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Dying is the easy part.

Killing is the fun part.

Taking that first ride is the hard part.

They call him “King Midas” because he owns so many venues. Willy Moya, forty-eight, is a success as he exits his V Bar, one of his many huge nightclubs, at 4 A.M. May 18. The building is the size of a warehouse, and it is but one piece of an empire—Hooligan’s, Vaqueras y Broncos, Frida’s, Tabasco’s, Arriba Chihuahua, Willy’s Country Disco, and so forth—that he lords over in the swank part of Juárez. He is standing in the center of his bodyguards when the bullet enters his skull. His bodyguards are unharmed. He is declared dead at the hospital only a block away. Until he falls dead on the ground, he is considered untouchable because he is rich and he is connected to other men with power and money.

I stand in front of his closed empire, and there is a huge, white bow over the door, a framed photo of him by the steps, with a candle and some wilted yellow roses.

Carlos Camacho is a former member of the federal congress, the environmental representative for Chihuahua in Ciudad Juárez and a member of the president’s political party. He lives in a very good apartment complex, one with seven units and a parking lot full of fine cars. He is talking to his girlfriend on the phone when he tells her that the army is at the door. That is his last statement. The next day, he and two other residents of the complex are found dumped on the street, strangled, their bodies with signs of torture. No one wants to face this May killing. Camacho is the clean leader, a man widely known and liked. His family says publicly that the army is responsible. And then, they fall into silence.

It is just drug guys killing drug guys, and if it is not, then who is safe?

The Aroma restaurant is fine wood and mirrors and veal chops that go for forty-five dollars. I sample sushi, lobster bisque, and a forty-five-dollar bottle of Chilean red that would cost maybe six bucks in a U.S. supermarket. The café is on a plush avenue next to the rich district of Juárez, an area of mansions and guards and a country club. The rumor is that on May 17, fifty heavily armed men arrived here, took the cell phones of the customers, and told people they could not leave. Outside, the army guarded the serenity of the establishment. Then El Chapo Guzman swept in, dined, and left around 2 A.M. He paid everyone’s tab. He is a man with a $5 million reward on his head and is said to be at war with the Juárez cartel. Yet everyone in the city seems to know of this visit to Aroma and believe it. That weekend, at least twenty people were murdered in Juárez as Chapo dined and the government of Mexico waged war on drug cartels.

The waiter brings a form for rating the dining experience. I check off everything as excellent and sign myself as El Chapo.

He is bubbling with energy, but then El Pastor always seems as though he is about to OD on a vitamin B shot. We are sitting in the Golden Corral in El Paso—El Pastor likes a good feed.

But the violence in Juárez is on his mind.

“There is a terror there right now,” he says. “People are more kind. They don’t honk their horns.” Suddenly he is flapping his arms and going honk honk honk.

Lately, he’s been going with people at shift change to the local police stations in Juárez and leading prayers with the cops.

“They are frightened,” he explains. “I saw this woman cop get out of her car for her shift with her two little kids, and they were kissing her and crying because they were afraid she wouldn’t come back. They are sending narco-corridos on the police radios an hour or two before a cop gets killed. The sicarios, the hit men, are kids, so skinny. But they get an AK-47 and they are powerful.”

He broods about what drives the violence, where does all the death come from?

“They are fighting for power,” he says, and now he is entering that Mexican moment where suddenly an unexplained “they” shows up, that fog of language that protects one’s mind from what one knows. He sketches a world where the ruling