Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “I finished the studies I left the country for. New York isn’t my home, and I’m not going to turn into a globetrotter to escape what I went through. I need this: a job I like, meeting people, having my own place. Getting away from everyone who looks at me like my soul’s been broken.”

  Amelia was surprised by the young girl’s poise.

  “I understand, you can count on me,” she replied, coming forward and laying a hand on the girl’s forearm. “Or, better yet, I’m going to count on you, because you’re going to save me from the wolves trying to take me down.”

  Alicia interrupted to announce the arrival of Luis Corcuera. Amelia told her to bring him in.

  Luis had changed a lot since the one time Amelia had seen him, in a hospital bed eleven months before. The boy who limped into the room looked much more mature than his twenty-five years. She supposed that for him, as for Rina, tragedy had sped life up. He was wearing jeans and a blue button-down, name-brand boots, and a thin black leather jacket. Despite his elegant dress, his five-o’clock shadow and his buzz cut gave him a slightly delinquent air, but the long eyelashes surrounding his brown eyes removed any hint of hostility from his face.

  “Luis, come in, thanks for stopping by,” Amelia said.

  “It’s a pleasure. I’m happy to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you from Vidal. Well, from Vidal and from the press,” he responded.

  Amelia waited for the two young people to greet each other, and after a disconcerting pause, the girl spoke.

  “So you’re the famous Luis,” she said, and for the first time, a broad smile transformed her face. Besides showing off her immaculate set of teeth, it pulled her eyes aside, giving her features a fascinating harmony.

  Luis seemed to notice the irresistible, strange beauty.

  “And you must be the beautiful Rina,” he said with a laugh.

  They looked at each other briefly, and Amelia felt like a stranger in her own meeting room.

  “Sorry I didn’t introduce you two! I assumed you’d met, since you’re both friends of Vidal’s…”

  “We’ve never met, but I feel like I already know her; she’s all Vidal ever talks about,” he said, walking around the table and looking at the graphs scattered on its surface.

  Rina didn’t take her eyes off him.

  Puzzled, Amelia interrupted.

  “If I can have you for a few minutes, Luis, I need to consult with you about something,” she said, and pulled him toward the door of her office. “Excuse us, Rina, we’ll pick back up afterward.”

  The young people said goodbye, smiling at each other.

  Once they were in her office, she told him Milena’s story and about the need to find her.

  “I don’t want you to get involved, not even a little. I just want you to tell us where to look. Tomorrow I have a meeting with the chief of police and I want to give him a few clues. They have a cyberintelligence unit. They’re probably not even close to your level, but you can put them on the right road to start looking, right?”

  Amelia saw Luis light up. The mere mention of a mystery to be solved made his pupils dilate and his nostrils flare, and he drew his lips tight. Luis lived to resolve conundrums and enigmas, as Amelia knew. Amelia told herself she had perhaps been mistaken to presume their conversation could stay a simple consultation. In fact, she didn’t even have a meeting with her friend, the chief of police yet, though she figured she’d see him in the coming days.

  Luis grabbed a pencil and paper from the desk and drew a series of concentric circles. Amelia followed his tracings, trying to make some sense of them, and then realized once he spoke that it was nothing but a tic while he worked out his thoughts.

  “First of all, ask for Milena’s real name, her legal status, when she’s entered and left the country. We need to figure out her phone number, her credit card, her emails, her Facebook, Twitter, and Skype if she has them. If we get one, we can figure out the rest.”

  “And how do we find out where she’s holed up?”

  “The easiest way is through her cell phone, because with that, we can localize her immediately. If she makes a credit-card purchase, she’s no more than an hour away from the store. Email will give you access to her network of friends and family, who will get back in touch with her sooner or later. Skype is useful because lots of people who live in another country use it to communicate with people back home, plus people think it’s secure.”

  “Perfect. Thanks a million, Luis, this has been very useful. You want to leave me your phone number and email?”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather you get in touch with me through Vidal. Working with this stuff can make you a little paranoid.”

  “I hear you, it’s the same for us in politics. I have ways of making calls that can’t be traced.”

  Luis just stood there with a stoic expression, looking her in the eyes.

  What is the deal with this generation? Amelia said to herself. Where do they get this nerve?

  Amelia signaled for them to leave and they returned to the meeting room, where the girl still hovered over the files. Her gaze fixated on Luis and followed him again as he walked through the room.

  “Let’s wrap it up for today, Rina. You want me to drop you off anywhere? I’m going to Colonía Roma.”

  “No, thanks a lot, I have a car.”

  “I don’t,” Luis said. “Will you give me a ride?” he asked Rina.

  “My driver will be happy to take you wherever you’d like,” Amelia interrupted, but neither of them seemed to hear her.

  Amelia shut off the light, went down with the two others to the street, and thought sadly of Vidal.

  ‌9

  Milena

  Tuesday, November 11, 10:30 a.m.

  She tried to look at something else, something besides her long, emaciated face, while they dyed her hair black in a neighborhood salon. The woman insisted on spinning the chair around and making her look at herself in the mirror, as if she was torturing her instead of squeezing tubes of dye into her hair. And it was a kind of torment, seeing her face like that: the deep rings under her eyes and her skin, drawn after four days without sleeping, shut up in a hotel. Beyond asking for what she wanted, she said nothing to the employee, worried she would give away her accent. She felt exposed when she left her hovel, as if at any moment a group of thugs might burst into the place. Twice, she’d turned her head abruptly, thinking she’d seen a silhouette in the window facing the street. Both times, a trail of dye ran down her face.

  She never made it to the airport to buy her ticket and flee the country. She had her passport and twelve thousand dollars in her pocket, but, remembering the Turk’s threats, she thought it was better to hide out. The Thursday before, after fleeing the apartment she shared with Rosendo Franco, she made it halfway to the airport before telling the taxi driver to turn off toward the nearest Holiday Inn. She remembered that the prostitution rings stayed away from that company, and she couldn’t run into one of her former bosses or one of their goons. Let alone someone from the Russian mafia.

  She knew the immigration agents on the traffickers’ payroll would report on her. She ran the risk that they would be there waiting for her wherever her plane landed, if she even managed to get onboard. She’d seen the power of those international organizations, and she knew their long arms could reach her anywhere.

  And then there was Leon. Her brother was eighteen now, and the traffickers had always kept their eyes on him. For the more than nine years that Milena had been in their hands, they would show her photos of the boy and her parents and warn her Leon would be pimped out and her parents killed if she ever tried to flee. “Your job pays for your brother’s freedom,” they told her.

  But down to its very last cell, her body refused to go back to the life she’d once lived. Only Franco’s affection and maneuvering had made it possible for her to escape the difficulties of the years when she’d been forced into prostitution. Thanks to the old man, she’d come to know lost freedoms and
get a sense of what life on the outside could offer. Her earlier existence was even more repulsive from outside than from within the layers of resignation she’d built around herself when she lived it.

  The Turk would come for her. She knew it: his henchman had warned her time and again in recent weeks, even when Franco was protecting her. The newspaper owner took her without paying for her, and that went against the only code the traffickers respected.

  For four days on the lam, she’d been paralyzed by fear. Room service with drawn curtains allowed her to stay at the hotel indefinitely. She dozed off but never felt rested. There were times when she felt the urge to call her family and tell them the danger they were in, but she worried that doing so, whether from the room or from her cell phone, which she kept shut off the whole time, might give away her location. She wasn’t brave enough to go outside and use a public phone. Anyway, what would she say to a family she hadn’t talked to in years? Where would she tell them to run?

  Now, as she watched them dye her hair, she began to regret her choice. The dark color made her face look severe, and she wasn’t like that. After twenty-six years as a blonde, she could barely recognize herself in that hard, determined visage staring back at her from the mirror. Not because her face had been gentle before: the years of abuse and neglect had left her looking stony, with a vacuous gaze. But before, it was a gaze of defeat, of sheer surrender. The brunette Melina possessed a determination and fierce rancor she thought she’d lost long ago, in the closet of an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of the German border. Little by little, she reconciled the sight before her with her renewed spirit. She decided she’d never go back to prostitution, and that she would never let them take her alive, not before she’d made the facts in the black book public. She had left it hidden in the hotel, and she felt vulnerable without it. She motioned to the employee to give her the bill. Nonetheless, when she saw the computer on the receptionist’s desk, she couldn’t resist the temptation to say a last goodbye to Rosario Franco.

  ‌10

  The Blues

  Tuesday, November 11, 2:00 p.m.

  “Hello, Mr. Director,” Jaime said to Tomás as he arrived at his and Amelia’s table.

  The journalist examined his friend’s face, looking for some trace of sarcasm, but his expression seemed sincere.

  “Thanks. You can buy the first couple of rounds.”

  “And Amelia,” he added, “my apologies for greeting the Fourth Estate first. There are hierarchies now, you know. Besides, I’m not really sure where the opposition stands in the hit parade in this country.” He gave her a light kiss on the cheek.

  Jaime’s casual manner could have led her to think the scene in the funeral-home parking lot had been a dream. Despite the long years of friendship, she concluded, she would never manage to understand him. But she decided to bridge the distance that had grown between them those past months. Hating him would mean rejecting a part of her own biography.

  “That was some funeral. I don’t remember anything like that since Camilo Mouriño died, and he was secretary of the interior and Felipe Calderón’s right-hand man.”

  “Yeah, they buried him like he was a national hero,” Jaime responded.

  “The number of guests at a funeral hasn’t got much to do with the virtues of the deceased,” Amelia said. “Lots of people show up just to make sure the person’s really dead. They bury big shots so respectfully, people who own the people who surround them. Family members cry their eyes out for nasty people like they owed them something. The daughter who was abused by the father; the children that begged for his attention. The father goes soft in his old age and they confuse that with love, forgetting how terribly he humiliated them, how he strong-armed everyone in his professional life, how he meddled in his children’s marriages. Dictators and satraps, people responsible for the worst crimes, they leave the world with elegies and honors.”

  Amelia’s severity was genuine, but there was something in it as well of the discomfort she felt on finding herself between her current boyfriend and Jaime, who had suddenly become a pretender to the throne.

  “Which brings us to what I wanted to talk to you all about,” Tomás interrupted. “Our national hero’s beloved is nowhere to be seen.” He explained to Jaime what he already told Amelia: about the wrecked apartment, the threats.

  “I ought to confess,” Jaime said, “Melina intrigued me from the first time I heard of her at the funeral, so I asked a couple of my people to take a look around.” In reality, an entire division of Lemlock had been at work those past few days putting together a file on her.

  He took a tablet from his blazer and looked over some notes. The three Blues were in a private room in Rosetta, a restaurant on Calle Colima in Colonía Roma. Jaime had assured them the place was discreet and they needn’t worry there, but every time a waiter came over, Tomás felt nervous.

  “Milena isn’t Russian,” Jaime said, moving his finger across the tablet. “Her name’s Alka Moritz and she was born in Jastrebarsko, Croatia, on August 23, 1988. She has a Mexican work visa as a model and public-relations agent. She hasn’t left the country yet, or at least there’s no record of her doing so. She has an American Express tied to Rosendo Franco’s account. No charges in the past few days. There’s no cell in her name, either. Most likely Rosendo gave her one of his. We’ll have to look in the newspaper’s files and see which phones are assigned to the owner. She entered the country ten months ago, but it’s like a black hole swallowed her up until June of this year. That’s when she started traveling with Franco and spending money on his credit card. Before that, there’s no record of her comings and goings or any sign of her existence apart from the date she entered the country. We can’t find anything about her past in the international databases, either.”

  “What does that mean?” Tomás asked.

  “It means she was kidnapped. In the sex trade, there are lots of different ways of doing things. The worst is how the Russians work, and it’s spread all over Europe. They buy women and literally treat them like slaves. They don’t even pretend there’s any kind of salary or commissions to work off some exorbitant debt; they just use the women until disease or drugs finish them off. They live in the same place they’re whored out from, locked up with no days off, unless they get sick or hurt and need to recover. And when they go out to turn tricks, an enforcer follows them straight to the front door of the hotel.”

  “I find it hard to believe they can’t escape, even kidnapping victims sometimes manage to get away. There’s not some customer they can ask for help?” Tomás inquired.

  “These women are terrorized and many of them are forced to become drug addicts. All are threatened with revenge against their families. The harassment and torture start from the beginning and leave them defenseless. I’d guess an attractive prostitute like Milena could pull in three hundred thousand a year for her minders, if not more. The Russians don’t work with a long-term perspective in mind: they wring the girls out to the max because they know the supply of Romanians, Slovaks, Africans, and Latin Americans is inexhaustible.”

  “If they’re Russians, they must be pretty well-known here in Mexico. It shouldn’t be difficult to find them, right?” the journalist said.

  “We say Russian when we talk about the method. But this approach has extended to numerous other people who have followed suit: Greeks, Turks, and Lebanese around the Mediterranean; Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Russians in North America, and all of them in Europe. In general, the mafias from the ex-Soviet countries are the ones in control of finding the girls and selling them wholesale, but once they go up for auction, the victims can end up anywhere in the world. Milena came to Mexico from Spain. I’ve already asked a friend from Interpol to get me the details of her time there.”

  “Pimps and human traffickers are closer than ever now,” Amelia said. “Before, the guys used to come to an arrangement with the local police and women from the region; now they form part of a long chain offering Venezue
lans or Romanians, they make deals with immigration agents, with the Federal Police, and even with the narcos who extort them. The Russians and those from similar countries are at the top, because they were the first to start moving people internationally. With globalization, organized-crime networks have entered the global marketplace.”

  During her time in Congress, Amelia had been president of the Committee Against Human Trafficking, and prostitution remained a focus of her professional activity.

  “In Mexico, it’s even more complicated because the drug cartels have got their hands in it,” she continued. “At first, it was just extorting the brothels, massage parlors, and table-dance joints, but now they’re more interested in direct exploitation. Pound for pound, moving women brings in more cash than drugs: they’re much easier to transport and you can sell the same product over and over to numerous clients instead of just once. In Mexico, the Russians and the narcos work together. The Zetas, for example, protect the brothels and the dives where the girls work all over the Gulf of Mexico, including in Cancun, where most of the money comes in. The European and Asian mafias have used the narcos’ contacts in immigration and among the coyotes to move girls into Mexico, and even the US.”

  “Listen,” Tomás interrupted, “if narcos are going to be mixed up in this, we need to take a good long look at what we’re doing. Last time, Vidal ended up with his fingers cut off and Luis with a bullet in his leg.”

  Amelia felt the urge to tell him that it had been Jaime’s henchmen who got to Vidal and Luis, not the narcos.

  “It’s just a matter of finding Milena to make sure the girl is okay,” Amelia said. “That shouldn’t be too difficult or too risky. Don’t you think?”

  Jaime and Tomás listened to her talk and both thought back to their high-school days thirty-five years before, when they’d first come to be known as the Blues. Amelia developed early. Her progressive parents, both psychologists, encouraged their only daughter to question authority and always treated her as an adult. The Blues coalesced around her, united in their struggle for lost causes and their striving for the plight of the defenseless. They were outsiders among their classmates, but also a quartet fighting for justice. They defended students humiliated by their peers and waged war on arbitrary and inept instructors. Hearing Amelia stand up on Milena’s behalf, they recalled the dozens of times she’d dragged them out of inaction. In the end, all of them had wound up feeling somehow responsible for the evils of the world.