Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “So, like you, but on the dark side.”

  Jaime acted as if he hadn’t heard his friend’s comment and continued.

  “Galván doesn’t know why Salgado’s after the Croatian, but he’s convinced Bonso’s just following his orders. He begged me not to get him involved because his life would be in play. But I still made him call. I pushed him to tell Bonso not to kill the journalist because the heat would come down on all of them, but Bonso told him to get fucked.”

  “So everything’s lost.”

  “Not everything,” Jaime said with a smile. “Thanks to that call, I know where Bonso is and who his boss is.”

  “How does that help us? It’s almost midnight. By the time we get there Emiliano’s going to be dead.”

  “No, not at all. Emiliano will remain alive as long as Milena’s not in Bonso’s hands. Your editor’s still worth something if we find the girl. That gives me the time I need to come up with a plan.”

  Tomás breathed a sigh of relief and stayed quiet a moment. Then he asked, “How’s Galván?”

  “Where should we drop you, Tomás?”

  ‌30

  Milena

  December 2011

  The unusually cold morning in Marbella seemed like a promising augur for her escape. Though the atmosphere was dense with a marine humidity unknown in her village, the cool early day reminded her of the frozen winds that whipped between the gravestones in the cemetery she used to thread through on her way to school. The ill-fated teenager who took those walks now made her feel tender nostalgia.

  She couldn’t allow herself to get depressed, Milena thought. She had 2,200 euros in her bag—tips she hadn’t turned in—and the goodwill of someone willing to get her to Madrid. There, she would go to the Croatian embassy and establish her identity somehow, even though she didn’t have a passport. Then she would call her family to warn them of reprisal.

  Amaury Vives was visiting Marbella with friends on a late vacation to celebrate the end of school. He was one of a half-dozen young graduates from the best business school in Spain who had decided to indulge themselves with two weeks of partying before diving into the professional life that awaited them. They weren’t millionaires, but they belonged to that comfortable class for whom the unemployment numbers were just a bit of bad news. Some of them would join the family businesses when their “wild retreat” was over, to use the term they had chosen for their escapade to the Costa del Sol. Their plan included calling the best escort service available: “It’s the closest thing to fucking a supermodel,” one of them had said.

  At twenty-four years old, Amaury had only slept with a professional once before, and he was inevitably timid once they were alone. They were in a bedroom in the mansion in the Nueva Andalucía subdivision that the boys had rented. The excitement and the vague discomfort he felt being with a hooker made him come almost immediately. After that, he was able to relax. Knowing his friends would be a long time with the girls they’d chosen, he spent the next hour chatting with Milena. Behind that beautiful blonde, he’d expected to find a semiliterate farm girl from Eastern Europe, but soon they were speaking to each other in fluent Spanish about the books they had read. That made him interested in Milena’s story. At first, she responded to his questions vaguely, but his indignant reaction when he found out how she’d been recruited and what her living conditions were like made her decide to tell him the whole truth. When their talk was over, Amaury promised he would help her run away, and they spent the last bit of time pondering an escape route.

  Four days later, they were ready to try. He let his friends return to Madrid on the day they’d planned and extended the booking at the house for another two days. At first, he wanted to get his friends involved, but Milena dissuaded him, fearing one of them would change his mind or, even worse, give them away.

  The idea was simple but viable. Amaury rented a car the day before and requested Milena’s services in advance. Since it was just one girl, and the house had already hosted a party with lots of them days before, the pimps sent a lone guard, who waited behind the wheel of his car. As soon as the Croatian entered the house, they went to the backyard, jumped the fence that bordered a small hill, and descended until they reached the street where Amaury had parked his rented Renault.

  They had been together two hours before her overseer realized she was gone. Amaury had tried to negotiate a longer visit, but that was the usual limit for a single girl unless the client in question was rich and someone they trusted. Still, they assumed it was time enough.

  That first hour, Amaury drove as fast as possible up the A7. For the first stretch after passing Marbella, Milena felt the euphoria of escape and the pleasure of observing the unfamiliar countryside. Though Amaury was speeding, infected by the Croatian’s excitement, she insisted on having the windows down, drunk on a freedom that had come so cheap. U2 blasted through the car’s speakers and her long blonde hair danced in the wind.

  Her enthusiasm turned to anxiety when the first two hours were over. She imagined the scene at the abandoned house, the frustrated gestures of the apelike man, the inevitable phone call to Bonso, and the implacable search. She looked at Amaury and asked herself if it hadn’t been irresponsible to put a healthy young man with such a promising future at risk. He didn’t seem conscious of the danger he was in. Maybe he thought he was just doing his good deed for the day. But she knew an attempted runaway could cost them their lives. He might already have a warrant out for some fabricated offense thanks to the mafia’s ties.

  Amaury tried to calm her down, and those next three hours, they drove slower to keep from attracting attention. They made it to Madrid at 4:30 a.m., and in the chill of Madrid, so different from the climate of Andalusia, Milena thought she felt once more a promising sign of the life that awaited her when she returned to her country.

  She planned to go to the embassy first thing in the morning. Amaury searched for the address on his phone and told her it wasn’t far from the house he lived in, next door to his parents. Milena wasn’t interested in staying there. She feared her captors had gotten hold of her friend’s information and were waiting in his home. She didn’t tell Amaury why she refused, to keep him from worrying too much. She just said she’d be more comfortable in a café on Calle Claudio Coello, close to the embassy. He thought it was pushing it to kill the four hours in an empty coffee shop, but he understood she wouldn’t necessarily behave rationally after her long captivity. Symbolic as it was, the proximity of the embassy made her feel closer to home.

  Melina’s intuitions weren’t wrong. Before they made it to Jaén, three hours after their departure, Bonso already had the name of the person who had first rented the residence in Marbella, a friend of Amaury’s, the one with the biggest credit line. They called him in Madrid that same night, saying a pipe had burst and the neighbors were complaining. The friend said Amaury was the last one at the house and gave them his full name and number.

  Bonso’s web of contacts fanned out, watching airports and train stations, hotels and public places. When things like this occurred, the different gangs that trafficked in women collaborated to one another’s benefit: no one needed someone like Milena breaking the system’s rules. At seven in the morning, when the first rental car companies in Málaga opened, an employee found Amaury in their database and sent his address and the make and model of his rented car to one of the cops on the gang’s payroll. By eight o’clock, two men were having coffee in a blue truck a hundred feet away from the Vives family home.

  Just then, Milena was in the bathroom of the restaurant where they were having churros and chocolate, taking off the skimpy clothes she’d had on and donning a tracksuit Amaury had bought on her instructions the night before. Neither had considered how strange her high heels would look with the informal clothes she was now wearing. She assured him it didn’t matter. She wasn’t planning to stroll through Madrid those next few hours.

  At nine, Amaury stopped the rental car in front of 78 Calle de Cla
udio Coello, a beautiful, majestic building of several floors. Milena looked around suspiciously, but no one seemed to pay attention to the Renault or its occupants. Amaury made fun of his friend’s worries and invited her to dinner that night. She shook her head, nervous about the long goodbye, and promised to call that evening. She got out of the car. The five yards that lay between her and the guard watching over the entrance seemed endless, but she saw none of Bonso’s men. In deliberately rudimentary Spanish, she told the guard she was a tourist who had lost her passport and needed to talk to an employee of the embassy.

  Five minutes later, she was seated in front of the ambassador’s secretary. They made her wait more than half an hour, but she wasn’t in a rush. All her fears vanished when she saw the Croatian landscapes adorning the walls. She assumed that from a legal standpoint, she was already home, and that was the only thing that mattered. A while later, an official had to tap her on the shoulder to rouse her from the stupor she had fallen into. The words he uttered were music to her ears: the first words in her language she’d heard in years. Introducing himself as an assistant to the ambassador, the man led her into a small office. It took her more than an hour to tell her story.

  The official listened attentively, at times interrupting the narration to clarify a date or confusing detail. Occasionally, he noted something down in a small journal he would take from his pocket and then put back. Finally, he asked her to wait in his office while he started the process of getting her a provisional passport. Establishing her identity as a Croatian citizen was the first step before they could offer her consular assistance. She insisted on calling her family to warn them of the danger they were in, but the man was firm about which priorities came first.

  Forty minutes later, he returned with a report in his hand. He didn’t open it. He’d talked with the police, he said, and had gotten in touch with the special unit in charge of human trafficking: a car would come for her in fifteen minutes and drive her to the station to take down a report. Milena was scared, and she said all that mattered to her was getting back to her country. She didn’t want anything to do with Spanish authorities or the police. She urged him to call her family to let them know the danger they were in, but he stated that only the ambassador could authorize long-distance calls and refused to allow her use of his personal phone for a nonofficial call.

  He told her that going to Zagreb on her own would do nothing. If what she said was true, these were European mafias active in several countries. She would be captured again, maybe even killed, along with her family, as a punishment for escaping. The only solution was to collaborate with the police so Bonso’s gang could be taken down. He told her the embassy closed at five p.m. and she would have to leave the building anyway. It was best to go now, when the police could protect her. Then he assured her an employee from the embassy would get in touch later to give her an envelope with cash and the reservation details for a hotel room. That was standard procedure for nationals stranded without a passport or resources.

  At 12:15, he said the detectives were waiting outside in their car. He walked her out himself, saying he would try and visit in a few hours and giving her a hug goodbye. Resigned, Milena got into the car where three people were waiting for her. As soon as it started moving, she looked at her companion in the back seat, and a chill ran up her spine: though she didn’t have a clear idea of how a Spanish detective should look, it was almost definitely nothing like the man sitting beside her.

  There was no need to drug her during the two hours they took to return to Marbella: she had broken down completely. Like a ragdoll, her head thrown back in her seat, she watched the clouds pass and asked herself if this would be the last time she saw the blue sky of southern Spain, the one thing she might miss from the life she’d spent there.

  Bonso was waiting for her in the house Milena had lived in with fourteen other girls. She assumed the first thing would be a long interrogation about her escape. Then she saw there wouldn’t be a prelude: they took her straight to what seemed to be a stage set for her punishment. The report by the embassy official must have made any examination unnecessary.

  Bonso was accompanied by three thugs and two huge dogs on leashes. He was short, almost a midget, but still, the scene was terrifying. The gang had dogs trained to offer bestiality shows for tourists. For that, they usually used the women the clients didn’t go for anymore. But the dogs were also a tool to terrorize the women. They might also be there to tear her apart. For the traffickers, nothing was worse than a runaway snitching to international authorities, because the girls knew all their methods and all their customers. The mafiosos would rather lose the investment a working girl like Milena represented than look weak in the eyes of the rest of the women and run the risk that more of them would try the same.

  The presence of one of the women who had sex with the animals confirmed her worst fears. She must have been there to prepare the beasts, a Rottweiler and a German Shepherd. The long sheets of plastic stretched out on the floor of the room left no doubt that it would end in bloodshed. She saw the excitement of the bodyguards, who were used to all sorts of excesses.

  Bonso made a gesture, and one of the men approached Milena and started taking off her clothes. She tried briefly to resist, but then thought that the sooner it was over, the better. Naked and trembling, she waited for the dogs to come over. Bonso got what he’d wanted: the girls’ faces were filled with terror.

  Thudding sounds at the front door froze the scene. One of the guards looked through the peephole and told his boss Torsi was there. Torsi was a key link between businessmen and the administration in Marbella and one of the city’s biggest customers for high-class hookers. Bonso nodded and three men entered: Torsi, a six-foot, five-inch black assistant, and Vila-Rojas. Everyone was surprised to see him. He wasn’t someone who liked to spend too much time in the port city’s underworld, and he was careful with his image.

  He saw Milena naked in the middle of the room, then the dogs and the plastic sheets, and looked at Bonso.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing, just a little disciplinary discussion with one of the girls so she learns to obey the house rules. Isn’t that right, dear?” Bonso said, turning to the Croatian.

  She closed her eyes to show her assent.

  “Is there somewhere we could talk?” Vila-Rojas asked.

  Bonso pointed to his office door and started walking in that direction. Vila-Rojas followed, motioning for his companions to stay put. Twenty minutes later, both men emerged, and the visitors left the house without uttering a word. On his way out, Vila-Rojas shot a quick glance at Milena, who had covered herself with a sheet and was sitting among the other girls. Dogs, thugs, and hookers were in the same position they’d been left in.

  “Everyone to your room,” Bonso commanded. “You know now what will happen if you break any rules. And you,” he said to Milena, full of hate and frustration, “you would have preferred punishment to what you’ve got coming to you.”

  Then he went back in his office, opened a false panel in the air conditioner embedded in the wall, took out a video camera, and made sure that his conversation with Vila-Rojas had been recorded, as all the sessions in his office were. He grabbed the envelope of cash Vila-Rojas had left on his desk and deposited it in his safe.

  ‌31

  Claudia and Tomás

  Thursday, November 13, 8:35 a.m.

  He drank his water in an obscene, almost animal-like way. Months ago, Claudia had changed out the clear glasses in the kitchen for thicker ones to keep from having to see her husband’s gaping mouth. But she still found it indecent how he brought the glass up to his lips, as if they were burned.

  When do you stop loving someone? At what moment do those little details that seemed curious and charming turn into irritating manias? When did her husband’s absurd bedtime ritual become intolerable to her? When did the long silences between them stop being bubbles of intimacy and become interludes of hostility?
<
br />   There was nothing alive between them anymore that could hold a man and a woman together. She knew that sooner or later they would have to face up to the failure of their marriage, but that wouldn’t be now. There were too many uncertainties in the air after her father’s death and her new responsibilities at the newspaper. For now, all she wanted was for her husband to go to work. Tomás would be there any minute to talk about his visit to Galván’s the night before, and she hadn’t even told her husband one of the deputy directors from El Mundo had been kidnapped.

  Alejandro mentioned plans for the weekend, and she tried to ignore him, looking at the open copy of El Mundo on the table instead. Any remark from her would drag things out. Still, he didn’t seem to be in a rush. He painstakingly pulled the crust from a slice of supermarket bread, a quirk that she found better suited to a picky teenager than a professional executive. The butler announced Tomás’s arrival, and Alejandro got up to receive him, but Claudia cut him short.

  “Don’t get up, I’ll see him on the terrace. There’s some delicate business we have to discuss. And don’t wait up for me tonight. I’ll probably be late.”

  Tomás greeted her with an almost-fraternal affection, as far as possible from the fantasies Claudia had experienced that morning in the shower. They sat down at a heavy wood table on a balcony looking down over the crowns of the trees in the Chapultepec Forest.

  He told her about Víctor Salgado and brought her more or less up to date on the adversary they were up against.

  “Another way to find Milena is to figure out what the hell Salgado’s up to here,” she mused. “He seems like too big a fish to take a personal interest in an immigrant prostitute, unless he was in love with her, too.”

  “I doubt it. If so, he would never have let her go with your father.”