The Queen of the South (8 page)

She'd kept her voice from shaking. Still staring into the shadows, she sensed that don Epifanio had turned to look at her.

"You're lucky," she heard him say. "For the time being, you're alive."

He sat like that a while longer. Studying her. The smell of the cigar mingled with the fragrance of the candles and the cone of incense burning slowly in a censer next to the bust of the sainted bandit. "What do you plan to do?" he asked at last.

"I don't know." Now it was Teresa's turn to shrug. "Güero said you'd help me. 'Give it to him and ask him to help you.' That's what he said."

"Güero was always an optimist."

The hollow feeling in her stomach got worse. The waxy smell of candles, the flickering lights before St. Malverde. Humid, hot. Suddenly she felt an unbearable sense of anxiety, and of trepidation. She repressed the urge to

jump up, knock over the burning candles, get out, get air. Run again, if they'd still let her. But when she looked up, she saw that the other Teresa Mendoza was sitting across from her, watching her. Or maybe it was she herself sitting there, silently, looking at the frightened woman leaning forward on the pew next to don Epifanio, with a useless pistol in her lap. "He loved you," she heard herself say.

Don Epifanio moved uneasily in his seat. A decent man, Güero had always said.

"And I loved him." Don Epifanio was speaking very softly, as though he didn't want the bodyguard at the door to hear him talk about emotions. "And you, too ... but those stupid runs of his put you in a tough spot."

"I need help."

"I can't get mixed up in this." "You have a lot of power."

She heard him cluck his tongue in discouragement and impatience. In this business, don Epifanio explained, still speaking softly, power was relative, ephemeral, subject to complicated rules. And he had kept his power, he said, because he didn't go sticking his nose in other people's business. Güero didn't work for him anymore; this was between him and his new bosses. And those people
mocharon parejo
—they took out everybody, wiped the slate clean.

"They don't have anything personal against you, Teresita. You know these

people. But it's their way of doing things. They have to make an example

when people fuck with them."

"You could talk to them. Tell them I don't know anything."

"They already know you don't know anything. That's not the issue ... and I can't get involved. In this country, if you ask for a favor today, tomorrow you've got to pay it back."

Now he was looking at the Double Eagle on her lap, one hand lying carelessly on the butt. He knew that Güero had taught her to fire it, and that she could hit six empty Pacifico bottles one after another, at ten paces. Güero had always liked Pacifico and liked his women a little tough, although Teresa couldn't stand beer and jumped every time the gun went off.

"Besides," don Epifanio went on, "what you've told me just makes things worse. If they can't let a man get away, imagine a woman.... They'd be the laughingstock of Sinaloa."

Teresa looked at his dark, inscrutable eyes. The hard eyes of a norteno Indian. Of a survivor.

"I can't get involved," she heard him repeat.

And don Epifanio stood up. So it was useless, she thought. It all ends here. The hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach grew until it included the night that awaited her outside, inexorable. She gave up, but the woman watching her from the shadows refused to.

"Güero told me that you'd help me," she insisted stubbornly, as though talking to herself. "'Take him the book,' he said, 'and trade it for your life.'"

"Your man liked his little jokes."

"I don't know about that. But I know what he told me."

It sounded more like a complaint than a plea. A sincere and very bitter complaint. Or a reproach. She was silent for a moment, and then she raised her face, like the weary prisoner waiting to hear the sentence. Don Epifanio was standing before her; he seemed even bigger and more heavyset than ever. His fingertips were drumming on Güero's notebook.

"Teresita ..."

"Si, senor."

He kept drumming. She saw him look at the saint's portrait, at the bodyguard at the door, and then at her. Then his eyes fell again on the pistol. "You swear you didn't read anything?" "I swear to you."

A silence. Long, she thought, like dying. She heard the wicks of the candles at the altar sputtering.

"You've got just one chance," he said at last.

Teresa clung to those words, her mind as keen as though she'd just done a line of coke. The other woman faded into the shadows. "One's enough," she said.

"Have you got a passport?"

"Yes, with a U.S. visa."

"And money?"

"Twenty thousand dollars and a few pesos " She opened the gym bag at her feet to show him, hopefully. "And a ten- or twelve-ounce bag of snow."

"Leave that. It's dangerous to travel with it Do you drive?"

"No." She had stood and was looking straight at him, following his every word. Concentrating on staying alive. "I don't even have a license."

"I doubt you'd be able to get across anyway. They'd pick up your trail at the border, and you wouldn't be safe even among the gringos.... The best thing is to get away tonight. I can loan you the car with a driver you can

Trust - I can do that, and have him drive you to Mexico City. Straight to

the airport, and there you catch the first plane out."

"To where?"

"Anywhere. If you want to go to Spain, I've got friends there. People that owe me favors ... If you call me tomorrow morning before you get on the plane, I'll give you a name and telephone number. After that, you're on your own."

"There's no other way?"

"Heh." The laugh was mirthless, flat. "It's this way or no way. You get led by the rope or it hangs you."

Teresa looked around the chapel, gazing into the shadows. She was absolutely alone. Nobody made decisions for her now. But she was still alive.

"I have to go." Don Epifanio was growing impatient. "Decide."

"I've already decided. I'll do whatever you say."

"All right." Don Epifanio watched as she put the safety on and stuck the pistol into the waist of her jeans, between the denim and her skin, and then covered it with her jacket. "... And remember one thing—you won't be safe over there, either. You understand?... I've got friends, but these people do, too. Try to bury yourself deep enough so they don't find you."

Teresa nodded again. She'd pulled the coke out of the gym bag, and she set it on the altar, under the statue of Malverde. She lighted another candle.
Santa Virgencita,
she prayed a moment in silence.
Santo Patron.
God bless my journey and allow my return. She crossed herself almost furtively.

"I'm truly sorry about Güero," don Epifanio said behind her. "He was a good man."

Teresa had turned to hear this. Now she was so lucid and cool she could feel the dryness of her throat and the blood running very slowly through her veins, heartbeat by heartbeat. She threw the gym bag over her shoulder, smiling for the first time all day—a smile that registered on her lips as a nervous impulse, unexpected. And that smile, or whatever it was, must have been a strange one, because don Epifanio's expression changed—that smile gave him something to think about. Teresita Mendoza.
Chale.
Güero's
morra.
A narco's old lady. A girl like so many others—quieter, even, than most, not too bright, not too pretty. And yet that smile made him study her thoughtfully, cautiously, with a great deal of attention, as though suddenly a stranger stood before him.

"No," she said. "Güero was not a good man. He was
un hijo de su pinche madre"

3- When the years have passed
. . .

She was nobody," said Manolo Cespedes. "Explain that to me." "I just did." My interlocutor pointed at me with two ringers, between which he held a cigarette. "Nobody means
nobody.
The lowest of the low. When she got here she had nothing but the clothes on her back, like she was trying to crawl into a hole and disappear. ... It was just chance." "And something else, too. She was a smart girl."

"So what?... I know a lot of smart girls that have wound up on a street corner."

He looked up and down the street, as though trying to see whether there might be an example he could show me. We were sitting under the awning on the terrace of the Cafe California, in Melilla, the Spanish town that sits across the strait from its country on the Moroccan coast. A noonday African sun turned the modernist facades of Avenida Juan Carlos I yellow. It was the

hour when everyone in Melilla stopped for
aperitivos,
and the sidewalks and terraces were filled with pedestrians, idlers, lottery vendors, and shoeshine boys. European dress mixed with North African jihabs and djellabas, accentuating the cultural-frontier atmosphere of this place spanning two continents and several races. In the background, around the Plaza de Espafia and the monument to those killed in the colonial war in 1921—a young soldier in bronze with his face turned toward Morocco—the high fronds of the palm trees indicated the nearness of the Mediterranean.

"I didn't know her back then," Cespedes went on. "Actually, I don't even remember her. A face behind the bar at the Yamila, maybe. Or not even that. It was only much later, when I began hearing things here and there, that I finally associated that girl with the other Teresa Mendoza.... Like I said. Back then she was nobody."

Former police chief, former head of security at Moncloa, the seat of the Spanish presidency, former parliamentary delegate from Melilla—fate and life had made Manolo Cespedes all those things, although they might have made him a wise, seasoned bullfighter, a happy-go-lucky Gypsy, a Berber pirate, or an astute Rifeno diplomat. He was an old man as dark, lean, and canny as a hophead Legionnaire, with a lot of experience and a lot of under-the-table dealings. We had met twenty years earlier, during that period of violent incidents between the European and Muslim communities that had put Melilla on the front pages of newspapers across the continent, back when I was still earning a living as a reporter. And back then, Cespedes, a Melillan by birth and the highest civilian authority in the North African enclave, knew everyone. He would stop in for drinks at the bar frequented by officers from the Spanish army brigade stationed there, the Tercio; he controlled an efficient network of informers on both sides of the border; he would have dinner with the governor of Nador; and on his payroll he had everyone from street beggars to members of the Moroccan Gendarmerie Royale. Our friendship dated back to that: long conversations, lamb with Middle Eastern spices, gin and tonics until the wee hours of the morning. Between us there was always an unspoken agreement: You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Now, retired from his official post, Cespedes was bored and peaceful, growing old, devoted to local politics, his wife, his children, and the noon
aperitivos.
My visit was a welcome interruption of his daily routine.

"I tell you, it was pure chance," he insisted. "And in her case, the chance was named Santiago Fisterra."

My glass froze in its upward track; I caught my breath. "Santiago Lopez Fisterra?"

"Sure." Cespedes took a drag on his cigarette, gauging my interest. "El Gallego"—the Galician.

I exhaled slowly, took a sip of my drink, and leaned back in my chair, delighted to have picked up a lost trail, while Cespedes smiled, assessing the new balance of our back-scratching account. That name had brought me to Melilla, in search of a period of obscurity in Teresa Mendoza's biography. Until that day on the terrace of the California, I had had only conjectures, or reports that were doubtful at best: This might have happened; they say that such-and-such went on; somebody had been told, or someone thought he remembered.... Rumors. The rest—the concrete facts—were few; in the immigration files of the Ministry of the Interior there was only an entrance date—Iberia airlines, Barajas Airport, Madrid—with her real name: Teresa Mendoza Chavez.

Then the official trail went cold for two years, until police report 8653690FA/42, containing fingerprints and one mugshot from the front, one in profile, had allowed me to follow her footsteps with a little more certainty from then on. The report was an old one, kept in an actual manila file folder, before the Spanish police computerized their documents. I'd had it before me on a desk a week earlier, in the police headquarters in Algeciras, thanks to a call from another old friend of mine: the police chief of Torremolinos, Pepe Cabrera. Among the bare facts on the report were two names: a person's and a city's. The person was Santiago Lopez Fisterra. The city was Melilla.

That afternoon Cespedes and I paid two visits. One was brief, sad, and almost useless, although it served to add another name to my list and a face to one of the characters of this story. Across the street from the yacht club, at the foot of the old city's medieval wall, Cespedes pointed out a filthy man with thin, ashy-colored hair who was "watching" parked cars—making sure nothing happened to them, you understand—in exchange for a few coins from the cars' charitable drivers. He was sitting on the ground near a mooring post, staring at the dirty water under the pier. From a distance I took him for an older man, battered by time and life, but as we approached I realized that he was probably not yet forty. He was wearing a pair of old pants torn and crudely sewn back together, an astoundingly clean white T-shirt, and filthy, stinking tennis shoes. The bright sunlight did nothing to hide the matte gray tone of his skin, which was covered with blotches. His face was cavernous; there were hollows at his temples. Half his teeth were missing, and it occurred to me that he resembled the sea wrack thrown up at high tide or by storms.

"His name is Veiga," Cespedes told me as we approached him. "And he knew Teresa Mendoza."

Without pausing to observe my reaction, he said,
"Hola,
Veiga, how are you," and gave him a cigarette and a light. There were no introductions, no other words between them, and we stood there awhile, silent, looking at the water, the fishing boats tied up, the old mineral barge on the other side of the harbor, and the horrific twin towers built to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the Spanish conquest of the city. I saw scabs, scars, marks on the man's arms and legs. He'd gotten to his feet to light the cigarette—clumsily, muttering disconnected words of thanks. He smelled like stale wine and stale misery. He limped when he walked.