Milena asked herself if the mafioso’s presence meant they would have to abort the mission. She felt an enormous weight lifted off her back. The relief, and the many hours she’d spent at similar parties, made her respond automatically.
“And you’re the only one in the room who’s not shaking,” she said. “You’ve got their hair standing on end.”
Yasha laughed.
“Except for you. Not a single one of your hairs is out of place,” he commented, and softly stroked the tips of her long blonde mane.
“Yours either,” she said, looking at his bald scalp.
Both of them cracked up.
Even after they’d made physical contact, Yasha didn’t give the sense that he was flirting. It was rather as if he was fulfilling a role that was expected of him. She looked at him closer, and seeing his tall, slender, somewhat-awkward body, she thought it must not be easy for him to play the part of mafia capo. At least, not among his countrymen, who tended to be immense, robust, ruddy-cheeked. Yasha’s build didn’t project power or any capacity to intimidate. His advantages lay elsewhere, Milena assumed, and this made her sympathize with him.
From the other corner of the room, Vila-Rojas saw what was happening and was filled with jealousy. He watched Yasha conversing with Milena in her long, tailored satin dress, and she looked like a beautiful, untouchable goddess.
They went on chatting, isolated from the group but always observed, askance, by the rest of the participants, until Yasha decided his visit had served its purpose.
“Find me if any of these guys gives you any problems, dear,” he said as he left.
“More likely it’s you one of these guys is going to give problems, dear,” she responded with a smile.
He turned around, still laughing, and headed toward the door to leave, saying goodbye to no one.
It was a while before the meeting recovered the cheerful atmosphere Yasha had interrupted. But the alcohol and the company of the women made the Flamingos relax again. Milena looked around several times for Vila-Rojas. When she caught sight of him, he squeezed his throat in a choking gesture, pretending to adjust the collar of his shirt.
When the night began, Vila-Rojas pointed Milena out to Rosado, and at a certain point, he approached her to ask if she would join him later. He spent the next few hours away from her. Milena liked it that way: the less she knew him, the easier her assignment would be. And yet she couldn’t avoid seeking her victim out and watching his timid and diffident behavior throughout the course of the party. He settled down on a three-person sofa in the corner, resting a cushion on his knees, and hardly participated in the conversations around him. If a woman sat down beside him, he put a hand on her thigh, but barely addressed a word to her. If someone offered him a drink, he took the glass, drank a few sips, and left it on the table beside him.
Milena took him to be an observer, like herself, which made her feel a jab of regret. She saw later that he was a double risk to Vila-Rojas: he looked vulnerable and inoffensive, but probably knew more secrets than all his other colleagues combined. She also noted with worry that his fragile exterior might conceal a fibrous and stout body. When he finally took off his tie, she saw his back was firm, despite his thin frame and unimpressive height. At one point he moved his neck in slight circles, as if to hear the noises in his bones. She’d seen some of her gym-rat clients do the same. The fact that he wasn’t getting drunk was also a bad omen for their plans.
Luckily the accountant was the first one to head for the bedrooms. That allowed them to choose the room and kept any guests from picking Velvet, who had stayed as far as possible away from the action.
Rosado walked over to Milena and again requested “the honor of her company.”
“People say you can leave a man breathless,” he said.
Milena smiled conspiratorially and said that for that kind of thing, she’d need Velvet’s help, which made the man suspicious. She assured him the girl would be a spectator, just there in case of emergency. She explained that in the heat of passion, people sometimes lost track of their limits, but a trained assistant never did. He looked at Velvet, and the look of her convinced him.
When the trio moved toward the stairs, Vila-Rojas yelled from the other side of the room: “Velvet, put the squeeze on that accountant, you’ll get five hundred euros if you get the lead out of him.” A few colleagues looked over with him. Five minutes later, Vila-Rojas stomped up to the second floor, acting dead drunk.
When Javi Rosado took off his clothes, Milena lost whatever empathy she might have felt. His languid way of removing his pants and shirt and painstakingly folding them on the chair, and the way he ignored the girls’ presence made her lose any sense of compassion. When she saw that he left on his socks and shoes, she knew he was the most brutal and insensitive kind of client. She took consolation in the idea that what she was about to do would be compensation for the insults she’d received from men like him.
Without compunction, he ordered her to kneel and suck his cock. Milena responded that she should set the scene before getting started. She trussed the two ends of the belt to the bedframe and left it in the center of the mattress. Once he slid his neck inside, all he’d have to do is lean forward, and the tension would be transferred to his throat. It was also just as easy to set him free by popping the buckle on one side of his Adam’s apple.
The accountant examined the contraption, closing it and opening it several times, and seemed satisfied. Milena told him they should only do it in the missionary position so she could unfasten the buckle as well, if needed.
Once the preparations were over, he repeated his command for a blowjob. It was more difficult than she expected. After ten minutes, he still wasn’t hard, and Milena asked him to get in the bed so she could put the belt around his neck. Afterward, she started over. Only then did he get the excitement he was looking for.
Velvet watched the action from a corner of the large room, leaning against the door that led to the balcony. When the man finally penetrated Milena, Velvet crept out, walked a few yards along the balcony, and knocked at the next door over. Vila-Rojas told her to come in, and they had a couple of glasses of gin and waited. Then he went to the neighboring room and watched in silence while the man wheezed and rammed, bent over Milena. Rosado would need only turn to notice his presence, but Vila-Rojas did nothing. He had told Milena he would act immediately, but now he decided he owed his old friend from the University of Seville the release he’d been promised.
Milena looked at Vila-Rojas standing behind Rosado’s back and grew impatient. While the belt closed around the man’s neck, his body came closer and his face grazed against hers. Milena started to panic. The noises coming from his throat were like nothing she’d heard before, agonized sounds that made her think of decomposing flesh and viscera. His eyes were bloodshot and his veins hard, like cables, and his face went from flaming red to purple. A thread of spit fell onto her cheek. Without thinking, she struggled to escape from beneath him, but couldn’t.
Desperate, she moved her hand toward the buckle to set the monster free, and Rosado bent his arm to do the same. Vila-Rojas was faster than both of them: he leapt onto the accountant with all his weight in an almost amorous-looking embrace. Milena’s face was an inch from Vila-Rojas’s: his expression was excited, euphoric. Squeezed between the two bodies, Rosado gave a last, fierce jerk, but the two accomplices held him until the spasms came to an end. Only then did Milena feel Vila-Rojas’s erection against her thigh.
Slowly, the three bodies broke apart. Vila-Rojas helped Milena out of the bed. He told her to pick up her things, go to the neighboring room, and bring Velvet back. When the Hungarian came in, the lawyer made sure she stank of liquor, helped her take off her clothes, and placed her where Milena had been seconds before. He ordered her not to move from that position and wait a few minutes before screaming.
Vila-Rojas met Milena in the next room over, stripped, and got in bed with her. They would wait for the others to r
espond to Velvet’s screams. Only then would they come out, half-naked, and join the other guests, gawking at the spectacle of the accountant and the Hungarian. Vila-Rojas penetrated Milena as soon as their bodies touched. Three minutes later, she had the second orgasm of her life. He came inside her right afterward. The contact had been brief but intense. After the final tremor, he took her face in his hands and looked at her as he never had before. For a second, Milena thought she saw in his pupils a desolate, timid adolescent who had been stumbling through life since he was sixteen, like her. He seemed about to tell her something when Velvet’s scream shook every room in the house.
She got three years for involuntary manslaughter, but she was only in prison eleven months. Following instructions from higher-ups, Bonso hired one of the best law firms in the port. No one in Marbella was surprised he wanted to protect his investment. Vila-Rojas kept his promise and gave Velvet a generous severance package. They never heard from her again.
The night of the murder, the lawyer took a ring of keys he found in the accountant’s pocket, and in the early hours of the morning, as soon as the police were gone, he went to the victim’s home and dug through his office. He didn’t find any compromising documents: the accountant had likely prepared himself for the authorities’ arrival. Still, Vila-Rojas told himself that what was dangerous about Rosado wasn’t in any file, but in his head, and now that was no longer a risk.
Milena had nightmares for months, with demonic figures pressing down on her body and cutting off her breathing. Sometimes the monsters had Rosado’s twisted face, other times the rueful face of Vila-Rojas. When she awoke, she’d be tense and sweating and, occasionally, strangely aroused.
51
The Blues
Monday, November 17, 7:30 p.m.
Tomás and Claudia said goodbye to the Mexico City chief of police and returned to the meeting room, where they saw Amelia and Jaime. Minutes before, they had gotten a call from a federal prosecutor who had assured the owner of El Mundo, on behalf of President Prida, that the government wouldn’t rest until it had found the person responsible for the deputy director’s death.
The four of them had a lot to talk about, but no one wanted to speak first. Claudia was profoundly depressed, Tomás overwhelmed, Jaime enraged, and Amelia confused. After they got the call on their way back from Los Pinos, Tomás and Claudia went to Emiliano’s house to see Isabel, his widow. When they reached the mansion in Coyoacán, they found Jaime, who had gotten there first, as his offices were close by. Lemus, using his profile as ex-director of the intelligence services, had already talked with the head of the police squad in charge of the case and told him to go easy on the widow and pay extra attention to the crime scene.
It hadn’t been pretty, Claudia trying to console Isabel. As soon as she saw Tomás, she tried to strike him.
“You son of a bitch,” she yelled. “You said it didn’t have anything to do with us, that we were out of danger.”
When they finally calmed her down, she told them a man had come to the door and said Tomás had sent him and he had an envelope for her husband. Before going down, the deputy director smiled at his wife and said he was sure it was a bonus or something so they’d be more comfortable during their vacation. When he got to the door, he was shot twice in the head.
Two hours later, back at the newspaper’s offices, Claudia still hadn’t gotten herself together. Tomás either. They couldn’t understand where they’d erred, what they could have done differently to save Emiliano’s life, what the logic was in the criminals’ behavior. Why let him go if they were going to kill him two days later?
“Marcelo Galván resigning,” Jaime said, as though talking to himself. “It’s their revenge.”
“What the hell did you do to make that revenge an act of murder?” Amelia said, disgusted.
“Nothing serious, but the fact that Galván exposed Víctor Salgado as Bonso’s protector meant a death sentence for him, that’s why he fled to the United States. It’ll take them a while to find him, but sooner or later, they will.”
“What does that have to do with us?” Claudia asked.
“We pushed him out,” Jaime responded. “It’s not just them throwing a tantrum: with Galván gone, they’ve lost someone in immigration who will be impossible to replace, at least for now.”
“Yeah, that’s the key office for human-trafficking issues,” Amelia added. “They’re making us pay for their loss.”
“And I guess in passing they’re also sending us a message that they won’t stop until they get Milena back,” Tomás said.
“Well, this is fucked up, because I can’t guarantee the safety of six hundred employees at El Mundo.”
“You’re right, Claudia, there’s no defending against that. We’re absolutely vulnerable.”
“And they’re not?” Claudia said. “The prosecutor can threaten Salgado, no? Arrest Bonso? We can’t give in to extortion and we can’t let them keep killing people, either. We have to put the pressure on Prida. El Mundo needs to start a campaign to expose Salgado.”
The three of them looked at her respectfully. She was a fighter. Far from taking refuge in self-pity, she was ready to face up to whatever was coming, even if she wasn’t sure of the ground she was walking on.
“If Salgado’s right, there are powerful interests behind Milena, and the president will just put you off,” Jaime said. “The attorney general’s office might find a sacrificial lamb, or in the best case, turn in the body of whoever pulled the trigger on Emiliano, but never the person who gave the order.”
“The police in the capital are running the investigation, but that doesn’t matter for the case itself,” Amelia added. “Most likely, the federal government will take over, since it’s a crime against the press.”
“And then, there’s no proof that ties Salgado to all this, so there’s nothing we can air out in the media besides the sins in his past,” Tomás said.
“So we’re fucked,” Claudia concluded.
The four of them paused again, lost in their own worries.
“I’ve got other news,” Jaime said. “We’ve figured out what Luis is doing on the Net. He covers his footsteps well, but we think he’s trying to turn the human-trafficking mafias against Bonso.”
“Is that good or bad news?” Claudia asked.
“It’s irresponsible, and the consequences are impossible to predict. It depends on how good Luis is at making his bluff look realistic and whether there’s already tension between Bonso and his rivals.”
“But it may be they could finish Bonso off without us getting blamed for his disappearance, no?” she said, more excited.
“Or they discover the bluff and their vengeance is way nastier than killing a deputy director,” Jaime responded. “They could blame the cyberharassment on the newspaper and assume the kid’s working for us.”
“And even if Bonso disappears, there’s still Salgado, and he’s the one pulling the strings,” Amelia said.
“So what?” Claudia exploded. “Nobody can get rid of Salgado?”
Jaime looked at her again and thought that he liked the owner of El Mundo less and less every day. She didn’t hold her tongue when it came to saying what she wanted.
“No one in this country is invulnerable,” Amelia said. “But you don’t solve problems by killing everyone who threatens us. As you told me, Salgado himself said that taking one link out of the chain only means having to go higher up.”
“And I already know who the next link in that chain is,” Jaime said. He would have preferred to keep his information to himself and stayed one step ahead. But he couldn’t bear the feeling of powerlessness there. Somehow, it made him feel responsible.
Jaime informed them of Agustín Vila-Rojas and certain details of his activities. He didn’t know much, but he was convinced that the Spanish lawyer was the source of the orders Salgado had received.
“Is there a way to get to him and apply pressure?” Claudia asked. “The Mexican ambassador to
Spain is a family friend.”
“Everything suggests he’s one of the main finance guys for the Russian mafias in Europe, and that isn’t small potatoes. These syndicates make the Mexican cartels look like kid’s stuff. Vila-Rojas is one of the point men between the surface and the underground, where these groups’ cash flows go. We’re not talking about someone it would be easy to pressure.”
Despite herself, Amelia admired Lemus. As if sensing that, Tomás burst out.
“I know the gringos have put their weight behind a unit tracking money laundering in recent years, with the Wall Street scandals and all. Your DEA contacts can’t help you? It’s worth knowing if the Spanish guy’s on their radar, if we can step on his tail somehow.”
“I looked into it and I may be getting some information soon, but I don’t expect much. As far as money-laundering investigations go, the gringos are hypocrites: they know it’s the key to stopping drug and arms trafficking, but they don’t want to cut off the cash flows that make America the world’s bank. China’s showing up their economy on all fronts except the capital markets. Investors everywhere, even in China, keep on going to Wall Street. The authorities know as soon as they step up, the cash will go elsewhere. So my bet is they’ve got something on Vila-Rojas, but they won’t want to share it.”
He knew in the information market he was tapped into, everything could be shared in exchange for data, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to pay the price.
Amelia’s presence had kept Claudia from uttering what was tormenting her, but she finally took the plunge.
“The real question here is who killed one of our people. El Mundo can’t just stand here with its arms folded. How are we going to answer this?”
The three of them weighed her words.
“Well, we need a plan of action for the next few hours,” Tomás said. “All eyes will be on tomorrow’s edition, including those of our enemy. It’s important to get what we think out there.”
“I suggest you take advantage of the solidarity of public opinion and the media to launch an attack against the mafias engaged in human trafficking, and if possible, the groups laundering money for organized crime. That way, at least they’ll think twice before hitting you again,” Amelia proposed.
Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World Page 25
