Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Gato,” the other man repeated. He had moved at last, taking a couple of steps into the room. “Quihubo,” he said. “What’s up? Güero was one of ours, man. A good guy. Remember—the sierra, El Paso, Río Bravo. And this was his woman.” And as he was saying this, he was pulling a Python out of his waistband and pointing it at Teresa’s forehead. “Get up so you don’t get splattered, man, and let me put her lights out.”

  But Gato Fierros had other plans. “She’s going to die anyway,” he said, “and it’d be a waste.”

  He knocked the Python away, and Pote Gálvez stood looking at them, first at Teresa and then at Gato—undecided, fat, with his dark, Indian, norteño hit-man eyes, drops of sweat in his thick moustache, his finger on the trigger guard, the barrel pointing up, as though he were about to scratch his head with it. And then it was Gato Fierros who took out his gun, a big silver Beretta, and pointed it straight at the other man, at his face. Laughing, he said that Pote was either going to have a go at her, too, so they’d be in it together, or, if he was the type of guy who preferred to bat left-handed, then he needed to step aside, cabrón, because if he didn’t he was having lead for lunch.

  Pote Gálvez looked at Teresa with resignation and embarrassment; he stood a few seconds more, and then he opened his mouth to say something but then didn’t. Instead, he slowly stuck the Python back into his waistband and walked slowly to the door, without turning around. The other killer kept his pistol pointed at him, saying, “I’ll buy you a Buchanan’s afterward, mi compa, to make you feel better about being a maricón.”

  And as Gálvez disappeared into the other room, Teresa heard a crash, the sound of wood splintering—maybe the hit man putting his fist through the closet door—which for some reason made Teresa very grateful. But she didn’t have time to think about that anymore, because Gato Fierros was already taking off her jeans, or rather ripping them off, raising her T-shirt, and pawing at her breasts, and as he did so he stuck the barrel of the pistol up between her legs as though he were going to blow her away from down there. She let him, without a scream or even a whimper, her eyes very open, looking up at the white ceiling, praying to God for it to all happen fast, and when it was over, for Gato Fierros to kill her fast, before it all stopped being a nightmare and turned into the naked horror of pinche fucking life.

  It was the same old story. Winding up like that. How could it be otherwise, even though Teresa Mendoza never imagined that The Situation would smell like sweat, like rutting macho, like the shot glasses of tequila that Gato Fierros had knocked back before coming up those stairs looking for his prey. I wish it was over, she thought in her moments of lucidity. I wish it was just fucking over and done with, and I could rest. She thought that for a second and then she sank again into her void without emotions, without fear. It was too late for fear, because fear was what you felt before things happened, and the consolation when they finally did happen was that it all came to an end. The only true fear was that the end would take too long to come.

  But Gato Fierros was not going to be that case. He was pushing violently, with the urgency to finish and empty himself. Quiet. Short. He was pushing cruelly, without looking at her, shoving her little by little to the edge of the bed. Teresa emptied her mind as she suffered his thrusts. She let her arm drop, and it touched the open gym bag on the floor.

  The Situation can go two ways, she suddenly discovered. It can be Your Situation or the Other Guy’s. She was so surprised to realize this, that if the man holding her down had let her, she would have sat straight up in bed, one finger held up, very serious and reflective, to think it through. Let’s see, let’s just consider this variant. . . . But she couldn’t sit up, because the only part of her that was free was her arm and hand, which, falling accidentally into the gym bag, was now stroking the cold metal of the Colt Double Eagle inside it, among her clothes and the stacks of bills.

  This is not happening to me, she thought. Or maybe she never really thought anything, but instead just observed, passively, while that other Teresa Mendoza thought in her place. Whatever—before she became conscious of it, her or the other woman’s fingers had closed around the butt of the pistol. The safety was on the left, next to the trigger and the button to release the clip. She touched it with her thumb and felt it slide down, to the vertical, freeing the hammer. There’s a bullet in the chamber, she remembered, there’s a bullet there because I put it there—she remembered the metallic click-click—although maybe she just thought she’d loaded the chamber, but hadn’t, and the bullet wasn’t ready. She considered all this with dispassionate calculation: Safety, trigger, hammer. Bullet. That was the right sequence of events—if, that is, that click-click had been real and not the product of her imagination. Because if it hadn’t been real, the hammer was going to hit nothing, air, and Gato Fierros would have time to take it badly. Of course, whatever happened, things couldn’t be that much worse than they were now. There might be a little more violence, or rage, in the last moments. Nothing that wouldn’t be over within a half-hour or so—for her, for that woman watching her, or for both at once. Nothing that wouldn’t stop hurting in a little while. And as she thought all this, she stopped looking up at the white ceiling and realized that Gato Fierros had stopped moving, and that he was looking at her. That was when Teresa raised the pistol and shot him in the face.

  There was an acrid smell, the smell of gunpowder, and the report of the gunshot was still echoing off the walls of the room when Teresa pulled the trigger the second time—but the Double Eagle had jumped at the first shot, recoiling so much that the new bullet only took a chunk of plaster out of the wall. By that time, Gato Fierros was lying against the night table, gasping for air, covering his mouth with his hands, while through his fingers gushed streams of blood that also spattered his eyes, which were wide open with surprise. He was stunned by the blast that had singed his hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, but Teresa couldn’t tell whether he was screaming or not, because the noise of the gunshot so close had deafened her.

  She’d gotten up on her knees in the bed, her T-shirt bunched up over her breasts, naked from the waist down, holding her right hand with her left so she could aim the third shot more accurately, when she saw Pote Gálvez appear in the doorway, stupefied, his mouth agape. She looked at him again, as though in a slow-motion dream, and Pote, whose revolver was still stuck in the waistband of his pants, put both hands up in front of him, as though to protect himself, looking in fear at the Double Eagle that Teresa was now pointing at him. Under the black moustache his mouth opened to pronounce a silent “No,” like a plea for mercy—although what may have happened was that Pote Gálvez actually said “No” aloud and she simply couldn’t hear it because she was still deaf from the gunshots. She finally decided that that must be it, because Pote kept moving his lips, fast, his hands out in front of him, looking at her apologetically, conciliatorily, speaking words she couldn’t hear. Even so, Teresa was about to pull the trigger when she remembered the fist through the closet door, the Python pointed at her forehead, the “Güero was one of us, man, no seas cabrón.” And the “She was Güero’s woman, man.”

  She didn’t shoot. That sound of splintering wood kept her finger motionless on the trigger. Her naked belly and legs were beginning to feel cold when, never taking the gun off Pote Gálvez, she backed up on the bed and with her left hand threw the clothes, the notebook, and the coke into the gym bag. As she did this, she watched Gato Fierros out of the corner of her eye. He was still slowly writhing on the floor, his bloody hands on his face. For a second she thought of turning the gun on him and finishing the job, but the other killer was still at the door, his hands outstretched and his revolver at his waist, and she knew with absolute certainty that if she stopped pointing the gun at him, the next bullet fired would be for her.

  She grabbed the gym bag, and holding the Double Eagle firmly in her right hand, stood up and stepped away from the bed. First Pote, she decided, and then Gato Fierros. That was the right order, and t
he noise of splintering wood—which she was truly grateful for—was not enough to change that. Just then she saw that the eyes of the man standing before her had read her own. The mouth under the moustache suddenly stopped, interrupted itself in mid-sentence—now it was a confused murmur in Teresa’s ears—and by the time she fired a third time, Potemkin Gálvez, with an agility surprising in a man as heavy as he was, had leapt to the front door and was clambering downstairs, pulling his gun as he ran.

  She shot a fourth and a fifth time, before realizing that it was useless and that if she wasn’t smart, she could wind up without ammunition. Nor did she run after him, because she knew that he wouldn’t just let this go, that he was going to come back for her, soon, and finish what the two of them had started.

  Two stories, she thought. Although it’s not any worse than what I’ve already been through. So she opened the bedroom window, looked down at the back yard, and saw a few stubby trees and some bushes in the darkness. I forgot to finish off that cabrón Gato, she thought too late, just as she was jumping. Then the branches and the bushes were scratching her legs, thighs, and face as she fell into them, and she felt a sharp pain in her ankles as she hit the ground. She got up, limping, surprised to be alive, surprised that nothing seemed broken, and she ran, barefoot, and naked from the waist down, through the parked cars and shadows in the lot.

  Finally, out of breath, far away, she stopped, squatting next to a half-ruined brick wall. Besides the sting of the scratches and the cuts to her feet from running, she felt an uncomfortable burning in her thighs and sex. The memory of what had just happened to her now hit her, because the other Teresa Mendoza had just abandoned her, left her with nobody to attribute sensations and emotions to. She felt a violent urge to urinate, and she did so just as she was, squatting motionless in the darkness, shivering as though she had a high fever. A car’s headlights illuminated her for a second; she clutched the gym bag in one hand and the pistol in the other.

  2. They say the law spotted him, but they got cold feet

  I mentioned earlier that I had been in Culiacán, Sinaloa, at the beginning of my research, before I met Teresa Mendoza personally. There, where drug trafficking had come out from underground a long time ago and become an objective social fact, a few well-placed dollars opened doors for me into certain exclusive worlds, places where a curious foreigner without any references might, overnight, turn up floating in the Humaya or the Tamazula with a bullet in his head. I also made a couple of good friends: Julio Bernal, head of the city’s office of cultural affairs, and the Sinaloan writer Elmer Mendoza—no relation to Teresa—whose splendid novels A Lonely Murderer and The Lover of Janis Joplin I’d read for background. It was Elmer and Julio who acted as my guides through that underworld and filled me in on all the local eccentricities.

  Although neither of my friends had had any personal dealings with Teresa Mendoza in the beginnings of this story—she was nobody back then—they did know Güero Dávila and some of the other characters who in one way or another pulled the strings of the plot, and they and their contacts set me on the track to knowing a good deal of what I know now. In Sinaloa everything is a question of trust; in a hard, complex world like that one, the rules are simple and there’s no place for mistakes. You’re introduced to somebody by a friend somebody trusts, and that somebody trusts you because he trusts the friend who vouched for you. Then, if anything goes wrong, the voucher pays with his life, and you pay with yours. Bang bang. The cemeteries of northwest Mexico are full of graves of people somebody trusted.

  One night of music and cigarette smoke in the Don Quijote, drinking beer and tequila after listening to the disgusting jokes of the comedian Pedro Valdez—who’d been preceded by the ventriloquist Enrique and his cokehead dummy Chechito—Elmer Mendoza leaned over the table and pointed to a heavyset, dark-skinned man in glasses who was drinking at a table in one corner, surrounded by a large group of the kind of guys that leave their sport coats or jackets on, as though they were cold no matter where they were—snake- or ostrich-skin boots, thousand-dollar belts with leather-laced edging, panama hats or baseball caps with the insignia of the Culiacán Tomateros, and a lot of heavy gold at their necks and wrists. We’d seen them get out of two Ram Chargers and walk in like they owned the place, right past the bouncer, who greeted them obsequiously, forgoing the ritual pat-down that all the other customers were subjected to.

  “That’s César ‘Batman’ Güemes,” Elmer said softly. “A famous narco.”

  “Got any corridos to him?”

  “Several.” My friend laughed in mid-sip. “He killed Güero Dávila.”

  My jaw dropped as I looked at the group: brown faces and hard features, lots of moustache and obvious danger. There were eight of them; they’d been there fifteen minutes and had already downed a case of beer—twenty-four tall ones. Now they’d just ordered two bottles of Buchanan’s and two of Rémy Martin, and the dancers—this was unheard-of in the Don Quijote—were coming over to sit with them when they left the runway. A group of bottle-blond gays—the place filled with gays late at night, and the two worlds mixed without any problems—had been giving the table insinuating looks, and Güemes smiled sarcastically, very macho, and called the waiter over to pay for their drinks. Pure peaceful coexistence.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Me? Everybody in Culiacán knows.”

  Four days later, thanks to a friend of Julio Bernal’s who had a nephew in the business, Batman Güemes and I had a strange and interesting conversation. I was invited to a cookout at a house in San Miguel, in the hills above the city. There, the junior narcos—the second-generation guys, less ostentatious than their fathers who’d come down from the sierra, first to the barrio of Tierra Blanca and later assaulting the spectacular mansions of Colonia Chapultepec—began to invest in more discreet houses, in which the luxury was reserved for the family and guests, inside. The nephew of this friend of Julio’s was the son of a historic narco from San José de los Hornos—one of those legendary bandidos who in his youth had traded bullets with the police and rival bands and was now serving a comfortable sentence in the prison at Puente Grande, Jalisco; the son was twenty-eight, and his name was Ernesto Samuelson. Five of his cousins and an older brother had been killed by other narcos, or the Federales, or soldiers, and he had quickly learned the lesson: law school in the United States; businesses abroad, never on Mexican soil; money laundered through a respectable Mexican company whose holdings included big transport rigs and Panamanian shrimp farms. He lived in an unassuming house with his wife and two children, drove a sober Audi, and spent three months a year in a simple apartment in Miami, with a Golf in the garage. You live longer that way, he would say. In this business, envy kills.

  It was Ernesto Samuelson who, under the bamboo-and-palm palapa in his garden, introduced me to Batman Güemes, who was standing with a beer in one hand and a plate of burnt meat in the other. “He writes novels and movies,” Ernesto told Batman, by way of introduction, and then he left us.

  Batman Güemes spoke softly, with long pauses that he employed so he could study you from head to toe. He’d never read a book in his life, but he loved movies. We talked about Al Pacino (Scarface was his favorite movie of all time) and Robert De Niro (Goodfellas, Casino), and how Hollywood directors and scriptwriters, those hijos de la chingada, never portrayed a blond, blue-eyed, gringo drug dealer; they all had to be named Sánchez and be born south of the Río Grande. His remark about the blond, blue-eyed drug runner was my cue, so I dropped the name Güero Dávila, and while Batman Güemes looked at me through his dark glasses very carefully and very quietly, I stuck my neck out by following that up with the name Teresa Mendoza. I’m writing her story, I added, aware that in certain circles and with a certain kind of man, lies always explode under your pillow. And Batman Güemes was so dangerous, I’d been warned, that when he went up into the sierra the wolves lit bonfires to keep him away.

  “One shitload of years has passed since then,” h
e said.

  I figured him for younger than fifty. His skin was very dark, and he had an inscrutable face with strong norteño features. I later learned that he was not from Sinaloa but from Alamos, Sonora, the homeland of María Félix, and that he had started out as a coyote and a burro, using a truck that belonged to him to run undocumented workers, marijuana, and cocaine for the Juárez cartel over the border. He rose in the hierarchy, starting as an operator for the Lord of the Skies and finally becoming the owner of a transport company and a private aviation business that ran contraband between the sierra and the western United States—Nevada and California—until the gringos tightened up the airspace and closed almost all the gaps in their radar system. Now he was living a relatively quiet life off the savings he’d invested in safe businesses and a few other investments, mainly opium villages up in the sierra, on the border with Durango. He had a nice ranch over in El Salado, with four thousand head: Do Brasil, Angus, Bravo. He also raised thoroughbreds for the parejeras, which is a two-horse race they run in Mexico, and fighting cocks that brought him sackfuls of money every October or November from the cockfights at the livestock fairs.

  “Teresa Mendoza,” he murmured after a while.

  He shook his head as he said this, as though remembering something funny. Then he took a swig of his beer, chewed on a piece of meat, and drank again. He was still looking at me hard from behind the dark glasses, a little sneer on his lips, perhaps, letting me know that he had no problem talking about something so old, and that the risk of asking questions in Sinaloa was entirely mine. Talking about dead men didn’t cause problems—the narcocorridos were full of real names and stories; what was dangerous was asking questions about live men, because you might get taken for a bigmouth and a snitch. And I, accepting the rules of the game, looked at the gold anchor—only slightly smaller than the Titanic’s—hanging from the thick gold chain that gleamed under the open collar of his plaid shirt, and without beating around the bush asked the question that had been burning my mouth since Elmer Mendoza had pointed this man out to me four days earlier. I asked what I needed to ask, and then I raised my eyes, and the guy was looking at me just like before. Either he likes me, I thought, or I’m going to have problems.