesting. Because she speaks to the reader in the present tense, letting us in on a wide range of her thoughts, from those that she's ashamed of, those she's pleased with, and everything in between. All this makes for an interesting, lively story. Not particularly earth-shattering, but a good read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Dramatic and Suspenseful
By Amazon Customer
Letting go can be hard to do, especially when you've invested so much love, time, and energy into someone. This is the situation Ellen has to deal with when she starts dating Patrick who has been stalked by his ex Saskia for three years. But the stalking doesn't just end with Patrick and as their relationship progresses so does Saskia's invasion into their lives.
This novel is written in the perspectives of Ellen and Saskia and I very much enjoyed seeing things from their personal point of views and the feelings that surrounded the decisions they made. It really makes you feel for both characters. Liane Moriarty is by far my favorite fiction author, she has a true gift and once again not only does she not disappoint​, but she goes above and beyond.

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An electrifying, internationally bestselling investigation of the global cocaine trade, from the author of the #1 international bestseller Gomorrah
�
“Zero zero zero” flour is the finest, whitest available. It is also the nickname among narcotraffickers for the purest cocaine on the market. And it is the title of Roberto Saviano’s unforgettable exploration of the inner workings of the global cocaine trade—its rules and armies, and the true depth of its reach into the world economy.
�
Saviano’s Gomorrah, his explosive account of the Neapolitan mob, the Camorra, was a worldwide sensation. It struck such a nerve with the Camorra that Saviano has lived with twenty-four-hour police protection for more than eight years. During this time he has come to know law enforcement agencies and officials around the world. With their cooperation, Savaiano has broadened his perspective to take in the entire global “corporate” entity that is the drug trade and the complex money-laundering operations that allow it to function, often with the help of the world’s biggest banks.
�
The result is a harrowing and groundbreaking synthesis of literary narrative and geopolitical analysis exploring one of the most powerful dark forces in our economy. Saviano tracks the shift in the cocaine trade’s axis of power, from Colombia to Mexico, and relates how the Latin American cartels and gangs have forged alliances with crime syndicates across the globe. He charts the increasing sophistication of these criminal entities as they diversify into other products and markets. He also reveals the astonishing increase in the severity of violence as they have fought to protect and extend their power.
�
Saviano is a writer and journalist of rare courage and a thinker of impressive intellectual depth, able to see connections between far-flung phenomena and bind them into a single epic story. Most drug-war narratives feel safely removed from our own lives; Saviano offers no such comfort. Both heart-racing and eye-opening, ZeroZeroZero is an investigative story like none other.
�
Praise for ZerZeroZero:
�
“[Saviano] has developed a literary style that switches from vivid descriptions of human depravity to a philosophical consideration of the meaning of violence in the modern world. . . . Most important of all is the hope Saviano gives to countless victims of criminal violence by standing up to its perpetrators.” —Financial Times

• Published on: 2016-08-25
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 7.80" h x .75" w x 5.08" l, .82 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 418 pages

Review
The Economist:�
Taken as a whole, [ZeroZeroZero] is an angry rebuke to all those—traffickers and politicians alike—who perpetuate the violence….By reminding readers of the senseless suffering wrought by the cocaine trade, this book makes a powerful case for a new approach.”
�
Financial Times:�
In articulating [his]�cri de coeur, [Saviano] has developed a literary style that switches from vivid descriptions of human depravity to a philosophical consideration of the meaning of violence in the modern world. Indeed, when he revisits his work on Naples — the city where he was brought up and from which he is now excluded — his reflections soar into the realm of the poetic. But for me, most important of all is the hope Saviano gives to countless victims of criminal violence by standing up to its perpetrators, especially those from his home country.

Booklist�(starred review):�
“With keen observation and deep probing, Saviano is an anthropologist and philosopher as much as a journalist. This is an epic account of how the modern cocaine trafficking business came to be and how widespread, how impenetrable, and how intertwined with international commerce and politics—and our everyday lives—it is.”

Kirkus:
“This revealing new book, with a strong focus on Mexico's cartels, surges with fast-moving prose detailing the lives of drug lords and pushers, the inner workings of their violent world, and how their lucrative business (between $25 billion and $50 billion annually) affects all our lives…. Saviano describes the complexities of money laundering, how world banks help make it possible, and the many ways in which drugs are smuggled: in paintings, handcrafted doors, frozen fish, and more. Throughout, the author provides vivid stories of the lives of well-known drug bosses and their minions. Saviano says he can no longer look at a beach or a map without seeing cocaine, and many will share that view after reading this dark, relentless, hyperreal report.”


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author
Roberto Saviano was born in Naples in 1979. He is the author of Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’s Organized Crime System and has lived under police protection since its publication in 2006. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and the Times (London).

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The guy sitting next to you on the train uses cocaine, he took it to get himself going this morning; or the driver of the bus you’re taking home, he wants to put in some overtime without feeling the cramps in his neck. The people closest to you use coke. If it’s not your mother or father, if it’s not your brother, then it’s your son. And if your son doesn’t use it, your boss does. Or your boss’s secretary, but only on Saturdays, just for fun. And if your boss doesn’t, his wife does, to let herself go. And if not his wife, then his lover—he gives her cocaine instead of earrings, in place of diamonds. And if they don’t, the truck driver delivering tons of coffee to caf�s around town does; he wouldn’t be able to hack those long hours on the road without it. And if he doesn’t, the nurse who’s changing your grandfather’s catheter does. Coke makes everything seem so much easier, even the night shift. And if she doesn’t, the painter redoing your girlfriend’s room does; he was just curious at first but wound up deep in debt. The people who use cocaine are right here, right next to you. The police officer who’s about to pull you over has been snorting for years, and everyone knows it, and they write anonymous letters to his chief hoping he’ll be suspended before he screws up big time. Or the surgeon who’s just waking up and will soon operate on your aunt. Cocaine helps him cut open six people a day. Or your divorce lawyer. Or the judge presiding over your lawsuit; he doesn’t consider it a vice, though, just a little boost, a way to get more out of life. The cashier who hands you the lottery ticket you hope is going to change your life. The carpenter who’s installing the cabinets that cost you a month’s salary. Or the workman who came to put together the IKEA closet you couldn’t figure out how to assemble on your own. If not him, then the manager of your condo building who is just about to buzz you. Or your electrician, the one who’s in your bedroom right now, moving the outlets. The singer you are listening to to unwind, the parish priest you’re going to talk to about finally getting confirmed because your grandson’s getting baptized, and he’s amazed you’ve put it off for so long. The waiters who will work the wedding you’re going to next Saturday; they wouldn’t be able to last on their feet all that time if they didn’t. If not them, then the town councillor who just approved the new pedestrian zones, and who gets his coke free in exchange for favors. The parking lot attendant who’s happy now only when he’s high. The architect who renovated your vacation home, the mailman who just delivered your new ATM card. If not them, then the woman at the call center who asks “How may I help you?” in that shrill, happy voice, the same for every caller, thanks to the white powder. If not her, your professor’s research assistant—coke makes him nervous. Or the physiotherapist who’s trying to get your knee working right. Coke makes him more sociable. The forward who just scored, spoiling the bet you were winning right up until the final minutes of the game. The prostitute you go to on your way home, when you just can’t take it anymore and need to vent. She does it so she won’t have to see whoever is on top or under or behind her anymore. The gigolo you treated yourself to for your fiftieth birthday. You did it together. Coke makes him feel really macho. The sparring partner you train with in the ring, to lose weight. And if he doesn’t, your daughter’s riding instructor does, and so does your wife’s psychologist. Your husband’s best friend uses it, the one who’s been hitting on you for years but whom you’ve never liked. And if he doesn’t, then your school principal does. Along with the janitor. And the real estate agent, who’s late, just when you finally managed to find time to see the apartment. The security guard uses it, the one who still combs his hair over his bald spot, even though guys all shave their heads these days. And if he doesn’t, the notary you hope you never have to go back to, he does it to avoid thinking about the alimony he has to pay his ex-wives. And if he doesn’t, the taxi driver does; he curses the traffic but then goes all happy again. If not him, the engineer you have to invite over for dinner because he might help you get a leg up in your career. The policeman who’s giving you a ticket, sweating profusely even though it’s winter. The squeegee man with hollow eyes, who borrows money to buy it, or that kid stuffing flyers under windshield wipers, five at a time. The politician who promised you a commercial license, the one you and your family voted into office, and who is always nervous. The professor who failed you on your exam. Or the oncologist you’re going to see; everybody says he’s the best, so you’re hoping he can save you. He feels omnipotent when he sniffs cocaine. Or the gynecologist who nearly forgets to throw away his cigarette before going in to examine your wife, who has just gone into labor. Your brother-in-law, who’s never in a good mood, or your daughter’s boyfriend, who always is. If not them, then the fishmonger, who proudly displays a swordfish, or the gas station attendant who spills gas on your car. He sniffs to feel young again but can’t even put the pump away correctly anymore. Or the family doctor you’ve known for years and who lets you cut the line because you always know just the right thing to give him at Christmas. The doorman of your building uses it, and if he doesn’t, then your kids’ tutor does, your nephew’s piano teacher, the costume designer for the play you’re going to see tonight, the vet who takes care of your cat. The mayor who invited you over for dinner recently. The contractor who built your house, the author whose book you’ve been reading before falling asleep, the anchorwoman on the evening news. But if, after you think about it, you’re still convinced none of these people could possibly snort cocaine, you’re either blind or you’re lying. Or the one who uses it is you.

1.

THE LESSON

“They were all sitting around a table, right here in New York, not far from here.”

“Where?” I asked instinctively.

He gave me a look that said he couldn’t believe I was stupid enough to ask a question like that. What I was about to hear was an exchange of favors. The police had arrested a young man in Europe a few years back. A Mexican with an American passport. He was sent to New York, where they let him stew in the swamp of the underworld instead of in jail. Every now and then he’d spill some news to keep from being arrested. Not an informer exactly, but pretty close, something that didn’t make him feel like a rat, but not one of those silent as stone types either. The police would ask him generic questions, nothing specific enough to expose him in front of his gang. They needed him to say which way the wind was blowing, what the mood was, rumors of meetings or wars. No proof or evidence, just rumors. They’d collect the evidence later on. But now that wasn’t enough. The young man had recorded a speech on his iPhone at a meeting he’d gone to. A speech that made the police uneasy. Some of them, whom I’d known for years, wanted me to write about it somewhere, to make noise, to see what sorts of reactions it got in order to find out if the story I was about to hear really went the way the young man said it had, or if it had been staged, a little theater piece. They wanted me to shake things up in the world where those words had been uttered, where they’d been heard.

The police officer waited for me in Battery Park, on a little jetty. No hat or dark glasses, no ridiculous disguise. He showed up in a brightly colored T-shirt and flip-flops, with a smile that said he couldn’t wait to spill his secret. His Italian was full of dialect, but I could understand him. He wasn’t looking for complicity of any sort; he had orders to tell me about the speech and didn’t waste time. I remember the story perfectly; it has stayed inside me. The things we remember aren’t stored merely in our heads; I’m convinced that other parts of our bodies remember too. The liver, testicles, fingernails, ribs. When you hear such words, they get lodged there. Each body part sends what it remembers to the brain. More and more I realize that I remember with my stomach, which stores up the beautiful as well as the horrendous. I know that certain memories are there, because my stomach moves. My diaphragm, that membrane rooted at the very core of my body, creates waves. The diaphragm makes us pant and shudder, but it also makes us piss, defecate, and vomit. That’s where the pushing during childbirth starts. Where everything starts. And I’m sure there are places that collect much worse, that store up the waste. I don’t know exactly where that place is inside of me, but I know it’s full. My place of memories, of waste, is saturated. That might seem like a good thing, but it isn’t. Because if the waste doesn’t have anywhere to go it starts worming its way into places it shouldn’t. It thrusts itself into places that collect different sorts of memories. That policeman’s story filled up forever the part of me that remembers the worst things. Those things that resurface just when you start thinking everything’s going better, when you start imagining you’ll finally be able to go home, when you tell yourself it really was worth it after all. It’s in moments like that when the dark memories resurface from somewhere, like an exhalation, like trash in a dump, buried and covered over by plastic, that somehow finds its way to the surface and poisons everything.

The police officer told me that the young man, his informer, had heard the only lesson worth learning—that’s what he called it—and had recorded it on the sly. Not to betray anyone, but to be able to listen to it again. A lesson on how to be in the world. And he let the officer hear the whole thing; they listened together, sharing the young man’s earbuds.

“Now you have to write about it. Let’s see if somebody gets pissed off�.�.�. which would mean that the young man’s telling the truth. If you write about it and nobody does anything, then either it’s just a load of crap from some B-grade actor, and our Chicano friend is making fools of us�.�.�. or nobody believes the bullshit you write.” He laughed.

I nodded without promising anything; I was just trying to understand the situation. Supposedly it was an old Italian boss talking to a group of Latinos, Italians, Italian Americans, Albanians, and former Kaibiles, the notorious Guatemalan elite soldiers. At least, that’s what the young man said. No facts, statistics, or details. Not something you learn against your will; you just enter the room one way and you come out changed. You’re still wearing the same clothes, have the same haircut, your beard is still the same length. No signs of being initiated, no cuts over your eyebrows, no broken nose, and you haven’t been brainwashed with sermons either. You go in, and when you come out, at first glance you look exactly the same as when you were pushed through the door. But only on the outside. Inside you’re completely different. They didn’t reveal the ultimate truth to you, they merely put a few things in their proper place. Things you hadn’t known how to use before, that you’d never had the courage to take in.

The police officer read me the transcription he’d made. They’d met in a room not far from where we were, seated in no particular order, randomly, not in a horseshoe like they do at ritual initiations. Seated like they do in a club in some small town in southern Italy, or on Arthur Avenue in New York City, to watch the soccer game on TV. But there was no soccer game on TV in that room, and this was no gathering of friends. They were all members of criminal organizations, of all different ranks. The old Italian gets up. They knew he was a man of honor, that he’d come to the United States after living in Canada for a long time. He begins talking without even introducing himself; he doesn’t need to. He speaks a bastard Italian, some dialect thrown in, mixed with English and Spanish. I wanted to know his name, so I asked the police officer, trying to sound casual, as if it were a passing curiosity. He didn’t bother answering me. There were only the boss’s words.

Them folks who think they can get by with justice, with laws that are equal for everybody, with hard work, dignity, clean streets, with women same as men, it’s only a world of fags who think it’s okay to make fools of themselves. And everyone around them. All that crap about a better world, leave it to them idiots. To the rich idiots who can afford such luxuries. The luxury of believing in a happy world, a just world. Rich people with guilty consciences, or with something to hide. Whoever rules just does it, and that’s that. Sure, he can say he rules for the good, for justice and liberty and all. But that’s just sissy stuff; leave all that to the rich fools. Who rules, rules. Period.

I tried asking how he was dressed, how old he was. Cop questions, things a reporter or a nosy obsessive would ask, believing that the typology of a boss who’d give this sort of speech can be had in the details. The police officer ignored me and kept on talking. I listened, sifting his words like sand in hopes of finding the nugget, the name. I listened to his words but was searching for something else. I was searching for clues.

“He wanted to explain the rules to them, capish?” the police officer said. “He wanted them to really get into it. I’m sure he’s not lying. This isn’t some lazy Mexican wank, I’m telling you. I swear on my life, even if no one believes me.”

The police officer buried his nose in his notebook and started reading again.

The rules of the organization are the rules of life. Government laws are the rules of one side that wants to fuck the other side. And we ain’t gonna let ourselves get fucked by nobody. There’s people who make money without taking any risks, and they’re always gonna be afraid of those who make money by risking everything. If you risk it all, you have it all, capish? But if you think you gotta save yourself, or that you can do it without jail time, without fleeing, without going into hiding, then let me make it clear right from the start: you are not a man. And if you’re not a man, you can leave this room right now, and don’t even hope to ever become one, ’cause you will never ever be a man of honor.

The police officer looked at me. His eyes were two narrow slits, as if he were trying to see words he remembered all too well. He had read and listened to that testimony dozens of times.

Crees en el amor? Love ends. Crees en tu coraz�n? Your heart stops. No? No love and no heart? So, do you believe in co�o, in pussy? Well, even pussies dry up after a while. You believe in your wife? Soon as your money runs out, she’ll tell you you’re neglecting her. You believe in your children? As soon as you stop giving them money they’ll say you don’t love them. You believe in your mama? If you don’t nurse her, she’ll say you’re an ungrateful child. Listen to what I’m tellin’ you. You need to live, vivir. You got to live for yourselves. It’s for yourselves that you need to know how to be respected, and how to show respect. La famiglia. Respect the people who are useful to you and despise the ones who aren’t. The people who can give you something get your respect, and the ones who are useless lose it. Somebody who wants something from you, doesn’t he respect you? Somebody who’s afraid of you? So what happens when you got nothing to give? When you got nothing left? When you’re no longer useful? Then you’re basura, rubbish. If you have nothing to give, then you’re nothing, nada, nulla.

“So,” the police officer said, “I understood right then and there that the boss, this Italiano, was somebody who counts, who knows what life’s about. Really knows. That Mexican kid couldn’t have come up with that speech on his own. The spic dropped out of school at sixteen; they fished him out of a gambling den in Barcelona. And the way this guy talks, his Calabrian dialect, how could some actor or braggart ever invent that? If it weren’t for my wife’s grandmother I never would have understood a word of it.”

I’d heard dozens of speeches on Mafia moral philosophy—in penitents’ confessions and wiretappings. But this was different; it was like training for the soul.

I’m talkin’ to you; I even like some of you. Some of you, I’d like to smash your face. But even if I like you the best, if you got more pussy or more money than me, I want you dead. If one of you becomes my brother, and I make him my equal in the organization, then one thing is clear: He’s gonna try to fuck me over. Don’t think a friend will be forever a friend. I’ll be killed by somebody I shared my food with, my sleep, everything. I’ll be killed by somebody I ate with, somebody who gave me shelter. I don’t know who it’ll be or I’d already have eliminated him. But it’ll happen. And if he doesn’t kill me, he’ll betray me. Rules are rules. And rules are not laws. Laws are for cowards. Rules are for men. That’s why we have rules of honor. Rules of honor don’t tell you you have to be good, just, upright. Rules of honor tell you how to rule. What you have to do to handle people, money, power. Rules of honor tell you how to behave if you want to rule, if you want to fuck the guy above you, if you don’t want to be fucked by the guy below you. There’s no sense explaining them. Rules of honor exist, period. They evolved on their own, on and through the blood of every man of honor. How do you choose?

Was that question for me? I searched for the right answer.

How can you choose, in a few seconds, a few minutes, hours, what you should do? If you choose wrong, you’ll pay for it for years, for that quick decision. The rules are always there, but you got to know how to recognize them, you got to understand when they really count. And then there’s God’s laws. God’s laws are contained in the rules. God’s laws—the real ones, though, not the ones they use to make poor fools tremble with fear. But remember this: You can have all the rules of honor you want, but still, only one thing’s for certain. You’re a man only if you know deep down what your destiny is. Poor fools grovel, because it’s easier. Men of honor know that everything dies, everything passes away, nothing lasts forever. Journalists start out wanting to change the world and end up wanting to be editor in chief. It’s easier to condition them than to corrupt them. Each one matters only for himself and for the Honored Society. And the Honored Society says you matter only if you rule. You can choose how, later. You can rule with an iron fist or you can buy consensus. By spilling blood or giving it. The Honored Society knows that every man is weak, depraved, vain. It knows that people don’t change; that’s why rules are everything. Bonds of friendship are nothing without rules. Every problem has a solution, from your wife who leaves you to your group that splits up. The solution merely depends on how much you offer. If things go poorly, you merely offered too little. Don’t go looking for other explanations.

It seemed like a university seminar for aspiring bosses. What was this?

You have to know who you want to be. If you rob, shoot, rape, deal drugs, you’ll make money for a while, but then they’ll take you and crush you. You can do it. Sure, you can do it. But not for long, ’cause you don’t know what might happen to you; people will fear you only if you stick a pistol in their mouth. But as soon as you turn your back, what happens? As soon as a job goes wrong? If you belong to the organization, you know there’s a rule for everything. If you want to make money, there’s ways to do it; if you want to kill, there are motives and methods; if you want to get ahead, you can, but you have to earn respect, trust, you have to make yourself indispensable. There’s even rules for if you want to change the rules. Whatever you do outside the rules, you never know how it might end. But whatever you do that follows the rules of honor, you always know exactly what it’s going to get you. And you know exactly how the people around you will react. So if you want to be an ordinary man, just keep doing what you’re doing. But if you want to become a man of honor, you got to have rules. And the difference between an ordinary man and a man of honor is that the man of honor always knows what’s happening, while the ordinary man gets screwed by chance, bad luck, or stupidity. Things happen to him. But the man of honor knows what’s gonna happen, and he knows when. You know exactly what belongs to you and what doesn’t; you know exactly how far you can push yourself, even if you want to push past every rule. Everybody wants three things: power, pussy, and money. Even the judge when he condemns bad people, even the politicians, they want dinero and pussy and power, but they want to get it by showing they’re indispensable, defenders of the law or the poor or who knows what. Everybody wants money, even though they go around saying they want something else, or doing things for other people. The rules of the Honored Society are rules for controlling everybody. The Honored Society knows you can have money, pussy, and power, but it also knows that the man who’s capable of giving up everything is the one who decides everybody else’s fate. Cocaine. That’s what cocaine is. All you can see, you can have it. Without cocaine, you’re nothing. With cocaine, you can be whoever you want. If you sniff cocaine, you screw yourself all on your own. The organization gives you rules for moving up in the world. It gives you rules for killing and for how you’re gonna be killed. You want to lead a normal life? You want to be worth nothing? Fine. All you need to do is not see, not hear. But remember this: In Mexico, where you can do whatever you want, get high, fuck little girls, drive as fast as you like, the only ones who really rule are the ones who have rules. If you do stupid stuff, you got no honor, and if you got no honor, you got no power. You’re just like everybody else.

The police officer pointed his finger at a particularly worn page of his notebook. “Look, look at this�.�.�. he wanted to explain absolutely everything. How to live, not just how to be a mafioso. How to live.”

You work, a lot. You have some money, algo dinero. Maybe some beautiful women. But then they leave you, for somebody more handsome, with more dinero than you. You might have a decent life—pretty unlikely—or a shitty life, like everybody else. But when you end up in jail, the ones on the outside, who think they’re clean, will insult you, but you will have ruled. They’ll hate you, but you’ll have bought yourself everything good in life, everything you wanted. You’ll have the organization behind you. It might happen that you suffer some, and maybe they’ll even kill you. The organization backs whoever’s strongest, obviously. You can climb mountains with rules of flesh, blood, and money. But if you become weak, if you make a mistake, you’re fucked. If you do good, you’ll be rewarded. If you make a bad alliance, you’re fucked; if you make a mistake in war, you’re fucked; if you don’t know how to hold on to power, you’re fucked. But these wars are permitted, they’re allowed. They’re our wars. You might win and you might lose. But on only one condition will you always lose, and in the most painful way possible: if you betray the organization. Whoever tries to go against the Honored Society has no hope of surviving. You can run from the law but not from the organization. You can even run from God, ’cause God can wait forever for the fugitive. But you can’t escape the organization. If you betray it and run, if they screw you and you run, if you don’t respect the rules and you run, somebody’s gonna pay. They’ll come looking for you. They’ll go to your family, to your allies. Your name will be on the list forever. And nothing can ever erase it. Not time, not money. You’re fucked for all eternity, you and your descendants.

The police officer closed his notebook. “The kid, it was like he came out of a trance.”

And then the officer told me what the young man had asked him: “So am I betraying the organization now, letting you listen to this?”

“Write about it,” the police officer said to me. “We got our eye on him. I’ll put three guys on his ass, twenty-four hours a day. If someone tries to close in on him, we’ll know he wasn’t bullshitting, that it isn’t some joke, this is a real boss talking.”

That story really stunned me. Where I come from, it’s what they’ve always done. But it was strange to hear those same words in New York. Where I come from, you don’t join merely for the money; you do it above all in order to belong, to have a structure, to move as if on a chessboard. To know exactly which piece to move and when.

“It’s risky, I think,” I said to him.

“Do it,” he insisted.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned. It wasn’t the story itself that struck me so much. It was the whole chain that left me perplexed. I’d been contacted to write the story of a story of a story. The source—the old Italian—I trusted instinctively. A bit because, when you’re far from home, whoever speaks your language, I mean your very same language—same codes, same locutions, same vocabulary, same omissions—you recognize immediately as one of your own, as someone to pay attention to. And also because his speech was delivered at the right time, to exactly the people who needed to hear it. If those words were true, they signaled a most dreadful turning point. The Italian bosses, the last remaining Calvinists of the West, were training new generations of Mexicans and Latin Americans, the criminal bourgeoisie born of drug trafficking, the most ferocious and hungry recruits in the world.

I couldn’t stay still. My bed felt like a wooden plank, my room like a cell. I wanted to pick up the phone and call that police officer, but it was two in the morning and I didn’t want him to think I was crazy. I went to my desk and started an e-mail. I would write about it, but first I had to understand more. I wanted to listen to the actual recording. That training lesson about how to be in the world wasn’t only for mafia affiliates but for anyone who decides they want to rule on this Earth. Words no one would utter with such clarity unless he were training people. When you talk publicly about a soldier, you say he wants peace and hates war, but when you’re alone with him, you train him to shoot. That speech was an effort to bring Italian organized crime traditions into South American organizations. That kid wasn’t boasting at all.

I got a text. The young man, the informer, had wrapped himself around a tree while driving. It wasn’t revenge. Just a fancy Italian car he didn’t know how to drive, and he slammed it into a tree. End of story.

2.

BIG BANG

Don Arturo is an elderly gentleman who remembers it all. And he’ll talk about it to anyone who’s willing to listen. His grandchildren are too big, he’s already a great-grandfather, and he prefers to tell the little ones other stories. Arturo tells of how one day a general arrived, dismounted his horse, which seemed incredibly tall but was merely a healthy animal in a land of skinny, arthritic beasts, and ordered that all the gomeros—the peasants who raised opium poppies—be rounded up. Burn all the fields: It was an order. That’s the way the government works. Do it or end up in jail. For ten years. Jail, the gomeros all thought, the sooner the better. Growing grain again was worse than going to jail. But during those ten years their children wouldn’t be able to grow poppies, and the land would be seized or, in the best of circumstances, devastated by drought. The gomeros merely lowered their eyes: Their lands and their poppies would all be burned. Soldiers arrived and dumped diesel fuel on the soil, the flowers, the mule tracks, the paths leading from one estate to another. Arturo told how fields once red with poppies were now stained black with buckets of dark, dense diesel fuel, how a foul smell saturated the air. Back then, the work was all done by hand; those big poison pumps didn’t exist yet. Bucketfuls of stench. But that’s not the reason old Arturo remembers it all. He remembers because it was there that he learned how to recognize courage, and that cowardice tastes of human flesh. The fields caught fire, but slowly. Not a sudden burst of flame, but row by row, fire contaminating fire. Thousands of flowers, stems, and roots catching fire. The peasants all watched, and so did the police and the mayor, the women and the children. A painful spectacle. Then all of a sudden they saw screaming balls of fire come shooting out of the nearby bushes. Living flames, it seemed, leaping and gasping for breath. But the fire hadn’t suddenly come to life—these were animals. Asleep among the poppies, they hadn’t heard the noise or smelled the diesel fuel, which they’d never smelled before. Flaming rabbits, stray dogs, even a small mule. All on fire. There was nothing to be done. No amount of water can put out diesel flames on flesh, and besides, the land all around was on fire. The howling beasts were consumed right before the people’s eyes. And that wasn’t the only tragedy. The gomeros who had gotten drunk while dumping the fuel, they too caught fire. They drank cerveza as they worked, and then fell asleep in the brush. The fire took them, too. They howled a lot less than the animals, staggering around as if the alcohol in their veins were feeding the fire from within. No one went to help them; no one ran over with a blanket. The flames were too fierce.

That’s when Don Arturo saw a dog, all skin and bones, run toward the fire. The dog dove into that inferno and came out with two, three, finally six puppies, rolling each one on the ground to put out the flames. Singed, spitting smoke and ashes, covered in sores, but alive. They stumbled after their mother, who walked past the people gazing at the fire. She seemed to look right at each one of them, her eyes piercing the gomeros, the soldiers, and all the other miserable human beings who were just standing there. An animal senses cowardice. And respects fear. Fear is the more vital instinct, and deserves more respect. Cowardice is a choice, fear is a state of mind. That dog was afraid, but she dove into those flames to save her young. Not one man had saved another man. They’d let them all burn to death. That’s how the old man told it. There is no right age for understanding. To him it came early, when he was only eight. And he remembered this truth till he was ninety: Beasts have courage and know what it means to defend life. Men boast about courage, but all they know how to do is obey, crawl, get by.

For twenty years there were only ashes where poppies had once grown. Then one day, Arturo recalled, a general came. Another one. On estates in every corner of the Earth, there’s always someone who appears in the name of a powerful figure, someone with a uniform, boots, and a horse—or an SUV, depending on when we’re talking about. He ordered the peasants to become gomeros again, Arturo remembered. Enough with grain, time for poppies again. Drugs again. The United States was preparing for war, and before the guns, before the bullets, tanks, planes, and aircraft carriers, before the uniforms and boots, before everything else, the United States needed morphine. You don’t go to war without morphine. If any of you have been in pain, excruciating pain, you know what morphine is: peace from suffering. You don’t go to war without morphine, because war is suffering, broken bones, and lacerated flesh. There are treatises and demonstrations, candles and pickets for people’s outrage. But for burning flesh there’s only one thing: morphine. Maybe you live in the part of the world that is still fairly tranquil. You know the cries of hospital wards, of women in labor, of the sick, of children who scream and joints that dislocate. But you’ve probably never heard the screams of a man hit by a bullet, his bones shattered by a submachine gun or shrapnel, his arm or half his face ripped off. Those are real cries, the only ones memory cannot forget. Our memory of sounds is fleeting; memories are linked to actions, contexts. But the cries of war never go away. Veterans and reporters, doctors and career soldiers all wake up to those cries. If you’ve heard the screams of a dying man, or one lying wounded in the middle of a battlefield, there’s no point spending money on psychoanalysts or seeking comfort. You’ll never forget those screams. Only chemistry can stop them, soothe them, only chemistry can lessen the pain. At the sound of those cries, the other soldiers all turn to stone. Nothing is less militaristic than the screams of someone wounded in battle. Only morphine can silence those cries and let the others go on thinking they’ll get off scot-free, come out unscathed, be victorious. And so the United States, which needed morphine for war, asked Mexico to increase its opium production, and even helped build a railroad to facilitate transportation. How much opium was needed? Lots. As much as possible. Arturo had grown up by then. He was almost thirty, already had four kids. He wasn’t about to set fire to his fields, as his father had done. He knew what would happen—first they’d ask, then they’d order him to do it. So when the general left, Arturo took the back roads and caught up with him. He intercepted the general’s caravan and negotiated. He would sell a portion of his opium on the black market. The bulk would go to the government, which would sell it to the United States military; the rest he’d smuggle out, for those Yankees who wanted to enjoy a little opium or morphine. The general accepted the proposal in exchange for a hefty cut. And on one condition: “You get your opium across the border yourself.”

Old Arturo is like a sphinx. None of his children are narcos. None of his grandchildren are narcos. None of their wives are narcos. But the narcos respect him because he was the first opium smuggler in the entire area. Arturo went from gomero to broker. He didn’t simply grow poppies; he mediated between producers and traffickers. He kept it up until the 1980s, and that was only the beginning, because back then most of the heroin that made its way to America was handled by Mexicans. Arturo had become a powerful, well-to-do man. But something ended his activity as opium broker. That something was Kiki. After the Kiki ordeal Arturo decided to go back to growing grain. He abandoned opium and the men who dealt in heroin and morphine. It’s an old story, the one about Kiki. From many years ago. But it’s a story that Arturo never forgot. So when his children said they wanted to traffic in coke, just as he had in opium, Arturo realized the time had come to tell them the story of Kiki. If you don’t know it, it’s well worth hearing. Arturo took his children outside the city and showed them a hole, now full of flowers, most of them dried. A deep hole. And he told them the story. I’d read it but hadn’t understood how decisive it was until I got to know the strip of land called Sinaloa, a paradise where people endure punishments worthy of the worst inferno.

�•�•�•�

The story of Kiki is linked to that of Miguel �ngel F�lix Gallardo, whom everyone knows as El Padrino, the Godfather. F�lix Gallardo worked for the Federal Judicial Police of Mexico, and then worked as a bodyguard for the family of Governor Leopoldo S�nchez Celis, from which perch he began amassing his understanding and his power. As a police officer he tracked smugglers, studied their methods, uncovered their routes, arrested them. He knew everything. He hunted them down. Eventually he would go to their bosses and propose that they organize, but under one condition—that they choose him as their boss. Whoever accepted became part of the organization, whoever preferred to remain independent was free to do so. And later killed. Arturo agreed to join. The era of transporting marijuana and opium on a large scale had begun for F�lix Gallardo. He got to know personally every inch of every access route into the United States: where you could climb over, where trucks or horses could slip through. There weren’t any cartels in Mexico back then; F�lix Gallardo created them. Cartels. Everyone calls them that now, even kids who don’t really know what the word means. Most of the time, it’s exactly the right word. Groups that manage coke, coke capital, coke prices, coke distribution. That’s what cartels are. After all, “cartel” is the economic term for a group of producers who agree on prices, production levels, and how, when, and where to distribute. This holds for the legal as well as the illegal economy. The prices in Mexico were decided by only a few drug cartels. El Padrino was considered the Mexican czar of cocaine. Under him were Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, known as Don Neto. In Colombia, the rival Cali and Medell�n cartels were in the midst of a full-blown war to control cocaine trafficking and routes. Massacres. But Pablo Escobar, lord of Medell�n, also had problems outside Colombia: The U.S. police, whom he couldn’t manage to bribe, were sequestering too many of his shipments off the coast of Florida and in the Caribbean, and he was losing tons of coke. Airport bribes were getting so high that he was losing lots of money. So Escobar decided to ask F�lix Gallardo for help. Escobar, El Magico, and F�lix Gallardo, El Padrino, understood each other right away. And they reached an agreement. The Mexicans would get the coke into the United States. F�lix Gallardo knew the U.S.-Mexico border, and for him all corridors were open. He knew the routes marijuana took—the same ones that opium took—and now cocaine would take them as well. El Padrino trusted Escobar; he knew he wouldn’t become a rival because the Colombian boss wasn’t strong enough to set up his own man in Mexico. F�lix Gallardo didn’t guarantee Escobar exclusivity. He’d give Medell�n priority, but if Cali or other smaller cartels asked him to handle their shipments, of course he’d take them on as well. To profit from everyone without becoming anyone’s enemy is a difficult praxis in life, but at that moment at least, when lots of cartels needed to cross the border, it was possible to squeeze money out of all of them. More and more money.

The Colombians usually paid cash for each shipment. Medell�n would pay—first in pesos, then in dollars—and the Mexicans would get their load into the United States. But after a while, El Padrino realized that currency could depreciate and that cocaine was more profitable: It would be a real coup to distribute it directly in the North American market. So when the Colombian cartel started commissioning more shipments, El Padrino demanded to be paid in goods. Escobar accepted; it even seemed like a better deal. And in any case, he couldn’t not accept. If a shipment was easy to transport, if it could be hidden in trucks or trains, 35 percent of the coke went to the Mexicans. If it was tricky and had to pass through underground tunnels, the Mexicans got 50 percent. Those impassible routes, that border, those nearly two thousand miles of Mexico sutured to the United States, became El Padrino’s greatest resource. The Mexicans went from being transporters to actual distributors. Now it was they who would place the coke with the American organizations, with the bosses, area managers, and pushers. It wasn’t just the Colombians anymore. Now the Mexicans could aspire to have a seat at the business table too. That and more. Much more. That’s how it works in big companies too; the distributor often becomes the producer’s main competitor, and its earnings surpass the head company’s.

But El Padrino was clever and understood that it was essential to maintain a low profile. Especially with the whole world watching Escobar, El Magico, and Colombia. So he tried to be prudent. To lead a normal life, to be a leader rather than an emperor. And he paid attention to the details, knew that every move had to be oiled, that every checkpoint, every officer in the area, every mayor of every village they went through had to be paid off. El Padrino knew he had to pay. To make sure your good fortune was understood to be everyone’s good fortune. And—most important—to pay before anyone had time to talk, betray, blab, or offer more. Before he could sell himself to a rival clan or to the police. The police were key. He’d been an officer himself once. Which is why they found someone who could guarantee their shipments would move smoothly: Kiki. Kiki was a cop who could guarantee impunity from the state of Guerrero to the state of Baja California. From then on, entry into the United States was smooth. Caro Quintero practically worshipped Kiki, and often invited him to his home. He’d tell him how a boss should live, what his lifestyle should be, how he should appear to his men: rich, well-off, but not too ostentatious. You have to make them believe that if you thrive, they’ll thrive too. That the people who work for you will thrive too. They have to want your business to grow. If instead you show them that you have it all, they’ll want to take something from you. It’s a fine line, and success lies in never overstepping it, never giving in to the allure of a life of luxury.

Kiki got drugs through everywhere with remarkable ease, and El Padrino’s clan paid willingly. It seemed that Kiki could bribe everyone, could get everything across the border smoothly. It was because of this extraordinary trust, which Kiki had earned over time, that they began talking to him about something they never had mentioned to anyone: El B�falo. After the umpteenth tractor trailer loaded with Colombian coke and Mexican grass made it over the American border, Kiki was taken to Chihuahua. He’d heard people mention El B�falo a thousand times, but he’d never understood what it was exactly, a code name, a special operation, a nickname? El B�falo was not the boss of bosses, or some sacred, venerable beast, even though it was usually spoken of with reverence. El B�falo was one of the biggest marijuana plantations in the world. Over 1,300 acres of land and something like 10,000 peasants working it. Every protest movement in the world, from New York to Athens, from Rome to Los Angeles, was characterized by marijuana use. Parties without joints? Political demonstrations without joints? Impossible. Weed, the symbol of a light buzz, of togetherness and feeling good, of sweet relaxation and friendship. For a long time almost all the marijuana that Americans smoked, the grass consumed in universities in Paris and Rome, the weed toked at Swedish demonstrations and on German picket lines, was grown in El B�falo; that’s where it came from, before mafias delivered it around the world. They needed Kiki to get more trucks through, more trains full of El B�falo gold. And Kiki agreed.

On the morning of November 6, 1984, 450 Mexican soldiers invaded El B�falo. Helicopters rained down soldiers, who ripped up marijuana plants and seized what had already been harvested, entire bales ready for drying and chopping. Between what was sequestered and what was burned, $8 billion worth of weed went up in smoke. El B�falo and all its plantings were under the control of Rafael Caro Quintero’s clan, and it operated with the full protection of the police and army: The ranch was vast and was the main economic resource of the area. Everybody profited from El B�falo. Caro Quintero couldn’t believe that with all the money he’d invested to oil the machine, to bribe the police and the army, a military operation of this scale could have escaped his notice. Even the military planes in the area would notify him before taking off, ask his authorization. No one could understand what happened. The Mexicans must have been pressured by the Americans. The DEA, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, must have stuck its nose in El B�falo business.

Caro Quintero and El Padrino were alarmed. The two shared a deep trust; they cofounded the organization that held the monopoly on drug trafficking in Mexico. They asked everyone who worked for them, at every level, to investigate everyone in their pay. Because they should have known about the raid in advance. Normally they were warned if the authorities were going to strike, and they themselves would make sure some drugs were found. A good amount, if the police officer responsible had news cameras with him, or needed to climb the ranks. A little less if he wasn’t one of their men. Kiki talked with everyone, with Don Neto, with El Padrino’s political cronies. He wanted to sound them out, figure out what the cartel aristocracy’s next move would be.

One day he was on his way to see his wife, Mika; they didn’t meet for lunch very often, only when Kiki was serene and not too swamped with work. They would meet somewhere far from his office, in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Guadalajara.

Kiki put his badge and pistol in a drawer, left his room, and stepped outside. He went over to his pickup, and five men, three near the engine and two near the bed, pointed pistols at him. Kiki raised his hands, tried to recognize the faces of the men threatening him. He was loaded into a beige Volkswagen Atlantic. His wife was waiting for him, and when he didn’t show, she called his office. Kiki was taken to Lope de Vega Street. He knew the house well, two stories, with a veranda and a tennis court. It belonged to one of El Padrino’s men. He’d been found out. Because Kiki wasn’t the umpteenth Mexican police officer in the pay of the drug lords, he wasn’t an extremely talented but corrupt cop who had become El Padrino’s alchemist. Kiki was with the DEA.

His real name was Enrique Camarena Salazar. An American of Mexican origins, he’d joined the DEA in 1974. He started working in California and then was sent to the Guadalajara branch. For four years Kiki Camarena mapped the country’s major cocaine and marijuana trafficking networks. He got to thinking about infiltrating, because police operations were merely arresting campesinos, dealers, drivers, killers, little guys, when the real problem was elsewhere. He wanted to get beyond the mechanism of big arrests, spectacular in terms of numbers but insignificant in terms of importance. Between 1974 and 1976, when a joint task force of the DEA and Mexico set out to eradicate opium production from the mountains of Sinaloa, there were four thousand arrests, all growers and transporters. But if you didn’t arrest the bosses, if you didn’t arrest the people pulling the strings of the whole operation, the organization was destined to live forever, to regenerate continuously. Kiki was trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into the Golden Triangle—the states of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua—a vast marijuana and opium production area. Kiki’s mother was against the idea. She wasn’t happy about his work, didn’t want her son taking on the world’s drug kingpins all by himself. But Kiki simply said, “Even though I’m just one person, I can make a difference.” That was his philosophy. And it was true. But they betrayed him. Very few people knew about the operation, and one of those very few had talked. His kidnappers took him into a room and began torturing him. They had to do an exemplary job. No one was ever to forget how Kiki Camarena was punished for his betrayal. So they recorded it all on tape, because they needed to prove to El Padrino that they had done everything possible to make Kiki spill what he knew. They wanted every word he uttered as he was beaten and tortured to be recorded, so they could catch every clue, even the most insignificant shred of information. At that point anything could turn out to be useful. They wanted to know how much Kiki had already talked and who the other members of his team were. They started with slaps in the face and punches to his Adam’s apple, to take his breath away. They blindfolded him, tied his hands, and then broke his nose and the bone above his eyes. When he lost consciousness his torturers called a doctor. They washed the blood off and splashed ice water on him, until he came to. Kiki wept from the pain. But he didn’t talk. They asked how the DEA got its information, who gave it to them. They wanted names. But there were no names. They didn’t believe him. They tied electric wires to his testicles and started giving him shocks. The tape records screams and thuds, as his body was hurled in the air by the electric current. Then, Kiki’s hands and feet tied to a chair, one of his torturers placed a screw on his head and began turning. The screw entered his skull, piercing flesh and bone, the pain was excruciating. Kiki merely repeated, “Leave my family alone.” “Please, don’t hurt my family.” At every slap, every extracted tooth, every electric shock, the pain was made worse by the thought that it would be multiplied on Mika, Enrique, Daniel, and Erik, his wife and three children. It’s the thing he repeats most often on the tape. No matter what sort of relationship you have with your family, when you know they might pay for something you’ve done, the pain becomes unbearable, as does the thought that someone else will suffer because of you, for a choice you made.

When pain takes hold of your body it generates reactions that are unexpected, unthinkable. You don’t produce some huge lie in the hope that it will end, because you fear you’ll be found out and the pain will come back, even more agonizing this time, if such a thing is even possible. Pain makes you say exactly what your torturers want to know. But the most unbearable thing that happens when the pain becomes intolerable is the complete loss of psychological orientation. You’re on the floor, in a pool of your own blood and piss and drool, your bones broken, and despite all this—you don’t have any choice—you continue to place your trust in them. To trust their logic, their nonexistent pity. The pain makes you lose all judgment, makes you blurt out your deepest fears. It makes you beg for mercy, above all for your family. How could you possibly think that someone capable of burning your testicles or screwing a piece of metal into your head would heed your prayers to spare your family? But Kiki begged anyway, unable to gauge the rest. How could he imagine that his prayers were feeding their hunger for revenge, their savagery?

They broke his ribs. At a certain point on the tape you hear him ask, “Could you bandage them for me, please?” His ribs had pierced his lungs, and it felt like crystal shards were slicing his flesh. One of his torturers lit some charcoal, like they were going to grill a steak. They heated a rod until it was red hot, and then stuck it up his rectum. They raped him with a boiling hot rod. His screams are impossible to listen to; no one can keep from turning off the recorder, from walking out of the room where the tape is played. Whenever Kiki’s story is told there’s always someone who recalls that the judges who listened to those tapes couldn’t sleep for weeks. They tell about the policemen who vomited when they had to draft the report on those nine hours of tapes. Others would weep as they wrote, or plug their ears and shout, “Enough!!!!” They tortured Kiki, all the while asking how he arranged it all. Asking for names, addresses, bank accounts. But Kiki was the only one. He had organized the infiltration all by himself, with the consent of a few of his supervisors and the help of a small support unit in Mexico. That was the strength of his undercover operation—he operated alone. But those few—very few—Mexican police officers who knew about it, who’d been tried and tested with years of experience, they sold themselves. They sold out to Caro Quintero.

It seemed clear from the start that the Mexican police were involved. Testimonies reveal that the kidnapping was carried out with the help of corrupt police officers in the pay of the Guadalajara cartel. But Los Pinos—the president’s residence—did nothing; no investigations were launched, no answers given. The Mexican government blocked every initiative, played down the whole affair, saying, “Someone’s simply gone missing—he could be sunbathing in Guadalajara. It’s not a priority.” They would not admit to the kidnapping. Washington also advised the DEA to let it drop and accept what had happened, since political relations between Mexico and the United States were too important to be compromised over some disappeared agent. But the DEA couldn’t accept such a defeat. They sent twenty-five of their men to Guadalajara to investigate. What ensued was a huge manhunt for Kiki Camarena. El Padrino began to feel suffocated. Touching Kiki had probably been a bad move. But when you have an entire contingent of political allies, and above all when you think you’ve taken care of everything, down to the last detail, you have the arrogance of power. And the power of money. They had to make an example out of Kiki. The trust they’d had in him was absolute, so the punishment had to be unforgettable. It had to go down in history, to stay lodged in people’s memories.

Kiki’s body was found a month after the kidnapping, near La Angostura, a small village in the state of Michoac�n, sixty miles south of Guadalajara. Dumped along the side of a country road. His tortured body was still bound, gagged, and blindfolded. The Mexican government lied, declaring that the body, wrapped in plastic, had been found there by a peasant. But FBI investigations on the soil traces on his skin confirmed that the body had been placed there only later; it had been buried somewhere else first. Buried in that hole where Don Arturo, the elderly opium smuggler, placed flowers, that hole where he took his children. And when his grandchildren and his grandchildren’s children asked his permission to join the cartels, to work for the drug lords, to give them land, Arturo didn’t say a word. Once a respected opium boss, he had renounced everything, but his descendants regretted his decision; they couldn’t understand it. Until the old man brought them all to that hole and told them about Kiki, and about that dog he’d seen when he was a little boy. It was his way of explaining what his refusal meant. It was his way of entering the fire and carrying out his puppies. Don Arturo knew he had to have the courage of that dog.

Kiki Camarena’s story shouldn’t hurt anymore, maybe it doesn’t even need to be told anymore, because by now it’s well known. A story one might think is marginal, which took place on an unknown, insignificant strip of land. But Kiki’s story is central. It’s the origin of the world, I’m tempted to say. It’s essential to understanding where our modern world begins, its birth pains, its principal path. What we experience today, the economy that regulates our lives, is determined more by what F�lix Gallardo, El Padrino, and Pablo Escobar, El Magico, decided and did in the eighties than by anything Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev decided or did. Or at least that’s how I see it.

Various testimonies relate that in 1989 El Padrino convened all the most powerful Mexican drug lords in a resort in Acapulco. While the world was preparing for the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the past of the cold war, iron curtains, and insuperable borders was being buried, the future of the planet was silently being planned in this city in southwestern Mexico. El Padrino decided to subdivide his activity and assign various segments to traffickers the DEA hadn’t fixed their eyes on yet. He divided his territory into zones, or plazas, each entrusted to men with exclusive rights to manage his assigned plaza. Whoever traveled through territory beyond their control had to pay the ruling cartel. In this way, traffickers would no longer enter into conflict over control of strategic areas. F�lix Gallardo created a model of cohabitation for the cartels.

But subdividing his territory also presented other advantages. Four years had passed since the Kiki story, and for El Padrino, it was still an open wound. He hadn’t thought it possible to be duped like that. Which is why it was so important to strengthen the chain, to prevent a weak link from bringing the entire organization to its knees. If it was no longer a single unit, the authorities could no longer bring it down in a single blow; the politicians could no longer compromise it if they withdrew their protection or the winds shifted. What’s more, autonomous management allowed for increased business potential for each group, and each boss would keep close watch on his plaza. Investments, market research, competition—all these things provided more work and more opportunities. To put it succinctly, El Padrino was staging a revolution, the significance of which the entire world would soon come to realize: He was privatizing the drug market in Mexico and opening it up to competition.

They say that the meeting at the Acapulco resort wasn’t rowdy or loud. There was no fighting, no melodrama, no comedy. They arrived, parked, and took their places at the table. There were few bodyguards and a menu fit for an important occasion, such as a baptism—the baptism of the new narco power. El Padrino arrived after the others had already started eating. He took his place and proposed a toast. A toast with several glasses, one for each territory to be assigned. Glass in hand, he stood and asked Miguel Caro Quintero to do the same: The Sonora corridor had been assigned to him. After the applause died down, they drank. The second glass was for the Carrillo Fuentes family: “For you, Ciudad Ju�rez.” A new glass, and this time he turned to Juan Garc�a �brego, to whom he assigned the Matamoros corridor. Then it was the Arellano-F�lix brothers’ turn: “For you, Tijuana.” The last glass was for the Pacific coast. Joaqu�n Guzm�n Loera, El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada Garc�a, El Mayo, got to their feet even before being called. They were expecting to get that zone; they’d been viceroys there, and now, finally, they were kings. The division was done; the new world created. It might be just a legend, but I’ve always believed that only a legend of this sort has the necessary symbolic force to give birth to an actual foundation myth. Like an ancient Roman emperor who summons his heirs and assigns each of his children a portion of his possessions. El Padrino needed to inaugurate the new era with a sovereign gesture, or needed at least for a story like this to get around.

So the drug cartels were born that day, and today, more than twenty years later, they still exist. A new breed of criminal organization, with the means and the power to decide prices and influences, either with some new rule or law decided around a table, or with TNT and thousands of deaths. There’s no one way to decide the price and distribution of cocaine.

El Padrino would still supervise the operations: He was the ex-cop, the one with the contacts, so he would still be the point man. But he didn’t get to see his plan put into effect. When Kiki’s body was found almost four years earlier it was immediately clear that his colleagues at the DEA would not rest until justice was done for the horror endured by one of their own. Relations between the Mexican and American governments grew increasingly tense. The nearly two thousand miles that join Mexico and the United States, that long tongue of land that licks America’s ass—as the carriers like to say—and as a result of licking, manages to slip in whatever it wants, was guarded day and night with a rigor and intensity never before seen. One of Rafael Caro Quintero’s associates confessed that Kiki’s body had originally been buried in a wooded park west of Guadalajara, not where it was found. Soil samples from the park matched those found on the victim’s skin. Kiki’s clothes had been destroyed, on the excuse that they were putrid, but it was clearly an attempt to erase the evidence. At that point the DEA launched the biggest homicide investigation ever undertaken by the United States up till then. It was called Operaci�n Leyenda—Operation Legend. The search for the murderers turned into a manhunt. The American agents followed every possible scent. Five policemen who admitted taking part in the plot to unmask Camarena were arrested. They all named as instigators Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseca Carrillo.

Caro Quintero tried to flee. He couldn’t believe that Mexico, his realm, would hand him over to the DEA. He, who had always bought everyone, paid a commander of the Federal Judicial Police of Mexico 60 million pesos for safe passage. He managed to get to Costa Rica. But don’t think you can bring your old life with you when you flee. You flee, that’s it. In other words, you die in some way. But Caro Quintero took someone with him—his girlfriend, Sara Cristina Cos�o Vidaurri Mart�nez. Sara wasn’t a boss. She didn’t know how to live in hiding. It may seem easy to live somewhere far away, to forge a new identity. You don’t think it will really take that much, other than money. Yet to live in hiding is a form of torture that inflicts a psychological pressure few can endure. After months living so far away, Sara couldn’t take it anymore, and she called her mother in Mexico. The police knew she’d call sooner or later and had been monitoring the phone. This was the mistake that allowed the DEA to locate the boss, his house, his new life. They went and got him. Caro Quintero and Don Neto refused to collaborate with the authorities and laid the blame for Kiki’s murder on their boss, El Padrino. All they did was kidnap him, they said. It was probably some sort of agreement they’d made with El Padrino, who had the protection of Mexican politicians and high-ranking officials. But in the four years following Kiki’s death, the American police had been chipping away at all of F�lix Gallardo’s protections. To get to El Padrino they had to isolate the entire network that defended him: politicians, judges, police, and journalists. Many of those who had been paid by the Guadalajara clan to protect El Padrino and his associates were arrested or fired. Among the accused was a certain Miguel Aldana Ibarra, the director of INTERPOL in Mexico, a repository of all sorts of information on investigations and cocaine trafficking. He too was in El Padrino’s pay: He would pass information first to the narcos and then to his superiors. El Padrino was arrested on April 8, 1989. A few years later he was transferred to the El Altiplano high security prison, where he is still serving his forty-year sentence.

El Padrino and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo are behind bars, but Caro Quintero is another matter: On August 9, 2013, he was allowed to breathe the fresh air of freedom again. A federal court in Guadalajara found a “formal” irregularity in Caro Quintero’s trial for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Kiki Camarena: The federal court that tried him was not authorized to do so because Kiki was a DEA agent, not a diplomatic or consular agent, so Caro Quintero should have been tried in a regular court. Such quibbles were enough to set one of the biggest Mexican bosses free. But he is still wanted for various federal crimes in the United States, and the U.S. Department of State has allocated a $5 million reward for anyone able to provide information leading to his arrest. The Americans want to see him behind bars again, American bars this time.

�•�•�•�

The murder of Kiki Camarena and all that ensued represents a turning point in the fight against Mexican drug trafficking. The level of impunity that the cartels enjoyed was revealed: To kidnap a DEA agent in plain daylight, right outside the U.S. consulate, and then torture and kill him far exceeded anything they had done in the past, all they had dared to do up till that moment. Kiki had been remarkably insightful: He had understood before anyone else that the structure had changed, that it had become much more than a band of gangsters and smugglers. He’d understood that they were now battling drug managers. He’d understood that the first step was to break the ties between institutions and traffickers. He’d understood that mass arrests of the small-time henchmen who do the dirty work were pointless if they didn’t behead the bosses, if they didn’t radically alter the dynamics that allowed the bosses to flood the markets with money and grow stronger. Kiki witnessed the birth of this unstoppable criminal bourgeoisie. He was more interested in the flow of money than in stopping the killers or dealers. Kiki had understood what the United States has trouble grasping even today: You have to strike at the head. You have to hit the bosses, the big bosses—the limbs merely carry out orders. He had also understood that the producers were weakening compared with the distributors. It’s a law of economics, and thus also of drug trafficking. The Colombian producers were in crisis, as were the Medell�n and Cali cartels, as were the FARC fighter groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Kiki’s death ignited American public opinion about the drug problem in a completely new way. After his body was found, many Americans, starting in Calexico, California, Kiki’s hometown, began wearing red ribbons, a symbol of pain and profanation of flesh. And they asked people to stop doing drugs in the name of the sacrifice Kiki had made in the war against drugs. In California they organized Red Ribbon Week, a campaign that later spread throughout the country. It’s still celebrated every October as part of a drug prevention campaign. And Kiki’s story ended up on TV and film.

Before he was arrested, El Padrino had managed to convince the bosses to give up opium in order to concentrate on cocaine coming from South America on its way to the United States. Not that marijuana and opium poppy cultivation have disappeared from Mexico. They’re still there, and the export business carries on. They’ve become less important, though, supplanted by cocaine and later by ice or methamphetamines. The decisions made during that meeting in Acapulco a few months before El Padrino was arrested helped the organizations grow, but without the guidance and recognized authority of the boss a fierce territorial dispute broke out among those who were still free. By the early 1990s the cartels had started warring among themselves, a war waged far from any media hype, since very few people believed in the existence of drug cartels. But as the conflict gradually became more bloody the protagonists’ names became better known, acquired popularity. They are sharks who, in order to dominate the drug market, which today is worth between $25 billion and $50 billion a year in Mexico alone, are eroding Latin America at its very foundations.

The economic crisis may be destroying democracies, destroying work, destroying hopes, destroying credit, destroying lives. But what the crisis is not destroying, and instead is strengthening, are criminal economies. If you look through the wound of criminal capital, all the vectors and movements appear different. If you ignore the criminal power of the cartels, all the interpretations of the crisis seem based on a misunderstanding. In order to understand it you have to look at this power, stare it in the face, look it right in the eye. It has built the modern world, generated a new cosmos. This was the Big Bang.

It’s not heroin, which turns you into a zombie. And it’s not pot, which mellows you and makes your eyes bloodshot. Coke is a performance-enhancing drug. On coke you can do anything. Before it explodes your heart and turns your brain to mush, before your dick goes soft forever and your stomach starts oozing pus—before all this happens, you’ll work more, fuck more, play more. Coke is the comprehensive answer to the most pressing concern of our day: the absence of limits. On coke, you’ll live more. You’ll network more—the first commandment of modern life. And the more you network, the happier you’ll be, the more fun you’ll have, the more emotions you’ll experience, the more you’ll sell. Whatever it is you sell, you’ll sell more of it. More. Always more. But our bodies don’t run on “more.” At a certain point the excitement has to die down, our bodies have to return to a state of calm. Which is precisely where coke intervenes. It’s very exacting, because it has to make its way to the synaptic juncture—to the exact point where individual cells divide—and inhibit a fundamental mechanism. It’s like when you’re playing tennis and you’ve just hit a winner straight down the line: Time stands still and everything is perfect, peace and strength are perfectly balanced inside you. That sensation of well-being is triggered by a microscopic drop of a neurotransmitter, which lands right in the synaptic juncture of a cell and stimulates it. That cell then infects the one next to it, and so on and so on, until millions of cells are stimulated, an almost instantaneous swarm. Life lights up. You move back to the baseline, and so does your opponent; you’re ready to play the next point, and that feeling of a second ago is now just a distant echo. The neurotransmitter has been reabsorbed, the impulses between one cell and the next have been blocked. This is where coke comes in. It inhibits the reabsorption of neurotransmitters, so your cells are always turned on; it’s like Christmas all year long, lights twinkling 365 days a year. The neurotransmitters coke is most crazy about, the ones it never wants to do without, are dopamine and norepinephrine. The first allows you to be the center of the party, because everything is so much easier now. Easier to talk, to flirt, to be nice, to feel you’re liked. The second, norepinephrine, is sneakier. It amplifies everything around you. A glass breaks? You hear it before everyone else. A window slams? You’re the first to realize it. Someone calls you? You turn even before they’ve finished saying your name. That’s how norepinephrine works. It raises your state of alertness; the world around you fills with threats and dangers, turns hostile; you’re always expecting to be harmed or attacked. Your fear-alarm responses speed up, your reactions become immediate, no filters. This is paranoia; the door is wide open. Cocaine is the body’s fuel. It is life cubed. That is, before it consumes you, destroys you. The extra life that coke seems to have given you, you’ll pay for later, at loan-shark interest rates. But later doesn’t count. It’s all here and now.

3.

THE WAR OVER WHITE PETROL

Mexico is the origin of everything. If you disregard Mexico, you’ll never understand the destiny of democracies transformed by drug traffic. If you disregard Mexico, you’ll never find the route that follows the smell of money, you won’t realize how the odor of criminal money becomes a winning smell that has very little to do with the stench of death, poverty, barbarity, and corruption.

In order to understand cocaine, you have to understand Mexico. Those nostalgic revolutionaries who have taken refuge elsewhere in Latin America or grown old in Europe look upon this land like it’s a former lover who has found herself a rich man yet still seems unhappy, whereas you remember how, when she was young and poor, she would offer herself with a passion that the rich man who has bought her with marriage will never know. On the surface Mexico can seem a place of unending and incomprehensible violence, a land that never stops bleeding. But it also retells a familiar story, a story of rampant civil war, because the warlords are powerful and the forces that should check them are corrupt or weak. As in feudal times, as in the Japan of the samurai and shogun or the tragedies of William Shakespeare. But Mexico is not some distant land that has caved in on itself. It is not some new Middle Ages. Mexico is now, here, and the warlords in question are masters of the most sought after goods in the world, the white powder that brings in more money than the oil wells.

The white petrol wells are in the state of Sinaloa, on the coast. Sinaloa, with rivers flowing down from the Sierra Madre to the Pacific, is so spectacular you can’t believe there’s anything else here but blinding sunlight and bare feet on the sand. That’s how a student would like to answer his geography teacher when asked about the area’s natural resources. But he should say, “Opium and marijuana, ma’am.” If his school has walls, it’s because Sinaloa’s grandfathers cultivated marijuana and opium. Today, thanks to cocaine, Sinaloa’s sons have universities and jobs. But if the student were to answer that way he would get a slap in the face and a black star next to his name. Better to repeat what it says in the textbooks: The region’s riches are fish, meat, and organic produce. Yet Chinese merchants brought opium to Sinaloa back in the 1800s. Black poison, they called it. And since then, Sinaloa has been full of opium. You can grow opium poppies just about anywhere; they grow wherever grain grows. All they need is the right climate: not too dry, not too humid, no frost, no hail. The climate’s good in Sinaloa; it almost never hails, and it’s close to the sea.

The Sinaloa cartel is hegemonic. In Sinaloa, drugs provide jobs for everyone. Entire generations have fed themselves thanks to drugs. From peasants to politicians, police officers to slackers, the young and the old. Drugs need to be grown, stocked, transported, protected. In Sinaloa, all who are able are enlisted. The cartel operates in the Golden Triangle, and with over 160 million acres under its control, it’s the biggest cartel in all of Mexico. It manages a significant slice of U.S. cocaine traffic and distribution. Sinaloa narcos are present in more than eighty American cities, with cells primarily in Arizona, California, Texas, Chicago, and New York. They distribute Colombian cocaine on the American market. According to the Office of the United States Attorney General, between 1990 and 2008 the Sinaloa cartel was responsible for the importation and distribution of at least two hundred tons of cocaine, as well as vast quantities of heroin, into the United States.

Most helpful customer reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
First 200 pages are great. A good editor would have greatly helped
By FernandoVenezuela
The first 200 pages of this book are absolutely gripping. I finished them in one sitting, which for a curmudgeon of a reader like me is rare. The first section deals mostly with the Mexican drug cartels and their violent creation story and wars over turf. It's written mostly without the "I" voice and self referential prose overdose that defines the rest of the book. As a result this first section is must-read material and the author puts on a clinic in how to write fantastic creative narrative non-fiction.

As soon as the author moves to his native Italy, however, which was the subject of his previous book (making him a hunted man by the Italian mafia) the writing slips regularly into the perspective of the author, utilizing the "I" voice along with a very impressionistic and non-journalistic style of writing. This tends to take the reader out of the narrative head space of the story and into the sometimes adolescent meanderings of the author as he describes in an overly stylistic way how difficult his life has become now that he is being pursued by the Neapolitan mafia. As the remaining stories are woven together with an over-stylized abundance of prose they become difficult to follow and the rest of the book becomes tough sledding for the reader.

I wish the author had forgone the references to his own battles with organized crime, and saved his first-person perspective for a later memoir instead of derailing the urgent, matter-of-fact narrative that defines the beginning of the book. I feel like a good editor would have stopped this project from mashing up its scope and losing focus over its central narrative. I wish I could have worked with this author and reigned in some of his better tendencies as an absolutely engrossing and brilliant story-teller, because that's exactly what he is. Saviano is a fantastically gifted raconteur who just needs the guidance of an editor who can reign in some his bombastic literary aesthetics so that the brilliant tales he weaves don't come off the rails like one of the hot tempered crime bosses he describes.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
I still think it's one of the best books I've read in some time and presents a ...
By Amazon Customer
I suppose one can criticize the book for being a bit unwieldy. I could also take issue with Saviano's overarching theme that cocaine is what makes the world (economic and otherwise) go 'round, as that's clearly an overstatement. However, I still think it's one of the best books I've read in some time and presents a rare glimpse into the world of international narco trafficking. It should be nearly impossible to have anything but great respect for Saviano's willingness to go deeply into worlds few others have ever been brave enough to enter, and to do so to such an extent that he himself has become a target of those he writes about. I can't imagine this book has lightened that personal load any. Perhaps the most effective thing "Zero Zero Zero" adds to the discussion of this subject is the way in which various organized crime groups have partnered (not always successfully or without bloodshed, of course) to make the cocaine trade increasingly efficient over time. There are great books on the rise of cartels in Latin America and others (including one Saviano wrote himself) on Italian organized crime, as well as groups from other parts of the world. I'm not sure there is another book in recent years which connects the dots between them the way this one does, however, and ultimately that's probably its greatest contribution to the discussion.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A detailed account on what's going on in the dark side of the world
By edsetiadi
Criminal organisations are much bigger than we can ever possibly thought. They are the firm structure in a broken society, one of the main reasons a lot of African countries have not collapsed yet. Their laundered money comprised of nearly 1/3 of liquidity during the 2008 financial crisis, and practically became the safety net that kept the global economy from collapsing.

Moreover, criminal organisations are also the direct reasons for some of the political changes occurring in the world, such as the killings of many politicians in Mexico, the forced regime changes in Colombia, or the imprisonment of Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko after a failed gas deal with Russia (which involved the Russian mafijas).

And in the veins of the global criminal network lies 1 commodity that is vital for the movement of the underground economy: cocaine.

In 2012 Apple became the most valuable company (by market capitalisation) ever listed on the New York Stock Exchange, thanks to the launch of iPhone 5 and iPad mini. Its stock price jump by 67% in just one year, meaning that if you had invested $1000 in the beginning of 2012, by the end of the year you would have a whopping $1670. However, by comparison, if you had invested $1000 in cocaine in the beginning of 2012, after a year you would get a phenomenal return of $182,000. And this is why cocaine play a central role in the criminal underworld.

This book is truly a masterpiece, an essential read if you want to know the complete picture of the world. It grasps and analyses the inner structure of multiple criminal organisations around the world - from the Colombian cartels, the Mexican cartels, the Italian mafias (including the largest criminal organisation 'nrangdheta), to the Russian mafijas and their eastern European counterparts - and their dealings with cocaine.

It gives a very detailed accounts on the sophisticated trade routes and the importance of the skills of the logistics guys. And it also tell the stories on the creative ways smugglers carry their stash, including swallowing them with a condom, or hide their cocaine in paintings, statues, fake pineapple, can of squid, even children's books and artificial breasts.

Furthermore, the author went to some great length to research everything there is about the industry, including visiting the distributors of cocaine and coming down to the streets to meet several pushers, and he vividly describes the gruesome details on the nasty effects of cocaine, which is very sobering.

He also reveals seemingly all the names of the biggest fishes in the industry, all down to the smallest details like how they torture their enemies and back stab each others, which has angered the criminal underworld and endangering him up to a point that he ended up needing protection 24/7.

With that in mind, this is quite possibly the most violent book I've ever read, a horrific reality on the real state of the world. A Mexican drug queen Sandra �vila Beltr�n repeatedly said "the world is disgusting", and after reading this book from cover to cover I eventually get what she means, her world certainly looks very dark indeed.

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