“Evidently, Rosendo Franco got her out of working as a hooker,” Jaime said. “He must have taken her by force, if she went on getting threats, even after she got with the old man. The mafia thinks it still has a right to her, and even more so now that her protector has died.”
Tomás explained the black book to Jaime and watched his pupils dilate.
“We have to find that book,” Jaime said, almost to himself. Amelia noticed how her friend’s chest swelled with nervous breaths.
“Don’t rush into anything,” Tomás said. “I promised Claudia no one would see the contents of the book before her.”
“Rosendo Franco’s keeping secrets?” Jaime said with a smile.
“We don’t know, but I’m definitely keeping my promise.”
“First we need to find the girl,” Amelia interrupted. She was uncomfortable with the way her boyfriend had declared his loyalty to Claudia. “Assuming Milena is in hiding and the people chasing after her haven’t caught her.”
“Agreed,” Jaime said. “So we need to find her before they do.”
11
Luis and Rina
Tuesday, November 11, 10:30 a.m.
How can you love a person you don’t know? Rina asked herself while she watched Luis pick up his laptop and carry it over to the window to try and improve his 4G connection. He lifted it over his head, as if the signal would come to rest there like a butterfly over the bewitching surface. His naked torso and his long, athletic frame made waves of tenderness and longing rise within her. Maybe it wasn’t love she felt, Rina reconsidered, but the intense aftershocks of joy that emanated from her grateful body.
“Does moving it around like that do any good?” she asked.
“No, I look like an imbecile, right?”
“Yes.”
“Do you always say what you think?” he asked, amused. He held the computer away from his body, but now he was focused on his friend. Since the time they met, barely fifteen hours ago, she had remarked that he walked like a penguin, and that he had huge ears and too much hair on his ass.
“Yes, especially if I feel like I can trust the person.”
“And you’re not worried about offending me?”
“Nothing I say to you will make you stop wanting me,” Rina said.
Luis looked at her, still wrapped in the sheets.
“I think you’re right.”
The night before, they hadn’t found a good reason to stop talking, or to stop caressing each other later on. In the morning, she called Amelia’s office to say that she would start the new job the day afterward. They slept, what little they did, in his room at the Hotel del Paseo de la Reforma; now she wanted to go with him to the doctor, where they would examine his leg. They never made it to the appointment, though, because they found Milena first.
The night before, they’d said the girl was the thing fate had used to bring them together. Neither of them drank much: he didn’t like the idea of outside stimuli stirring his brain, and she’d drunk a bottle of wine a day for six months after her family’s murder before getting scared and going almost cold turkey for the six months afterward. Still, they toasted a few times in Milena’s honor with beers from the minibar.
Rina didn’t know anything about Luis. For the moment, the feeling of satisfaction and relaxation after the sex was enough. She hadn’t felt that for a long time. Despite the usual self-consciousness about her body, she walked naked through the room as if they’d just celebrated their silver anniversary, and every time she lay down over his chest, it was like returning to her true home. Rina had felt alone and beaten down those first weeks in a foreign country, and it seemed her life had no meaning with her family gone. Now, she came to see the success or failure of her relationship with Luis would be linked to the fate of that woman who had brought them together.
He, on the other hand, needed no further motivation than the mystery of her disappearance. He stretched out for his laptop and set it down over his naked belly.
Twenty minutes later, he was reading out the emails Rosendo Franco and Milena had exchanged. Rina was moved by the intimacy of their dialogue, by the old man’s love cut short, by the dark, sordid abyss that loomed over the young foreigner. Franco didn’t hide his docile, unconditional devotion. Nor did she disguise the drunken bliss of every moment she shared with her protector. For her, each one was borrowed time before her inevitable death. Rina and Luis noted she never said she was in love with her benefactor. Franco had called her Lika, normally preceded by the words my dearest. She always signed off with Thanks, Rosendo, even when her affection was clearly something more than mere gratitude.
Rina and Luis grew worried as they read the increasingly frequent threats Melina received and passed on to Rosendo. They could feel her grief and worry, even as she lived in her powerful benefactor’s shadow.
“She must be terrified now,” Rina said, stirred.
“There’s no activity in her email account after Franco’s death. Most likely she opened it just to communicate with him. I’m going to set up an alert. If she or anyone else logs in, we’ll know,” Luis said, and shut off the light. They went on talking in whispers until sleep overcame them.
In the morning, they made love again, had breakfast in the room, and then showered together, at Rina’s insistence. She was convinced you didn’t know anyone thoroughly until the water coursed over your heads, pressed your hair down to your cranium, and washed your mask off your face. All Luis was thinking was he should extend his stay in Mexico to keep from having to leave her too soon.
Rina was trying on one of Luis’s shirts when the alert sounded, and the laptop showed someone had accessed Rina’s account. He pressed a few keys and a new window opened on the screen. The cursor flickered.
“They’re reading old messages,” he said while he opened another window. “I have the IP where they’re logged in.”
“Is it in Mexico?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he kept typing.
“A salon in the city center. I don’t know if it’s her.”
“Why don’t we find out? We’re just ten minutes or so from Zócalo.”
Luis hesitated, remembering his wounded leg.
“She doesn’t know who we are, and neither do the people looking for her. We’ll just go see if it’s Milena or not,” Rina said.
“Are we taking your car?” he asked.
“A taxi will be faster. Don’t close your laptop.”
Twelve minutes later, they got out in Calle Isabel la Católica, fifty feet from the salon. They each glanced at the laptop screen to make sure the window with Milena’s email remained open.
“They’re still reading it, right?” she asked, while Luis paid the taxi driver.
Rina didn’t wait or slow down when he called for her to stop. She entered the salon and saw Milena right away, absorbed in the screen of the desktop in the small salon’s reception area. Rina knew what she looked like from when Luis had shown her images from old advertisements that her minders had posted. Now her eyes were red and her hair freshly dyed black. She must have asked to use the computer on her way out, Rina thought, imagining she wouldn’t be tracked on a semi-public computer.
She turned to the hairdresser furthest from the desk and asked if they did leg waxing. “We use the best quality wax, no knockoffs,” the employee, a dark-skinned girl with impossibly blonde hair, told her. Rina said that she would call the next day to set up an appointment and walked out. She took care to make sure Milena didn’t see her face, but she was still glued to the screen.
“It’s her, but she’s not blonde anymore. She’s still reading Franco’s emails,” Rina said when she met back up with her companion.
“Well, I hope she wraps up quick, because if I can find her, other people can, too.”
“So now what do we do?”
Before Luis could answer, they saw Milena walking out. Unsteady and baffled-looking, she stood still for a moment, feeling the world in disarray. She wor
e big, dark glasses, but the sun still blazed ruthlessly over her face, as if to punish her for getting rid of her golden hair. When she started to walk, the two young people followed her.
She was dressed in raggedy jeans, an oversized sweatshirt, and flat-soled tennis shoes, but she was still taller than either of them. Her baggy clothes couldn’t hide her shapely body, and men turned around as she passed by. Milena was the kind of woman who would have trouble blending in, regardless of how she dressed or made herself up, Luis thought.
They crossed two blocks before she disappeared into the Holiday Inn on Calle Cinco de Mayo, a few steps from the Zócalo in the historic center. Luis hesitated, then entered the hotel, followed closely by Rina. Milena was nowhere to be seen, but he saw the elevator go up and stop at the fourth floor. The lobby was almost empty: just two elderly women, Germans by the looks of it, were there, arguing over a map of the area about which route to take. There were no porters in sight.
Luis took Rina’s arm, went to reception, and asked for a room on the fourth floor. The employee looked at the couple suspiciously, perhaps because they had no baggage, but the American Express Platinum overcame any doubts. Luis asked for two keycards, and they got into the elevator and went up to their room.
Rina paused behind Luis on their floor, seeing that two doors, 411 and 418, had the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging out. She imagined one must belong to Milena. She entered their room and found Luis bickering on the phone with the front desk because the Wi-Fi password they’d given him didn’t work. He returned to reception, telling Rina not to leave.
In the lobby, he saw the porter was back at his post and decided to ask him about the internet connection. He was a thin man of around forty who wore his uniform with an elegance suited to a finer hotel. Three guys cut him off, and Luis stopped a few feet away. He thought he saw one, a man in a gray suit, pass the porter a hundred-dollar bill. He turned around, sat in an armchair in the lobby ten feet from the men, and leaned over his computer keyboard. He managed to make out some words. The men seemed to be thanking him for giving up the blonde’s location. The porter said the woman never left the hotel, they exchanged a few more words, something about the room, before the porter turned to the reception desk. Luis walked away and called Rina’s cell phone.
“They’re coming for Milena, take her to our room. If you don’t find her in sixty seconds, go back. Promise? And one more thing: call her Lika, the way Franco did, and tell her Claudia sent you. Hurry!”
Luis stood waiting next to the elevators, typing away on his laptop as if firing off an urgent email. The three men joined him. While they watched the elevator descend, one of them pointed toward the emergency stairwell. Luis figured they would take Milena down that way if she put up any resistance.
When the elevator arrived, Luis got in with them and pressed the button for the second floor in a last attempt to slow the thugs down. A sidelong glance at the guy in front of him left little room for doubt as to his job: three gold rings, four tattooed knuckles, a bracelet with real or fake diamonds. When the elevator opened on the second floor, Luis walked out into the hallway, waited until the two metal doors had nearly slid closed behind him, and turned around, hitting the button again.
“Sorry, I’m on the third,” he said, feigning an embarrassed smile as he got back in and pressed three.
“You idiot, we don’t have time for this,” the man with the gold rings said.
The guy in the gray suit put his hand over the other’s bare, muscular arm.
Luis nodded, looking down, and walked out as soon as the doors reopened. Once in the hallway, he cursed himself. He’d bought a few seconds, but now he couldn’t go back up. Rina would have to face what was about to happen alone.
As soon as she’d gotten the call, she went out, though it took her a few seconds to find the keycard, which Luis had left in front of the TV. She went to 411 first, because it was furthest away, and her philosophy was that everything was always harder than it seemed. She tapped on the door, so the maid, who had vanished into one of the rooms she was cleaning, wouldn’t hear. After trying again, she went to 418. Milena opened on the third attempt, expecting room service.
“Lika, I’m Rina, I’m a friend of Claudia Franco, I’m here for you. You need to leave right now, there are men coming to take you away.”
Milena looked at her a moment, and then, without a word, she turned around, grabbed her bag, and went out. As they turned down the hall toward Rina and Luis’s room, they heard the chime of the elevator doors.
Once they were inside, Rina heard her heart pounding and felt the adrenaline course through her veins. The feeling fascinated her. She sat on the bed and put a finger over her lips.
Rina’s phone buzzed, and a WhatsApp from Luis appeared on the screen.
Did you do it?
Yes, I’m in the hotel room with her.
Ours?
Yes. Where are you?
In the lobby. I can’t come up because they saw me. Cut off the ringer on your cell. Go into the bathroom and don’t answer if they knock on the door. They don’t know our room is occupied.
What do we do now?
Nothing. Wait and hope. I’ll tell you when they’re gone.
Luis wanted to call Amelia, but he put little faith in institutional solutions: he didn’t like the thought of the head of the PRD calling her friend, the city’s chief of police, and having the thing end in a shootout at the hotel. Or even worse, for her to turn to Jaime Lemus, the asshole responsible for his limp. The bad guys had beaten him to finding Milena because they had already been tracking her for five days. The concierges were the link between the tourist or business traveler and the drug dealers and human traffickers.
Rina and Milena looked one another over from opposite sides of the bed. Milena asked herself what kind of a mousetrap she’d wound up in. Rina gestured toward Milena’s hair and then made a slicing motion across her neck. They both smiled: the cut was deplorable. Rina put a finger over her lips again and motioned with the other hand for Milena to follow her to the bathroom, as Luis had said, before closing the door silently. She wet a towel and tried to clean one of Milena’s blackened eyebrows and a smudge on her forehead.
When Rina had wiped away the traces of dye from Milena’s face as best she could, the two of them looked into the mirror. The effect surprised them: now that the Croatian’s hair was black, there was a strange similarity between them. Both had long, straight hair, slender faces, prominent cheekbones, and blue eyes. Milena’s features were more harmonious, Rina’s more individual. But anyone who saw them in the street would say they were family, Rina thought.
A message from Luis interrupted their exchange of glances.
They just left, but one of them stayed behind in the lobby.
OK. Let us know.
She told Milena what he’d said, and for the first time, she heard the girl speak.
“So who are you and why are you helping me?”
Her voice was rough, with just the slightest note of an accent in her fluent Spanish.
Rina realized how difficult answering that question would be. She didn’t know Claudia personally, and she had barely ever seen Tomás. To talk about the Blues and their relationship with Amelia, or what role Luis played in all that, would have taken ages, and it didn’t seem true even to her. She decided on something simpler.
“Claudia wants to meet you and help you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But I think you could use a bit of help, no?”
Two more messages from Luis appeared.
Get whatever’s necessary from Milena’s room, but don’t bring a suitcase.
And tell me when you’re ready to come down.
Luis watched the third guy, who had stayed behind and was drinking a beer at a small bar table with a view of the hotel’s main entrance. They must have thought Milena was out and left him there to wait for her return, because he didn’t take his eyes off the street. Luis stepped out onto the sid
ewalk again to make sure the man in the gray suit and the other with the gold rings weren’t waiting in a car, but they seemed to have disappeared.
After the lookout’s second beer, Luis guessed it wouldn’t be long before he would need to go to the bathroom. He sent another message.
Go down the service stairway and wait behind the door. I’ll let you know when you can come out.
A few minutes later, the man got up as expected and looked around for the bathroom. He vanished into a room by the reception desk bearing the clear image of a tobacco pipe.
Luis rushed to the emergency door, opened it, and the three of them crossed the lobby. Even Luis was surprised to see Milena had copied Rina’s outfit—jeans, jacket, and boots—and combed her hair the same. The concierge watched them until a ringing phone caught his attention.
They got to the sidewalk and hurried down Calle Cinco de Mayo. They’d barely gone thirty feet when a taxi stopped for them. Before Luis could say a word to the driver, Rina cut in: “Take us to Río Balsas 37, in Colonía Cuauhtémoc.”
12
Tomás and Amelia
Tuesday, November 11, 5:00 p.m.
“Tomás, we found the girl you were after,” Amelia said. She had called his cell, guessing the newspaper’s lines would be tapped.
“Really? Is she somewhere safe?”
“Yeah, but I think we should talk about it in person. Is today shaping up to be a late one?”
Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World Page 7
