Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  Breakfast broke off abruptly when Isabel called Tomás to tell him Emiliano wasn’t well. Tomás promised to stop by their home right away. Amelia talked with Rina briefly on the phone, and they arranged to meet at her office in an hour so Rina could resume her analysis of the budget law. They said goodbye with a kiss and made plans to meet that night. She watched him leave, and a vague and indefinable feeling clouded her spirit.

  Emiliano’s colonial mansion was in Coyoacán on a cobblestone street with tall birch trees. Isabel was an unusual Chilean, dark-skinned and with curly hair, easier to imagine on a beach in the Caribbean than in the Andes. The four-year-old who met him in the doorway had his father’s face and his mother’s hair.

  The deputy director of opinion was on the terrace facing the rectangular inner courtyard, idly watching the rhythmical dripping of a gurgling stone fountain. On the table was a still-unopened copy of El Mundo. Despite his clean pajamas, his two days’ of beard growth and gaunt face revealed the terror he’d been through.

  “They’re animals, Tomás,” he said.

  “You’re safe now, Emiliano. It was a bad dream. Now it’s over.”

  “They kept me handcuffed in a van the whole time, they didn’t even take them off for me to sleep. The worst thing is they never even told me what it was about.”

  “Did they hit you?”

  “Twice, I think, when I was complaining a lot and then when I asked for help when I heard voices out on the street. Both times, this guy called the Turk came in and kicked the shit out of me until the other guys made him stop. If they didn’t, I think he would have killed me.”

  Tomás looked over his friend. Though the pajamas covered his body, he could see a bright contusion around his wrist. He held his torso at an odd angle and kept his elbow close to his ribs.

  “I’m really sorry, Emiliano. They need to look you over. Let my driver take you to the hospital, you might have broken something.”

  “Isabel’s going to take me now. But first, I need to ask you why they kidnapped me: I need to know if I’m in danger, if my family’s safe. I only saw the boss at first, when he called you from my phone—a real nasty piece of work. I heard something about Milena. What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Nothing,” Tomás responded, and told the story of the Croatian in broad strokes. “So as you can see, you have nothing to fear. It’s got nothing to do with you. Take a few days, go somewhere, forget this nightmare. When you come back, it’ll seem like nothing, a story to impress people with after dinner.”

  “Just a bad dream, huh? A story to tell after dinner?” Emiliano looked at Tomás with fury. He stood up from the chair and took down his pajama pants: on the right buttock, he had a fresh tattoo, an enormous B. “They raped me before they branded me. They told me I was their property now.”

  Forty minutes later, having listened to Emiliano’s story, Tomás showed up at Claudia’s house, profoundly aggrieved. The whole way, he asked himself how the hell he was going to keep the promise he’d made to Emiliano and kill the Turk.

  For now, he needed to warn Claudia and the rest of the Blues that they were in the middle of a war with different rules from the ones they’d known before. What they’d done to Emiliano didn’t make any sense: the violence was as gratuitous as it was savage. He assumed glumly that once again, this terrain would be far more familiar to Jaime than to the rest of them.

  Claudia had been up all night but slept long and deep after getting word of Emiliano’s freedom.

  “Well, that’s one crisis off the list,” she said once they were in her studio, each with a cup of coffee in hand. This time, her husband wasn’t there. “Now we’ll have to get everything ready for the lunch on Monday with the president. I suppose we should get an agenda ready, even if it’s just things we’re going to throw out in the course of the conversation, no?”

  “I guess so. Aggressions toward journalists haven’t ceased and the economic situation at the daily papers is dismal. In other countries, they’re looking into fiscal exemptions to alleviate the crisis news companies are facing. We could bring some of that up in our talk.”

  Tomás found it odd that Claudia wasn’t talking about Milena, who had become an obsession of hers since her father’s death. He wondered whether it was better to keep silent about the torment Emilio had been through and stick to the subjects Claudia proposed. If they did manage to forget Milena, maybe they wouldn’t hear of the matter again, and they could go on with the already-hazardous job of running a newspaper. If they were lucky, the story of the disturbing black book was nothing more than a senile exaggeration of Don Rosendo’s.

  But he couldn’t count on it. Deep down, Tomás knew he was fooling himself. The violence Emiliano had gone through had been ruthless and unnecessary. The rape and the tattooing took place after their meeting with Víctor Salgado; it was a warning.

  He asked for a beer and proceeded to tell her what he had talked about that morning with Emiliano.

  “He didn’t let me leave until he’d made me promise the Turk would die, but I can’t consider that,” he concluded.

  “Why not?” she said. “A piece-of-shit delinquent can’t do something like that to a director from El Mundo and get away with it. I don’t care if he dies under arrest or in jail, after he’s been caught. We owe it to Emiliano, and we owe it to the paper.”

  It was as if Tomás were seeing Claudia for the first time. Her implacable attitude was more like Rosendo Franco’s than that of someone who had studied the Renaissance in Italy. Apparently she had learned more Sicilian culture than Florentine.

  “I understand what you’re saying and I guarantee you that bastard will pay for what he did. But killing him… I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t want to get wrapped up in it, don’t, I’ll understand. I’ll take care of it on my own. And don’t even think we’re going to hand Milena over to them. If they want war, they’ve got it.”

  Tomás didn’t dare remind her that they didn’t have Milena either. Her red hair and flushed face were the very image of indignation.

  “Do you want to talk to the president about this?”

  “I don’t think so. If we do, how will we explain it when the Turk dies on us?”

  Tomás couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Well, you’re more of a bitch than you look like with that pretty face, if you’ll let me say so, boss. Are you sure Rosendo wasn’t getting you ready behind the scenes?”

  “It’s not about me, Tomás. The truth is, I’m not a fighter: just look at me with my marriage. But El Mundo is different. I grew up in a house where it is almost a religion: life or death, you defend the newspaper, and no blow goes unanswered. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Agreed,” Tomás said, a little rueful that he’d laughed at Claudia. “For now, we need to beef up security. I’m talking to Jaime today to put together a strategy.”

  “You think he can help us with the other issue, too? The Turk, I mean. Can you trust him?”

  “Oh, I can trust him. Whether he’s willing to help us or not is another thing, but I can ask.”

  She got up from her chair and walked over to him, then mussed his hair.

  “Thanks, Tomás. Help me if you can, and don’t judge me. I don’t want this to push us apart.”

  He raised an arm to wrap it around her waist, but she moved away, turned around, and offered him a tequila.

  “It’s already noon, right?”

  ‌45

  Milena

  June 2012

  Her first murder was so antiseptic it struck her as inoffensive, even a letdown. The Flamingos had started meeting again a few months before, but now they did so more discreetly than in previous years: a long lunch in some rented villa, the girls at nightfall, and talking till dawn.

  Vila-Rojas instructed Milena how to approach Cristóbal Puyol at their next reunion. They called him the Catalan even though he was from Córdoba. He looked like a gypsy through and through, not just because of his brown skin
and oily, curly hair: his florid shirts and the gold chain around his neck made him a dissonant figure among his colleagues. Despite his appearance, he was the most sought-after tax lawyer for local businessmen. Puyol had a natural instinct for finding cracks in the fiscal codes and exploiting their weaknesses to the maximum.

  In recent years, Vila-Rojas had begun consulting with him on delicate matters. Generally, in these kinds of consultancies, quantities and the names of companies and shareholders go unmentioned: you state the problem, you pay a fee, and that’s that.

  But on one occasion it was necessary to show him all the contracts and documents for the establishment of a philanthropic organization whose real purpose was to send money back to the Ukrainian mafia after it had been laundered through tourism. Vila-Rojas wanted to be sure of the legal status of a recently created front organization that channeled resources to fake humanitarian causes in North Africa. The money was sent to local charities in Morocco, Algeria, and Western Sahara, but only a small part went to digging wells or building houses in the country. The biggest piece of the pie returned to Europe through fake purchases of Russian grain. It was a financial virtuous circle: the Marbella businessmen got a tax break thanks to their donations, and the Ukrainian mafia got back the money it paid to the hotels for nonexistent room charges at inflated prices.

  But after Operation White Whale and the arrest of various colleagues, Vila-Rojas felt less sure that the foundation would pass unnoticed among the Spanish treasury inspectors. For now, he had diminished the quantity of donations and started investing more in housing construction in the Sahara. Still, Cristóbal Puyol was a weak link. If the Catalan fell, he could negotiate with the authorities by giving them Vila-Rojas’s head.

  The night of the party, at a spacious country house in the hills bordering Marbella, Milena had no problems getting close to Puyol. He had a thing for blondes, and she made sure to be the first to sidle up to him. She observed with satisfaction that he was already drunk, but Puyol didn’t seem to want to make it easy on her: he called over another blonde, a Bulgarian named Alexa, and she settled in on his right. They spent a few hours in the living room among the other guests while the girls organized a striptease contest. Puyol was the clown of the group: he got up on the table and challenged the professionals.

  The Catalan never left the two blondes alone. Convinced Alexa wouldn’t move, Vila-Rojas approached her, saying he admired her tailored dress, then took her by the waist and led her off to dance. The strategy worked out poorly: Puyol called another blonde to fill the gap she’d left behind. There was no lack of replacements. There were fifteen women for seven men.

  A little before two in the morning, Puyol stood up shakily, his mind clouded but his burning desires crystal clear. He stripped off his clothes, sat in an armchair in the bedroom, and told the two girls to have sex with each other. After a while Milena got tired, but Alexa wanted to keep going. The Croatian’s pussy turned her on. Milena feigned an orgasm to get Puyol on his feet. She knew what voyeurs liked.

  “Come here, my lord,” she said to him. “I’d rather finish off with your dick than with her little tongue.”

  Puyol didn’t answer, but the invitation excited him. He took his member in his hand and shook it without taking his eyes off the raised ass of Alexa, whose face was still buried between Milena’s legs. He stood up with a swollen dick, got in the bed on his knees, and penetrated the Bulgarian from behind. Milena sat up, left the bed, took something from the pile of clothing on the floor, and got behind him. While he rammed Alexa, Milena caressed his balls and anus, and he reacted with delight. Then she pushed a finger inside him. Just before he came, she took out her finger and slipped in the suppository, pushing it in as deep as she could. She kept her finger inside him until he exploded in Alexa’s body and fell back, exhausted. Puyol didn’t notice the foreign object inside him, or he didn’t care. Either way, he collapsed and fell asleep.

  Vila-Rojas had assured her that it wouldn’t provoke a sudden death or anything like it. He just said she should wash her hands as soon as possible afterward, and she did as instructed. She grabbed her bag and went to the bathroom, still naked, and scrubbed herself furiously with alcohol.

  The next few days, she kept her eyes on the copies of El Sur, a local paper that the guards would bring home along with Marca to keep up with the sports and politics, but she never saw anything about Cristóbal Puyol. Four months later, by the time she had stopped looking for news, another of the girls remarked that one of her clients, the Catalan, had shot himself. One of the obituaries stated that Marbella was in mourning over the death of a local accountant with an unblemished reputation.

  From what Milena could gather—and as Vila-Rojas himself would later corroborate, with little enthusiasm and fewer details—they found Puyol’s body naked in his home office on a Monday morning. His family—a wife and two daughters—had spent the weekend in Seville picking out gifts for one of the girls’ upcoming wedding. On his desk, next to his body, the authorities found two lab reports with the same result: Puyol was infected with HIV and Hepatitis C. Though potentially fatal, both were treatable.

  The next time she saw Vila-Rojas, in the suite in the Hotel Bellamar after Puyol’s suicide, was the first time they made love. She took it as a kind of reward. It was also the first time she had an orgasm. She was surprised by the intensity of his reaction: she didn’t know if he had a wife or girlfriend, and as far as she could tell from what her coworkers said, he never slept with professionals either. More importantly, it was the first time he had caressed her gently and given in to what he must have felt for her.

  With time, she understood that what she’d done hadn’t killed the Catalan, but that the infection had been the perfect pretext for someone to stage his suicide without arousing suspicions.

  For the next few months, she went on seeing Vila-Rojas two or three times a week, telling him about the clients who visited her and the conversations she overheard. They didn’t make love again until he presented her with the next case, but sometimes their information sessions would devolve into long conversations, stretching on past midnight. For him, she got deeper into the mission he had assigned her, and probing the other girls about the clients they saw, and she took further risks, trying to wheedle useful information out of her own. She’d go through phones, pockets, and wallets when the men weren’t around. Pleased with his protégée’s initiative, he gave her a cell phone and showed her how to take photos of documents, but she rarely used it: where she lived, they were contraband.

  ‌46

  Amelia and Rina

  Friday, November 14, 1:30 p.m.

  “I’m pregnant, Vidal,” Rina said, and he felt his heart skip a beat, and not only because he’d just eaten tortas de tamal they’d bought from a stand in Colonía Juárez.

  She uncovered her belly, markedly swollen between her two hipbones. Only then did he understand the joke, and he smiled laggardly.

  “I think I need an Alka-Seltzer to abort,” she added, rubbing her belly.

  “You can have a chamomile tea, that’ll help,” he said.

  He always thought of something witty to say seconds later, but never when he needed it. He asked himself how Luis would have responded to her joke. It was a lost cause, he thought, especially because his friend had been so worried about Luis all morning. Though he had tried to cheer her up, talking about the importance of her work at Amelia’s office, Rina was distracted and stared at her phone’s screen every few seconds.

  In the end, they ordered a coffee in a bookstore on the Avenida Álvaro Obregón, and while they waited to be served, she browsed through the economics section, finding nothing she wanted. As a gift, he bought her Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, a love story with a happy ending that he had read on Tomás’s recommendation months before.

  The gift made her strangely irritated. Now she’d have to read it because he’d ask her every few days if she’d liked it. Vidal’s constant attention wore her out. He reacted so intens
ely to everything she said or did. She missed Luis; his self-esteem was difficult to wound.

  As if she had conjured him, Rina’s phone rang in her hand and showed an unknown number.

  “Hey, hot stuff, I’m at a public phone, I can’t talk long.”

  “Are you okay?” she said, rushing out to the street, afraid she might lose her signal inside the building.

  “Great. You? Did you already leave Lemlock? Are you free?”

  “Yeah, everything’s back to normal. Vidal’s with me. I talked to Amelia and I’ll be working in her office all day. I’m worried about you…” she said in a barely audible tone, noticing that Vidal had crept up beside her.

  “I’m worried about you, too, but don’t let it get to you. I won’t be traceable while I’m working on what I told you about before. Don’t worry about our friend, either. Everything’s going to be okay, you’ll see.”

  “Promise me you won’t take unnecessary risks.”

  “I promise. I’ll call you tomorrow. And stay away from Lemlock, nothing good comes out of that place. You’re better off with Amelia.”

  “Done,” she said. “I promise. You want to talk to Vidal?”

  “Not now. Bye.”

  She wanted to say something more, but he’d already hung up.

  Vidal was disappointed, but also slightly relieved, that he hadn’t talked to his friend. He knew Lemlock was recording the call and they would have evaluated his ability to extract useful information from Luis during their conversation. He didn’t want to disappoint his uncle, but he also didn’t want to betray his friend. Vidal was playing a complex game, trying to get Milena back but also to protect Luis from the absurd risks he was running.

  He tried to explain his strategy to Rina.

  “Maybe the opposite is true,” she said, “maybe the only way out is the one he’s proposing: to manipulate information on the Net and try and take down Bonso’s gang.”