Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  She took off her shoes and they started walking through the dirty sand, and then among the big rocks at the water’s edge, under the walls of ocher stone through whose loopholes protruded the barrels of rusty cannons. In the distance rose the blue-gray silhouette of Cabo Tres Forcas. From time to time the spray wet their feet. Santiago was walking with his hands in his pockets, pausing now and then to make sure that Teresa didn’t slip on the moss-covered wet rocks.

  “Other times,” he added suddenly, as if he hadn’t stopped thinking about it, “I look at you and all of a sudden you look older, a lot older. . . . Like this morning.”

  “What happened this morning?”

  “Well, I woke up and you were in the bathroom, and I got up to look at you and I saw you standing in front of the mirror, splashing water on your face, and you were looking at yourself like you were having a hard time recognizing yourself. And you had the face of an old woman.”

  “Ugly?”

  “Horrible. Which was why I wanted to make you pretty again, so I swept you up in my arms and carried you to the bed and we screwed for over an hour.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Being in bed?”

  “Being ugly.”

  She remembered perfectly, of course. She had waked up early, with the first gray light. Roosters crowing at daybreak. The voice of the muezzin in the minaret. The tick-tock of the clock on the night table. Unable to get back to sleep, she had watched the light gradually grow brighter, more golden, on the ceiling, with Santiago asleep on his stomach, his hair tousled, half his face sunk into the pillow, the rough shadow of his beard grazing her shoulder. His heavy breathing and his almost perfect motionlessness, so like death. And the sudden panic that made her jump out of bed, go to the bathroom, turn on the faucet, and splash water on her face over and over again, while the face looking out at her from the mirror resembled that woman with wet hair who had stared back at her the day the phone rang in Culiacán. And then Santiago reflected behind her, his eyes swollen with sleep, naked like her, embracing her before he carried her back to bed to make love between the wrinkled sheets that smelled of them both, of semen, and of the warmth of entwined bodies. And then the ghosts fading away into the new order once again, with the shadow of the dirty dawn—there was nothing in the world as dirty as that undecided lead-gray light just before dawn—that the sunlight, now streaming in through the shutters, was banishing once more to the underground.

  “With you, sometimes, I feel like I’m a little outside, you know?” Santiago was gazing out at the blue ocean, the waves rising and falling, splashing among the rocks—an experienced look, almost technical. “I’ve got you all controlled and then—bam!—all of a sudden you seem to go off somewhere.”

  “To Morocco.”

  “Stop it. I told you that’s over.”

  Again the smile that erased everything else. Handsome as hell, she thought again, bien padre. Fucking smuggling hijo de su puta madre.

  “You seem far away sometimes, too,” she said. “God knows where you are, but it’s fucking far.”

  “That’s different. There are things that worry me . . . I mean things now. But you’re different.”

  He didn’t say anything else for a while. He seemed to be searching for an idea that was hard to pin down. Or express.

  “You . . .” he said at last, “it’s that there are things that were there before I met you.”

  They walked on a little farther before returning to the arch. The old kebab man was cleaning off the table. He and Teresa smiled at one another.

  “You never tell me anything about Mexico,” Santiago said.

  She leaned on him as she put on her shoes. “There’s not much to tell,” she replied. “. . . Some guy fucks over another guy because of drugs or a few pesos, or because he says you’re a Communist, or a hurricane comes and everybody gets fucked.”

  “I was talking about you.”

  “I’m Sinaloan. A little wounded in my self-esteem lately. But stubborn as hell.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s it. I don’t ask you questions about your life. I don’t even know whether you’re married.”

  “I’m not.” He waggled his finger, negative, before her eyes. “And it pisses me off that you’ve never asked till now.”

  “I’m not asking. I’m just saying what I don’t know. That was the deal.”

  “What deal? I don’t recall any deal.”

  “No stupid questions. You come, I’m there. You leave, I stay.”

  “What about the future?”

  “We’ll talk about the future when it gets here.”

  “Why do you sleep with me?”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Why me?”

  She halted before him, hands on her hips, as though she were about to sing him a ranchera.

  “Because you’re a good-looking guy,” she said, appraising him, her eyes traveling up and down him slowly, appreciatively. “Because you’ve got green eyes, a great ass, strong arms . . . Because you’re an hijo de la chingada without being totally fucking selfish. Because you can be hard and sweet at the same time . . . That enough?” She could feel the muscles in her face grow tense, without her realizing it. “And because you look like somebody I once knew.”

  Santiago looked at her. An awkward expression on his face now, naturally. The flattered expression had gone, and she could predict what he was about to say.

  “I don’t like the idea of you remembering another man.”

  Fucking Gallego, she thought. Pinches hombres de mierda. So easy, all of them, and such assholes. She had to end this conversation.

  “Jesus Christ. I didn’t say I remember another man. I said you looked like somebody.”

  “And you don’t want to know why I sleep with you?”

  “Besides my usefulness at Dris Larbi’s parties?”

  “Besides that.”

  “Because you have a great time in my dark little cave down there. And because sometimes you feel alone.”

  She watched him run his hand through his hair, confused. Then he took her by the arm.

  “What if I slept with other women? Would you care?”

  She pulled her arm away gently, until she felt free again. “I’m sure you sleep with other women.”

  “In Melilla?”

  “No. Not that I know of. Not here.”

  “Say you love me.”

  “Órale. I love you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What do you care? I love you.”

  It was not hard for me to trace the life of Santiago Fisterra. Before I went to Melilla, I supplemented the Algeciras police report with another document, a very detailed Customs report that had dates and places, including Fisterra’s birth in O Grove, a fishing village on a tidal inlet, the Ría de Arosa. Which is how I learned that when he met Teresa, Fisterra had just turned thirty-two. His was a classic case: He had shipped on fishing boats starting at age fourteen, and after military service in the navy had worked for the amos do fume, which in Galician is the “tobacco bosses,” the capos of the smuggling rings that operated in the Galician rías—Charlines, Sito Miñanco, the Pernas brothers. Three years before he met Teresa, the Customs report had him in Villagarcía as the owner of a speedboat working for the Pedrusquiños, a well-known clan of tobacco smugglers who were then expanding into Moroccan hashish.

  At that point, Fisterra was a hired man, so much per run; his work consisted of piloting speedboats that offloaded tobacco and drugs from mother ships and fishing boats sitting just outside Spanish waters, taking advantage of the complicated geography of the Galician coastline. That led to dangerous duels with the coast guard, Customs, and the Guardia Civil. On one of those incursions, when he was eluding pursuit by a turbocraft by making tight zigzags through the mussel barges just off the island of Cortegada, Fisterra or his copilot—a young man from Ferrola named Lalo Veiga—turned a spotlight on their pursuers in the middle of a maneuver, and the
Customs men crashed into a barge. Result: One dead.

  The police reports gave only a rough outline of what happened, so I fruitlessly dialed several telephone numbers until Manuel Rivas, a writer friend of mine who happened to be Galician and happened to live in the area—he had a house on the Costa de la Muerte—made a couple more calls and confirmed the episode. What Rivas told me was that no one could actually prove that Fisterra had a hand in the incident, but the local Customs officers, who were as tough as the smugglers—they’d been raised in the same small towns and sailed on the same boats—swore to send him to the bottom at the first opportunity. An eye for an eye. That had been enough to make Fisterra and Veiga leave the Rías Bajas in search of less insalubrious air: Algeciras, in the shadow of the Rock of Gibraltar, with its Mediterranean sun and blue waters. And there, profiting from the permissive British laws, the two Galicians registered, through a third party, a powerful speedboat twenty-four feet long and packing a Yamaha PRO six-cylinder engine that put out 225 horsepower, tweaked to 250, on which they made runs between the colony, Morocco, and the Spanish coast.

  “Back then,” Manolo Céspedes explained to me in Melilla, after I’d seen Dris Larbi, “cocaine was still for the super-rich. Most of the illegal trafficking consisted of moving Gibraltar tobacco and Moroccan hashish: two harvests and twenty-five hundred tons of cannabis illegally exported to Europe every year. . . . And all of it came through here, of course. Still does.”

  We were putting away a dinner remarkable for both quality and quantity as we sat at a table in La Amistad, a bar-restaurant better known by Melillans as Casa Manolo. It was across the street from the headquarters of the Guardia Civil, which Céspedes himself had had built during his time in power. The owner of the place was actually not named Manolo, but rather Muhammad, although he was also known as Juanito’s brother—Juanito being the owner of the restaurant Casa Juanito, though his name was not Juanito, but rather Hassan. Labyrinths of names, all very much in keeping with a city, like Melilla, of multiple identities. As for La Amistad, it was a decidedly working-class place, with plastic chairs and tables and a tapas bar frequented by both Europeans and North Africans; people often ate standing up, even dinner. The quality of the food was memorable, as I said: a menu of fresh shellfish and crustaceans brought in from Morocco that Manolo/Muhammad himself bought every morning at the central market. That night, Céspedes and I were having clams, langostinos from Mar Chica, chunks of halibut, pollack kebabs, and a bottle of cold Barbadillo. And enjoying it, of course. With the Spanish trawlers that fishermen used nowadays, it was getting harder and harder to find anything like this in the waters off the Peninsula.

  “When Santiago Fisterra came here,” Céspedes continued, “almost all the major traffic was handled in speedboats. He came because that was his specialty, and because a lot of Galicians were setting up in Ceuta and Melilla and along the Andalucían coast. . . . The contacts were made here or in Morocco. The busiest part of the whole Strait was the fourteen kilometers between Punta Carnero and Punta Cires—small-time drug runners in the Ceuta ferries, big consignments in yachts and fishing boats, speedboats. . . . The traffic was so intense that that strip of water started being called Hashish Boulevard.”

  “What about Gibraltar?”

  “Well, right over there, in the middle of everything.” Céspedes pointed to the pack of Winstons in front of him on the table, and with a fork he drew a circle around it. “Like a spider in its web. Back then it was the main base for smuggling in the western Mediterranean. . . . The Brits and the locals from the colony left the mafias’ hands free. Invest here, sir, trust us with your dough, your financial contacts, and your port facilities. . . . The shipment of tobacco would go directly from the warehouses on the docks to the beaches of La Línea, a thousand meters or so over there. . . . The fact is, it’s still going on.” He pointed toward the cigarettes again. “These are from there. Tax-free.”

  “You’re not ashamed to smoke them? . . . A former delegate to parliament defrauding Tabacalera, S.A., and the government?”

  “Yeah, right. I’m on a pension, don’t forget. Any idea how many packs I smoke a day?”

  “So what about Santiago Fisterra?”

  Céspedes chewed his halibut a moment, savoring it. Then he took a sip of his Barbadillo and looked at me.

  “I don’t know whether that particular individual smoked or not, but he never moved tobacco. One run with a cargo of hashish was worth a hundred bringing in Winstons or Marlboros. Hashish was a hell of a lot more profitable.”

  “And more dangerous, I imagine.”

  “Much more.” After painstakingly sucking them, Céspedes was arranging the langostino heads along the rim of his plate, as though lining them up in formation for inspection. “If you didn’t have the Moroccans well greased, you were fucked. Look at poor Veiga. . . . But with the English there was no problem—they acted according to their usual double standard. As long as the drugs didn’t touch British soil, they looked the other way. . . . So the traffickers came and went with their consignments, and everybody knew who they were. And when they were surprised by the Guardia Civil or Spanish Customs, they hightailed it to Gibraltar for shelter. The only condition was that first they had to throw their cargo overboard.”

  “It was that easy?”

  “That easy.” He pointed to the pack of cigarettes with his fork again, this time tapping it. “Sometimes the drug runners would post accomplices up on top of the rock with night-vision binoculars and walkie-talkies—monkeys, they called them—to keep track of the Customs boats. . . . Gibraltar was the hub of an entire industry, and billions, billions were moved through it. Moroccan, Gibraltar, Spanish cops, everybody was on the take. . . . They even tried to buy me.” He laughed out loud at the memory, the glass of wine in his hand. “But how could they? Back then it was me who bought off other people!”

  After that, Céspedes sighed.

  “Now,” he said as he polished off the last langostino, “things are different. In Gibraltar, money moves in another way now. Take a walk down Main Street and look at the mailboxes, count the number of ghost corporations. You won’t believe it. They’ve discovered that a financial paradise is more profitable than a pirates’ den, even if it’s the same thing, underneath. And customers, add it up: the Costa del Sol is a gold mine, so the foreign mafias move in and set themselves up in everything you can think of. Plus, from Almería to Cádiz there’s heavy surveillance of the Spanish waters because of illegal immigration. And although the hashish business is still good, coke is catching on, too, and the methods are different. . . . Let’s just say that the old days of independent operators—the heroic days—are over, and now there are suits instead of old sea wolves. Everything is decentralized. The smugglers’ speedboats have changed hands, tactics, and bases. And the dough is different, too.”

  Having said all this, Céspedes leaned back in his chair, signaled Manolo/ Muhammad for a coffee, and lit up a tax-free cigarette. That old cardsharp’s face of his smiled nostalgically; he raised his eyebrows. They can’t take that away from me, he seemed to be saying. And I realized that the former parliamentary delegate missed not just the old days, but a certain kind of men as well.

  “What happened,” he concluded, “is that when Santiago Fisterra appeared in Melilla, the Strait, if not the world, was his oyster. It was a golden age, as the locals in Gibraltar would say. Whew . . . Round-trip runs, balls out. Every night was a game of cat and mouse between the drug runners on the one hand and the Customs guys, police, and Guardia Civil on the other. . . . Sometimes you won and sometimes you lost.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, and his sly eyes narrowed, remembering. “And out there—jumping out of the frying pan so she could land directly in the fire—is where Teresa Mendoza wound up.”

  People say it was Dris Larbi who ratted out Santiago Fisterra, and that he did it despite Colonel Abdelkader Chaib, or maybe even with Chaib’s knowledge. That would have been easy in Morocco, where the weakest link was th
e small-time smugglers that weren’t protected by money or politics: a name dropped here and there, a few bills changing hands, and the police would have some big new numbers to add to their statistics. At any rate, no one could ever prove that Dris Larbi dropped the dime. When I raised the subject—I had saved it for our last meeting—he clammed up like an oyster and there was no way to get another word out of him. It’s been a pleasure. End of confidences, bye-bye, and never again.

  But Manolo Céspedes, who was still a delegate to parliament in Melilla when the events took place, maintains that it was Dris Larbi who, intending to run the Gallego off so as to keep Teresa behind the bar, passed the word to his contacts on the other side. Generally, the motto was, Pay up and the Strait’s yours, and go with God. Iallah bismillah. And that motto applied to a vast network of corruption that ran from the mountains where the cannabis was harvested to the border or the Moroccan coast. The payments rose according to rank: cops, soldiers, politicians, high-level officials, and members of the government. To justify themselves to public opinion—after all, the Moroccan minister of the interior had observer status at the antidrug meetings of the European Union—gendarmes and soldiers would carry out periodic antidrug operations; there would be dragnets, raids, arrests. But it would always be on a pretty small scale, and the guys arrested would never belong to the big official mafias, so nobody would care much one way or another if they got hauled in. People as often as not were ratted out, or pushed out, by the same contacts that got the hashish for them.

  Commander Benamú of the Moroccan Gendarmerie Royale’s coast guard division had no hesitation in telling me about his role in the Cala Tramontana episode. He did so on the terrace of the Café Hafa, in Tangiers, after a mutual friend, police inspector José Bedmar—veteran of the Central Brigade and intelligence agent in the days of Céspedes—located him and made an appointment; all this came about after a great deal of fax- and phone-praise of my work, to soften the commander up.