Life’s little ironies, I thought. After the scandal a few years earlier that cost Juárez—then known simply as Nino Juárez, or Chief Juárez—his career, here he was again: impeccable, triumphant, with that interpolated G. that gave his name a new respectability and this new look of a man with money coming out his ears, not to mention new power, new influence, new influential friends, and more men and matériel under his command than ever before. You never ran into men like him in the unemployment lines; they knew too much about people, sometimes more than people knew about themselves. The articles in the press, the file at Internal Affairs, the decision from National Police Headquarters relieving him of service, the five months in jail in Alcalá-Meco—that was all old news. How lucky to have friends. Old comrades-in-arms who return favors, and who have money or good contacts for securing them. There’s no better unemployment insurance than a list of the skeletons in people’s closets. Especially if you’d helped people hide them there.
“Where should we begin?” he asked, trying his appetizer.
“At the beginning.”
“Then it’s going to be a long lunch.”
We were in Casa Lucio, in the Cava Baja. Not only was I paying for his lunch—huevos con patatas, tenderloin of beef, a Viña Pedrosa ’96—I had also, in a sense, bought his presence there. I did it my own way, using some of my old tactics. After his second refusal to talk about Teresa Mendoza, but before he’d had the chance to tell his secretary not to put through any more of my calls, I put it to him straight out. “With you or without you,” I said, “the story is going to get told. So you can choose between being in the story—your role described in explicit detail, down to a photograph of your first communion—or staying out of it and wiping the sweat off your forehead with a great deal of relief.”
“And what else?” he asked.
“Not a cent,” I replied. “But I’d be delighted to buy you dinner—and dessert. You gain a friend, or almost a friend, and I owe you one. You never know. . . . So what do you think?” He was smart enough to think just what I thought, so we agreed on the terms: nothing compromising attributed to him, few dates or details that could be traced back to him.
And there we were. It’s always easy to come to an agreement with a son of a bitch. What’s hard is the other ones—but there aren’t many of those.
“The half-ton part is true,” Juárez confirmed. “High-quality stuff, hardly cut at all. Brought in by the Russian mafia, who at the time were beginning to get a foothold on the Costa del Sol and open up their first contacts with the South American narcos. That load had been the first big operation, and when it failed, it put a damper on the Colombian connection for a long time. . . . Everybody figured the half-ton was lost, and the guys from South America were laughing at the Russkis for whacking O’Farrell’s boyfriend and his two partners without making them talk first. . . . ‘I ain’t doin’ any more business with amateurs,’ Pablo Escobar was reputed to have said when he heard what happened. And now all of a sudden the Mexicana and the O’Farrell chick show up with five hundred keys out of thin air.”
“How did they get their hands on the cocaine?”
“That I don’t know. Nobody found out, as far as I know. But whatever— it showed up on the Russian market, or rather started showing up. And it was Oleg Yasikov that brought it there.”
I had that name in my notes: Oleg Yasikov, born in Solntsevo, a mafioso neighborhood in Moscow. Military service with what was still the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Owner of discotheques, hotels, and restaurants on the Costa del Sol. And Nino Juárez filled in the rest of the picture for me. Yasikov had washed up on the Málaga coast in the late eighties—thirty-something, polyglot, quick-witted, just stepped off an Aeroflot flight with $35 million to spend. He started by buying a disco in Marbella that he named Jadranka, which took off right away, and within a couple of years he was the boss of a solid money-laundering infrastructure based on hotels and real estate, apartments and big pieces of land near the coast. A second line of businesses, created around the disco, consisted of heavy investments in Marbella nightlife, with bars, restaurants, and luxury whorehouses staffed by Slavic women brought in directly from Eastern Europe. All very clean, or almost clean: low-profile money-laundering only. But the DOCS had confirmed his ties to the Babushka, a powerful Solntsevo organization made up of ex-cops and Afghanistan veterans who specialized in extortion, stolen cars, smuggling, and white slavery and who were very interested in branching out into the drug trade. The group already had one hook-up in northern Europe: a sea route that linked Buenaventura, in Colombia, with Saint Petersburg via Göteborg, in Sweden, and Kotka, in Finland. And Yasikov was given the assignment of, among other things, exploring an alternative route through the eastern Mediterranean, a hook-up that would be independent of the French and Italian mafias that the Russians had used up till then as intermediaries. That was the context.
The first contacts with the Colombian narcos—the Medellín cartel, specifically—consisted of simple trades of arms for cocaine, with very little money changing hands: shipments of Kalashnikovs and RPGs from Russian arms depots. But things never quite jelled. The lost drugs were just one of several fuck-ups that had made Yasikov and his Moscow associates . . . uncomfortable, shall we say. And all of a sudden, when Yasikov and his friends had almost forgotten about them, those five hundred keys fell out of the sky on them.
“I’ve been told that the Mexicana and the other girl went directly to Yasikov, to negotiate,” Juárez explained. “In person, with a sample, a package still in the original wrapper . . . Apparently, the Russian took it hard at first and then really badly. But the O’Farrell chick stood up to him—she told him she’d paid her debt already, that the bullets that hit her when her boyfriend got whacked had reset the counter to zero. That they’d played the game straight, and now they wanted their reward.”
“Why didn’t O’Farrell and Teresa just distribute the drugs wholesale themselves?”
“There was too much of it for beginners to handle. And Yasikov would not have liked it.”
“Was it that easy to tell where it came from?”
“Sure.” With expert motions of his knife and fork, the ex-cop cut himself a bite of the tenderloin served on a pottery plate. “Everybody knew whose girlfriend O’Farrell had been.”
“Tell me about the boyfriend.”
“The boyfriend’s name”—Juárez grinned contemptuously as he cut again—“was Jaime Arenas, Jimmy, to his friends. From a good family in Seville. Pansy-ass, if you’ll pardon the French. High-dollar interests in Marbella and family business dealings in South America. He was ambitious and he thought very highly of himself—thought he was smarter than those stupid drug lords, you know. So when he got his hands on that cocaine, he decided to play a little game with the tovarich fellow. Hadn’t dared try anything like that with Pablo Escobar, but the Russians didn’t have the reputation back then that they have now. Thick-necked apes, I imagine he figured them for. So he put the snow in hiding while he negotiated an increase in his commission, despite the fact that Yasikov had already paid cash money to the Colombians for their part—this time there’d been more cash than weapons. Jimmy started making excuses, beating around the bush, not taking phone calls, until the Russian finally lost his patience. Lost it so bad that he whacked Jimmy and his two partners, all at the same time.
“The Russians were never very subtle.” Juárez clucked his tongue critically. “And they’re probably less so now.”
“How did Yasikov and Jimmy Arenas ever get hooked up in the first place?”
Juárez pointed his fork at me, as though congratulating me on the question. Back then, he explained, the Russian gangsters had one major problem. Like now, but more so. Which is that they stuck out like sore thumbs. You could see them a mile away: big, gruff, blond, with those ham hands and those cars and those showy whores always on their arms. Not to mention how truly pitiful they were at languages. The minute they set foot in Miami or any other Ameri
can airport, the DEA and the state and local police were on their ass like the spandex on those whores. So they needed intermediaries, fronts, that kind of thing.
Jimmy Arenas played the part pretty well at the beginning; he started out by getting them liquor from Jerez to smuggle into northern Europe. He also had good contacts in Latin America, and he muled for the hot discos in Marbella, Fuengirola, and Torremolinos. But the Russkis wanted their own networks: import-export. The Babushka, Yasikov’s friends in Moscow, could already get blow wholesale by using Aeroflot flights from Montevideo, Lima, and Bahía, which weren’t under the same kind of surveillance as the ones from Rio or Havana. So half-kilo shipments could be smuggled in via the airport at Cheremetievo on an individual basis, but the pipeline was too narrow. The Berlin Wall had just come down, the Soviet Union was crumbling, and coke was the hot thing in the new Russia of fast and easy money.
“And we now know that the Russians had not underestimated the market,” Juárez went on. “Just to give you an idea of the demand, a gram sold today in a disco in Saint Petersburg or Moscow is worth thirty or forty percent more than in the U.S.”
The ex-cop chewed his last mouthful of meat, then helped it down with a long sip of wine.
“Imagine,” he went on, “Comrade Yasikov scratching his head trying to figure out a way to thread the needle big-time again. And all of a sudden a half-ton of coke appears that doesn’t require setting up a whole operation from Colombia—it’s right there, no risks, all pure profit, practically speaking.
“And as for the Mexicana and the O’Farrell girl, like I said, there was no way for them to do it on their own. . . . They didn’t have the money or the connections or the infrastructure to put five hundred kilos on the street, and the first gram that showed up on a corner somewhere, the whole fucking sky would have fallen on them: the Russkis, the Guardia Civil, my people. . . . They were smart enough to see that. Only an idiot would have started by dealing a little here, a little there, and before the Guardia or my guys were able to cuff ’em, they’d have been stuffed in the trunk of a car, probably in several well-carved pieces. R.I.P.”
“But how could they know they wouldn’t wind up like that anyway? . . . That the Russians would keep their part of the deal?”
“They couldn’t,” Juárez said. “They just decided to risk it. And Yasikov must’ve taken a shine to them. Especially to Teresa Mendoza, who even proposed a couple of variants on the deal.”
Did I know about that Gallego that had been her boyfriend? Yeah? Well, that was where her experience in all this came from. The Mexicana had a past. And she had something else it took—she had a tremendous pair of balls. Juárez’ outstretched fingers made a circle the size of a dinner plate.
“And another thing. You know how some girls have this calculator between their legs, clickety-click, and ka-ching, the bill comes out? Well, the Mexicana had a calculator here”—he tapped his temple—“in her head. There’s one eternal truth about women—sometimes you hear the song of a siren, and what you end up with is a sea wolf.”
Saturnino G. Juárez had to know that better than most. I silently remembered the size of his bank account in Gibraltar, which had been aired in the press during his trial. Back then, Juárez had a little more hair and wore just a moustache; that was his look in my favorite photograph, in which he posed between two uniformed colleagues at the door of a court in Madrid. And look at him now, after paying the modest price of five months in prison and expulsion from the National Police Corps—calling the waiter over to order a cognac and a Havana cigar, to aid digestion. Not a lot of evidence, bad jury instructions from the judge, very able lawyers. I wondered how many people owed him favors, including Teresa Mendoza.
“So, bottom line,” Juárez concluded, “Yasikov made the deal. Besides, he was on the Costa del Sol to invest, and the Mexicana looked like an interesting investment. So he kept his word like a gentleman. . . . And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Oleg Yasikov looked at the package on the table: white powder in a double layer of plastic shrink-wrap sealed with wide, thick tape, still obviously intact. A thousand grams, vacuum-packed, just the way it was packaged in the underground laboratories in Yari, in the Amazon jungle.
“I admit,” he said, “that you two are playing it pretty cool. Yes.”
He spoke Spanish well, Teresa thought. Slowly, with many pauses, as though carefully setting one word after another. His accent was very soft, and in no way did he resemble the evil, terrorist, drug-smuggling Russians in movies, the kind who keel Amehricahn enehmy. Nor did he look like a mafioso or a gangster. His skin was light, his eyes big, bright, and childlike, with a curious mixture of blue and yellow in the iris, and his straw-colored hair was short, like a soldier’s. He was wearing khaki pants and a navy-blue shirt, the cuffs turned up to reveal a diver’s Rolex on the left wrist, powerful forearms with a dusting of blond hair. The hands resting at each side of the package, not touching it, were big, like the rest of his body, and on one finger was a heavy gold wedding ring. He looked healthy, strong, and clean. Patty O’Farrell had said that he was also—and especially—dangerous.
“Let me see if I understand. You—you two girls—offer to return a shipment of goods that belongs to me, but only if I pay for it again. How do you call that? . . .” He reflected a moment, almost amused, seeking the word. “Extortion?”
“That,” said Patty, “is taking things way too far.”
She and Teresa had discussed this for hours, backward and forward, front and back, since the trip to the Marrajos Caves and until just an hour before coming to this meeting. All the pros and cons, over and over. Teresa wasn’t convinced that their arguments would be quite as effective as Patty thought they would, but it was too late now to turn back. Patty—tasteful makeup for the occasion, expensive dress, self-assurance in keeping with her role as a high-powered female executive—started to explain again, although it was clear that Yasikov got it the first time, the minute they put the brick on the table. This, of course, came after the Russian—with an apology that sounded at best neutral—had ordered two bodyguards to pat them down for hidden microphones. “Technology,” he said, shrugging.
After the gorillas closed the door, he’d offered them a drink; they both declined, although Teresa’s mouth was dry. Then he sat down behind the table, ready to listen. Everything was neat and tidy—not a piece of paper in sight, not a file folder. Walls the same cream color as the wall-to-wall carpet, paintings that looked expensive, a large Russian icon inlaid with a great deal of hammered silver, a fax in one corner, a multiline telephone and a cell phone on the table. An ashtray. An enormous gold Dupont lighter. Chairs of white leather. Through the large windows in the office—the top floor of a luxury apartment house in Santa Margarita—you could see the curve of the coast and the line of surf on the beach all the way down to the breakwaters, and the masts of moored yachts, and the white houses of Puerto Banús.
“Tell me one thing,” Yasikov suddenly interrupted Patty’s clumsy explanation. “How did you do it? . . . Go to the place where it was hidden. Bring it here without calling attention to yourselves. Yes. You have taken risks. I think. You are still taking them.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Patty told him.
The gangster smiled. Come on, that smile said, tell the truth. It’ll be all right. His was a smile that made you want to trust him, Teresa thought as she watched him. Or distrust so many other things that you wind up trusting him.
“Of course it matters,” Yasikov replied. “I looked for this merchandise. Yes. I didn’t find it. I made an error. About Jimmy, I mean. I didn’t know that you knew. . . . Things would be different, no? How time flies. I hope you’ve recovered. After the incident.”
“Perfectly recovered, thank you.”
“I should thank you for one thing. Yes. My lawyers said that you never mentioned my name in the investigations and interrogations. No.”
Patty frowned sarcastically. In the tanned t
riangle of her cleavage one could see the scar from the exit wound.
“I was in the hospital,” she said. “With holes in me.”
“I mean later.” The Russian’s eyes were almost innocent. “The interrogations and the trial. That part.”
“You see now that I had my reasons.”
Yasikov reflected on her reasons.
“Yes. I see. But still, your silence saved me some trouble. The police thought you knew nothing. I thought you knew nothing. You have been patient. Yes. All these years . . . There had to be some motivation, yes?” He tapped his chest. “Inside.”
Patty took out another cigarette, which the Russian, despite having the enormous Dupont on the table, made no move to light for her, even when it took several seconds for her to find her own lighter in her purse. Stop shaking, Teresa thought, looking at Patty’s hands. Control that twitching in your fingers before the son of a bitch notices and this tough-girl façade starts cracking and this whole thing goes to la chingada.
“The packages are still hidden where they were. We only brought one.”
The discussion in the cave, Teresa remembered. The two of them inside, counting packages in the beam from the flashlights, half euphoric and half scared shitless. One for now, while we think—and leave the rest, Teresa had insisted. Taking it all with us now is suicide, so let’s not be stupid. I know they shot you and all, but I didn’t come to your lovely country as a tourist, either, you blond bitch. Don’t make me tell you the whole story, which I’ve never told you so far. A story that has no resemblance to yours—since you managed to get shot wearing Carolina Herrera. Don’t fuck with me. In this kind of deal, when you’re in a hurry, the best thing you can do is go slow.
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