“Amelia’s right,” Tomás said, turning to Jaime. “All these networks are related and they all have ties to other mafias. If we find a go-between, maybe we can negotiate under better conditions, or at least different ones.”
“True. But I doubt the authorities will be content with a mere consultation. And we can take it for granted that Bonso’s got people on the force looking after him. These guys never work without them,” Jaime objected.
“Fine. What do you propose, then? Do you have a solution or are you just trying to look interesting?” Claudia said, exasperated.
All at once, she had realized that as owner of the newspaper Emiliano worked for, she was the one most responsible for his protection. Until now, her mind had been on Milena and their recent meeting, but now she understood that the life of her opinion editor had to be her first priority.
The three friends looked at each other, surprised. She-wolf, Tomás thought. Amelia looked at her attentively, as though seeing her for the first time, which was true, in a sense: finally, the little rich girl was showing she was more than just a pretty face with Papa’s money behind her. Jaime just smiled.
“Let’s look at one thing at a time,” Lemus said after a long sigh. “First we need to take care of Milena. My people should be at Rina’s duplex any second. We need to get her out of there and take her to a safe house. I’ll take care of that. We also need to find out if she has the notebook and what’s in it that’s generating so much interest.”
Tomás asked himself how the hell Jaime knew it was a duplex if he’d just gotten the address.
“No one look at that notebook till I’ve been through it. That’s the deal, okay?” Claudia interrupted, looking at Tomás.
The three looked at her with surprise.
“Second,” Jaime continued as if he hadn’t even heard her, “Amelia’s right: we need to find out who Bonso’s boss is, if he has one, or someone who has influence over him, and we can’t do that without the authorities. But I can get hold of whatever they have in their records in less than an hour.” Jaime already had the information in his files, but he wasn’t going to mention that yet. “Third, these trafficking and prostitution networks can’t function without police and politicians shielding them. Before we start talking to government employees, we need to figure out which office is protecting this group in particular. That could be the key for negotiating with this bastard.”
“And how do we find his protector?” Claudia asked.
“Give me a few hours,” Jaime responded. “I already know who I need to talk to.”
“Now that I think of it, I’ve got someone who might know as well. Or, should I say, Amelia does,” Tomás said, looking at her with a complicit smile.
Amelia looked back undecided for a few moments, and then her face lit up.
“Of course! Madame might know…”
Before she could go on, Jaime put up his hand and told them to be silent as he stood and raised his telephone to his ear.
“There have been shots fired at Rina’s. They’re reporting deaths, we don’t know who.”
23
Milena
Wednesday, November 12, 5:35 p.m.
His instructions were to watch and wait, watch and wait. Watching was fine for him, waiting not so much. Julián Huerta had been working as a field detective for Lemlock for ten months, and his assignments fascinated him: rooting around in other people’s lives, following them around without getting noticed, opening envelopes sent to others and closing them again without a trace, going into apartments and looking through hidden photos and medicine cabinets. Finding a hiding place—and everybody had one—gave him immense pleasure. Since he was a kid, he’d spied on his girl cousins and friends in the shower or their bedroom, through half-closed curtains or old keyholes; it wasn’t just the furtive sight of prohibited flesh, but also sharing the intimacy a person believed was hers and hers alone.
But surveilling Marina Alcántara’s apartment had lasted more than eight hours and was boring him to death. At nine in the morning, he relieved a colleague who had kept guard all night. Both their reports would be exactly the same: Milena, the tall girl with black hair who occasionally glanced out the window, hadn’t left the house she’d been in since the night before. They had orders not to intervene, but they were also not to lose sight of the girl if she left. The redhead and her guards had left almost an hour before, and inside, the house looked calm. But for the past few minutes, he had seen the occasional movement through the window; the woman was doing dance steps or something. Through the lenses of Huerta’s small, powerful binoculars he saw the outline of the tall, pretty foreigner appearing and disappearing between the slit in the curtains. He felt tempted. He would just go to the tiny backyard, he thought, peep through the window, and watch her at his leisure. When he tried to turn off the ringtones and alerts on his phone, he saw the battery had gone dead.
Huerta was silently opening the gate to the yard when the rash braking of a car made him turn. Two men got out of a gray sedan driven by a third. They looked like police, marshals, or something like that—every possibility he imagined was worse than the one before. But he didn’t back down. He didn’t have the build for physical confrontation, but he had always been able to rely on his mouth.
“Hey there, gentlemen,” he said, as if he was lost. “You don’t know where the Martínez Nieto family lives, do you?” he asked, pointing at the other half of the duplex.
That might have been enough to save him if another vehicle hadn’t screeched to a halt just then. Two of his colleagues from Lemlock, but he wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad news. It was very bad, as he discovered two seconds later.
His two colleagues got out with their guns in their hands. One of the cops tried to pull his own while he turned to face them and was shot down; the other jumped behind Huerta and fired at the new arrivals. A human shield held fast by his captor’s arm, all Huerta could do was play spectator to his own death: in the foreground, the tattooed knuckles and a diamond-crusted bracelet were in his face; further off, the thug who drove the sedan took down one of Jaime’s men. The shooting lasted no more than a minute.
When the gunfight was over, Milena peeked out the window. She ran out to the yard armed with a leftover board from the shelf that had just been set up in the kitchen and a large bag looped over her arm. Only two men were still alive: a dark-skinned guy with tattooed forearms, drowning in his own blood, and another in a suit and tie sitting on the ground, looking stunned at a hole in his abdomen, his back leaned against a truck. She recognized the first guy, one of the cops on Bonso’s payroll. Without thinking twice, she hit him in the head with the board; it didn’t do much damage, but it made her feel better. Then she glanced at the elegant man bleeding out in front of her, unsure whether she should thank him or strike him as well. She threw the plank down and walked off quickly.
Julián Huerta had fallen victim to the first bullets. He was facedown on the pavement, his eyes wide open as if he hadn’t wanted to miss a single detail of the spectacle he’d witnessed.
24
Amelia
Wednesday, November 12, 7:40 p.m.
The long trip to Madame Duclau’s home, prolonged by the dense rush-hour traffic, gave Amelia time to deal with the most-pressing issues at the office, even if it was only over the phone. Irreconcilable divisions on the left and the government’s growing authoritarianism stripped her of any enthusiasm she might have felt for her political duties. She would have preferred to use the institutional resources she had at hand to help resolve the crisis Tomás was facing with his new responsibilities. The kidnapping of the opinion editor put her partner at risk if hostilities escalated. If something ever happened to Tomás, she would never forgive herself for stepping back just to show due respect to his job. Under normal conditions, she’d already have mobilized the police squads at her beck and call, but they still didn’t know the identity of Bonso’s protectors. On that point, Jaime was right. And then,
she didn’t want to get mixed up in Claudia’s business, either. She needed to avoid taking too big a role in anything that might be seen as a territorial dispute around Tomás. The thought made her sad.
She knew Tomás well enough to know he and Claudia weren’t lovers yet. But they might be soon.
Amelia asked herself what she would do when that happened. She had been in a relationship with her childhood friend for a year now, and they had gotten used to the shared weekends, the daily emails and WhatsApp messages, and the trips together when their schedules permitted it. But more than the time, what Amelia appreciated was the emotional security Tomás had given her. They knew each other so well and had for so long that being together was never an effort. “Sleeping with you is being alone twice over,” Fito those had complained in his song “When It Rains, It Pours.” For her, those would have been words of praise. Being alone was something she’d always liked, and even if she had enjoyed living with some of her boyfriends in the past, it was a struggle to make room for them. With Tomás, it was the complete opposite: being with him was like being alone, but with someone else, and that was the best feeling of all. There was no effort, no tension: they shared what they had, and both had room for the penchants and phobias the other had accumulated over four decades of life.
Tomás’s recent celebrity, first as columnist and now as director of El Mundo, made the relationship more manageable, despite her prominence on the national stage. Few men were capable of dealing with a girlfriend who got recognized everywhere she went, chatted up in restaurants, and waved at in the streets. She wasn’t sure Tomás would have handled it so well a year before. But something had changed. He didn’t have the same profile as a party leader, but he knew he was still as important as her in the circles that mattered.
Now everything was at risk. Amelia asked herself what she would do if Tomás and Claudia got together. She knew Tomás loved her, but she was also aware of his emotional insecurity and his tendency toward promiscuity. Claudia gave off the aroma of recently tilled, damp black earth, of savage nature bursting with life, and it would be hard for her lover to resist burying his hands in it and covering his body. Tomás wouldn’t be able to resist the call of a woman as powerful as the redhead now was.
This conclusion jabbed at her entrails, like a fist squeezing the organs and viscera just past her bellybutton. She told herself she’d never been jealous and wasn’t about to start at forty-three years of age. She’d rather give him up than sniff his lapels or prick up her ears every time he picked up the phone.
Arriving at Madame Marie Duclau’s home cut her miserable reflections short. The old woman was waiting in the doorway, elegant and covered in jewels. She greeted her with four kisses, two on each cheek. It had been years since Amelia had seen her, but she seemed identical, in body and soul, to the person she had met long ago. The woman was at least a decade older than her mother, who had been her close friend, but nothing in her face or her graceful posture betrayed her seventy-plus years: a happy mix of good genes and better surgeries had left her in a chronological limbo that was difficult to pin down.
“Amelita, what a pleasure to see you.”
“The pleasure’s mine, Madame Marie.”
“Remember: just Marie. Don’t make me feel like a grandmother, I’m younger than your mother,” her hostess lied with a smile. “And by the way, how is Dolores? And your father? What’s his story?”
“Mama is happy, she’s still living in Cuernavaca, almost retired, though she keeps up a few therapy sessions. My father went to Miami, the truth is I don’t see him much. Far as I know, he’s good.”
“Yeah, all that’s so sad. I never understood why Dolores lasted so long with that man. From the day I met him, I knew he was a faggot, and I told your mother as much. I guess the job gives you a sense for those things.”
Amelia’s brow furrowed, Marie Duclau didn’t apologize. She never did anymore: privileges of age.
“The important thing is you’re a grown woman now: as beautiful as your mother, but with more presence, more élan. That’s what you need to survive in the jungle with the rich and powerful, believe you me!”
“Exactly, Marie, that’s just what I wanted to talk to you about; maybe you can help me.” Amelia told her all the details of Milena’s case.
The only thing real about Madame Marie Duclau was the “Madame” part: she wasn’t French, and the last name she’d picked up from a very brief marriage. For decades, she’d been the unofficial director of public relations for various governmental offices, though she didn’t have a business per se; she worked as a private consultant for ministers, governors, and bigwigs in the public sector. She’d suggest changes in their image and wardrobe, she’d spruce up the consorts of newly ascendant functionaries or people running for office, she brought in specialists in oratory and diction, and she’d been English teacher to more than one guest at Los Pinos. Her services were appreciated because she guaranteed absolute discretion. Her job, she always said, was to do a cultural and social upgrade on the politicians who hired her. But her real money came from something far darker.
Madame Duclau understood very well that power and sex were necessarily linked. All the brand-new governors and ministers soon tired of the limitless resources and the indulgences and trifles they could permit themselves, being above the law; power only makes sense if it’s exercised, and few uses of it were as tangible as getting access to women who were formerly unavailable.
The euphoria and the need for stimulus invariably led to their libidos running wild. Career politicians tended to work out that issue by hiring secretaries and consultants to accompany them on their rises to the top, but that wasn’t the case with the young men who had arrived into power recently. The revolving door at the top during the twelve years the PAN ran the show had made way for a sudden wave of men between thirty and forty years of age who seemed to exude hormones with every decision they took. It was known that in the cabinet of Felipe Calderón, the former president, made up of young men who had been stuffed shirts in the public administration before then, extramarital hijinks became an obsession. Many of the guys ended their traditional marriages to their old girlfriends from university and hooked up with women fifteen or twenty years younger, some of them from the art world.
Madame had evolved a strategy to resolve these difficulties with a maximum of discretion and damage control. Thanks to her close contacts with the big escort services, places quiet as churches, if rather less pious, she was able to supply companions for any occasion. She had a keen instinct for finding the right lover for each leader, whether it was for a night or six years in office. The girls liked having a long-term contract and the politicians convinced themselves the women’s expressions of affection were genuine, preferring to ignore that it had all been arranged behind their backs. And Madame Duclau charged exorbitant sums for her work as an image and event consultant.
Amelia told the old woman the reason for her visit and that the clock was ticking for Emiliano. After listening to the story, the hostess maintained a long silence, never taking her eyes off a silver bracelet she turned around and around on her cadaverously thin wrist; the coloring of her hands didn’t hide her age. Amelia imagined Madame Duclau was debating whether to help her in the name of their old friendship or maintain her policy of discretion in business matters.
She and Amelia’s mother had become friends two decades before, when Marie was looking for a psychologist who specialized in disorders of the libido. A governor with aspirations to become president was suffering from a serious case of sex addiction that led him to flirt with every beauty who crossed his path. A businessman and a congressman had taken offense to the man’s harassment of their wife and daughter, and were ready to ruin the politician’s promising career. He never made it to the presidency, but he managed to stay off the front pages of the gossip rags thanks to Dolores’s therapy. From then on, Madame Marie conferred with the psychologist regularly, and later cultivated a personal relations
hip with her. Amelia never completely accepted the counterfeit Frenchwoman because she had a sense, from the beginning, of her real profession, but she ended up appreciating that peculiar friendship Marie and her mother shared. And Amelia herself had to recognize that more than once, she was happy to find Madame Duclau visiting her parents’ house. She liked her casual cynicism and her impudent judgments on the human race. She also knew the woman discouraged the more savage and violent forms of prostitution of the kind Milena had fallen into.
“Of course I know who Bonso is,” the hostess told her. “A real bad egg. He showed up at the beginning of the year with a group of blondes from Eastern Europe. Someone from immigration services keeps him under their wing. I’d be willing to bet it’s Marcelo Galván, a lifelong area chief, corrupt, powerful, who helps out these trafficking rings.”
Amelia repeated the name in her mind over and over to keep from forgetting it without taking her eyes off Marie. She didn’t want to write it down and make Marie uncomfortable.
“I had to deal with Bonso for a director from Pemex who was obsessed with having a Natasha all to himself,” her hostess continued. “I looked over the Romanian’s portfolio and there were three or four that interested me and the guy was drooling, you know? They all want to get in my good graces.”
“Do you think Milena could be one of them? If I bring you a photo, could you pick her out?”
“I don’t know, I doubt it. That was a few months back and the photos are usually too touched-up,” her host said, “but I do remember one thing: when he found out I was looking to set up a Natasha in a long-term arrangement, he pulled out one of the photos. More from curiosity than any real interest, I insisted on that one and he got pissy and stubborn and said that one was out of commission. I don’t like them trying to push me around, so I asked, was he hiding something, was the chick ill or dangerous. Then he started freaking out because in this business, you’re doomed if word gets around among the high-level types that a girl represents any kind of risk. So he explains to me hesitantly that this girl has been reserved for a very big fish from the time she was in Europe, and he has instructions not to let anything happen to her and never to let her out of his sight. That’s why she could only do nights and wasn’t available for any long-term arrangement.”
Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World Page 13
