Triple Crossing

Triple Crossing is a crime thriller by Sebastian Rotella, who clearly knows his stuff when it comes to borders. Two play prominent roles here: the one between the U.S. and Mexico, specifically at Tijuana, and the so-called Triple Border, a no-man's land where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet.

The novel uses two protagonists, and throughout the book the chapters alternate from two points of view. One is Valentine Pescatore, a U.S. Border Patrol agent who is young, impetuous, and just barely on the side of the law. The second is Mendez, a stoic, noble ex-journalist who has been tapped to head a government organization that looks into Mexican police corruption.

The two men are on the same side, but have a mutual distrust of each other. "Mendez had a visceral nationalistic aversion to Border Patrol agents. Although he did not work with The Patrol, from a distance they reminded him of a species he had come to loathe during his year among the gray skies and gray buildings of the University of Michigan: fraternity boys. They had struck him as crude, swaggering, well-off rednecks with a clannish mentality that reeked of racism and fascism."

Indeed, Rotella doesn't paint the Border Patrol with a very complimentary brush. In the opening chapter, Pescatore impulsively chases a suspect over the fence and into Tijuana, a definite no-no. To avoid charges, he works with a beautiful agent, Isabel Puente, who has him go undercover to bust a crooked agent named Garrison. Pescatore falls in love with Puente, and in a weak spot in the book she succumbs to his cowboy charms.

Mendez is looking to bring down a drug lord called Junior, who is the nephew of a senator, and is practically untouchable. Through a series of misadventures, Pescatore ends up in deep cover with Junior's gang, vouched for by a menacing but compassionate henchman called Buffalo. They all end up at the Triple Border, which Rotello describes thusly: "Pescatore saw signs in Portugese, Spanish, English, Asian languages, a warning about product piracy, a shingle that said ALI BABA AND CO. Women in Muslim veils passed a man arranging pornography on a rack. A contingent of shaven-headed Asian monks went by. They wore sandals and billowing brown robes; they seemed to float through the melee of buying and selling, loading and unloading, everyone jabbering into cell phones and radios."

Rotella's knowledge of the subject helps make up for the lack of storytelling. At a certain point I became weary of the usual depictions of drug kingpins and their minions, and Mendez, while an admirable character, seems a bit too good to be true. Occasionally, though, Rotella dazzles with bits of prose that seem out of left field: "The pianist was a senior citizen with a somewhat mildewed dignity. His backswept gray hair aspired to a Beethoven-like mane; he shook it occasionally for emphasis. His three-piece suit had a velvety sheen and looked no younger than him."