Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “And how are you going to tie Emiliano to those mafias? You can’t let out that it was payback for Milena,” Jaime objected.

  “There’s no need to,” Tomás responded. “We can say El Mundo was preparing an investigation into the subject and we received pressure from the mafias that made us call it off. Without accusing them directly, we could say we had a profile of Bonso and Salgado as representative parties in those networks.”

  “It’s not bad, but you’re talking all-out war,” Jaime warned. “You think you can handle the backlash?”

  “Do it,” Claudia said to Tomás.

  “Plus, this will make it harder for Prida’s government to pass the buck,” Amelia said. “With the eyes of the international media on Mexico, a second attack against a paper as important as El Mundo won’t slide.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Jaime said doubtfully. He didn’t like the frontal approach. They’d be at the mercy of their rivals’ reactions, and those were impossible to predict. Further, their plan would render him unnecessary. “In the meantime, I’ll keep investigating Vila-Rojas. That might get us a permanent solution,” he said, getting up to go.

  Impatient, Tomás got up as well and announced he would call a reunion of the editorial team to work nonstop on a cover.

  Suddenly, Amelia and Claudia found themselves alone for the first time. They looked at each other warily: Claudia with a timid smile, Amelia with feigned camaraderie. Neither dared to speak of what was really going through their heads. Amelia would have liked to say that she knew about her and Tomás’s little games, and add that she didn’t own anyone and that Tomás was old enough to decide what he wanted, but she didn’t. In the old days, she would have: anything was better than passing for a typical spurned girlfriend, the last one to find out about her man’s infidelities. She said nothing because she understood the truth, that the issue was between Tomás and her, and was no cause for conflict between women. If he left her or cheated on her, it wasn’t Claudia’s fault.

  Claudia would have liked to say that she and the journalist had become a professional duo, that they liked each other and that was all. She could have taken Amelia’s hand and asked her not to confuse their companionship with something else. That would have made her feel generous, and also terrible about herself. Before, she would have done it, but not now. She’d decided she wouldn’t be dishonest. The life she’d led until a few weeks ago was shattered, and she couldn’t close the door to the new life Tomás might offer her.

  The two women stood in silence, gave each other a kiss on the cheek, and separated. Amelia walked a few feet and then retraced her steps, deciding to say what she should have said before.

  “I know you think you have a right to the black book and you’ve said no one can open it before you. You also want to be the first and only one to talk to Milena. I want to believe it’s out of respect for your father, but people are dead, and it seems obvious the cause isn’t her, but whatever’s in her notebook. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be knocking down walls everywhere they go. That’s why I’m saying we have to find her and figure out what the notebook contains. I don’t work for you and I’m not here to follow your orders.”

  Claudia was stunned by Amelia’s bluntness. After a moment, she managed to recover.

  “They’re neither rules nor orders, Amelia. And I’m sorry you’ve taken it like that. It was just a courtesy on Tomás’s and Jaime’s part. Let’s do what we have to do to keep this from leading to more deaths. I’m not your enemy.”

  No, but you are my rival, Amelia thought.

  “So it is, then. If I find out what’s in the notebook, you’ll be the first person I call.”

  “My infinite thanks.”

  The women separated again. This time, there was no kiss on the cheek.

  Them VII

  There’s no woman as grateful as a reformed hooker. I know, because I married one. That life raked Augusta over the coals so bad, all I had to do was show her a little care and sincerity.

  At first, she didn’t believe me, even though I took flowers to every date and wrote her love poems. I even refused to keep making love to her at the brothel: all I needed was to rest my head on her chest and let her play with my hair. The truth is, it’s not the sex that attracts me to whores, it’s the romance. What’s the charm in falling in love with a woman in an office or a café? Zero. They’re all on the prowl for a husband, or at least a man that’ll put them up.

  With a hooker, things are more honest. It’s a transaction, it doesn’t aspire to being anything else, just the satisfaction of a need: pleasure in exchange for cash. The challenge is to find true love there where it’s for sale.

  I understood Augusta’s objections from the beginning. Some guys go to them to mend a broken heart, guys with no balls that end up falling for a whore because she offers them words of consolation. These are dupes mistreated by some impossible love, still stinging from past rejections, and they mistake a caress for real passion. All the pros have been through that. They know behind the bouquets of flowers and the devoted lamb eyes there’s a sad son of a bitch who will eventually throw their past in their face or ditch them when he finally comes across a “pure” woman.

  But I overcame her resistance and after a year of courting her, I was able to convince her my love was real. I paid what she owed Fulgencio, the owner of the place, and we got married on December 29, the anniversary of my mother’s death. She was a saint.

  Since then, she’s been devoted to me. She learned to cook the way I like, she changed how she dressed, she waited for me to come home like a faithful hound posted at the front door. No husband’s ever gotten the kind of loyalty Augusta gave me.

  But something broke. I started asking myself if behind that affection there wasn’t some kind of desperate effort to suppress nostalgia for her past. When she was silent, it was like I could hear her humming the music in those dives where she used to work. How could she treat me that way, after all I’d done for her?

  As you can imagine, I had to stop making love to her. I didn’t want her comparing me to the thousands of clients who’d been between her legs. And when she told me one time she’d like it if I’d take her dancing somewhere, I understood the gutter has a stronger pull than love. Next week I have a meeting with Don Fulgencio.

  J.I. Owner of Sierra Morena

  Construction, the second most

  important builder in Andalusia

  ‌52

  Rina, Vidal, Luis, and Milena

  Monday, November 17, 8:20 p.m.

  Luis was chanting “Love Me Two Times” by the Doors, walking back to the hotel he and Milena had started to see as their temporary home. He had a baguette under his arm and a bag with cheese and wine for dinner, and on his back, his satchel with his laptop. But more importantly, his laptop contained the help he’d solicited from his friend Bad Girl in Spain. The little he’d been able to glance at was more than promising. She’d broken through all of Vila-Rojas’s security features and figured out some of the avatars he used to connect with Russian-speaking contacts. Maybe Milena could understand some of their transactions. Judging by the few amounts he could decipher, the lawyer was moving an impressive amount of cash. That afternoon, he would send Bad Girl’s report to Anonymous.

  But for now, he was only thinking of the evening ahead of him. As on previous nights, they would eat from the wide window ledge that faced what would have been a depressing view in other circumstances: an anodyne street flanked with old buildings with flaking walls. But on those cold nights in the shadows, they shared memories, dreams, and frustrations in a way that is only possible under extraordinary circumstances.

  It seemed to him that Milena had become another person. She would recite some story from her village or an anecdote about Bonso’s brothel as if they had nothing to do with her. Luis felt there was more of her in the novels she talked about than in the years she had spent in Marbella, even in Jastrebarsko.

  The night before, they had made love fo
r the first time. They went to bed without touching, as before, but after those long confessions at the windowsill, something seemed to have changed. Lying faceup, they listened to each other’s breathing in the darkness, and they guessed, more than felt, the heat and the weight of the other’s body on the mattress they shared. Intimacy had grown over the previous days, and Luis’s excitement mounted. Before realizing it, he turned over and laid his hand on her stomach. He felt her stiffen in the darkness, like an animal hearing a sound in the distance and waiting motionless for the next one to come.

  “We’re just passing through each other’s lives, Milena. Let’s live in the moment.”

  “Rina…”

  “Rina’s still with us, and in a way, she and I are just passing through as well.”

  She said nothing, then turned and kissed him. They lost themselves in a long embrace and her hands began to slide over his body. There was something virginal in the way she explored him, as if it was the first time she cared to know what a man’s body was made of.

  When he touched her firm breasts, Luis realized there wasn’t a condom in sight, but when he penetrated her, any considerations beyond that total, savage frenzy were pushed aside.

  Over and over that next day, the memory of her jumping out of the bed naked that morning came back to him. The embrace the night before had been all flesh, heat, torpor, but in the light of day, the innate elegance of her movements was hard to forget. She exuded sexuality, but also aesthetic refinement.

  Luis told himself that today, they would do what they had done almost anonymously, and sometimes clumsily, the night before, but unhurried and in the daylight. If intimacy with Milena was going to be unique, without any follow-up chapters, he wanted at least to remember it fully.

  The excitement Luis felt at the evening before him vanished when he saw the headline on the newspaper at the kiosk: “Deputy Director of El Mundo Executed.” He bought a copy and read that Emiliano Reyna had been shot twice in the face when he opened the door to his home. He wondered if the unexpected reprisal had something to do with his digital harassment of Bonso or his investigations into Vila-Rojas’s businesses. Whatever the case, the news hinted that all of them were in much greater danger than he had thought. If, from fear or prudence, Claudia and the Blues gave up the fight, they would also give Milena up.

  He decided to call Rina, even though she was just six blocks from their hotel. He would have preferred to go further and call her from a public phone, but the matter was urgent.

  “Hey, babe. I just found out about the murdered journalist. Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m about to leave Amelia’s office. Vidal’s here now, he’s insisting I not go to my uncle’s to sleep, he wants me to stay at Lemlock, like on the first day. What do you think?”

  “You know what I think of Lemlock, but this time it’s probably for the best. It’s just a precaution, I think you’ll be safe there. But what worries me is the travel in between.”

  “Jaime assigned Vidal a couple of bodyguards, so I’ll be okay. How are you? How’s Milena? Is she feeling hemmed in?”

  Luis swallowed.

  “She stays shut up inside while I work all day. She’s fine.”

  “Tell her she better not think I’ve forgotten about those Croatian recipes, and that one day we’ll laugh about all this while she teaches us to cook them, all right?”

  “Yep. Be safe and stay out of sight. I hope this is all over soon. Bye.”

  For the next few blocks, the warmth of Rina’s voice enveloped him like a cloud, along with the memory of the intimacy and trust he’d felt with her from the beginning. There was something real there, and nothing could change that. The thought calmed him.

  Before he went to the room, he stopped to reflect for a few seconds. He was afraid Milena would take Emiliano as another death that was her fault, one more reason to disappear or, even worse, to end her own life. But he decided to tell her anyway: he couldn’t treat his companion in flight like a teenager, and he didn’t want to hide information the way Jaime did, using it to play with others’ lives.

  Milena had an agenda that evening as well. Knowing each night could be her last, she wanted this one to be like no other. She had already told Luis about her crimes. Now she wanted to share her hopes for Tales of the XY Chromosome. It was the only project she’d ever undertaken with an eye to the future, the only trace her passage through the world would leave behind once she was gone. She had told Claudia and Rina of the stories’ existence, but as if they were nothing special, a mere diversion. She was afraid they might think she was naïve or ignorant, but with Luis she didn’t want to keep secrets.

  She wanted to unveil to him the true purpose of those notes: to leave a testimony of what the men who paid for prostitutes were really like. If it wasn’t for them, her name would still be Alka. She had seen how many fellow sex workers had been ground up by the inexorable machinery of the pimps and their clients. Bringing attention to Tales of the XY Chromosome would give a meaning to the awful trap life had set for her, and she hoped it would harm those who had abused her as well. She would have preferred to give their complete names rather than initials, but she was afraid it could keep her work from getting published.

  When they finally met again in the hotel room, Milena read a cooling of Luis’s feelings for her in his change of mood, but he dispelled those doubts when he told her about Emiliano Reyna’s execution.

  Milena seemed neither surprised nor disheartened by the news. She knew perfectly well what her pursuers were capable of. Time with Luis and the long conversations they’d shared had convinced her that she wasn’t responsible for the deaths her escape brought about. Emiliano and whoever else fell were victims of the same force of destiny that had upturned her own existence.

  Anyway, the journalist’s execution confirmed what she already knew: that there was no way out, that she was living her last days, and that she should make sure they were as intense as possible. She agreed with Luis that they should stay hidden at all costs. She asked him to uncork the bottle of wine, then took her notebook out and started reading. That night, Milena had the first orgasm of her life that a man hadn’t had to die for.

  Seven miles away, Rina and Vidal were also spending a night together, but with little romance and no sex at all. She was too worried about the danger Luis was in to pay attention to Vidal’s efforts to distract her.

  “Now, when people talk in the bars, it’s not ‘Are you working or studying?’ It’s ‘Apple or Android? Facebook or Twitter? Spotify or Blind?’”

  “In New York it was ‘cat person or dog person,’” she said, just to keep him from feeling let down.

  “So are you a cat or dog person?”

  “I’m someone dying to get some sleep,” she said, bored, and took off the jacket Vidal had offered her an hour before, when they left Amelia’s office. But when she saw his needy face, she felt bad. “Thanks a million. I’ve got a sweater in my suitcase you brought over from my uncle’s,” she said and handed the jacket back to him. “Thanks a million for everything, Vidal,” she repeated, and gave him a goodnight kiss on the cheek.

  “You don’t have to say thanks for anything, Rina. You know I’m your best friend.”

  “I know.”

  Idiot, he said to himself when he was alone, his cheek still burning from the kiss. You don’t want to be her best friend, you want to be her boyfriend, he thought.

  “Vidal, can you come to my office?” Jaime said through the speaker of the cell phone in his shirt pocket.

  He jumped up, and wondered what other tricks were built into the phone his uncle had given him.

  “We’ve found Luis,” Jaime said as soon as Vidal set foot in his office.

  ‌53

  Jaime

  Monday, November 17, 11:00 p.m.

  The last call Rina had received, three hours before, was the key to triangulating Luis’s position. Presumably Milena was with him.

  They had run the various payphone call
s through their geolocation program and found that all had been made near a certain underground station. The software, a program devised to optimize online deliveries for products throughout the city, identified Tasqueña as the likely epicenter for his travels.

  The previous calls had been made from the phone booths around different metro stops, and once or twice from inside the station, but the last time he’d used a public phone five blocks away from Tasqueña. Lemlock’s team took this as confirmation that he was going to the different stops with the sole purpose of calling her, but this time he hadn’t bothered to catch public transport to look for a phone far from where he was staying.

  When Jaime read the transcript of Luis’s dialogue with Rina from that night, he saw why he’d been incautious. He’d just found out about Emiliano’s murder and was more worried about getting in touch with his girlfriend.

  Patricia had left two hours before with six detectives with fake badges and portraits of Luis and Milena, the Croatian’s photo altered so her hair appeared black. Starting from the last phone he’d used, they dispersed through the area and interrogated the staff at the small restaurants and taverns. Patricia and a colleague checked out the eight hotels in the search perimeter.

  Jaime was explaining to Vidal the procedure they’d followed to localize Luis when the call came in from Patricia: they were in room 312 of the Hotel Michoacán. Milena apparently almost never left the room, the person on duty said, but the boy who was with her came and went all day.

  Patricia told her boss she had reserved two rooms: 311, which was next door, and another on the ground floor. She’d quietly put two agents in the first one, and the rest of them would be in the one at street level. Two of Lemlock’s detectives would post guard fifteen yards from the entrance.