There you go, thought Teresa. Straight where I was figuring we’d be going. “Well, I don’t think so, Sergeant,” Teresa replied very serenely. “Because unless you had something concrete, which you don’t, I’d be in your headquarters there just long enough for my attorneys to shove it up your ass. . . . With compensatory and punitive damages thrown in for good measure.”
“There’s no reason to be that way,” said Captain Castro calmly. “No one’s accusing you of anything.”
“I’m sure of that. That nobody’s accusing me of anything.”
“Certainly not Sergeant Velasco.”
This is a trap, Teresa thought. And she put on her Aztec mask.
“Sorry? . . . Sergeant who?”
The officer looked at her with cold curiosity. You’re damn fine, Teresa thought, bien padre. With those good manners and that gray hair and that nice official, gentlemanly moustache. The bitch, however, ought to wash her hair more often.
“Iván Velasco,” the captain said slowly. “Guardia Civil. Deceased.”
Sergeant Moncada leaned forward again. Brusquely.
“A pig. You know anything about pigs, señora?” She said this with ill-repressed rage.
Maybe she’s just in a shitty mood, thought Teresa. Or maybe it has something to do with being a redhead. Or maybe she’s just overworked, or unhappy with her husband—who the hell knows. Maybe she just needs a good screw. And it can’t be easy being a woman in her line of work. Or maybe they take turns: good cop, bad cop. With a cabrona like they think I am, they decide the girl’s going to be the bad cop. Logical. Like I give a fuck.
“Does this Velasco have something to do with the potassium permanganate?” asked Teresa.
“Be nice, now.” The tone of voice did not sound friendly; the sergeant was digging something out from between her teeth with a fingernail. “Don’t go pulling our leg.”
“Velasco kept bad company,” Captain Castro explained, clearly, as he always did. “And he was killed some time ago, just about when you got out of prison. Remember? . . . Santiago Fisterra, Gibraltar, and all that? When you didn’t even dream of being what you’ve become today.”
Teresa’s expression gave away nothing of what she might or might not remember. You’ve got squat, she thought. You just came to pull my chain.
“Well, you know, I don’t think I do,” she said. “I don’t think I can place this Velasco.”
“Can’t place him,” remarked the sergeant. She almost spat it out. She turned to her boss as if to say, What do you think, Captain? But Castro was looking out the window, as though thinking about something else.
“Actually, we can’t connect you,” Sergeant Moncada went on. “Besides, it’s water under the bridge, right?” She licked her thumb again and consulted her notebook, although it was clear she wasn’t reading anything there. “And that other guy, Cañabota, that got killed—that name’s not familiar, either, I suppose? . . . The name Oleg Yasikov ring any bells? . . . And you never heard of hashish or cocaine or Colombians or Galicians?” She stopped herself, glumly, to let Teresa say something, but Teresa didn’t open her mouth. “. . . Of course. You deal in real estate, the stock market, Jerez wineries, local politics, financial paradises, charity, and dinners with the governor of Málaga.”
“And the movies,” added the captain drily. He was still turned toward the window, with an expression as though he were thinking about almost anything else. An expression almost melancholy.
The sergeant raised a hand. “It’s true. I’d forgotten that you were also into movies.” Her tone was becoming more and more insulting—even vulgar, as though so far she had repressed it, or were now using it on purpose, as a provocation. “Between your multimillion-dollar businesses and your fancy lifestyle, with the paparazzi making you a star, you must feel like you’re pretty much untouchable.”
I’ve been provoked by better than you, Teresa said to herself. Either this bitch is incredibly naive, despite the venom, or they really have nothing to hang on to.
“Those paparazzi,” she replied very calmly, “are now involved in court cases that won’t soon be over for them. . . . And as for you, do you really think I’m going to play cops and robbers with you?”
It was the captain’s turn. He had slowly turned back toward her, and was looking at her again.
“Señora. The sergeant and I have a job to do. That includes several ongoing investigations . . .” He cast a none-too-trusting glance at the sergeant’s notebook. “The only purpose of this visit is to tell you that.”
“How nice, how incredibly nice. Telling me like this, I mean.”
“You see? We just wanted to talk for a while. Get to know you better.”
“And,” the sergeant put in, “maybe make you a little nervous.”
Her boss shook his head.
“Señora Mendoza is not one to get nervous. She’d never have gotten where she is”—he smiled a little, the smile of a long-distance runner—“if she were. I hope our next conversation will take place under more favorable circumstances. For me, I mean.”
Teresa looked at the ashtray, with her single cigarette butt among the wads of Kleenex. Who did these two take her for? Hers had been a long, hard road—too long and hard to put up with these stupid TV-detective antics. They were just a couple of snoops that picked their teeth and wadded up Kleenex and asked to go through your closets. Make her nervous? Don’t make her laugh. Now she was pissed. She had things to do—take an aspirin, for example. The minute these jokers were out of there, she’d have Teo sue for harassment. And then she’d make a few telephone calls.
“I’m going to ask you to leave now,” she said, standing up. And it turned out the sergeant knew how to laugh, Teresa discovered, although she didn’t like the sound of it. The captain stood up at the same time as Teresa, but the sergeant remained seated, a little forward in the chair, her fingers gripping the edge of the table. With that dry, sneery smile.
“Just like that, ask us to leave? . . . Without threatening us, or trying to buy us off, like those shits in Organized Crime? . . . That would make us so happy . . . an attempt to bribe us.”
Teresa opened the door. Pote Gálvez was there—thickset and vigilant, as though he hadn’t moved an inch since they went in. And he probably hadn’t. He held his hands slightly away from his body. Waiting. She calmed him with a look.
“You really are insane,” Teresa said. “I don’t bribe people, and I certainly don’t threaten them.”
The sergeant got up finally, almost grudgingly. She’d blown her nose again and was gripping the wad of Kleenex in one hand, her notebook in the other. She looked around—the expensive paintings on the walls, the view of the city and the sea. She was no longer reining in her anger and resentment. As she passed through the doorway behind her boss she stopped before Teresa, very close, and put the notebook in her bag.
“Of course. You have people who do it for you, don’t you?” She brought her face closer, and her reddened eyes seemed to flame with rage. “Go ahead, try it. Try doing it in person just this once. You know what an agent in the Guardia Civil makes? . . . I’m sure you do. And also the people that die and rot because of all the shit you bring in . . . Why don’t you try to bribe the captain and me? . . . I’d love to hear your offer, so I could drag you out of this office in handcuffs.” She threw the wad of Kleenex on the floor. “You hija de puta.”
There was always logic to help keep things in perspective, after all. That was what Teresa was thinking as she crossed the almost dry bed of the river, with water gathered in small, shallow pools near the sea. A focus that was virtually mathematical, so unemotional it chilled the heart. A calm system of putting events in order, especially the circumstances at the beginning and end of the chain. It was what allowed you, in principle, to put aside guilt or remorse. That photograph torn down the middle—the girl with the trusting eyes, so far back there in Sinaloa—was her ticket of indulgences. And since it was all a question of logic, she could do nothing
but move toward the place to which logic led her. Which was up toward the pinnacle of success in her business.
Yet there was always a paradox: What happens when life decides you’ve had enough success, and it hits you with the payback? The Real Situation. Once that thought occurs to you, you start lying awake, waiting for that moment to come. So you die little by little for hours, and days, and years. A long death, which you die pretty quietly on the outside, no screaming, no blood. But the more you think and the more you live, the more you die. She refused to die that way.
She stopped on some rocks, like stepping-stones on the beach, and looked out to sea. She wore a gray tracksuit and tennis shoes, and the wind blew her hair into her face. On the other side of the mouth of the Guadalmina, the surf broke against a sandbar, and in the background, in the bluish haze of the horizon, stretched the white silhouettes of Puerto Banús and Marbella. The golf courses were to the left, their fairways dipping down toward the shoreline and swirling around the ocher hotel building and the beach cabañas now closed for the winter. Teresa liked Guadalmina Baja at this time of the year, with its beaches deserted and only a few peaceful golfers moving in the distance. The luxury mansions silent, shuttered behind their high, bougainvillea-covered walls. One of these mansions, the one closest to the spit of land that ran out into the water, belonged to her. “Las Siete Gotas” was the name painted on a beautiful Spanish tile beside the entrance, a bit of irony that only she and Pote Gálvez understood. From the beach, all that could be seen was the high outer wall, the trees and shrubbery that peeked up over the top and camouflaged the security cameras, and the tiled roof and four chimneys: sixty-five hundred square feet of house on a lot that measured fifty-four thousand. The house was constructed on the model of an old Mexican hacienda, white with ocher details, a terrace off the second floor, a big porch open to the garden, the lawn, the tiled fountain, and the pool.
She could see a boat in the distance—a fishing boat working the waters close in to shore—and she stood there for a while watching it. She still felt a close link to the ocean, and every morning when she got up, the first thing she did was look out at the immense expanse of blue, gray, or violet—depending on the light and the day. She still instinctively calculated high and low tide, water depth, favorable or unfavorable winds, even when she didn’t have anybody working out at sea. That coast, engraved in her memory with the precision of a nautical chart, was a familiar world to which she owed sadness and good fortune, and also images that she tried not to call up too often, for fear that her memory might change them. The house on the beach at Palmones. The nights on the Strait, flying along over the waves, the speedboat bumping under her. The adrenaline of the pursuit and the victory. The hard, tender body of Santiago Fisterra. At least I had him, she thought. I lost him, but first I had him. It was a very calculated, very intimate luxury to sit with a joint of hashish and a glass of tequila and remember those days, those moonless nights when the murmur of the surf on the beach came to them across the lawn. Sometimes she would hear the Customs helicopter fly over the beach, without lights, and she would think that it might be the man who’d jumped into the water to save her life when they crashed into the León Rock. Once, upset by the Customs pursuits, two of Teresa’s men suggested they rough up the chopper pilot, that hijo de puta, break his fingers, beat the living shit out of him.
When she heard their plan, Teresa called in Dr. Ramos and ordered him to tell the two, repeating her words exactly, that that guy was just doing his job, exactly the same as we’re just doing ours. Those are the rules, and if one day he crashes and burns during a pursuit or his chopper goes down on a beach somewhere, that’s tough. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But if anybody touches a hair on his head when he’s not on duty, I’ll have his skin peeled off him in strips. Is that clear? And apparently it had been.
Teresa still felt the personal tie to the ocean. And not just from the shore.
The Sinaloa, a Fratelli Benetti 125 feet long and 21 feet wide, registered in Jersey, was tied up at the yacht club in Puerto Banús: a blindingly white, classically styled beauty with three decks, its interiors furnished with teak and iroko wood, marble bathrooms, four cabins for guests, and a thousand-square-foot salon presided over by a wonderful seascape by Montague Dawson—Combat Between the Spartiate and the Antilla at Trafalgar—that Teo Aljarafe had bought for her at an auction at Claymore. Despite the fact that Transer Naga moved naval resources of all kinds, Teresa never used the Sinaloa for illicit activities. It was neutral territory, a world apart, which she wanted to keep separate from the rest of her life. Access restricted. A captain, two sailors, and a mechanic kept the yacht ready to sail at a moment’s notice, and she went out on it often, sometimes for short sails of a couple of days, other times on cruises of two or three weeks. Books, music, a TV and video player. She never took guests, except sometimes Patty. The only person who always went with her, stoically suffering through his seasickness, was Pote Gálvez.
Teresa liked the long days in solitude, when the telephone didn’t ring and there was no need to talk. She’d sit at night in the wheelhouse beside the captain—a taciturn merchant marine skipper hired by Dr. Ramos, whom Teresa had approved of precisely because of his economy of speech—and disconnect the autopilot, taking the wheel in a rough sea, bad weather. Or she’d spend calm, sunny days on a chaise on the aft deck with a book in her hands or watching the ocean. She also took a personal interest in maintaining the two 1,800-horsepower MTU turbodiesel engines that allowed the Sinaloa to cruise at thirty knots, leaving a straight, wide, powerful wake. She would often go down into the engine room, her hair pulled back into two braids, a kerchief across the top of her head, and spend hours there, whether in port or at sea. She knew the engines’ every part. And once when they had a breakdown in a heavy sea and easterly wind to the windward side of Alborán, she worked four straight hours down there, covered with grease and grime, banging her head against the pipes and bulkheads while the captain tried to prevent the yacht from turning across the waves or drifting too far to leeward, until between her and the mechanic they solved the problem.
Once in a while, during a longer trip aboard the Sinaloa—through the Aegean to Turkey, the south coast of France, around the Lipari islands and through the Strait of Bonifacio—she would give orders to fix a course for the Balearic islands. She liked the calm anchorages north of Ibiza and Mallorca, almost deserted in the winter, liked to drop anchor off the sandbar between Formentera and the Es Freus passage. There, off the beach at Trocados, Pote Gálvez had recently had a run-in with some paparazzi. Two photographers from Marbella recognized the yacht and pedaled out on a tourist paddle boat to get the drop on Teresa, until Pote chased them off in the rubber dinghy. Result: A couple of broken ribs, another million-dollar payoff. Even so, the photograph was published on the front page of Lecturas: “The Queen of the South Relaxing in Formentera.”
She walked back slowly. Every morning, even on the rare days of wind and rain, she walked down the beach to Linda Vista, alone. On the low rise next to the river she could see the solitary figure of Pote Gálvez, watching over her from a distance. She had forbidden him to accompany her on these walks, so he kept back, watching her go and come. A motionless sentinel, as loyal as a hunting dog uneasily awaiting the return of his owner. Teresa smiled inside. Between her and Pinto, time had forged a tacit complicity, made of past and present. Despite his years in Spain, Pote Gálvez looked like he’d just walked out of a Sinaloa cantina, and the pistolero’s strong Sinaloa accent, his clothes, his eternal iguana-skin boots, his Aztec-Mayan features and big black moustache, the way he acted, the way he moved his deceptive two-hundred-plus pounds meant more to Teresa than she was generally willing to admit. Batman Güemes’ former hit man was actually her last link to Mexico. Shared nostalgia, which there was no real reason to talk about. Good memories, and bad. Evocative images that would rise up out of a phrase, a gesture, a look. Teresa lent her bodyguard cassettes and CDs of Mexican music:
José Alfredo, Chavela, Vicente, Los Tucanes, Los Tigres, even a beautiful tape she had of Lupita D’Alessio—I’ll be your lover or whatever I have to be, I’ll be whatever you ask of me—and often, passing under the window of Pote’s room at one end of the house, she would hear the songs, over and over again. Sometimes, when she was in the living room, reading or listening to music, he would pass by and stop a moment—respectful, distant, cocking an ear from the hall or the doorway, his expression unreadable, his eyes almost vacant, which in him was the sign of a smile. They never talked about Culiacán, or the events that had made their paths cross. Or about Gato Fierros, whose remains had been incorporated long before into the foundation of a nice cottage in Nueva Andalucía.
Only once had they spoken about all that, a Christmas Eve on which Teresa had given the staff the night off—a housekeeper, a cook, a gardener, and two Moroccan bodyguards that stood watch over the front entrance and the garden. She herself went into the kitchen and made tortillas, stuffed crab gratinée, and chilorio—pork with chiles—and then called Pote in and said, “Have a narco dinner with me, Pinto. Órale, it’s gonna get cold.”
They sat in the dining room, one at each end of the table, with candles lit in the silver candlesticks, and tequila and beer and red wine. They were both very quiet, listening to Teresa’s music and the other music too, pure Culiacán and heavy shit, which Pote Gálvez got from over there once in a while: Pedro and Inés and their pinche gray pickup, El Borrego, El Centenario in the Ram, corridos about Gerardo, the Cessna, Twenty Women in Black. They know I’m from Sinaloa—the two of them singing along at this point—which is why they mess with me.
And when, to cap the evening, José Alfredo sang “El Caballo Blanco,” the corrido about the White Horse (it was the bodyguard’s favorite; he bowed his head and nodded to the music), she said, We’re so far away from all that, Pinto, and he replied, That’s the truth, patrona, but it’s better to be too far away than too close.
Queen of the South Page 38
