There is a brief flurry of notice, and then the fantasies begin. Within days the Mexican press announces that the FBI beat local cops to the murder scene. A rumor hits the U.S. press that a Mexican drug leader paid $3 million for the hit. A magazine claims the Comandante was getting ready to return to Mexico and tell all. An old colleague of his says it was a contract killing from the ruling class of Mexico.

And then the footprints of Calderoni’s life begin to blow away as the ground shifts in the secret world where he thrived. Just five days after his death, he is already well on his way to being a figure known by a few old cops, a story told in murderous cantinas, a memory to some beautiful women as they rest their heads against their fine pillows in those special moments just before sleep comes. He was the man who knew everything, and his death means that now things will never be known. That is the way of the world that produced him—a world that was not really Mexico or the border or the drug wars, but the world of spies, secrets, agents, networks—the basic elements governments have found so necessary as events overwhelmed simple customs and laws. Ask around and it’s unlikely you’ll find a man who even knows his name, unless he has entered certain rooms under certain conditions and tasted certain pains.

I can taste things sometimes.

In November 2001, I was in a border city where eight girls had been buried in a ditch splattered with sunflowers in bloom. I left the grave site and went to a country club in a gated community where the Mexican rich huddled. I entered the bar, which overlooked the golf course, ordered a drink and began taking notes on what I’d seen. A couple of hundred yards away was the home of the head of a major drug cartel. This bar and this country club were his playground. I remember the anger rising in me over the dead girls, over the rich ignoring the poor, over the protection granted the drug merchant who lived a football field from where I sat. Calderoni had once been the boss of this town.

Sometimes when I’m in the mood in strange cities, I go to suicide bars—the kind of places where, by the second beer, someone is going to call you out. I do this because I am angry and looking for trouble. I felt the same way in this country club. As I sipped my drink and took notes, the waiters stared at me. Then I could hear them on the phone. I was with a Mexican, and as time passed he became very worried.

We got up and left. As we walked down the palatial steps fronting the clubhouse, an unmarked state-police car wheeled up, the two men in it staring at us with eyes. Someone had called them; the Mexican and I knew this in our bones. We walked past. Had we stayed five more minutes in the bar, things could have turned out differently.

I think of my drinks and note-making in the country-club bar as a kind of Calderoni moment. He lived in that zone where violence floods the air like lilacs in springtime, and he was at the beck and call of those who needed someone murdered or vanished pronto. Sometimes he answered the call and took care of business. On that warm Wednesday morning last February in McAllen, someone else got the call, and then someone took care of him.