Queen of the South - Страница 19

К оглавлению

"I was talking about you."

"I'm Sinaloan. A little wounded in my self-esteem lately. But stubborn as hell."

"What else?"

"That's it. I don't ask you questions about your life. I don't even know whether you're married."

"I'm not." He waggled his finger, negative, before her eyes. "And it pisses me off that you've never asked till now."

"I'm not asking. I'm just saying what I don't know. That was the deal." "What deal? I don't recall any deal."

"No stupid questions. You come, I'm there. You leave, I stay."

"What about the future?"

"We'll talk about the future when it gets here."

"Why do you sleep with me?"

"Who else is there?"

"Why me?"

She halted before him, hands on her hips, as though she were about to sing him a ranchera.

"Because you're a good-looking guy," she said, appraising him, her eyes traveling up and down him slowly, appreciatively. "Because you've got green eyes, a great ass, strong arms… Because you're an hijo de la chingada without being totally fucking selfish. Because you can be hard and sweet at the same time… That enough?" She could feel the muscles in her face grow tense, without her realizing it. "And because you look like somebody I once knew."

Santiago looked at her. An awkward expression on his face now, naturally. The flattered expression had gone, and she could predict what he was about to say.

"I don't like the idea of you remembering another man."

Fucking Gallego, she thought. Pinches honibres de mierda. So easy, all of them, and such assholes. She had to end this conversation.

"Jesus Christ. I didn't say I remember another man. I said you looked like somebody."

"And you don't want to know why I sleep with you?" "Besides my usefulness at Dris Larbi's parties?" "Besides that."

"Because you have a great time in my dark little cave down there. And because sometimes you feel alone."

She watched him run his hand through his hair, confused. Then he took her by the arm.

"What if I slept with other women? Would you care?"

She pulled her arm away gently, until she felt free again. "I'm sure you sleep with other women." "In Melilla?"

"No. Not that I know of. Not here."

"Say you love me."

"Orale. I love you."

"That's not true "

"What do you care? I love you."

I

t was not hard for me to trace the life of Santiago Fisterra. Before I went to Melilla, I supplemented the Algeciras police report with another document, a very detailed Customs report that had dates and places, including Fisterra's birth in O Grove, a fishing village on a tidal inlet, the Ria de Arosa. Which is how I learned that when he met Teresa, Fisterra had just turned thirty-two. His was a classic case: He had shipped on fishing boats starting at age fourteen, and after military service in the navy had worked for the amos do fume, which in Galician is the "tobacco bosses," the capos of the smuggling rings that operated in the Galician rias-Charlines, Sito Minanco, the Pernas brothers. Three years before he met Teresa, the Customs report had him in Villagarcia as the owner of a speedboat working for the Pedrusquinos, a well-known clan of tobacco smugglers who were then expanding into Moroccan hashish.

At that point, Fisterra was a hired man, so much per run; his work consisted of piloting speedboats that offloaded tobacco and drugs from mother ships and fishing boats sitting just outside Spanish waters, taking advantage of the complicated geography of the Galician coastline. That led to dangerous duels with the coast guard, Customs, and the Guardia Civil. On one of those incursions, when he was eluding pursuit by a turbocraft by making tight zigzags through the mussel barges just off the island of Cortegada, Fisterra or his copilot-a young man from Ferrola named Lalo Veiga-turned a spotlight on their pursuers in the middle of a maneuver, and the Customs men crashed into a barge. Result: One dead.

The police reports gave only a rough outline of what happened, so I fruitlessly dialed several telephone numbers until Manuel Rivas, a writer friend of mine who happened to be Galician and happened to live in the area-he had a house on the Costa de la Muerte-made a couple more calls and confirmed the episode. What Rivas told me was that no one could actually prove that Fisterra had a hand in the incident, but the local Customs officers, who were as tough as the smugglers-they'd been raised in the same small towns and sailed on the same boats-swore to send him to the bottom at the first opportunity. An eye for an eye.

That had been enough to make Fisterra and Veiga leave the Rias Bajas in search of less insalubrious air: Algeciras, in the shadow of the Rock of Gibraltar, with its Mediterranean sun and blue waters. And there, profiting from the permissive British laws, the two Galicians registered, through a third party, a powerful speedboat twenty-four feet long and packing a Yamaha PRO six-cylinder engine that put out 225 horsepower, tweaked to 250, on which they made runs between the colony, Morocco, and the Spanish coast.

"Back then," Manolo Cespedes explained to me in Melilla, after I'd seen Dris Larbi, "cocaine was still for the super-rich. Most of the illegal trafficking consisted of moving Gibraltar tobacco and Moroccan hashish: two harvests and twenty-five hundred tons of cannabis illegally exported to Europe every year… And all of it came through here, of course. Still does."

We were putting away a dinner remarkable for both quality and quantity as we sat at a table in La Amistad, a bar-restaurant better known by Melillans as Casa Manolo. It was across the street from the headquarters of the Guardia Civil, which Cespedes himself had had built during his time in power. The owner of the place was actually not named Manolo, but rather Muhammad, although he was also known as Juanito's brother-Juanito being the owner of the restaurant Casa Juanito, though his name was not Juanito, but rather Hassan. Labyrinths of names, all very much in keeping with a city, like Melilla, of multiple identities. As for La Amistad, it was a decidedly working-class place, with plastic chairs and tables and a tapas bar frequented by both Europeans and North Africans; people often ate standing up, even dinner. The quality of the food was memorable, as I said: a menu of fresh shellfish and crustaceans brought in from Morocco that Manolo/Muhammad himself bought every morning at the central market. That night, Cespedes and I were having clams, langostinos from Mar Chica, chunks of halibut, pollack kebabs, and a bottle of cold Barbadillo. And enjoying it, of course. With the Spanish trawlers that fishermen used nowadays, it was getting harder and harder to find anything like this in the waters off the Peninsula.

"When Santiago Fisterra came here," Cespedes continued, "almost all the major traffic was handled in speedboats. He came because that was his specialty, and because a lot of Galicians were setting up in Ceuta and Melilla and along the Andalucian coast… The contacts were made here or in Morocco. The busiest part of the whole Strait was the fourteen kilometers between Punta Carnero and Punta Cires-small-time drug runners in the Ceuta ferries, big consignments in yachts and fishing boats, speedboats… The traffic was so intense that that strip of water started being called Hashish Boulevard."

"What about Gibraltar?"

"Well, right over there, in the middle of everything." Cespedes pointed to the pack of Winstons in front of him on the table, and with a fork he drew a circle around it. "Like a spider in its web. Back then it was the main base for smuggling in the western Mediterranean… The Brits and the locals from the colony left the mafias' hands free. Invest here, sir, trust us with your dough, your financial contacts, and your port facilities… The shipment of tobacco would go directly from the warehouses on the docks to the beaches of La Linea, a thousand meters or so over there… The fact is, it's still going on." He pointed toward the cigarettes again. "These are from there. Tax-free."

"You're not ashamed to smoke them?… A former delegate to parliament defrauding Tabacalera, S.A., and the government?"

"Yeah, right. I'm on a pension, don't forget. Any idea how many packs I smoke a day?"

"So what about Santiago Fisterra?"

Cespedes chewed his halibut a moment, savoring it. Then he took a sip of his Barbadillo and looked at me.

"I don't know whether that particular individual smoked or not, but he never moved tobacco. One run with a cargo of hashish was worth a hundred bringing in Winstons or Marlboros. Hashish was a hell of a lot more profitable."

"And more dangerous, I imagine."

"Much more." After painstakingly sucking them, Cespedes was arranging the langostino heads along the rim of his plate, as though lining them up in formation for inspection. "If you didn't have the Moroccans well greased,

you were fucked. Look at poor Veiga. But with the English there was no

problem-they acted according to their usual double standard. As long as the drugs didn't touch British soil, they looked the other way… So the traffickers came and went with their consignments, and everybody knew who they were. And when they were surprised by the Guardia Civil or Spanish Customs, they hightailed it to Gibraltar for shelter. The only condition was that first they had to throw their cargo overboard."

"It was that easy?"

"That easy." He pointed to the pack of cigarettes with his fork again, this time tapping it. "Sometimes the drug runners would post accomplices up on top of the rock with night-vision binoculars and walkie-talkies-monkeys,