Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Quihubo, carnala. I ask myself how other people see me, and I hope they see me from way far away.

  What was that? The need for a man? Órale. Falling in love. No, gracias, not anymore.

  “Free” was perhaps the word, despite its grandiloquence, its poetry. She didn’t even go to mass anymore. She looked up, at the dark ceiling, and saw nothing. They’re pouring me one for the road, José Alfredo was singing just then, and she sang along. No, I won’t be going just yet—right now all I want is to hear “The Woman Who Left” one more time.

  She shivered. On the sheet, beside her, was the torn photograph. Being free made you very cold.

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

  The installations of the Guardia Civil in Galapagar are on the outskirts of the village, which is near El Escorial: smaller houses for the guardsmen’s families and a larger building for the headquarters offices, with the snowy gray landscape of the mountains in the background. Directly behind—one of life’s little paradoxes—some nice-looking prefabs where a community of Gypsies live. The two populations inhabit the place in a live-and-let-live proximity that gives the lie to so many of García Lorca’s clichés about the Heredias, Camborios, and tricorne-wearing soldiers.

  After identifying myself at the gate, I left my car in the parking lot, under the eye of the soldier at the entrance. A tall, blonde guard—in her uniform she was green down to the ribbon tying the ponytail that emerged from under her beret—led me to Captain Víctor Castro’s office: a small room with a computer on the desk and a Spanish flag on the wall, next to which were hanging, whether as decoration or trophies I never learned, a Mauser Coruña from 1945 and a Kalashnikov AKM assault rifle.

  “All I can offer you is a cup of really terrible coffee,” he said.

  I accepted his offer, and he himself brought me a cup from the machine in the hallway, stirring the tarry black liquid with a plastic spoon. It was, indeed, unspeakably bad. As for Captain Castro, he was one of those men one likes at first sight: serious, with efficient manners, impeccably turned out in his olive-green fatigues and buzz-cut gray hair, a moustache that was turning gray, and a gaze as direct and open as the handshake he’d given me when we met. He had the face of an honest man, and it may have been that, among other things, that had led his superiors, some time back, to put him in charge of the Delta Four group, on the Costa del Sol, for five years. But according to my sources, Captain Castro’s honesty proved to be something of an inconvenience even to his superiors. That, perhaps, explained why I was visiting him in an out-of-the-way village up in the Sierra de Madrid, in a command post with thirty guardsmen the rank of whose commanding officer should not have been as high as that of Captain Castro, and why it had taken me a good bit of work—calling in favors, twisting a few arms—to persuade Guardia Civil national headquarters to authorize this interview. As Captain Castro himself noted that afternoon, philosophically, when he politely accompanied me to my car, Boy Scouts never have much of a career in this line of work.

  Now we were talking about specifically his career. He was sitting at the desk in his little office, with his eight multicolored ribbons sewn on the left side of his jacket, across from me with my coffee. Or to be more precise, we were talking about the day Teresa Mendoza first came to his attention, back when he was investigating the murder of a Civil Guardsman in the Manilva detachment, one Sergeant Iván Velasco, whom Castro described—he was very careful in his choice of words—as an agent of questionable honesty. Others whom I’d consulted about this individual—among them the ex-cop Nino Juárez—had not been quite so circumspect, defining him instead as a thoroughgoing asshole son of a bitch.

  “Velasco was murdered in a very suspicious way,” Castro explained. “So we worked on that for a while. Certain overlaps with episodes of smuggling, among them the matter of Punta Castor and the death of Santiago Fisterra, led us to link Velasco’s murder to Teresa Mendoza’s release from prison. Although nothing could ever be proved, that was what led me to her, and in time I became a specialist in the Mexicana: surveillance, videotapes, telephone taps—with a court order, of course. . . . You know the drill.” He looked at me, taking for granted that I did in fact know the drill. “It wasn’t my job to pursue drug trafficking, just investigate that world. The people the Mexicana bought and corrupted, including bankers, judges, and politicians. And people in my line of work, too: Customs officers, Civil Guardsmen, cops.”

  The word “cops” made me nod, interested. Surveillance on the guys doing surveillance. Enforcement on the enforcers.

  “What was Teresa Mendoza’s relationship to Commissioner Nino Juárez?”

  He hesitated, and he seemed to be calculating the worth, or currency, of each detail he was going to give. Then he made an ambiguous gesture.

  “There isn’t a lot I can tell you that the newspapers didn’t publish at the time. . . . The Mexicana managed to infiltrate even the DOCS. Juárez, like so many others, wound up working for her.”

  I set my styrofoam cup on the desk and leaned forward.

  “She never tried to buy you off?”

  Captain Castro’s silence became uncomfortable. He looked at the cup inexpressively. For a moment I feared the interview was over. It’s been a pleasure, sir. Adiós and hasta la vista.

  “I understand many things, right?” he said at last. “. . . I understand, although I can’t condone, the fact that somebody earning a very low salary might see the opportunity if someone says to him, Listen, tomorrow when you’re at such and such a place, instead of looking this way look that way. And in exchange, that person sticks out his hand and gets a wad of bills. That’s only human. Everybody has his own way of looking at things. And we all want to live better than we live now. . . . The thing is, some people have limits and others don’t.”

  He fell silent again and raised his eyes. I tend to doubt people’s innocence, but that look I didn’t doubt. Although one never knew . . . Anyway, people had talked to me about Captain Víctor Castro, number three in his class, seven years in Intxaurrondo, one as a volunteer in Bosnia, distinguished service medal with red ribbon.

  “Of course they tried to buy me,” he said. “It wasn’t the first time, or the last.” Now he allowed himself a gentle, almost tolerant smile. “Even here in this village people try from time to time, on a different scale. A ham at Christmas from a builder, an invitation to dinner from a city council-man . . . I’m convinced that every man and every woman has a price. Maybe mine was too high. I don’t know. But whatever the case, me they didn’t buy.”

  “Which is why you’re here?”

  “This is a good posting,” he said as he looked at me impassively. “Quiet. I’ve got no complaints.”

  “Is it true, as people say, that Teresa Mendoza at one point had contacts in the Guardia Civil high command?”

  “You should ask the high command about that.”

  “And that you worked with Judge Martínez Pardo in an investigation that was halted by the minister of justice?”

  “I’ll tell you the same as before: Ask the Ministry of Justice.”

  I nodded, accepting his rules. For some reason, that terrible coffee in a styrofoam cup increased my liking for him. I remembered former Commissioner Nino Juárez at the table in Casa Lucio, savoring his Viña Pedrosa ’96. How had my interlocutor put it a minute ago? Ah, yes. Everybody has his own way of looking at things.

  “Talk to me about the Mexicana,” I said.

  At the same time I took a copy of the photograph shot from the Customs helicopter out of my pocket, and I laid it on the table: Teresa Mendoza spotlighted in the middle of the night with a cloud of spray sparkling around her, her face and hair wet, her hands on the shoulders of the man piloting the speedboat. Rushing at fifty knots toward the León Rock and his destiny. “I know that photo,” said Captain Castro. But he sat there looking at it pensively for a long time before pushing it back toward me.

  “She was very smart and very fast,” he added a
moment later. “Her rise in that very dangerous world was a surprise to everyone. She took big risks and was lucky. . . . From the woman riding with her boyfriend in that speedboat to the woman I knew, it’s a big jump, I’ll tell you. You’ve seen the press reports, I presume. The photos in ¡Hola! and all that. She got refinement, manners, a bit of culture. And she became powerful. A legend, they say. The Queen of the South. The reporters called her that. . . . To us, she was always just La Mexicana.”

  “Did she kill people?”

  “Of course she killed people. Or had people killed. In that business, killing is part of a day’s work. But she was clever. No one could ever prove anything. Not a killing, not a shipment of drugs, nada, zip, nothing. Even the tax guys in Treasury were after her, to see if they couldn’t get at her that way, for tax evasion or some other offense. Nothing . . . I suspect she bought off the agents that were investigating her.”

  I thought I detected a hint of bitterness in his words. I gave him a querying look, but he leaned back in his chair—Let’s not take that road, he seemed to be saying. It’s a little off the subject, and not my area of expertise.

  “How did she go so far so fast?”

  “I told you—she was very intelligent. And lucky, of course. She came on the scene just when the Colombian cartels were looking for alternative routes in Europe. But besides that, she was an innovator. . . . If the Moroccans now have a monopoly on all the traffic on both sides of the Strait, it’s thanks to her. She started depending more on those people than on the drug smugglers from Gibraltar or Spain, and she turned a disorganized, almost homegrown organization into an efficient business operation. She even changed the look of her employees. She made them dress right, none of those heavy gold chains and tacky silk shirts—simple suits, cars that didn’t call attention to themselves, apartments instead of big houses, taxis to go to appointments. . . . And so, Moroccan hashish aside, she was the one who set up the cocaine networks that served the eastern Mediterranean, and she managed to elbow out the other mafias and Gallegos that wanted to work it. Nothing she moved was her own, as far as we could learn. But almost everybody depended on her.”

  The key, Captain Castro went on to tell me, was that the Mexicana used her technical experience with speedboats for large-scale operations. The traditional boats had been Phantoms with those stiff hulls that made them prone to break up on the open sea, and Teresa was the first to realize that a semi-rigid boat could tolerate bad weather and bad seas better because it got banged up less. So she put together a flotilla of Zodiacs, or “rubbers,” as they were known in the Strait: inflatable boats that in the last few years had become available in lengths up to fifty feet, sometimes with three motors—the third not for extra speed, since the boat’s limit was around fifty knots, but rather to maintain power. The larger size also allowed the boat to carry reserves of fuel. Greater range, more cargo aboard—it was the perfect solution. That way she could work in good or bad seas in places quite a distance from the Strait, such as the mouth of the Guadalquivir, Huelva, and the desert coastlines of Almería. Sometimes she would go as far as Murcia and Alicante, using fishing boats or private yachts, which could lay far offshore, on the high seas, as relay boats. She carried out operations with ships that came directly from South America, and she used the Moroccan connection, the entrance of cocaine through Agadir and Casablanca, to organize air transports from runways hidden in the mountains of the Rif to small Spanish landing sites that weren’t even on the maps. What they called “bombings” were also in fashion: twenty-five-kilo packages of hashish or coke wrapped in fiberglass and strapped with flotation devices that they’d throw into the ocean to be recovered by fishing boats or speedboats. Nothing like that, Captain Castro said, had ever been done in Spain before.

  Teresa Mendoza’s pilots, recruited from among the daredevils that flew crop-spraying planes, could take off and land on dirt highways and two-hundred-yard runways. Using the moon, they would fly low between mountains or just skim the surface of the ocean, taking advantage of the fact that Moroccan radar was almost nonexistent and that the Spanish air-detection system had, or has—the captain made a huge circle with his hands—holes this big in it. Not to mention that there was always somebody who, palm duly greased, would close his eyes when a suspicious blip appeared on the screen.

  “We confirmed all this later,” Castro said, “when a Cessna Skymaster crashed near Tabernas, in Almería, loaded with two hundred kilos of cocaine. The pilot, a Polish guy, was killed. We knew it was one of the Mexicana’s operations, but nobody could ever prove the connection. For that operation or any other.”

  She stopped in front of the window of the Alameda Bookstore. Recently she’d been buying a lot of books. There were more and more of them in her house, lined up neatly on shelves or laid randomly on the furniture. She would read until late at night, or sit during the day on the terrace facing the ocean. Some were about Mexico. In this Málaga bookstore she’d found several authors from her homeland: detective novels by Ricardo Garibay, a True History of the Conquest of New Spain by one Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who had been with Cortés and Malinche, and a three-volume collection of essays by Octavio Paz—she’d never heard of this Paz before, but he seemed to be a very important writer in Mexico. This volume was titled El Peregrino en Su Patria—The Pilgrim in His Homeland. She read the entire thing—slowly, with difficulty, sometimes skipping the many pages she couldn’t understand. But some of it stuck: a trace of something new that made her think about the country she had been born in—that proud, violent land, so good and so miserable at the same time, always so far from God and so close to the fucking gringos—and about herself. They were books that made her think about things she had never thought about before.

  She also read the newspapers and tried to watch the news on TV. That and the telenovelas, the soaps that ran in the evening, although now she spent more time reading than anything else. The advantage of books, as she discovered when she was in El Puerto de Santa María, was that you could appropriate the lives, stories, and thoughts they contained, and you were never the same person when you closed them as when you had opened them for the first time. Very intelligent people had written some of those pages, and if you were able to read with humility, patience, and the desire to learn, they never disappointed you. Even the things you didn’t understand stuck here, in a corner of your head, ready for the future to give them meaning, to turn them into beautiful or useful lessons. Thus The Count of Monte Cristo and Pedro Páramo, which for very different reasons remained her favorites—she had read them so many times she’d lost count—were now familiar journeys, which she had managed to almost completely master. Juan Rulfo’s book was a challenge from the beginning, and now it gave her a sense of satisfaction to turn its pages and understand: I wanted to go back, because I thought I might find the heat I’d just left, but I could tell the cold was coming from inside me, from my own blood. Fascinated, shivering with pleasure and fear, she had discovered that all the books in the world were somehow about her.

  And now she was studying the display in the store window, seeing whether there might be some title or cover that attracted her. With unknown books, she tended to let herself be guided by the covers and the titles. There was one by a woman named Nina Berberova that she’d read because of the portrait of a young woman playing the piano on the cover, and she had liked the story so much that she had sought out other titles by the same author. Since Berberova was Russian, Teresa gave the book—The Accompanist, it was called—to Oleg Yasikov, who read nothing but the sports page or things related to the times of the czar. Loony, that pianist, the gangster had said a few days later. Which showed that he had at least opened the book.

  The morning was a sad one, a bit cool for Málaga. It had rained, and a misty haze hung over the city and port, turning the trees on the Alameda gray. Teresa had spotted a novel in the window called The Master and Margarita. The cover was not particularly attractive, but the author’s name looked Russian, and Te
resa smiled at the idea of Yasikov and the face he’d make when she gave him the book. She was about to go in and buy it when she saw her reflection in a mirror in the corner of the window: hair pulled back and falling over her shoulders, silver earrings, no makeup, an elegant three-quarter-length leather coat over blue jeans and brown leather boots. Behind her, the light traffic toward the Tetuán bridge, and only a few people out on the sidewalk. All at once everything inside her froze, as though her blood and heart and thoughts had turned to ice, or stone. She felt it before she could think about it. Even before she knew how to interpret it. But it was unmistakable, familiar, and menacing: The Situation.

  She’d seen something, she thought in a rush, not turning around, standing motionless before the mirror that allowed her to look behind her, over her shoulder. Frightened. Something that didn’t go with the scene but that she couldn’t identify. One day—she remembered Güero Dávila’s words—someone will come up to you. Someone you may know. She carefully scanned the visual field the mirror gave her, and she became aware of the presence of two men crossing the street from the median strip of the Alameda, walking unhurriedly, dodging cars. There was something familiar about both of them, but she didn’t realize that until a few seconds later. First, a detail caught her eye: despite the cold, both men were carrying their jackets folded over their right forearms. Then she felt the blind, irrational, ancient fear she’d thought she would never feel again. And only when she had hurried into the bookstore and was about to ask the clerk if there was a back way out, did she realize that she had recognized Gato Fierros and Potemkin Gálvez.

  She ran again. Actually, she hadn’t stopped running since the telephone rang in Culiacán. A flight with no direction, no destination, that had carried her to unforeseen people and places. Hardly had she hurried out the back door of the bookstore, her tense muscles awaiting a bullet, when she began to run down Calle Panaderos, not caring whether she attracted attention. She ran past the market—once more the memory of that first flight—and kept on straight until she reached Calle Nueva. Her heart was beating at sixty-eight hundred rpms, as though a souped-up V-8 were inside her chest. Vroom, vroom. She turned to look back from time to time, hoping against hope that the hit men were still waiting for her to come out of the bookstore. She slowed down when she almost slipped on the wet sidewalk. Calmer now, more rational. You’re going to crack your skull, she told herself. So take it easy. Don’t be stupid—think. Not about what those two assholes back there are doing, but about how to get rid of them. How to save yourself. You’ll have time to think about the why of all this later, if you’re still alive.