The Queen of the South (25 page)

And although Patty didn't insist, Teresa got up slowly after a minute or so, still clutching the bottle, and went and sat on the edge of her cellmate's bunk. Patty's legs were open and she had a hand between them, moving it slowly and softly, and she was doing all this while gazing at Teresa out of the green shadows of the rack. Teresa passed her the bottle, and Patty drank with her free hand, then returned the bottle as she continued to gaze at Teresa's face, into her eyes. Then Teresa smiled and said, "Thanks again for the birthday, Patty, and the book, and the party." And Patty never took her eyes off her as she moved her fingers between her naked thighs. Then Teresa leaned down close to her friend, repeated, "Thanks," very softly, and kissed her softly on the lips, just that, and for only a second. And she felt Patty hold her breath and tremble several times under her mouth, and moan, her eyes suddenly very wide, and afterward she lay without moving, still looking at her.

O'Farrell woke her up before dawn. "He's dead, Mexicanita." They hardly spoke about him. About
them.
Teresa was not one to open up too much, share confidences. Dropped words here and there, casual remarks: one time this, another time that. She really tried to avoid talking about Santiago, or Güero Dávila. Or even thinking very long about either one of them. She didn't have any photographs—the few with the Gallego, who knew where they were now?—except, of course, for the one of her and Güero torn in half. Sometimes the two men merged in her memory, and she didn't like that. It was like being unfaithful to both of them at once. "That's not it," Teresa replied.

They were in darkness, and the sky had not yet begun to turn gray outside. It was still two or three hours before the guard would start banging on the doors with her key, waking the inmates up for the first head count, giving them time to wash up before they rinsed out their underwear—the panties and T-shirts and socks that they would hang up to dry on broom handles stuck into the wall. Teresa heard her cellmate turning over, moving about in her bunk. A while later she changed positions, too, trying to sleep. Very far away, behind the metal door, down the module's long corridor, a woman's voice cried out.
I love you, Manolo,
she screamed.
I
love you, I tell you,
another called back, closer, provocatively.
So do I,
a third voice chimed in. Then there were the footsteps of a guard, and silence once again. Teresa lay on her back, in a nightshirt, her eyes open in the darkness, waiting for the fear that would inevitably come, as regular as clockwork, when the first glow appeared in the window, through the lace curtains sewn by Charito the pickpocket.

"There's something I'd like to tell you," said Patty.

Then she fell silent, as though that were all, or as though she weren't sure she should tell, or perhaps waiting for some response from Teresa. But Teresa didn't say anything—not
Tell me,
not
Don't.
She lay motionless, looking up at the night.

"I've got a treasure hidden on the outside," Patty finally said.

Teresa heard her own laugh before she realized she was laughing.
"Hijole!"
she said. "Just like Abbe Faria."

"Yeah." Patty laughed too. "Except I don't intend to die in here. ... In fact, I don't intend to die anywhere."

"What kind of treasure?" Teresa was curious.

"Something that got lost and everybody looked for, but that nobody found because the people who hid it are dead.... Like in the movies, huh?" "I don't think it's like the movies. It's like life."

The two were silent for a while. I'm not sure, thought Teresa. I'm not totally convinced that I want to hear your secrets, Lieutenant. Maybe because you know more than I do and you're smarter than I am and older and everything, and I always catch you looking at me that way you look at me. Or maybe because I'm not crazy about the fact that you come when I kiss you. If a person's tired, there are things that shouldn't be talked about. And tonight I'm very tired, maybe because I drank and smoked and snorted too much, and now I can't sleep. This
year
I'm very tired. Hell, this
life.
For the moment, the word "tomorrow" doesn't exist. My lawyer only came to see me once. Since then all I've gotten from him is a letter telling me he invested our money in paintings whose value has dropped to almost nothing and there's not even enough left to pay for a coffin if I kick the bucket. But the truth is, I don't care about that. The one good thing about being in here is that this is all there is. And that keeps you from thinking about what you left outside. Or what's waiting for you out there.

"That kind of treasure is dangerous," Teresa said.

"Of course it is." Patty was speaking slowly, very softly, as though she were weighing every word. "I've paid a high price myself... got shot, you know. Bang bang. And here we are."

"So what
about
this fucking treasure, Lieutenant O'Farrell?"

They laughed again in the darkness. Then there was a quick burst o f light at the head of Patty's bunk—she had just lit a cigarette.

"Well, I'm going to go look for it," she said, "when I get out of here."

"But you don't need that. You've got money."

"Not enough. What I spend in here is not mine, it's my family's." Her voice turned sarcastic when she pronounced that last word. "And the treasure that I'm talking about is real money. A lot of it. The kind that sometimes makes lots more, and more, and more."

"You really know where it is?"

"Sure."

"But somebody owns it.... I mean somebody besides you. Who owns it?"

The ember of the cigarette glowed. Silence. "That's a good question."
"Chale.
That's
the
question."

They fell silent again. You may know a lot more things than I do, thought Teresa—you've got education, and class, and a lawyer that comes to see you once in a while, and a good chunk of money in the bank, even if it belongs to your family. But what you're talking to me about—
that,
I know about, and it's very possible that I know quite a bit more about it than you do. Even if you've got two scars like little stars and a boyfriend in the cemetery, you're still like above it all. But me, I've seen it from down below. I've had mud on my bare feet when I was a kid, in Las Siete Gotas, where the drunks knocked on my mother's door in the middle of the night. I've also seen Gato Fierros' smile. And the Leon Rock. I've thrown fortunes overboard at fifty knots, with a chopper on my ass. So let's cut the crap.

"That question is hard to answer," Patty finally said. "There are people
that were looking for it, sure. They thought they had a certain right to it, you
know But that was a while back. Now nobody knows that I know."

"So why are you telling me about it?"

The red glow of the cigarette grew brighter a couple of times before the reply came. "I don't know. Or maybe I do."

"I never figured you for such a talker," said Teresa. "I could turn out to be the kind of girl who can't keep a secret. I could rat you out."

"Uh-uh. We've been in here together for a while, and I've been watching you. You aren't like that."

Another silence. This time longer than the others.

"You keep your mouth shut. You're loyal."

"You are too," Teresa replied.

"No. I'm other things."

Teresa saw the cigarette go out. She was curious, but she also wanted this conversation to be over.
Let's get this behind us,
she thought. I don't want you to wake up tomorrow and regret having said things you shouldn't have. About things that I don't need to know, places where I can't follow you. Or better yet, if you go to sleep now, we can always forget this happened, blame it on the party and the tequila and the coke.

"One day I may get you to help me recover that treasure," Patty suddenly concluded. "You and I, together."

Teresa held her breath. Oh shit, she said to herself. Now we can never pretend that this conversation never took place.

"Why me?" Teresa asked. She couldn't just say nothing. But she couldn't say flat-out yes or no, either. So that question was her only possible reply.

She heard Patty turn over in her bunk, toward the wall, before she answered.

"I'll tell you when the moment comes. If it does."

8. Kilo

bricks

There are people whose good luck derives from misfortunes," Eddie Alvarez concluded. "And that was the case of Teresa Mendoza." The lenses of his glasses made his wary eyes look smaller. It had taken me time and a couple of intermediaries to get him to this point, sitting in front of me, but there he was, putting his hands in his jacket pockets and pulling them out again, after offering me just the tips of his fingers to shake. We were chatting on the terrace of the Rock Hotel in Gibraltar, with the sun filtering in through the ivy, ferns, and palms of the hanging garden on the face of the Rock itself. Down below, on the other side of the white balustrade, lay the Bay of Algeciras, bright and blurry in the blue haze of the afternoon: white ferries at the end of long straight wakes, the coast of Africa a hint of gray out beyond the Strait, the boats at anchor with their bows all pointing east.

"Well, I understand that at the beginning
you
helped her," I said. "By which I mean, you made some of those 'misfortunes' possible."

The lawyer blinked twice, twirled his glass on the table, and looked at me again.

"You shouldn't talk about things you don't know anything about." It sounded like reproach, and advice. "I did my job. That's how I make my living. And back then, she was nobody. No one could possibly have imagined . .."

His face underwent two or three changes of expression, almost involuntarily, and there was displeasure, discomfort, a squirming quality there, as though somebody had told him a bad joke, one that it took a while to get. "Couldn't possibly ..." he mused.

"Perhaps you're mistaken. Perhaps somebody
could
have imagined how things would go."

"We're often mistaken." Alvarez seemed to console himself with that plural. "Although in that chain of mistakes, I was the least of them."

He passed a hand across his sparse, curly hair, which he wore too long and which gave him an air of seediness. Then he touched the broad-mouthed glass again: his whisky was an unappetizing chocolaty color.

"In this life, everything comes with a price," he said after thinking for a

moment. "Some pay in advance, others during, and still others afterward

In the case of the Mexicana, she paid in advance.

She had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. And that's what she did."

"People say that you abandoned her in prison. Without a penny."

He looked truly offended. Although in a guy like him, with his background—I had taken the trouble to look into it—that meant absolutely nothing.

"I don't know what these 'people' might have told you, but that's not quite accurate. I can be as practical as the next man, understand?... It's perfectly normal in my profession. But that's not the point. I didn't abandon her."

With that out of the way, he gave a series of more or less reasonable justifications. Teresa Mendoza and Santiago Fisterra had, in fact, entrusted a certain amount of money to him. Not an extraordinary amount, just some funds that he proceeded to discreetly launder. The problem was that he invested almost all of it in paintings: landscapes, seascapes, and so on. A couple of nice portraits. Yes. And this happened to be just after the Gallego's death, when Teresa was in prison. And the painters were not very well known. Their parents may not even have claimed them—he smiled—which was why he invested in them. Appreciation, of course. But then the crisis came along and he'd had to sell off everything, to the last canvas, plus their small interest in a bar on Main Street and a few other things. From all that he deducted his fees—there were late payments and other matters—and the rest of the money went toward Teresa's defense. That entailed a considerable amount of money in expenses, of course—an arm and a leg, you might say. And after all was said and done, she'd spent only a year in prison.

"They say," I told him, "that that was thanks to Patricia O'Farrell, because it was her lawyers who did the paperwork."

He started to put a hand over his heart, once again offended. But he stopped in mid-gesture.

"They say a lot of things. The fact is, there came a moment when, well..." He looked at me the way a Jehovah's Witness looks at a doorbell. "... I had other concerns. The Mexicana's case was at a standstill."

"You mean the money had run out."

"The little there was, yes. Run out."

"And so you stopped representing her."

"Look ..." He showed me the palms of his hands, raising them slightly, as though that were a guarantee. "This is how I earn my living. I couldn't afford to work for free—that's what court-appointed lawyers are for. Besides, I repeat that it was simply not possible to know .. ."

"I understand. She didn't come around to settle the score later?"

He became lost in the contemplation of his glass on the glass top of the table. My question did not seem to call up pleasant memories. Finally he shrugged in reply, and sat looking at me.

"But later," I insisted, "you
did
work for her again."

Once more he put his hands in his jacket pockets and took them out again. A sip from the glass, and the hands again.

"Maybe I did," he finally admitted. "For a short period of time, and a long time ago. Then I refused to go on. I'm clean."

My information said otherwise, but I didn't argue. What I'd been told was that when she got out of prison, the Mexicana had grabbed him by the balls and squeezed them till Eddie did what she wanted him to do, and then she threw him out once he was no longer useful. Those were the words of the police chief of Torremolinos, Pepe Cabrera. "Mendoza had that bastard shitting bricks. To the last." And that phrase fit Eddie Alvarez like a glove. You could perfectly imagine him so scared he was shitting bricks, or anything else Teresa Mendoza told him to shit. "Tell him I sent you," Cabrera had said while we were eating in the sporty port city of Benalmadena. "That piece of shit owes me big-time, and he won't be able to say no. That affair of the container from London and the robbery at Heathrow, for example—just mention that and he'll be eating out of your hand. What
you
get out of
him
is your business."