Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “That’s not going to happen. The people in there have enough ammunition to negotiate with Marbella. After that, we’ll all be free.”

  Bonso turned to look at Jaime, considered his strength and poise, and thought Milena could be right. The implications threw him off. As if he could no longer conceive a life apart from the one he’d been living in recent days.

  “I’ll have to talk to Vila-Rojas,” he said. “I don’t take orders from whores.”

  “Talk to whoever you want. You won’t see me again.”

  “Don’t get clever. If what you’re saying is true, all that means is you’ll be mine again. You belong to me. When your contract with Vila-Rojas is up, you’ll be back on the team. No more privileges, princess. You’ll have to shake your ass again.” Bonso seemed revived from listening to his own voice.

  Milena realized that according to the pimp’s code, nothing had changed. She’d never be out from under the yoke of exploitation. In fact, things had gotten worse. The stories of some of her clients in the black book reverberated in her mind. Fury did the rest.

  She leapt up, grabbed Bonso by the armpits, and raised him up to her chin. His body was light, much more fragile than she’d thought. Luis had gotten distracted, trying to hear something Jaime was saying. Everything took place in an instant. She marched the two yards to the balcony’s edge, legs spread like someone toting a large pot of boiling water, took a breath, and threw him over the edge. Kicking and thrashing, Bonso fell backward, shrieking like an angry baby in its crib, until his head struck the pavement sixty feet below. Luis made it to Milena’s side in time to see the red blot diffusing over the gray of the sidewalk.

  Milena looked up into the midday sun, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. After a few seconds, she looked at Jaime, who’d rushed out.

  “Where is the Turk?”

  Them X

  Something has changed in Milena. I don’t know if it’s the black hair beneath her blonde wig or the way she moves. Her gestures and words aren’t the same as before, when she was there without being there, when she used to sit in those rooms trying to make her body undetectable. Or maybe it’s her slight Mexican accent that makes her different. Tropical words, sweet, musical, even if her face still looks steely. “Let’s go chat in my room,” she whispered after we met in the bar. “I have something that will interest you. About Yasha Boyko.”

  I didn’t want to see her. When Jaime Lemus told me she was also staying at the London Park Majestic and that she wanted to tell me something about the Ukrainians, my first reaction was to make an excuse and keep my distance. The last thing I wanted was a bunch of whining and recrimination. But my meeting with the Mexican put me in a good mood. If half of what he says is true, those investments on North America’s doorstep could be a golden opportunity. And Lemus seems like a straight shooter, according to all we’ve found out. The file he handed off to me shows it. The goddamn Yankees know more than I thought. In the end, curiosity about the Kattel family got the best of me. Yasha never told me what his phone calls with Milena were about, but they must have been important if he kept saying that she had to be under strict watch. Lemus is asking for Milena’s freedom in exchange for keeping a lid on the information from Moscow. If we’re in business, I need to look her in the face and make sure she’ll keep mum.

  We went up in the elevator and didn’t utter a word. I just took a step back and looked at her. I wanted to find the keys to unlock that unknown person. Even her clothing now has nothing to do with what she used to wear in Marbella. A wide-brimmed hat, big sunglasses, and a short gray designer dress, tailored—completely vulgar.

  I don’t like this Milena. She doesn’t drink in my words, she doesn’t follow my gestures like before. Her face doesn’t change with the inflection of my voice. But I can barely contain the excitement she provokes. The feeling is unexpected, uncomfortable. I follow her into the room and rush to sit down in the only chair so she knows I’m not there to take off her clothes. I try and take a harsh tone with her, but my erection works against me. She looks at my crotch, and her face shows no reaction. But she sits on the bed, stretches out her arm until she reaches the open bottle of champagne chilling on the nightstand, and her fingers wrap around the neck and caress the gilded paper before folding it down. She fills a glass, walks over, and hands it to me. I’m surprised by the savage urgency of my hands longing to grasp her waist. The memory of possessing her in the past is no consolation for the desperate craving blinding me now. I empty the glass and am thankful for the tickle of bubbles on my dry throat.

  She goes back to the bed and serves herself one. She starts speaking before she drinks.

  “The only thing I wanted was for my femur not to be used as a sword.”

  I see how the long muscles in her thighs tense when she crosses her legs, and think, that must be the most beautiful femur in the world. She starts telling some story about a Germanophile grandfather and a restaurant in Berlin. I can barely hear her with the bubbles now bursting in my head. I try to remember what I drank with the Mexican, and how much. From where I sit, I can see she hasn’t drunk a drop. Something isn’t right.

  Milena keeps talking, but now she’s started unbuttoning her dress down the front. I know I should do something to rouse myself, get off the chair that’s imprisoning me, but I can only watch, hypnotized, while her dress slips slowly off her, gliding past her hips.

  I try to get up, not knowing if I want to touch her flesh or escape the room and leave behind this feeling of danger. My muscles fail, I try to say something, but my tongue is like a wooden spatula. Milena towers over me in her stiletto heels and underwear. She bends over to pull down my pants; my hard-on hasn’t gone away. I look at my swollen dick for a minute before she straddles me and I see it disappear inside her. We come together easily. The brief feeling of intimacy is interrupted when she utters what she’s really come to tell me.

  “I helped you eliminate the ones who threatened you, who threatened your comfort. Today, you’ll do the same for me. You’re the only one who keeps me in the past. Today, I’m here to free myself. I’m doing it the way you taught me. I’m fucking you so I can kill you, Agustín.”

  She says it gently, her warm breath on my ear sending waves of pleasure down my spine, even if her words are horrible. I understand what she’s saying, and for some reason, it doesn’t alarm me. Maybe it’s the tranquilizer that’s paralyzing me, or maybe the sensations in my groin. I concentrate what’s left of my strength on penetrating her, a last act of resistance that ends in surrender when I come inside her.

  Milena pulls away from my embrace, and that’s when I see the tears in her eyes and the syringe in her hand. She places her other hand at the base of my dick and squeezes until she finds a thick vein, makes the injection, and walks away.

  Moments later, my breathing grows labored and the room starts to go blurry. Even so, I can make her out, now fully dressed, walking toward the door. She turns and contemplates me. It’s impossible to speak. I try to project the depth of my hatred with my eyes, but weariness overcomes me, and the feeling of ridicule when I imagine myself in a shirt, cufflinks, and a tie, but nude from the waist down, legs splayed and a syringe hanging out of my limp cock. She smiles and a look I’ve never seen before crosses her face. It’s not the Milena from before. Then she turns and disappears from my life. Along with everything else.

  Agustín Vila-Rojas,

  Lawyer, Granada

  ‌Epilogue

  Everyone

  Tuesday, November 25

  It was Milena herself who told Jaime, sitting beside him on the return flight from London to Mexico, about Agustín Vila-Rojas dying of cardiac arrest a few hours before. The news hit the Lemlock director with the force of a hammer. When he left the Spanish lawyer, still alive, at the London Park Majestic, he thought he’d built an alliance that would put his ambitious plans for Mexico into motion. Full of regret, he figured that possibility was now gone forever. Could Milena have had something to do w
ith his death?

  But then she pulled him out of his nightmare. It took her a few hours on that long flight, but in the end, she convinced him that her proposal was even better than an alliance with Vila-Rojas.

  On Monday night, at Lemlock’s offices in Mexico City, Milena called Yasha and told him about his money man’s betrayal. There was more than enough proof. Esteban Porter, who was still in Marbella, sent an email with fragments of Anonymous’s report on Vila-Rojas and Olena’s dealings with each other, and she passed these along as well. More important still, she sent him the news that would come out the next day in El Mundo, and afterward in the international press, about the conspiracy between Moscow and members of the Russo-Ukrainian community in Marbella. Milena exaggerated Jaime’s merits in the discovery of the plot and then passed the phone over to Lemus.

  Yasha was stunned by the revelations, but thought he could make a clean escape if he took advantage of the time difference between the continents. He had Tuesday morning to make his moves in Spain before the news was published in Mexico and New York. Through his trusted contacts, he could claim credit for informing the authorities of what the Kremlin had up its sleeve. Jaime was ecstatic. In the end, it looked like doing business in Mexico with the head of the mafia on the Costa del Sol was a far better prospect than with the deceitful Vila-Rojas. They agreed to meet in Europe as soon as things calmed down.

  “Take care of Milena,” Yasha told Jaime before hanging up. “That woman’s worth her weight in gold.”

  So that Tuesday morning, Jaime had reasons to smile. And the meeting he’d just had with his team confirmed it. For now, his business had done adequate damage control after Bonso’s death. The authorities had accepted their version: he came to Lemlock looking for a job, got turned down, and committed suicide. Thanks to solid PR work, the news barely made a ripple that weekend.

  With the Turk, things turned out worse. Jaime had thought of offering Claudia his head as a sign of his ability and, above all, his loyalty. He even thought of giving her or Tomás the opportunity to execute the bastard with their own hands. It would have been a blood secret to bind them together for the rest of their days and assure his continued influence at El Mundo. But Milena’s attitude toward the Turk put an end to that possibility.

  Still, she’d been highly efficient where it really counted. She managed to talk her way onto the flight to London to “say goodbye to Vila-Rojas,” which he’d found strange, even if he wasn’t able to prevent it. That was the condition she’d laid down to get the Turk to admit to where they kept the videos, and he needed those videos to get in the good graces of the man he thought would be his future business partner. He wasn’t sure of her motives for wanting to talk with the person most likely to have initiated the chase against her, but he figured they shared a history more complicated that just the overdose that had killed the Russian kid. Anyway, things had ended in the best possible way. With his new relationship with Yasha, he could build a solid alliance between the immense assets of the underground economy and the flexible stability of the Mexican state.

  With the additional resources, he would even be able to get a foothold at El Mundo. The paper would go on losing money, and, with time, he could intervene to bail it out, and not only to keep it from shuttering. With the right support and the right people pulling strings, he could place it in a media conglomerate, with TV and telecommunications branches. Remembering the paper, he thought of Tomás, and smiled smugly: his friend literally owed him his life. He hoped that from then forward, the Blues would ease off with their harsh judgments of his methods.

  Now more than ever, he felt he was a better companion for Amelia than Tomás was. His friend’s idealism was an obstacle, but he trusted the endless waves of reality that politics brought would erode her naïve idealism. Amelia had lost her innocence some time ago, and eventually she’d lose much more than that. Sooner or later, things would turn romantic between the journalist and Claudia. Tomás’s heart was volatile and his dick had a mind of its own. When he betrayed her, Jaime would be there for Amelia. He’d soon have her in those Egyptian earrings he’d hoped she’d put on twenty years before, but for now, he’d tell her his passion was real and let that information settle in.

  He thought the deaths of Bonso and Vila-Rojas would please Claudia, or at least help her get over her deputy director’s death. He hadn’t been able to present her with the image of the Turk’s dead body the way he would have liked, but she had to understand he was a mere trigger man carrying out his bosses’ orders: Bonso’s, Salgado’s, and, further up the ladder, Vila-Rojas’s. And now they were all dead. After Vila-Rojas perished in London, Jaime called Tomás so that he could give Claudia the news in person. He preferred to let the journalist get the credit, and hopefully much more than that, from El Mundo’s owner.

  Jaime wasn’t wrong: Claudia was overjoyed. Tomás told her as tactfully as possible to avoid wounding her sensibilities, but she had a strong stomach when it came to revenge. She thanked him effusively, as if Tomás himself had shot Salgado, stopped Vila-Rojas’s heart, and pushed Bonso over the ledge.

  Claudia was pleased: the threat against the newspaper was neutralized, and the enemies who had dared to defy it were dead. That same morning, she read through the black-covered journal, which Milena had given her the night before after returning from London. In total, there were fifty-eight stories about Them with the title Tales of the XY Chromosome. All together, a long list of reasons men give themselves to justify prostitution. Though the signatures at the end of each story were only initials, and most of them were from Spain, she recognized a half-dozen Mexicans. In fact, everyone could identify them, and even if the material had no legal value, it would be enough to destroy the reputations of the men it mentioned. She could understand her father’s suspicion: he’d probably found out about the book, maybe even read a story or two. The old man must have feared she’d get spiteful or he’d say the wrong thing and wind up in there.

  It gave Claudia a strange but agreeable feeling to become the benefactor of her father’s former lover. In front of her lay the package she had picked up under the domed ceiling of the bank twenty days before: a half-million dollars, a handwritten note, and a sheet of paper with his letterhead. Her fingers traced out Rosendo Franco’s familiar signature and her eyes were trapped by his posthumous words.

  Dear Claudia:

  I beg you, don’t judge me, just help me carry out this last wish. I wanted to save the family the discomfort of reading this last part of my will.

  Alka Moritz has made me infinitely happy in the final part of my life. That doesn’t affect the love I feel for you and your mother. I hope you can understand that.

  With what’s in this bag, I hope to give her the opportunities life has denied her. Don’t take that satisfaction from me. This is nothing more than a thank-you from an old man to a friend who transformed his winter into spring.

  I trust you.

  PS: AlkaMilena lives in Cópernico 26–201, Colonía Anzures.

  Reading the text slowly, Claudia was moved by how her father called his lover AlkaMilena, fusing her real and assumed name in a clumsy attempt to hide her profession. She was proud, almost like a child, that he had trusted her to carry out this task, which might have seemed unnatural earlier. Even if it meant giving the Croatian a sum that could have gone toward the newspaper’s struggling budget, she was happy contributing to Milena’s new life. It made her feel generous, mature. She consoled herself with the thought that there was almost certainly no trace of the money on the business’s balance sheet, and depositing it would have been complicated. Most likely it had come from the safe where they kept the income from the classifieds, not all of which was reported to the revenue service: customers didn’t ask for a receipt when they posted an ad to get rid of a secondhand fridge or put a puppy up for sale.

  She was roused from her meditations when Tomás entered her office, proud to show her references from newspapers and websites all over the world to the
article El Mundo had published. One of them, from the Associated Press, caught her attention.

  The Russian Mafia Goes to War in Ukraine

  Mexico City/Madrid/AP

  In recent months, the Kremlin has employed the Russo-Ukrainian mafia in Marbella to establish a network for the distribution of financial resources and materiel to the rebel militias in Eastern Ukraine in an attempt to evade sanctions imposed on Moscow by the European Union.

  An exclusive investigation at the Mexican newspaper El Mundo reveals contacts between Russian agents and Olena Kattel, an alleged head of a mafia faction on the Costa del Sol, concerning the establishment of a series of shell companies in Spain for the purpose of funneling money to the insurgent groups. The article gives bank account numbers, startling deposit amounts, and the names of the businesses created. Atlantic Import-Export, Baltic and Mediterranean, and Wood, Aluminum, and Steel Inc. are just a few from among a dozen titles employed. On the board of these companies are numerous prominent members of the Russian community in Marbella.

  After Brussels levied sanctions on Moscow this past summer in retribution for the pro-Russian militias’ insurrection against the new Ukrainian government, Putin’s regime attempted to disguise its support as humanitarian aid. Nonetheless, European governments denounced these donations as a subterfuge to keep the uprising alive and threatened Moscow with a new round of sanctions.

  Presumably, it was then that the Kremlin decided to draw on its relations with leaders of the Russian community in Spain to find an alternative route for its aid.

  The press office of the Brussels government gave assurances that an investigation will be carried out. It has not discarded the possibility of additional sanctions if there is confirmation of Moscow’s involvement in the construction of a financing network to support the war in Ukraine from Western Europe.

  The news has shaken the Russo-Ukrainian community in Marbella. Authorities are currently seeking out Olena Kattel, widow of the alleged former head of the Russian mafia in the region, but she has not yet been apprehended.