Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  He had hung his jacket over the back of his chair and unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled them up over his forearms, although the knot in his tie was still impeccably tight. He spoke slowly, clearly, with a sober voice that Teresa found soothing. Competent and smart, Patty had once summarized him: from a good Jerez family, married to a girl with money, two young daughters. “He travels a lot to London and New York and Panama and places like that. Financial consultant to very high-level firms. My dearly departed idiot ex had some sort of business with him, but Teo was always much the more intelligent of the two. He gives his advice, collects his fee, and stands back, far in the background. A top-drawer mercenary, if you know what I mean. And he never gets involved in the dirty work, as far as I can tell. I’ve known him since I was a girl. He fucked me once, too, when we were younger. No big deal in bed. Quick. Self-centered. But back then I was no big deal, either.”

  “As for the serious matters, things get a bit more complex,” Teo continued. “I’m talking about real money, the kind that never passes through Spanish soil. And I’d suggest forgetting about Gibraltar. It’s a water hole in the jungle. Everybody has an account there.”

  “But it works,” said Eddie Alvarez.

  He seemed uncomfortable. Jealousy, maybe, thought Teresa, who was observing the two men closely. Eddie had done good work for Transer Naga, but his skills were limited. Everyone knew that. The Gibraltar attorney considered the Jerez financial advisor a dangerous competitor. And he was right.

  “It works now.” Teo gave Eddie the kind of sympathetic look you’d give a handicapped person whose wheelchair you’re about to push down the stairs. “I’m not talking about what’s been done thus far. But Gibraltar’s full of amateurs gossiping in the corner bar, and a secret stays secret for about twenty-four hours. . . . Plus, for every three good citizens, one is bribable. And that goes in both directions: we can bribe them, but so can the police. . . . It’s okay if you’re fooling around with a few kilos, or tobacco, but we’re talking about large quantities of important material. So Gibraltar’s not the place.”

  Eddie pushed up his glasses. “I don’t agree,” he protested.

  “I don’t care.” Teo’s voice turned harder. “I’m not here to discuss smuggling cigarettes.”

  “I’m—” Eddie began. He placed his hands on the table, turning first to Teresa and then to Patty, seeking their support.

  “A small-time shyster,” Teo interrupted, finishing his sentence for him. He spoke the words softly, his face expressionless. Dispassionate. A doctor telling a patient there’s a shadow on his X ray.

  “I won’t allow you—”

  “Shut up, Eddie,” said Teresa.

  Eddie Alvarez’ mouth froze. A kicked dog looking around disconcertedly. The loose tie and wrinkled jacket accentuated his slovenliness. I’ve got to watch that flank, Teresa told herself, glancing at him again while she heard Patty laugh. A kicked dog can be dangerous. She made a note in the little book she carried in her head. Eddie Alvarez: Consider situation later. There were ways to ensure loyalty despite a grudge. There was always a way to win a person over.

  “Go on, Teo.”

  And Teo went on.

  “The best thing is to set up corporations and do your financial business with foreign banks that are outside the oversight and control of the European Union: the Channel Islands, Asia, the Caribbean. The problem is that a lot of money comes from suspicious or criminal activities, and you have to allay official suspicion through a series of legal covers that no one will ask questions about.

  “Otherwise the procedure is simple: delivery of merchandise is timed to coincide exactly with the transfer of the fee, by what’s called a SWIFT transfer, an irrevocable bank order issued by the sending bank.”

  Eddie Alvarez, still chewing his own bone, returned to the conversation: “I did what was asked of me.”

  “Of course, Eddie,” said Teo. She liked that smile of his, Teresa discovered. A balanced, practical smile: When the opposition is down, you don’t kick him. “Nobody is saying you didn’t do your job well. But it’s time for you to relax, take some time off. Without neglecting your commitments, of course.”

  He was looking at Eddie, not at Teresa or Patty, who was still more or less on the fringes, with an expression that said she was enjoying this show immensely. “Your commitments, Eddie.” That was the second lesson. A warning. And that guy knows his stuff, thought Teresa. He knows about kicked dogs, because he’s no doubt kicked his share of them. All with soft words, every hair in place. The attorney seemed to get the message, because he collapsed almost physically. Out of the corner of her eye, Teresa sensed the uneasy look he gave her. Scared shitless. Just like at the door of his apartment house, with the papers all over the floor.

  “What do you recommend?” Teresa asked Teo.

  He made a gesture that took in the entire table, as though it were all there, in plain sight, among the coffee cups or in the black leather portfolio he had open in front of him, its pages blank, a gold fountain pen on top. His hands were dark, well cared for, manicured, with black hairs peeking out from under the rolled-up cuffs. Teresa wondered how old he’d been when he and Patty slept together. Eighteen, twenty. Two daughters, her friend had said. A wife with money, and two daughters. No question he was still sleeping with other women, too.

  “Switzerland is too serious,” Teo said. “It requires too many bonds and guarantees and confirmations. The Channel Islands are all right, and there are subsidiaries of Spanish banks that are based in London rather than Madrid, and that therefore demand financial opacity. But they’re too close, too obvious, and if the European Union decides to pressure them someday, and England decides to tighten the screws, Gibraltar and the Channels will be vulnerable.”

  Despite everything, Eddie had not given up. Maybe it was patriotism. “That’s what you say,” he put in, and then muttered something unintelligible.

  This time Teresa didn’t say anything. She just kept looking at Teo, waiting for his reaction. He touched his chin, pensive. He sat like that for a second, his eyes down, and then looked up, straight at Eddie.

  “Don’t mess with me, Eddie. Okay?” He had picked up the fountain pen, and after taking off the cap he drew a line of blue ink across the white page of his notebook, a line so perfectly straight and horizontal that he might have been using a ruler. “This is serious business, not running Winstons across the line.” He looked at Patty and then at Teresa, the pen suspended over the paper, and at the end of the line he drew an arrow pointing to Eddie’s heart. “Does he really have to be here for this conversation?”

  Patty looked at Teresa, her eyebrows arched exaggeratedly. Teresa was looking at Teo. No one was looking at Eddie.

  “No,” Teresa said. “He doesn’t.”

  “Ah. Good. Because we need to discuss some technical details.”

  Teresa turned to Eddie. He was taking off his glasses to wipe the nosepieces with a Kleenex, as though in the last few minutes they had been slipping more often than usual. He also wiped the bridge of his nose. His nearsightedness accentuated the bewilderment and fear in his eyes. He looked as pathetic and helpless as a duck soaked in crude oil on the ocean shore.

  “Go downstairs and have a beer, Eddie. We’ll see you later,” said Teresa.

  He hesitated, then put on his glasses as he clumsily got up. The sad imitation of a humiliated man. It was obvious that he was trying to think of something to say before he left, and that nothing occurred to him. He opened his mouth, closed it. Finally he left, in silence: a duck leaving black footprints, chuff chuff chuff, with a face that looked like he was going to throw up before he made it outside.

  Teo drew a second blue line in his notebook, under the first, and just as straight.

  “I would go to Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, the Caribbean, or Panama,” he said. “Several of my representatives operate with Grand Cayman, and they’re very satisfied: six hundred and eighty banks on a tiny island two hours by plane from Mia
mi. No tellers, virtual money, no taxes, confidentiality a sacred trust. They’re only obliged to report transactions when there’s proof of direct links to known criminal activity. . . . But since they have no legal requirements for a customer’s identification, establishing those links is not possible.”

  Now he was looking at the two women, and three out of four times it was at Teresa. I wonder, she thought, what the Lieutenant’s told him about me. Where everybody stands. She also wondered whether she was dressed appropriately: a loose ribbed sweater, jeans, sandals. For a moment she envied the mauve and gray Valentino outfit that Patty was wearing as naturally as a second skin. Elegant bitch.

  Teo went on explaining his plan: A couple of nonresident corporations located abroad, covered by law firms with adequate bank accounts, to start with. And so as not to put all their eggs in one basket, transfer select amounts of money, laundered through a series of secure circuits, to fiduciary deposits and serious bank accounts in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. Dormant accounts, he insisted, that were not to be touched, as insurance for the long term. They could also invest their money in corporations that dealt in trusts, real estate, titles, things like that. Clean money—spotless, in fact—in case someday the Caribbean infrastructure had to be dynamited or everything else had to be blown to bits.

  “Do you agree with all this?”

  “It sounds like the right thing,” Teresa replied.

  “It is. The advantage is that now there’s a lot of movement between Spanish banks and the Caymans, and we can get lost in all the wire traffic for the first deposits. I have a good contact in George Town: Mansue Johnson and Sons. Banking consultants, financial advisors, and attorneys. They do complete tailor-made packages.”

  “Isn’t that going a little far, making everything way too complicated?” asked Patty. She had been smoking one cigarette after another, the butts accumulating in the saucer of her coffee cup.

  Teo put the pen down on the notebook page. He shrugged. “That depends on your plans for the future. What Eddie did for you works for the current state of your business: it’s that simple. But if things start picking up, you really need to prepare a structure that can handle any expansion, without rushing it and without improvisation.”

  “How long would it take you to have everything ready to go?” Teresa asked.

  Teo smiled the same smile as before: restrained, a bit vague, very different from the smiles of other men she remembered. And she still liked it, or maybe it was that now she liked that kind of smile because it didn’t mean anything. Simple, clean, automatic. More a polite gesture than anything else, like the gleam on a polished table or the shine on a new car. There was nothing compromising behind it: not sympathy, or dreams, or weakness, or obsessions. There was no intention to deceive, no attempt to convince or seduce; it was there only because it was linked to the character, inculcated in him through upbringing, the way his manners and the well-tied knot in his tie had been. He smiled the way he drew those ruler-straight lines on the blank pages of his notebook, and that was reassuring to Teresa. By this time she had read, and remembered, and she could look at a person and see many things. This man’s smile was one of those that put everything in its proper place. I don’t know whether it’ll happen with him, she told herself—I really don’t know if I’ll ever screw another man. But if I do, it’ll be a man who smiles like that.

  “How soon can you give me the money to start? After that, a month, maximum, and the papers will be ready for you to sign. We can have the right people come here, or we can all go to a neutral site. An hour of signatures and paperwork, and it’ll be done. . . . I also have to know who’s in charge of everything.”

  He waited for a reply. He had said this in a light, offhanded way. A detail of no great importance. But he was still waiting, and he was looking at each of them in turn.

  “Both of us,” said Teresa. “We’re in this together.”

  Teo took a second or two to answer. “I understand. But we need a single signature. The one who’ll be sending the faxes or making the telephone calls. There are things that I can do, of course. That I’ll have to do, if you give me a limited power of attorney. But one of you has to make the fast decisions.”

  Lieutenant O’Farrell’s cynical laughter broke the silence. The fucking laugh of an ex-combatant who wipes her ass with the flag.

  “That’s her.” She pointed at Teresa with her cigarette. “Somebody’ll have to get up early every morning, and I don’t get up till noon.”

  Miss American Express. Teresa asked herself why Patty decided to play it this way, and since when. Where she was pushing her, and why. Teo sat back in his chair. Now his eyes moved back and forth between the two women.

  “It is my responsibility to tell you that you’ll be leaving everything in her hands,” he finally said to Patty.

  “Sure.”

  “All right.” Teo studied Teresa. “That’s it, then.”

  He was no longer smiling, and his expression seemed to indicate he was appraising the situation. He’s asking himself the same questions about Patty, Teresa told herself. About our relationship. Calculating the pros and cons. To what degree I represent profits. Or problems. To what degree she does.

  At that, she began to sense many of the things that were going to happen.

  Patty gave them a good, long look when they left the meeting, and the look continued as the three of them went downstairs in the elevator and then strolled along the docks of the harbor, tidying up the last details. They picked Eddie Alvarez up at the door of the Ke bar, where he resembled someone who’d just been the victim of a mugging and was expecting another, the ghost of Punta Castor and perhaps the memory of Sergeant Velasco and Cañabota making his throat tight. Patty seemed pensive, her eyes squinting, marked with wrinkles, with a touch of interest or amusement, or both—amused interest, interested amusement—bubbling inside her, somewhere in that strange head. It was as though she were smiling without smiling, mocking Teresa, and perhaps herself, a little, laughing at everything and everybody. She had been watching them with that strange expression when they left the apartment in Sotogrande, as if she had just planted pot up in the sierra and were waiting for the perfect moment to harvest it—and she continued watching them during the conversation with Teo along the docks, and then for weeks and months afterward, when Teresa and Teo Aljarafe began to grow close. And once in a while Teresa got a whiff of that and was about to confront Patty, say, Quihubo aquí, carnalita, what’s up, cabrona, spit it out.

  But then Patty would smile in a different way, more open, like, Who, me? and light a cigarette, sip at her drink, pick at her food, do a line of coke. Or she’d start talking about something with that frivolousness she wielded so perfectly—frivolousness that Teresa had figured out wasn’t frivolousness at all—or anything like sincerity, either. Or Patty might go back, for a time, to being what she’d been in the beginning: the distinguished, cruel, cutting, quick Lieutenant O’Farrell, the comrade from back when, whose dark side you might occasionally glimpse.

  Afterward, Teresa even came to wonder to what extent Patty had sacrificed herself to fate, like a woman accepting the tarot cards that she herself turns up. To what degree had Patty foreseen, or even fostered, many of the things that eventually occurred between the two of them, Teresa and Teo Aljarafe? And thus, in a way, among the three of them.

  Teresa often saw Oleg Yasikov. There was good chemistry between her and the big, quiet Russian, who looked at work, money, life, and death with a dispassionate Slavic fatality that reminded her of certain men from northern Mexico. The two of them would sit drinking coffee or take a walk after a work-related meeting, or go out to dinner at Casa Santiago, on the sea walk in Marbella—Yasikov liked crayfish in white wine sauce—with the bodyguards strolling along the sidewalk across the street, along the beach-front. He was not a man of many words, but when they were alone, talking, Teresa heard him say things, almost offhandedly, that later she would spend hours turning over in he
r head. He never tried to convince anyone of anything, or counter one argument with another. I tend not to argue, he had once remarked. They tell me it’ll be less and I say, Ah, well, maybe it will be. Then I do what I think is right. This guy, Teresa soon realized, had a point of view, a very clear way of looking at the world and the beings who inhabited it: he didn’t kid himself that it was reasonable, or fair, or nice. Just useful. His behavior, his objective cruelty, suited her somehow.

  “There are animals,” he said, “that live on the bottom of the ocean in a shell. Others go out and expose their bare skin—they risk it. Some reach the shore. They stand up. They walk. The question is, How far do they get before their time is up? Yes. How long do you last and what do you achieve while you last? Which is why everything that helps you survive is essential. The rest is superfluous. Disposable, Tesa. In my work, as in yours, you have to move within the simple margins of those two words. Essential. Superfluous. Understand? . . . And the second of those words includes the lives of other people. Or sometimes excludes them.”

  So Yasikov wasn’t so hermetic after all. No man was. Teresa had learned that it was silences, skillfully administered, that made other people talk. And it was in that way, little by little, that she approached the Russian gangster. One of Yasikov’s grandfathers had been a czarist cadet in the days of the Bolshevik Revolution, and during the hard years that followed, the family preserved the memory of that young officer. Like many men of his class, Oleg Yasikov admired bravery—that, he would eventually confess, was what had made him admire Teresa. It was during a night of vodka and conversation on the terrace of the Salduba bar in Puerto Banús; she caught a sentimental, almost nostalgic, vibration in his voice when in a very few words he told the story of the cadet and later lieutenant in the Nikolaiev Cavalry Regiment, who had time to father a son before being shot by a firing squad, alongside Baron von Ungern Sternberg, in Mongolia, or Siberia, in 1922.