Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “And for our part,” Rangel added, “we haven’t forgotten that he had a DEA agent killed.”

  “Exactly.” That shared responsibility seemed to relieve Tapia. “Because the government of the United States, which as you know, señora, continues to follow our own country’s politics very closely, would also not approve of Epifanio Vargas’ becoming senator . . . So there has been an attempt to create a high-level commission to act in two phases—first, to open an investigation into Vargas’ past, and second, if the necessary evidence can be gathered, to strip him of his government position and end his political career, perhaps even bring him to trial.”

  “At the end of which,” Rangel added, “we do not exclude the possibility of requesting his extradition to the United States.”

  “And where do I fit into this happy plan?” Teresa asked. “What’s the purpose of you flying all the way over here to tell me all this, like we were in the gang together back in the old days?”

  Rangel and Tapia looked at each other. The diplomat cleared his throat, and while he was taking a cigarette from a silver case—offering one to Teresa, who shook her head—he said that the Mexican government had followed the, ahem, career of Señora Mendoza in recent years. They had nothing against her, since as far as they could tell, her activities took place outside the territorial limits of Mexico—she was an exemplary citizen, Rangel put in, so straight-faced that the sarcasm was almost lost. And in view of all that, the authorities were willing to come to an agreement. An agreement satisfactory to all concerned. Cooperation in exchange for immunity.

  Teresa looked at them. Wary.

  “What kind of cooperation?”

  Tapia very carefully lit his cigarette. As carefully as he appeared to be meditating what he was about to say. Or the way to say it.

  “You have personal scores there. You also know a great deal about the period when Güero Dávila was alive, and about Epifanio Vargas’ activities,” he finally said. “You were an eyewitness, and it almost cost you your life. . . . One might think that an arrangement would be of benefit to you. You have more than enough resources of all kinds to go into other activities, enjoying what you have with no worries for the future.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do say.”

  “Híjole. To what do I owe this generosity?”

  “You never take payment in drugs. Just money. You’re a transporter, not an owner or distributor. The largest transporter in Europe at the moment, unquestionably. But that’s it. . . . That leaves us a margin for reasonable maneuvering, in the face of public opinion. . . .”

  “Public opinion? . . . What the fuck are you talking about?”

  It took the diplomat some time to answer. Teresa could hear Rangel breathing; he was squirming in his seat uneasily, rubbing his hands together and interlacing his fingers.

  “You are being given the opportunity to go back to Mexico, if you wish,” Tapia went on, “or to move quietly to another country, wherever you like. . . . The Spanish authorities have even been sounded out in this regard: we have a commitment from the minister of justice to halt all proceedings and investigations currently under way . . . which, according to my information, are at a very advanced stage and could, in the short term, make things quite difficult for the, ahem, Queen of the South. . . . This would be a chance to start over—all debts forgiven.”

  “I didn’t know the gringos’ arm was so long.”

  “Depends on what we’re talking about.”

  Teresa broke out laughing. “You’re asking me,” she said, still incredulous, “to tell you everything that you think I know about Epifanio Vargas. That I start ratting people out, at my age. And me from Sinaloa.”

  “Not just that you tell us,” Rangel interrupted. “But that you tell it there, and to a judge.”

  “Where’s ‘there’?”

  “In Mexico. Before the Justice Commission in the national prosecutor’s office.”

  “You want me to go to Mexico?”

  “As a protected witness. Absolute immunity. It would all happen in the Distrito Federal, under every kind of personal and judicial guarantee. With the thanks of the nation, and of the government of the United States.”

  Teresa suddenly stood up. Pure reflex, without thinking. This time, the two men also rose: Rangel disconcerted, Tapia uncomfortable. I told you so, said the last look Tapia gave the DEA agent. Teresa went to the door and yanked it open. Pote Gálvez was in the hallway, his arms held slightly away from his body, his stockiness falsely peaceful. If you have to, she told him with a glance, kick them out.

  “You,” she almost spat, “have gone crazy.”

  And there she was now, at her old table in the bar, reflecting about all that. With a tiny life in her belly, not knowing what she was going to do with it. The echo of that conversation in her head. Trying to think. Trying to feel. Turning over in her mind the last words of the conversation and many old memories. Pain and gratitude. The image of Güero Dávila—as motionless and silent as she was now, back in that cantina in Culiacán—and the memory of the other man sitting next to her late at night, in the Malverde Chapel. “That Güero of yours liked his little jokes, Teresita. You really didn’t read any of it? Then get out of here, and try to bury yourself so deep that they can never find you.”

  Don Epifanio Vargas. Her godfather. The man who could have killed her, but who took pity on her. And who then thought better of it, but too late.

  16. Unbalanced load

  Teo Aljarafe returned two days later with a satisfactory report. Payments received promptly on Grand Cayman, efforts made to find a small bank of their own and a shipping company in Belize, good profits on the money—laundered of its powder and weed—deposited in three banks in Zurich and two in Liechtenstein. Teresa listened attentively to his report, looked over the documents, and signed a few papers after reading them carefully, and then they went to eat at Casa Santiago, on the boardwalk in Marbella, with Pote Gálvez sitting outside. Ham with fava beans and roasted crayfish, which was juicier and tastier than lobster. A Señorío de Lazán Reserva ’96. Teo was talkative, charming, handsome. His jacket over the back of his chair, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up twice over his tanned forearms, his firm wrists with a dusting of fine hair. His Patek Philippe, buffed fingernails, the wedding band gleaming on his left hand. Occasionally he turned his face away, looking out toward the street, wanting to see who came into the restaurant, his fork or wineglass in midair, and when he did he showed her that impeccable aquiline Spanish profile of his. A couple of times he rose to say hello to someone. Tomás Pestaña, who was having dinner in the rear with a group of German investors, had apparently not seen Teresa and Teo when he came in, but a few minutes later the waiter came over with a bottle of good wine. From the mayor, he said. With his compliments.

  Teresa looked at the man sitting across from her, and she meditated. She wasn’t going to tell him that day, or tomorrow or the next day, and maybe not ever, what she was carrying in her womb. And there was something else curious about that: At first she’d thought she would soon be able to feel something, have some physical awareness of the life that was beginning to develop inside her. But she felt nothing. Just the certainty of what was there, and her thoughts on it. Her breasts might have become fuller, and her headaches might have disappeared, but she felt pregnant only when she thought about it, reread the medical report, or looked at the calendar marked with two skipped periods. Still—it occurred to her just then, as she listened to Teo Aljarafe’s banal conversation—here I am. Pregnant, like some stupid teenager without enough sense to take precautions. With something, or someone, on the way. Still undecided on what to do with my fucking life, with the life of this baby, or with Teo’s life. She looked at him, as though searching for some sign.

  “Is there anything under way?” Teo asked distractedly, sipping at the mayor’s wine.

  “Nothing for the moment. Routine stuff.”

  After dinner he suggested they go to
the house on Calle Ancha or some good hotel on the Milla de Oro, where they could spend the rest of the evening, and the night. A bottle of wine, a plate of Iberian ham, he suggested. But Teresa shook her head. I’m tired, she said. I really don’t feel like it tonight.

  “It’s been almost a month.” Teo smiled.

  That smile. Easy. He brushed her fingers, tenderly, and she sat looking at her motionless hand on the tablecloth, as though it weren’t really hers. With that hand, she thought, she’d shot Gato Fierros in the face.

  “How are your daughters?” she asked.

  He looked at her, surprised. Teresa never asked about his family. It was a tacit pact with herself, which she had never broken. “They’re fine,” he said after a moment. “Fine.”

  “Good,” she replied. “I’m glad. And their mother, I suppose. The three of them.”

  Teo put his dessert fork down and leaned over the table, looking at her quizzically.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. “Tell me what’s happened today.”

  She looked around, the people at the tables, the traffic out on the avenue still lit by the sun setting on the ocean.

  “There’s nothing wrong.” She lowered her voice. “But I lied to you. There’s something under way. Something I haven’t told you about.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t always tell you everything.”

  He looked at her, worried. Impeccably open. Five seconds, almost exactly, and then he turned his eyes toward the street. When he turned them back, he was smiling slightly. Charming. He touched her hand again, and this time, too, she didn’t pull it away.

  “Is it big?”

  Órale, Teresa said to herself. This is just the way things are, and in the end everybody makes their own destiny. The final push almost always comes from you and you alone. For good or ill.

  “Yes,” she answered. “There’s a ship on the way. The Luz Angelita.”

  It had grown dark. The crickets were chirping in the yard like they’d all gone crazy. When the lights were turned on, Teresa ordered them turned off again, and now she was sitting on the porch steps, her back against a column, gazing at the stars above the thick black tops of the weeping willows. She had a bottle of tequila, unopened, between her legs, and behind her, on a low table near the chaise longues, Mexican music was playing on the stereo. Sinaloan music that Pote Gálvez had lent her that afternoon—Quihubo, patrona, this is the latest by Los Broncos de Reynosa, tell me what you think:

  My mule had started limping bad,

  The load had all shifted to one side.

  We were dodging pine cones on the path

  Up in the sierra in Chihuahua.

  Little by little, the former hit man was adding to his collection of corridos. He liked them tough, violent—mostly, he told her very soberly, to feed his nostalgia for all that. A man’s from where a man’s from, and you can’t change that, he said. His personal jukebox included the entire norteño region, from Chalino—What lyrics, doña—to Exterminador, Los Invasores de Nuevo León, El As de la Sierra, El Moreño, Los Broncos, Los Huracanes, and other gangster groups from Sinaloa and up that way, the ones that turned the police gazette into music, songs about mules and murders and lead and shipments of the good stuff, and Cessnas and new pickups, and Federales and cops, traffickers and funerals. As corridos had been to the Revolution in those bygone days, so the narcocorridos were the new epics, the modern legends of a Mexico that was there and had no intention of going anywhere, or changing—among other reasons because a not inconsiderable part of the national economy depended on the drugs. It was a marginal, hard world, of weapons, corruption, and drugs, in which the only law not broken was the law of supply and demand.

  There Juan el Grande took one in the chest,

  But he died defending his people.

  He let my mule get past,

  And then he killed the lieutenant.

  “Unbalanced Load,” the song was called. Kind of like mine, thought Teresa. On the cover of the CD, the Broncos de Reynosa were all shaking hands with each other, and under his coat, one of them had a huge pistol sticking out of his belt. Sometimes she would watch Pote Gálvez while she listened to these songs, fascinated by the expression on his face.

  They would still have a drink together once in a while. Come on, Pinto, have a tequila. And they would sit, saying almost nothing, listening to the music, Pote respectful, keeping his distance. Teresa would hear him cluck his tongue and see him shake his head, Órale, feeling and remembering, mentally drinking at the Don Quijote and La Ballena and the Sinaloa dives that floated around in his memory, maybe missing his buddy Gato Fierros, who was no more than concrete-encased bones by now, nobody to take flowers to his grave and nobody to sing pinche corridos to his pinche memory—that hijo de puta Gato, whom Pote Gálvez and Teresa hadn’t spoken another word about since then, ever.

  Lamberto Quintero, our hero,

  Had a pickup truck tailing him.

  It was on the highway to Salado

  And they was just out for a spin.

  From the stereo now came the Lamberto Quintero corrido, which with José Alfredo’s “El Caballo Blanco” was one of Pote’s favorites. Teresa saw his shadowy silhouette come to the door, look out, and immediately move away again. She knew he was inside, always within range of her voice, listening. If you were in Mexico, you would already have so many corridos it wouldn’t be funny, patrona, he’d said once. He didn’t add, And maybe I would, too, but Teresa knew that he thought it.

  Really, she decided as she stripped the band off the Herradura Reposado, every pinche man in Mexico aspires to that. Like fucking Güero Dávila. Like Pote. Like, in his own way, Santiago Fisterra. Have a corrido, real or imaginary, written about you, with your name on it—music, wine, women, money, adventure, even if it cost you your skin. And you never know, she thought, looking at the doorway where Pote had appeared. You never know, Pinto. After all, corridos are always written by other people.

  His buddy turns to him and says,

  That pickup’s been tailing us some.

  Lamberto just grins and says,

  Why d’ya think I brought the machine guns?

  She drank straight from the bottle. A swig that went down her throat with the force of a bullet. She stretched out her arm holding the bottle, held it up, offering it with a sarcastic grin to the woman looking down at her from the shadows of the lawn. Cabrona, why didn’t you just stay in Culiacán? Sometimes I’m not sure whether it’s you that’s come over to this side or me that went over to the other side with you, or whether we’ve exchanged roles in this farce and maybe it’s you that’s sitting on the porch steps and me that’s half hidden out there looking at you and what you’re carrying inside you.

  She’d talked about this once more—she had a feeling it was the last time—with Oleg Yasikov that same afternoon, when the Russian came by to see whether the hashish run was ready, after everything had been settled and they went out for a walk on the beach. Yasikov had looked at her out of the corner of his eye, studying her in the light of something new, which was neither better nor worse but simply sadder and colder.

  “And I don’t know,” he’d said, “whether now that you’ve told me certain things I’m seeing you differently or whether it’s you, Tesa, who is changing, somehow. Yes. Today, while we were talking, I was looking at you. Surprised. You had never given me as many details or talked in that tone of voice. Nyet. You were like a ship casting off. Forgive me if I don’t express myself well. Yes. They’re complicated things to explain. Even to think.”

  “I’m going to have it,” she abruptly said. She spoke without thinking about it, point-blank, as though the decision had been forged at that instant inside her head, linked to other decisions that she had already made and was about to make. Yasikov had stood there, still, inexpressive, for a long time, and then he’d nodded—not to approve of anything, which wasn’t his place, but rather to suggest that she was a person able to have or do whatever she wa
nted, and that he also thought her perfectly able to deal with the consequences. They took a few more steps and he looked out at the ocean, which was turning lead-gray in the dusk, and then, not facing her, said: “Nothing has ever scared you, Tesa. Nyet. Nothing. Since the day we met I have never seen you hesitate when it was a question of life and freedom. Never. That’s why people respect you. Yes. That’s why I admire you. And that’s why,” he concluded, “you are where you are. Yes. Now.”

  That was when she’d burst out laughing, a strange laugh that made Yasikov turn his head.

  “Fucking pinche Russki,” she said. “You don’t have the slightest idea. I’m the other girl, the narco’s morra, that you don’t know. The one that looks at me, or the one I look at—I’m not sure which me is me. The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m a coward, with nothing I ought to have. I’ll tell you—I’m so afraid, I feel so weak, so indecisive, that I burn up all my energy and my willpower, to the last ounce, in hiding the fact that I’m afraid. You can’t imagine the effort. Because I never chose this, and the corrido, somebody else wrote the words to it. You. Patty. Them. What a pendeja, huh? I don’t like life in general and mine in particular. I don’t even like the parasitic fucking tiny life that’s inside me. I’m sick with something that I refused to try to understand a long time ago, and I’m not even honest, because I won’t talk about it. I’ve lived for twelve years like this. All the time pretending and not talking.”

  The two stood in silence, watching the ocean go dark. Finally, Yasikov nodded again, very slowly.

  “Have you made a decision about Teo?” he asked softly.

  “Don’t worry about him.”

  “The operation . . .”