Yasha Boyko, a distinguished leader of the Ukrainian immigrant community in the south of Spain, has declared in the name of his compatriots that the vast majority of Eastern European residents of Marbella are peaceful neighbors who uphold the law, and that their presence has been one of the factors in the region’s prosperity.
When she finished reading, her eyes were damp. Finally, the newspaper her father founded had caused the world to shake. She looked at Tomás, moved by what she’d read but also by his enthusiasm as director, his loyalty, his generosity. She told herself that now that the crisis was over, she’d have to face up to the collapse of her marriage. She didn’t want to spend another day feigning a relationship with someone she had begun to scorn.
“Let’s go to New York for four or five days and soak up the journalism culture,” she told Tomás. “We’ll see people from Columbia, from the New York Times, from the weeklies. We’ll recharge our batteries and get out from under the pressure of the daily grind. What do you say? In two or three weeks, maybe?”
It might not have been professional, striking up a romance with the director of her newspaper, but she didn’t want to let the chance slip. Life had put enough responsibilities on her shoulders without her imposing sacrifices on herself. She decided to let things follow their course, even to give them a little nudge.
“It would be worth it,” Tomás said, recalling the pale skin and red hair atop the sheets in a room at the Plaza Hotel facing Central Park. But he thought of Amelia and something clenched in his stomach. He supposed it was a foretaste of the sense of loss he would feel if he broke with her, and he couldn’t bear it. He preferred to concentrate on the difficult task at hand: turning El Mundo into a paper of reference for public opinion. It would be a tough job when the blogosphere was pushing paper aside. He needed to find a business model where the digital edition could hold onto the current editorial staff: he’d need all the help he could get, no matter where it came from.
He thought of the Blues and the possibility of them making a mission out of El Mundo’s retrenchment. Maybe he could bring Mario onboard when he came back from Puerto Rico. For a long time, he’d had a sense that the university job was a disappointment. He could give him a hand with the opinion page, which had been vacant since Emiliano’s death.
The murder of his collaborator made him recall Jaime, a vicious guy but loyal in his own way, and always with a trick up his sleeve. With his support, the newspaper could find shortcuts and powerful backers. Jaime never ceased to amaze him, sometimes in the worst way, but in the end, he knew he could always count on him, especially when it came to life or death. A shiver ran over his body as he remembered Salgado’s corpse on the chair in his living room.
It struck him that for two nights now, he’d been looking for excuses to stay with Amelia and not go back to his apartment. It was time to move, but they couldn’t live together yet. Perhaps he could find a place closer to her home in Colonía Roma, or halfway between the newspaper and Amelia. But perhaps that wish was a projection of an inability to choose between two women’s love. He put the thought out of his mind. That night, and the rest of the week, he would sleep with Amelia, and that would be enough to stave off the demons lingering around his heart and his groin.
The demons pestering Amelia, on the other hand, had little to do with her heart and a lot to do with her guts. That morning, she’d found out that the coordinator of her party’s representatives in Congress had already negotiated the necessary votes with President Prida’s envoys to pass through the next year’s budget with an ample majority. There had been no point in revealing to her colleague those lines on the budget, masked as social services, that were only there to push the vote in the government’s favor. Her colleagues had given in to the executive because, thanks to their negotiations, pensions for the handicapped had gone up. To Amelia, the sudden acquiescence of the left’s leader had more to do with his own career than with the well-being of the disabled population.
Again, she considered renouncing her party’s presidency and exposing the shady accords the leadership carried out behind the public’s back. But just as before, she thought this would do more harm to the left’s already scant chances of influencing policy in the Prida government, and he and his successors could easily be in office for decades. She swallowed the bad taste in her mouth and tried to comfort herself with the unexpected and inspiring end of Milena’s story.
With Jaime involved, it was natural that many questions remained unanswered about Vila-Rojas’s strange death in London and the Turk’s sudden disappearance. Jaime was like that: he always took care of business, but he never got into details. And to prove what Tomás had already said, Jaime had literally saved him from certain death. Her partner’s commentaries were vague, but she assumed that with time she would find out the details of the story in the darkness of their bed, where Tomás liked to share his secrets.
For the first time in her life, she asked herself if Jaime might not be right when he stressed that you needed harsh methods and a strong stomach to fight the rot in the system. She remembered again how the coordinator of her representatives had betrayed her, and asked what Jaime would have done in her shoes. She was shocked by the depths of her resentment: not even Lemlock, she imagined, would be willing to do what she had imagined doing to the representative’s testicles in an attempt to dissuade him from his plan.
Maybe she was unfair with Jaime: her friend was capable of going into the shadows time and again, but he never got lost there. His recent declarations of love had made her uncomfortable. She’d known of his feelings since her adolescence, and they had been a source of tension running through the strange family of the Blues for decades. She briefly imagined the possibility of becoming his lover, but it made her shudder. She remembered the thick hair on his muscular forearms and her own hair stood on end as she thought of Carlos Lemus, Jaime’s father, whom she’d idolized twenty years before with the intense fervor of first love. To Jaime’s sorrow, she’d never stop seeing him as a weaker version of his powerful father.
Those juvenile flings recalled to her, with a healthy tinge of jealousy, the spontaneous commitment that Luis and Rina seemed to feel for each other: a pure attraction that was safe for now from the complaints, small and large, that life tended to impose. Or maybe she was being unfair, because an attraction like that was so foreign and unbelievable to her. After all, Luis and Milena’s escapade had been a first test for whatever was brewing between them. It must have been a torment to Rina, knowing they were shut up in some ratty hotel room, but her attitude with Milena was absolutely selfless. Once more, she admired her collaborator, though in the end she didn’t know whether for the generosity of her heart or her unbelievable capacity to ignore whatever bothered her. Maybe she was interpreting as maturity what was nothing more than the girl’s practical approach to a fleeting winter romance.
Vidal could have used something like that, and he didn’t hide the sadness Luis and Rina’s affection produced in him. Friday night had been humiliating: excited by what seemed to be the end of the story, the three of them dragged Milena to a cantina and ended the evening at midnight in the Plaza Garibaldi, world capital of mariachi music. The whole time, Vidal kept glancing at Rina, trying to focus on her vulgar gestures and hollow words, anything that might break the spell and relieve his longing. But what he observed only fed his passion.
Urged on by Luis and Milena, to the delight of the tourists, Rina did the Mexican Hat Dance on one of the tabletops around midnight, and no one mocked her, not even when she slipped and fell facedown onto a chair. She stood back up, not without a certain gracefulness, to take in the applause. It was fascinating, even incomprehensible to Vidal, who could never shake off the feeling that those around him were judging him, that Rina’s body could keep moving, totally indifferent to others’ opinions.
Luis seemed to appreciate that as well, and Rina’s vitality drew him like a magnet, with the advantage that he didn’t have to forget about her,
at least not for now. After the partying was over, the four of them went back to Rina’s apartment. The bedroom arrangements brought joy to some and sadness to others. Milena settled into the armchair in the living room, and Vidal stretched the rug out into a makeshift bed, lying down there and trying to ignore the tormenting sounds coming from Luis and Rina in the bedroom.
Vidal took consolation in the thought that now, his life had a direction. He would become Jaime’s model pupil, and later, a successful executive. He saw himself at twenty-nine, emanating the same authority and aplomb as his instructor, and that image helped soften the effects of being there, fifteen steps from his beloved, who was lying in bed with someone else. He recalled Jaime’s advice and convinced himself that Rina would be his, sooner or later. He would just have to wait until Luis decided to disappear, and he would have to figure out how he could help make that happen.
But disappearing was the last thing on Luis’s mind that night. He had made love to the apple of his eye slowly, attentively, stopping to caress parts of her body as though wishing to substitute for Rina the memory of the skin, the scent, the contours of Milena, which were still present in his hands and on his lips, to stoke his passion for the one with the ardor the other had inflamed. Over and over, images of Milena’s flesh leapt into his mind, and he kept pushing them aside, telling himself his relationship with the Croatian had been irreplaceable, but also unrepeatable.
For the first time in years, Luis didn’t have a plan. He had come to Mexico City for a doctor’s visit, and his return ticket to Barcelona was for the following weekend, but Rina—and then Milena—had come into his life. He decided to cancel his flight and stay on in Mexico for the next few weeks while he finished designing a program he had agreed to write for a shopping center. They had paid him a fortune to come up with highly efficient, rather devious marketing software. It offered free Wi-Fi to anyone who set foot in a mall in Houston, and once users accepted, it registered their every step: which stores they went to, which windows they stopped to look at; an enormous mirror tied to mobile geolocation technology allowed them to know the user’s sex, approximate age, and ethnicity. With that information, it could bombard them with personalized ads for special offers as they passed through the different businesses. It was like Big Brother, but commercial rather than political.
Though he got a kick out of designing such programs, Luis was increasingly uncomfortable with their profit-seeking manipulation. After crossing paths with Milena and getting to know Amelia and the causes she fought for, he found his old work childish, frivolous, and dispiriting. Maybe his newly explored ability to combat human-trafficking networks could help rescue other victims of the mafia. Once the dust settled, he would approach Amelia and—why not?—Milena herself, to talk about putting an operation together. But he had no idea what Milena wanted to do with her life.
Nor did Milena. She couldn’t identify with the name Alka anymore, even if she had woken up that Tuesday murmuring it like a mantra. She had slept in the suite Jaime used when he spent the night at Lemlock’s offices, but Claudia would be passing through later. At night, back from London, she had spoken on the phone to Rosendo Franco’s daughter, and was surprised by her warmth and generosity. She implied that she had a big surprise coming and offered to let her spend a few days in her apartment in Cuernavaca while she decided what to do with herself.
But all she wanted was to be rid of Milena once and for all. That same morning, she thought she would settle her accounts with the Turk and everything would be over. Letting him go was one of her conditions in the exchange for the videos. Lemus had been more curious than frustrated by her decision, and she didn’t really know why she’d come to that conclusion, either. There was nothing she wanted less than to ever see the Turk again, but she tried to explain her actions to herself by saying it was something she owed him. After all, he’d saved her twice: once in the women’s bathroom, when Boris’s thugs had come after her, and again on the docks in Málaga, when Bonso wanted her dead. She insisted on accompanying the Turk out to the street to be sure Jaime was actually letting him go. And once they were on the sidewalk and saying goodbye, they looked at each other in silence. Then, with a pleading look in his eyes she had never seen before, the Turk asked her to come with him, so they could run away together. After Bonso’s disappearance, her old watchdog’s life was as wrecked as her own, or maybe more so. She refused and watched him walk away, overwhelmed and confused, eroding into a silhouette less substantial than the trail of cigarette smoke he left in his path. To her surprise, something dark inside her pushed her, for a fleeting instant, to follow him, to lose herself with him, to lose herself in him.
It was only then that she took stock of what had happened in those past few days. Without Bonso and the Turk, she was free. Without Vila-Rojas, she was unfathomably empty. She tried to erase the last ten years of her life from her mind and to go back to age sixteen, when the future was an open field full of endless paths. But she couldn’t identify with that teenager who had existed in a previous life. Someday she would visit her family in Croatia, but she would have to be ready for it, and even more, they would have to be ready for her. She had less desire to go back to Marbella, even if Yasha had promised her a life of ease there. The mere notion of setting foot in the city where she’d been exploited day after day made her ill. Plus, there was Olena Kattel: she wasn’t sure what Yasha had said to Boris’s mother to keep her from seeking vengeance. Probably he had told her that her son’s killer was already dead. All the same, the Costa del Sol was off-limits as long as Olena was alive.
She wondered whether she should move to Madrid or Barcelona. That made her think of Luis. She shook her head, looked at the outline of the purse sitting on the coffee table, and remembered the little black book she had loaned to Claudia. She shivered with satisfaction, and immediately, she knew what would happen next.
She still had a bit of unfinished business from her past: publishing a book with the stories she’d gathered through the years. That was the only way she could close the circle and say goodbye to Milena forever. Tomás had offered to print them in El Mundo in installments, promising the effect would be explosive. He even said he would talk to his colleagues about getting them into the daily papers in Madrid, Barcelona, and Seville. Milena saw that finally, her life could have a direction, even if she didn’t know where she’d end up. She decided she would just navigate, like the seafarers of old, from one horizon to the other. She opened the new black book Luis had just given her and reread the text she had written in it the night before: Tales of the XY Chromosome. Them: Agustín Vila-Rojas. It felt good. Before she knew it, her mind was cooking up another story, but now, for the first time, the passages would be drawing on a life that was no longer hers.
Author’s Note
The links between fiction and reality are close throughout the book. The author has taken a few liberties for the sake of the novel’s plot. One of them has been a slight transformation of the composition of the community of citizens of former Soviet Republics residing in Marbella. Gangs originating in Russia and Ukraine are not necessarily the predominate ones in the port city, though they are important. A journalistic report from 2004 designated the Ukrainians as dominant in Murcia, Alicante, Huelva, Cuenca, Badajoz, and the south of Valencia. In Marbella, apart from Ukrainians, Lithuanian, Armenian, Georgian, and Romanian gangs are active. Naturally, their composition changes over time. It goes without saying, in the words of Yasha Boyko, that the vast majority of Eastern European residents of Marbella are peaceful neighbors who uphold the law.
In the description of the merciless organizations in charge of sexual slavery, no literary license has been taken. The phenomenon has worsened in recent years as a result of the globalization of human-trafficking networks. The typology of customers described in Them draws on an ample bibliography. For general interest, I would highlight three works in particular: The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade by Sheila Jeffreys (R
outledge), and two extraordinary investigations by Victor Malarek—The Natashas: The Horrific Inside Story of Slavery, Rape, and Murder in the Global Sex Trade (Arcade Publishing) and The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It (Arcade Publishing).
Lydia Cacho drew my attention to the theme, Guillermo Zepeda Patterson helped me with editing, and Camila Zepeda was a stimulus and a constant sounding board. Alejandro Páez took a great deal of work onto his own shoulders so I would have time to write. Alma Delia Murillo was an accomplice to whatever part of me is a writer, and most importantly, she made me happy throughout the process. I owe all of them my thanks.
About the Author and Translator
Journalistically speaking, Jorge Zepeda Patterson has accomplished everything: newspaper’s managing editor, magazine founder, television anchor, newspaper political columnist, and author of half a dozen books on current affairs. After spending decades researching and writing about political power, he found that only fiction could explain the way in which the brain of a politician works. Los Corruptores (2013), his first novel, was finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Award. His second novel, Milena (2014), won the $800,000 Premio Planeta. Born in Mazatlán, Mexico, in 1952, Zepeda received a master’s degree from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales and a doctorate in political science from The Sorbonne. After his journalistic training at El País, he was the founding editor of the newspapers Siglo 21 and Público in Guadalajara, and was later editor-in-chief of El Universal. He has authored numerous books on political analysis, and his weekly column appears in over twenty newspapers in Mexico. He currently edits the news website SinEmbargo.mx.
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