Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  The Gallego gave a crude, short laugh. “Well, you oughta tell me how you manage that.”

  “Maybe I’m just a little less stupid than you are.”

  What’s said is said, she thought. Clear and straight out. And now let’s see where these cabrones go. Teo was taking off and putting on the cap of his fountain pen. You’re not enjoying this much, either, she thought. Which is why you get paid what you get paid. The difference is that you show it, and I don’t.

  “Everything can change,” Siso Pernas said. “I mean for you.”

  Variant considered. Foreseen. Teresa took a Bisonte out of the pack in front of her, next to a glass of water and a leather portfolio. She did so as though she were thinking, and put the cigarette between her lips without lighting it. Her mouth was dry, but she decided not to touch the glass of water. The question is not how I feel, she told herself. It’s how I look.

  “Of course,” she admitted. “And I have a feeling it will. But I’m still just one person. With my people, but otherwise just one. My business is intentionally limited. Everybody knows that the merchandise I transport is not mine. I just transport it. That reduces my possible losses. And my ambitions. You people, however, have a lot of doors and windows that somebody can get to you through. Lots of choices if somebody wanted to hurt you. People you love, interests you’d like to keep . . . There are plenty of places to hit you where it would hurt.”

  She looked into the man’s eyes, cigarette in her mouth. Inexpressive. She sat like that, counting the seconds, until Siso Pernas, seeming to see the light, even if grudgingly, put his hand in his pocket, took out a gold lighter, and leaned over the table to offer her a light. Gotcha, she thought. You blinked. She thanked him with a nod.

  “And you have no doors and windows?” the Gallego asked at last, putting away the lighter.

  “You could try and see.” Teresa exhaled as she spoke, her eyes squinting a bit. “It would surprise you to know how strong somebody can be who doesn’t have anything to lose except herself. You have a very pretty wife, they say . . . A son.”

  Let’s get this over with, she told herself. You don’t have to frighten people all of a sudden. That can make them think there’s no way out, and then they might do something crazy. The art is in scaring the shit out of them little by little—let the fear seep in, and last, and keep them awake at night—because then fear becomes respect. The line is subtle, and you have to keep a steady hand to find it without going over it.

  “In Sinaloa we have a saying: I’m going to kill your whole family, and then dig up your grandparents and shoot them, and then bury them again. . . .”

  While she was talking, without looking at anyone she opened the portfolio in front of her and took out a press clipping: a photograph of a soccer team. It was the team that Siso Pernas, a huge soccer fan, put generous amounts of money into. He was the president of the club, and in the photograph—Teresa had laid it very carefully and gently on the table, between them—he was posing before a game with the players, his wife, and his son, a nice-looking boy of ten wearing a team shirt.

  “So don’t fuck with me.” Now she was looking the Galician straight in the eye. “Or as you say here in Spain, hagan el favor de no tocarme los cojones.”

  The sound of water behind the shower curtain. Steam. He liked to shower in very hot water.

  “They can kill us,” Teo said.

  Teresa was leaning on the door frame. Naked. She could feel the warm steam on her skin. “No,” she replied. “First they’ll try something less drastic, to test us. Then they’ll try to reach the agreement.”

  “They’ve already tried what you call less drastic—the investigation of the rubbers that Juárez was telling you about, they leaked that to Judge Martínez Pardo. They’ve sicced the Guardia Civil on us.”

  “I know. That’s why I played hardball. I wanted them to know we know.”

  “The Corbeira clan . . .”

  “That’s enough, Teo.” Teresa shook her head. “I control what I do.”

  “That’s true. You always control what you do. Or you sure make it look like you do.”

  Of the three sentences, Teresa reflected, you could have done without the third. But I guess here, you think you’ve got a right. The steam fogged up the mirror in the bathroom, making her a gray blur in it. Next to the washbasin, miniature bottles of shampoo and body lotion, a comb, soap in its wrapper. Parador Nacional de Cáceres. One of the national chain of inns. On the other side of the bed with its rumpled sheets, the window framed a medieval landscape: rocks outlined against the night, columns and porticos gilded by hidden spotlights. Híjole, she thought. Like in some gringo movie, but the real thing. Vieja España—old Spain.

  “Hand me a towel, please,” Teo asked.

  He was almost obsessively clean. He always showered before and after, as though to add a nice hygienic touch to the act of screwing. Meticulous, neat, one of those men that never seem to sweat or have a single bacteria on their skin. The men that Teresa remembered naked were almost all clean, or at least looked like they were, but none of them as much as Teo. He had almost no odor of his own; his skin was soft, with only the slightest, most indefinable masculine smell, the smell of soap and aftershave, as unassuming as everything else about him. After making love he always smelled like her—her skin, her saliva, the strong, dense odor of her wet sex, as though she were taking possession of the man’s body. Colonizing it. She handed him the towel, her eyes taking in his tall, thin frame, dripping in the shower stall. The black hair on his chest, legs, and sex. The calm, always welcome smile. The wedding ring on his left hand. She didn’t care in the least about that ring, and apparently he didn’t, either. Ours is a professional relationship—Teresa had said the only time, in the beginning, that he had tried to justify himself, or justify her, with a light, unnecessary remark—so cut the crap. Teo was smart enough to get it.

  “What you said about Siso Pernas’ son, was that for real?”

  Teresa didn’t answer. She had stepped toward the foggy mirror, wiping away some of the steam with her hand. And there she was, so blurred that it might not have been her at all, with the tousled hair, the big black eyes looking out at her like always.

  “Nobody would think so, seeing you that way,” he said.

  He was beside her, looking at her in the open patch in the steam-frosted glass, drying his chest and back with the towel. Teresa shook her head slowly. What do you think, she said wordlessly. He gave her an absentminded kiss on the hair and went on drying himself as he walked into the bedroom, while she stood where she was, her hands on the washbasin, looking at her blurry reflection. I hope I never have to show you, she thought, speaking inwardly to the man shuffling around in the next room. I hope I don’t.

  “I’m concerned about Patricia,” Teo said abruptly.

  Teresa went just to the door, not entering the bedroom, and looked at him. He had taken a perfectly ironed shirt out of his suitcase—the cabrón’s clothes never got wrinkled when he packed—and was unbuttoning it to put it on. They had a table reserved for a half-hour later at the Torre de Sande. A truly great restaurant, he had said. In the old part of the city. Teo knew all the truly great restaurants, all the “in” bars, all the elegant shops. Places as custom-made for him as the shirt he was about to put on. Like Patty—they seemed to have been born into these places: two society types whom the world always somehow owed, although he wore it better than Patty did. All of this so terrific, and so far from Las Siete Gotas, Teresa thought, where her mother—who had never kissed her—washed dishes in a tub in the yard and slept with drunk neighbors. So far from the school where the runny-nosed boys would lift Teresa’s skirt behind the schoolyard wall. Jack it off, bitch. For all of us. Give me and my boys a handjob or we’ll break your face. So far from the wood-and-zinc roofs, the dirt under her bare feet, the pinche poverty.

  “What’s wrong with Patty?”

  “You know what’s wrong with her. And it’s getting worse.”

&nb
sp; It was. Drinking and sniffing coke till you couldn’t see straight was a bad combination, but there was more. The Lieutenant was coming apart, very quietly. The word might be “giving up,” although Teresa couldn’t quite decide what she was giving up on. Sometimes Patty seemed to be like one of those shipwrecked sailors that stop swimming for no apparent reason. Glug, glug, glug. Maybe because they don’t think they’ll ever be rescued or get to land, or maybe just because they’re tired.

  “It’s her life—she’s of legal age to do what she wants with it,” she said.

  “That’s not the point. The point is whether that’s good for you or not.” Just like Teo. He wasn’t worried about O’Farrell, he was worried about the consequences of her behavior for Teresa. Is it good for you or not, boss.

  The listlessness, the lack of spirit, the distance from which Patty dealt with the few responsibilities she still had at Transer Naga—this was the dark side of the problem. During business meetings—she went to fewer and fewer, delegating her power to Teresa—she always seemed absent, or she made jokes that were out of place, and everything was like a joke to her. She spent a lot of money, she didn’t care, she turned serious things, which might mean a lot of money and resources and time invested, and not a few lives, into frivolities. A boat casting off and simply drifting away . . . Teresa wondered whether it was she herself who had relieved her friend of her obligations, or whether the distancing came from Patty, from the growing murkiness of her mind and her life. You’re the boss, she would constantly say. And I applaud, drink, snort, and look on with pride. Maybe it was both, and Patty had simply drifted with the course of things—the natural, inevitable course that everything had followed since the beginning.

  Maybe I was wrong about Edmond Dantès, Patty had remarked in Tomás Pestaña’s house. He wasn’t this, and you weren’t him. I misjudged you, I got you wrong. Or maybe, as she said on another occasion—her nose covered with white dust and her eyes blank—the only thing that’s happening is that sooner or later Abbé Faria always leaves the stage.

  Fucked up, and dying a slow death. And not caring. Those were the words for it, and the first of them was the worst in this business, which was so sensitive to any sort of scandal. The latest episode was quite recent: a short, squat, lowlife teenage girl, who had bad friends and tougher sentiments, had been openly hustling Patty. Until one particularly sordid night of excesses—drugs, hemorrhaging, a visit to the hospital at five in the morning—had threatened to wind up in the newspaper. And it would have, had Teresa and Teo not moved all the resources available to prevent it—money, favors, blackmail. They covered it up, deep.

  Shit happens, Patty said when Teresa talked to her about it.

  “It’s all so simple for you, Mexicana. You’ve got it all, and somebody to give you a cunt massage, to boot. So you live your life and let me live mine, if you don’t mind. Because I don’t stick my nose in your business, or anybody else’s. I don’t ask questions, you hear? I’m your friend. I paid for your friendship, and I’m still paying. I know the rules and I keep ’em. And you, who buy everything so easy, just let me buy mine. You always say it’s half and half, not just in business or money. Well, I agree. This is my free, deliberate, and puta half.”

  Even Oleg Yasikov had alerted Teresa about this. “Careful, Tesa. It’s not just money on the line, it’s your freedom and your life. The decision is yours. Of course. But maybe you should ask yourself. Yes. Questions. For example, what part of all this is your fault. Or your responsibility. What part isn’t. To what degree did you start all this, playing her games. There are passive responsibilities that are just as bad as the active ones. There are silences that we can’t say we didn’t hear absolutely clearly. Yes. From a certain point in a person’s life on, they’re responsible for what they do—and what they don’t do.”

  What would things have been like if . . . Teresa sometimes thought about that. If I had . . . The key might lie there, but she couldn’t see any way to look over that increasingly clear and inevitable barrier. She felt uncomfortable, or remorseful—it came over her in vague waves, as though it filled her hands and she didn’t know what to do with it. And that irritated her. Why did she have to feel this? she asked herself. What Patty had wanted never could be, and never was. Nobody deceived anybody, and if Patty really had harbored hopes, or intentions, in the past, she ought to have discarded them long ago. Maybe that was the problem. Everything was finished, or almost finished, and Lieutenant O’Farrell was left without even the goad of curiosity to make her live. Teo Aljarafe might have been Patricia O’Farrell’s last experiment with Teresa. Or her revenge. From then on, everything was simultaneously foreseeable and dark. And each of the two women would have to face whatever it was alone.

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

  There it is,” said Dr. Ramos. He had the hearing of a dog, Teresa decided. She herself couldn’t hear a thing, except the swooshing of the light waves on the beach. It was a calm night, and the Mediterranean was a black expanse out beyond the inlet at Agua Amarga, on the coast of Almería. The moon made the sand on the shore look like snow, and flashes from the Punta Polacra lighthouse—three every twelve or fifteen seconds, her old professional instincts told her—shone at the foot of the Sierra de Gata, six miles to the southwest.

  “All I can hear is the ocean,” she replied.

  “Listen.”

  She focused on the darkness, her ears straining. They were standing next to the Cherokee, with a thermos of coffee, plastic cups, and sandwiches, protected from the cold by sweaters and heavy slickers. The dark silhouette of Pote Gálvez paced back and forth a few yards away, guarding the dirt trail and the dry path that led down to the water.

  “Now I hear it,” she said.

  It was nothing more than a distant droning barely distinguishable from the sound of waves against the shore, but it was growing louder and louder, and it seemed very low, as though it came from the sea and not the sky. It sounded like a speedboat approaching at high velocity.

  “Good boys,” Dr. Ramos remarked.

  There was a touch of pride in his voice, like a man talking about his son or a talented student, but his tone was calm, as usual. This guy, thought Teresa, never loses his cool. She, however, was having a hard time controlling her uneasiness, making sure her voice came out with the serenity that the others expected. If they only knew, she said to herself. If they only knew. And even more so tonight, with what they had at stake. Three months in preparation for what would be decided in less than two hours, an hour and a half of which had already passed. The sound of engines was growing louder, and closer. The doctor brought his wristwatch up to his eyes before checking it with a quick flick of his lighter.

  “Prussian punctuality,” he said. “The right place and right on time.”

  The sound was coming closer and closer, and at very low altitude. Teresa peered into the darkness, and she thought she saw it—a small black dot, growing, just on the line between the shadowy water and the glimmering of the moon, still fairly far out.

  “Híjole,” she whispered to herself.

  It was almost beautiful. She had memories that allowed her to picture the sea viewed from the cabin, the muted lights on the instrument panel, the line of the shore silhouetted ahead, the two men at the controls, Almería VOR/DME at 114.1 on the dial to calculate ETA and distance above the water, dot-dash-dash-dash-dot-dash-dot, and then the coast sighted by moonlight, the search for landmarks in the flash from the lighthouse to the left, the lights of Carboneras to the right, the dark void of the inlet in the center. I wish I was up there, she thought. Flying by visuals like them, and with the balls to do it. Then the black dot got larger, still just above the water, while the sound of the engines became almost deafening—rooooarrr, as though the sound were coming straight at them—and Teresa made out a pair of wings materializing at the same altitude from which she and the doctor were looking at them. And then she saw the silhouette of the whole plane, fly
ing very low, no more than fifteen feet above the water, the two propellers whirling like silver disks in the moonlight. Jesus shit. An instant later, buzzing them with a roar that left a cloud of sand and dry seaweed in its wake, the plane pulled up, its left wing dropped as it turned, and it disappeared into the darkness inland, between the Sierra de Gata and the Sierra Cabrera.

  “There goes a ton and a half,” the doctor said.

  “It’s not on the ground yet,” Teresa replied.

  “It will be in fifteen minutes.”

  There was no reason to remain in darkness anymore, so the doctor rummaged around in his pants pockets, pulled out his lighter once more, lit his pipe, and then lit the cigarette that Teresa had just put between her lips. Pote Gálvez walked over with a cup of coffee in each hand. A heavy shadow, anticipating her needs and desires. The white sand muffled his footsteps.

  “¿Qué onda, patrona?”

  “Everything fine, Pinto. Thank you.”

  She drank the bitter brew, no sugar but laced with brandy, enjoying her cigarette spiked with hashish. I hope everything continues to be fine, she thought. The cell phone in the pocket of her slicker would ring when the stuff was in the four trucks waiting beside the rudimentary runway: a tiny airport abandoned since the civil war, in the middle of the Almería desert near Tabernas, with the closest village a little over ten miles away. That would be the last stage in a complex operation that linked a shipment of fifteen hundred kilos of cocaine hydrochloride from the Medellín cartel to the Italian groups. Another pebble in the shoe of the Corbeira clan, which still believed it had a monopoly on the movements of the white lady on Spanish soil. Teresa smiled to herself. Pissed, those Gallegos are going to be if they find out. But the Colombians themselves had asked Teresa to study the possibility of moving, in one huge shipment, a large cargo that would be loaded in containers in the port of Valencia for delivery in Genoa, and all she did was solve the problem. The drug, vacuum-sealed in ten-kilo packages and stuffed into cans of automobile grease, had crossed the Atlantic after being taken from the original ship off the coast of Ecuador, around the Galápagos Islands, and put on an old merchant marine boat, the Susana, sailing under the Panamanian flag. The cargo was unloaded in Casablanca, and from there, under the protection of the Gendarmerie Royale—Colonel Abdelkader Chaib was still on the best of terms with Teresa—it was trucked to the Rif, to a warehouse used by Transer Naga for preparing hashish shipments.