“Teresita . . .”
“Sí, señor.”
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 Patrón. God bless my journy 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 narco’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 Céspedes. “Explain that to me.”
“I just did.” My interlocutor pointed at me with two fingers, 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 Café 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 façades 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 España 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,” Céspedes 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.”
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 Céspedes all those things, although they might have made him a wise, seasoned bullfighter, a happy-go-lucky Gypsy, a Berber pirate, or an astute Rifeño 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, Céspedes, 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, Céspedes 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 López Fisterra?”
“Sure.” Céspedes 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 Céspedes 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 re
al name: Teresa Mendoza Chávez.
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 López Fisterra. The city was Melilla.
That afternoon Céspedes 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, Céspedes 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,” Céspedes 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,” Céspedes 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,” Céspedes 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 Céspedes 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,” Céspedes 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. Céspedes introduced the man as Dris Larbi—“My friend Dris,” he said, patting him on the back—and I found myself standing before a Rifeño with Spanish citizenship who spoke Spanish perfectly. We met in the Hippódromo 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,” Céspedes 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 Rifeño might justify his prudent respect for the former congressman.
It was my turn to be introduced. “He’s investigating the life of Teresa Mendoza.”
Céspedes 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 Céspedes broke out laughing.
“Relax,” Céspedes 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 official 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 t
he 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 Moët 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 pensión 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.
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