Martino was sitting on the whitewashed balcony in his room at Las Hadas in Manzanillo, a resort once made famous by an actress in an American movie, an actress like his mother. It was primarily Canadians who flocked here now, to the brown-speckled sand and the blue ocean and the green sweep of the mango and palm trees all the way to the water’s edge.

The resort got its name, which meant “the fairies,” from mariners who saw sparkling lights illuminating the ocean at night—a chemical by-product of phosphorus in the waves, but entrancing all the same. Magical. Martino had seen it before, too, on his other visits here.

Martino did not know much about his mother, but understood that she had been born near here, in Comala. She’d been an actress, successful in only small parts in telenovelas like María Mercedes, before she’d somehow caught the eye of Fox Uno. She had circled in his orbit for a while, but not long after Martino was born, she was gone. He’d been raised by a woman he only called Abuela, a much older version of Luisa, the woman who had looked after Zita (and like Luisa, Abuela was now gone). Martino knew only a little more about Zita’s mother, a onetime beauty pageant winner in Nuestra Belleza Nuevo León, who was killed along with three of his father’s men in a shoot-out with soldiers at a checkpoint on a dirty road outside Saucillo. She came out of her truck firing first, eight rounds from a 9mm pistol, before she was shot at least twenty-seven times, including twice in the face that had made her a pageant winner. The truck was later found to contain three AR-15 assault rifles, a dozen more 9mm handguns, more than eight hundred rounds of ammunition, and eighty-five thousand dollars.

Martino had seen the pictures of her body in a newspaper when he was barely sixteen years old.

He had not chosen this life. It had chosen him.

Actresses and beauty pageant winners. Martino had bedded both, and men as well, preferring the latter, since those he could not impregnate. He found them in small towns like Comala and put them up in a hotel like this one for a week, and gave them more money than they had ever seen in their lives. He then returned them to their towns again with all the clothes or watches or jewelry he had bought them and a thick envelope with even more money—enough for the inevitable six brothers and sisters and sick grandparents. He didn’t love them, didn’t care for them all that much. They simply fulfilled a need, like drinking cold water on a hot day, and he wanted nothing to tie him to them or nothing to remember them by.

He never wanted to see them again.

He never wanted to look at a bloody picture of them in the newspaper.