Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Fortunately, the police told Teo, Patty hadn’t been at the wheel when the car went out of control on the curve, so that took care of the involuntary-homicide charge. The cocaine and the rest could be fixed with a little money, a great deal of tact, some timely telephone calls and visits, and the right judge, as long as the press didn’t get wind of it. That last one was the vital detail. Because these things, the lawyer said—sometimes looking at Teresa out of the corner of his eye, pensively—begin with a story buried on page seventeen and wind up on page one. So be careful of that.

  Later, when everything at the hospital and morgue had been seen to, Teo had stayed behind, making phone calls and taking care of the police—luckily, this was the municipal police, under Tomás Pestaña, not the Guardia Civil’s traffic division—while Pote Gálvez brought the Cherokee around to the door, and Teresa took Patty out very quietly, before anyone could make a call and some reporter started sniffing around. And in the car, leaning on Teresa, the window open so the cool night air might wake her up, Patty started talking.

  “I’m sorry,” she kept repeating, almost in a whisper, the headlights of oncoming cars lighting her face in flashes. “I’m sorry for her,” she said in a thick, muted voice, the words running together. “I’m sorry for that little girl. And I’m sorry for you, too, Mexicana,” she added after a silence.

  “Well, I don’t give a fuck who or what you’re sorry for,” Teresa replied, fed up and ill humored, looking down the highway over Pote Gálvez’ shoulder. “You should feel sorry for your fucking life.”

  Patty shifted position, leaning her head on the window behind her, and said nothing. Teresa squirmed uncomfortably. Chale, for the second time in an hour she’d said things she hadn’t intended to say. Besides, she wasn’t really irritated, not at Patty, anyway. In the end, it was she, Teresa, who was responsible for all this, or almost all of it. After a while, she took her friend’s hand, which was as cold as the body they’d left in the hospital, under the blood-soaked sheet.

  “How are you?” Teresa asked softly.

  “I’m . . . all right.” Patty didn’t lift her head from the window. She leaned on Teresa again only when she got out of the SUV.

  The minute they got her into bed, still dressed, she fell into an uneasy half-sleep, full of shivering and starts and moans. Teresa sat with her, in an armchair next to the bed, for a long time—the time it took to smoke three cigarettes and drink a big glass of tequila. Thinking. The room was almost dark, the curtains pulled back to reveal a starry sky and tiny, distant lights moving out at sea, beyond the shadows of the garden and the beach. Finally she stood up, to go to her own room, but at the door she thought better of it. She went and lay down on the edge of the bed, beside her friend, very quietly, trying not to wake her, and stayed there for hours. Listening to Patty’s tormented breathing. And thinking.

  Are you awake, Mexicana?” “Yes.”

  After the whispered answer, Patty had moved closer. Their bodies touched.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Go to sleep.”

  Another silence. It had been an eternity since the two of them had shared a moment like this, Teresa recalled. Almost since prison, in El Puerto de Santa María. Scratch the “almost.” She lay motionless, her eyes open, listening to her friend’s irregular breathing. Now she, too, couldn’t sleep.

  “Got a cigarette?” Patty asked after a while.

  “Just mine.”

  “I’ll take one.”

  Teresa got up, went over to the dresser, and took out two Bisontes laced with hashish from her purse. The flame from her lighter illuminated Patty’s face, the purple bruise on her forehead. Her lips were dry and swollen, her eyes, with bags under them from fatigue, were fixed on Teresa.

  “I thought we could do it, Mexicana.”

  Teresa lay faceup on the edge of the bed. She picked the ashtray up off the night table and put it on her stomach. Slowly, giving herself time.

  “We did,” she said at last. “We came a long way.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Patty stirred beside her, changing positions. She’s turned toward me, thought Teresa. She’s looking at me in the darkness. Or remembering me.

  “I thought I could take it,” Patty said. “You and I this way. I thought it would work.”

  How strange everything was, Teresa meditated. Lieutenant O’Farrell. Herself. How strange and how far away, and how many bodies behind them, on the road. People we accidentally killed while we lived.

  “Nobody deceived anybody. Nobody lied to anybody. Nobody twisted anybody’s arm.” As Teresa talked, she brought the cigarette to her mouth and saw the ember flare briefly between her fingers. “I’m where I always was.” She exhaled the smoke after holding it in awhile. “I never tried—”

  Patty interrupted. “Do you really think that? That you haven’t changed?”

  Teresa, irritated, shook her head. “And as for Teo . . .” she started to say.

  “Good God!” Patty’s laugh was scornful. Teresa felt her moving beside her as though she were shaking with laughter. “Teo can go to hell.”

  There was another silence, this time very long. Then Patty began to talk again, very softly.

  “He screws other women. . . . Did you know that?”

  Teresa shrugged, inside and outside, knowing that her friend couldn’t see or feel the gesture. She didn’t know, she concluded. Maybe she’d suspected, but that wasn’t the issue. It never had been.

  “I never expected anything,” Patty went on, her tone pensive, self-absorbed. “Just you and me. Like before.”

  Teresa suddenly had the urge to be cruel. Because of what Patty had said about Teo.

  “The good times back in El Puerto de Santa María, right?” she sneered.

  “You and your dream. Abbé Faria’s treasure.”

  She had never been sarcastic about that before. Never in this way. Patty didn’t say anything.

  “You were in that dream, Mexicana,” she said at last.

  It sounded like justification and reproach. But I’m not getting into that, Teresa told herself. It’s not my game, and never was. So fuck it.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t ask to be in it,” she said. “It was your decision, not mine.”

  “That’s true. And sometimes life comes around and bites you on the ass just by giving you what you want, you know?”

  That doesn’t apply to me, either, thought Teresa. I didn’t want anything. And that’s the biggest paradox of my whole pinche life. She stubbed out the cigarette and put the ashtray back on the night table.

  “I never made the decision,” she said aloud. “Never. It came and I stepped up. Period.”

  “So what happened with me?” asked Patty.

  That was the question. Really, Teresa reflected, it all came down to that. “I don’t know . . . At some point you dropped out, started drifting away.”

  “And at some point you turned into an hija de puta.”

  There was a long pause. They were motionless. If I heard the sound of metal bars, thought Teresa, or the footsteps of a guard in the corridor, I’d think I was in El Puerto. The old nightly ritual of friendship. Edmond Dantès and Abbé Faria making plans for freedom and the future.

  “I thought you had everything you needed,” Teresa said. “I took care of your business, I made a lot of money for you. . . . I took the risks and did the work. Isn’t that enough?”

  Patty took a minute to answer. “I was your friend.”

  “You are my friend,” Teresa corrected her.

  “Was. You didn’t stop to look back. And there are things that you never . . .”

  “¡Híjole! Here’s the wounded wife, complaining because her husband works all the time and doesn’t think about her as much as he should. . . . Is that where this is going?”

  “I never wanted . . .”

  Teresa could feel her anger growing. Because i
t could only be that, she told herself. Patty was wrong, and she, Teresa, was getting pissed. Pinche Lieutenant, or whatever she was now, was going to wind up hanging the dead girl tonight around her neck, too. Even that, she had to sign the checks for. Pay the bills.

  “God damn you, Patty. This is like some cheap fucking soap opera.”

  “Sure. I forgot I was talking to the Queen of the South.”

  She laughed quietly, choppily as she said this. That made it sound all the more cutting, and things were getting no better. Teresa raised up on one elbow. A mute rage was making her temples throb. Headache.

  “What exactly the fuck is it that I owe you? . . . Just tell me, for Christ’s sake, once and for all. Tell me and I’ll pay you.”

  Patty was a motionless shadow haloed by moonlight shining in obliquely through the window.

  “It’s not that.”

  “No?” Teresa leaned closer. She could feel her breathing. “I know what it is. It’s what makes you look at me strangely, because you think you gave up too much in exchange for too little. Abbé Faria confessed his secret to the wrong person . . . right?”

  Patty’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. A soft gleam, the reflection of the silver brightness outside.

  “I never reproached you for anything, ever,” she said very quietly.

  The moonlight in her eyes made them look vulnerable. Or maybe it’s not the moon, thought Teresa. Maybe we’ve both been fooling each other since the beginning. Lieutenant O’Farrell and her legend. She felt the urge to laugh, thinking, How young I was, and how stupid. Then came a wave of tenderness that shook her to the tips of her toes and shocked her—enough to make her half open her mouth. The rancor came next, almost as a relief, a solution, a comfort given her by the other Teresa, who was always around, in mirrors and shadows. She leapt at the support. She needed something to erase those three strange seconds, slay them with a cruelty as hard and definitive as an axe blow. She experienced the absurd impulse to turn toward Patty violently, straddle her, take her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled, pull off her clothes and say, Well, you’re going to collect it all right now, once and for all, so we can finally put this to rest. But she knew not to do that. You couldn’t pay back anything that way, and they were now too far apart—they’d followed paths that would never cross again. And in that double clarity, she saw that Patty knew this as well as she did.

  “I don’t know where I’m headed, either.”

  Teresa said that. And then she moved closer to the woman who had once been her friend, and embraced her in silence. She felt something shattered and irreparable within. An infinite despair, or grief. As though the girl in the torn photograph had returned and was crying deep down inside her.

  “Well, be sure not to find out, Mexicana . . . because you might wind up getting there.”

  They lay like that, unmoving, in silence, the rest of the night.

  Patricia O’Farrell committed suicide three days later, in her house in Marbella. A maid found her in the bathtub naked, up to her chin in the cold water. On the counter and the floor the police found several bottles of sleeping pills and a bottle of whisky. She had burned all her papers, photographs, and personal documents in the fireplace, and she left no note. For Teresa or anyone else. She just departed—like a woman walking quietly out of a room and closing the door behind her softly, so as not to make any noise.

  Teresa didn’t go to the funeral. She didn’t even see the body. The same afternoon Teo Aljarafe called her to tell her what had happened, she went aboard the Sinaloa, alone except for the crew and Pote Gálvez, and spent two days at sea, lying on a chaise on the aft deck, staring at the boat’s wake, never speaking a word. In all that time she never even read. She stared at the ocean and smoked. From time to time she drank some tequila. And from time to time Pote Gálvez’ footsteps were heard on the deck; he prowled, as usual, but kept his distance. He approached her only when it was time for lunch or dinner, saying nothing, bringing a tray and waiting for his boss to shake her head before he disappeared again, or to bring her a jacket when clouds covered the sun, or when the sun set and the night turned cold.

  The crew stayed even farther away. Pote had no doubt given instructions, and they were trying to avoid her. The skipper spoke to Teresa only twice: first when she came aboard and ordered him to sail, she didn’t care where, until she said to stop, and next when, two days later, she came into the wheelhouse and said, “We’re going back.” For those forty-eight hours, Teresa didn’t think for five minutes at a time about Patty O’Farrell or anything else. Whenever the image of her friend came to her, a wave, a seagull gliding in the distance, the reflection of sunlight off the water, the purring of the engines below, the wind that blew her hair into her face rushed to occupy all the useful space in her mind. The great advantage of the sea was that you could spend hours just looking at it, without thinking. Without remembering, either—or you could throw memories into the boat’s wake as easily as they came, let them slide off you without consequences, let them pass like ship’s lights in the night.

  Teresa had learned that with Santiago Fisterra: it happened only at sea, because the sea was as cruel and selfish as human beings, and in its monstrous simplicity had no notion of complexities like pity, wounding, or remorse. Maybe that was why it was almost analgesic. You could see yourself in it, or justify yourself by it, while the wind, the light, the swaying, the sound of the water on the hull worked the miracle of distancing, calming you until you didn’t hurt anymore, erasing any pity, any wound, and any remorse.

  Finally the weather changed, the barometer fell five millibars in three hours, and a stiff gale began to blow. The skipper looked at Teresa, who was still sitting back on the aft deck, and then at Pote Gálvez. So Pote went back and said, The weather’s turned bad, mi doña. You might want to give orders. Teresa looked at him without replying, and the bodyguard returned to the skipper, shrugging. That night, with easterly winds blowing between force 6 and 7, the Sinaloa sloshed about with engines at half-throttle, its bow into the wind and seas, spray leaping up over the wheelhouse in the darkness. Teresa stood at the wheel in the reddish light of the binnacle, one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle lever, with the autopilot disconnected, while the skipper, the sailor on duty, and Pote Gálvez, who was buzzed on Dramamine, watched her from the aft cabin, clinging to their seats and the table, the coffee sloshing out of their cups each time the Sinaloa pitched and yawed. Three times Teresa went out and, buffeted by the wind, leaned over the leeward gunwale to throw up, then returned to the wheel without saying a word, her hair wet and tousled, dark circles around her eyes from sleepless nights, and calmly lit a cigarette. She’d never been seasick before. The weather grew calmer around dawn, with less wind and a grayish light that made the ocean look like a sheet of molten lead. It was only then that she gave the order to return to port.

  Oleg Yasikov arrived at breakfast time. Blue jeans, dark blazer over a polo shirt, moccasins. Blond and stocky as always, although a little bigger around the waist lately. She greeted him on the rear terrace, beside the pool and the lawn that ran under the weeping willows down to the wall at the beach. It had been almost two months since they’d seen each other, at a dinner during which Teresa had warned him that the European Union Bank, a Russian bank in Antigua that Yasikov used for transferring funds to Latin America, was about to close its doors. It had saved him quite a few problems and a great deal of money.

  “Long time, Tesa. Yes.”

  Now it was he who had wanted to see her. A telephone call the previous afternoon. “I don’t need to be comforted,” she had told him. “It’s not that,” the Russian answered. “Nyet. Just a little bit of business and a little bit of friendship. Yes. The usual.”

  “Want a drink, Oleg?” she asked him now.

  The Russian, who was buttering a piece of toast, stared at the glass of tequila next to Teresa’s coffee cup and the ashtray with four butts already in it. She was in a tracksuit, leaning
back in a wicker chair, her bare feet on the rustic tile floor.

  “Of course not,” said Yasikov. “Not at this hour, for God’s sake. I’m just a gangster from the extinct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not a Mexican with an iron stomach. Yes. Or asbestos, maybe. No. I’m not nearly as macho as you.”

  They laughed. “I see you can laugh,” said Yasikov, surprised.

  “And why not?” Teresa didn’t flinch from the Russian’s blue-eyed gaze. “Anyway, remember that we’re not going to talk about Patty.”

  “I didn’t come for that.” Yasikov poured himself a cup of coffee, pensively chewed his toast. “There are things I have to tell you. Several.”

  “Breakfast first.”

  The day was gloriously sunny, and the water in the pool reflected it back in turquoise blue. It was nice out there on the terrace warmed by the early-morning sun, among the bougainvillea and other flowers, the birds singing. Teresa and Oleg unhurriedly ate their breakfast and chatted about this and that, reviving their old friendship as they always did when they met: small meaningful words and gestures, shared codes. They had come to know each other very well. They knew which words to speak and which not to.

  “Let’s start with the biggest thing first,” Yasikov finally said when breakfast was obviously over. “There’s a job for you. A big one. Yes. For my people.”

  “That means absolutely first priority.”

  “I like that word ‘priority.’”

  “You need smack?”

  He shook his head.

  “Hashish. My bosses have partnered up with the Romanians. They want to supply several markets there. Yes. Immediately. Show the Lebanese that there are alternative suppliers. They need twenty tons. Moroccan. Grade double-A. The best.”

  Teresa frowned. Twenty thousand kilos was a lot, she said. They would have to get it together first, and the time was not the best for that. With the political changes in Morocco, it still wasn’t clear who you could trust and who you couldn’t. She had even been keeping a shipment of coke in Agadir for a month and a half, afraid to move it until things got clearer. Yasikov listened attentively, and when she finished he nodded. “I understand. Yes. You decide. . . . But you’d be doing me a big favor. My people need that chocolate within a month. And I’ve gotten good pay for you. Very good pay.”