Milena, or the Most Beautiful Femur in the World

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  “And what will you do with Bonso?”

  “First, I’m going to find out what his real relationship with Milena is. After that, we’ll know what to do.” They both thought of Claudia’s order to execute the Turk, but neither of them mentioned it.

  Jaime left after promising to call first thing in the morning, once he had the mafiosos under control. He told the journalist he’d leave a guard posted in a car outside his house, and made a few other security recommendations. Tomás realized his friend was squeezing all he could out of the fact that he’d saved his life. What had just happened would mark a definitive change in the strange, sometimes fierce balance of power that had existed between the two of them since their boyhood.

  On his way back to the office, Jaime was ecstatic. He had Milena in his power, and soon he’d have Bonso, too. He was confident that in a matter of days, when he sat down with Vila-Rojas, he’d have several aces up his sleeve, and he’d be able to negotiate with the Spaniard for more than just Milena’s freedom. And then there was the kiss between him and Amelia. It gave him a feeling of completion.

  He fantasized about financing huge projects with the help of laundered and gray-market money from the European mafias. As a protector of the investments and business dealings of Mexico’s organized criminals, Salgado had been primitive. Jaime told himself he could bring a new dimension to the relationships between shady financial operations and profit-yielding businesses in a society as flexible as Mexico’s. A proper broker between Prida’s government and the capital chomping at the bit to break free from the new restrictions imposed by Wall Street. He smiled to himself: all the pieces fit together perfectly.

  ‌61

  Luis and Milena

  Wednesday, November 19, 11:50 p.m.

  A full day behind closed doors had done little to calm Luis down, and it didn’t help that they’d taken his computer and cell phones. Milena joked about his withdrawal: a smoker without cigarettes or a drunk without alcohol wouldn’t have paced back and forth as much as he did in Room 312, where they were confined. During the first few hours they were in custody, Patricia had tried to converse with them, but Luis assumed she was only after information. Finally she stopped dropping in on them.

  They knew the warnings they had sent to Bonso to keep him from falling into Jaime’s trap had worked, not only because Lemlock took his electronics, but also because their guards seemed so much less tense.

  “We have to get out of here. There won’t be any attack. Now they can’t even say they’re protecting us. This is kidnapping, pure and simple.”

  Milena smiled. In fact, she’d started to enjoy every minute of this forced custody. She felt that within those four walls, for that unusual period of time, there were no rules or loyalties, and she gave herself over completely to love for her cellmate. She had never cultivated tenderness, and now she was moved by the barely perceptible groans Luis let out as he fell asleep or the sight of the shaved nape of his long neck. She hadn’t had a single romantic relationship: with Rosendo Franco, she had been more a refugee than a lover, and though it was hard to get a grip on the nature of her own feelings for Vila-Rojas, she knew his attachment to her had been mixed with rational calculation and unconfessed passion.

  Far from his friend’s romantic reveries, Luis stretched his torso out the window for the umpteenth time, looking for a way out. He thought just how far he’d have to jump to grab a tree branch and keep from plunging to the pavement.

  “If we try at four a.m., there’s a good chance we’ll make it. They have a car on every corner, but I doubt they’re awake all night. If worse comes to worst, they’ll just take us back to the room.”

  “If worse comes to worst, we’ll crack our heads open on the sidewalk,” she said, laughing. “I’m not worried about it, it can’t be any harder than pole dancing, and we did that for years to stay in shape. I’m worried more about you,” she added, her eyes looking down at Luis’s left leg.

  “Four doors down from this hotel is that covered walkway where we had that orange juice you like so much; from there we can exit out onto a cross street,” he said, ignoring her look.

  “And your things, your phone and computer?”

  “Everything important is on the Net. Besides, sooner or later I’ll get them back, from Vidal, I suppose.”

  “Then I’ll put my notebook and the passports in my bag and we’ll go,” she said.

  “Passports?”

  “I didn’t tell you I was from Veracruz?” she said with a coquettish smile. “But I could be from Yucatan as well. Bonso has my original passport, so Rosendo got me a Mexican one so I could travel. Later it turned out he did it twice, with two different people, and both passports worked. They’re authentic documents, they haven’t been falsified, just like the birth certificates I got in Perote, in Veracruz, and in Valladolid, Yucatan. Look, let me introduce you to Margarita Valdivia. Or do you prefer Margarita Salazar?” she said, and passed him the documents from her pocket.

  Luis scanned them and then looked her in the face.

  “I like Alka,” he said, and grabbed her by the waist and kissed her. Then he made love to her ardently, thinking it would be the last time.

  They nodded off for the next few hours wrapped around one another. His sleep was fitful, interrupted by dreams in which he careened into the abyss. He could no longer sleep once three in the morning struck. He listened to Milena’s breathing and felt the weight of her thigh on his leg. The position had become uncomfortable, but he tried to tell himself her powerful muscles were transmitting some sort of vigor into his irreparably torn ligaments. The memory of Jaime made him think any risk was worth it to keep from being the prisoner of that man who had ruined his life: they would escape, he would call Rina, and with Amelia’s help, they would get her far from her pursuers’ reach.

  Twenty minutes later, they were examining the tree branch. She was calm, but he was nervous, knowing how weak his left leg was. One of the two cars had disappeared, but in the other, parked twenty yards farther away, the outline of a man was visible.

  “I’ll go first,” she said, seeing Luis’s hesitation.

  She passed her belt through the loops on her backpack to pull it tight into her lower back, crouched on the windowsill where they had told each other so much in the course of those nights, leapt, and landed astride the branch. Luis considered that his testicles wouldn’t resist an impact of that kind. Assuming, that is, that he managed to do what Milena just had.

  She descended a few yards, sat on a thicker branch further down, and waited for her friend with a smile—mocking or inviting, he wasn’t sure, but it worked, because he stopped wavering. He imitated the position he had seen her take, and when he threw himself toward the tree, his fears came true: his left leg lacked the strength, and he fell more than flew. What saved him were his stature and his long appendages: he managed to grab the branch with both hands, but he felt dread as the weight of his body overcame the strength of his knuckles one inch at a time. He looked down at the concrete twenty-five feet below, and wondered whether he’d survive the fall.

  Suddenly he felt her thigh slide between his and push him upward. Milena, who had been behind him up to then, was holding onto the branch as if it were a beam resting on her shoulder, and she had bent a leg to hold up her friend for a moment. He blessed his lover’s powerful thighs, got a better grip on the branch, and bent his waist until he managed to get his legs wrapped around the tree. Exhausted, he held his position for a few moments. Finally, he heaved, pressed his torso tight to the branch, and sat up.

  They stopped to look at the street through the foliage. The man’s shadow hadn’t moved and there wasn’t a trace of other people or of vehicles circulating. They descended on the side of the trunk opposite the car and ran alongside the wall until they reached the entrance of the walkway lined with shops. Then they walked for hours through side streets toward the city center. They knew no one would miss them until nine in the morning, when they usually ordered th
eir breakfast, but they wanted to get as far away as possible from Lemlock and its men. At one point, in a crosswalk, she took his hand, but he let hers go a few feet later. To him, it seemed like an act of loyalty to Rina, the least he could do.

  At seven, they drank a juice at the first post they found open and then hailed a taxi. It took them almost an hour to reach the PRD offices in the Colonía Roma. They didn’t talk much during the trip, and when they did, it was about trivialities: the cold weather, Milena’s athleticism, the awful state of Luis’s jeans. Nothing pertaining to the intimacy they’d shared over those days or their imminent meeting with Rina.

  When they got out of the taxi in front of the PRD, they met Alicia, Amelia’s secretary, who was walking into the building just then. She led them to the president’s meeting room, where she called her boss to let her know about the unexpected visitors.

  ‌62

  Jaime

  Thursday, November 20, 5:15 a.m.

  It was hard to believe the little man swinging his legs in the chair had brought such worry to the world, or at least to El Mundo. Jaime stared at Bonso with absolute fascination before entering the room with the two-way mirror to interrogate him. A short guy, tubby, fifty-six years old, if his passport was to be trusted, tan skin crusted with acne, hair dyed light brown. Not the kind of physique you win with in life. One more reason not to underestimate him.

  Bonso, the Turk, and two underlings had been captured in an apartment in Villa Olímpica. The four of them were asleep when Jaime’s people rushed in. They’d found them thanks to their surveillance of the guards who took care of the gang’s brothels. At last, one of them had gone to the hideout where the Romanian and his right-hand man were holed up.

  “What kind of cops are you? I have a right to speak to my lawyer and to make a call to the embassy,” Bonso demanded when Jaime entered the interrogation room.

  Again, the director of Lemlock admired his aplomb.

  “The type of cops that don’t show up on any organizational chart. The kind that can do what they like with scum like you.”

  “I’m a foreign citizen, I have rights.”

  “Salgado had them, too, I guess. Now he’s got nothing,” Jaime said, and showed him the photo of his body on the screen of his mobile phone.

  Bonso looked at it, and Jaime could see he was finally afraid.

  “And you know what? I had less reason to kill the colonel than you and the Turk, so let’s cut the bullshit. My job is to give a picture like this one, but of you, to the people who hired me. Think you’ll leave a photogenic corpse?”

  “Why am I alive then?”

  “Because I’m trying to figure out if you’re more useful that way than dead. That’ll depend on you.”

  “I’ve got money, all the women you could want.” Now the Romanian’s voice was like a ringmaster’s. His face lit up with a smile that aimed to enthrall.

  “All I’m interested in is what you’ve got on Vila-Rojas and what you’re trying to find among Milena’s things.”

  Bonso’s face contracted, and a burst of terror clouded his eyes.

  “Vila who? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, trying to look composed once more.

  “I’m not going to waste time playing cat and mouse, and you shouldn’t either, since you only have an hour left before you’re dead. Look at the clock on the wall: in sixty minutes, someone will be here to torture you. Not to get information out of you, but just to be sure you die painfully. You have fifty-nine minutes to make a decision.”

  “Wait. If you kill me, you won’t get anything!”

  “If I kill you, it’ll be because you decided not to give me anything. At worst, I’ll be doing the job my client asked for and turning in your bloody body. Besides, it’s always possible that your pal is more attached to his life than you.” Jaime turned around and headed out the door without waiting for a response.

  When he reached the other side of the mirror, Patricia and Commandant Carrasco were waiting for him with a coffee in hand.

  “Think he’s going to talk?” Patricia asked. She had less training than the other two in high-pressure interrogation techniques.

  “We’ll know for certain by the way he looks at the clock these next few minutes. I’d say yes, though,” Jaime replied. “This guy’s a survivor.”

  “Well, you didn’t give him much reason to think you were bluffing.”

  “I’m not bluffing,” Jaime said, taking the first sip of his coffee.

  The three of them concentrated on Bonso.

  Aware they were observing him from behind the mirror, the Romanian stared down at his fingernails, and after a thorough inspection, he began to clean them, slowly and meticulously.

  “The son of a bitch is good.”

  “He only has ten fingers,” the commandant responded.

  Once the thumbnail on his right hand had been freed of any grime it might have harbored, Bonso looked up, tugged at his hair, and glanced furtively at the clock. Fourteen minutes had passed. When the first half-hour was over, he started glancing over every two or three minutes, and after a quarter till, he never took his eyes off the second hand. With five minutes remaining, he knocked on the glass, first with resignation, then desperately. Jaime let the clock run down until there was a minute left, then walked back into the room. By then, the prisoner was frenetic.

  “I’ve been calling you for ten minutes,” he said anxiously, turning to the mirror, as though to recruit witnesses to his behalf. He wasn’t sure whether Jaime had come in as a negotiator or executioner.

  “Then convince me that what you’ve got is enough to make me disobey my clients’ orders,” Jaime said, and sat down casually at one of the chairs placed around the long table.

  “The only thing that’s kept me alive is a stash of documents. If I turn them over to you, I’m a dead man.”

  “If you don’t turn them in, you’ll be dead sooner. You’ve already lived a minute longer than you deserve. Your move.”

  Bonso took a deep breath.

  “What I know is they’re trying to get hold of some papers of Milena’s, but I’m not clear on the details. Until five weeks ago, all they wanted was for us to keep a close eye on her, because she needed to be available to consult with someone in Marbella about information she had. I never knew what it was about. When she split with the guy from the newspaper, I tried to get her back for the colonel…”

  “Salgado?” Jaime interrupted.

  “Yeah, him. He said that as long as the line of communication with Spain wasn’t broken, everything was okay, and that fucking with Franco could cause a big stir.”

  “So what happened five weeks ago?”

  “No idea, they just said we needed to get rid of the whore and all the documents she had, no matter the price.”

  “Who gave the order? Vila-Rojas?”

  “Probably I should tell you what happened that last night in Marbella.”

  ‌63

  Milena

  January 2014

  “What the fuck happened at One Percent?” Vila-Rojas asked Bonso, enraged, after he’d charged up the fourteen metal steps to the brightly lit office in the old warehouse on the docks in Marbella.

  “What happened was that Boris’s execution, the one you ordered, got out of hand, and you’ve got us in the middle of some serious shit,” Bonso responded.

  Vila-Rojas scanned the room for cameras and microphones before answering.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Bonso waved him off.

  “Boris died of an overdose administered by Milena, according to your instructions. Your whore already confessed to us.”

  “Who is this Milena and what does she have to do with me? It’s pathetic to try to incriminate me with what one of your hookers says,” Vila-Rojas responded loudly, continuing to look for some surveillance device.

  “What does Milena have to do with me? Don’t be an ingrate, Agustín, she’s been working for you for tw
o years. I have the video at my house from the night you bought her from me. I asked you for a hundred thousand euros, and you offered two with the condition that she would only obey your orders from that day forward. I have ten copies of that video planted in places I can trust.” In fact, there were only four, but the lawyer had no way of knowing that.

  Vila-Rojas motioned for them to follow him and led them downstairs to his car, parked close to the entrance in a barely lit corner of the warehouse.

  “I’d rather talk here,” Vila-Rojas said, leaning against the car. “What are you planning on doing with these videos?”

  “Nothing, as long as I stay alive. If not, my friends have instructions to send them to Boris’s mother and uncles, in Marbella and in Ukraine as well.”

  “There’s no saving the Turk. It was supposed to be a thing between two junkies, but he turned it into a gun battle. No way the Ukrainians will let him live: he killed two of them and shot one in the back. Same goes for Milena. But I can save you. It’s just a matter of convincing them that this was a lover’s quarrel gone wrong. The Turk got jealous and wanted Boris off the scene.”

  Boris shook his head.

  “A jealous lover who plans an overdose and then shoots the place up? You think these Russians are morons? No, the doomed romance story ain’t going to fly. You won’t save me that way.”

  “Then what’s your recommendation?”

  “I don’t know, lawyer, you’re the one who’s in Yasha’s good graces. You’ll come up with something, right? And if not, then we’re both fucked.”

  “Where’s Milena?” Vila-Rojas asked.

  “I’ve got her. Don’t worry.”

  The lawyer took a long time to reflect. Bonso kept his eye on him throughout.

  “There’s no reason Yasha has to find out,” he said finally. “You two get out of the country, tonight if possible. The best thing would be somewhere in South America, Colombia or Mexico, that’s where my best contacts are. Yasha will have no choice but to go after you with everything he’s got, but I’ll make sure he keeps his hands off if you guarantee me those videos never appear.” Vila-Rojas could never trust Bonso, but at least he had bought some time to deal with the incriminating videos. What was important was that Yasha’s men, or even worse, Olena Kattel’s, didn’t catch the Turk, Bonso, or Milena. “She stays with me,” he added, realizing the girl was a loose end.