Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  1. I fell off the cloud I was riding

  2. They say the law spotted him, but they got cold feet

  3. When the years have passed . . .

  4. Let’s go where no one will judge us

  5. What I planted up there in the sierra

  6. I’m staking my life on it, I’m staking my luck on it

  7. They marked me with the Seven

  8. Kilo bricks

  9. Women can, too

  10. I’m in the corner of a cantina

  11. I don’t know how to kill, but I’m going to learn

  12. How ’bout if I buy you?

  13. I get planes off the ground in two and three hundred yards

  14. There’s gonna be more hats than heads before I’m done

  15. Friends I have where I come from, people who say they love me

  16. Unbalanced load

  17. Half my drink, I left on the table

  Afterword

  From

  More Praise for The Queen of the South

  “Full-speed-ahead narrative, outsized characters, and a degree of intellectual seriousness not ordinarily associated with bestseller-list fiction. The Queen of the South is complicated, lively, and . . . convincing. [Pérez-Reverte] knows his stuff, and brings all of it to life.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “Captivates the reader with a thoroughness and sophistication that Pérez-Reverte’s previous novels never achieved. In addition, Teresa emerges as his fullest and most intriguing protagonist to date . . . she is the author’s greatest achievement.” —The Baltimore Sun

  “Here is a novel with fast-paced action, psychological intrigue, and philosophical musings . . . Vividly depicted . . . it feels real.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Fans of Pérez-Reverte, whose work has been called both cerebral and swashbuckling, have been looking forward to this new book, and he rewards them handsomely for their patience. He is an amazing storyteller.” —USA Today

  “Mesmerizing . . . that rare blessing, a book by a mature writer at the top of his game. You are inexorably drawn into Teresa’s world.” —BookPage

  “A first-rate novel, magnificent in scope and gracefully written and so remarkably real, so tragically doomed, so mysteriously complex that one will be left wondering where Teresa is today.” —Hispanic magazine

  “A thriller with an almost meditative tone, the novel’s energy comes not only from the action scenes but also from the monologues in which Mendoza struggles with the multiple contradictions in her life . . . Readers . . . will be drawn in by the author’s remarkable eloquence and ability to plumb the recesses of a character’s psyche.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “Readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough . . . a gripping tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte was born in 1951 in Cartagena, Spain, where he currently lives. His five books, among them The Nautical Chart and The Flanders Panel, have been translated into twenty-eight languages in fifty countries and have sold millions of copies.

  Visit www.perez-reverte.com

  ALSO BY ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE

  The Flanders Panel

  The Club Dumas

  The Seville Communion

  The Fencing Master

  The Nautical Chart

  PLUME

  Published by Penguin Group

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  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Previously published in a Putnam edition.

  First Plume Printing, June 2005

  Copyright © Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 2002

  English translation copyright © Andrew Hurley, 2004

  This is a translation of La Reina del Sur.

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Putnam edition as follows:

  Pérez-Reverte, Arturo

  [Reina del sur. English]

  The queen of the South / by Arturo Pérez-Reverte ;

  translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68482-1

  I. Title

  PQ6666.E765R

  863’.64—dc22

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  To Elmer Mendoza, Julio Bernal,

  and César “Batman” Güemes.

  For the friendship.

  For the corrido.

  The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die. She knew it with such certainty that she froze, the razor motionless, her hair stuck to her face by the steam from the hot water that condensed in big drops on the tile walls. R-r-ring—r-r-ring. She stayed very still, holding her breath as though immobility or silence might change the course of what had already happened. R-r-ring—r-r-ring. She was in the tub, shaving her right leg, soapy water up to her waist, and goosebumps erupted on her naked skin as if the cold-water tap had just gushed. R-r-ring—r-r-ring. Los Tigres del Norte were on the stereo in the bedroom, singing about Camelia la Tejana. Smuggling and double-crossing, they were singing, were in-se-pár-able. She’d always feared that songs like that were omens, and then suddenly they turned out to be a dark and menacing reality. Güero had scoffed, but the ringing telephone showed how wrong a man could be. How wrong and how dead. R-r-ring—r-r-ring. She put down the razor, slowly cli
mbed out of the bathtub, and made her wet way into the bedroom, leaving a trail of watery footprints. The telephone was on the bed—small, black, and sinister. She looked at it without touching it. R-r-ring—r-r-ring. Terrified. R-r-ring—r-r-ring. The words to the song and the buzzing ring of the telephone mixed together, the ringing becoming part of the song. Because smugglers, Los Tigres sang, are merciless men. Güero had used the same words, laughing as only he laughed, while he stroked the back of her neck and tossed the phone into her lap. If this thing ever rings, it’s because I’m dead. So run. As far and as fast as you can, prietita—my little dark-skinned one. And don’t stop, because I won’t be there anymore to help you. And if you get to wherever you’re going alive, have a tequila in memory of me. For the good times, mi chula. For the good times . . . That was how brave Güero Dávila was, and how irresponsible. The virtuoso of the Cessna. The king of the short runway, his friends called him, as did don Epifanio Vargas, his employer—because he was a man able to get a small plane, with its bricks of cocaine and bales of marijuana, off the ground in three hundred yards, a man able to skim the water on black nights, up and down the border, eluding the radar of the Federales and those vultures from the DEA. A man able, too, to live on the knife-edge, doing runs of his own behind his bosses’ backs. And a man able, in the end, to lose.

  The water dripping off her body made a puddle around her feet. The telephone kept ringing, and she knew there was no need to answer—what for, to confirm that Güero’s luck had run out? But it’s not easy to accept the fact that a simple telephone ring can instantly change the course of a life, so she finally picked up the phone and put it to her ear.

  “They wasted Güero, Teresa.”

  She didn’t recognize the voice. Güero had friends, and some of them were loyal, bound by the code that used to apply back when they’d transport pot and bundles of cocaine inside the tires of cars they drove across the bridge in El Paso—the bridge that linked the Americas in more ways than one. It might be any one of them: maybe Neto Rosas, or Ramiro Vázquez. She didn’t recognize the voice and didn’t fucking need to; the message was clear. They wasted Güero, the voice repeated. They got him and his cousin both. Now it’s his cousin’s family’s turn, and yours. So run. And don’t stop running.

  Then whoever it was hung up, and she looked down at her wet feet and realized that she was shivering from cold and fear, and she realized that whoever the caller was, he’d used the same words Güero had. She pictured the anonymous man sitting, nodding attentively, in a cloud of cigar smoke, amid the glasses of a cantina, Güero before him, smoking a joint, his legs crossed under the table the way he always sat, his pointed-toe snakeskin cowboy boots, his scarf around his neck under his shirt, the aviator jacket on the back of the chair, his blond hair cut short, his smile knife-sharp, self-assured. You’ll do this for me, carnal, if they clean my clock. You’ll call and tell her to run and not stop running, because they’ll want to waste her, too.

  The panic hit without warning, and it was very different from the cold terror she’d been feeling up to now. Now it was a blast of confusion and madness that made her give a quick, hard scream and put her hands to her head. Her legs couldn’t hold her, and she crumpled onto the bed, where she sat stock-still. She looked around: the white-and-gold crown moldings; the garish landscapes on the walls, with couples strolling at sunset; the porcelain figurines she’d collected over the years to fill the shelves, make a pretty, comfortable home. She knew this was not her home anymore, and that in a few minutes it would be a trap. She looked at herself in the big mirror on the dresser—naked, wet, her dark hair sticking to her face, and between the strands of hair her black eyes open wide, bulging in horror. Run, and don’t stop, Güero and the voice on the phone had told her. So she started running.

  1. I fell off the cloud I was riding

  I always thought that those narcocorridos about Mexican drug runners were just songs, and that The Count of Monte Cristo was just a novel. I mentioned this to Teresa Mendoza that last day, when (surrounded by bodyguards and police) she agreed to meet me in the house she was staying in at the time, in Colonia Chapultepec, in the town of Culiacán, state of Sinaloa, Mexico. I mentioned Edmond Dantès, asking if she’d read the novel, and she gave me a look so long and so silent that I feared our conversation would end right there. Then she turned toward the rain that was pittering against the windows, and I don’t know whether it was something in the gray light from outside or an absentminded smile, but whatever it was, it left a strange, cruel shadow on her lips.

  “I don’t read books,” she said.

  I knew she was lying, as no doubt she’d lied countless times over the last twelve years. But I didn’t want to insist, so I changed the subject. I’d tracked her across three continents for the last eight months, and her long journey out and back again was much more interesting to me than the books she’d read.

  To say I was disappointed would not be quite accurate—reality often pales in comparison with legends. So in my profession the word “disappointment” is always relative—reality and legend are just the raw materials of my work. The problem is that it’s impossible to live for weeks and months obsessed with someone without creating for yourself a definite, and invariably inaccurate, idea of the subject in question—an idea that sets up housekeeping in your head with such strength and verisimilitude that after a while it’s hard, maybe even unnecessary, to change its basic outline. We writers are privileged: readers take on our point of view with surprising ease. Which was why that rainy morning in Culiacán, I knew that the woman sitting before me would never be the real Teresa Mendoza, but another woman who was taking her place, and who was, at least in part, created by me. This was a woman whose history I had reconstructed piece by piece, incomplete and contradictory, from people who’d known her, hated her, and loved her.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I’m still lacking one episode of your life. The most important one.”

  “Hm. One ‘episode.’”

  “Right.”

  She’d picked up a pack of Faros from the table and was holding a plastic lighter, a cheap one, to a cigarette, after first making a gesture to stop the man sitting at the other end of the room, who was lumbering to his feet solicitously, left hand in his jacket pocket. He was an older guy, stout—even fat—with very black hair and a bushy Mexican moustache.

  “The most important one?”

  She put the cigarettes and the lighter back down on the table, perfectly symmetrically, without offering me one. Which didn’t matter to me one way or the other, since I don’t smoke. There were several other packs there, too, an ashtray, and a pistol.

  “It must be,” she added, “if you’re here today. Must be really important.” I looked at the pistol. A SIG-Sauer. Swiss. Fifteen 9-millimeter cartridges per clip, in three neat staggered rows. And three full clips. The gold-colored tips of the bullets were as thick as acorns. “Yes,” I answered coolly. “Twelve years ago. Sinaloa.”

  Again the contemplative silence. She knew about me, because in her world, knowledge could be bought. And besides, three weeks earlier I’d sent her a copy of my unfinished piece. It was the bait. The letter of introduction so I could get what I needed and finish the story off.

  “Why should I tell you about that?”

  “Because I’ve gone to a lot of trouble over you.”

  She was looking at me through the cigarette smoke, her eyes slightly Mongolian, somehow, like the masks at the Templo Mayor. She got up and went over to the bar and came back with a bottle of Herradura Reposado and two small, narrow glasses, the ones the Mexicans call caballitos, “little horses.” She was wearing comfortable dark linen pants, a black blouse, and sandals, and I noticed that she was wearing no diamonds, no stones of any kind, no gold chain around her neck, no watch—just a silver semanario on her right wrist, the seven silver bangles I’d learned she always wore. Two years earlier—the press clippings were in my room at the Hotel San Marcos—th
e Spanish society magazine ¡Hola! had included her among the twenty most elegant women in Spain. At about the same time, El Mundo ran a story about the latest police investigation into her business dealings on the Costa del Sol and her links with drug traffickers. In the photo, published on page one, you could see her in a car with the windows rolled up partway, protected from reporters by several bodyguards in dark glasses. One of them was the heavyset guy with the moustache who was sitting at the other end of the room now, looking at me as though he weren’t looking at me.

  “A lot of trouble,” she repeated pensively, pouring tequila into the glasses.

  “Right.”

  She sipped at it, standing up, never taking her eyes off me. She was shorter than she looked in photos or on television, but her movements were still calm and self-assured—each gesture linked to the next naturally, as though there were no possibility of improvisation or doubt. Maybe she never has any doubts about anything anymore, I suddenly thought. At thirty-five, she was still vaguely attractive. Less, perhaps, than in recent photographs and others I’d seen here and there, kept by people who’d known her on the other side of the Atlantic. That included her profile in black-and-white on an old mugshot in police headquarters in Algeciras. And videotapes, too, jerky images that always ended with big gruff gorillas entering the frame to shove the lens aside. But in all of them she was indisputably Teresa, with the same distinguished appearance she presented now—wearing dark clothes and sunglasses, getting into expensive automobiles, stepping out onto a terrace in Marbella, sunbathing on the deck of a yacht as white as snow, blurred by the telephoto lens: it was the Queen of the South and her legend. The woman who appeared on the society pages the same week she turned up in the newspapers’ police blotter.