Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “Do what you like, but I’m not going to stand here while they kill her.”

  Tomás felt struck down again.

  “What I’d like to do is rest, and it’s obvious I won’t be able to here.” He tried to get up, but he grew dizzy and fell back on the sofa. “And I need to tell Claudia Emiliano’s free, so she can sleep easy.”

  Tomás took his cell phone out and rang the owner of the newspaper. Amelia went to the kitchen for a glass of water. When she returned, she found Tomás asleep on the sofa, wrapped him in a blanket, and went to bed. Hours later, she felt his cold body arrive, hugging her tight, looking for warmth.

  ‌42

  Jaime and Vidal

  Friday, November 14, 8:10 a.m.

  “With Emiliano Reyna back, I want all eyes on Milena. The work crews should split up and tackle four lines of investigation. One will dig into Milena’s past in Marbella, that’s where the key to all this craziness lies. One will map out Bonso’s gang: whorehouses, webpages, famous or influential clients, number of prostitutes, front businesses, etc. Another will try and get a grasp on Víctor Salgado. I want to know which politicians are on his side and how tight he is with the money launderers. The old guy was almost reverential when he brought them up. Last of all, I want a team tracking Milena and Luis’s whereabouts.”

  Fifteen people were listening to Jaime in Lemlock’s meeting room. Some were clearly suffering from lack of sleep: half had spent the night at the offices, but all hung on their boss’s every word.

  “Patricia will coordinate between the teams. I want one person from each reporting to her every six hours. Tomorrow we’ll meet back up at nine.”

  When they dispersed, Jaime kept Patricia and Vidal back.

  “What are you thinking of doing with Milena when we find her?” she asked once they were alone.

  “It depends on what we discover about her time in Marbella. Milena could either be a major ace in the hole or a hot potato we need to get off our hands as quickly as possible. Everything suggests the pressure from Spain has ramped up in recent weeks, and something provoked that. Right now, we’re still in the dark.”

  “If we do find her, that doesn’t mean we have to turn her in to Bonso, does it?” Vidal asked.

  “We’ll do what’s best for everyone. With these things, you have to take your cue from your head and not your heart. We can’t discard the possibility that turning Milena in might be the only way to save Luis or even Claudia. I hope you’re aware of that. We won’t know until we’re certain who her protector is and why she was sent away. That’s the only way we’ll get a clear sense of what our options are and the risks each one involves.”

  Jaime gave Patricia additional instructions, and she left the room.

  “Let me tell you another thing about Milena. Call this lesson number three for you. Misfortune doesn’t make a person better, especially when it’s this extreme. Every victim is dangerous; tragedy makes them desperate.”

  Vidal imagined Milena at sixteen, frightened and raped by her captors, but he simply nodded his head at what Jaime said.

  “And me?” he asked “What should I do? Do I join one of the teams?”

  “Your job is not to let Rina out of your sight. Sooner or later, Luis will get in touch with her, and you need to be there to find out what he says. He turned off his phone, so we can’t trace him that way. Anyway, I think you and Rina have a lot to talk about.”

  “Yeah, I tried to get a sense of what’s pushing her, as you said. I think she’s disoriented. She’s looking for something to give meaning to her life, but she doesn’t know where to begin. She’s scared of lots of things.”

  “Very good. You’re going in the right direction. No one falls in love so fast unless there’s some kind of pressing need there. It’s not the person—your friend, in this case—but the longing for protection and purpose that’s attracting her to Luis. For her, he represents safety and certainty.”

  Vidal fell silent. How could he offer Rina safety and certainty?

  “You have a better chance than Luis at giving Rina what she’s looking for,” Jaime said. “Luis is always going to find his projects more important than people. You’re not like that: I can assure you that if you had been in the same situation as Luis at the cabin, you wouldn’t have run away with Milena. You would have gone back to Rina as soon as possible to try and protect her. Am I right?”

  “Obviously. Just thinking that Bonso could have taken her away makes me sick.”

  “You have to convince Rina that you’re her true ally.”

  “So I need to find out what Rina’s real needs are? That’s it? That’s how you make a person happy?”

  “No. There’s a difference between needs and desires. There are women who get married to take care of their needs, but most of them are driven to it by their desires. I can assure you that Rina is the second type. Figure out what she wants, even if she doesn’t know. When you do, she’s yours. Try to get her excited about her projects with Amelia; she could become a key collaborator. That’s a much more attractive path than playing second fiddle to Luis and his schemes. Over there, she’ll be in the shadows. Here, she’ll be a leader.”

  “And I’d be the one who opened that door for her,” Vidal said.

  “That’s right, and she’ll know she owes you for it. You have to be patient and delicate and get her to that point. Don’t criticize what she has with Luis; it could be over next week, anyway. All you need to do is bring the conversation around to the important contribution she could make as one of Amelia’s consultants.”

  “Rina will stay at home with her uncle these days and they look at me as part of the family. I can stay there the whole time, except nights. I’ll take her to a bookstore café so she can buy the books she needs for her work with Amelia.”

  “Right, but don’t forget your main job: finding Luis as soon as he gets in touch with you. Take a company car and also this,” Jaime said, removing a stack of bills from his wallet. “Don’t let her pay for anything.”

  When Vidal came back to see Rina, he was beaming with the confidence that comes from the keys to a powerful automobile and a few thousand pesos in hand. And more importantly, he had a plan to get his love back.

  She was in the reception area ready to go, just waiting for him to return.

  “I’m hungry as a wolf. Will you take me to breakfast?”

  “I’d love to. Have you had tortas de tamal? It’s carbs inside of more carbs, you won’t be hungry for days.”

  “Cool. I’ll call Amelia on the way. I left her hanging on the budget analysis. If she wants, I’ll go on to her office afterward.”

  Rina said nothing more and gazed at the phone in her hand. Neither she nor Vidal noticed the car that was following them.

  Them VI

  Me, I treat my whores great. They live like queens: they give me pleasure, I give them money. I mean, it’s not fortunes we’re talking about, but still, my wife would love to be able to afford the dresses I’ve seen on Romilia.

  Like everything in life, prostitution’s neither good nor bad on its own. I know men and women that work as domestics, and they get treated worse than whores. Juanita, the Ecuadorian girl who works for Juan Pedro, the guy with the hardware stores—she’s a slave to her bosses. Every week my wife tells me something new and terrible they’ve put her through. Even that bony teenage son of theirs is fucking her behind closed doors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the father was, too. They’ll end up knocking her up and then she’ll be out on her ass. She’d have been better off as a hooker; at least she’d be getting paid for it.

  I know brothels are creepy places and some women suffer like Job. But we didn’t stop digging up minerals because of abuses in the mines, did we? They freed the blacks, but they didn’t shut down the cotton plantations.

  Now that I think about it, it’s just a matter of regulation. Like on the plantations. If they introduced better working conditions, some oversight as far as sanitary conditions, and got ri
d of the bastard pimps exploiting the girls, it could be a legitimate business and everyone would be happy.

  Just like if she was a dentist, Romilia could have her little office where she’d see her clients and she could set the hours and the prices. And that way, just like you choose a doctor when you’re sick, you could choose the sex professional you liked best.

  Of course, they’d need someone to supervise them, take care of them, protect them, arrange things with the inspectors. Now that I think about it, I could set Romilia up: I charge her a commission and then she can pay off the initial investment in installments. She’d have to work a full day, otherwise my little angel tends to get offtrack. Four clients a day, six days a week would be fine, and in eighteen months she’d recoup the investment and operating costs. And if I managed to get some of her friends in, the economy of scale would allow better margins.

  That means the ideal service staff would consist of eight professionals, six on each shift and two to fill in when the chicks were on break or needed patching up.

  I’d have a generous marketing plan (commissions among the hospitality workers and servers in the neighborhood, advertising on the web and in local newspapers) and a budget for recruiting new candidates, because the turnover’s really high. Recruiting is highly specialized, so that means I’d have to outsource it. The easiest thing is to have a versatile inventory to address the various niche markets: mulatas, Northern Europeans, Africans, Latin Americans, and a couple of Spanish girls (maybe I could even bag the Ecuadorian for low-rent customers).

  After making a few notes in Excel, I come up with the following numbers:

  Income

  Six active workers per shift

  Twenty-four clients served per day minimum

  150 euros average per service

  3,600 euros per day

  108,000 euros per month operating at 100 percent

  54,000 euros per month operating at 50 percent

  Personnel expenses

  Base monthly salary: 1,000 euros

  Commission per client served: 10 percent

  Cumulative monthly salary per employee: 2,440 with four clients per day; 1,720 with two clients per day.

  Estimated monthly payroll and commissions: 13,760 to 19,550 euros

  Fixed costs

  Rent: 4,000

  Security (two guards): 3,000

  Equipment and supplies: 1,200

  Payment for inspectors and permissions: 5,000

  Medical and sanitary services: 1,500

  Accounting: 1,200

  Marketing: 5,000

  Miscellaneous operating expenses: 1,500

  Unforeseen expenses: 2,000

  Total expenses: 45,950 at 100% capacity, 39,760 at 50%

  That makes an operating profit between 14,240 and 62,048 per month. In other words, an EBITDA ranging from 26 percent and 57 percent, depending on the number of clients served. The initial investment and then some could be recouped within six months. I could even be generous with my employees and offer them incentives: a bonus for employee of the month, a prize for whoever has the highest customer satisfaction.

  A solid business. The only bad thing is, even if I got laid for free, I never liked sleeping with people from the office. I’d still need my Romilia.

  O.A. Financial Director

  of High-Speed Railways

  ‌43

  Luis and Milena

  Friday, November 14, 8:45 a.m.

  Luis and Milena couldn’t get warm all night, but they still didn’t embrace again, and barely spoke. It took them three hours to reach the road and a few more to reach the first few houses while they looked for a taxi. They went slowly, because Luis preferred to keep a certain distance from the road, away from where the vehicles passed; he knew that sooner or later their pursuers would take that same route to get back to Mexico City.

  When day broke, they stopped and rested on some rocks with their faces turned to the sun, desperate for warmth. They still had food, but their water had run out some time before. Thirst made them get moving again. At the first shop they came across, they bought bottles of water and asked where there was a taxi stand. The cashier recommended they catch a bus and told them where to find one. They walked a few blocks to a strange outcropping of miserable shacks. It was just one more of the villages built by illegal investment on the foothills of the mountain range, far from the hand of God or the government.

  Milena was surprised by the harshness of the poverty. Though it was cold, half the windows were just holes in makeshift walls of cardboard and brick. The streets were dust-covered grooves with nothing more to mark them off than the arbitrary arrangement of the houses on the hillside. An old woman and what looked like her grandson walked up the steep road carting buckets of water that seemed to tear at the shoulder joints of their filthy arms. Milena remembered a documentary about life in isolated African villages, scenes that she could imagine in indigenous zones but not on the outskirts of Mexico City, with its tall buildings and broad avenues.

  A half-hour later, they squeezed into a local bus headed into the city. Milena said she was happy that at least for a day, the kids went to school or to some park far away from the misery of their hovels. Luis decided not to tell her that many of them would spend their days at some intersection downtown selling trinkets or begging for spare change.

  Their stature and skin tone created a contrast with the rest of the passengers, and some of them stared. Luis hoped they’d pass for hikers. Standing up, compressed in the aisle, he was holding the backpack with his laptop between his and her bodies, like a young couple cradling their precious baby between their arms. And in a way, that’s what it was: because that computer held the key for resolving Milena’s dilemma, or at least Luis believed so. She liked that the other passengers took them for a couple in love, their only worry the potholes in the road that made them jump every few yards.

  Two hours later, close to the enormous Tasqueña metro station, he checked into the kind of hotel where no one asks questions or shows ID. He paid for three nights in cash. Milena still had almost nine thousand dollars in her bag, but their attempts to remain anonymous worked out well for her economically, because they were obliged to eat in cheap restaurants and cantinas. Luis wanted to leave right away for an internet café and start his offensive against Bonso, but the sleepless night and the long walk had taken a lot out of both of them. They took turns cleaning up in a shower that stank of other bodies and climbed into the bed to sleep. He left his clothes on, because of the cold in the room, he said, and she put on a long T-shirt she fished out of her bag. They slept the whole morning, back to back.

  At two in the afternoon, Luis woke up and observed his companion’s relaxed face and deep breaths as she slept. There was something virginal in the image before him: a vestal figure in the moment before sacrifice. It was hard for him to reconcile Milena’s face with the crimes he’d heard about the night before.

  He went through his pockets looking for a scrap of paper to leave a note before he left the room. When he didn’t find one, he opened the black book, the corner of which peeped out from Marina’s bag, resting on a chair. He started to tear out a sheet.

  “What are you doing?” he heard. The tone was hostile, distrustful.

  Luis showed Milena the piece of paper he had pulled out and put the notebook back in the bag.

  “I was going to leave you a note,” he said. “I’m going to look for a public place with internet. Now that you’re up, write down some of the names you told me yesterday. Rosado? Vila-Rojas? Do you remember the other Flamingos?”

  Milena’s withering gaze faded, and she got up and walked to the chair to flip through her notebook. Luis tried to avert his eyes from her body, looking at his backpack and going through the inside pockets to take out a pen.

  While Milena wrote, Luis went to wash his face. Then he went over her notes and prepared to leave.

  “I’m coming back around six. It would be best if you didn’t leave the room.
There’s still fruit in the bags. When I come back, I’ll take you to dinner. Sound good? On my way out, I’ll tell the front desk not to clean the room.”

  “Do you think they ever do?” she said with a cheeky laugh while her eyes swept across it. She was happy now. The scene felt so domestic: the husband leaving the house for a day at the office. Milena walked to the door and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll wait for you here. When you come back, we’ll have dinner and you can tell me about your progress. Will you bring me some newspapers? A book would be even better. I don’t want to be shut up in here with just a TV,” she said, looking at the junky set on the shelf. “If it even works,” she added with a grin.

  Luis passed by reception briefly, then out to the street. He had to talk to Rina as soon as possible.

  ‌44

  Tomás

  Friday, November 14, 11:00 a.m.

  They ate breakfast like there was no tomorrow: mango, mandarin-orange juice, eggs in salsa verde, coffee with pastries. Tomás liked to get up late and make breakfast his main meal of the day. Amelia preferred to start the day with something more frugal, and only went along with his gluttony on those long, relaxed Saturday brunches when both of them read the paper and gave their running commentary. Even though it was a Friday, she decided to stay with him longer than usual and put off her work at the office, considering their argument over Milena the night before.

  They didn’t revisit the theme in the morning. Emilio’s freedom still had Tomás elated, even if he was hungover. They compared the newspapers’ front pages, decided President Prida needed to make changes in his cabinet after the years of attrition, and remarked that Jaime seemed more like his famous father by the day. Amelia had been left shaken up by a nightmare involving Claudia, but all her worries dissipated as they ran down the pros and cons of various ministers and their possible replacements.