Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  The contact, a rushed young man of few words whom she met in the Café Nebraska on the Gran Vía, offered just two choices: Galicia or southern Spain. Heads or tails, take it or leave it. Teresa asked whether it rained much in Galicia, and the young man smiled a little, just enough—it was the first time he’d smiled in the entire conversation—and said it did. It rains like hell, he said.

  So Teresa chose the south, and the man took out a cell phone and went to another table to talk for a while. When he came back, he wrote a name, a telephone number, and the name of a city on a paper napkin. There are direct flights from Madrid, he told her, handing her the napkin. Or from Málaga. To Málaga, trains and buses. There are also boats from Málaga and Almería. And when he saw the puzzled look on her face—boats? planes?—he smiled for the second and last time before explaining that the place she was going belonged to Spain but was in North Africa, sixty or seventy kilometers from the Andalucían coast, near the Strait of Gibraltar. Ceuta and Melilla, he explained, are Spanish cities on the Moroccan coast.

  Then he laid an envelope full of money on the table, paid the bill, stood up, and wished her good luck. He said those words—“Good luck”—and was leaving when Teresa, grateful, tried to tell him her name. The man interrupted, saying he didn’t want to know it—couldn’t care less what it was, in fact. He was just helping out some Mexican friends of his by helping her. He indicated the envelope on the table, and said she should use the money well. When it ran out and she needed more, he added in a tone of objectivity clearly not intended to give offense, she could always use her cunt. That, he said in farewell, apparently regretting he didn’t have one of his own, is the advantage you women have.

  She was nothing special,” said Dris Larbi. “Not pretty, not ugly. Not particularly quick, not particularly stupid. But she was good at numbers. . . . I saw that right away, so I put her at the register.” He remembered a question I’d asked before, and shook his head before continuing. “And no, the fact is she didn’t work on her back. At least not when she worked with me. She was recommended by friends, so I let her choose. One side of the bar or the other, your choice, I told her. . . . She chose to stay behind it, as a waitress at first. She didn’t make as much, of course. But that was fine with her.”

  We were walking along the border between the neighborhoods of Hippódromo and Real—straight streets that ran down to the ocean, colonial-style houses. The night was cool, and filled with the fragrance of the flowers in window boxes.

  “She may have gone out now and then. Two, three times, maybe. I’m not sure.” Dris Larbi shrugged. “It was her decision, you understand? . . . A couple of times she went off with somebody she wanted to go with, but not for money.”

  “What about the parties?” Céspedes asked.

  The Rifeño looked away, suspicious. Then he turned to me before he looked over at Céspedes again, like a man who prefers not to talk about delicate matters in front of strangers.

  But Céspedes didn’t care. “The parties,” he repeated.

  Dris Larbi looked at me again, scratching his beard.

  “That was different,” he conceded after thinking it over. “Sometimes I organized meetings on the other side of the border. . . .”

  Now Céspedes laughed sarcastically. “Those famous parties of yours,” he said.

  “Yeah, well. You know . . .” The Rifeño was looking at him as though trying to remember how much Céspedes really knew, and then, uncomfortable, he turned his eyes away again. “People over there . . .”

  “‘Over there’ is Morocco,” Céspedes noted for my information. “He’s referring to important people: politicians and police chiefs.” He smiled foxily. “My friend Dris always had good contacts.”

  The Rifeño smiled uneasily as he lit a low-nicotine cigarette. I asked myself how many things about him and his contacts had wound up in Céspedes’ secret files. Enough, I figured, for Dris Larbi to grant us the privilege of this conversation.

  “She went to these meetings?” I asked.

  Larbi made a gesture of uncertainty. “I don’t know. She may have been at some. And, well . . . You should ask her.” He appeared to reflect for a while, studying Céspedes out of the corner of his eye, and then at last he nodded unhappily. “The fact is, toward the end she went a couple of times. I didn’t want to know, because these particular meetings weren’t to make money with the girls—they were another kind of business. I just threw in the girls for free. Compliments of the house, you might say. But I never told Teresa to come. . . . She came because she wanted to. She asked to.”

  “Why?”

  “No idea. Like I told you—you should ask her.”

  “And she was going out with the Gallego then?” Céspedes asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “They say she did certain things that he needed done,” Céspedes prodded.

  Dris Larbi looked at him. Looked at me. Looked at him again. Why is he doing this to me? his eyes said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, don Manuel.”

  Céspedes laughed maliciously, arching his eyebrows. He was clearly enjoying this. “Abelkader Chaib,” he said. “Colonel. Gendarmerie Royale . . . That sound familiar?”

  “I swear I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t get it? . . . Bullshit, Dris. I told you, this man is a friend of mine.” We walked a few steps in silence while I tried to figure all this out. The Rifeño smoked, silently, as if unhappy about the way he’d told the story.

  “While she was with me she didn’t get involved in anything,” he suddenly said. “And I didn’t have anything to do with her, either. I mean I never fucked her.” He lifted his chin toward Céspedes, tacitly saying, Ask him.

  It was, as I said, public knowledge that Dris never got involved with any of his girls. And he had said that Teresa was good at keeping the books. The other girls respected her. La Mexicana, they called her. La Mexicana this and La Mexicana that. She clearly was a good-tempered girl, and although she hadn’t gone to school much, her accent made her sound educated, with that big imposing vocabulary Latin Americans have, that makes them sound like members of the Royal Academy. Very reserved about her private life. Dris Larbi knew she’d had problems back in Mexico, but he never asked. Why should he? Nor did Teresa talk about Mexico; when somebody brought up the topic, she’d say one or two words, as little as possible, and change the subject. She was serious at work, lived alone, and never allowed customers to be confused about what her role was in the bar. She didn’t have any girlfriends, either. She minded her own business.

  “Everything was fine for . . . I don’t know . . . six or eight months. Until the night the two Gallegos turned up.” He turned to Céspedes, gesturing at me. “Did he see Veiga? . . . Well, that one didn’t have much luck. But the other one had less.”

  “Santiago Fisterra,” I said.

  “Right. And I can still see him: a dark-skinned type, with a big tattoo here.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “Something of a troublemaker, like all Gallegos. One of those that you never know what they’ll do next. . . . They came and went through the Strait in a Phantom—Señor Céspedes knows what I’m talking about, right? . . . Winstons from Gibraltar and chocolate from Morocco . . . Back then they weren’t working the smack, although it was right around the corner. . . . So . . .”

  He scratched his beard again and spit straight at the ground, bitterly. “So what happened was, one night those two came into the Yamila, and that’s when I began to lose the Mexicana.”

  Two new customers. Teresa glanced at the clock beside the register. Less than fifteen minutes to closing time. She saw that Ahmed was looking at her questioningly, and without raising her head she nodded once. A quick drink before they turned on the lights and threw everybody out. She went on with her numbers, finished balancing the cash drawer. These two probably wouldn’t change the bottom line much. A couple of whiskies, she thought, sizing them up. A little chat with the girls, who were already swallowing their yawns, and maybe a date outsi
de, a while later. Pensión Agadir, half a block down the street. Or maybe, if they had a car, a quick trip to the pine groves, alongside the walls of the Tercio headquarters. Anyway, none of her business. Ahmed kept the list of dates in another book.

  The two new customers sat at the bar, leaning on their elbows, next to the beer pulls, and Fatima and Sheila, two of the girls that had been talking to Ahmed, went over to sit with them while the waiter poured two putative twelve-year-old Chivases with a lot of ice, no water. The girls ordered splits of champagne, with no objection from the customers. The men at the broken-glasses table were still toasting and laughing, after having paid the tab without so much as blinking. The guy at the end of the bar couldn’t quite reach an agreement with his companions; they could be heard arguing softly, through the sound of the music. Now it was Abigaíl singing for nobody on the deserted dance floor, whose only sign of life was the monotonous spinning of the disco ball. I want to lick your wounds, she was singing. I want to hear your silences. Teresa waited for the last line of the final stanza—she knew all the songs of the Yamila’s repertoire by heart—and looked again at the clock beside the register. Another day down. Identical to yesterday’s Monday and tomorrow’s Wednesday.

  “Closing time,” Teresa said.

  When she raised her eyes, she found herself looking into a quiet smile. And into a pair of light-colored eyes—green or blue, she thought after a second—looking at her with amusement.

  “So soon?” asked the man.

  “We’re closing,” she repeated.

  She returned to the books. She was never friendly with the customers, especially at closing time. In six months she’d learned that was the best way to keep things in their places and avoid misunderstandings. Ahmed turned on the lights, and the scant charm that the semidarkness had given the place vanished: threadbare fake velvet on the chairs and barstools, stains on the walls, cigarette burns on the floor. Even the smell—of rancid cigarette smoke, of musty upholstery that never saw the light of day—seemed stronger. The men who had broken the glasses pulled their jackets off the backs of their chairs, and after reaching a quick agreement with their female companions, they left, to wait for them outside. The other customer had already left, alone, refusing to pay the price for a double-header. I’d rather jerk off, he muttered as he walked out.

  The girls gathered up their things. Fatima and Sheila, without touching their champagne, were lingering, hanging on the newcomers, but the two men didn’t seem interested in becoming any closer acquainted. A look from Teresa sent the girls off to join the others.

  She put the check down on the bar, in front of the dark-skinned one. He was wearing a khaki work shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and when he reached for the check she saw that he had a tattoo that covered his entire forearm: a crucified Christ in a design of sailing symbols. The man’s friend was blond and thinner, with light skin. Almost a kid. Twenty-something, maybe. The dark one, thirty-something.

  “Can we finish our drinks?”

  Teresa once again met with the man’s eyes as she raised her head. In the light, she saw that they were green. Playful. Maybe mocking. She saw that they weren’t just serene, they were also smiling, even when the mouth below them wasn’t. His arms were strong, a dark beard was beginning to show on his chin, and his hair was tousled. Almost good-looking, she thought. Or strike that “almost.” She also thought he smelled of clean sweat and salt, although she was too far away to know that. She just thought so.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Green eyes, a tattoo on his right arm, a skinny blond friend. One of those things that happen in a bar. Teresa Mendoza, far from Sinaloa. One day like another, until one day, something happens. The unexpected that pops up—no fanfare, no signs on the horizon, no warning, just sneaking up on you, easy, so quiet it might be nothing at all. Like a smile or a look. Like life itself, or—that other thing that sneaks up on you—death. Which may have been why, the next night, she expected him to come in again. But he didn’t. Each time a customer entered, she looked up, hoping it was him. But it wasn’t.

  After she locked up she walked along the nearby beach, where she lit a cigarette—sometimes she would spike it with a few grains of hashish—and looked at the lights on the breakwater and in the Moroccan port of Nador, on the other side of the dark stretch of sea. When the weather was good, she did that, strolled along the sea walk until she found a taxi to take her to her little apartment near the Polígono—bedroom, tiny living room, kitchen, and bathroom rented to her by Dris Larbi, who deducted it from her salary. Dris wasn’t a bad sort, she thought. He treated the girls pretty well, tried to get along with everybody, and was violent only when circumstances left him no choice. I’m not a whore, she had told him that first day, straight out, when he met with her in the Yamila to explain the kinds of jobs that were possible in his business. I’m glad for you, he’d said—and left it at that.

  At first he took her in as something inevitable, neither a bother nor an advantage, an arrangement he was forced into by personal commitments—the friend of a friend of a friend—that had nothing to do with her. A certain deference, due to obligations that Teresa knew nothing about, the chain that joined Dris Larbi to don Epifanio Vargas through the man at the Café Nebraska, led Dris to let her work behind the bar, first with Ahmed, as bartender girl, and later as cashier, beginning the day there was an error in the figures and she caught it and set the books straight in fifteen seconds. Dris asked whether she’d studied for that. She answered that she’d never gone beyond the sixth grade, and Dris stood looking at her thoughtfully and said, “You’ve got a head for numbers, Mexicana, you seem like you were born to add and subtract.”

  “I did some of that back in Mexico,” she answered. “When I was younger.”

  So Dris told her that the next day she’d be earning the salary of a cashier, and Teresa took over the place, and they never mentioned the subject again.

  She walked on the beach for a while, until she had finished her cigarette, absorbed in the distant lights that seemed almost to have been strewn over the quiet black water. Finally she looked around and shivered, as though the cold of the late hour had just penetrated the jacket she wore buttoned all the way up, its collar raised around her neck and chin. Híjole. Back in Culiacán, Güero Dávila had often told her that she didn’t have what it took to live alone. No way, he would say. You’re not that kind of girl. You need a man to take charge. While you stay—why, just like you are—sweet and tender. Unbelievably pretty. Soft. Treated like a queen or not treated at all, mi vida. You don’t even have to make enchiladas—that’s what restaurants are for. Plus you like that, mi vida, you like what I do to you and how I do it, and when I get mine, bang, you’ll be so sad. He laughed as he whispered, that pinche Güero cabrón, his lips between her legs, So come here, prietita. Come down here, to my mouth, and hang on to me and don’t let me get away, and hold me tight because one day I’ll be dead and nobody will ever hold me again. How sad for you, mi chula. You’ll be so alone in the world when I’m not here anymore and you remember me, and miss all this, and know that nobody will ever do this to you again, not the way I do it.

  So all alone. How strange and at the same time how familiar that word was now: alone. Every time Teresa heard it, or said it down deep inside, the image that came to her was not of herself, but of Güero. Or maybe the image was of herself: Teresa watching him. Because there had also been dark times, black doors that Güero would close behind him, and he would be miles away, as though he hadn’t come down from wherever he’d been up there. Sometimes he would come back from a mission or one of those runs that he never told her about—but that all Sinaloa seemed to know about—and he would be mute, silent, without his usual swaggering and bravado. He’d dodge her questions from an altitude of five thousand feet, evasive, more self-absorbed than usual, as though he were deeply thoughtful, or preoccupied, or worried. And Teresa, bewildered, not knowing what to say or do, would hover around him like some clumsy
animal, in search of the word or gesture that would bring him back to her. Scared.

  Those times, he would leave the house and head downtown. For a while, Teresa suspected that he had another woman—he had them, no question, like all these men did, but she resented the fact that he might have one in particular. That thought drove her crazy with shame and jealousy, so one morning, mixing in with the flow of people, she followed him to a place near the Garmendia mercado, where she saw him enter a cantina called La Ballena. “Vendors, beggars, and minors not allowed”—the sign on the door didn’t mention women, but everyone knew that that was one of the unspoken rules of the place: Nothing but beer and nothing but men.

  So she stood out on the street for a long time, more than half an hour in front of a shoe store window, doing nothing but watching the swinging doors of the cantina and waiting for him to come out. But he didn’t, so at last she crossed the street and went into the restaurant next door, which connected to the cantina through a bead curtain toward the middle of the room. She ordered a soft drink, walked to the curtain, looked through, and saw a large room full of tables, and in the rear a Rock-Ola from which Los Dos Reales were singing “Caminos de la Vida.” And the strange thing about the place, at that hour, was that at every table there was a single man with a bottle of beer. One of each per table. Almost all the men looked down-and-out or old—straw hats or baseball caps on their heads, dark-skinned faces, big black or gray moustaches—each drinking in silence, lost in his own thoughts, speaking to no one, like some weird convention of isolated, downcast philosophers, and some of the beer bottles still had a paper napkin stuck in the neck, the way they’d been served, as though a white carnation came with each longneck. The men sat silently, drinking and listening to the music, and once in a while one of them would get up and put a few coins in the jukebox and select another song. And at one of the tables sat Güero Dávila with his aviator jacket over his shoulders, completely alone, his blond head unmoving, staring into space. He sat there minute after minute, breaking his trance only to pull the paper carnation out of the neck of the seven-peso Pacífico and put the bottle to his lips. Los Dos Reales fell silent and were relieved by José Alfredo singing “Cuando los Años Pasen”—“When the Years Have Passed.”