Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  In this group there was the occasional Spaniard from La Atunara, but most of the kids were from Gibraltar—Brits with surnames inherited from Spain, England, Malta, and every other corner of the Mediterranean. As Lobato said with a wink, including Santiago in the gesture, “the best of every country.”

  “So, Mexican, eh?”

  “Órale.”

  “You’ve come a long way.”

  “Life’s like that.”

  The journalist’s smile was flecked with beer foam.

  “That sounds like a song by José Alfredo.”

  “You know José Alfredo?”

  “A little.”

  And Lobato started humming “The Drunk Came In Drunk” as he signaled the waiter for another round. “The same for my friends and me,” he said. “And for those gentlemen at that table, and their ladies.”

  Calling for five tequilas,

  and the bartender told him

  that’d be all for tonight.

  Teresa sang a few lines with him, and they laughed at the end. He was simpático, she thought. And he wasn’t a know-it-all. Being a know-it-all with Santiago and those guys over there was bad for the health. Lobato was studying her, trying to guess her weight, so to speak. Eyes that knew which side of his mouth the iguana chewed on.

  “A Mexican and a Gallego. Never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  That was good. Don’t ask questions, but open the door so the other person could tell his story, if he wanted to. Smooth as silk, this one.

  “My father was Spanish.”

  “From where?”

  “I never knew.”

  Lobato didn’t ask whether that was true or not, that she’d never known, or whether she was just closing that door. Giving up on the family questions, he sipped at his beer and gestured toward Santiago.

  “They say you ride over to Morocco with this guy.”

  “Who says that?”

  “People. There are no secrets here. Ten miles—not a lot of water, you know.”

  “End of interview,” said Santiago, taking Lobato’s half-drunk beer out of his hand, in exchange for another one from the new round that the blond guys at the next table had just sent over.

  The reporter shrugged.

  “She’s pretty, your girl. And that accent.”

  “I like her,” said Santiago.

  Teresa let herself be hugged tight in Santiago’s arms. Kuki, the owner, set out some tapas on the bar—gambas al ajillo, roast beef, meatballs, tomatoes drenched in olive oil. Teresa loved to eat this way, the way the Spaniards did, from a dozen little plates of all sorts of food, eating standing at the bar, going from one bar to another—sausages, cold cuts, wonderful things from the kitchen. Tapas. She saw the beef, and dipped a piece of bread in the juice. She was famished, and she didn’t worry about gaining weight; she was naturally thin, and for years she had been able to allow herself to indulge. Overindulge. Stuff herself, in fact. Kuki had a bottle of Cuervo behind the bar, so she ordered a tequila. In Spain they didn’t use the tall, narrow caballitos that were so common in Mexico, so she always drank it from sherry glasses, which weren’t a bad substitute. The problem was that you got a double with every drink.

  More customers came in. Santiago and Lobato, at the bar, were discussing the advantages of Zodiac-type rubber speedboats for crossing the sea in high swells, and Kuki was taking part in the conversation. Stiff hulls took a beating during chases, and for a while now Santiago had been toying with the idea of a semi-rigid with two or three engines, a boat big enough to stand up to the ocean and run as far as the eastern coast of Andalucía and Cape Gata. The problem was money—too much investment and too much risk. Even assuming that these ideas could be confirmed on the water.

  Suddenly the conversation halted. The Gibraltar boys at their table had fallen quiet, too, and their eyes were turned toward the group that had just taken seats at the far end of the bar, next to an old poster announcing the last bullfight before the civil war—Feria de La Línea—19, 20 y 21 de julio de 1936. The group consisted of four young men, clean-cut and good-looking. A blond in sunglasses and two tall, athletic types wearing polo shirts, hair cropped short. The fourth man was attractive, dressed in an impeccably ironed blue shirt and a pair of jeans so clean and starched they looked new.

  “And here I am once more,” Lobato sighed ironically, “between the Achaeans and the Trojans.”

  He excused himself a moment, winked at the Gibraltar boys, and went over to say hello to the newcomers, pausing especially at the man in the blue shirt. When he returned, he laughed softly.

  “All four of them are with Customs Surveillance.”

  Santiago regarded them with professional interest. One of them, when he realized he was being inspected, inclined his head a bit in greeting, and Santiago lifted his glass a couple of inches. It might be a reply, or might not. The codes and the rules of the game they all played: hunters and prey in neutral territory. Kuki set out sherry and tapas as though nothing were happening—which in a way it wasn’t; this kind of encounter happened every day.

  “The movie star,” Lobato went on, “is the pilot of the bird.”

  The bird was the Customs’ BO-105, equipped for tracking and hunting at sea. Teresa had seen him harrying the smugglers’ boats. He flew well—low, and well. Took risks. She examined him: thirty-something, dark hair, deep tan. Could pass for Mexican. Looked good, maybe even fine. A little shy.

  “He told me somebody fired a flare at him and hit a blade.” Lobato looked at Santiago. “That wouldn’t have been you, would it?”

  “I didn’t go out last night.”

  “Must have been one of these guys.”

  “Must have been.”

  Lobato looked at the Gibraltar boys, who were now talking exaggeratedly loud, and laughing. “I’m gonna ram eighty kilos tomorrow,” one of them was crowing, “right up your ass.” One of them, Parrondi, told Kuki to serve a round to the gentlemen from Customs. “It’s my birthday and it will be my pleasure,” he said with obvious sarcasm, “to buy them a drink.” From the end of the bar, the four men turned down the gesture of appreciation, if it could be called that, although one of them held up two fingers in the sign of victory as he wished Parrondi happy birthday. The blond in sunglasses, Lobato informed them, was the captain of an HJ turbocraft. And a Galician, of course. From La Coruña.

  “As for the bird,” Lobato added for Santiago’s sake, “it’s in the shop, so there’s a week of clear air, no vultures on your back. So . . .”

  “I don’t have anything going these days.”

  “Not even tobacco?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  Teresa was still watching the pilot. He looked so calm, well behaved, inoffensive. With that ironed shirt and gleaming hair it was hard to tie him to the helicopter that was every smuggler’s nightmare. Maybe, she thought, it was like in that movie that she and Santiago had seen in La Línea: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  Lobato, who had noticed where her eyes were turned, smiled more broadly.

  “He’s a good-looking young man. From Cáceres. And they throw the wildest things you can imagine at him. Once somebody threw an oar. It broke a blade and almost killed him. And when he landed on the beach, the kids almost stoned him to death. . . . Sometimes, I swear, La Atunara is like Vietnam. ’Course out on the water, it’s different.”

  “Yeah,” said Santiago, sipping at his beer. “Out there it’s those hijos de puta that have the advantage.”

  That was how she and Santiago filled their free hours. Other times they would go shopping, or run errands at the bank in Gibraltar, or walk along the beach in the afternoon, enjoying the long, glorious Andalucían sunset, with the lights on the Rock coming on one by one in the background. The bay would be full of ships under many flags—Teresa could now identify most of them—and their lights, too, would come on one by one as the sun sank in the west. The house was a little place about ten yards from the water, at the mouth
of the Palmones River, where there were also a few fishermen’s houses, in the middle of the bayshore between Algeciras and Gibraltar. She liked this area, whose sandy beaches and blue and red fishing skiffs beside the calm river reminded her a bit of Altata.

  In the morning they would have coffee—very black, just a drop of milk; café cortado, it was called, coffee cut in this case with rich whole milk—and bread toasted on a grill with oil, at El Espigón or the Estrella del Mar. On Sunday, Spanish omelettes at Casa Willy—thick, potato-rich plates with onions and, in Willy’s case, shrimp. Sometimes, between cargo runs across the Strait, they would take Santiago’s Cherokee and head up toward Seville on the Ruta del Toro, to eat at Casa Becerra or stop at roadside stands for spicy sausage or hard, gamy slices of ham from hogs fed only on nuts. They might drive up the Costa del Sol to Málaga, or in the opposite direction, through Tarifa and Cádiz to Sanlúcar de Barrameda and the mouth of the Guadalquivir—Barbadillo wine, langostinos, discos, outdoor cafés, restaurants, bars (sometimes with karaoke), until Santiago would pull out his wallet, look inside, and say, “Let’s go, we’re running on the reserve tanks already. Gotta go back and earn some more—nobody’s giving it away.” Sometimes they would spend days on the Rock, covered with oil and grease, getting roasted by the sun and eaten by flies on the dry dock at Sheppard’s marina, breaking down and then reassembling the Phantom’s engine—words once Greek to Teresa, like “pistons,” “hemi heads,” “bearings,” no longer held any mystery—and then they would take the boat out for a test run through the bay. They’d race along at planing speeds, watched over by the chopper and the HJs and the Heinekens that that very night might well meet them again in the cat-and-mouse game they played south of Punta Europa. And every afternoon on those calm days in port or dry dock, when the work was done they would go to the Olde Rock to sit at their usual table, under an engraving depicting the death of an English admiral named Nelson, and have a drink.

  So during those almost happy months—for the first time in her life she was conscious of being happy—Teresa became a pro. The little Mexican girl that little more than a year earlier had taken off running in Culiacán was now a woman experienced in midnight runs and scares, in sailing skills, in boat mechanics, in winds and currents. She knew the course and activity of boats by number, color, and positioning of their lights. She studied Spanish and British nautical charts of the Strait and compared them with her own observations until she knew soundings, coastal profiles, references by heart—things that later, at night, would make the difference between success and failure. She stowed tobacco in the hold from the Gibraltar warehouses and unloaded it a mile farther on, in La Atunara, and stowed away hashish on the Moroccan coast and then unloaded it in coves and on beaches from Tarifa to Estepona. Wrench and screwdriver in hand, she checked refrigeration pumps and cylinders, changed electrodes, oil, and spark plugs, and learned things that she never imagined would be useful, such as, for example, that the fuel consumption per hour of a souped-up engine is calculated by multiplying the maximum horsepower by 0.4—an extremely valuable rule of thumb when fuel is being burned at high speeds on the open sea, where there are no gas stations.

  She also learned to guide Santiago by tapping him on the shoulder during super-fast chases, so that the proximity of the turbocraft or helicopter wouldn’t distract him when he was running at dangerously high speeds. She even learned to steer a speedboat herself at over thirty knots, giving it gas or slacking off in bad seas so the hull wouldn’t suffer unnecessarily, raising the tail of the outboard motor in swells or lowering it for planing, camouflaging the boat near the coast, taking advantage of moonless nights, running close in to a fishing boat or big cargo ship in order to throw off the radar signal. And also evasive tactics: using the Phantom’s short turning radius to keep the more powerful but less maneuverable turbocraft from boarding them, circling behind the pursuit boat, turning its bow or cutting across its wake, taking advantage of gasoline over the adversary’s diesel. And so, run by run, she went from fear to euphoria, from victory to failure, and she learned, once again, what she already knew: that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you call it a draw. She would throw bundles of cargo into the sea, with her pursuers’ spotlight right on her, or offload them to fishing boats or black shadows that scurried out of the underbrush onto deserted beaches and waded waist-deep into the water, with the murmur of the waves as background noise.

  On one occasion—the only one so far, and in the course of an operation with people you couldn’t trust too much, anyway—she offloaded the cargo while Santiago looked on from the rear deck. He was standing in the darkness with an Uzi under his coat, not as a precaution should Customs or the Guardia Civil show up—that was against all the rules—but as a precaution against the people he was delivering the stuff to: some French guys with a bad reputation and worse manners. And then, that same dawn, on their way back to the Rock, the cargo offloaded, Teresa herself, with great relief, had thrown the Uzi into the sea.

  Now she was far from feeling that sense of relief, despite the fact that they were hydroplaning empty, on their way back to Gibraltar. It was four-forty in the morning, and just two hours earlier they had loaded three hundred kilos of hashish resin on the Moroccan coast—enough time to travel the nine miles between Al Marsa and Cala Arenas and offload the cargo with no problems. But as the Spanish saying had it, until the tip of the tail goes by, it’s still a bull. And to confirm that, a little before Punta Carnero, just after they entered the lighthouse’s red zone and could see the lighted mass of the Rock on the other side of the Bay of Algeciras, Santiago, looking up, had muttered a curse. And an instant later, over the sound of the engine, Teresa heard a purring sound approaching from one side and then taking up a position on the stern, seconds before a blinding light suddenly lit up the boat.

  “The bird,” Santiago growled. The fucking bird. The helicopter’s blades were raising a tornado of wind and spray around the Phantom when Santiago moved the trim-tab lever, shoved the throttle lever forward—the needle jumped from 2,500 to 4,000 rpms—and the speedboat took off, its nose high, hydroplaning, slapping lightly over the water. But no luck—the spotlight was still on them, moving from one side of the boat to the other and from bow to stern, its white curtain of light illuminating the spray raised by 250 horsepower of finely tuned engine. Bounced by the slaps of the hull against the water, stung by the spray, holding tight so she wouldn’t fall overboard, Teresa did what she had to do: forget about the relative threat of the helicopter—it was flying, she calculated, about twelve to fifteen feet above the water, and like them, at about forty knots. She needed to worry about another threat that was no doubt close by, and certainly, because they were so close to land, more dangerous: the Customs Surveillance HJ that must be even now racing toward them at full speed, trying to cut them off or force the speedboat in toward the shore. Toward the rocks on the sandbar at La Cabrita, which was somewhere forward and to port.

  She glued her face to the rubber cone of the Furuno, banging her forehead and nose each time the hull hit the water, and punched the buttons to reduce the range to a half-mile. Dios, dios. In this business, if you’re not in good with God, you’re cooked, she thought. The antenna sweep on the screen seemed to take forever, an eternity through which she held her breath. Get us out of this, sweet God, she prayed. She even remembered St. Malverde, that black night in Sinaloa. They were running without any cargo that might send them to prison, but the Customs people were hard, even if they wished you happy birthday in the bars in Campamento. At this hour, and on this course, they could use any pretext they felt like to seize the boat, or to ram it “accidentally” and sink it. The blinding glare of the spotlight fell on the screen, making it hard to see. She noticed that Santiago had revved the engine higher, despite the fact that with the sea raised by the wind out of the west, they were at the limit already. But the Gallego was not one to roll over and play dead, or to gift-wrap his boat for a fucking Customs seizure. S
o the speedboat gave a leap longer than the others—Don’t let the engine seize up, she prayed silently, imagining the propeller whirling in space, out of the water—and when the hull hit the water again, Teresa, holding on the best she could, her face striking the radar cone, finally saw on the screen, among the countless little echoes of the wave swell, another green blip, a different kind—a long, sinister shape approaching rapidly from off the starboard stern, less than five hundred yards away.