Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  He stared thoughtfully at his plate and then raised his head. “You ever thought about going back, mi doña?”

  Teresa looked at him so fixedly that the pistolero squirmed in his seat and turned away. He opened his mouth, perhaps to apologize, when she smiled, distantly, and raised her glass of wine.

  “You know we can’t go back,” she said.

  Pote Gálvez scratched his temple.

  “Well, I mean, I thought, I mean I can’t, no . . . but you’ve got money, pull, connections now—you might could do it. . . . I mean, if you wanted to. You could do it.”

  “And you—what would you do if I went back?”

  The bodyguard looked down at his plate again, wrinkling his brow, as though he had never considered that possibility. “Well, I don’t know, patrona,” he finally said. “Sinaloa is so far away, and going back—that seems like it’s even farther, you know? But you . . . you could . . .”

  “Forget it.” In a cloud of rising cigarette smoke, Teresa shook her head. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a bunker in Colonia Chapultepec, looking over my shoulder and jumping every time I see a shadow.”

  “No . . . But it’s a shame, you know. It’s not a bad place.”

  “Órale.”

  “It’s the government, patrona. If there wasn’t any government, or politicians, or gringos up there north of the Río Bravo, a man could live like a king there. . . . There wouldn’t be any need for pot or any of that, no? . . . We’d live on pure tomatoes.”

  There were also the books. Teresa was still reading, and now even more. As time went on, she grew more convinced that the world and life were easier to understand through a book. Now she had a lot of them, and oak shelves on which she arranged them by size or collection, filling the walls of the library, which opened south, onto the garden. She’d furnished it with comfortable leather armchairs and good lighting, and she would sit there at night or on cold days to read. When it was sunny, she would go outside to one of the lounge chairs by the pool or in the shade of the cabaña—there was a barbecue grill nearby, where Pote Gálvez would cook meat to death on Sunday—and lie for hours, rapt in the pages of a book. She always read two or three at a time: something about history, she was fascinated by the history of Mexico at the time of the conquest, Cortés and all that; a sentimental or detective novel; and another novel, more complicated, one of those that took her a long time to finish and that she sometimes couldn’t entirely understand but that always left her with the sensation that something had happened to her inside. She read almost randomly, mixing everything together. She found herself a little bored by a very famous novel somebody had recommended to her, One Hundred Years of Solitude—she liked Pedro Páramo better—but she found no more delight in the mysteries of Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes than in the tough books like Crime and Punishment, The Red and the Black, and Buddenbrooks, which was the story of a young society girl and her family in Germany at least a hundred years ago, maybe more. She’d also read an old, old book about the Trojan War and the voyages of the warrior Aeneas, where she came upon a phrase that made a great impression on her: The only salvation of the conquered is to expect no salvation.

  Books. Every time she browsed the full shelves and touched the leather-bound spine of The Count of Monte Cristo, Teresa thought about Patty. They talked almost every day, although sometimes several days went by without their seeing each other. How are you, Lieutenant? How’s tricks, Mexicana? By now Patty was refusing to take part in any activity directly related to the business. All she did was collect her paycheck and spend it: coke, liquor, girlfriends, trips, clothes. She would go to Paris or Miami or Milan and have a great time, do exactly what she wanted, not a worry in the world. Why should I, she’d say, if you drive this car like God himself. She continued to get into jams, conflicts it was easy enough to resolve with friendships, money, Teo’s expertise. But her nose and her health continued to fall apart. More than a gram a day, tachycardia, dental problems. Dark circles around her eyes. She heard strange noises, she slept badly, she’d put on a CD and turn it off within seconds, get in the bathtub or the pool and get out again instantly, seized by an anxiety attack. She was loud, showy, and reckless. She talked too much. And to anybody. And when Teresa, choosing her words very carefully, confronted her with it, Patty would turn on her nastily: “My health and my cunt and my life and my part of the business are my business,” she would say. “I don’t ask what you do with Teo or how you handle the fucking money.”

  It had been a lost cause for some time, and Teresa was caught in a conflict that not even the sage advice of Oleg Yasikov—she continued to see her Russian friend occasionally—could find her a way out of. This is going to end badly, Yasikov had said. Yes. The only thing I hope you can do, Tesa, is stand back so you don’t get splattered too much. When it happens. And I also hope that it’s not you who has to make the decision.

  Señor Aljarafe called, mi señora. He says the ham you ordered came in.” “Thank you, Pinto.”

  She walked across the lawn, followed at a distance by the bodyguard. The ham was the last payment made by the Italians—to an account on Grand Cayman via Liechtenstein, with fifteen percent laundered in a bank in Zurich. It was another piece of good news. The air bridge was working regularly, the bombings of bales of drugs with GPS devices—another of Dr. Ramos’ technological innovations—were giving excellent results, and a new route opened by the Colombians through Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica was making big profits for all concerned. The demand for cocaine base for clandestine laboratories in Europe continued to grow, and thanks to Teo, Transer Naga had just made a good connection for money laundering through the Puerto Rican lottery. Teresa asked herself how long this streak of good luck was going to last.

  With Teo, professional relations were optimal, and the other kind—she’d never gone so far as to call them emotional—were perfectly adequate to her needs. He didn’t come to her house in Guadalmina; they always met in hotels, almost always during business trips, or in an old house that he had had remodeled on Calle Ancha in Marbella. Neither put more into it than was necessary, neither risked much at all.

  14. There’s gonna be more hats than heads before I’m done

  She’d been right—luck ran in cycles. After a good stretch, the year started off bad and by spring was worse. Bad luck combined with other problems. A Skymaster 337 with two hundred kilos of cocaine aboard went down near Tabernas during a night run, and Karasek, the Polish pilot, died in the crash. That alerted the Spanish authorities, who intensified aerial surveillance. Not long afterward, a general settling of internal scores between the Moroccan traffickers, the army, and the Gendarmerie Royale complicated relations with the people from the Rif. Several rubbers were intercepted in not altogether clear circumstances on one side and the other of the Strait, and Teresa had to go to Morocco to normalize the situation. Colonel Abdelkader Chaib had lost influence after the death of the old king, Hassan II, and establishing secure networks with the new strongmen in the hashish industry took time and a great deal of money.

  In Spain, pressure from the courts, which had been inflamed by the press and public opinion, grew stronger: some legendary amos da fariña—cocaine bosses—were taken down in Galicia, and even the powerful Corbeira clan had problems. And in the early spring, a Transer Naga operation ended in disaster when, halfway between the Azores and Cabo San Vicente, the merchantman Aurelio Carmona was boarded by Spanish Customs. The ship’s hold was full of bobbins of industrial linen thread, in metal casings, but each huge bobbin was lined with sheets of lead and aluminum so that neither X rays nor lasers could detect the five tons of cocaine hidden inside.

  “It can’t be,” said Teresa when she heard the news. “First, I can’t believe that they got the information. Second, we’ve been watching the movements of the Petrel for weeks”—the Customs boarding vessel—“and it hasn’t moved from its base. That’s why we pay a guy inside there.”

  Dr. Ramos, smoki
ng his pipe as calmly as though he had lost not five tons of cocaine but a tin of pipe tobacco, replied, “That’s why the Petrel didn’t leave port, boss. They left it tied up all quiet and peaceful to lull us, while they went out in secret with their boarding gear and their Zodiacs in a tow-boat that the merchant marine loaned them. They know we’ve got a man on the inside, and they’re just playing it back on us.”

  Teresa was uneasy about the Aurelio Carmona interception. Not because of the interdiction of the cargo—profits and losses went into their respective columns as in any other business, and the losses were all figured into the overhead—but rather because of the evidence that somebody had fingered the shipment and that Customs had inside information. This is how they bust us wide open, she said to herself. Three possible sources for the tip-off occurred to her: the Galicians, the Colombians, and somebody in her own crew. The rivalry with the Corbeira clan continued, although without any spectacular faceoffs—some elbowing here and there, a foot stuck out to trip one another up, an “I’m keeping an eye on you, motherfucker, nothin’ to bring you totally down, but you slip up and it’s adiós, Mexicana, you know?” Through their suppliers in common, the Corbeiras could make trouble. If it was the Colombians, there wasn’t much she could do—not much more than pass on the information and let them clean out their ranks for themselves. Then there was the third possibility, that the information came from within Transer Naga. If that was the case, they had to take some new precautions: box off access to plans—eyes only and need to know, just like the military—and lay a trap with marked information so they could follow the rat’s trail, to see where it led. But that took time. Discover the bird by its fucking droppings.

  Have you thought about Patricia?” asked Teo. “Fuck that, cabrón. Don’t go there.”

  They were at La Almoraima, a short distance from Algeciras: a former monastery set in a forest of thick oak, now a small hotel with a restaurant specializing in game. Sometimes they went for a couple of days, taking one of the rustic, gloomy rooms opening onto the cloister. They’d dined on venison and pears in red wine and were now having a cigarette with their cognac and tequila. The night was pleasant for the season, and through the open windows came the sound of crickets and the murmur of the old fountain.

  “I don’t mean she’s passing information on to anybody,” Teo said. “Just that she talks too much. And that she’s careless. And that she’s running around with people we can’t control.”

  Teresa looked out—the moonlight sifting down through the leaves of the grapevines, the whitewashed walls, and the ancient stone archways: another place that reminded her of Mexico.

  “From that to revealing information about shipments,” she replied, “is a stretch. Besides, who’s she going to tell?”

  Teo studied her awhile without speaking. “She doesn’t have to tell anybody in particular,” he said finally. “You’ve seen how she is lately—she rambles, she goes off on fantasies, she’s paranoid and weird. And she talks a blue streak. All it takes is the wrong word dropped here, some compromising information there, and anybody with an ounce of brains can come to their own conclusions. We’re having a rash of ‘coincidences’ here, not to mention the judges on our case and pressure from all over. Even Tomás Pestaña is keeping his distance lately, just in case. That guy can see trouble coming a mile away, like those people with arthritis that can tell you when it’s going to rain. We can still manage him, but if there’s trouble, or too much pressure and things go bad, he’ll drop us in a heartbeat.”

  “He’ll hold. We know too much about his business.”

  “Knowing isn’t always enough.” A shrewd, man-of-the-world expression came to his face. “In the best of cases, it can neutralize him, but it can’t make him stay on board. . . . He has his own problems. Too many cops and too many judges can scare him. And nobody can buy every cop and every judge in Spain.” He looked at her hard. “Not even you.”

  “So you’re suggesting that we pick Patty up and beat the shit out of her until she tells us what we want to hear.”

  “God, no. All I’m saying is that maybe you should cut her out of the loop. She’s got what she wants, and we don’t have enough manpower to follow up on every skirt she chases.”

  “I think that was unnecessary.”

  “But true. There’s that one girl that comes and goes like it was her own house. Patricia is out of control.” Teo touched his nose meaningfully. “It’s been going on for some time. And you’ve lost control, too. . . . Over her, I mean.”

  That tone, Teresa said to herself. I don’t like that tone. My control is my business.

  “She’s still my partner,” she replied, irritated. “Your boss.”

  An amused smile crossed the lawyer’s face: Was she serious? But he said nothing. Your relationship is curious, he’d once told her. A friendship that no longer exists. And if you owe her, you’ve paid. . . .

  “What she still is, is in love with you,” Teo said after a pause, swirling the cognac in the snifter expertly. “That’s the real problem.”

  The words came softly, almost in a whisper, and almost one by one. Don’t go there, Teresa silently warned him again. That’s none of your business. Especially not yours.

  “It’s strange to hear you say that,” she answered. “She introduced you and me. She brought you to me.”

  Teo frowned. He looked away and then back. He seemed to be thinking, weighing, deciding between two loyalties, or maybe one of them. A loyalty that was now remote, faded. Maybe even expired.

  “She and I know each other well,” he said at last. “Or we did. Which is why I’m going to say this: From the beginning she knew what was going to happen between me and you. . . . I don’t know what there was between you and Patty in El Puerto de Santa María, and I don’t care. I’ve never asked. But whatever it was, she hasn’t forgotten.”

  “And yet,” Teresa insisted, “Patty brought you and me together.”

  Teo inhaled as though he were going to sigh, but he didn’t. He looked at his wedding ring on his left hand, which was resting on the table.

  “Maybe she knows you better than you think,” he said. “Maybe she thought you needed somebody, in several ways. And with me, there were no risks.

  “Risks like what?”

  “Falling in love with you. Complicating your life.” The lawyer’s smile made his words seem trivial. “Maybe she saw me as a substitute, not as a rival or adversary. And depending on how you look at it, she was right. You’ve never let me go too far.”

  “I’m beginning not to like this conversation.”

  As though he had just overheard Teresa, Pote Gálvez appeared at the door. He was carrying a cell phone, and was more somber than usual. Quihubo, Pinto. The bodyguard looked hesitant, uncomfortable; he stood on first one foot, then the other, and he wouldn’t step inside. Respectful. He was sorry to interrupt, patrona, he said at last. But it sounded important. Apparently señora Patricia was in trouble.

  It was more than trouble, Teresa discovered in the emergency room of the Marbella hospital. It was a typical Saturday-night scene: ambulances outside, gurneys, voices, people in the hallways, doctors and nurses rushing about. She and Teo found Patty in the office of a solicitous chief of hospital services: her jacket was draped over her shoulders, her pants had dirt stains on the knees and the outside of the thighs, along her hip, and there was a bruise on her forehead, bloodstains on her hands and blouse. Somebody else’s blood. A half-smoked cigarette lay in the ashtray, and another was between her fingers. There were also two uniformed police officers in the hall, the body of a dead young woman on a gurney, and out on the Ronda highway a car, Patty’s new Jaguar convertible, wrapped around a tree on a curve with empty bottles on the floorboard and ten grams of cocaine like talcum powder on the seats.

  “A party,” Patty explained. “We were coming back from a fucking party.” Her tongue was thick and her expression confused, as though she couldn’t quite understand what was going on. Teresa knew the
dead girl, a young Gypsy-looking woman who had recently been with Patty constantly: eighteen, but with all the vices of an older woman, and as wiped out most of the time as a creature in her fifties—hot to trot and ready to screw anybody for what she wanted. She’d died instantly, when her face smashed into the windshield—her skirt had been up around her thighs and Patty had been fingering her at a hundred and ten miles an hour. One problem more, one problem less, Teo muttered coldly as he exchanged a look of relief with Teresa when they stood over the body, the sheet covering it stained with blood on one side of the head—half her brains, someone said, were on the hood, among the slivered glass.

  “Let’s look on the bright side, right? . . . We’re rid of this little slut,” Teo said. “Her snorting and her blackmailing. She was dangerous company, given the circumstances. And as for Patty, speaking of getting somebody out of the way, I wonder how things would have gone if . . .”

  “Shut up,” said Teresa, “or I swear you’re a dead man.”

  She was shocked by her own words. She saw herself speaking them, without thinking, spitting them out as they came into her mind: softly, without any reflection or calculation whatsoever.

  “I just . . .” Teo started to say.

  His smile seemed frozen, and he was looking at Teresa as if seeing her for the first time. Then he looked around disconcertedly, fearing that someone had overheard. He was pale.

  “I was just kidding,” he finally said.

  He was much less attractive like that—humiliated. Or scared. And Teresa didn’t answer. He was the least of her concerns. She was concentrating on herself, digging deep, trying to bring up the face of the woman that had spoken in her place.