The Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  The doors slammed. She held her breath. One, two, three. Hijole!—shit. Three male silhouettes standing alongside the car, backlighted by the street-lamps. Choose. She'd thought she could be safe from this, on the sidelines, while somebody did it for her. You just take it easy, prietita—that was at the beginning—you just love me, and I'll take care of the rest. It was sweet and comfortable. It was deceptively safe to wake up at night and hear her man's—any man's?—peaceful breathing. There was not even any fear back then, because fear is the child of the imagination, and back then there were only happy hours that passed like a pretty love song, or a soft stream. And the trap was easy to fall into; his laughter when he held her, his lips traveling over her skin, his mouth whispering tender words, or dirty words down below, between her thighs, very close and very far inside, as though it were going to stay there forever—if she lived long enough to forget, that mouth would be the last thing that she forgot. But nobody stays forever. Because nobody is safe, and all sense of security is dangerous. Suddenly you wake up with proof that it's impossible to just live—you realize that life is a road, and that traveling it entails constant choices. Who you live with, who you love, who you kill. Whether you want to or not, you have to walk the road by yourself. ... The Situation ... What it came down to was choosing.

  After hesitating a second, she aimed the gun at the broadest and biggest of the three silhouettes. It was the best target, and besides—he was the boss.

  "Teresita," said don Epifanio Vargas.

  That familiar voice stirred something inside her. Suddenly, tears blurred her vision. Unexpectedly, she'd turned fragile; she tried to understand why, and in the effort it was too late to avoid it. Stupid bitch, she told herself. Pinche fucking stupid baby. If something goes wrong, you had your chance. The distant lights from the street blurred and wavered before her eyes, and everything became a confusion of liquid lights and shadows. Suddenly there was no one to aim at.

  So she lowered the pistol. All because of one fucking tear, she thought, resigned to what awaited. Now they're going to kill me, and all because of one pinche tear.

  It's bad times." Don Epifanio Vargas took a long puff of his cigar and stood looking at the ember, pensive. In the semidarkness of the chapel, the candles and altar lights illuminated his Aztec profile, his thick, combed-back jet-black hair, his norteno moustache, all those stereotyped features that Teresa had always associated with Emilio Fernandez and Pedro Armendariz in the old Mexican movies on TV. He was probably somewhere around fifty, and he was big and wide, with huge hands. In his left hand he held a cigar, and in his right, Güero's notebook.

  "In the old days, at least there was some respect for women and children." He shook his head sadly, remembering. Teresa knew that "the old days" referred to the time when, as a young campesino from Santiago de los Ca-balleros, tired of being hungry, Epifanio Vargas traded in the brace of oxen and the little field of corn and beans for marijuana plants. He'd screened out the seeds for a clean product, he'd put his life on the line selling it and taken the lives of everybody else he could, and finally he'd come down from the sierra to the flatland, settling in Tierra Blanca. That was when the networks of Sinaloa drug smugglers had first been moving north not just their bricks of Mexican gold but also the first packages of white powder that came in by boat and plane from Colombia.

  The men of don Epifanio's generation—men who had once swum the Rio Grande with cargos on their backs—now lived in mansions in Colonia Chapultepec. They had pliant rich-kid offspring who went to high school in their own cars and to American universities. But they'd had their long-ago days of big adventures, big risks, and big money made overnight: a lucky operation, a good crop, a big cargo that got to the right place. Years of danger and money, living a life that up in that sierra would have been scarcely more than a miserable getting-by. Intense and short, because only the toughest of men managed to survive, make a life for themselves, and mark off the territory of a large drug cartel. Those had been years when the lines were still being drawn. When nobody held a place without pushing out somebody else, and if you fucked up, you paid the price.

  But the price was your life, not anybody else's with you. Just yours.

  "They went to Chino Parra's house, too," he said. "I heard it on the news a little while ago. Wife and three kids." The ember of his cigar glowed bright again. "Chino was found in the driveway, in his Silverado."

  He was sitting beside Teresa on the pew to the right of the little altar. When he moved his head, the candles made patent-leather glints in his thick, stiff-combed hair. The years that had passed since he first came down from the sierra had refined his appearance and his manners, but under the handmade suits, the Italian ties, and the $500 silk shirts, there was still the campesino from the mountains of Sinaloa. And you could see that not just because of the norteno ostentation—pointed-toe boots, huge silver belt buckle, gold centenary medal on the keychain—but also, and especially, because of the eyes, which were sometimes impassive, sometimes distrustful or patient. They were the eyes of a race that for generations, hundreds of years, had been forced, time and time again, by a hailstorm or a drought, to start over again, from scratch.

  "Apparently they caught Chino in the morning and spent the day with him, talking.... From what the radio said, they took their time with him."

  Teresa could imagine, and it didn't take much effort: Hands tied with wire; cigarettes; razor blades. Chino Parra's screams muffled by the plastic bag or the strip of duct tape, in some basement or warehouse, before they finished him off and went for his family. Maybe Chino himself had ratted out Güero. Or his own family. Teresa had known Chino well, his wife, Brenda, and the three kids—two boys and a girl. She remembered them playing, running around on the beach at Altata, the previous summer: their warm little brown bodies in the sun, covered by towels, sleeping as they drove back in that same Silverado their father's remains had been found in. Brenda was a petite woman, very talkative, with pretty brown eyes, and on her right ankle she wore a gold chain with her man's initials on it. She and Teresa had gone shopping together many times in Culiacan—getting expensive manicures, buying tight leather pants, spike heels, Guess jeans, Calvin Klein, Carolina Herrera ... She wondered whether they'd sent Gato Fierros and Potemkin Galvez, or some other gunmen. Whether it had happened before or at the same time as they were coming after her. Whether they killed Brenda before or after the kids. Whether it had been fast, or whether they'd also taken their time with them. Pinche hombres puercos.

  She inhaled and then breathed out slowly, so that don Epifanio wouldn't see her sob. Then she silently cursed Chino Parra, after cursing that cabron Güero Dávila even more. Chino was brave the way so many that killed or ran drugs were—out of pure fucking ignorance, because he didn't think. He got into jams because he was fuck-stupid, unaware that he was putting not just himself but his whole family in danger. Güero had been different: he was smart. He knew all the risks, and he'd always known what would happen to her if they got him, but he couldn't care less. That fucking notebook. Don't read it, he'd said. Take it, but don't even look at it. Damn him, she muttered again. God damn him, pinche Güero cabron.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  Don Epifanio Vargas shrugged. "What had to happen," he said.

  She looked at the bodyguard standing at the door, AK-47 in hand, silent as a shadow or a ghost. Just because you'd traded in drugs for pharmaceuticals and politics didn't mean you didn't take the usual precautions. The other backup was outside, also armed. They'd given the night watchman two hundred pesos to take off early. Don Epifanio looked at the gym bag Teresa had set on the floor, between her feet, and then at the Double Eagle in her lap.

  "Your man had been tempting fate a long time, Teresita. It had to come sooner or later."

  "Is he really dead?"

  "Of course he's dead. They caught him up in the sierra.... It wasn't soldiers, or Federales, or anybody. It was his own people."

  "Who?"

 
"What difference does it make? You know what kind of deals Güero was doing. He got caught playing both sides. And somebody finally blew the whistle on him."

  The cigar's ember glowed red again. Don Epifanio opened the notebook. He held it in the candlelight, turning pages randomly. "You read what's in here?"

  "I just brought it to you, like he told me. I don't know anything about these things."

  Don Epifanio nodded, reflectively. He seemed uncomfortable. "Poor Güero got what he'd been looking for," he concluded.

  She was staring straight ahead, into the chapel's shadows, where ex votos and dry flowers were hanging. "Poor Güero my ass," she suddenly said. "That pig never thought about what would happen to me."

  She'd kept her voice from shaking. Still staring into the shadows, she sensed that don Epifanio had turned to look at her.

  "You're lucky," she heard him say. "For the time being, you're alive."

  He sat like that a while longer. Studying her. The smell of the cigar mingled with the fragrance of the candles and the cone of incense burning slowly in a censer next to the bust of the sainted bandit. "What do you plan to do?" he asked at last.

  "I don't know." Now it was Teresa's turn to shrug. "Güero said you'd help me. 'Give it to him and ask him to help you.' That's what he said."

  "Güero was always an optimist."

  The hollow feeling in her stomach got worse. The waxy smell of candles, the flickering lights before St. Malverde. Humid, hot. Suddenly she felt an unbearable sense of anxiety, and of trepidation. She repressed the urge to

  jump up, knock over the burning candles, get out, get air. Run again, if they'd still let her. But when she looked up, she saw that the other Teresa Mendoza was sitting across from her, watching her. Or maybe it was she herself sitting there, silently, looking at the frightened woman leaning forward on the pew next to don Epifanio, with a useless pistol in her lap. "He loved you," she heard herself say.

  Don Epifanio moved uneasily in his seat. A decent man, Güero had always said.

  "And I loved him." Don Epifanio was speaking very softly, as though he didn't want the bodyguard at the door to hear him talk about emotions. "And you, too ... but those stupid runs of his put you in a tough spot."

  "I need help."

  "I can't get mixed up in this." "You have a lot of power."

  She heard him cluck his tongue in discouragement and impatience. In this business, don Epifanio explained, still speaking softly, power was relative, ephemeral, subject to complicated rules. And he had kept his power, he said, because he didn't go sticking his nose in other people's business. Güero didn't work for him anymore; this was between him and his new bosses. And those people mocharon parejo—they took out everybody, wiped the slate clean.

  "They don't have anything personal against you, Teresita. You know these

  people. But it's their way of doing things. They have to make an example

  when people fuck with them."

  "You could talk to them. Tell them I don't know anything."

  "They already know you don't know anything. That's not the issue ... and I can't get involved. In this country, if you ask for a favor today, tomorrow you've got to pay it back."

  Now he was looking at the Double Eagle on her lap, one hand lying carelessly on the butt. He knew that Güero had taught her to fire it, and that she could hit six empty Pacifico bottles one after another, at ten paces. Güero had always liked Pacifico and liked his women a little tough, although Teresa couldn't stand beer and jumped every time the gun went off.

  "Besides," don Epifanio went on, "what you've told me just makes things worse. If they can't let a man get away, imagine a woman.... They'd be the laughingstock of Sinaloa."

  Teresa looked at his dark, inscrutable eyes. The hard eyes of a norteno Indian. Of a survivor.

  "I can't get involved," she heard him repeat.

  And don Epifanio stood up. So it was useless, she thought. It all ends here. The hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach grew until it included the night that awaited her outside, inexorable. She gave up, but the woman watching her from the shadows refused to.

  "Güero told me that you'd help me," she insisted stubbornly, as though talking to herself. "'Take him the book,' he said, 'and trade it for your life.'"

  "Your man liked his little jokes."

  "I don't know about that. But I know what he told me."

  It sounded more like a complaint than a plea. A sincere and very bitter complaint. Or a reproach. She was silent for a moment, and then she raised her face, like the weary prisoner waiting to hear the sentence. Don Epifanio was standing before her; he seemed even bigger and more heavyset than ever. His fingertips were drumming on Güero's notebook.

  "Teresita ..."

  "Si, senor."

  He kept drumming. She saw him look at the saint's portrait, at the bodyguard at the door, and then at her. Then his eyes fell again on the pistol. "You swear you didn't read anything?" "I swear to you."

  A silence. Long, she thought, like dying. She heard the wicks of the candles at the altar sputtering.

  "You've got just one chance," he said at last.

  Teresa clung to those words, her mind as keen as though she'd just done a line of coke. The other woman faded into the shadows. "One's enough," she said.

  "Have you got a passport?"

  "Yes, with a U.S. visa."

  "And money?"

  "Twenty thousand dollars and a few pesos " She opened the gym bag at her feet to show him, hopefully. "And a ten- or twelve-ounce bag of snow."

  "Leave that. It's dangerous to travel with it Do you drive?"

  "No." She had stood and was looking straight at him, following his every word. Concentrating on staying alive. "I don't even have a license."

  "I doubt you'd be able to get across anyway. They'd pick up your trail at the border, and you wouldn't be safe even among the gringos.... The best thing is to get away tonight. I can loan you the car with a driver you can

  Trust - I can do that, and have him drive you to Mexico City. Straight to

  the airport, and there you catch the first plane out."

  "To where?"

  "Anywhere. If you want to go to Spain, I've got friends there. People that owe me favors ... If you call me tomorrow morning before you get on the plane, I'll give you a name and telephone number. After that, you're on your own."

  "There's no other way?"

  "Heh." The laugh was mirthless, flat. "It's this way or no way. You get led by the rope or it hangs you."

  Teresa looked around the chapel, gazing into the shadows. She was absolutely alone. Nobody made decisions for her now. But she was still alive.

  "I have to go." Don Epifanio was growing impatient. "Decide."

  "I've already decided. I'll do whatever you say."

  "All right." Don Epifanio watched as she put the safety on and stuck the pistol into the waist of her jeans, between the denim and her skin, and then covered it with her jacket. "... And remember one thing—you won't be safe over there, either. You understand?... I've got friends, but these people do, too. Try to bury yourself deep enough so they don't find you."

  Teresa nodded again. She'd pulled the coke out of the gym bag, and she set it on the altar, under the statue of Malverde. She lighted another candle. Santa Virgencita, she prayed a moment in silence. Santo Patron. God bless my journey and allow my return. She crossed herself almost furtively.

  "I'm truly sorry about Güero," don Epifanio said behind her. "He was a good man."

  Teresa had turned to hear this. Now she was so lucid and cool she could feel the dryness of her throat and the blood running very slowly through her veins, heartbeat by heartbeat. She threw the gym bag over her shoulder, smiling for the first time all day—a smile that registered on her lips as a nervous impulse, unexpected. And that smile, or whatever it was, must have been a strange one, because don Epifanio's expression changed—that smile gave him something to think about. Teresita Mendoza. Chale. Güero's morra. A nar
co's old lady. A girl like so many others—quieter, even, than most, not too bright, not too pretty. And yet that smile made him study her thoughtfully, cautiously, with a great deal of attention, as though suddenly a stranger stood before him.

  "No," she said. "Güero was not a good man. He was un hijo de su pinche madre"

  3- When the years have passed . . .

  She was nobody," said Manolo Cespedes. "Explain that to me." "I just did." My interlocutor pointed at me with two ringers, between which he held a cigarette. "Nobody means nobody. The lowest of the low. When she got here she had nothing but the clothes on her back, like she was trying to crawl into a hole and disappear. ... It was just chance." "And something else, too. She was a smart girl."

  "So what?... I know a lot of smart girls that have wound up on a street corner."

  He looked up and down the street, as though trying to see whether there might be an example he could show me. We were sitting under the awning on the terrace of the Cafe California, in Melilla, the Spanish town that sits across the strait from its country on the Moroccan coast. A noonday African sun turned the modernist facades of Avenida Juan Carlos I yellow. It was the

  hour when everyone in Melilla stopped for aperitivos, and the sidewalks and terraces were filled with pedestrians, idlers, lottery vendors, and shoeshine boys. European dress mixed with North African jihabs and djellabas, accentuating the cultural-frontier atmosphere of this place spanning two continents and several races. In the background, around the Plaza de Espafia and the monument to those killed in the colonial war in 1921—a young soldier in bronze with his face turned toward Morocco—the high fronds of the palm trees indicated the nearness of the Mediterranean.

  "I didn't know her back then," Cespedes went on. "Actually, I don't even remember her. A face behind the bar at the Yamila, maybe. Or not even that. It was only much later, when I began hearing things here and there, that I finally associated that girl with the other Teresa Mendoza.... Like I said. Back then she was nobody."