Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “I guess Emiliano’s kidnapping was his doing, but it’s hard for me to believe he’s willing to go against us on this, knowing all we could come back at him with,” she said. “But then, what can we unleash, really? By the way, when are we having lunch with the president?”

  “Monday. For better or worse, I don’t know whether this thing with Emiliano will be wrapped up in the next four days.”

  Both of them fell silent. The image of a grieving woman flashed through Claudia’s mind—her head covered with a black kerchief, a victim of Pinochet’s repression. That was her notion of what a Chilean widow looked like.

  “I’m asking myself if my father ever found out Salgado was who he was up against. The emails with Milena don’t mention him, they just talk about threats she was receiving, and he seemed to think he could neutralize them.”

  “Even Salgado wouldn’t cross Don Rosendo, and that has to mean something. If we show that motherfucker that the power your father had is still intact, I’m sure we can negotiate from a better position.”

  Claudia nodded.

  “Jaime says he can find a good go-between to deal with Salgado,” Tomás continued.

  “And you trust him? Jaime? We won’t have to pay for it later?”

  Tomás recalled it was the second time Claudia had asked him that question.

  “I think we need to use every resource at our disposal, and if there’s a price to pay, we’ll worry about it later, no?”

  Still, the question gave Tomás pause. Resorting to Jaime, there was nothing, or everything, to fear.

  “Jaime should be at the newspaper by now. We agreed to meet at ten to decide what course of action to take. Amelia will drop in, too, even if it’s only for a moment; she has a business meeting later.”

  Claudia noted Tomás’s tone when he talked about Amelia’s schedule, as if that morning they had shared their plans for the day. She didn’t know if the black cloud that crossed her mind was jealousy or a touch of envy for that powerful and brilliant couple. And yet, sitting in the back seat of Tomás’s car on their way to the newspaper, followed by her car with her escorts inside, Claudia felt again that something was pulling them together: the ease with which she used the word “we,” the way she would softly touch his thigh to make a point, or how his hand grazed her hip when he greeted her. Were they the prelude to something that was bound to happen or mere gestures of camaraderie?

  “Señorita Claudia, what a pleasure to see you!” said Silvano Fortunato as soon as they got in the car. “I never had the chance to offer my condolences. My sympathies for what happened to Don Rosendo, may God keep him in his heart. Please, give my regards to your dear mother.”

  “Thank you, I will. I’m happy to see you, too,” she answered, reaching forward to touch the shoulder of Tomás’s driver. For a few years, Fortunato had been assigned to Franco’s home, and in her teenage years he had driven her to ballet classes.

  “I don’t know why the Reaper always takes the best ones first. Miss, you got every scorpion, snake, and cockroach you could imagine living like fucking kings over their neighbors and the bastards don’t catch as much as a cold. In the meantime, we lost Pedro Infante, Manolete, and Kennedy. There’s no justice in the world. That’s why I’m almost always an atheist, God forgive me,” the chauffeur said, quickly crossing himself.

  “What do you mean, almost always, Don Silvano? Either you’re an atheist or you’re a believer,” Tomás asked him, pleased to distract himself with something that wasn’t the crisis of the past few hours.

  “Probably you, being well read and a gentleman, find it easy to choose between apples and oranges, but the man on the street, he can’t reach up to pick his fruit. There’s neither apple nor orange in sight. All you can do is take what comes how it comes. And if it comes with a divine face, then God be praised, and if it comes from the earth, then to hell with Him.”

  “What does that mean, the man on the street never gets to pick? Sounds very comfortable, morally speaking, don’t you think?”

  “More than anything, a guy with hard luck is too busy trying to make a buck to go around plucking the petals off of daisies trying to decide what’s what. Not making that buck, though, that would be a disaster. You snooze, you lose. Let it go, boss, let it go.”

  “I think you’re a cynic, more than anything. I’m saying that respectfully, Don Silvano.”

  “For a while I used to moonlight as a bouncer to make it to the end of the month. Standing around outside a bar. My orders were strict: ‘Don’t let in anyone who looks like you.’ So I only let in light-skinned types with thin noses, people like you’d see in a commercial. I didn’t find that especially right or dignified for a person like me, but it helped me put my son through prep school. So you see, I wasn’t offered apples or oranges, there was nothing sweet about this. But whatever, I swallowed it. I follow the good soldier’s philosophy: if there’s food in front of you, eat it; if there’s a bed, sleep in it; and if you pass by a bathroom, go ahead and take a piss, because you never know if you’re going to find another one. Pardon my French, Señorita.”

  “You’re acting all tough, but you’re a sweetheart, everyone at the newspaper knows it,” she said.

  “Well, there’s a time to pray and a time to tell God to fuck off, and I’ve lived through both. If and when we’ve been on speaking terms!”

  “There’s a time to work, too,” Tomás said, relieved to see the newspaper building ahead of them and to escape another of the driver’s philosophical tirades.

  ‌32

  Milena, Rina, and Luis

  Thursday, November 13, 10:30 a.m.

  She heard the chirping of the birds and felt the darts of sunlight over her eyelids and asked herself if she was dead. Then she remembered that the night before Rina and Luis had frustrated her attempt to dive onto the metro tracks, and had driven her to the outskirts of the city, to a kind of cabin in the mountains. The intense aroma of bacon confirmed to her she was alive, and also that she was hungry.

  Rina and Luis were making breakfast and making fun of one another’s culinary abilities. The partially fried eggs and burnt toast were like manna from heaven to Milena, though she did leave one inedible strip of bacon untouched. Once more, the friendship between the other two embraced Milena as well, soothing her and making her feel a sense of belonging she hadn’t known for a long time.

  Luis said they were in a country house in the mountains between Toluca and Mexico City. It belonged to a friend of his father’s who rarely used it. The night before, Luis had called to ask if he could stay, and had gotten the contact info for Hernán, the watchman who lived next door. They could stay as long as they wanted, and he said it was certain no one would find them. Milena knew that wasn’t true: sooner or later, Bonso would locate her, and now he would definitely kill her. Again, she thought things would work out for the best: at least in Mexico there wouldn’t be any dogs involved.

  Luis tried to dispel her fears with his optimism.

  “If we want to solve this problem once and for all, we have to find a way to get rid of Bonso,” he said. “It can be done.”

  “Impossible. He has so many lives,” Milena objected. “The three of us would only make him laugh.” She could not stop trembling at what lay in store for them, however much she trusted Luis’s ingenuity.

  “It’s not just the three of us: there are other people more powerful and more vicious than Bonso, and they’re the people we need in our corner. But, to start with, I have to get online. I need to go somewhere with a connection.”

  “Get some groceries while you’re out,” Rina said. “If we are to survive here, it won’t be thanks to your cooking.” She looked at Milena. “Maybe you’ve got something up your sleeve; I’ve never had Croatian food before.”

  Milena tried to remember some of the braised dishes her mother used to make. She didn’t think much of her own abilities, but she told herself anything would be better than her friends’ shocking ineptitude. She told him som
e of the ingredients she’d need, and was surprised at how the thought of preparing those old recipes made her feel a burst of enthusiasm. She suddenly had the sense that life was looking for cracks to seep inside her again.

  Luis went to a restaurant famous for grilled goat in La Marquesa, on the roadside a mile from the cabin. Their Wi-Fi was iffy, but he figured it would be enough to surf around as long as he didn’t download any big files. He activated the software that let him navigate with IP addresses from the US and Canada and logged onto the Darknet to get familiar with the hardcore sites used by the human-trafficking networks. For most people, the web is a pristine, open universe: they don’t know that beneath the surface lies a hidden, parallel dimension, a dark place where the pages don’t allow their users to be traced. There is where the information about drugs, sex slaves, guns, and hardcore porn resides: places where you can hire a hit man or a hacker for illegal jobs. It took Luis a few hours in that universe to map out the sites that might serve his purposes.

  After he left, the two girls spent the better part of the morning stretched out on the terrace. Don Hernán and his wife kept the place immaculate. The décor was cold, but there was lots of sun. Both of them laughed about how pale Milena’s legs were: longer and shapelier than Milena’s, Rina’s legs were like a runner’s.

  The Mexican girl’s way of talking made her feel good. She went from talking about her resolution to stop smoking before she turned thirty to her wish to live in a cabin on the beach with no possessions other than three bathing suits. She talked about how the little imperfections in Luis’s body made him irresistible, and she argued for the need to decriminalize marijuana. It seemed frivolous, but it wasn’t. Milena saw that Rina’s ideas were the product of long reflection: she sincerely analyzed the pros and cons of each of her postulates in a language that was educated, sometimes exquisite. Or maybe it was that she talked in a way Milena had only seen in books. The Spanish she had heard up to now was the one spoken by pimps, clients, and prostitutes: colorful, coarse, and basic.

  Milena was surprised Luis and Rina had just met.

  “You seem like you’ve been together a long time. Are you thinking of getting married?”

  “Getting married? No one gets married at twenty-three,” she laughed. “He lives in Barcelona, he’s just passing through Mexico.”

  Milena regretted her question. She felt provincial, like a redneck. She knew a lot about sex and novels, but not much else. For her part, Rina wished she hadn’t spoken to Milena so frivolously.

  “I think Luis is great, and we get along really well, but I don’t even know if we’re boyfriend and girlfriend. And why put a label on a relationship when he has a plane ticket for next week? The last thing I’m interested in right now is getting hooked, I’ve only just started feeling better.”

  Milena appreciated her confidences, less for the information itself than for how close she now felt to her. It reminded her of her teenage years, when she’d talk forever with her friends under the open sky and life seemed like a colorful prairie. She was used to women sharing secrets with each other in the prison-houses she’d passed through. That was their main pastime during the dead hours in that captive atmosphere. But there always seemed to be something false in those dialogues: enigmas, impossible plans, cynical and merciless revelations from women who pretended not to know, even if they had no choice, that life had already broken them.

  What Rina told her spoke of a real world where people caught trains and planes, signed up for classes and then dropped out, went to a restaurant and got overwhelmed choosing their dishes, and suffered from the uncertainty of unrequited love. She would have liked to return the gesture with some juicy secret she had never shared, but everything that came to mind was dark, cruel, or repulsive.

  She liked being with Rina for her approach to life: relaxed, but also serious. And yet the best thing about her new friend wasn’t her words, but the gleam in her eyes and the animated way she gestured, swinging her arms like propellers. It was impossible not to get caught up in the enthusiasm her presence exuded. For a moment, she dared to think she could redeem her past, build a future. Then she remembered Vila-Rojas and a tingle in her lower abdomen told her otherwise. She decided to take a bath when the B tattooed on her buttock started throbbing insistently.

  Them V

  Me, I’m jealous of whores, to tell the truth. Getting money to fuck is a sweet deal, right? But the thing is, they’re a bunch of hypocrites and whiners. People go crazy trying to get sex and money, all you have to do is turn on the TV to see that’s what drives all advertising. What’s so bad about putting the two things together? Best of both worlds, right?

  If I was young and looked like Richard Gere or Robert Redford—before the wrinkles, I mean—I wouldn’t have hesitated to sell my body for a living. Of course, you have to make sacrifices; the customers wouldn’t exactly be Julia Roberts, I reckon. But still, an hour sweating it out with a fat chick to make what some working stiff gets in a month wouldn’t be too bad. And an orgasm is an orgasm. Or, as my godson says, for a good soldier, any hole is a trench.

  But I don’t have Brad Pitt’s body and my teeth could be in better shape, so I’ll never be able to make money off my physical attributes. Instead, I have to pay, and the price keeps going up, it seems to me: the halitosis, you know, it’s getting worse and worse.

  Now Rosario’s the only one who will take my money. She says because of her sinusitis, her nose runs all the time and she can take care of me without noticing my problem. But I’m getting off-track.

  What I’d like to say is, I’d be jumping for joy if I could make a living from sex like they do. They’re ingrates, they don’t appreciate the privilege life has given them.

  I tell Rosario that when she comes to visit me, but she makes like she doesn’t hear. She just looks at me, scratches her crotch, blows her nose, picks up the cash, and leaves the room. Pampered and ungrateful.

  B.N. Bishop of Estepona

  Spain

  ‌33

  Vidal and Luis

  Thursday, November 13, 11:00 a.m.

  The screen showed a red dot moving threateningly toward a blue one. Surprised, then alarmed, Vidal saw the spot representing Luis on the map on his phone’s screen was coming rapidly toward where he himself was located. How the hell could Luis have known he’d been tracking the three of them?

  He had followed them at a safe distance, always in a chauffeured Lemlock car, all the way to the outskirts of Mexico City. When he was convinced his friends had stopped somewhere near the highway to spend the night, he and the driver reserved two rooms in a truckers’ hotel close to La Marquesa. It was a rough night, his sleep interrupted by the impulse to glance back at the GPS and verify Luis’s location on his phone, but nothing had happened between ten hours ago and now. The driver in the neighboring room had given no sign of being awake. He would have to deal with what was about to happen on his own.

  Vidal prepared to explain to his friend what he was doing in the rundown café of a roadside hotel a mile away from where they’d spent the night. He thought of various circumstantial and improbable excuses. None of them seemed like they would work. Frustrated, he decided to tell the truth, and looked for the best way to frame it. “It’s for your own safety,” he heard himself saying. But that didn’t sound convincing either. The strength Luis emanated and the insecurity Vidal felt in his presence made the idea seem absurd. He would have to refer to how Lemlock’s enormous resources could help Milena out, but he knew that for Luis, any mention of Jaime was sacrilege.

  To Vidal’s relief, the red dot stopped a fraction of an inch from the blue one representing his own location. He figured his friend was fewer than a hundred yards away, and when he looked outside, he saw Rina’s car turning the corner. A few seconds later, he saw Luis enter the nicest-looking restaurant around. Neither of the girls was with him.

  For now, he was off the hook, but he knew that soon enough he’d have to face Luis, who could use his GPS to
detect Vidal, just as Vidal had done with Luis.

  Anyway, he had no idea how far away the chase could take him. The night before, he’d called Olga, his mother, to explain his absence, saying he would spend the night with some friends. He did that often when a party threatened to stretch on into the morning. But his mother seemed to have a built-in polygraph, and could detect the inflections in his voice that showed he was lying. Vidal and his father always said a Gestapo interrogator would have been less suspicious than his mother when she sensed a crack in a family member’s story. The day before had been no exception: Olga said goodbye to her child, making him promise to call her when he got home.

  Vidal wondered whether his uncle hadn’t overstepped by putting so much confidence in him. A few hours before, he thought he was doing the right thing, trying to compensate for Luis and Rina’s imprudence. Everything indicated Rina had lost her head, and Vidal trusted she would recover her common sense as soon as she saw the sacrifice he was making by putting his own feelings aside to help them.

  But Luis’s unexpected appearance shattered his determination. Now he was burning with the desire to go to his friend and confess the truth, let him know what Jaime was up to, and rebuild the complicity that had always characterized their relationship. All it would take was walking a few steps, surprising Luis, and looking him in the face, and he was sure he’d be forgiven. He imagined the four of them in a mad dash on the back roads from one motel to the next, making Rina’s car their second home. He even thought that if she and Luis insisted on staying together, he and Milena would have to hook up, if only because they couldn’t rent so many rooms in all the different hotels they’d stay in. Maybe then, Rina’s head would clear, and she’d realize she was losing her true love to the Croatian’s embrace. Owning up to Vidal was the right path to take.