Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  ‌18

  Claudia, Tomás, and Jaime

  Wednesday, November 12, 10:30 a.m.

  Claudia asked herself how the two men in front of her could possibly be close friends. Apart from their age, Jaime and Tomás couldn’t be more different. The Italian suit and the made-to-measure shirt with the monogrammed “JL” contrasted sharply with Tomás’s wrinkled tie and calamitous blazer, which had clearly managed to elude the dry cleaner’s. Lemus’s assertive tone, peremptory and articulate, was the opposite of the reflective dodging and parrying that characterized the journalist’s conversation. Jaime’s hard stare was the antithesis of his friend’s watery, mocking eyes.

  And yet Claudia recalled the description given that very morning by Miriam Mayorga, her father’s former secretary, now beholden to Tomás, to describe the firm and decisive style the new director of El Mundo employed when he had taken the reins: “He’s got just the right amount of asshole in him,” his assistant had said. Maybe deep down, the two friends had more in common than it seemed.

  They were in a small meeting room to one side of the enormous office where Rosendo Franco had worked when he was alive. Claudia refused to take over her father’s desk. It was still colonized by his mementos: a golf trophy, a photo with President Clinton, another with María Félix, a replica of his yacht, a miniature printing press, a portrait of his famous nephew from when he won the Australian Open. Under a lamp, two glasses cases lay side by side, like somber coffins waiting for their occupants in some provincial funeral home. Claudia preferred to work at the six-person table alongside it, which she had made into her own desk.

  In front of her and Tomás, Jaime unfolded a map showing the mafias tied to prostitution in Europe and the Americas. He explained that the Kosovars were experts in moving human cargo and stolen goods, and the Romanians and Greeks ran brothels up and down the Mediterranean. But the Russians and Ukrainians were the elite among these groups, with the Slovaks, Georgians, Serbs, and Romanians as their usual men on the ground.

  In Mexico, the phenomenon was more mixed. Colombians and Argentines controlled the traffic of South American women that fed the table-dance circuits and the high-dollar escort services, but the European mafias had set up their own groups to watch over the small number of women from their countries working in Mexico and, more importantly, to get them into the US. Young women from the Balkans, Romania, and Bulgaria got duped into these schemes with the hopes of being brought across the border illegally and finding their American dream. Even then, the intermediaries sometimes wound up pimping them out in Mexico on a temporary or permanent basis.

  That appeared to be the case with Bonso, a Romanian who said he was Italian, had ties to businesses in the Canary Islands and Andalusia, and did a little bit of everything in the sex trade. He had three or four high-end brothels that supplied escort services and men’s clubs for elite clientele. He also worked as a broker on behalf of other European mafias trafficking women to Cancun and the US through Mexico.

  “So this Bonso—is that his last name?” Tomás asked.

  “According to his passport, his name’s Neulo Radu, but he seems to have gone by Bonso his whole life; it’s on every piece of evidence we’ve found on him.”

  The truth was, he’d gotten that name forty years back when he showed up in Milan fresh out of adolescence looking to make his fortune. A friend started calling him Bonsai for his short stature, and he was happy to adopt the name, thinking it had something to do with samurais. Eventually, he realized he’d made a mistake and ended up changing it to Bonso.

  “Is it really possible this guy’s so powerful?” Claudia interrupted.

  “On their own, these groups don’t have much muscle. Just enough to rule over the girls. But they have extensive ties with politicians and leaders, especially in the case of a guy like Bonso, who provides hookers to the biggest fish in the country: from narco cartels to governors and generals, board members of the biggest companies and, as we know, owners of mass-media outlets.”

  Jaime regretted that last phrase, but Claudia didn’t even blink. Tomás made a gesture of disapproval, but continued to press the point.

  “So you think it would be possible to have a word with this Bonso?”

  “Talk, yeah, I could arrange a meeting,” Jaime said confidently. He in fact had no idea how he might approach the Romanian. “But I’m not sure it’s a good idea for us.”

  “Why?” Claudia asked.

  “Because even if he’s a creep from the gutter, I’m sure he’s a world-class negotiator. When he gets the idea that there’s a girl who interests you, the price is going to go up. And unfortunately, price can mean a lot of things: influence trafficking, maybe even favorable coverage in El Mundo.”

  “What?” Claudia exclaimed. “He’s not going to want us to publish a full-color photo of his daughter’s debutante ball, is he? Or is he?” she added sarcastically.

  “No, but they’re brokers who exchange favors: sympathetic coverage of a general or for a failing casino, a crime that shows up on page thirty-eight instead of page twelve in Breaking News. It could be constant blackmail in exchange for Milena.”

  Breaking News was a tabloid owned by El Mundo with a daily circulation of more than two hundred thousand, and it was the reference point for police reporting in Mexico City.

  “That’s a price we can’t accept,” Tomás cut in.

  “Exactly,” Jaime agreed. “That’s why we have to come up with the right strategy to confront this fucker before we decide to sit down and talk with him.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easiest to get her out of the country, send her back to where she’s from?” the owner of the newspaper asked.

  “Sending her back to her village could be counterproductive. I’m not saying this is Milena’s case, but sometimes the parents themselves, or an uncle or a father-in-law, are the people responsible for selling them to traffickers.”

  “No, that’s not what happened with Milena,” Claudia affirmed. “She told me she ran away from home at sixteen, tricked by someone who told her they’d get her a restaurant job in Berlin.”

  “Sometimes,” Jaime continued, “they threaten the victim with retaliation against the family if they ever try and flee.”

  “I’m going to see her today,” Claudia said. “I’ll ask her and try to get more info about Bonso and company.”

  “I’ll wait for some additional reports from my team,” Jaime said, “then we’ll have the elements we need to work up a strategy.”

  They agreed to meet back up as soon as they had any news. Jaime left, pleased with the turn events had taken. Everything indicated he was well on his way to becoming Claudia’s security consultant.

  When they were alone, Claudia and Tomás discussed the most-urgent topics at the newspaper. They picked three candidates to interview for the post of general manager and accepted one of the times the president had offered to have lunch at Los Pinos: the following Monday.

  As he left her office and headed toward his own, it struck Tomás that their dialogue had been less one of boss and employee or publisher and editor. They seemed more like a harmonious married couple working together to organize a dinner party for the following weekend.

  On the way to his desk, Tomás remembered that he hadn’t talked to Amelia since the afternoon before. In general, they only met on the weekends, at her house, and then only when the head of the PRD allowed it. They tried to eat together once a week and the rest of the time, they exchanged WhatsApp messages to wish each other good morning or goodnight or air out their worries or their sudden fits of desire, always in code to avoid some scandal caused by the very-predictable spies who intercepted their phone messages and emails. Tomás typed a quick “I miss you” and didn’t think of Amelia or Claudia again for hours.

  Them III

  I’ve spent my life with ladies of the night. Whoever talks down on them doesn’t know them.

  My true home is in those hours between two and five in the morning, when the
drunk tells you you’re his brother and the old whore shows you a gentleness you never got from the girl you always longed for. There are men and women whose soul is in the whorehouse. It’s not the drinking or the sex; it’s not the dim lights or the trashy music. Those just set the scene, the ecosystem where our species flourishes. No one in this family browbeats you for singing out of tune or stumbling.

  There are people who live for soccer or golf, to make the priest happy or please their father: bland men and women who follow their routines to a T, like a prisoner shining the bars of his cell.

  All I’m saying is there’s more spontaneity in a rundown dive than in those sanitized lives, controlled by the clock on the outside and cowardice on the inside.

  We guys who like the bohemian life have it easy. Nothing keeps us from giving ourselves up to our passion three or four nights a week.

  Bohemian women, on the other hand, have it harder: they get called whores. Those women’s only sin is belonging to our species. Night animals, nocturnal flowers that only open their petals to the sound of an out-of-tune piano and the intermittent flicker of neon lights.

  You’ll say I’m romanticizing. Maybe. All those years of boleros and the entire repertoire of Agustín Lara weren’t in vain.

  But still, the most admirable females I have known are from that world where the sun doesn’t shine. The most beloved names—Amarilda, Zéfira, and Zulma—were never real, just sobriquets, but the women who bore them were realer than any Patricia, Marta, or Susanita, those daytime monstrosities I tried to hook up with once or twice.

  Amarilda was the moon: pale and brilliant, generous with her curves. Sarcasm on the tip of her tongue, lavish eyes, hand always ready for a caress. She could calm down a young rooster hot under the collar just as well as she could raise the spirits of a down-and-out townsman. She died years back, after a botched abortion.

  What I always remember about Zéfira is her bottomless cleavage and how firm her breasts were back in the days before silicone. The best table companion when you felt like raising the roof. She had a liver of steel and a raspy voice. Gorgeous, unforgettable. Two years back, I saw her one morning selling herself on the street in Tepito. She’d gotten AIDS sometime before, and I preferred to keep my distance, but I was happy to know she was still alive.

  Zulma could have been a psychiatrist. She didn’t talk much, she didn’t sing, and only a very few times did she get up to dance. But for some reason, she was the favorite of all the clients when they needed to pour their heart out. In her white dress with black dots, with her thin lips painted blood red, she’d take your hand and listen to you without blinking, as if you were in a bubble, or the confessional. She had an innate wisdom that let her know if what you needed was an innocent schoolgirl’s caress or someone to grab hold of your cock. I heard some guy beat her to death not too long back.

  Admirable women, those ladies of the night. Though now that I think of it, I can’t figure out why they all ended up so bad.

  C.S., leader of the railway union.

  Senator of the Republic.

  ‌19

  Jaime and Vidal

  Wednesday, November 12, 1:00 p.m.

  Vidal and Jaime were in Jaime’s Lemlock office, seated in front of an enormous plate of thick glass that served as a desk. From his keyboard, Jaime was manipulating images on the three matching screens embedded in the walls. He needed to confer with his team and uncover the reasons Milena’s persecutors were hunting her so desperately. But he was the one who had invited Vidal to come to Lemlock, and he couldn’t let him down now. Perhaps the young man’s help could still be useful in the case that was taking up so much of his thoughts.

  “Burn this into your mind,” he said to him. “Human beings are never what they appear.”

  And to demonstrate it, he showed him the dirty laundry of various well-known figures. Jaime let him read Rosendo Franco’s private correspondence, where he cried like a schoolboy, showed him evidence of Alcántara’s gambling addiction, and most painful of all, the nasty comments, both spoken and written, that Manuel, his close friend, had made behind his back.

  “Stand up straight,” Jaime said. “Don’t let it get to you. It’s not nearly as bad as it seems. Every relationship that lasts and is worth a damn goes through this kind of betrayal. Even marriages. These are the little episodes we human beings have to make up for the vulnerability we feel when we get too close to someone, brief acts of insubordination that help us bear mutual dependence. What do you think would happen if the Blues fessed up to all we’ve done to each other over the course of three decades? My guess is, we couldn’t look each other in the eyes.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Vidal responded, still stung by the cruelty of Manuel’s words. “So I should ignore it and just keep going like I never heard anything?”

  “Of course not! You need to make sure it doesn’t affect you, but don’t ever ignore it. The weaknesses you sniff out among the people who surround you are a resource in your favor.”

  “With all due respect, I’m not interested in finding out Manuel’s weaknesses or anybody else’s to use against them.”

  “This isn’t about good and bad or about using these things against people. In fact you might use it for them.”

  “How so?”

  “As I said, human beings aren’t what they appear, but they’re also not what they think they are.”

  “And what does that have to do with Manuel?”

  “It has to do with Manuel, and Luis, and Rina.”

  Vidal reacted the way Jaime supposed he would have if he heard his own lover’s name. The boy looked him in the eyes the way the German Shepherd he’d had when he was a boy used to do: head slightly to one side, his entire being absorbed in examining his face, hanging on his next word as if it were a matter of life or death.

  “Understanding people’s motivations allows you to understand what they’re capable and incapable of better than they do,” Jaime continued. “Often we hurt the ones we love most because we share in their weakness or we put faith in the structures they set up for themselves to try and get a grip on the world, even if they are almost always rickety. We’d avoid a lot of suffering if we were brave enough to confess to someone that they’re not cut out for something; the truth, told at the right time, is worth its weight in gold, even if someone hates you for speaking it. You don’t know how many times I’ve rescued Amelia, and especially Tomás, from situations where their romantic ideals could have harmed them.”

  “And how does that apply to Rina?”

  “Human beings act out of necessity, and Rina’s no different. Understanding her needs will help you make her happy, if that’s what you want.”

  Vidal turned red.

  “I’ll show you. Are you ready to learn?”

  For the next two hours, Jaime showed Vidal the sophisticated system Lemlock had devised for intercepting calls and digital communications, the best of its kind in Latin America.

  When Vidal left the office, he had already decided what he was going to do with his life, or so he thought. On the walk back home, he couldn’t stop looking at the map and the two red dots—Luis and Rina—that were moving across the screen of his cell phone.

  ‌20

  Milena

  January 2011

  She didn’t know why, but as soon as she saw him, she knew the man would be different from the many she’d known before. She would be sure months later, when she agreed to kill for the first time. Perhaps Agustín Vila-Rojas’s entrance into her life was so unexpected and overwhelming because he was interested less in what lay between her legs than in what lay between her parietal bones.

  She met him at a private party attended by all the girls in the house, though it actually seemed more like a wake: a judge had just issued another round of verdicts against the bureaucrats and businessmen in Marbella, heirs to the corruption scandals left behind by the ex-mayor Gil y Gil and his cronies.

  An important hotelier wanted to liven the depre
ssing ambience that had settled over the city, and invited a dozen members of the elite to a cocktail party on a giant yacht moored in Puerto Banús. The guests went more to show the others they had nothing to hide than from any desire to celebrate what was, to all lights, the collapse of the real-estate boom that had made them all millionaires.

  Vila-Rojas was in attendance, but that was all he had in common with the tourism and construction magnates there.

  Milena had a professional smile pasted on her face and was listening attentively to a builder from Málaga. That was probably what attracted Vila-Rojas’s gaze: the rest of the women could barely cover up their lack of interest in those discussions of fines and jail sentences the press had been covering. Between the relief of still being free and the fear of being next on the list, the men weren’t much up for sex, and if they still fondled the girls, it was more from inertia than excitement.

  In reality, Milena was examining each of the men to try and bring to life the story she was hatching in her head. She tried to imagine the role each of them would play on a lifeboat in the hypothetical case that the boat sank on the high seas. The guy from Málaga, the most nervous of all, would definitely be the first to freak out and drink seawater; the host, a man with an insidious smile, would probably turn out to be the cannibal. A half-hour later, she’d decided Vila-Rojas, reflective and reticent, would turn out to be the leader, once they’d gotten over the initial quarrels.

  Bored of the conversation, Agustín took Milena around the waist and dragged her onto the deck. She was grateful to escape the almost unbreathable air of the cabin, thick with the smoke of cigars.

  Amid the damp aromas of evening and the muffled lapping of the waves against the yacht’s hull, they talked.