Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  She was almost never this talkative, Lieutenant O’Farrell. Teresa did in fact get it, though, because she found herself intrigued by this new way of looking at clothes, and at herself. Until then, she had dressed one way or another in response to two clear objectives: pleasing men—her men—or being comfortable. Viewing clothes as a tool one needed in order to do one’s work better, as Patty had put it with a laugh—that was a new one. Getting dressed not just for comfort or seduction—or even elegance, or status. No, it was more subtle than that. . . . Clothes could express a mood, an attitude, a person’s power. A woman could dress like what she was or what she wanted to be, and that could make all the difference. There were other things you could learn, of course—manners, how to carry on a conversation, how to eat—provided you kept your eyes open.

  “And there’s nobody, Mexicana,” Patty had said, “whose eyes are more open than yours are. Fucking Indian bitch. You read people like a book.”

  . . . “And then, when you want to wear something dressier . . .” They were coming out of the dressing room, where Teresa had stood before the mirror in a cashmere turtleneck. “. . . nobody says you have to dress boring. The trick is that in order to wear certain things you have to know how to move. And stand. And be. Not everybody can wear everything. This, for example: Don’t even think about Versace. You’d look like a whore in Versace.”

  “Which is no doubt why you wear it sometimes.”

  Patty laughed. She was holding a Marlboro despite the “No Smoking” sign and several censorious looks from the saleswoman. One hand in the pocket of her knit jacket, which she wore over a dark gray skirt. The cigarette in the other. I’ll put it out right away, my dear, she’d said when she lit the first one. This was the third.

  “I’ve had training, Mexicana. I know when to look like a whore and when not to. But you . . . Remember that the people we deal with are impressed by classy types. Ladies.”

  “Please. I’m no lady.”

  “What do you know? Being one, looking like one, and becoming one—or never being anything—there’s a very fine line between all those things. . . . You’ll want to wear Yves Saint Laurent, things from Chanel and Armani for the more serious occasions. Crazy stuff like Galliano, you can leave for somebody else.”

  Teresa looked around. “Putting things together is hard.” She didn’t mind showing her ignorance to the saleswoman. It was Patty who spoke in a near-whisper.

  “Well, there’s one rule that never fails: Half and half. If you’re sexy from the waist down, from the waist up you’ve gotta be demure. And vice versa.”

  They left the shop with their bags and walked up Calle Larios. Patty made Teresa stop before every store window.

  “For everyday,” she went on, “the ideal thing is these transitional pieces. And if you stay with one label, make sure it has a little of everything.” She pointed out a suit dress, with a light black jacket with a round collar that Teresa thought was very chic. “Like Calvin Klein, for example. See? He’s got everything from sweaters to leather jackets to evening dresses.”

  They entered the store. It was elegant, and the sales staff wore uniforms—short navy-blue skirts and dark stockings. To Teresa they looked like executives in some gringo movie. All tall and svelte, with exquisite makeup—like models, or stewardesses. And very, very accommodating. I’d never be able to get a job here, she thought. Chale, what fucking money will do.

  “The ideal thing,” said Patty, “is to come to stores like this one, that have good clothes from several labels. Keep coming back, get some confidence. A relationship with a salesgirl is important—they know you, know your likes and dislikes, what looks good on you. They call you, tell you such-and-such just came in. They take care of you, my love—they spoil you.”

  Accessories were upstairs: Italian and Spanish leather, belts, bags, glorious shoes by famous designers. This place, thought Teresa, is better than Sercha’s in Culiacán, where the narcos’ wives and girlfriends went twice a year, at the end of each harvest up in the sierra—chattering like parrots, with their jewelry, their dyed hair, and their wads of U.S. dollars. She’d shopped there herself, back when she was with Güero Dávila. But the things she was buying now made her feel insecure. Maybe because she wasn’t sure they were really her: she’d traveled a long way, a really long way, and it was another woman who now looked out at her from the mirrors in these expensive shops.

  “And shoes are absolutely fundamental,” Patty was saying. “More than purses. Remember that no matter how well dressed you are, bad shoes make you look like a bag lady. Men can get away with bad shoes—like those hideous loafers with no socks that everybody started copying from fucking Julio Iglesias. But for us girls, it’s, like, shocking. Unpardonable.”

  They wandered through displays of perfumes and makeup, sniffing and trying everything on Teresa’s skin before they went off for prawns and mussels at El Tintero, on the beach at El Palo.

  “You Latin American girls,” Patty said, “love strong perfumes. Try to tone it down, eh? Makeup, too. When you’re young, makeup makes you look older. And when you’re old, it makes you look like an undertaker’s model. . . .” They both laughed uproariously at that. “You’ve got big, dark eyes, beautiful eyes, and when you wear your hair with that part down the middle and all pulled back tight, very picturesque, like a real Mexican peasant, you look dynamite.”

  She said this as she gazed deep into Teresa’s eyes, while the waiters moved back and forth through the tables set out in the sun with plates of fried eggs, sardines, potatoes alioli, calamari fritti. There was nothing superior or patronizing in her tone, just as when Teresa had arrived at El Puerto de Santa María and Patty had guided her through prison customs. Do this, don’t do that. But now Teresa sensed something different: an ironic twist to Patty’s mouth, in the wrinkles around her eyes when she smiled. You know what I’m wondering, thought Teresa—you can almost hear my thoughts. Why me, when I don’t give you what you’d really like to have? My position is simple: I allowed myself to be lured in by the money, and I’m loyal because I owe you a lot. But that wasn’t what you were looking for. So the question is, Why don’t you lie to me and betray me and forget me? Or why not yet?

  “Clothes,” Patty was going on, her expression unchanged, “have to fit the occasion. It’s always unsettling when you’re having lunch and a woman comes in with a shawl, or you’re having dinner and she comes in wearing a miniskirt. That shows lack of judgment, or upbringing. She doesn’t know what’s right, what the rules are, so she wears what looks to her like the most elegant thing she has, or the most expensive. That’s what tells you she’s nouveau.”

  Patty’s smart, Teresa told herself. Much smarter than I am, and she’s had everything. She even had a dream; when she was behind bars, it kept her alive. But it’d be nice to know what keeps her alive now. Apart from drinking like she drinks, and those girlfriends of hers from time to time, and snorting like there’s no tomorrow, and telling me all the things we’re going to do when we’re multimillionaires. I wonder. But I probably ought to stop wondering so much.

  “I’m nouveau,” Teresa said.

  It sounded almost like a question. She’d never used that word, or heard it, or read it in books, but she intuited what it meant. Patty laughed out loud.

  “Ha! Of course you are. In a way, sure. But you don’t have to advertise it. Soon you won’t be, don’t worry.”

  There was something dark in Patty’s gestures, Teresa decided. Something that seemed to pain her and amuse her at the same time. Maybe, Teresa suddenly thought, it’s just life.

  “Anyway,” Patty added, “if you make a mistake, the last rule is to pull it off with as much dignity as you can. After all, everyone makes mistakes once in a while.” She was still staring at Teresa. “With clothes, I mean.”

  More Teresas kept popping up during this time—strangers, unfamiliar women who had always been there, though she hadn’t known it. And some new ones appeared in the gray dawns and silences. She
discovered them with curiosity—sometimes, with surprise.

  That Gibraltar attorney, Eddie Alvarez, the one who’d been managing Santiago Fisterra’s money and then hardly showed up to defend Teresa, he’d met one of those women.

  Eddie was not a brave man. His dealings with the rough part of the business were what one would call peripheral—he preferred not to see or know about certain things. Ignorance, he’d said during our conversation at the Rock Hotel, is the mother of great wisdom and no little health. Which is why when he came home and turned on the stairway light and found Teresa Mendoza sitting on the stairs he jumped so hard that he dropped all the papers he was carrying.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

  Then he stood there speechless, leaning against the wall with the papers all over the floor—no intention of picking them up, no intention of doing anything except letting his heart stop thumping like a jackhammer in his chest. Meanwhile, Teresa, still sitting on the stairs, informed him slowly and in detail of the reason for her visit. She did it in her soft Mexican accent and with that air of a shy girl who seemed to have stumbled into all this by accident. No reproaches, no questions about the investments in paintings or the vanished money. Not a word about the year and a half in prison, or how the lawyer had washed his hands of her defense.

  “At night, things always seem more serious,” was all she said at first. “Things leave an impression, I suppose. Which is why I’m here, Eddie. To leave an impression on you.”

  The light on the stairway was on a timer; every ninety seconds or so it turned off. Teresa, from her seat on the stairs, would reach up and turn it on again, and the lawyer’s face would look yellow, his eyes behind his glasses would have a frightened intensity, and the glasses themselves would be sliding down his greasy, sweaty nose.

  “I want to leave an impression on you,” she repeated, sure that the lawyer had been pretty impressed for a week now, ever since the newspapers had published a story on the murder of Sergeant Iván Velasco, who had been stabbed six times in the parking lot of a disco as he headed, at four in the morning, drunk of course, for his brand-new Mercedes. By a drug addict, or a mugger prowling the parking lot. A robbery, that was all—watch, wallet, etc. But what made an impression on Eddie Alvarez was that the death of Sergeant Velasco had occurred exactly six days after another close acquaintance of his, Antonio Martínez Romero, alias Antonio Cañabota, had been found strangled in a pensión in Torremolinos, facedown and naked except for his socks, hands tied behind his back, apparently by a gay hustler who had approached Cañabota in the street about an hour before his demise. And putting two and two together would, in this case, be enough to leave an impression on anyone, assuming that “anyone” had enough memory—which Eddie Alvarez certainly did—to recall the role those two individuals had played in the Punta Castor affair.

  “I swear, Teresa, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “With what?”

  “You know. With anything.”

  Teresa bowed her head—she was still sitting on the stairs—considering the matter. The fact was, she knew that very well. Which was why she was there, instead of getting a friend of a friend to send a friend, as she’d done in the cases of Sergeant Velasco of the Guardia Civil and the hombre de confianza. For some time now, she and Oleg Yasikov had been doing each other little favors—you scratch my back, I scratch yours—and the Russian had people, drug addicts and muggers included, with picturesque abilities.

  Then, evidently having thought it over, Teresa lifted her head. “I need your services, Eddie.”

  The glasses slid down his nose again.

  “My services?”

  “Papers, banks, corporations. That sort of thing.”

  Then Teresa laid it out for him. And when she did—easiest thing in the world, Eddie, just a few corporations and bank accounts, and you as the front man—she thought how ironic it was, how Santiago would have laughed at all this. She also thought about herself as she talked, as though she were able to split into two separate women: one practical, telling Eddie Alvarez the reason for her visit—and also the reason he was still alive—and the other one weighing everything with a remarkable absence of passion, from outside or from a distance, through the strange gaze that she was casting on herself, feeling neither anger nor desire for revenge. The same woman who’d put out a contract on Velasco and Cañabota, not to settle scores, but rather—as Eddie Alvarez would have put it, and in fact later did—out of a sense of symmetry.

  Things should be what they were—accounts balanced and closets in order. And Patty was mistaken. It was not always the Yves Saint Laurent dresses that left the biggest impression on men.

  You’ll have to kill,” Oleg Yasikov had said. “Sooner or later.” He had said this to her one day when they were walking along the beach in Marbella, below the waterfront promenade, in front of one of Oleg’s restaurants, the Tsarevich—deep down, Yasikov was a sentimental guy—near the kiosk where Teresa had worked when she got out of prison.

  “Not at first, of course,” the Russian said. “Or with your own hands. Nyet. Unless you’re very passionate or very stupid. Not if you stay outside, just looking in. But you will have to do it if you go to the essence of things. If you are consistent and are lucky, and you last. Decisions. Little by little. You will be going into unknown territory, an obscure place. Yes.” Yasikov said all this with his head down and his hands in his pockets, looking at the sand before his expensive shoes—Patty would have approved, Teresa imagined. Alongside his six feet, three inches and his broad shoulders in a silk shirt a bit less sober than his shoes, Teresa looked smaller and frailer than she was. She wore a short skirt over her dark legs and bare feet, and the wind blew her hair into her face as she listened attentively.

  “Making your decisions,” Yasikov was saying, pausing, placing his words carefully one after another. “Right ones. Wrong ones. Sooner or later the job will include taking a life. If you’re smart, having someone else take it. In this business, Tesa”—he always called her that, as he seemed unable to pronounce her whole name—“you can’t get along with everybody. Or make everybody happy. No. Friends are friends until they aren’t anymore. And then you have to act quickly. But there is a problem. Discovering the right moment. Exactly when they stop being friends.

  “There is one necessary skill. Yes. In this business.” Yasikov pointed two fingers at his eyes. “Looking at a man and instantly knowing two things. First, how much he’s going to sell himself for. And second, when you’re going to have to kill him.”

  Early that year they outgrew Eddie Alvarez. Transer Naga and its front corporations—headquartered in the lawyer’s office on Line Wall Road—were doing all too well, and the enterprise needed a larger, more complex infrastructure than the one created by Eddie. Four Phantoms based at Sheppard’s marina and two under the cover of a sportfishing operation in Estepona, maintenance, payments to pilots and “collaborators”— including half a dozen police officers and Civil Guardsmen—were not terribly complicated, but the clientele was expanding, the money was flowing in, and there were frequent international payments, so Teresa realized that more complex investment and money-laundering techniques had to be used. They needed a specialist who knew how to navigate the legal loopholes with maximum profit and minimum risk. And I’ve got the man, said Patty. You know him.

  She knew him by sight. The first formal meeting took place in an apartment in Sotogrande. Teresa, Patty, and Eddie went, and there they met with Teo Aljarafe—Spanish, thirty-five years old, an expert in tax law and financial planning. Teresa remembered him immediately when Patty introduced them in the bar at the Hotel Coral Beach. She’d noticed him at the party at the O’Farrell estate in Jerez: tall, dark, thin, handsome. The thick black hair combed back, a little long at the neck, framing a bony face with that large aquiline nose she had remarked on. A very classic look, Teresa decided. The way you always imagined Spaniards to be, before you met them—thin and elegant, with that air of nobility that the
y almost never actually had.

  Now the four of them were sitting around a sequoia table with an antique coffee service, a trolley of liquor and glasses under the window that opened onto the terrace, offering a panoramic view of the harbor with its yachts and sailboats, the sea, and a long stretch of the coast, all the way down to the distant beaches of La Línea and the gray mass of Gibraltar. It was a small apartment with no telephone, no neighbors on either side, and one reached it directly from the garage by private elevator; Patty had bought it—from her own family—in the name of Transer Naga and furnished it as a place to hold meetings: good lighting, an expensive modern painting on one wall, a white plastic board with red, black, and blue erasable markers. Twice a week, and always immediately before any meeting held there, an electronic-security specialist recommended by Oleg Yasikov swept the room for bugs.

  “The practical part is nothing,” Teo was saying. “Justifying income and lifestyle: bars, discos, restaurants, laundries. What Yasikov does, what lots of people do, and what we’ll be doing. Nobody keeps track of the number of drinks or paellas you serve. So it’s time to open a serious line that goes in that direction. Interconnected or independent investments and corporations that justify every gallon of gas in your car. Lots of invoices, lots of paper. Treasury won’t hassle us if we pay enough taxes and everything’s straight on Spanish soil, unless there are judicial actions already under way.”

  “The old principle,” said Patty. “Don’t shit where you live.”

  Elegant, distracted, her blond hair cut almost to the scalp, she was smoking cigarette after cigarette; she would nod, look around as though she were no more than a visitor. She was acting as if this was just some entertaining adventure. Another in a series.

  “Exactly.” Teo nodded. “And if I have carte blanche, I’ll design the structure and present it to you all laid out, and I’ll fit in what you already have set up. Between Málaga and Gibraltar, there are plenty of places and opportunities. And the rest is easy: once the train is loaded with all the various corporations’ assets, we’ll create another holding company to pay out dividends and you two will remain insolvent. Easy.”