Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  And yet, Teresa admitted to herself, it was a good story. The boyfriend shot dead, the half-ton of coca that nobody ever found. Now, after the party, Teresa could picture the boyfriend, a guy like the ones she’d seen in the house, with a dark jacket and a shirt with no tie and all very elegant. Like the second or third generation of Colonia Chapultepec but better, spoiled like those society kids in Culiacán that drove to high school in their 4x4s escorted by bodyguards. A boyfriend who was lowlife and society at the same time—white powder dusting his nose a gram at a time, fucking other girls and letting her fuck other guys and other girls, too, and playing with fire until he got burned, getting mixed up in a world where fuck-ups—not to mention amateurism, with a little bit of spoiled machismo stirred in—exacted a high price.

  They killed him and two others, Patty had said, and Teresa knew better than many people what kind of fucked-up thing her friend was talking about. They killed him for lying to them and double-crossing them and not doing what he said he’d do, and it was bad luck, the worst, because the next day the Narcotics Division moved in, because the other half-ton of coca, they were following it real close, and they had bugged everything, down to the glass of water he gargled with after he brushed his teeth. The hit was done by the Russian mafia, who got kind of drastic when some bullnecked Boris wasn’t happy with the boyfriend’s explanations of the suspicious loss of half a shipment that had come into the port of Málaga in a single container. And those Communists recycled into gangsters tended to wipe the slate clean—after many fruitless attempts to recover the cargo, when their patience ran out, one of the boyfriend’s partners had been found dead in his house in front of the TV, and the other was discovered out on the Cádiz- Seville highway. Patty’s boyfriend got it as he was leaving a Chinese restaurant in Fuengirola, three in the head as he opened the car door, two by accident for her, since they thought she wasn’t in the loop. But fuck being out of the loop—she was definitely in it. Because the boyfriend was one of those bigmouths that spill things before and after they come, or when they’ve got their nose in the powder. Which meant that at some point, in bed or after a few lines, he had told Patty that the stash of coke, the half a shipment, half a ton that everybody thought was lost and sold off on the black market, was still all packed up nice and neat and stashed in a cave on the coast near Cape Trafalgar, waiting for somebody to come and give it a lift home. And after the murder of her boyfriend and the others, the only person that knew the location was Patty. So when she got out of the hospital and the Narcotics Division guys were waiting for her in the parking lot, all that happened when they asked her about the famous half a ton was that her eyebrows went up practically to her hairline. What! I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about, she said, looking them dead in the eye, one by one. And after a lot of subsequent huffing and puffing on their part, they believed her.

  So what do you think, Mexicana?” “I don’t think.”

  She had stopped, and Patty was looking at her. The light of the moon behind Patty fell on her shoulders and the crown of her head, whitening her short hair as though she’d suddenly gone gray.

  “Make an effort.”

  “I don’t want to. Not tonight.”

  A glow. A match and then a cigarette illuminating Lieutenant O’Farrell’s chin and eyes. It’s her again, thought Teresa. The old one.

  “You really don’t want to know why I’ve told you all this?”

  “I know why. You want to recover that stash of coke. And you want me to help you.”

  The ember glowed twice in silence. They began walking again.

  “You’ve done things like this,” Patty insisted. “Incredible things. You know the places. You know how to get there and get back.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve got contacts. I know what to do afterward.”

  Teresa continued to refuse to think. It’s important, she told herself. She was afraid that if she thought too much, she’d see the dark water, the lighthouse flashing in the distance again, or the black rock where Santiago was killed.

  “It’s dangerous to go there.” Teresa surprised even herself, saying that.

  “Plus, if the owners find out . . .”

  “There are no owners anymore. A lot of time has gone by. Nobody remembers.”

  “People remember things like that forever.”

  “Well, then,” Patty said, and walked a few steps in silence, “we’ll negotiate with whoever we need to.”

  Incredible things, she’d said. It was the first time Teresa had heard her say anything that sounded so much like respect. And she’s not trying to do a snow job on me, Teresa told herself. She’s capable of trying to manipulate me, but not this time. I know her, and I’m sure she was sincere.

  “And what do I get out of it?”

  “Half. Unless you prefer to go on being a waitress selling beer to tourists.”

  That nasty slash reawakened the heat, the T-shirt soaked with sweat, the suspicious look from Tony on the other side of the bar, her own animal exhaustion. The voices of the swimmers, the smell of bodies smeared with oils and creams. All that lay a four-hour bus ride from this stroll under the stars. A soft sound among the nearby branches interrupted her thoughts. A whir of wings, startling her.

  “It’s an owl,” said Patty. “There are a lot of owls here. They hunt at night.”

  “What if the stash is not still there?” said Teresa.

  And yet . . . she thought finally. And yet . . .

  9. Women can, too

  It had rained all morning, heavy sheets that raised foggy spatters in the surf, with gusts of wind that drove the rain and blotted out the gray silhouette of Cape Trafalgar. With the rubber dinghy and outboard motor sitting useless on the trailer, they smoked on the beach, inside the Land Rover, listening to music, watching the water run down the windshield and the hours pass on the dashboard clock. Patricia O’Farrell was in the driver’s seat, Teresa in the other, with a thermos of coffee, bottles of water, packets of tobacco, thick ham and white cheese on good dense rolls with thick golden crust, notebooks with hand-drawn maps, and a nautical chart of the area, the most detailed one Teresa could find. The sky was still dingy gray—the tail end of a spring that was resisting the coming of summer—and the low clouds were scudding toward the east, but the ocean, an undulating, leaden surface, was calmer, and the only whitecaps were breakers on the rocks, farther down the coast.

  “We can go now,” said Teresa.

  They got out of the Land Rover, stretching their stiff muscles as they walked along the wet sand, and then they opened the tailgate and took out the wetsuits. There was still a light, intermittent drizzle, and Teresa got goosebumps when she took off her clothes. It’s cold as hell, she thought. She pulled the tight neoprene pants on over her bathing suit, and zipped up the vest without pulling the hood up over her hair, which was gathered into a ponytail. Two girls going scuba diving in this weather, she said to herself. Gimme a break. Although if somebody is stupid enough to be out in this weather, I guess they’ll buy it.

  “Ready?”

  She saw her friend nod without taking her eyes off the enormous gray expanse that undulated out there in front of them. Patty was not used to this kind of situation, but she took it all with reasonable aplomb—not too much chatter, or nerves, at least that you could see. She just looked preoccupied, although Teresa had noticed how many cigarettes she’d smoked while they were waiting, one after another. She had one in her mouth now, wet with mist, and she squinted as she pulled the wetsuit up onto her legs. And she’d had a snort just before they got out of the car, a precise ritual, a new bill rolled up, two lines on the plastic sleeve that held the automobile registration.

  But Teresa wouldn’t join her this time. It was another kind of alertness she needed, she thought as she finished gathering up her equipment, mentally reviewing the chart that she had studied for so long it was engraved on her memory: the line of the coast; the curve toward the south, toward Barbate; the
steep, rocky cliff at the end of the clean beach. And there, not on the chart but pointed out very carefully by Patty, the two large caves and one small one hidden between them, inaccessible from land and hardly visible from the sea—the Marrajos Caves.

  “Let’s go,” Teresa said. “We’ve only got four hours of daylight.”

  They put their backpacks—zip-lock bags, knives, lengths of nylon rope, waterproof flashlights—and their harpoons in the rubber boat, for appearance’ sake, and after unbuckling the belts on the trailer, dragged the boat down to the shore. It was a nine-foot gray rubber Zodiac. The gas tank was full, and the fifteen-horsepower Mercury, checked by Teresa the previous day, like back in the old days, was ready. They fitted it onto the motor brackets and tightened the wing nuts. Everything in order, the motor horizontal and the propeller up. Then, one on each side, pulling on the safety lines, they dragged it into the water.

  In cold water up to her waist, pushing the inflatable raft outside the breakers, Teresa made an effort not to think about the past. She wanted her memories to bring her nothing but useful experience, essential technical knowledge, not to burden her with dead weight.

  Patty helped her climb aboard as she scaled the slippery rubber. The sea was pushing them toward the beach. Teresa started the engine on the first try, a quick, sharp tug on the rope. The noise cheered her heart. Here we are again, she thought. For good or ill. She told Patty to go forward to balance the weight, and she herself settled down beside the motor, steering the boat away from shore and then toward the black rock down at the end of the sandy beach, which shone silvery-white in the gray light. The Zodiac handled well. Teresa steered it the way Santiago had taught her, dodging the crests, bow into the sea and then sliding down the other face of the waves. Enjoying it. Chale, even like this, nasty, choppy, gray, the ocean was beautiful. With delight she inhaled the wet air that brought memories of salt spray, scarlet sunsets, stars, night hunts, lights on the horizon, Santiago’s impassive profile silhouetted in the helicopter’s spotlight, the HJ’s flashing blue eye, the bounces on the black water jolting her kidneys. How sad everything was, yet how beautiful. Now there was still a fine misty drizzle, and gusts of salt spray pelted her face. She looked at Patty, dressed in the blue neoprene that clung to her figure: she was gazing out at the water and the black rocks without entirely concealing her apprehension. If you only knew, carnalita, thought Teresa. If only you’d seen the things I’ve seen on these seas.

  But Patty was a trouper. They’d talked a hundred times about the consequences if things went south, including the possibility that the half-ton of coke wasn’t there at all. Lieutenant O’Farrell had her obsession, and she had balls. Maybe that was the least reassuring thing about her—too much balls and too big an obsession. That, Teresa thought, didn’t always go hand in hand with the cool head this kind of business called for. On the beach, while they were waiting in the Land Rover, Teresa had realized something: Patty was a companion, even a partner, but not a solution. However this ended, there was a long stretch that Teresa would have to travel by herself; nobody was going to make the trip any easier.

  Although she could never quite pin down how it happened, the dependency that Teresa had felt up to now, on everything and everybody—or rather, her stubborn belief in that dependency—began to change into a certainty that she really was an orphan in the world. The conviction had begun to form in prison, in those last months, and maybe the books she’d read had had something to do with it, the hours spent lying awake, waiting for the sun to come up, the reflections that the peace of that time brought to her head. Then she’d gotten out, and was once again alive and in the world. And the time that had passed working at the beach kiosk, in what turned out to be just another wait, only confirmed the truth.

  But she’d been aware of none of this until the night of the party at the estate in Jerez. As they were walking through the dark vineyards and she heard Patty speak the word “future,” Teresa saw in a kind of flash that Patty was perhaps not the stronger of the two. Just as hundreds of years earlier, in another life, Güero Dávila and Santiago Fisterra had not been, either. It might be that ambition, plans, dreams, even bravery, or faith—even faith in God, she decided, shivering—didn’t give you strength, but took it away. Because hope, even the mere desire to survive, made a person vulnerable, bound to possible pain and defeat. Maybe that was the basic difference between some human beings and others, and that was the case with her. Maybe Edmond Dantès was wrong, and the only solution was not to trust, and not to hope.

  The cave was hidden behind huge boulders that had fallen off the cliff face. Teresa and Patty had done reconnaissance four days earlier: from thirty feet up, standing on the cliff ’s edge, Teresa had studied and made a note of every rock, taking advantage of the clear day, the clean, calm water, to consider the bottom, its irregularities, and the way to approach the cave by sea without having a sharp edge underwater puncture the Zodiac.

  And now they were there, swaying in the water while Teresa, with light touches on the gas and zigzagging adjustments of the tiller, tried to stay clear of the rocks and find a safer way in. Finally she realized that the Zodiac could make it into the cave only in calm water, so she steered toward the larger opening to the left. And there, beneath the overhang of the cave entrance, in a place where the ebb and flow wouldn’t push them against the cliff face, she told Patty to drop the folding grapnel, which was tied to the end of a thirty-foot line. Then they both slid down the sides of the boat into the water and swam with another line to the rocks, which the swell covered and uncovered with each movement. They floated easily, thanks to their wetsuits.

  When they reached the rocks, Teresa tied the line to one, warning Patty to be careful of the sea-urchin spines, and then they made their way slowly along the rocky coast, from the big cave to the smaller one, wading in water that rose and fell from their waists to their chests. Sometimes a breaking wave forced them to hold on to something so as not to lose their footing, and then their hands were cut and scratched by the sharp rocks, or they could feel the tugging at the neoprene around their elbows and knees. It was Teresa who, after looking down from the top, had insisted on the suits. “They’ll keep us warmer,” she said, “and without them we’ll get cut to ribbons.”

  “Here it is.” Patty pointed. “Just the way Jimmy described it . . . The arch up above, the three big rocks, and that little one. See? . . . We’ve got to swim in to where it gets shallow, and then we can stand.”

  Her voice echoed in the large opening. There was a strong smell of rotting seaweed, the mossy rocks that the swells constantly covered and uncovered. The two turned away from the light and pushed forward into the semidarkness. Inside, the water was calmer; they could still see the bottom clearly when it fell away and they had to swim a few yards. Almost at the end of the cave they found some sand, scattered pebbles, and shreds of dead seaweed. That far in, it was dark.

  “I need a goddamn cigarette,” Patty muttered.

  They waded out of the water and fished cigarettes out of the waterproof pockets of their packs. They smoked for a while, looking at one another. The arc of light at the entrance was reflected in the water until about halfway in, and it cast a grayish light over them. Wet, their hair stringy, fatigue on their faces. Now what? they seemed to ask each other silently.

  “I hope it’s still there,” Patty whispered.

  They stayed where they were long enough to finish their cigarettes. If a half-ton of cocaine was really just steps away, nothing in their lives would ever be the same once they’d covered that distance. And both of them knew it.

  “Órale, there’s still time, carnalita.”

  “Time for what?”

  Teresa smiled, turning her thought into a joke. “Well, I’m not sure. Maybe to not find out.”

  Patty smiled, too, distantly. Her mind was already a few steps farther ahead. “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

  Teresa squatted down to look for something in the backpack at her feet.
She had loosened her hair, and the ends were dripping water inside the pack. She took out her flashlight.

  “You know something?” she said, testing it.

  “No. But you’ll tell me.”

  “I think there are dreams that can kill you.” The walls, now lighted by the flashlight, were of black rock, and stalactites could be seen hanging from the ceiling. “More than people, or disease, or time.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing. Just occurred to me, that’s all. A minute ago.”

  Patty didn’t look at her; she was hardly paying attention. She had picked up her own flashlight, and had turned toward the rocks at the rear of the cave, lost in thought.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  A distracted question, not interested in a reply. Teresa didn’t answer. She looked at her friend attentively, because her voice, even if you took into account the effect of the echo inside the cave, sounded strange. I hope she hasn’t decided to shoot me in the back, in this treasure cave, like pirates in some book, Teresa said to herself, only half amused. Despite the absurdity of the idea, she caught herself looking down at the reassuring handle of the diving knife sticking up out of her open pack. Jesus, no need to creep yourself out. And she kept telling herself that as they collected their equipment, slung their packs over their backs, and walked carefully farther in, their flashlights illuminating the rocks and seaweed. The floor rose gently toward the rear. Two shafts of light revealed a dogleg to the left. Down it were more pebbles and rocks and dead seaweed—thick carpets of it washed up against a hole in the cave wall.

  “It would have to be in there,” said Patty.

  Híjole, Teresa suddenly realized: Lieutenant O’Farrell’s voice is quivering.

  I gotta admit,” said Nino Juárez, “that it was a very ballsy thing to do.” There was nothing about the former head of the DOCS—the organized-crime unit for the Costa del Sol—that would have led one to take him for a cop. Or even an ex-cop. He was a small, thin man, almost fragile. He had a sparse blond beard and wore a gray suit, no doubt very expensive, with a silk tie-and-handkerchief combination, and a Patek Philippe on his left wrist, under the French cuff of his pink-and-white-striped shirt with its designer cuff link. He looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of a men’s fashion magazine, although he’d actually come straight from his office on Madrid’s Gran Vía. “Saturnino G. Juárez,” read the business card I’d put in my wallet. “Director of Internal Security.” And in one corner was the logo of a chain of department stores with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales.