Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  ‌39

  Milena and Luis

  Thursday, November 13, 8:45 p.m.

  A long silence reigned between Luis and Milena when she had finished the story of her life in Marbella. By then, they were surrounded by absolute darkness and bitter cold. She couldn’t see Luis’s face, and the intermittent forest sounds had a hypnotic effect. Luis was stunned by what she described, but she spoke as if she was speaking of things experienced by someone else.

  Luis asked himself what would have happened to him if he’d been forced to commit such abominable acts for ten years after he turned sixteen. He doubted the girl could ever return from the darkness she’d been plunged into.

  But Milena felt liberated: for the first time, she had let herself share with someone the terrible crimes she had committed, the burden of which she’d borne along for so long. She had the sense that Luis was capable of peering into the bottom of her soul without pushing her away.

  “I’m really cold,” she said, and before waiting for a response, she lay down over him and rested her head on his chest.

  He wrapped an arm around her back and shifted against the stump he was leaning on, and she lowered her hand down his belly until she reached his groin. With satisfaction, she noted a growing bulge pressing against his jeans, but he took her wrist and brought it to his chest.

  “Let’s rest,” he said.

  His rejection confused her, then she felt humiliated and, finally, guilty. Provoking excitement and giving pleasure were her way of saying thanks, of getting close to a person of the opposite sex. Those were the only ways she knew to be close to men. She had been taught to see her beauty as her defining virtue, and that was what she wanted to offer to her protector and confidant. But she remembered Rina and was overcome by embarrassment and guilt.

  Luis’s reaction had little to do with fidelity and a great deal to do with the story he’d just heard. It was impossible not to relate the hand that crawled over his penis with the images that had taken shape in his mind as he listened to her words.

  He took the phone out of his jacket, turned it on, and listened to a message. He memorized the number he was given, dialed it, and heard a man’s voice.

  “Hey, Luis, we’re in the cabin. We have a written message from Rina.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “In Mexico City, in a safe place. We can take you both to her. You’re with Milena, right?”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “We’re with Claudia. It’s urgent to protect you all.”

  “Tell Rina to call me on this phone at exactly nine-fifteen. Not a minute before or after.”

  Luis hung up and told Milena what he had heard. They stood up and decided, for their own reasons, to ignore what had just happened. It was better to remain silent, submerged in their own worries. Eight minutes later, he turned on the phone and heard Rina’s voice immediately.

  “I’m fine, Vidal’s with me. They brought me to Jaime’s offices, they say it’s for my safety. They thought I was Milena.”

  “Are they holding you against your will?”

  “No, nothing like that, I already called my uncle’s house. I’m going by there tomorrow to get some clothes. And you? Are you coming?”

  “I’m not sure. You’re out of danger, but I’d rather think about it. I trust Jaime less than a dentist with rotten teeth,” he said. “The way they took you was almost a kidnapping. The best thing would be to talk to Amelia. Ask her to call this phone at eleven.”

  “Do what you have to do, but take care. I’ll tell Amelia to call you.”

  “I’m going to hang up before they trace my location. We’ll be moving over the next few hours.”

  “You don’t want to talk to Vidal?”

  Luis hesitated a moment.

  “No, we’ve already been on too long. I miss you. Take care. For me.”

  “You take care, too. For me.”

  The men in the cabin asked Patricia for instructions. She told them they hadn’t been able to trace the call, but she ordered them to stay there in case Amelia managed to convince Luis and Milena to go back when they talked later.

  For security, and because of the looming cold, Luis and Milena decided to start moving. By his calculations, the highway, which ran parallel to the toll road they and their pursuers had taken, should only be a mile or two away. He wanted to get close to be sure he’d have a cell-phone signal and an escape route toward the city. Even if the men in the cabin weren’t a risk, he couldn’t forget the threat of the traffickers, who were also looking for Milena.

  In the hours since they had embraced, Milena still hadn’t opened her mouth. When she reached the crest of a hill, three yards ahead of Luis, she stopped. Outlined against the light from the crescent moon, her curvy figure unleashed a wave of desire in him. He snuffed out the jolt of penitence growing between his legs and substituted it with commiseration for his friend. Milena would always be a sex object: for women, a menace evoking dirty sheets and abortions; for men, a hormonal urgency.

  Luis summited the little hill, put his arm around her shoulders, and guided her down.

  “You’re not alone anymore, Lika. I won’t let them hurt you.”

  Milena was thankful for the gesture and went along with him, but she knew her friend had no idea of the danger they were in. The real risk was that she would hurt him, even if involuntarily. As long as he stayed with her, he was condemned to death. The mafia would eliminate any possibility of their secrets getting out. Again, she told herself her death would solve everything. But something in the dangers he was facing and his willingness to help her touched her deeply. She felt the impulse to open up to him entirely, to show him everything in her little book, and above all, to share her doubts. Was the crisis in Ukraine what had brought this fury down on her, because of the dirt she had on the Russian mafia? Or was it just Bonso’s impatience to have her back because of the pressure the prostitution rings were placing on him? Did they want to destroy the secrets she knew about the powerful clients who had passed through her bed? But she said nothing and showed him nothing.

  “What were you doing today with the computer?” she asked.

  Thankful for the opportunity, Luis now entered into a long account of his technical abilities, his status in the world of elite hackers, his ability to penetrate previously unbreachable databases without a trace, to find out anything and everything about an individual and turn his life into a living hell, if necessary.

  “Is that what you’re thinking of doing with Bonso? Turning his life into a living hell?” she asked.

  “Something much worse.”

  ‌40

  Milena

  2012

  The Flamingos were a group of guys who took their pleasures seriously. And these weren’t any ordinary pleasures. For more than ten years, they’d been getting together once a month, and their definition of fun had changed considerably since the early days.

  They started seeing each other at the end of the nineties, when Vila-Rojas, a successful lawyer from Granada based in Marbella, united with three colleagues working in a similar field: laundering money on the Costa del Sol. One of them, Javi Rosado, had been a fellow student of his at the University of Seville; another, Jesús Nadal, he had worked with in his London days, when he worked in the legal department at Barclays; the third, Andrés Preciado, he had met on Wall Street. Over the succeeding months, two more joined their group, and through the years, the group grew to twelve. They were all Spaniards from the south, although none was from Marbella.

  None of them had gotten a piece of the first tourist boom in the seventies and eighties. They came later, at the beginning of the nineties, at the time when Jesús Gil y Gil had a stranglehold on Marbella and institutionalized corruption drew mafia money like a magnet. The same thing happened in that touristy port town that had happened in Cancun, Punta del Este, and Miami: First, they were chosen as residences for the capos of various gangs thanks to the common denominator of easy pleasur
e and lax authorities. Later, the new residents—Russians, Arabs, and Europeans—took the opportunity to profit from explosive growth and an absence of regulation.

  When money laundering became an industry of its own in the mid-nineties, people like Vila-Rojas and his friends were suddenly indispensable: lawyers, financiers with international experience, former accountants of multinational corporations. They did the work that the businessmen who’d come up around Marbella’s picturesque mayor couldn’t. The first generation consisted of old-school builders and real-estate speculators, who were able to multiply the value of a hectare by fifty thanks to their influence on public planning and ability to facilitate rezoning. But they lacked overseas contacts or the aptitude to manage the millions in secret cash that had started to flow into the Spanish coast. Vila-Rojas and others like him were the ideal mediators between traditional businessmen and the managers of illicit capital from other continents.

  The Flamingos started as a group of friends, but as time went on, they began to see themselves as the puppet masters of life in the port. They barely saw each other apart from their monthly meetings, and they didn’t work together, save for the occasional project in common. Even so, those get-togethers fostered closeness. It seemed to them it was only during their time together that they could revel in what they really were: the true bosses of the city. They kept a low profile in comparison to Jesús Gil and his raucous successors, who showed the typical garishness of the nouveaux riches. Only in their meetings, when they were in their element, did they confess their contempt for the hayseed local elite and give themselves over to pleasures and extravagances they avoided the rest of the month.

  They started meeting at the Hotel Fuerte on the last Friday of the month. They got the name Flamingos from the general manager of the hotel restaurant when he saw the names Rojas and Rosado, Red and Pink in Spanish, on the reservation that the group made for the private dining room. Learning of the nickname, the members took a liking to it, remembering it was the same as that of a Vegas hotel where Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and other members of the Rat Pack had hung out.

  Their sessions usually started off with a midday lunch and finished at sunrise on Saturday, but after a hooker died from an overdose they decided to move their celebration somewhere private and began taking turns hosting their meetings. That was what caused their excesses to take off: each person competed to make his party the most spectacular and memorable. Weekend villas became scenes out of ancient Rome; yachts were overtaken by Amazonian pirates with voracious sexual appetites; there were exotic feasts and festivals of perverse videos.

  When Agustín Vila-Rojas told Milena about the Flamingos, she didn’t say that she already knew about their parties, but at least a half-dozen times, Bonso had been responsible for supplying the female consorts. She herself had taken part in one organized by a certain Rosas, who she now knew formed part of the brotherhood Vila-Rojas described. She didn’t remember the man from Granada, and he didn’t remember her.

  Agustín explained that the party on the yacht where they had met a year before was the first one they had thrown after a long break, when the authorities had come out against money laundering and dismantled a good part of the networks they operated. Two members of the original group had fallen and several others feared for their freedom; another had disappeared. Agustín didn’t know if he’d fled or been killed by criminals who wanted to be sure there was no trace of him left behind.

  Operation White Whale, as the fight against money laundering on the Costa del Sol was known, ended up netting 250 million euros and apprehending fifty consultants, government workers, and businessmen. It didn’t come close to eliminating the phenomenon during those years, but it was enough to make it more sophisticated. In a way, it benefited Vila-Rojas, because the arrests were a kind of purge: the survivors got more and better business. It was a mix of good luck and moderation that saved him. He had always been more cautious than ambitious; the investigators’ files didn’t even mention his name.

  Despite everything, he and the remaining members of the Flamingos knew the bonanza of impunity was over. They put up walls around anything to do with the transfer and investment of capital, turned down any proposals that didn’t come from their most trusted clients, and concentrated on a smaller number of jobs, to which they could devote their complete attention. The risk of jail wasn’t related to the amount of money, but to how dirty the money was.

  All in all, these new precautions didn’t neutralize mistakes made in the past, and that was what kept Vila-Rojas up at night. He cleaned house and looked back over each of his files. In the end, he had a list of six guys he had dealt with before whose testimony could land him in prison. Three of them belonged to the Flamingos. “And that’s where you come in, dear,” he said to Milena.

  ‌41

  Tomás and Amelia

  Friday, November 14, 1:10 a.m.

  Neither of them would go to bed. Tomás had arrived at Amelia’s house a half-hour before, told her the outcome of the meeting with Víctor Salgado, and they took a shot together, “to lower the ailerons,” as Tomás said. When he had knocked back his second tequila, she thought she’d never seen him drink so regularly. It was true Tomás had never taken on the kind of responsibility that now weighed on him. Whatever the case, his weakness for drink was worrisome. If he went on this way, she’d have to talk to him.

  Is this what we’ve become, a couple that spies on each other and criticizes each other’s excesses? Do I really want to be the watchdog keeping my lover from cutting loose? These thoughts depressed her and made her refill her wine glass to the top.

  After a sip, she repeated the phone conversation she’d had with Luis two hours before, when he was somewhere out in the forest. She told the story of how Jaime had ended up with Rina instead of Milena and how Luis had run off with the Croatian to the mountains in La Marquesa. They criticized Lemlock’s methods and Jaime’s passion for intrigue. Amelia admired Luis and his crusade to defend Milena, regardless of the risk. If things fell apart, Tomás thought, the crusade wouldn’t be particularly admirable anymore, and would instead look like a huge mistake: with enemies like Salgado and Bonso, the boy’s temerity could end up getting people hurt.

  Tomás’s cell phone interrupted the parade of their worries. The screen showed it was Isabel, Emiliano’s wife, and he imagined she was calling about him missing lunch. He would have liked to keep the deputy director’s family in the dark about the kidnapping, trusting the negotiations with Salgado would work something out. He was afraid the woman could get mixed up in things, start a scandal, maybe get the authorities involved, and everything they’d tried so far could turn to dust. But what Isabel told him was that her husband had just come home and gone directly to the tub. He looked unharmed, but exhausted. All he wanted was to be left alone, to rest, and he said he would call the director in the morning.

  Tomás hung up and hugged Amelia. The intensity he grabbed her neck with made her believe he was coming apart, and she felt him quiver a few times before he pulled away.

  Tomás served himself another tequila and toasted to Emiliano.

  “What will happen with Milena now?” she asked, once they had both drunk.

  “I have no idea what will happen with Milena, and believe me, at this point, it’s not my problem.” Tomás knew they still hadn’t found the black book Rosendo Franco had mentioned, but he didn’t feel like ruining the solace the phone call had brought him. He also didn’t want to encourage Amelia’s inclinations; he felt she was addicted to lost causes.

  “I understand the main thing is taken care of now, and I can’t tell you how happy I am for Emiliano, but the girl is also a victim of circumstances, and we can’t pass her off to those vultures.”

  “I’m not so sure she’s a victim anymore. Milena’s been part of these organized-crime rings for a long time; just think of the skeletons she’s got in her closet. Anyway, I’m not motivated to let any of our people risk their lives in a
matter that doesn’t concern us.”

  Amelia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She would have seen the logic in those words coming from Jaime, who invariably hedged his bets, but not from Tomás, who was always prepared to tackle other people’s problems, even if only symbolically.

  “Milena didn’t choose to be what she became, Tomás. She was your daughter’s age when they took her.”

  He didn’t like that comparison. The thought of Jimena in a brothel…

  “Give it a fucking rest, Amelia. Can you not let me enjoy the fact that Emiliano’s back in his home? Right now, they’re pimping out girls Jimena’s age in Thailand, in Madrid, here in Mexico City. Does that mean we need to leave now and go rescue them all?”

  “I’m sorry I brought your daughter into this, it was in bad taste and I apologize, but Milena is a human being and fate brought her into our hands. You can’t solve all the problems in the world, but you have to deal with the ones that wind up in your path.”

  “You haven’t even met the goddamned Croatian, and I only saw her once. Besides, we don’t know her past and everything suggests she did something much worse than just run away from her captors.”

  “We don’t know what she did. What’s obvious is she’s a survivor and anything she’s done she had to do, given the circumstances.”

  “Bonso or the Turk could say the same thing, no? They’re products of their circumstances, too. We should look into the Romanian’s childhood; he probably suffered from all kinds of abuse and misfortune. Does that mean those assholes need to be rescued, too?”

  Amelia could see Tomás was having trouble saying his r’s and that the alcohol was making him take a harsher tone. She also saw that now wasn’t the ideal moment for this, but she was on the hook, emotionally: she had made Rina and Luis’s struggle to save Milena’s life her own.