Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  But Bonso wasn’t a man with much sense for the ridiculous. Stumbling only increased his fury, and Milena was resigned to being the victim of his wrath.

  But the Romanian’s survival instinct was far more powerful than his tantrums. He might be prone to fits, but he was the kind of guy who squeezed his toothpaste from the bottom of the tube. He rinsed off his sweaty face, sat in the chair the Turk had left for him, and asked for the details about what had happened at One Percent.

  Milena started to describe the events, but the Turk interrupted her, and rightly: her need for drugs and her raw emotions were making her babble nonsensically. The Turk took over and told him everything from the time they entered the club to when they arrived at the warehouse and about Vila-Rojas’s plans to eliminate Boris.

  “That son-of-a-bitch lawyer,” the Romanian spat when he heard the end of the tale. “And you? What are you doing sticking your nose in where you don’t belong?”

  “It’s the life, boss,” the Turk responded, holding his stare.

  Bonso stood up to get a closer look—still not that close—at his underling. It was the first time he’d seen the Turk show something other than absolute submission. The Romanian paced in a circle around him, arms akimbo, without taking his eyes off of him.

  Milena couldn’t help but admire the midget’s steely resolve. The Turk didn’t flinch, either, he just watched his boss with the cold calm of a cobra waiting to strike. Bonso finally returned to his seat.

  “Luckily for you, I have our safe-conduct on me,” he said, taking a few DVDs in slipcases from his coat pocket. “Let’s hope Vila-Rojas is better at making deals with the Ukrainians than planning murders. We’ve got him by the balls.”

  The Turk took the DVDs and looked at his boss, intrigued.

  “Remember two years ago when Vila-Rojas came into my office and bought that whore and gave me instructions for her to work under his orders, but to stay in my house? I got all that on tape,” the Romanian said with a smile, gesturing toward the envelopes the Turk held.

  Milena remembered that the Romanian had come up filming hardcore pornography and distributing videos of bestiality, pederasty, and S&M. He’d given it up after an official investigation into snuff films, but his ability to manipulate video files remained intact.

  “Well, if Vila-Rojas wants to save us in exchange for this, he’ll have to hurry, because they must be combing Marbella for us already.”

  “He’s almost here. Now I need you to lend me the fat guy who opened the gate so he can go spread these discs around: there are two houses where he should drop them off, and the other two he’ll mail. They’re going to old friends, guys I trust, who know to get them around if they don’t hear from me. That’ll protect us from that goddamn lawyer.”

  “Yeah, he’s the type to hold a grudge,” the Turk admitted.

  “And you—what do we do with you?” Bonso said, turning to Milena. “I always said there’s something not right about a whore who reads books. You got a second life after you ran off to Madrid, and look how you pay me back for it. You’ve fucked us all.”

  Melina nodded reluctantly. Bonso was right.

  “Kill her,” he ordered the Turk. “Put the body in the trunk of the car and dump it somewhere when we get out of here. But send the DVDs first, in case that fucker shows up early.”

  Milena had been waiting for this death sentence, and only hoped it would be quick and painless.

  She told herself to choose carefully what she thought about in her last minutes of life. She tried to remember her childhood in Jastrebarsko, but all that came into her mind were vignettes from the biography of a person who was no longer her. In the same way, she rejected the images of recent years that pounded against her closed eyelids: the whorehouses she’d lived in or the scenarios with her clients, repeated a thousand times. The time she really wished to say goodbye to had been spent in front of an open book. She would miss the people she had taken refuge in to make her existence easier: now she invoked them to better bear her passage into death. She said goodbye to Anna Karenina, to La Maga, to all the heroines whose skin she’d lived in throughout the course of those years. All were dead, and now she would join them.

  The Turk’s steps on the metal stairway resounded in her brain like bells counting down: fourteen steps, and Milena’s breathing in time with them. When he entered the office, she was hyperventilating.

  “I don’t know if that’s the best thing for us, boss,” the Turk said, jerking his head toward Milena.

  “What? Getting rid of the bitch?”

  “Yeah. Vila-Rojas wanted to kill her, too. She saved herself because she didn’t take the shot. No one thought Boris would start screaming like a madman. It clearly never occurred to him that she might have a way out. The best thing for him was if she croaked from an OD, because if the Russians got hold of her, they could make her talk.”

  “So?” Bonso replied.

  “We’re going to negotiate with Vila-Rojas and he wanted to get rid of her, so having her in our possession gives us an advantage, doesn’t it?”

  Bonso hesitated a few moments and then nodded.

  “I’ll be goddamned. You’re right. Beyond the video, she’s the proof that Vila-Rojas killed him. And if everything goes to shit and the Russians come down on us, they’ll be wanting to get hold of whoever killed Boris. She could save our skin either way.”

  They spoke of Milena as if she weren’t present. She thought they would have been more nervous about ditching a car than deciding what to do with her life. She wondered if the Turk might have some ulterior motive in rescuing her beyond mere canniness. “Checkers” was almost a kindness compared with the other nicknames in whorehouses: Fleabag, Hairy, Darky, Hick. In the past three months, while he accompanied her during her conversion into a biker chick, they’d only talked a few times, but she thought she could sense the Turk’s pleasure on those motorcycle jaunts. She remembered the vest she had gotten when her training was over, which she hadn’t thought much of at the time.

  Milena came back down to earth as quickly as she had left: a part of her was sad at leaving Anna Karenina & Co. behind. She wasn’t even sure what she’d heard was good news. If she fell into the Russians’ hands, she’d end up yearning for Bonso’s dogs.

  “Take her in the back with the others, I don’t want Vila-Rojas to see her. We’ll figure out where we put her later,” Bonso said, looking at a message coming through on his phone. “Here comes the asshole now.”

  Milena and the Turk rushed down the metal stairway.

  “Thanks,” she said when they were alone.

  “Don’t get your panties moist, Checkers,” he answered.

  She spent the next hour in the shadows, occasionally observing the three men arguing around the desk in the office. The light that shone over them, the height of the platform, and the darkness in the rest of the building made it look like a theater scene.

  Sick with uncertainty, the twenty or so Arabs surrounding her followed the movements of the three actors beneath the spotlight, convinced the men were deciding their future. There was never a play so keenly observed. In shaky Spanish, one of them asked Milena what was going on. “Don’t bother me,” she responded in Serbian. Another Arab leapt toward her, his face suddenly lit up, and begged her in that same language: “Please, we’ve been here a week without knowing anything.”

  Goddamned globalization, Milena said to herself. The night had exhausted her, and she would have rather let them fuck her than give them explanations. But as she swept her eyes over the group, she saw the silhouettes of women and children, and remembered those first days after her capture. She spent the next half-hour trying to calm them down, once she’d made sure they were nothing more than run-of-the-mill illegal immigrants. Bonso kept them till their families sent money to cover their expenses, real and imagined. In the end, Milena was happy for the distraction of speaking Serbian again, even if the process of translating her words into Arabic was laborious, because it allowed he
r to forget Boris and Vila-Rojas for a while. After all, it was her future, not theirs, that the men were arguing about up there.

  ‌58

  Jaime

  Wednesday, November 19, 1:00 p.m.

  Claudia and Tomás had beaten Víctor Salgado. The political apparatus abandoned one of its own.

  Jaime had figured out Salgado’s name was mud in the highest spheres of power. The chiefs at El Mundo had managed to make the ex-warden the villain of the day on social media. The article in the New York Times, with its withering emphasis on corruption in Mexico, was the last straw. The reporters, conveniently tipped off by El Mundo, used the attorney general’s press conference to announce the capture of a leader of the Zeta cartel and to pepper the official with questions about Salgado.

  Lemus’s team intercepted the instructions sent from the attorney general’s office to the public ministries and the police departments to look into any accusations against Salgado and dust off any investigations that might be pending in the far-flung corners of the Mexican judiciary. He still hadn’t issued an arrest warrant, but now it was just a matter of time.

  Jaime figured that at some point that morning, President Prida had weighed the powers pitted against each other and decided to cede to the pressure of public opinion. That didn’t mean that the delicate ties between politics and money laundering were broken: they’d just need to have a talk with Salgado’s bosses and get someone else into his place. In the end, they’d have to give something for the ex-official’s head: the hardcore money guys never took a loss.

  Jaime figured that he was the one who had come up short. Tomás and Claudia would feel satisfied that their strategy had been a success even though he’d advised them against it. Tomás hadn’t rescued Milena or even come close, but he’d managed to do away with the immediate threat looming over them. That meant Jaime had lost. The possibility of solidifying his influence at El Mundo was almost gone now, and Claudia would continue looking at him with mistrust.

  He hadn’t managed to strike a decisive blow against Bonso either, let alone bring the Turk’s head to the newspaper chief. Once more, Luis had frustrated his plans by alerting the pimp’s gang, apparently through email. If the boy had followed the Croatian’s instructions, her relationship with Bonso must have been more complicated than hunter and prey.

  The situation had changed with Víctor Salgado out of the picture, though how still wasn’t clear, Jaime thought. The old Mexican was Bonso and Milena’s protector in the country and the one responsible to people back in Spain for assuring that local conditions were ripe so the two of them could make good on whatever deal they had set up back in Marbella. Even with Salgado gone, probably on the lam at that very moment, the deal remained in force. The description Emiliano Reyna’s maid gave of his killer matched the Turk’s profile in the file Interpol had passed along. It seemed neither his gang nor his bosses back in Spain would give up in their search for Milena, even if they’d avoid another public scandal after what had happened with Salgado. Claudia and Tomás didn’t know about how far the matter was from resolved, or if they did, they preferred to ignore it.

  Jaime called a team meeting.

  “We’ve found three houses belonging to the gang and we’re tracking all the inbound and outbound calls,” said Patricia. “Any minute now, we’ll localize the phone Bonso is using.”

  “Anything new in Spain?” Jaime asked.

  “Yes,” Esteban Porter responded. “My contact in Interpol in Madrid hit me up for ten thousand euros, but it was worth it. According to him, half that cash is going to an official from the Marbella police who swears to him that just before Bonso and Milena disappeared almost a year ago, some guy named Boris Kattel and two of his bodyguards were murdered in a dive bar in the port. He OD’d, they were shot. Boris was the son of the former head of the Ukrainian mafia in the south of Spain. Apparently he’d been going out with Milena a few months, and she was the one who turned him onto heroin.”

  “Then the question is: why is she still alive?” Commandant Ezequiel Carrasco interrupted.

  The group fell silent.

  “Is there anything else on Vila-Rojas?” Jaime asked.

  “They don’t have much at Interpol. He’s kept clear of the ongoing investigation into corruption and money laundering in Marbella. Dozens of big shots have taken a fall, but his file is clean, even though he’s always been on a list of suspects.”

  “Any luck hacking into his email or any other accounts?”

  “His tech stuff is state-of-the-art, we need a little more time to crack it,” Mauricio Romo responded. “He’s clearly been shifting his operations from local to international circuits. Most of the transactions take place in London and New York, and a lot in Gibraltar, which is like the Cayman Islands of the Mediterranean. Almost all we can find is money that’s already been laundered, which his trusted brokers shift back and forth for him between funds and other types of speculative investments. He sits on the boards of more than twenty companies, all of them top-tier. Incidentally, three or four of them have operations in Mexico: one of the biggest construction firms is on the list, and a Spanish hotel chain with a heavy presence on the Riviera Maya. He must be one of the main financial advisers for organized criminals in Europe, maybe the most important one in Spain.”

  “Too big a player to be dabbling in hookers,” the commandant said.

  “No, I don’t think that’s it,” Jaime said, “but clearly there’s some kind of relationship with Milena, that’s what we’ve gathered from Luis’s searches, and she’s got to be the one feeding him clues. The question is, what ties them together?”

  “Everything points to some link to what happened to Boris and Milena. If he’s handling that kind of money in Marbella, it has to be coming from deals with the Russian mafia.”

  “More than deals, I’d say he’s their money man,” Porter concluded.

  “Then that’s it,” Patricia said. “The link between Milena and Vila-Rojas is Boris. They knew each other, they had business together, and she was mixed up with him when he died.”

  “Which brings us back to the commandant’s question,” said Jaime. “Why are Milena, Bonso, and the Turk still alive if they were caught up in the murder of a big-time mafioso?” Jaime asked like a teacher waiting for the obvious answer.

  “Vila-Rojas is protecting them,” Patricia said.

  “And he’s protecting them because…”

  “Because he’s in love with Milena,” Mauricio Romo, the young hacker, said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Jaime said. “If it was that, he wouldn’t have her working as a hooker in Mexico.”

  “Because he’s involved,” Porter said.

  “And because the people we’re trying to track down have proof of it,” Patricia continued.

  “That’s the only thing that could explain why Milena would try and keep them alive even when she’s doing everything she can to get away from them. She doesn’t want them to be her pimps anymore, but she knows that if one of them dies, whatever is keeping the Russians from avenging themselves on her disappears,” Jaime finished with a smile.

  “Knowing what we know now, our hands are tied,” Patricia said.

  They all sat there without speaking, taking in her words. All of them except Jaime.

  “Not necessarily. This could be the opportunity of our lives,” he said after a pause, his smile now broader. Then, he rattled off a series of commands: “Get a bead on Bonso and the Turk for once and make a plan to bring them in alive. Tell me when it’s ready: you’re in charge, Commandant. Don’t let me down. Now that they don’t have Salgado’s support, they’re vulnerable, at least for a while. Patricia, set up a security cordon around Milena: protect her, but also keep her from getting away.” He pressed the button on the intercom and told his secretary to get in touch with the Mexican ambassador in Spain and get him a plane ticket for Madrid the following night.

  ‌59

  Amelia

  Wednesday, November 19, 6
:00 p.m.

  It wasn’t a good day for Amelia, either: for some time now, she’d gotten nothing from politics but intrigue and backstabbing, and from love, nothing but lovelessness. After a week buried under budget projections, she felt like an expert in public finances. That very night, she was headed to a meeting with the congressmen from the party to define their strategy before the upcoming vote, but already she was feeling discouraged. The president’s party controlled just over 50 percent of the votes, which meant debate would be rhetorical and, ultimately, useless. Her colleagues at the head of the PRD argued for the importance of the legislative tribune to help the people understand that the party was defending the interests of the working classes, but Amelia thought that was ridiculous. Voting to fulfill an obligation, with no chance of influencing the outcome, wasn’t only pointless, it was an act of complicity. She had agreed to take part in politics to intervene in the country’s public life, not to give excuses to those in power.

  Her relationship with Tomás was still at an impasse. They’d barely seen each other over the weekend; for the few hours they were together, they took refuge in routines that had once been an oasis of relaxation but were now automatic, a reflex that kept them from that warmth that separated love from merely living together. Or at least that was how it seemed to Amelia.

  Beyond all that, she thought she’d found a new spot on the back of her hand. She’d never been a hypochondriac, but she couldn’t help asking herself if those new spots were a sign of cell death, a manifestation of some invisible cancer gestating deep inside one of her vital organs. She knew Tomás would laugh at her worries and push aside her fears with an ode to her firm breasts or satiny thighs, but she couldn’t help feeling sadness, provoked by reasons of the heart, and discouragement brought on by politics. Maybe it was depression, an affliction that had always seemed as alien as malaria, a terrible thing that happened to other people, but not to her.