“He was a noted womanizer, but I didn’t know he was a whorehouse connoisseur as well.”
“I don’t think he went to brothels, but when political bigwigs get together, they often hire high-class prostitutes to close the deal, like a little dessert course after their meetings.”
“And beyond the fact that he died in Milena’s bed, why is the daughter so interested? You believe this thing about the black book?”
“It seems Rosendo was crazy for the girl. Claudia told me her father always had lovers, but that never stopped him from going home regularly to sleep, and he never abandoned his wife the way he had this time.”
“All these men in denial about aging turn weird when their testosterone levels start dropping. Age makes them soft. They use women up and cast them aside their whole lives, and then they turn into old-timers with chicken hearts weeping out these adolescent love songs.”
Tomás was surprised by the bitterness of Amelia’s words. He told himself the old wound from her relationship with Carlos Lemus, twenty-four years her senior, was still far from healing.
“The most worrisome thing is that the girl’s life could be in danger, if she’s even still alive. In Rosendo’s emails, he promises to keep her safe from whatever threats she seemed to be facing. Claudia says there is something he repeats obsessively: ‘As long as I’m alive, no one will touch a hair on your head.’”
“It could be something the old man said to make himself necessary to her. Maybe he exaggerated the risk she was in to guarantee her dependence or submission, who knows,” Amelia said.
“Everything’s a maybe, but if Franco did make moves to get her out of the world of prostitution, it could be the threats were real. He had a great deal of power, politically speaking, but the mafias that deal with cross-border trafficking are hardly a bunch of schoolgirls. Whatever it is, Claudia’s afraid for the life of this Milena, and she’s got it into her head to fulfill this promise to her father to protect her and to safeguard the reputation of the Franco family by getting back that little black book. A weird way of showing loyalty to the old man, I suppose.”
“That, and curiosity to know Rosendo Franco’s only love, apart from his wife. A morbid attraction, no?” she said.
“Could be,” he responded. “I get the sense that reading her father’s emails gave Claudia a very different impression of her father figure from the one she believed in before. In recent years, they weren’t very close; maybe it’s a way to close the distance.”
“The girl could really be in danger. Is there anything else we know about her?”
“She vanished, but it’s not like the police are looking for her. Franco died from a heart attack, so there’s no need to investigate any further. I don’t know if Claudia will want to report the damages to the apartment. I don’t even know if she’s found out about them yet.”
“Jaime could probably help,” Amelia said in a doubtful tone.
She decided not to share with Tomás Jaime’s strange declaration of love from the night before. The two friends’ relationship was tense enough already.
“Probably,” he conceded, looking her in the eyes. They both knew their friend’s talents, but they were equally aware that calling on him was making a pact with the devil. What they didn’t know was that Jaime Lemus was already on Milena’s trail.
5
Jaime
Saturday, November 8, 7:30 P.M.
Her name wasn’t Milena Asimov and she didn’t come from Slovakia. The file Jaime had in front of him was only a few pages long, but it had all the essential information. A copy of her passport proved that Alka Moritz had been born twenty-six years ago in a village called Jastrebarsko in Croatia. She was six feet tall, had blue eyes, blonde hair, a thin nose, and an angular, well-proportioned face. There was something ethereally delicate in her features, the face of a benign fairy, even if there was nothing subtle or slight about the rest of her body. The photos his staff had been able to get off some porn page showed her protuberant breasts and buttocks, probably from surgeries ordered by the pimps who farmed her out.
For any prostitution ring, Milena would be a prize of immeasurable value, Jaime thought to himself. Her presence in Mexico was already a mystery. Latin America tends to be a recycling bin for prostitutes from ex-communist countries, who are in high demand in Western Europe and the United States; only after their best years are over do their owners bring them into secondary markets. That wasn’t the case with Milena: the copy of her immigration card in front of him proved she had shown up in Mexico from Madrid ten months ago. Everything indicated she was at the peak of her beauty and sex appeal. Something about this girl’s story didn’t add up. This was exactly the kind of challenge that fascinated Jaime.
His interest grew when he found out Tomás would be taking over the newspaper the following Monday. That, and the fact that Claudia had a private meeting with his friend right there in the funeral home. He remembered when he had run into Tomás at Claudia’s wedding a few years back: all he could remember was Tomás’s mood, wavering between nostalgia and abjection. Like a cast-off boyfriend, Jaime concluded, and that set his bloodhound instincts in motion.
Jaime Lemus had become one of the most important security consultants in Latin America. His business, Lemlock, received contracts from local governments, multinational corporations, and municipalities to set up closed-circuit camera systems, digital-information protection, police-force training, and everything related to cyberintelligence. For years, he was the real or de facto head of the Mexican intelligence services, and when he withdrew to the private sphere he took the best specialists and technicians with him. He also had the trust of the FBI and DEA, often passing them information that even the Mexican government wasn’t in a position to share, because of legal restrictions or because they didn’t have it in the first place. His business was responsible for, among other things, the network of cameras watching over the streets of a dozen Latin American cities, including Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Four countries in the region, among them Cuba, had used Lemlock’s services to develop monitoring systems for tapping into telephone calls and social-network activity. Jaime benefited from all of it. His real passion wasn’t for growing his company’s revenues, which were already big enough, but for rooting around in the information his work gave him free access to. Lemlock’s hackers, its sophisticated technology, and Jaime’s role as a consultant gave him a privileged relationship with the intelligence services of numerous countries and enormous weight with the Mexican political class, which both feared and needed him.
He was interested in the changes that El Mundo would go through after Rosendo Franco’s death for two reasons. First, the paper’s website had the highest traffic for any news site in all of Mexico, and the most followers on Twitter and Facebook of any of the media companies. Its influence was significant not only in Mexico, but also among the Latino population in the United States. Lemus knew how terrified even the Mexican president, Alonso Prida, was of a negative hashtag. Jaime had honed the art of optimizing content placement on the Net to control the rise and fall of politicians in public opinion; now, he wanted influence on El Mundo’s page.
Then, of course, there was his love for Amelia. Despite what had happened the day before in the parking lot, Jaime was keeping his hopes alive. He knew Tomás and Amelia had started seeing each other two months back, but he was gambling that the journalist’s flakiness would sabotage things, and he was more than ready to guarantee the breakup came sooner rather than later. In the attachment he had sensed between Claudia and Tomás, he glimpsed something that might be the perfect fuse: he just needed to get closer to the Blues one more time and prepare to strike.
6
Tomás and Claudia
Monday, November 10, 11:45 a.m.
A teeming office has something sinister about it, Tomás thought as he surveyed the editorial headquarters of El Mundo. It doesn’t matter how easygoing the team members are; all of them divest themselves of thei
r status in the outside world and succumb to routine, becoming cogs in a wheel, each subject to the mores and rituals dictated by the office’s singular culture. The ritual of the morning coffee; the way to greet the influential secretary; the jokes every Monday at the expense of the soccer fanatic; the exchange of glances in the presence of the arrogant deputy director. Tomás Arizmendi had never been part of an office; he spent his first years as a reporter on the street, and the last fifteen years, as a columnist, he’d barely set foot in the editing room. But today he would be named director of the entire floor, that miniature universe that unfolded in the eight thousand square feet between the elevators and the photo archives forty desks away. Even so, Tomás remained fixated in part on how and when he would tell Claudia that the apartment her father stayed in with his lover had been destroyed.
Five minutes before noon, she appeared in the doorway of Tomás’s temporary office. She closed the door behind her and stood alone with Tomás. Outside, almost two hundred employees waited.
“You ready, Director?” she asked.
“I’m really nervous.”
“I’m shitting myself, I’m so scared,” Claudia confessed.
They both laughed. Just then, Tomás understood how easy it would be to fall in love with her, and how hard things would be if he did.
“I sent you the text of what I’m planning to say out there, then they’ll do a quick summary of your words and mine, throw in a few pictures, and it’ll be up on the Net right away. Tomorrow, we’ll put a photo under the cutoff line.”
“The cutoff line?”
“On the lower half of the first page. A respectable placement, but without hogging the spotlight.”
“Perfect, do it,” she said. “Today we’re going to grab a bite together, you and me, knock back a couple of tequilas, and see what we’re going to do to get all this up and running. We’ll meet at three at El Puerto Chico, how’s that sound?”
Three hours later, Tomás walked the eight blocks to the Spanish restaurant. Claudia was already waiting for him at a table, leaning against the wall under an enormous painting of the Cantabrian coast. From afar, her red hair blended in with the base of the painting, like a bonfire on the verge of spreading out over the meadows crowning the cliff that overlooked the waters of the Atlantic.
“The salted fish in this place is the stuff of legends, boss.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “Talk to me that way again and you’ll be the shortest-lived director in the history of Mexican journalism.”
Tomás was going to answer her when a server set down their shots or tequila and he remembered what the deceased minister of the interior, Augusto Salazar, had told him about hidden microphones and waiters the government kept on their payroll at the main spots in the city where politicians wined and dined.
Once they were alone, Tomás felt under the table for a microphone. He found two gobs of chewing gum but no surveillance equipment. He felt ridiculous and asked himself if you could even locate such devices with your fingertips.
They toasted to the memory of Rosendo Franco and the newspaper’s future.
“I was moved by what you said, Tomás, and more importantly, I think you moved the editors and reporters, too,” Claudia said. “You really think good journalism can save El Mundo?”
“We’ll never know if we don’t fight for it, don’t you think? Anyway, it’s better to die for a good cause than live for a bad one.”
“I’d be thankful to you if we didn’t die for either reason. More than six hundred people work at the paper.”
“Daily papers are dying the world over, Claudia. Sooner or later, print is going to be confined to a small group of readers. But I’m still convinced that society needs someone to handle the news, the reporting, the opinion columns, and the only people who can do that are the experts, professionals working in a well-trained, organically organized newsroom.”
“If it’s not on paper, it will be on the internet, I guess, but right now, when everything gets given away for free there’s still no way of making online news profitable.” She paused as the waiter brought over the sardines and tuna-stuffed peppers they had ordered. “From what I’ve read, analysts don’t only seem to think the press is on its last legs, but also that there isn’t even a business model capable of bankrolling a newsroom of full-time journalists. You can’t sell information anymore. That means none of these platforms has a future.”
“Okay, I see: you’re an expert on the subject now. Maybe there’s more of your father in you than you think. What you’re saying is true, but I prefer to think the overwhelming abundance of information has made professional curators indispensable, people who can sort out the wheat from the chaff. Right now, we might get a tweet that tells us Mick Jagger is dead,” Tomás said, knocking on wood as he did so, “but until we see it on the New York Times website or somewhere similar, we’re not going to believe it. Never has the community needed credible editors and journalists as much as now.”
“But how do you foot the bill for that kind of journalism?”
“Obviously they’re not willing to pay for the kind of puff pieces and gossip El Mundo has been cranking out to try and keep up with ‘what people want to read’—gossip about Lady Gaga or political intrigues you can find anywhere. El Mundo has got to become a brand that says credibility and respect. Its features need a quality and depth you can’t find anywhere else.”
“I agree, but the journalism you’re talking about costs even more. Give a young reporter a thousand bucks a month and he can publish three stories a day; a good investigative reporter costs two or three times as much and can only publish one or two a week. At the end of the day, the outcome could still be that the newspaper shuts down, but with even more debt.”
The restaurant employee took away what was left of the first course and put a large tray of salted fish and green salad in the center of the table.
“Have you found out anything about Milena?” Claudia asked.
“I’m meeting with Jaime Lemus tomorrow to talk about that. He can help us.”
“He’s the one who was with you at the funeral yesterday, right? The guy who worked in the CISEN?”
“In the CISEN and lots of other places. An expert in security and intelligence.”
“And the other two, what’s their story?”
“Mario Crespo is a university professor, but right now he’s at a seminary in Puerto Rico. The other is Amelia Navarro, everybody knows her.”
“That woman is something else,” she said. “She’s nothing like the traditional politicians.”
“She’s really more of an activist, with a gender and human rights agenda. She ended up in the party almost by accident. Deep down she’s not with the PRD. She’ll resign in the next few months.”
“And you trust this friend of yours, Jaime?”
He reflected a few moments. To describe who Jaime was and what he did was no simple matter. He decided to tell the truth.
“Jaime gets the job done, but sometimes the price is high. For him, nothing is off-limits if he feels the ends justify it.”
“So how does that make him different from any politician?”
“Touché,” Tomás said. “When I was railing against the political background of the Pamela Dosantos assassination in my columns a year back, the world came crashing down on me. Lots of people would have liked to see me dead to keep me from publishing the state secrets she had piled up in the course of her affairs with the elite. Some people even tried to make that happen. I’m alive thanks to Jaime.”
“Well, I like him so far,” she said, and lay one of her hands on top of his for a second.
“Right, but in the process, terrible things happened. The mission got out of hand, someone made a mistake, we think, and some tough guys under his command cut off the fingers of Mario’s son Vidal and shot his friend Luis Corcuera in the leg. All this because they got caught up in the investigation of Pamela’s assassination. They managed to reattach the fi
ngers, though you can see Vidal’s hand is still stiff. Luis limps when he walks, and he holds a nasty grudge against Jaime. It’s too bad, because together they’d make a hell of a team.”
“I’m sorry. Were the people responsible punished, at least?”
“The guy who did it is dead.”
“Better,” she said.
“That’s not all, though. Another of Vidal’s friends got killed, along with almost his entire family. Only the kid’s sister, Marina Alcántara, survived. You might remember the case. The father was a well-known accountant.”
“I remember a nasty picture from one of the afternoon papers. So people who worked for Jaime were responsible for that, too?”
“Not directly. It was the drug cartels, but my impression is that they were looking for him.”
“Did it all get resolved in the end?”
Tomás wavered briefly before answering: “Yeah.”
“Then go to him. He’ll help us find Milena.”
Turning toward the server, who had just returned, she ordered a macchiato for each of them, no dessert.
Now Tomás saw why the information about the penthouse couldn’t be kept back any longer. He hadn’t wanted to distract from his nomination as director or their saucy chitchat those past few hours. But he figured the awful description of all that had happened last year had set the scene, and now he could tell her what had happened in the place where her father died.
A crease, invisible up to now, emerged between her brows as she listened to the news.
“There must have been something to my father’s fears about the danger his family might be in, Tomás. We have to find that girl.”
Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World Page 4
