The Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Former police chief, former head of security at Moncloa, the seat of the Spanish presidency, former parliamentary delegate from Melilla—fate and life had made Manolo Cespedes all those things, although they might have made him a wise, seasoned bullfighter, a happy-go-lucky Gypsy, a Berber pirate, or an astute Rifeno diplomat. He was an old man as dark, lean, and canny as a hophead Legionnaire, with a lot of experience and a lot of under-the-table dealings. We had met twenty years earlier, during that period of violent incidents between the European and Muslim communities that had put Melilla on the front pages of newspapers across the continent, back when I was still earning a living as a reporter. And back then, Cespedes, a Melillan by birth and the highest civilian authority in the North African enclave, knew everyone. He would stop in for drinks at the bar frequented by officers from the Spanish army brigade stationed there, the Tercio; he controlled an efficient network of informers on both sides of the border; he would have dinner with the governor of Nador; and on his payroll he had everyone from street beggars to members of the Moroccan Gendarmerie Royale. Our friendship dated back to that: long conversations, lamb with Middle Eastern spices, gin and tonics until the wee hours of the morning. Between us there was always an unspoken agreement: You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Now, retired from his official post, Cespedes was bored and peaceful, growing old, devoted to local politics, his wife, his children, and the noon aperitivos. My visit was a welcome interruption of his daily routine.

  "I tell you, it was pure chance," he insisted. "And in her case, the chance was named Santiago Fisterra."

  My glass froze in its upward track; I caught my breath. "Santiago Lopez Fisterra?"

  "Sure." Cespedes took a drag on his cigarette, gauging my interest. "El Gallego"—the Galician.

  I exhaled slowly, took a sip of my drink, and leaned back in my chair, delighted to have picked up a lost trail, while Cespedes smiled, assessing the new balance of our back-scratching account. That name had brought me to Melilla, in search of a period of obscurity in Teresa Mendoza's biography. Until that day on the terrace of the California, I had had only conjectures, or reports that were doubtful at best: This might have happened; they say that such-and-such went on; somebody had been told, or someone thought he remembered.... Rumors. The rest—the concrete facts—were few; in the immigration files of the Ministry of the Interior there was only an entrance date—Iberia airlines, Barajas Airport, Madrid—with her real name: Teresa Mendoza Chavez.

  Then the official trail went cold for two years, until police report 8653690FA/42, containing fingerprints and one mugshot from the front, one in profile, had allowed me to follow her footsteps with a little more certainty from then on. The report was an old one, kept in an actual manila file folder, before the Spanish police computerized their documents. I'd had it before me on a desk a week earlier, in the police headquarters in Algeciras, thanks to a call from another old friend of mine: the police chief of Torremolinos, Pepe Cabrera. Among the bare facts on the report were two names: a person's and a city's. The person was Santiago Lopez Fisterra. The city was Melilla.

  That afternoon Cespedes and I paid two visits. One was brief, sad, and almost useless, although it served to add another name to my list and a face to one of the characters of this story. Across the street from the yacht club, at the foot of the old city's medieval wall, Cespedes pointed out a filthy man with thin, ashy-colored hair who was "watching" parked cars—making sure nothing happened to them, you understand—in exchange for a few coins from the cars' charitable drivers. He was sitting on the ground near a mooring post, staring at the dirty water under the pier. From a distance I took him for an older man, battered by time and life, but as we approached I realized that he was probably not yet forty. He was wearing a pair of old pants torn and crudely sewn back together, an astoundingly clean white T-shirt, and filthy, stinking tennis shoes. The bright sunlight did nothing to hide the matte gray tone of his skin, which was covered with blotches. His face was cavernous; there were hollows at his temples. Half his teeth were missing, and it occurred to me that he resembled the sea wrack thrown up at high tide or by storms.

  "His name is Veiga," Cespedes told me as we approached him. "And he knew Teresa Mendoza."

  Without pausing to observe my reaction, he said, "Hola, Veiga, how are you," and gave him a cigarette and a light. There were no introductions, no other words between them, and we stood there awhile, silent, looking at the water, the fishing boats tied up, the old mineral barge on the other side of the harbor, and the horrific twin towers built to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the Spanish conquest of the city. I saw scabs, scars, marks on the man's arms and legs. He'd gotten to his feet to light the cigarette—clumsily, muttering disconnected words of thanks. He smelled like stale wine and stale misery. He limped when he walked.

  "Ask him, if you want to," Cespedes finally said.

  I hesitated and then spoke the name Teresa Mendoza. I detected no sign of recognition, or of memory. Nor did I have any better luck when I mentioned Santiago Fisterra. This Veiga, or what remained of him, had turned back toward the oily water of the pier.

  "Try to remember, man," Cespedes urged him. "This friend of mine has come to talk to you. Don't tell him you don't remember Teresa and your partner. Don't make me look bad, all right?. . ."

  But Veiga still didn't answer, and when Cespedes insisted, the most he got was a puzzled, indifferent look as the man scratched lazily at his arms. And those blurred, distant eyes, their pupils so dilated they occupied the entire iris, seemed to slide across people and things from a place there was no returning from.

  "He was the other Gallego," Cespedes said as we walked away. "Santiago Fisterra's crew ... Nine years in a Moroccan jail did that to him."

  Night was falling by the time we paid the second visit. Cespedes introduced the man as Dris Larbi—"My friend Dris," he said, patting him on the back—and I found myself standing before a Rifeno with Spanish citizenship who spoke Spanish perfectly. We met in the Hippodromo section of the city, in front of the Yamila, one of the three nightspots Dris Larbi owned in Melilla—I later learned that and several other things. He stepped out of a shiny Mercedes sports coupe: medium height, very curly black hair, carefully trimmed beard. A hand that extended to shake yours cautiously, to see what you were carrying.

  "My friend Dris," Cespedes repeated, and the way the other man looked at him, cautiously and deferentially at the same time, made me wonder what biographical details about the Rifeno might justify his prudent respect for the former congressman.

  It was my turn to be introduced. "He's investigating the life of Teresa Mendoza."

  Cespedes said it like that, straight out, as the other man offered me his right hand and with his left aimed his car-security control toward the Mercedes, the beeps from the car—bip-bip, fast—confirming activation. But when the words registered, Dris Larbi studied me with great deliberation and great silence, to the point that Cespedes broke out laughing.

  "Relax," Cespedes said. "He's not a cop."

  The noise of shattering glass made Teresa Mendoza's brow furrow. It was the second glass the party at table four had broken that night. She exchanged looks with Ahmed, the waiter, and he walked over with a broom and dustpan, taciturn as always, his black bow tie bobbling loose under his

  Adam's apple. The lights swirling across the empty dance floor cast bright dots on his striped vest.

  Teresa went over the tab being run up by a customer at the far end of the bar. He'd been there a couple of hours, and the tab was respectable: five White Label and waters for him, eight splits of champagne for the girls— most of which had been discreetly made to disappear by Ahmed, under the pretext of changing the glasses. It was twenty minutes to closing, and Teresa could overhear the animated conversation the customer was having with the girls. It was the usual exchange: I'll wait for you outside. One or both of you. Preferably both. Et cetera. Dris Larbi, the boss, was inflexible when it came to the establishment's offic
ial morality. It was a bar that served drinks, period. Outside working hours, the girls were free to do whatever they wanted. Or in principle they were, because there was still strict control: Fifty percent for the house, fifty for the girl. With the exception of trips and parties, when the rules were modified depending on who, what, how, and where. I'm a businessman, Dris would say. Not a pimp.

  A Tuesday. Slow night. On the empty dance floor, Julio Iglesias was singing to no one. Caballero de fina estampa, he sang. Teresa's lips moved silently, following the lyrics, her mind on her paper and ballpoint pen in the cone of light from the lamp next to the cash register. A soft night, she saw as she added the numbers. Almost bad. Pretty different from Fridays and Saturdays, when they had to bring in girls from other places because the Yamila filled to capacity: government officials, businessmen, wealthy Moroccans from the other side of the border, soldiers from the base. A middle-level crowd generally, not too much rough trade except for the inevitable. Girls young and clean, respectable-looking, the work force renewed every six months with Arab girls Dris recruited in Morocco or the marginal neighborhoods of Melilla, or with European girls from the Peninsula. Payments made punctually—that was the key—to the right authorities: Live and let live. Free drinks for the assistant chief of police and the plainclothes detectives— "inspectors," they were called here. An exemplary business, permits all in order. Almost no problems.

  Certainly nothing Teresa didn't remember a thousand—or infinite— times from her still-recent days in Mexico. The difference was that people here, though more gruff, less courteous, settled their scores with lead from a pencil, not a gun, and everything happened under the table. There were even people—and this took her a while to get used to—who simply could not be bought off. I'm sorry, miss, you're mistaken. Or in the more strictly Spanish version: Why don't you just shove that up your ass. It made life hard, sometimes. But just as often, it made life easier. You could relax a lot if you didn't have to fear every cop. Or fear every cop all the time.

  Ahmed came back with his dustpan and broom, slipped behind the bar, and struck up a conversation with the three girls who were free. From the table with the broken glasses came the sounds of laughter, toasts, the clinking of glasses. Ahmed calmed Teresa with a wink. Everything all right there. That tab was going to be a good one, she noted, looking down at the pad next to the cash register. Spanish and Moroccan businessmen celebrating some deal, jackets on the backs of their chairs, collars unbuttoned, ties in their jacket pockets. Four middle-aged men and four girls. The supposed Moet et Chandon in the ice buckets disappeared quickly: five bottles, and there'd be another one killed before closing. The girls—two Moors, one Jew, one Spaniard—were young, and professional. Dris never slept with the employees—you don't stick your dick in the cash register, he would say— but sometimes he would have one of his friends act as a kind of quality-control inspector. Top drawer, he would later crow. In my places, only the best. If the report was less than excellent, he would never mistreat the girl; he would fire her, and that would be that. Pink slip. There was no lack of girls in Melilla, with illegal immigration and the crisis and all that. Some dreamed of making it to the Peninsula, becoming models, TV stars, but most were happy with a work permit and legal residency.

  Only a little more than six months had passed since Teresa Mendoza's conversation with don Epifanio Vargas in the Malverde Chapel. But she realized how long it had been only when she looked at the calendar—most of the time she'd spent in Melilla seemed static, unmoving. It might just as well have been six years as six months.

  This was her destiny, but it could have been any other when, newly arrived in Madrid, with a room in a pension near the Plaza de Atocha, her only luggage a gym bag, she had a meeting with the contact to whom Epifanio Vargas had sent her. To her disappointment, there was nothing for her in Madrid in the way of a job. If she wanted someplace out of the way, as far as possible from any potentially unpleasant encounters, and also a job to justify her residency until the papers establishing her dual nationality came through—the Spanish father whom she'd barely known was going to be of some use to her for the first time—she had to make one more trip.

  The contact, a rushed young man of few words whom she met in the Cafe Nebraska on the Gran Via, offered just two choices: Galicia or southern Spain. Heads or tails, take it or leave it. Teresa asked whether it rained much in Galicia, and the young man smiled a little, just enough—it was the first time he'd smiled in the entire conversation—and said it did. It rains like hell, he said.

  So Teresa chose the south, and the man took out a cell phone and went to another table to talk for a while. When he came back, he wrote a name, a telephone number, and the name of a city on a paper napkin. There are direct flights from Madrid, he told her, handing her the napkin. Or from Malaga. To Malaga, trains and buses. There are also boats from Malaga and Almeria. And when he saw the puzzled look on her face—boats? planes?— he smiled for the second and last time before explaining that the place she was going belonged to Spain but was in North Africa, sixty or seventy kilometers from the Andalucian coast, near the Strait of Gibraltar. Ceuta and Melilla, he explained, are Spanish cities on the Moroccan coast.

  Then he laid an envelope full of money on the table, paid the bill, stood up, and wished her good luck. He said those words—"Good luck"—and was leaving when Teresa, grateful, tried to tell him her name. The man interrupted, saying he didn't want to know it—couldn't care less what it was, in fact. He was just helping out some Mexican friends of his by helping her. He indicated the envelope on the table, and said she should use the money well. When it ran out and she needed more, he added in a tone of objectivity clearly not intended to give offense, she could always use her cunt. That, he said in farewell, apparently regretting he didn't have one of his own, is the advantage you women have.

  She was nothing special," said Dris Larbi. "Not pretty, not ugly. Not par-ticularly quick, not particularly stupid. But she was good at numbers

  I saw that right away, so I put her at the register." He remembered a question I'd asked before, and shook his head before continuing. "And no, the fact is she didn't work on her back. At least not when she worked with me. She was recommended by friends, so I let her choose. One side of the bar or the other, your choice, I told her.... She chose to stay behind it, as a waitress at first. She didn't make as much, of course. But that was fine with her."

  We were walking along the border between the neighborhoods of Hippodromo and Real—straight streets that ran down to the ocean, colonial-style houses. The night was cool, and filled with the fragrance of the flowers in window boxes.

  "She may have gone out now and then. Two, three times, maybe. I'm not sure." Dris Larbi shrugged. "It was her decision, you understand?... A couple of times she went off with somebody she wanted to go with, but not for money."

  "What about the parties?" Cespedes asked.

  The Rifeno looked away, suspicious. Then he turned to me before he looked over at Cespedes again, like a man who prefers not to talk about delicate matters in front of strangers.

  But Cespedes didn't care. "The parties," he repeated.

  Dris Larbi looked at me again, scratching his beard.

  "That was different," he conceded after thinking it over. "Sometimes I organized meetings on the other side of the border...."

  Now Cespedes laughed sarcastically. "Those famous parties of yours," he said.

  "Yeah, well. You know . . ." The Rifeno was looking at him as though trying to remember how much Cespedes really knew, and then, uncomfortable, he turned his eyes away again. "People over there ..."

  "'Over there' is Morocco," Cespedes noted for my information. "He's referring to important people: politicians and police chiefs." He smiled foxily. "My friend Dris always had good contacts."

  The Rifefio smiled uneasily as he lit a low-nicotine cigarette. I asked myself how many things about him and his contacts had wound up in Cespedes' secret files. Enough, I figured, for Dris Larbi t
o grant us the privilege of this conversation.

  "She went to these meetings?" I asked.

  Larbi made a gesture of uncertainty. "I don't know. She may have been at some. And, well... You should ask her." He appeared to reflect for a while, studying Cespedes out of the corner of his eye, and then at last he nodded unhappily. "The fact is, toward the end she went a couple of times. I didn't want to know, because these particular meetings weren't to make money with the girls—they were another kind of business. I just threw in the girls for free. Compliments of the house, you might say. But I never told Teresa to come. ... She came because she wanted to. She asked to."

  "Why?"

  "No idea. Like I told you—you should ask her."

  "And she was going out with the Gallego then?" Cespedes asked.

  "Yeah."

  "They say she did certain things that he needed done," Cespedes prodded.

  Dris Larbi looked at him. Looked at me. Looked at him again. Why is he doing this to me? his eyes said. "I don't know what you're talking about, don Manuel."

  Cespedes laughed maliciously, arching his eyebrows. He was clearly enjoying this. "Abelkader Chaib," he said. "Colonel. Gendarmerie Royale ... That sound familiar?"

  "I swear I don't get it."

  "Don't get it?... Bullshit, Dris. I told you, this man is a friend of mine."

  We walked a few steps in silence while I tried to figure all this out. The Rifefio smoked, silently, as if unhappy about the way he'd told the story.

  "While she was with me she didn't get involved in anything," he suddenly said. "And I didn't have anything to do with her, either. I mean I never fucked her." He lifted his chin toward Cespedes, tacitly saying, Ask him.

  It was, as I said, public knowledge that Dris never got involved with any of his girls. And he had said that Teresa was good at keeping the books. The other girls respected her. La Mexicana, they called her. La Mexicana this and

  La Mexicana that. She clearly was a good-tempered girl, and although she hadn't gone to school much, her accent made her sound educated, with that big imposing vocabulary Latin Americans have, that makes them sound like members of the Royal Academy. Very reserved about her private life. Dris Larbi knew she'd had problems back in Mexico, but he never asked. Why should he? Nor did Teresa talk about Mexico; when somebody brought up the topic, she'd say one or two words, as little as possible, and change the subject. She was serious at work, lived alone, and never allowed customers to be confused about what her role was in the bar. She didn't have any girlfriends, either. She minded her own business.