Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  ‌7

  Milena

  2005–2006

  Those first days, she welcomed each client with a tinge of optimism. There was no way the men could be indifferent to her situation, she told herself. Her next lover would be her key to escape. She looked them in the eyes the way old sailors look at maps, invoking the experience of the voyage in a single glance. But that was when she still believed in human beings, or at least in their desire to atone for their sins. The look they gave her back could be covetous, contemptuous, timid, ashamed, very occasionally compassionate, but never supportive or receptive.

  Just in from Marbella, barely seventeen years old, she lost her virginity to an Arabian sheik, the winner of an auction. With time, she found that rich Arabs looked at sex the way the French looked at food: they preferred talking about the experience to the experience itself. The man who deflowered her spoke his mother tongue in long stretches while uncovering various parts of her body, like a gourmand declaiming his relish with each new bite of stew, but the final onslaught consisted of barely a half-dozen thrusts and a couple of exhausted sighs. The man collapsed beside her and forgot her for awhile, then seemed to remember something, lurched up in bed, and pushed her aside brusquely. A smile crossed his lips as he saw the trail of blood on the sheet, and the smile didn’t vanish while he walked to a dresser and took a box out of the top drawer. He took out an anklet and slipped it over Milena’s foot.

  More than that night, she remembered the next day: the sharp, abrupt ache she’d felt at the sheik’s hands was nothing compared to what they subjected her to twelve hours later. The four men who ran the prison-house she’d ended up in gathered up around her bed in the morning, and did all they’d been kept from doing until her virginity had been sold off. For the next twenty-four hours, she lay there crippled by pain and shock. She never saw the anklet again.

  Two days later, the parade of customers started, all of them wealthy, many of them foreign. In the early years, they only assigned her one person a night, and always a regular. Not that they were looking out for her, but she brought in a fortune, and the people who paid it had specific requests. Usually they’d take her to a suite somewhere, and often she’d have to spend the night. Few were inclined to pay a thousand or two thousand euros for a half-hour of company.

  From girlhood, Milena had been good with languages. She spoke Serbian and Croatian, a bit of German, and passable English. Over the years, she would master the last, along with Spanish and Russian, would polish her German, and would pick up enough French, Italian, and Arabic to make herself understood—all this given the diverse makeup of her clientele. Early on, she tried to explain to each customer how she’d been kidnapped, the outrages she’d suffered, and her desperation to escape. The men’s responses wavered between discomfort and open irritation. They hadn’t paid that kind of cash to listen to someone’s problems. At best, her begging led to a mirthless shrug, as when someone refuses a coin to a beggar, pretending to have no money in their pockets.

  Before a week had passed, a client told her captors the girl’s accusations and her world turned upside down. They burned the soles of her feet with cigarettes and shut her up for three days with no clothing, food, or drink in a dark, stinking cell, like the first time. When they took her out, they shoved her head under the water in a bathtub. Then they moved her to a rundown brothel in an old part of town, and for a week, she had to do eight to ten men a night for forty euros a session. The man in charge was told to give her the drunkest, most repugnant customers, though they insisted she always use a condom.

  After that lesson, Milena stopped looking to her clients for help. Only once in a while, when someone took the initiative to ask who she was and where she was from, would she dare hint she might like to change her situation. No one took the trouble to try and free her: the most sensitive ones were also the ones most easily intimidated by the guard who showed up and left with her on every “date.”

  Even those timid feints ceased six months after her first punishment. Natasha Vela (one of the three Natashas who lived in the house: she’d been born as Valeria, but the clients went nuts for those Russian-sounding names) managed to flee with a customer who’d fallen for her. It didn’t take twenty-four hours for her captors to get her back. She was holed up with her john in a hostel in Marbella’s center, thinking they wouldn’t be noticed if they just stayed clear of the places the well-heeled tourists frequented. The pimps beat up the guy, the Dutch owner of a small printing press, and told him he’d be dead if they saw him again or he breathed a word to the police. They found pictures of his wife and family among his papers, and that made things easier. They took him to the airport and put him on a plane to London. Natasha they dragged back home and decided to make an example of her for the others, beating her to death with sticks in front of the rest of the girls.

  ‌8

  Amelia

  Monday, November 10, 1:00 p.m.

  If I’d been born in the nineteenth century, I’d have been burned at the stake, Amelia said to herself. She had gotten up with a grim premonition. All through the morning, she thought over recent events and discussions, with the sense that something didn’t fit, and felt her soul shifting microscopically from her body, like a slightly off-center portrait. Nothing in Tomás’s words or mood revealed a change of attitude during the weekend they spent together. On Sunday, they had breakfast in bed, read the newspapers and supplements, took a walk through the city’s historic center, and ate chiles rellenos in the Café de Tacuba.

  But she perceived a diffuse and hard-to-grasp lightness in Tomás’s presence. At night, afflicted with insomnia, she would attribute her lover’s distraction to his new responsibilities and the worries overwhelming him; the morning after would mark the start of his first full week as director of El Mundo. With that, she managed to get a bit of sleep, but when she woke up, she looked at the man lying at her side and saw that a part of him wasn’t there. In the shower, she couldn’t figure out the sudden appearance of Claudia in Tomás’s life. No one turns a newspaper over to an outsider, or puts their family secrets in the hands of a person they haven’t seen in so many years.

  Seven hours later, in her office, she still couldn’t shake off the feeling of abandonment. She went to the bathroom, washed her face, and decided to push her thoughts aside. She had an hour free before her work lunch with the revenue secretary, Héctor Villalobos, and she decided to spend it studying the prospective budget coming up for a vote in the Chamber of Deputies. After two years as president, Alonso Prida was having trouble fulfilling his campaign promises. After a glamorous return to power, the PRI only held onto a precarious minority in the chambers, and they’d lost public opinion months ago. The lunch would be a tug-of-war: the minister wanted to negotiate the PRD’s votes with Amelia to get unanimous support for his budget proposal for the following year.

  She had barely started jotting the first few notes in a thick document covered with numbers when Alicia interrupted her over the intercom.

  “Vidal is calling for you, he says it’s an emergency and he wants to talk to you in person. He’s five minutes away. Will you see him?” Alicia was the only secretary to a member of the political elite who didn’t call her boss sir or ma’am.

  “You don’t know what it’s about?”

  “Remember how you were looking for outside assistance to analyze the budget? Vidal heard about it and I think that’s what he’s interested in.”

  “Vidal? What does he know about that stuff?”

  “I think he’s coming with someone,” Alicia said, and Amelia could see her secretary knew more than she was saying. But she was like that, a Samaritan, always helping out with other people’s problems. And her assistant also knew how much she cared about Vidal.

  She had to stop perusing the voluminous documents in front of her, but it didn’t matter, it had been more than four months since she last saw Vidal. He was the son of Mario, one of the four Blues, and she considered him her nephew. She knew
the boy was excited about the job he had with his friend Luis Corcuera. They’d managed to set up lucrative contracts with a number of American businesses. She also knew he was in love.

  “Hey, you remember Rina, no?” he said, pointing to the young woman who came in on his arm. Her name was actually Marina, but since she’d come back to Mexico, she’d insisted on being called by her childhood nickname.

  Amelia glanced at the girl. It was easy to tell poor Vidal was in trouble, or would be soon. Rina must have been his same age, or maybe a little younger, but she was several stories above him on their society’s unwritten but merciless hierarchy. A striking woman with a strange presence, she was tall and pale, with jet-black hair that made her blue eyes stand out. She wore tight, tasteful jeans, high heels, a black blouse, and a blazer that added an elegant touch. Her aplomb marked the strongest contrast with Vidal’s nervousness and timidity.

  “Vidal, so nice to see you! I missed you. It’s been a long time since you’ve visited.” Amelia exaggerated the warmth of her greeting in an effort to compensate for the young man’s shortcomings, and he blushed, flattered by this attention from the PRD president in his beloved’s presence.

  “You’ll have to forgive me, Amelia. I’ve been busy with Luis developing software for some firms in the United States.”

  “Rina? Are you Marina Alcántara?”

  Amelia didn’t know the sole survivor of the massacre of the Alcántara family, but she had seen her in photos not long before. And yet the woman in front of her bore little resemblance to the image of the student that she remembered. She imagined being orphaned and living alone in another country for a year had obliged her to skip a few stages on her way to adulthood.

  “Thanks for having us, Señora Navarro. It’s an honor. I know all about the work you do for women.”

  “Please, if you’re one of Vidal’s friends, then you’re practically part of the family,” Amelia responded, taking her nephew’s arm. He turned to look at his companion, unable to repress a proud smile.

  “Rina’s back in Mexico City after finishing her studies in the US. Jaime tells us the danger’s past.”

  The girl interrupted.

  “I’m looking for work, Amelia. My relatives managed to get me some interviews in banking and finance, but what really interests me is the public sector. Making rich people richer doesn’t appeal to me.”

  “What exactly did you study?” Amelia responded, and looked back without meaning to at the thick file on her desk.

  “My master’s is in political science and public finance, and before that, I studied administration at the ITAM.”

  Amelia stared back at the girl, this time with more interest. She had noted something strange about her eyes earlier, and now she saw what it was: they were placed very close together. That, and her angular nose, gave her the vague air of a character from Almodóvar. It didn’t surprise her that Vidal was so taken with her.

  “Well, maybe I have something for you here until something better comes along,” she said, looking again at the budget project. “A temporary position, and the pay isn’t much.”

  “Money’s no problem,” Rina responded.

  Amelia figured the girl had inherited her father’s assets, which were likely considerable.

  “Then we can start whenever you’re ready,” Amelia said. “In a few days, they’ll set the government’s budget for the coming year, and I don’t have time to analyze some of the areas that interest me.”

  “I’m happy to. But doesn’t the party have trained economists working on the documents?”

  “Of course, but they all have their agendas. What I’m most worried about is making sure certain line items for social programs don’t end up getting cut. I need good analysis in that area, comparisons with other countries, the minimum investment standards necessary for a project to be viable.”

  “If it’s urgent, I can start right now,” Rina answered. “Since I’ve been back, my family hasn’t left me alone. They think they need to protect me like I was still fifteen.”

  “I’ll make you a proposition. I’m going to lunch, where I’ll be talking over these very subjects. In the meantime, I’ll put you in the meeting room next door, you can look the document over, and when I return, we’ll talk it over and I’ll tell you what worried me. If you like, I can bring you something to eat. Sound good?”

  “You’re very kind,” Rina said, and for the first time, the girl’s expression gave away her youth.

  Amelia called Alicia and asked her to take Rina to the meeting room and give her whatever she needed.

  “How is Luis? What’s he been doing all this time?” she asked Vidal once they were alone. When Vidal had brought up his friend, an idea began to germinate in Amelia’s mind. She remembered the revelations the brilliant hacker had dug up in the case of Pamela Dosantos’s murder.

  “He went to live in Barcelona with his father a few months after all that happened, but we stayed in touch while he was there. Last week, he came back and went to Guadalajara a few days, and now he’s in Mexico City because his old man is insisting he go see the doctor who first operated on his leg. But he’s going back to Spain in two weeks or so.”

  “I’d like to have a coffee with him. Would you ask him if we could meet?”

  “I’ll check with him right now,” Vidal said, and tapped out a message on his cell-phone screen.

  She looked at her nephew and told herself what a waste it was that the four Blues had only produced two offspring, especially given that both of them, Vidal and Jimena, Tomás’s daughter, were so charming. She stroked the boy’s hair and gave him a kiss on the cheek goodbye.

  “You’ll let me know, right?”

  “Wait, Amelia. What do you think of Rina?”

  “Well, I just met her. You can see she’s got her head on straight despite what happened. It must have been awful. I suppose now she should take it easy and not push anything,” she said cautiously. In reality, the advice was for Vidal: she didn’t want to see the boy’s heart broken, and to all appearances he was chasing a dream that wasn’t likely to come true.

  Vidal’s phone buzzed and interrupted whatever he was about to say.

  “It’s Luis. He says he can do tonight, he wants to know where to meet.”

  “If he doesn’t mind, tell him to come to my office when he likes, I’ll be working late on that godforsaken file.”

  Two hours afterward, Amelia found Rina in the meeting room just as she’d left her. She hadn’t even taken off her jacket, and the coffee beside her was untouched. It reminded Amelia of how Tomás slept: when he got out of bed, nothing but a couple wrinkles in the pillow showed that anyone had spent the night there. But the profuse pencil markings on many of the pages showed that Rina had moved little but worked a great deal.

  “Hey. Did Vidal leave?”

  “I threw him out so I could get some work done.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  “I focused exclusively on the budgets in the social sector. Expenses for the upcoming year grow 6.5 percent, which isn’t bad. That’s more than in other sectors, but when you break it down, you see it’s highly politicized. It’s concentrated on programs that generate quick successes and votes, but it does nothing for people in extreme poverty or the indigenous population—those groups that barely vote. I did my thesis on that.”

  “I’m going to take care of a couple of urgent matters in my office and then I’ll come see you and you can show me everything you’ve found. What you’re telling me is a godsend when it comes to shining a light on those bastards.”

  Rina nodded without looking up from the papers. Amelia left, but before closing the door, she looked at the girl, who had already forgotten her. She liked how she got absorbed in her work, homing in with those eyes that were so close together. She seemed reliable and devoted, but what Amelia liked the most about her was that, without being disrespectful, she treated her like an equal, irrespective of her position.

  She spoke wi
th the party chief from Quintana Roo, who brought some names of the candidates for the election the following summer. The PRI had wrested control of Cancun from them two years ago, and Amelia wanted to get it back. But the candidates he proposed seemed the same or even worse than those from the opposition. She cut the visit short and promised herself she would find time to search out someone honest and respected.

  After writing some emails and sketching out a speech to give at a ceremonial function the next day, Amelia went back to see Rina. It was late, but the girl didn’t seem to notice. She had papers scattered across the table, some barely visible in the faint light from the wall lamp.

  “Rina! How can you see? You’re all in the shadows.”

  “You’re right, I’m going cross-eyed.”

  “So, what did you find?” she asked, switching on the overhead lights.

  “I need more time, but I can already tell they’re eliminating programs without having to say so: the budgets assigned to some of them are so lean that it turns them into empty shells. Everything to do with the handicapped, for example.”

  “I imagined that. Sons of bitches. We’ll have to make a list of the programs affected,” Amelia said. She saw how much work that would imply and added: “Take it slow, we’re not going to fix everything in a day. Go get some rest for now and tomorrow we’ll keep going, okay?”

  “I don’t mind,” the girl said, and lowered her voice. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “What? Where are you staying?”

  “Sorry, I put that wrong. They’ve turned the apartment I bought over to me, but I haven’t moved in yet. They just finished the kitchen, it’s super nice, though,” Rina said. “I’m still with my aunt and uncle, but I can’t stand the sappy way they look at me anymore. For them I’m the tragic orphan.”

  “Tell me something, Rina. Did you maybe come back to Mexico too soon?” Amelia asked, as gently as she could.