She told herself it wasn’t Tomás who was making her sad, no matter how much the possibility of losing him tormented her. She had never depended on a man to make herself feel alive or useful. She decided to sketch out a plan, as she’d done so many times in her life. She could do more than stand there like a spectator watching the tragedy Milena was living through. For more than a decade, she had been one of the main activists in the country combating human trafficking and prostitution. The Croatian’s case offered the chance to put a halt to the infiltration of European mafias into Mexico’s sex-trafficking networks. She wouldn’t let Milena end up the victim of Jaime’s dark machinations or Claudia’s blitheness. She decided for the first time to make use of her political influence to aid one of her own causes. But first, she would have to get her hands dirty.
An hour later, Rina and Vidal showed up. It wasn’t easy to convince him to disobey Lemlock’s instructions and come to her office. He said they shouldn’t move, for security reasons. Amelia had to leave a message with Jaime’s secretary telling him that she needed Rina, and when she received a courteous no, she asked whether the girl had been kidnapped. Apparently, Jaime decided it wasn’t worth it to go to war with Amelia, and he allowed Rina to go, telling Vidal not to let her out of his sight. Now that Lemlock had Luis and Milena under their power, Rina had lost strategic value.
Once they were in front of her, Amelia noticed how impatient Rina was with Vidal’s attentions and remembered the closeness between her and Luis.
In less than half an hour, Vidal and Rina brought the president of the PRD up to date on all that had occurred in the past few days. The contrast between the fine points in each of their versions led Amelia to think that the distance between them was due less to matters of the heart than to Rina taking Luis’s side, Vidal working for Jaime, and Rina seeing this as a kind of betrayal. Their stories gave Amelia some sense of the situation: Claudia wanted the Turk dead and Jaime hoped to offer her his head as a trophy; for reasons that were hard to understand, Milena was opposed to seeing her pursuers dead; Víctor Salgado had bolted, and a certain Vila-Rojas was the new puppet master. Jaime had Luis and Milena holed up in some hotel in Tasqueña.
Amelia remembered a position called zugzwang in chess—the only one of her father’s pastimes she had shared with him. Zugzwang was a situation in which one of the players is obliged to move, but any move he makes can only worsen his situation. Striking out against the gang hunting Milena would work to the Croatian’s disadvantage, but not doing so could hasten her death or capture by the traffickers and a descent back into prostitution. A Gordian knot without a clear solution.
But for an activist like Amelia, any strategy to help had to start with the victim: she was the thread that could cause the whole web to unravel. Consequently, the first step was to rescue Milena from Jaime’s clutches, and the second to work out a safe and definitive escape plan. A half-dozen times, Amelia had successfully orchestrated the relocation of victims to other countries with new identities. The Mexico City chief of police, her friend and tireless suitor, could offer the muscle she needed.
She could also use an ally inside Lemlock, and for that reason, she’d need to win Vidal back. She seized the moment when he went to the restroom—maybe just as a pretext to speak with Jaime—and revealed her plan to Rina. The girl was enthusiastic: patching things up with Vidal and freeing Luis and Milena were her primary objectives as well, though not necessarily in that order. It took two hours of convincing, but finally Vidal agreed to become their informant. A long, warm embrace from Rina sealed their accord, at least for the moment.
Afterward, Rina let herself out. She wanted to dive into an analysis of the budgets. She knew that at this point, there was little useful in whatever she might bring to the table, but she felt she had failed Amelia by being gone so many days during this crisis with Milena. She hoped to show her value as a consultant for future assignments.
“In a way, Jaime is right,” Vidal said when they were alone.
“How so?”
“People aren’t what they say they are, and sometimes they don’t even know what they are,” he responded. That argument had sounded so irrefutable coming from his uncle but nonsense now that he was uttering it. “What I mean is, what Lemlock does is very important for discovering people’s true intentions, what they do and don’t do when they think nobody’s watching. You’d be surprised by the technology Jaime has to find things out.” When he heard his own words, the young man turned white and glanced at Amelia’s cell phone on her desk and touched his own in his pants pocket.
“Including us, right?” Amelia asked.
Vidal nodded his head slowly, and went on to detail the vast operation Lemlock had set in motion to keep all of them under their control, including his own spying on Rina and Luis. When he finished, he cried like a baby and Amelia took him in her arms. Then she asked him to go keep Rina company.
When she was alone, she called Jaime, and he arrived twenty minutes later.
“What’s the emergency?” he asked in her office. “We’ve got a leak and we’re about to figure out where Bonso’s hiding out. You pulled me out of a meeting for a potential mission.” In reality, Jaime was thankful for the opportunity to see Amelia one-on-one.
“I want you to tell me what you’re up to with Vidal. He hasn’t got the stuff to become a KGB apprentice. And while you’re at it, you can tell me what right you have to tap our cell phones.”
“I’m not your enemy, Amelia,” he said, and Amelia had the wry recollection of hearing the same words from Claudia a few days before. “None of us has got a grip on Vidal. He’s disoriented and insecure. I’m just offering him an alternative. But maybe I’m giving him a glimpse of shit he’s not ready for. Let’s talk about this another time.”
“And let’s not forget, we’re not his parents,” Amelia responded.
“No, unfortunately neither of us is,” he said, and put a hand on her shoulder.
Amelia pulled away with a soft shrug.
“Espionage is unacceptable…” she started to say, but Jaime interrupted.
“You should know that people like you, me, and Tomás are already being watched and listened to by more than one office. It’s not a bad thing that someone on our side is doing it, too, but for our own good. I can intercept the people stalking us. More than once, I’ve blocked parts of a sensitive conversation of yours so that it wouldn’t be captured electronically. If I stop listening in, do you think the others will, too?”
She recalled intimate conversations with Tomás and some delicate topics that had come up with her political colleagues. The better part of her relationships, both personal and professional, were carried out by telephone and email. If what Jaime was saying was true and he was listening in on all her conversations, he knew her better now than anyone else in the world.
“Don’t worry,” Jaime said. “I’ve seen to it that all the files and recordings related to you are treated with absolute discretion. I’m the only person who can access them. And believe me, none of it will ever be used against you. No one will take care of you the way I do. You know that, right?”
She said nothing, and he grasped her shoulders again, this time with both hands.
“Amelia, just accept it. You and me being together was always in the cards. When you were twenty, you were already more of an adult than the rest of us, and I understand that my father was more mature, more imposing, than I was. But I’m convinced that deep down, I was the one you were looking for in that relationship. Now we can try. I never stopped loving you.”
Jaime brought his face close and kissed Amelia on the lips. She didn’t move, surprised and overwhelmed by the feelings that rose within her. She would have liked to push him away, indignant, but she didn’t want to hurt him. And a part of her explored that kiss, looking for traces of the father’s passion. Maybe that was what she found, or maybe it was just knowing that someone desired her when her lover might be about to abandon her for another woman.
Regardless, she felt a pleasant gust of air traveling over her body.
A message arrived over Telegram and interrupted their embrace. Jaime’s professional habits got the better of him, and he looked at the text: “We’ve found Bonso.”
Them VIII
I admit it: in an ideal world, prostitution wouldn’t exist. Or lies, envy, or guilty pleasures. But none of that’s going to disappear, first of all, because of our biological makeup. It’s only in textbooks that grand causes and noble principles triumph; in real history, and not in that golden-age bullshit they teach us in school, it’s the lower passions and unsatisfied obsessions that are the real motor of world events.
It’s not that we act like pigs, but we’ll never get anywhere denying our place in the animal kingdom. We’re designed for satisfying the basic conditions of survival and reproduction. Look at the Norwegians: they try and ban sex for cash, they think they’ve gotten past racial discrimination, too. And that works till one of those modern-day Vikings comes along and takes out a hundred of them to remind them they still belong to the human race.
So it doesn’t matter how much deodorant we lather on; we’re still armpits, fluids, and cracks. It’s better to live with it than against it. Those moral codes built up to go against hormonal tendencies are nothing more than self-justifications for cowards.
For thirty-nine years, I’ve lived faithful to the requirements of my orifices. I don’t have anything to regret, and I bear it all with same dignity of a blighted old oak. It’s only some days that the Hepatitis C and the latent syphilis get to me. It doesn’t matter. One way or another, I don’t have many years left.
C.B. Ex-Magistrate
of the Supreme Court
Spain
60
Tomás
Wednesday, November 19, 11:45 p.m.
“You’re out early today, boss.”
“Today I could manage it,” Tomás responded, not especially in the mood to chat with his garrulous chauffeur. They rounded the Avenida Insurgentes on the way to his apartment in the Colonía Condesa. He thought the journey would be a brief one; midweek, at that hour, there was barely any traffic.
“The one in the middle’s not bad,” said the driver appreciatively, and pointed at three women posted on the corner. “But the other two should find something else to do. Children, drunks, and panty hose always tell the truth.”
Tomás followed his gaze. They were three hookers braving the cold night anxiously at the intersection of Insurgentes and Álvaro Obregón. The spectacle brought to mind Milena, and with her, the murder of Emiliano Reyna. For the past few hours, Tomás had been able to evade the subject thanks to his routines at the paper, which he’d had to turn to as soon as the threat of Salgado had disappeared. Tomás saw little difference between his own duties and those of a factory foreman or insurance exec: marketing, personnel management, and budgets. As he opened the door to his apartment, he was convinced that all that would have to change, and he would need to hire a right-hand man for those administrative tasks.
And yet it was his left arm that caught him when he fell to the floor after receiving a blow to the back of his neck. He was struggling to get up when someone behind him turned on the light and he was able to make out the figure in the living room.
“So, dickhead, who told you men solved their problems by running and squealing to the papers?”
Salgado had settled into the easy chair with a glass of whiskey. On his lap was an open album of family photos Jimena had given her father the Christmas before.
“What are you doing here? The police are after you,” Tomás said, more confused than afraid.
“You fucked up my life, but I’m not the type to go down alone.”
“You son of a bitch. What did you expect? You killed Emiliano for no reason.”
“For no reason? Who the fuck told you to get mixed up in things that didn’t concern you? You’re in over your heads. How else was I going to let you know?”
Tomás noticed the closed curtains and figured he had few chances to save himself: Salgado wasn’t there to negotiate. Salgado raised two fingers of the hand resting on the arm of the chair, and Tomás felt a kick in his ribs. He got on all fours, trying to catch his breath, and received a kick to the opposite flank from another man.
“I just came here to say no one fucks with me. I’m going to put two bullets in your skull and from here, we’ll go to Vicente Suárez Forty-Six. We won’t play kickball with your wife and daughter, though. We’ll come up with something better, you sack of shit.”
“What’s in it for you? You’ll be the first one they suspect.”
“I’m a dead man, if that’s any consolation to you. The cops aren’t the ones I’m worried about.”
“Then you need to run. Why are you here wasting time on us?”
“Run? At my age? How undignified. I’d rather have a little fun before I meet my maker.”
“Go have fun with your whore of a mother,” Tomás finally said.
“Nah,” Salgado replied. “For this party, you’re providing the women. Anyway, you’re out of whiskey. Hopefully Teresa’s cellar is better stocked.” Turning to one of his gorillas, he added, “Kill him, but grab a pillow first. I don’t want you waking up the whole building.”
Tomás decided to end his life with a bit of dignity as well. He raised his hands to show he wasn’t going to try anything crazy and nodded toward the sofa that rounded out the scanty furnishings in his living room. He preferred to sit rather than kneel while he waited for the coup de grâce from the thug who was returning from the bed just then with the requisite pillow. As he stood, Tomás asked himself when the last time he’d changed the sheets was, and was glad to recall that the cleaning woman had done it the day before.
That was the last thing he thought. Then came a noise at the door, two quick hisses, the sound of a body hitting the floor, then another two hisses. When his hands landed on the chair and he turned around to see what was happening, he saw a black mass pointing a long pistol at Salgado. The silencer looked like the ones in the movies, but the noise was different. He saw the two bodies lying on the floor, one of them starting to bleed, and thought of his maid again, a woman with a very nasty attitude. The other man lay faceup, hugging the pillow he had pulled into himself for protection.
Two more hisses cut short the movement Salgado was attempting, and a pistol hung from the hand that had just given the signal for Tomás to be punished. The other, resting on the chair, still held onto the glass of whiskey. That seemed like the only thing that hadn’t changed in the last minute.
Tony Soprano ignored him as he approached the three bodies and made sure each of them was on its way out. One of them, the guy with the pillow, got a bullet to the forehead for good measure. Tomás would have preferred otherwise: the first six shots had been in a confrontation of three against one, which had taken guts, but the last was a summary execution.
Jaime’s gunman didn’t seem too worried about these ethical considerations. After a quick glance to make sure the journalist was unharmed, he ignored him, and he didn’t seem to care about preserving the crime scene: he dragged the three corpses across the floor and leaned them against the wall to one side of the door. Then he went through their pockets, taking their wallets, cell phones, a couple of knives, keys, a pack of Marlboros, two condoms, a lighter, and coins. He went to the kitchen and rifled through the drawers until he found a plastic bag, and he put each item inside, except the wallets and phones, which he slipped into his pockets.
The fat guy stopped worrying over his victims’ bodies for a moment to type something into his phone and returned to his labors. Two minutes later, Jaime burst into the room, followed by three other men.
“Are you okay, Tomás?”
“Me, yes. Them, no,” he answered, unable to take his eyes off Salgado’s body.
Jaime nodded, and his men looked for blankets to wrap the three corpses up in. He walked to the cabinet where his friend kept his liquor and
poured out two shots of tequila. He gave one to Tomás and sat down where Salgado had been resting moments before.
“They were about to execute me,” Tomás said, almost to himself.
“I know. And now it’s all over. Drink your tequila.”
Tomás downed it in a long swig and then looked at Jaime, as if noticing his presence for the first time.
“How did you know? How did you get here so fast?”
“Well, you asked me for help guarding the newspaper, so I put someone there to watch your building. If they’d already offed a deputy director, it wasn’t crazy to think they’d go after the director next, right? I was told some suspicious guys had gone inside, so I decided to come around after I left my office, and I sent my best man ahead of me.”
Jaime wasn’t lying, not completely, though he thought it best to omit that he’d tapped his friend’s phone and installed microphones throughout his house a few days before. A locksmith had gotten him the key to the front door.
“Where are we now, with Salgado out of the picture? Will there be revenge?” Tomás asked.
“I doubt it. He was cornered. I don’t even think his organization knew he was coming to pay you a visit. We’ll dump the bodies and that’ll be that.”
“Well, I owe you one, brother. This was close,” Tomás said, moved.
“No sweat. It’s my specialty,” Jaime responded, waving his friend off.
“I guess while Bonso and the rest of them are on the loose, we’re still not out of danger, are we?”
“No,” Jaime said. “But we’ve already got a bead on them. Tomorrow morning, we’re moving in.”
“Are you going with Lemlock, or are the authorities getting involved? It’s dangerous, no? Last time, you lost three men.”
“Now they’re alone. The police who protected Bonso were Salgado’s men. I want to take them out before the new guy in charge assigns them another police escort.”
Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World Page 30
