Alka spent the first sixteen years of her life in Jastrebarsko, an ancient town half an hour from Zagreb, with six thousand people rotting alive in houses and another thirty thousand in its ramshackle cemetery. She lived just three blocks from the graveyard and every path led her past the decrepit tombs, many of them in various states of collapse. During her childhood, her playmates had used femurs and tibias as makeshift swords: first to play D’Artagnan, then Darth Vader. When she reached adolescence, and her long, sculpted legs became the object of sudden admiration in the village, Alka promised herself that her femur wouldn’t end up as an ersatz foil in the hands of some wannabe fencer.
The day she escaped was the happiest in her life. It wasn’t the first time she’d ridden a train, but it was the first time she’d done so with no thought of turning back. She was leaving behind a future boxing produce in a plant, in an insipid marriage with one of the few young men who hadn’t left for Zagreb or another European country.
Alka spent the train ride to the capital with her friend Sonjia absorbed in the landscape slipping past, devoured by the frame of the car’s window. But her soul was not weighted down by remorse or nostalgia. In the window, she was contemplating the reflection of her big blue eyes and the contours of a face that had still not lost its adolescent plumpness. Her only thought was that leaving behind her old life had been much simpler than she’d thought.
Fifteen days before, Sonjia had told her she was going to Berlin; a Zagreb businessman was going to open a new branch of his successful Balkan restaurant there, and he needed waitresses who would give it a touch of authenticity. Alka felt it was destiny calling. She could stumble along in German thanks to her grandfather, the village watchmaker and an unconditional Germanophile. (Alka’s mother suspected her father-in-law’s parents had been collaborators during the Nazi occupation, though it was never discussed.) For a few days, Alka pressed her friend to invite her to Germany without making any progress. Sonjia’s boyfriend, a Hungarian living in Zagreb, wasn’t convinced they needed another waitress, despite the fluent German she professed to speak. Only when she sent a full-body photo with the dress she wore out to the dance clubs did he decide to take her on, saying that with that face, she could even become hostess, which paid much better than serving tables.
The adventure ended almost as soon as it had begun. In the station in Zagreb, they met Sonjia’s boyfriend, Forkó, prematurely bald, stubby, with kindly features. Alka found his flattery a little excessive, and the way he eyed her up and down gave her the creeps. Still, the electrifying euphoria kept her from dwelling on anything that might cloud her recently acquired freedom. After a late breakfast, they hit the road in his car, a blue Peugeot with comfortable seats and the aroma of newness, something the girls took as a foretaste of the bonanza awaiting them.
They were supposed to cover the four-hundred-mile drive between there and Prague in a single day, then sleep at a friend’s place before heading on to Berlin. In fact, they drove only forty. Hardly had they passed Durmanec, still far from the border, when Forkó told them he had to get something from an acquaintance’s house. They pulled off the highway and passed over a through road before exiting onto a country lane that led to an old house, run-down and solitary. When he got out of the car, he invited the girls to come in and stretch their legs, have a glass of water, and use the bathroom if they cared to.
Three men received them with hugs and congratulations and spoke to Forkó in a language that sounded like Greek. The oldest one, a corpulent character of around fifty, took an envelope of cash from the back pocket of his pants and passed it to the Hungarian; Forkó counted the bills, thanked him, and walked out the door he’d come in through without giving the girls a second glance. Sonjia called to him and tried to follow his steps, but a punch to the ear knocked her to the floor. The three men laughed and looked down at her.
Alka was paralyzed. In that instant, she knew she would never make it to Berlin and wouldn’t be a waitress in a Croatian restaurant. In spite of herself, she looked over the three men’s faces, aiming for some kind of visual contact that might provoke their solidarity or pity. The capacity of her big, expressive eyes to incite empathy had been her greatest defense throughout her life. But the attempt was fruitless: three crocodiles would have inspired more hope than the indifferent and obtuse faces looking back at her.
She was much prettier than Sonjia and the three examined her with curiosity; there was more greed than lust in their eyes. The oldest approached her and squeezed one of her breasts; with the other hand, he cupped her buttocks. There was no prurience in his actions, just scrutiny, like a baker feeling the dough before he throws it in the oven. Without thinking, Alka slapped him, more from fear than anger. He smiled and hit her in the stomach. She fell forward, gripped by pain; she felt her lungs give out and thought she was fainting. She balled up on the floor, trying to catch her breath, while the jabs of pain radiated through her body. She felt hands pulling at the zipper on her back and others tearing at her panties. Indifferent to the desperate efforts she was making to suck air into her lungs, one of them yanked her into a sitting position by her hair and then tugged her dress off in one go. They had stripped her bare in a matter of seconds. She fell to the floor again while the three men walked around her trying to evaluate her body from all angles. She heard laughter and what she thought was hands slapping against one another.
She assumed they would want to rape her now and told herself she’d bite and scratch, even if it cost her life. One of them grabbed her hair again, stood her up, and pushed her toward a door in the back of the room; another opened what looked like a small closet, and when she looked back at them, the one holding her by the hair shoved her so hard she smacked against the back wall. Then the door closed and she sank into the darkness. Two days later, they threw a plastic water bottle inside; by the fourth day, when they let her out, she’d nearly eaten the entire wooden hanger.
They pulled her out roughly, showering her with insults, and led her back into the main room. The leader was no longer there, but his two henchmen were. One of them tried to tear off her damp towel, and she resisted, knowing it was the last bit of dignity available to her: a little rag was all that stood between her and the animal kingdom. Her resistance made the man furious, and he tore it away and struck her hard on the left temple. It wasn’t as tough a blow as she’d received days before, but in her weakened state, it took its toll: she fell on her knees to the floor, and stayed there prostrate for a long time, like a Muslim at the hour of prayer.
When she finally looked up, one of the men came over with a plate with a half-eaten hamburger. He let her take a bite before offering her a sip of water. Then they undid their flies and motioned what they expected of her. Only afterward did they gave her the rest of the hamburger.
She never saw Sonjia again. She didn’t dare ask about her and, not knowing her captors’ language, couldn’t have. They took her to the outskirts of Teplice, on Czech territory, a few miles from the German frontier, to what seemed like a cheap hotel on the road linking Prague and Dresden. She spent thirty-six hours shut up and sedated, watched constantly over by one of the Greeks, in a windowless room where men passed through to look at her. Finally, a Spaniard bought her for thirty thousand euros.
Alka spent her seventeenth birthday in a car with two other girls heading toward Marbella. Though she spent the entire trip under the influence of the powerful sedatives they’d forced on her, she managed to learn her first word in Spanish: vacas, cows. That was the word the two men driving the car used to describe the three women, whom they had wrongly assumed were eslovacas, Slovakians. Nevertheless, the nickname stuck. Darva was Milk Cow, for her enormous breasts; Kristina was Spotted Cow, because of the freckles all over her body; and Alka was the Lean Cow, for her long legs and elegant torso. The owner of the brothel they arrived at gave her the working name “Milena.” She accepted it with resignation, and never said her real name again in the years that followed. In the end, she tho
ught that Alka had died and was buried in a cemetery in Jastrebarsko.
Them I
Me, I don’t like to go with hookers. It’s a hell of a lot of money week after week, and after seeing some of them I wonder if I’ve caught some kind of infection. The thing is just that the ones who don’t charge are even worse. I’m tired of spending money like a jerkoff. You invite chicks for dinner in a restaurant or you pay outrageous bar tabs and then they don’t want to fuck you on the first date. Some don’t even offer it to you the second time, which means your money’s gone down a black hole. Then there are the ones who let you cop a feel on the second or third date but won’t even think of stripping down. By that time you’ve spent a fortune and you’ve got a major case of blue balls. The worst are the ones who make you pony up for a weekend at the beach in Cuernavaca before they’ll fork over the whole enchilada, as the gringos say. And then, to top it off, they’re a dead lay, that’s the word my friend the Galician uses. By this time you look at your bank balance and you realize you could have been balls-deep for weeks in a centerfold-quality piece of ass, fucking like a king with all you’ve invested.
And as far as diseases go, the professionals get themselves checked out, and they’re cleaner than a lot of these born-again virgins that you have to carry off to the sack with kid gloves before you find out they’re crawling with more germs than a handrail in a subway car.
And as far as oral goes, they drive a hard bargain—I mean that literally. With civilians you need to fuck a good three or four times before they understand that you’re not putting your hand on the back of their head to smooth out a cowlick. But what can you do about it? They’re all afraid you’ll think they’re sluts if they do a solo on the skin flute. Like you’re a douchebag and you can’t tell how much flight time they’ve logged as soon as they grab onto the stick.
Anal? Forget about it. That’s almost like exchanging rings. A band with a rock on it for the privilege of slipping it up in their sphincter. For fuck’s sake, who made women so complicated?
With a hooker, on the other hand, it’s different. There’s no stress and no doubt, no dinners out and no unnecessary expenses. You arrange the price and the service and that’s that. Guaranteed happiness.
I don’t like hookers, but I guess I like the other ones even less.
F.D., Ex-Technical Director
of the Mexican National Soccer Team
4
Amelia and Tomás
Saturday, November 8, 11:00 a.m.
Tomás chose to check out the penthouse Rosendo Franco and his lover shared in the Anzures development, more out of curiosity to see the love nest of the Mexican press baron than out hope of finding the little black book that was keeping Claudia awake at night. And in fact he didn’t find it. The couches and chairs were hacked and gutted, the bathroom fixtures torn from the walls, and the walls broken open with sledgehammers. The violence of it all overwhelmed him. These weren’t just the ravages of a very thorough search, he thought, but of raging, savage fury. He looked over the scarcely discernible bedrooms and then ran down to the street, his heart pounding.
The night before, he’d thought Claudia’s fears about the black book were exaggerated. Now he wasn’t so sure. He decided to call her to meet and bring her up to date on what he had found, but she didn’t answer the phone. He imagined she was sleeping after the frenzy of the past two days. He dialed Amelia’s number, and twenty minutes later they were walking through the park near her house.
“I didn’t know you and Claudia were so close,” Amelia said when he finished telling her about the conversation he’d had with the heiress and his visit to the wrecked apartment.
“We’re not. I feel like the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind that is the editorial offices of El Mundo. Five years ago, we took a trip to New York together with other executives from the newspaper, and I think I was the only one to save myself from her contempt for all the lapdogs her father brought along with him.”
“Being the one-eyed man among the blind isn’t much of a qualification for heading up a newspaper, is it?”
Amelia sensed something was missing from Tomás’s tale, but she couldn’t figure out exactly what it was that sat ill with her. It was hard for her to understand that the newspaper owner’s daughter would entrust a responsibility of that magnitude to a columnist she barely knew. And even stranger was the fact that she should ask his help to find a vanished woman and her compromising little booklet. Tomás was a good political analyst, but his talents as a detective could hardly be called top-notch.
The journalist didn’t answer. He squeezed her arm and indicated with his eyes a curious scene in front of them in the park. A woman was pretending to concentrate on her telephone screen while she looked askance at a gray bulldog at the end of an elegant leash defecating profusely in the middle of the sidewalk; she must have known that the city ordinances required owners pick up after their dogs, but was too prim to actually do it.
“I read somewhere that if an alien landed in one of our parks on a Sunday, it would think that the supreme beings on this planet were dogs, and that the humans were a race of slaves dedicated to serving their masters. How else do you explain that one species agrees to pick up the other’s excrement with its hands?”
Amelia nodded and half-smiled, more because of Tomás’s attitude than his comment. She had already gotten used to the way her partner would introduce these digressions and sarcastic phrases into crucial moments of the conversation. At first, she’d found it exasperating and a little bit manic, but with time she came to view it tenderly; she saw it was his way of protecting himself. She came to assume these little twists and turns were intended not to distract from the subject, but rather to buy time to broach it properly, and in passing they gave her a sense of what he was sensitive about.
The invitation to take charge of the paper attracts him and makes him anxious at the same time, she said to herself.
“There’s one thing I agree with Claudia about,” she said. “There’s no one there at that office she can lean on. Some of them are morons, and a lot of them are rotten to the core. But can’t she poach a good professional from somewhere else?”
“They don’t grow on trees. It would have to be the deputy director of one of the other papers. But it’s not like the press is a breeding ground for talent these days. The best journalists and editors have left for other areas, they’re taking on personal projects. The economic crisis in the dailies and the cutbacks have led to this awful cannibalism in the media world, and the mediocre ones are the only ones to survive it.”
“And how do you feel being faced with that possibility? Maybe the dailies are going downhill, but El Mundo could still have a big impact. In a country where the courts play into the hands of the powerful, a good press is our last refuge for a fair hearing.”
“I’ve been turning it over in my head since last night. It excites me to think about what El Mundo could become with a more professional, independent editorial line, but I have to ask myself if I’m capable of heading up a project on that scale.”
Amelia stopped, turned to stand in front of him, took his head in her hands and kissed him. Then, she looked around to be sure there weren’t any photographers lurking nearby—something he couldn’t stand but she couldn’t avoid either. Her relationship with Tomás wasn’t a secret, but she didn’t care for her private moments being splashed around all over social media. It was embarrassing enough that her two bodyguards were the constant witnesses to her intimate life.
“I don’t have the least doubt about that,” she said affectionately.
He thanked the gesture and grabbed her around the waist. The woman with the bulldog looked at them with a smile that could have conveyed complicity or ironic disapproval. Tomás turned his eyes away and contemplated the offering the dog had left on the cement: its owner tugged at the leash, turned around, and went on her way.
“Maybe you could bring reinforcements, stay there through the transit
ion while Claudia learns to place her trust in some director you train for her,” she added.
“Maybe,” he said, and furrowed his brow, trying to imagine some respectable candidate from among his colleagues.
Now it was she who pulled at his shirt to turn his attention toward what was happening on a bench in Río de Janeiro Park, where their walk had taken them: a teenager was kissing the muzzle of a little Yorkshire terrier she had in a basket.
“Well, that will certainly confuse your aliens about the relationship between the two species, no?”
Tomás laughed. He enjoyed those diversions and moments of relief the urban landscape offered while they conversed, walking through the Colonía Roma near Amelia’s house. He had taken such a liking to their weekend walks that he’d come to think theirs was a peripatetic affair. Not that they had stopped having sex for that year they’d been seeing each other as lovers, but those first weeks they were together, an intense, animal passion had consumed them, a product, perhaps, of the long wait. They had known each other since they were six, and they had flirted with the idea of an affair when they were twenty-three, but its time didn’t come until they were in their forties. In the past few months, the intensity had waned into a mature relationship, and even if they still chased each other around the kitchen table from time to time, Tomás felt that these outings were when he loved her most. And that was true despite the two unnerving guards escorting them from ten feet away.
“And what do you think of Claudia’s other request, finding out where that Milena ended up and getting hold of the fated black book? The thing about the penthouse sounds nasty. What’s your gut tell you?” he inquired.
“First, tell me what you know about her and what the hell her role in Franco’s life was.”
“Everything’s all mixed up. Rosendo Franco died in his bed, more or less as the newspaper printed it, but his bed was no longer the one he shared with his wife in Las Lomas; it was this penthouse in the Anzures development, where he practically lived with his lover. It seems that for the past few months he’d been spending most of his nights with her. From what Claudia could figure out, Milena is around twenty-five years old, from Eastern Europe, and Franco rescued her from prostitution.”
Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World Page 3