Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “What? That’s what he’s up to? How’s he thinking of doing that?”

  She decided it was better to stay quiet. Maybe she’d already said too much: she trusted Vidal absolutely, but he was too good a person. He’d be incapable of betraying her or Luis or of doing anything to harm them, but Jaime could get information out of him without his even realizing it. Rina appreciated what Lemus did, but she had to respect Luis’s instincts. If he didn’t want to share his plans, then she wouldn’t do so either.

  “No fucking idea. Hey, our coffees are getting cold, and the way we look right now, they’ll think we’re trying to leave without paying,” she said, and dragged him back to the table they had left.

  When they arrived at the PRD offices, Amelia was already waiting for them.

  “Rina! Look at all that’s happened since we last saw each other,” Amelia said, and hugged her.

  She had ordered sandwiches, coffee, and soft drinks that both of them turned down. Rina touched her belly again and remarked that she’d just miscarried.

  Amelia informed them that Emiliano was free and there was nothing else to fear there. Rina cheered and Vidal tried to show the same enthusiasm, though he’d already found out from Jaime that morning. He hadn’t wanted to share the news with Rina, thinking it would be best if she didn’t know he attended Lemlock’s planning meetings.

  Rina felt calmer. She took the news as a sign that the gang they were up against wasn’t as savage as the killers the mafia had hired to slaughter her family the year before. Vidal used this to argue in favor of Jaime and his ability to handle the criminals.

  Rina decided to spend the next few hours studying the budget proposal in Amelia’s meeting room. Vidal used the time to visit Rina’s aunt and uncle’s house and ask her cousin, Violeta, for a change of clothes for her, but he didn’t dare mention she’d also asked him to pick up some pads. He preferred blushing in the pharmacy while he asked for a box of Kotex. Rina was impassive in her tone when she asked for them, as if she was talking about a tube of toothpaste. He didn’t know the codes of conduct of girls of his age: that was something that was never talked about at his house. Back at the office, Vidal put together a Spotify playlist for Rina, and she found it perfect background music for her work.

  “Vidal, I’m going to stay here the rest of the afternoon. If you want, we can see each other tonight at my uncle’s place. You must have stuff to do in the meantime, right?”

  “You’re what I have to do right now. As long as Milena and Luis are on the run, they might need us. It’s better if we stay together. Besides, I’m making headway on a piece of software Luis and I have been working on. So don’t worry about me.”

  Rina kept looking at him, thinking she’d been ungrateful those past few days. She walked to the other end of the long meeting table, hugged him like a sister, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  “You’re a doll.”

  He tried to get up and almost tripped and fell. By the time he was standing, she was already walking back to the other end of the table.

  Vidal’s excitement came in part from the physical contact, especially because she was the one who’d initiated it, and also because he’d had to rush to cover the screen so she wouldn’t see the report he was writing for Jaime.

  Slowly he calmed down. It seemed Rina hadn’t seen anything. Still, the scene made him feel like a traitor once more, especially now.

  Later that afternoon, Amelia returned to the meeting room and the two women talked about the budget documents. Vidal went out to the hallway to make a call to Lemlock.

  “What do you think of Jaime?” Rina asked when she noticed Vidal was gone.

  Amelia looked at her closely.

  “In what sense? As a friend, consultant, best man at a wedding?”

  “Gross! Best man!” Rina protested with a cackle. “I think I’d rather not get married. No, I’m asking you, in a way, for Milena. He seems very interested in rescuing her and protecting her. Vidal trusts him completely, and Luis doesn’t trust him one bit. In fact, it’s the opposite.”

  “Well, they’re both right. There are moments when you can’t turn down Jaime’s help. Other times, it’s better to think twice. His assistance always comes with a price tag, and sooner or later, he’ll make you pay up.”

  “And when he supports you, is he trying to help you or use you?”

  “That’s a question that you could ask about everyone, isn’t it?”

  Amelia recognized that what she had said was closer to Jaime’s cynicism than to the idealism she once had. Her time in the world of professional politics had made her vision of life more bitter.

  “Even in the support you get from your family, there’s a tacit agreement of reciprocity,” she continued. “Maybe using you isn’t the best way to describe what somebody expects when they do you a favor, but there’s always a personal motivation. Every Samaritan has his reasons for getting off the road to help a stranger.”

  Rina wasn’t convinced. She didn’t think benevolence needed an explanation. She didn’t know why she wanted to help Milena, but she didn’t need to invent a justification. But there was one thing Amelia was right about: Jaime was far from altruistic in the services he offered.

  “It’s something I’ll have to resolve alone, no?” she said.

  “Jaime? Yeah, but I think Luis and Milena have a place in that, too. Don’t take that responsibility on yourself.”

  She was going to reply, but Vidal’s return interrupted her.

  ‌47

  Jaime

  Saturday, November 15, 10:30 a.m.

  Instead of heading a team meeting he had called his staff to Saturday morning, Jaime was eating breakfast with Tomás in front of Parque México.

  “I’m not saying we should do it, but if we want to fulfill Emiliano and Claudia’s wishes, do you think it could be done?” Tomás asked.

  “Wait, are you telling me to take charge of assassinating the Turk?” Jaime responded, unable to suppress a smile.

  “It’s just a hypothetical scenario,” Tomás responded, his eyes not shifting from the tablecloth.

  “Of course it can be done,” Jaime said, restraining himself. “That’s not the problem.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “According to Bonso’s code, and the code of those above him, revenge multiplies exponentially. You answer a broken finger with a broken arm; you kill one of their guys, they leave six of yours with their throats slit. The death of a valued enforcer they’ll punish by wiping out their rival’s family. What I mean is yeah, you can get rid of the Turk, but you have to be ready for the war that comes afterward.”

  Tomás fell silent. The ethical fine points were minor compared with the violent consequences.

  “It’s not worth it,” he said.

  “Wait, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. You just have to find a way for others to get the blame. It’s complicated, but it’s doable.”

  “Let me talk to Claudia again first. Then I’ll get in touch.”

  “Sure. In the meantime, we’ll set up a security protocol for the newspaper’s offices. Now that I’ve been there, I see it has tons of holes in it.”

  “I’m worried about Rina, Luis, and Vidal. Bonso and the bastards he runs with know Milena was in Rina’s house. Claudia’s exposed as well.”

  “Claudia’s security isn’t bad, it’s the same as her father had, though I can go over their procedures. I’m keeping an eye on Rina and Vida, even if they don’t know it. There’s nothing we can do about Luis, he’s on his own. The one who worries me is you. You’re the most vulnerable piece in the puzzle. That driver you’ve got is fucking worthless, not to mention he never shuts his damn mouth.”

  Tomás asked himself how the hell Jaime knew about Silvano’s chattiness, but he let the comment slide. Anyway, his friend was right; if they wanted vengeance, he was the ideal victim. And yet surrounding himself with a security detail didn’t seem a viable possibility at this point in his life. It wo
uld mean giving up freedoms and taking on the symbols of a status he had always struggled against. For now, he would have to convince his daughter, Jimena, to leave the city, and for that, he’d have to speak with his ex-wife.

  They said goodbye as on so many other occasions. They both felt a vague mutual contempt mixed with a slightly sick fascination with one another.

  At the Lemlock morning meeting, Jaime’s team had a profile of Bonso’s gang, the addresses of a number of his houses, the webpages he operated and the intermediaries he used to produce and distribute pornography. It was good information for an ambush, if it ever came to that, but none of it suggested where the Romanian might be. Apparently, he had abandoned his routines and wasn’t showing up at the usual places.

  There was one minor step forward with respect to Víctor Salgado. He was cozy with the coordinator of the PRI senators and had ties to three governors whose chiefs of security he might have procured in Tamaulipas, Michaocán, and Colima, territories infested with drug cartels. But there was little information related to the financial circuits and the money laundering the ex-director of prisons was wrapped up in.

  Milena’s location was still a mystery, and Jaime was furious. Luis had done a good job of disappearing somewhere in Mexico City, and he only hoped he was as hard to find for Salgado and his people, too. At least Jaime had the advantage of monitoring the umbilical cord Vidal and Rina represented for the two fugitives.

  On the most important point, there had been no progress whatsoever. The Interpol dossier on Bonso they had gotten hold of through back channels showed innumerable run-ins with the Spanish authorities, but all minor, nothing that led to Milena or Alka Moritz. Jaime had the best team of hackers in the country, but they didn’t know who else to look for, or where, in the European files. It was still impossible to know what made the Croatian so important for the criminals.

  At 12:40, Patricia burst into the office.

  “Thanks to Vidal, the knot’s coming unraveled,” she said.

  Lemus had asked for a fifth line of investigation: tapping into Luis’s work sessions. Though his friend used a great deal of security, Vidal showed them the methods he used to erase his tracks and some of the accounts he used to receive messages. A few times, Vidal had hit on his codes for accessing the inner circle of Anonymous, the international organization of hackers and cyberactivists. He wasn’t an active member, but he had collaborated with them on attacks in the past.

  With that information, Lemlock’s team, led by Mauricio Romo, was able to find traces of Luis’s steps on the Net those past few hours. They saw he’d posted a request on the Anonymous message board to investigate a certain Agustín Vila-Rojas, whom he accused of using the web to launder enormous quantities of money coming from the Ukrainian mafia in Spain. Anonymous was usually interested in anything that concerned online criminal activity, but for now, Luis was only asking for documentation in the case. Thanks to the passwords Vidal had provided them, they found that one of his aliases had been used to access various pages in the Darknet linked to human trafficking.

  Lemlock’s operatives perused the pages Luis had visited and were unsurprised to find they were the same ones employed by Bonso and his hangers-on.

  Excited by these discoveries, Jaime gave his hackers new instructions. The best ones should concentrate on searching for any and everything related to Agustín Vila-Rojas and the Ukrainian mafia in Spain. From the little Víctor Salgado had said, it was obvious that Milena had been close to someone powerful in the money-laundering world. He assumed Luis had gotten Vila-Rojas’s name directly from her. A few keystrokes confirmed they were on the right track: Vila-Rojas was a highly regarded finance lawyer in Marbella.

  Lemus slowly examined the face on the screen. He liked it: a rival cut from the same cloth. The mystery of Milena finally had a face.

  ‌48

  Luis and Milena

  Sunday, November 16, 2:00 p.m.

  Milena’s memory was remarkable, Luis thought as he watched her transcribing information on her clients: physical traits, the use of some characteristic phrase, the layout of the room, the song she heard an afternoon two years before. Luis had asked her to make an effort to remember everything she could about the Flamingos. When he came back that Saturday night, she handed him a handful of pages torn from her notebook. After going over them, he realized very little of what was there would help him tracking the crime syndicate from the Costa del Sol. He consoled himself thinking that at least it had kept her busy during the hours when she was shut up.

  But still he picked up on the names of people and businesses here and there and decided to underline a few promising bits. Absorbed in his reading, he began to see the parade of bodies, the nightlife and its ephemeral pleasures, the human race reduced to the single instant when it satisfied its longings. There were no adjectives, but no concessions either: just a redoubtable description starting with some pregnant detail, a revealing phrase. All together, it was a unique and ruthless portrait of the prostitution trade.

  Luis realized that, in their own way, Milena’s observations constituted a fresh insider’s perspective of a sordid world to which, at times, she seemed not to belong. He assumed Milena had survived by disconnecting herself from that life, and maybe that was why it was hard for him to imagine her in a brothel or a bar. During their long conversation the previous night, before bed, Milena had spoken of her village as if she’d just left it yesterday. She told him of the scent of the chrysanthemums flanking the tombs in the cemeteries, the rough cloth of the school uniform, the basketball hoop that never got used. But he couldn’t situate her in those stories as a teenage girl from the village either. For ten years, Milena had lived in the bubble of her readings, her vocabulary was extensive and literary, and she could transport herself more easily than he to a Siberian landscape, or understand the many different varieties of jealousy.

  But at other points in the conversation, she showed that, far from being emotionally distant, as she sometimes seemed, she was devoured from within by a deep resentment against those responsible for her tragedy. A part of her wanted to escape and forget. Another was determined to get vengeance.

  That Sunday morning, they went to a street market to buy fruit and some clothes for him, and they had breakfast at a long table with benches in an outdoor cantina. Milena had never been in one, and the explosion of colors and scents fascinated her. She asked the names of the unknown fruits and vegetables, dazzled to see them for the first time.

  Then they walked two blocks to get her newspapers. As her interest in the press grew, she seemed to be searching for something. At first, he thought it had to do with Amelia, whom Milena had seen in one of the newspapers he brought her that first day. In an interview, the PRD leader had pushed for a stricter law against human trafficking. The Croatian had commented admiringly on Amelia’s arguments.

  But as the days passed, he realized Milena’s interest wasn’t confined to local news. Now she was asking him for newspapers he couldn’t always get hold of in the working-class neighborhoods he was moving through. Once in a while, she asked him to do a Google search on what was going on in Ukraine and she would read on the screen for a while.

  “What does Croatia have to do with Ukraine?” he had asked the night before. “Do you have relatives there?”

  “None. But the Ukrainian mafia in Marbella is powerful and it’s split into two groups I knew well.”

  “And what’s going on in Ukraine affects them?”

  “A lot. One of the two groups is close to the pro-Russian president who left the country in February. The other isn’t. My guess is how this all turns out will change things in Marbella, at least among the mafias.”

  Luis remembered vaguely the news he’d read at the beginning of the year about the pharaonic luxury the former president had lived in. Apparently he was just a puppet of Putin’s. He recalled the images from television of the people running through the palatial chambers and artificial lakes after the escape of the leader
who was now taking refuge in Moscow.

  He knew Milena was still hiding something about her former life, but he didn’t want to pressure her. Especially not now, when she seemed newly reborn just forty-eight hours after wanting to throw herself in front of the metro.

  Luis knew they were running an unnecessary risk by showing themselves at the market or walking down the street looking for newspapers, but Milena was content and calmer with their new life. When she saw that he was enjoying it, too, she couldn’t help but feel a hint of confusion.

  Again, they had slept back-to-back, but this time he’d stripped down to his underwear and T-shirt. Unlike the first night, it was hard for him to get to sleep. He couldn’t relax with Milena’s body inches away. When he woke up, she had an arm around his torso and her breath was tickling his neck.

  But he had to recognize that after the incident in the forest, she had avoided any gesture that might be interpreted as an attempt at seduction. She went into the bathroom fully clothed, showered, and dressed again before coming back out.

  In the morning, while she washed up and he tried to concentrate on something else besides the sound of the water and her body covered in soap, he thought about Rina and the only shower they had shared together. Then he let himself go, feeling the warm certainty that came whenever he thought of Rina. He remembered, more than anything, the sensation of being exactly in the right place when he was with her. But there wasn’t much material to feed his memories; he’d spent more hours with Milena than with the girl he was in love with. He told himself that the situation shouldn’t go on much longer.

  When he made it to a café that afternoon, the long session at the computer helped him leave any emotional dalliance behind. He was so focused on his investigation that he barely heard the alarm that told him he’d spent ninety minutes on the same connection at Gloria Jean’s Coffee. He’d made a map of twelve places that offered free public Wi-Fi, and he shifted among them every hour and a half. It was an additional security measure beyond the firewalls and passwords that already protected him.