The Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  He was still a reporter, he said. Like back then. A fucking infantryman reporter. But with honor. The truth was, he didn't know how to do anything else. He liked his job, although it still paid the same ratshit salary as ten years back. But thank goodness his wife brought home a second check. And there were no kids to say, "Papi, I'm hungry!"

  "That," he concluded, "gives you more liberte, egalite, and fraternite."

  He paused to return the greeting of some local politicos in dark suits who were just sitting down at a nearby table—a low-level minister of culture and another one of urban affairs, he whispered. "Never even graduated from college." And then he went on with Teresa Mendoza and the Gallego. He would run into them from time to time in La Linea and Algeciras, her with her Indian-looking face, kind of pretty, really, very dark-skinned ...

  "... And those big eyes ... vengeance in those eyes. She was not what you'd call a knockout, she was a little thing, no bigger than this, but when she fixed herself up she was good-looking. With good tits, by the way. Not big, but..." Here Lobato brought his hands together and extended his index fingers, like the horns of a bull. "A little tacky in the wardrobe department, same style as the molls of the other hashish and tobacco runners: skintight pants, T-shirts, high heels, all that. Good hair, good makeup, good nails, but the rest... slutty, you know? But she didn't mix much with the other girls. She had just enough class, although it was hard to say why, exactly. Maybe the way she talked, because she spoke softly, with an accent that was sweet and cultured. With those nice archaisms that Mexicans use. When she pulled her hair back into a bun, with a part down the middle, you could see the class even clearer. Like Sara Montiel in Veracruz. Twenty-something, probably."

  It had struck Lobato that she never wore gold, only silver. Long dangling earrings, bracelets. All silver, and not much of it. Sometimes she would wear seven bangles on one arm—a semanario, he thought she called it. Cling, cling. He remembered her by that clinkling.

  "In the street she started earning respect—little by little at first, you know. First, because the Gallego had a reputation, people respected him. And second, because she was the only one of those girls that went out shoulder to shoulder with her man. Early on, people thought it was a joke— Whoa, look at that, you know. Even the Customs agents and the Guardia Civil had their little laugh. But when word got out that she had the same balls as any man, things changed."

  I asked him why Santiago Fisterra had such a good reputation, and Lobato made a circle with his index finger and thumb, as though indicating he was okay. "He was straight with people. Quiet, dependable. Very much the Gallego, in the good sense of the word. I mean, he wasn't one of those callous, dangerous cabrones, or one of those guys you could never depend on, or some fucking ghost—appearing out of nowhere and vanishing just as fast— dabbling in hashish running. He was discreet, never made trouble. Straight-shooting. Not one of these fucking wise guys, and no fooling around. Not an amateur. He went about his business like he was working in a bank or an insurance office or something. The other guys, the guys from Gibraltar, would tell you tomorrow at three, and tomorrow at three they'd be screwing their girlfriend or off drinking in some bar, and you'd be leaning against a lamppost with spiderwebs up and down your back, looking at your watch. But if the Gallego told you, Tomorrow I'll be there, that was it. He'd be out there, with his sidekick, even if there were fifteen-foot waves. A man of his word. A professional. Which was not always a good thing, because he made certain other ... entrepreneurs look bad.

  "His dream was to save enough money to go into something else. And that may have been why he and Teresa got on so well. They looked like they were in love, of course. Holding hands, hugging each other, you know. Standard stuff. But there was something about her that wouldn't allow her to be completely controlled. I don't know if I'm explaining myself. Something that forced you to ask yourself whether she was sincere—and I'm not talking about hypocrisy or anything like that. I'd put my hand in the fire and swear she was an honest girl.... I'm talking about something else. I'd say that Santiago loved her more than she loved him. Capisce?... because Teresa was always kind of distant. She'd smile, she was discreet and a good woman, and I figure they fucked like rabbits. But there was that something, you know?... Sometimes, if you looked carefully—and looking carefully is my job, my friend—there was something in the way she looked at all of us, even at Santiago, that implied that she wasn't in it for the whole ride. Like she had some bread and ham wrapped in wax paper, and a bag with a few clothes and a train ticket ready somewhere up in the closet. You'd see her laugh, drink her tequila—she loved tequila, of course—kiss her man, and all of a sudden there'd be something in her eyes, a strange expression ... like she was thinking, This can't last."

  This can't last, she thought. They had made love almost all afternoon, like there was no tomorrow, and now they were walking under a medieval arch in the old city walls of Tarifa. Won from the Moors—Teresa read on a tile set into the archway—during the reign of King Sancho IV the Brave, September 21, 1292.

  "An appointment, work," Santiago had said. "Half an hour by car. We can take advantage of the trip to have a drink, take a walk through the town. And then have pork ribs at Juan Luis."

  So there they were, with the sunset almost gray from the salt spray raised by the wind blowing in from the east, across from the beach at Los Lances, on the Atlantic, with the Mediterranean on the other side and Africa hidden in the haze that the setting sun was slowly darkening in the east. Slowly—the way they were walking, their arms about each other's waist, wandering through the narrow whitewashed streets of the town where the wind always blew, from whatever direction, almost every day of the year. That afternoon it was blowing hard, and before walking into the town proper they had sat in the Cherokee and watched the waves break on the rocks along the edge of the parking lot at the foot of the old wall, alongside the Caleta, the shattered water spattering the windshield. And sitting there, comfortable, happy, listening to music from the radio, her head resting on Santiago's shoulder, Teresa saw, in the distance, a sailboat sail out of the harbor, its three masts looking like something out of an old movie. It was sailing slowly out toward the Atlantic, its bow plunging into the high waves as the strongest gusts overtook it, the boat blurred in the gray curtain of wind and spray like some ghost ship from another time, one that had been sailing for centuries. Then they'd gotten out of the car and walked down the most protected streets toward the center of Tarifa, looking into shop windows. The summer season was over, but the terrace under the awning and the interior of Cafe Central were still full of suntanned, athletic-looking foreigners. Lots of blond, blue-eyed types, lots of gold earrings, lots of T-shirts with company logos and city names. Windsurfers, Santiago had said the first time they were there. The latest craze. People will do the strangest things.

  "I wonder if you'll make a mistake someday and tell me you love me."

  She turned to look at him when she heard his words. He was not upset with her, or in a bad mood. It was not even a reproach. "I love you, cabron."

  "Of course you do." He was always making this joke. In his easygoing way, watching her, inciting her to talk, provoking her.

  "You'd think it cost you money," he would say. "You're so cool.... You've got my ego, or whatever you call it, beat to a pulp." And then Teresa would hold him, kiss his eyes, say I love you, I love you, I love you, over and over. Pinche Gallego piece of shit. And he would laugh as though it didn't matter to him, as though it were nothing but a simple pretext for conversation, a joke, and she were the one that should be reproaching him. Stop, stop. Stop! And in a minute they would stop laughing and stand facing each other, and Teresa would feel powerless at all the things that she couldn't do, while the male eyes would look at her fixedly, resignedly, as if crying a little inside, silently, like some kid running after the older boys that were leaving him behind. A dry, unspoken grief that made her feel so tender, and then she would be almost sure that maybe she did really, a
ctually love this man. And each time this happened, Teresa would repress the impulse to raise her hand and caress Santiago's face in some way hard to know, explain, feel, as if she owed him something and could never repay him.

  "What are you thinking about?"

  "Nothing."

  I wish this would never end. I wish this existence somewhere between life and death, suspended above some strange abyss, might go on until one day I could say words that are true again. I wish his skin and his hands and his eyes and his mouth could erase my memory, and I could be born again, or die once and for all, so that I could say old words as though they were new, as though they didn't sound to me like betrayal or a lie. I hope I have—I wish I had, we had—enough time for that.

  They never talked about Güero Dávila. Santiago was not one of those men that can talk about other men, nor was she one of those women that does. Sometimes, when he lay breathing quietly beside her in the darkness, very close, Teresa could almost hear the questions. That still happened, but for a long time the questions were just habit, the routine whisper of silences. In the beginning, during those first days when men, even the ones just passing through, try to make obscure—inexorable—demands that go beyond mere physical intimacy, Santiago asked some of those questions aloud. In his own way, of course. Not particularly explicit, or not explicit at all. He circled like a coyote, attracted by the fire but not daring to come in. He had heard things. Friends of friends that had friends. And, well. ..

  She'd had a man, she summarized one day, tired of seeing him slinking around the same old topic when the unanswerable questions left unbearable silences.

  "I had a man that was good-looking and brave and stupid," she said. "A great guy. A pinche cabron like you—like all of you, but this one in particular got me when I was just a kid, without a world, and in the end he screwed me good, and I had to run because of him, and you can see how far I had to run if I came all the way to fucking Spain or whatever the fuck this place is. But it's no business of yours if I had a man or not, because this man I'm talking about is dead—very, very dead. He got taken out, and he died, the way we all die, but early. And what that man was or was not in my life is my business, not yours."

  And after all that, one night when they were screwing, clutching each other for dear life, and Teresa's mind was deliciously blank, stripped of memory or future—nothing but dense, thick present, a warm intensity to which she abandoned herself without remorse—she opened her eyes and saw that Santiago had stopped and was looking at her very close in the semi-darkness, and she also saw that he was moving his lips, and when she finally came back to where they were and paid attention to what he was saying, the first thing she could think was, Stupid Gallego, stupid, stupid, stupid, like all men, with those questions at the absolutely worst fucking time—him or me, him better, me better, love me, loved him. As though it were that easy, just sum everything up that way, life in black and white, good and bad, one better than the other, one worse. And she felt a dryness in her mouth and in her soul and between her legs, a new anger bursting inside, not because he was asking questions again but because he was elementary, and awkward, and was seeking confirmation for things that had nothing to do with him, and it wasn't even jealousy, but habit, self-image, some absurd stupid male thing, the hang-ups of a macho that takes the woman out of the herd and refuses to allow her any life but the life that he plants in her womb. Which was why she wanted to insult him, and hurt him, and she shoved him away as she spat out Yes, the truth, of course—to see what he would think, this idiotic Gallego. What did he think—that life started with him and his fucking prick?

  "I'm with you because I've got no better place to go, or because I learned that I don't know how to live alone, without a man—which could be one man or another, no big deal—and I couldn't care less why he chose me or I chose the first one that came along." And getting up, naked, still not free of him, she slapped him, hard, a slap that made Santiago turn his face. And she tried to hit him again, but this time it was him that hit her, kneeling above her, returning the slap with a violence that was calm, dry, without anger— she was surprised, perhaps—and then he stood there above her, still on his knees, unmoving, while she cried and cried, tears that sprang not from her eyes but from her chest and throat, as she lay still, on her back, insulting him—Pinche gallego cabron de la chingada, pendejo, hijo de puta, hijo de tu pinche madre, cabron, cabron, cabron. Then he tumbled down beside her and lay there awhile not saying anything, not touching her, ashamed and confused, while she lay on her back, also not moving but growing calmer little by little, until she felt her tears drying on her face. And that was all, and it was the only time. Neither one ever again raised a hand against the other. Nor were there, ever again, any questions.

  Four hundred kilos," said Canabota in a half-whisper. "First-quality oil, seven times purer than the normal stuff. The cream of the crop."

  He had a gin and tonic in one hand and an English cigarette with a gold filter in the other, and he alternated puffs at the cigarette and sips at his drink. He was short and fat, and his head was shaved, and he sweated all the time, to the point that his shirts were always wet under the arms and at the collar, where there gleamed an inevitable gold chain. Maybe, thought Teresa, it was his job that made him sweat that way. Because Canabota—she had no idea if that was his surname or some kind of nickname—was what in professional slang was called un honbre de confianza, a man of trust: a local agent, a go-between, an intermediary between two groups of drug traffickers. Specializing in logistics, in organizing the shipment of hashish from Morocco and ensuring its delivery. That included hiring runners like Santiago, and also seeing to the complicity of certain local authorities. The sergeant of the Guardia Civil—thin, fiftyish, dressed in civilian clothes—who accompanied him that afternoon was one of the many instruments that had to be played to make the music. Teresa knew him from other times, and she knew that he was posted somewhere around Estepona. There was a fifth person in the group: a Gibraltar attorney named Eddie Alvarez, a small man with thin, kinky hair, very thick glasses, and nervous hands. He had a modest law office located down by the harbor in the British colony, with ten or fifteen front operations with their signs on the door. He was in charge of controlling the money that Santiago was paid in Gibraltar after each run.

  "This time we have to send notaries," Canabota added.

  "No way." Santiago shook his head, very calmly. "Too many people on board. What I've got is a Phantom, not a fucking ferryboat."

  Notaries were witnesses that drug traffickers put on speedboats to ensure that everything went according to plan: one for the providers, who were usually Moroccan, and another for the buyers. Canabota didn't seem to like this new wrinkle.

  "She"—he tilted his head toward Teresa—"can stay on land."

  Santiago didn't take his eyes off the hombre de confianza as he shook his head. "I don't see why she should. She's my crew."

  Canabota and the guardsman turned to Eddie Alvarez disapprovingly, as though they blamed him for the refusal. But the lawyer shrugged. It's useless, his gesture said. I know the story, and besides, I'm just here to watch. What the fuck do I care.

  Teresa ran her finger over the condensation on the outside of her glass. She had never liked going to these meetings, but Santiago always insisted. "You take the same risks I do," he would tell her. "You have a right to know what goes down and how it goes down. Don't talk if you don't want to, but it can't hurt you to pay attention. And if these guys don't like you being there, fuck 'em. Fuck all of'em. I mean, their women are playing with themselves at home, watching TV, they're not risking their cunts against the Moros five or six times a month."

  "Usual payment?" Eddie Alvarez asked, looking out for number one.

  Payment would be made the day after the delivery, Canabota confirmed. One-third direct to a BBV account in Gibraltar—the Spanish banks in the colony were branches not of the main bank in Madrid, but rather the bank in London, and that made for delightful
financial blindspots—and two-thirds in hand. The two-thirds in dineros, as the Spaniards called money that was never reported on tax forms. Although they'd need some fake invoices for the bank. The usual red tape.

  "Make the arrangements with her," Santiago said. And he indicated Teresa.

  Canabota and the guardsman exchanged an uncomfortable glance. What a fucking thing, their silence said. Bringing a chick into this. Lately, Teresa had been increasingly involved in the bookkeeping side of the operation. That included control of expenses, doing the books, telephone calls in code, and periodic visits to Eddie Alvarez. And also dealing with a corporation headquartered in the lawyer's office, the bank account in Gibraltar, and the justifiable money invested in low-risk ventures—something without too many complications, because Santiago was not used to having his life exposed too much to banks. He'd opted for what the lawyer called a minimal infrastructure. A conservative portfolio, he also called it, when he was wearing a tie and decided to get technical. Until recently, and despite his mistrustful nature, Santiago had depended almost blindly on Eddie Alvarez, who charged him a commission even for simple monthly payments when he invested legal money. Teresa had changed that, suggesting that everything be used for safer and more profitable investments, and even that the lawyer make Santiago a partner in a bar on Main Street, to launder part of their income. She didn't know anything about banks or finance, but her experience as a money changer on Calle Juarez in Culiacan had given her some very clear ideas. So gradually she took over the money end of the business, putting papers in order, finding out what could be done with the money instead of immobilizing it in some hiding place or checking account. Skeptical at first, Santiago finally had to yield to the evidence: she had a good head for numbers, and was able to foresee possibilities that never entered his mind. Above all, she had incredible common sense. Unlike him—the son of the Galician fisherman was one of those people who keep their money in plastic bags in the back of the closet—Teresa always saw the possibility that two and two made five. So despite Eddie Alvarez' initial reticence, Santiago put it to him clearly: She had a say in the money.