Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “Getting the girl out of there won’t be any problem,” said Ezequiel Carrasco, head of tactical operations at Lemlock. “We just have to make sure the kid doesn’t get hurt trying to protect her, or that she doesn’t do something desperate.”

  “It might be better to wait till the morning when Luis leaves,” added Esteban Porter, an ex-Interpol official. “Two agents will intercept him in the hallway and another two will take the room key and go straight to Milena.”

  “So what if we take advantage of Luis and Milena’s presence to trap Bonso or the Turk?” Jaime asked.

  “You’d use Luis as bait?” Vidal protested.

  “Don’t worry,” Jaime replied. “We’ll take them both somewhere safe.”

  “That’s not the problem,” Porter said. “It’s the carnage that could take place afterward. If they came with three agents before, imagine how many they’ll bring this time.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re not used to getting shot at, my friend,” ex-commandant Carrasco joked.

  “It’s not a matter of balls, it’s a matter of strategy.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Jaime interrupted. “Now that we know Víctor Salgado is behind this, we can assume they’ll use cops again. Lemlock would have to do a lot of explaining for a shootout with so-called ‘lawmen.’”

  “Still, it’s not a bad idea to use Milena to draw Bonso out of whatever hole he’s crawled into,” Porter said. “We could take him out with a sniper then and there, and if he doesn’t show, we could track his men and figure out where he’s staying.”

  “Good point,” said Mauricio Romo, the chief hacker. “Even if none of the bosses come, we’ll use the new scanner to sweep the vicinity for phones. Sooner or later, the agents he sends will have to report back for instructions, and when they do, we’ll know the number he’s using.”

  “It won’t be necessary,” Porter said. “I think one of them will be there: Bonso and the Turk are the only ones who can identify Milena. They must know about Rina and her similarity to the Croatian, and they won’t want to run the risk of making a mistake. They’re pros.” For months, the head of overseas missions had been upset at Patricia’s newly acquired status at Lemlock and couldn’t help the jab at her spoiled operation in Marquesa.

  “Fine,” Jaime concluded. “We’ll leak the information that Milena is in a hotel in Michoacán. We don’t want them to think it’s an ambush. Do it through the Net or maybe through one of the cops working for them. Give me options,” he said, pointing to Romo.

  “You want to go with a sniper or just a recon team to follow them from the hotel?” Carrasco asked.

  “I prefer to track them, intercept their communications, and hit them when we know where the big fish are. There’s no sense in going to war on the sidewalk in front of a hotel. Still, the sniper’s not a bad Plan B,” Jaime said, remembering Claudia wanted the Turk dead. “Let’s put a guy on the roof, someone we can trust, and keep him on an open line, so we can decide when the time comes.”

  When the assistants left the meeting room, Jaime held his nephew back.

  “Don’t worry, Vidal. It’s going to work. Once we get their calls registered, they’ll be sitting ducks.”

  “It’s weird you use that term. I was thinking to myself Luis and Milena were the sitting ducks. I don’t like it. Why don’t we rescue them, get them out of those assholes’ reach, and then confront Bonso?”

  “Because this way, we can find them and we can choose the time and place when we eliminate them. Your friends aren’t in any danger, we’ll move them to another floor, but they can’t leave the hotel. On the street, it will be impossible to protect them.”

  “Luis is never going to let you use him as bait.”

  “He will if you sell him on it.”

  ‌54

  Milena

  August 2013

  Milena’s third murder was the bloodiest. So many months had passed since Vila-Rojas mentioned the issue that she assumed he’d given up on his kill list. Often, he canceled her weekly meetings with the German, and even when he called her, she frequently found the suite empty. But Vila-Rojas still appreciated her intelligence and her powers of observation and was overjoyed at the depth of her reports. Their sessions, now further apart, had become like marathons analyzing the political and business alliances in Marbella. He started sharing information and hunches about his colleagues with Milena. The trust and complicity between them grew until it became a kind of intimacy, even without physicality.

  One day, Vila-Rojas brought up Boris, Yasha Boyko’s nephew. Boris was the son of Alexander Kattel, one of the first Russian mafia chiefs to set up shop on the Costa del Sol at the end of the eighties. His kid had practically grown up on the Iberian coast and had all his father’s new-money defects and none of his virtues. Violent, out of control, slow-witted, and extravagant, he was hated and feared by his men, but never respected.

  Alexander had died two years before in a Jacuzzi under murky circumstances, and his sister’s husband had taken over as leader of the group. Yasha Boyko was far more cerebral than his brother-in-law. He kept one foot in the criminal activities that united the Russians’ interests and those of Alexander’s brothers in Kiev, but he also looked westward, moving part of the group’s operations into legal or quasi-legal businesses in the area, thanks to his relations with businessmen in Mediterranean countries. Vila-Rojas was his close counselor and his financial adviser.

  Yasha wasn’t a threat, regardless of what he knew. Even if he was arrested, he’d never breathe a word. His financial consultant’s help was what would make it possible to keep his hands on his fortune—or part of it—through his incarceration. But Boris was a different story.

  The kid was going mad because his uncle kept him on the sidelines, and his uncle seemed tired of his nephew’s screwups and scandals. It was getting harder and harder for Boris to maintain his lifestyle. In recent months, he had gone to Vila-Rojas twice to ask for money, knowing the lawyer was in charge of the gang’s finances, and both times, he had gotten an envelope of cash and Yasha had heard nothing about it. But it was clear that Boris was a ticking time bomb: there was a veiled threat in his requests, and moreover, his lack of discipline was turning him into a weak link. If he was arrested, he could give Vila-Rojas up, whether as a bargaining chip to save his skin or just because he was too stupid to know better.

  There were many reasons to take Boris out, but it wouldn’t be easy. Alexander’s brothers in Ukraine resented Yasha, riled up by the comments made by Boris and his mother Olena, the widow of the former boss. Though the boy’s outbursts troubled all his relatives, his uncles would never accept being ordered around by someone who wasn’t their blood.

  Vila-Rojas decided to do his boss—and himself—a favor, even knowing that Yasha would have to kill him if he ever found out about it. There wasn’t a lack of options for doing Boris in, the problem was figuring out how to do it without dying in the process.

  The Ukrainian was obsessed with the Hell’s Angels and had done everything possible to turn himself into a character from Mad Max: he drove a Harley-Davidson with straight pipes, wore high boots and a leather jacket, even in summer, covered his chest and arms with neo-Nazi tattoos, and became an assiduous follower of the small circles of bikers that congregated on the Costa del Sol.

  For three months, the lawyer prepared Milena so Boris would find her irresistible: hair buzzed almost to the skin, eyebrow piercing, leather outfits, a taste for heavy punk rock and powerful motorcycles. Some of the garments she wore came from Vila-Rojas himself, and he made her try them on in front of him in the suite they occasionally shared. In those private exhibitions, Milena thought she saw pride and even excitement in him.

  Covered in black leather that gripped her flesh like a second skin, with unbelievably high heels, she started drawing people’s attention in the seedy bars the Russian frequented. At Vila-Rojas’s instructions—and with the prior agreement of Bonso, she assumed—she would show up with the Turk
, though he kept his distance, as if he were her bodyguard. Mastering the huge motorcycle Vila-Rojas gave her was the hardest part of her training, but after practice every afternoon for a month, she started to like it. In the end, even the Turk had to admit that she had become a daredevil on her Streetfighter. And when she finally tamed the metallic beast, he gave her a leather vest.

  “You earned it, Checkers,” he said to her when he handed her the gift, and turned away before she could say thanks. A faithful follower of all televised sports, the Turk had started calling her that after the white and red checked flag the Croatian athletes used.

  With the jacket as the last piece, Milena was an Amazon of the asphalt, the queen of the underground. The Russian picked up on her immediately in the tiny world of metal bars in the port. After a few weeks, he was obsessed with her.

  Milena hardly even had to change her story. She just said a sheik had fallen in love with her and given her a small fortune to pay Bonso for her freedom, but instead of looking for another life, she opted for a promotion. Now she worked as a madam in charge of the Romanian’s whores and spent her free nights pursuing a passion she’d never been able to cultivate before: biker culture. Boris felt he’d met his soul mate. Little by little, he developed a taste for Milena’s company and shared his true dream with her: to bump off his uncle Yasha and become successor to his father, the great Alexander Kattels. Time and again, he boasted of the strategy he, his mother, and his relatives in Kiev were devising, the details of his enemies and allies, and his hated uncle’s weak points.

  Vila-Rojas knew the next phase would be much more complicated: turning Boris on to heroin. Again they were mistaken: Boris had been an addict three months back. Milena, too, though not nearly as bad. Saying she had a sure supplier, she was the one who brought drugs for the couple. She would shoot herself up with plain water without his knowing it, but did have to take the drug once or twice. Before Boris Kattel died of an overdose, Vila-Rojas had to spread the rumor about the Russian’s new taste for the needle among his family and friends. When the time came, his body would be covered in track marks.

  One night, Boris cut short their date at the One Percent, a bar where they often met, and asked Milena to go somewhere else with him. She hesitated because the Turk wasn’t with her, but she figured Boris was just taking her to another dive. Milena followed him on her bike from Puerto Banús into the hills. When they crossed into a residential area and she saw the huge mansion with its byzantine cupolas, it was too late: she was going to meet Boris’s mother.

  If she’s not an opera singer, that’s a hell of a waste of a ribcage, Milena said to herself, remembering one of her grandfather’s phrases, the first time she saw Olena, Kattel’s widow. The voice the woman greeted her with didn’t let her down.

  “So you’re the whore that stole my son from me?” she said in dreadful Spanish when they were greeting each other. “He doesn’t come see me anymore now, he just goes to those nasty dumps with all the hoodlums and druggies. Is that where he met you?”

  Milena didn’t want to get on the woman’s bad side, but she also didn’t want to fold in front of Boris. She just needed to watch them for a moment to see that the son’s submission to his mother’s will was absolute. She caressed him like he was a month-old baby. She pinched his cheeks, adjusted his shirt collar, even cupped his balls when she asked Milena whether she was with him for his wallet or the good sex.

  The worst was the painstaking examination the woman subjected Milena to: she regretted her eyebrow piercing and exaggerated makeup. Milena lost the aplomb she’d shown till then in front of the Ukrainian. She could barely hold his stare and spoke in a barely audible voice.

  Ultimately, she didn’t pass Ms. Kattel’s examination—far from it. Not because she considered Milena a bad influence on her son, but because she detected something fake about her: clearly her femme-fatale persona concealed something else. The assessment was reciprocal, and Milena could tell that behind the expansive, blathering woman was an alert and calculating mind. She sensed that Boris’s mother was the one pulling the strings, and if he was successful with the power grab, she would become the real leader. When she shared this perception with Vila-Rojas, he was surprised: he’d found her a woman of bad taste and limited intelligence, though he admitted she was a force of nature. From the moment of Milena’s report, he began to see her with new eyes, and tried to find out all he could about her and her activities.

  After that visit, Boris stopped seeing Milena. Vila-Rojas feared Olena was investigating her, and told her to keep her front up even at Bonso’s house, to go on driving the motorcycle and continue showing up at One Percent. Boris appeared two weeks later as if nothing had happened, though he occasionally made jokes about his mother’s impression of Milena. The absence seemed only to have caused his desire for Milena to grow. Now he insisted they spend all their time together, and she wound up ending most of her nights in his luxurious apartment a few blocks from where his mother lived. From that moment on, the Turk stopped accompanying her, and was only around once in a while, when the couple passed through One Percent.

  One time they received a visit from a group of Russians, clearly different from their compatriots living in Marbella. Their dress, accent, and gestures suggested they were more likely government workers than mafiosos. That made Milena pay attention. When Boris told his guards to leave the apartment and Milena to go to the bedroom so he could speak to his guests, she stepped on the balcony with the excuse of a smoke. From there, she could hear the conversation a little better. Neither Boris nor the other two men took any precautions because she had always concealed her knowledge of Russian. She could only hear Boris and one of the guys, because the other spoke too softly. She understood there was an operation afoot, coming from the Kremlin, to recruit the Russians in Marbella to help with its international initiatives. Boris insisted that he and his mother, with help from his uncles in Kiev, were the right people for the job on the Costa del Sol. Yasha might be Ukrainian, but he was no friend to the Russians, Boris told the operatives.

  They met several more times over the following weeks, at the apartment and at various restaurants. She tried to memorize the names of go-betweens, agents, and front businesses, the Russian and Ukrainian middlemen who would be in contact with the people in Marbella. At night, she would write everything down in the hidden pages of her notebook. In the end, it turned out to be unnecessary. On one of the last nights she spent with Boris, he passed out from his substantial intake of alcohol and meth and she took snapshots of the papers he’d put in his safe. Days before, she had found the combination inside the guitar he never played but also never let out of his sight. She was impressed by the number of bank accounts, their balances, and the names of some of those Russians who never went to the whorehouses and wouldn’t be associated with the mafia, even if they did reside in Marbella. She wrote everything down in tiny letters in her black book.

  Something inside her made her hold back sharing what she’d found out with Vila-Rojas. The crude, manipulative attitude Vila-Rojas sometimes showed with her made her anxious and distrustful. Plagued by these feelings, she decided to go on accumulating evidence before making a decision.

  Boris always traveled with an entourage. Milena suspected that at least two of them, a little older than the rest, were following orders from his uncle Yasha, probably to keep him from getting in trouble. The lovers normally shut themselves up in the bedroom in Boris’s apartment when they wanted to get high, but his guards were never far away. Milena wouldn’t let the execution take place in the building because then she would be at the mercy of his vengeful mother. She would have preferred somewhere public where the police and the paramedics could get involved after the overdose. Vila-Rojas accepted her conditions begrudgingly.

  Boris’s obsession with Black Zero, a Belgian heavy-metal group that played now and then at One Percent, gave her and Vila-Rojas the opportunity they were waiting for. The Croatian convinced Boris that shooting up at th
e beginning of the show would make it a night to remember, as long as they did it right: a little bit of the new meth that was coming in from Morocco, and then heroin afterward. She promised him she’d take care of all the details.

  If everything worked out right that night, she would have her freedom once and for all. Vila-Rojas had assured her that as soon as the scandal subsided, she could go where she wanted with a hundred thousand euros in her pocket. But Milena wasn’t sure she could make it: the pill she was going to feed the Ukrainian would put him out, but she would still have to give him the deadly injection. Not that she cared for the guy—on the contrary, she thought he was cruel and despicable—but still, she was preparing to kill someone with her own hands.

  When she went to the bar with the Turk in tow that second Saturday in January, she found Boris at his regular table surrounded by his friends. During the hour they had to wait for the group to go onstage, Milena drank more than usual. The Russian’s gesticulations, the veins pulsing in his neck, his unmistakable voice, his favorite drink in his hand—all those things gave evidence of the explosive vitality in the boy’s body she was about to snuff out forever. In no time, that universe of throbbing organs, febrile globules, neuronal circuits, and shuddering hormones would be nothing more than an inert lump, with no possibility of coming back.

  Vila-Rojas had told her that the drug cocktail would be foolproof if she administered it in the right order: she should give him the pill when the group started up with the first song, and then take him to the women’s bathroom fifteen minutes later and give him the heroin. She would take the same stuff, but in smaller doses, and the medical examinations would show that she was drugged up, too. The lawyer handed her two packages marked “Death Kit” and “Dream Kit.”

  When Black Zero finally started playing their thunderous tracks, she was feeling woozy from the four martinis. Nervously, she fingered the two plastic packages in the pockets of her leather jacket: Boris’s kit on the right, hers on the left. But when the time came to give the Russian his pill, she wasn’t sure which was the right one, and she didn’t take her pill: she was afraid the combination of alcohol and meth would make her lose control and she would screw up when the time came to deliver the lethal dose. Boris swallowed his pill, and not long afterward, she saw his eyes become lost and his voice confused by an unmanageable tongue.