Queen of the South - Страница 3

Chingale. She hoped Guero had died fast. That they'd shot down the Cessna with him in it, food for the sharks, instead of carrying him into the desert to ask him questions. With the Federates or the DEA, the questions were usually asked in the jail at Almoloya or in Tucson. You could make a deal, reach an agreement, turn state's evidence, go into the Witness Protection Program or be an inmate with certain privileges if you played your cards right. But Guero didn't play his cards right-it was just not his way of doing business. He wasn't a coward, and he didn't actually work both sides of the street. He'd only double-crossed a little, less for the money than for the thrill of living on the edge. Us guys from San Antonio, he'd smile, we like to stick our necks out, you know? Playing the narcobosses was fun, according to Guero, and he would laugh inside when they'd tell him to fly this up, fly this other stuff back, and make it fast, junior, don't keep us waiting. They took him for a common hired gun-or mule, in his case-and they'd toss the money on the table, disrespectfully, stacks of crisp bills, when he came back from the runs where the capos had collected a shitload of green and he'd risked his freedom and his life.

The problem was, Guero wasn't satisfied to just do things-he was a big-mouth, he had to talk about them. What's the point in fucking the prettiest girl in town, he'd say, if you can't brag about it to your buddies? And if things go wrong, Los Tigres or Los Tucanes de Tijuana'll put you in a corrido and people'll play your song in cantinas and on the radio. Chale, you'll be a legend, compas. And many times-Teresa's head on his shoulder, having drinks in a bar, at a party, between dances at the Morocco, him with a Pacifico and her with her nose dusted with white powder-she had shivered as she'd listened to him tell his friends things that any sane man would have kept very, very quiet. Teresa didn't have much education, didn't have anything but Guero, but she knew that the only way you knew who your friends were was if they visited you in the hospital, or the jail, or the cemetery. Which meant that friends were friends until they weren't friends anymore.

She walked three blocks, fast, without looking back. No way this was going to work-the heels she was wearing were too high, and she realized that she was going to twist an ankle if she had to take off running. She pulled them off and stuck them in the gym bag, and then, barefoot, turned right at the next corner. She came out on Calle Juarez. There she stopped in front of a cafe to see whether she was being followed. She didn't see anything that might indicate danger, so to buy some time to think and lower her pulse rate a little, she pushed open the door and went inside.

She sat at a table at the far end of the cafe, her back against the wall and her eyes on the street. To study The Situation, as Guero would have put it. Or to try to. Her wet hair was in her face; but she pushed it back only once, because she decided it was better like that, hiding her face a little. The waitress brought her a glass of nopal juice, and Teresa sat motionlessly for a while, unable to think, until she felt the need for a cigarette. In her rush to get out of the apartment she'd forgotten hers. She asked the waitress for one and held it as she lit it for her, ignoring the look on the woman's face, the glance at her bare feet; she sat there quietly, smoking, as she tried to pull her thoughts together. Ah, now. Finally. Finally, with the cigarette smoke in her lungs, she could feel her serenity returning-enough, at least, to think The Situation through with a degree of practicality.

She had to get to the other house, the safe house, before the hit men found it and she wound up with a bit part in those narcocorridos by Los Tigres or Los Tucanes that Guero was always dreaming he'd have someday. The money and the documents were there, and without the money and the documents, no matter how fast she ran, she'd never get anywhere. Guero's notebook was there, too: telephone numbers, addresses, notes, contacts, secret runways in Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila; friends, enemies-it wasn't easy to tell them apart-in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and on both sides of the Rio Grande-El Paso, Juarez, San Antonio. That, he'd told her, you burn or hide. For your own good, don't even look at it, prietita. Don't even look at it. But if you're totally fucked, I mean you're totally in a corner and the whole thing has gone to shit, you can trade it to don Epifanio Vargas for your hide. Clear? Swear to me that you won't open that book, under any circumstances. Swear by God and the Virgin. Come here-swear by this sweet thing you're holding in your hand right now.

She didn't have much time. She'd forgotten her watch, too, but she saw that it would be night soon. The street looked quiet-normal traffic, normal people walking normally down the street, nobody standing around. She put her shoes on. She left ten pesos on the table and got up slowly, gripping the gym bag. She didn't dare look at herself in the mirror when she left.

At the corner, a kid was selling soft drinks, cigarettes, and newspapers set out on a flattened cardboard box that read "Samsung." She bought a pack of Faros and a box of matches, stealthily looking over her shoulder, and then walked on with deliberate slowness. The Situation. A parked car, a cop, a man sweeping the sidewalk-they all spooked her. The muscles in her back were aching again, and there was a bitter taste in her mouth. The high heels were bothering her, too. If Guero had seen her, she thought, he'd have laughed. And she cursed him for that, deep inside. Laughing out the other side of your mouth now, aren't you, pinche cabron You and that macho attitude of yours, you and those fucking brass balls of yours, you and.., She caught the smell of burned flesh as she passed a taqueria, and the bitter taste in her mouth suddenly got worse. She had to stop and duck into a doorway, where she vomited up a slimy greenish thread of nopal.

I knew Culiacan. Before my interview with Teresa Mendoza, I had been there, right at the beginning, when I started researching her story and she was no more than a vague personal challenge in the form of a few photographs and press clippings. I also went back later, when it was all over and I was finally in possession of what I needed to know: facts, names, places. So I can lay it out now with no more than the inevitable, or convenient, gaps. Let me mention, too, that the seed of all this was planted some time ago, during a dinner with Rene Delgado, editor of the newspaper Reforma, in Mexico City. Rene and I have been friends ever since as young reporters we shared a room in the Hotel Intercontinental in Managua during the war against Somoza. Now we see each other when I go to Mexico, talk over old times and new, avoid mentioning our gray hair and wrinkles. And that time, eating escamoles and tacos de polio at the San Angel Inn, he offered me the story.

"You're a Spaniard, you've got good contacts there. Write something dynamite about her for us."

I shook my head as I tried to keep the contents of the tortilla from dripping down my chin. "I'm not a reporter anymore. Now I make it all up, and I don't write anything under four hundred pages."

"So do it your way," Rene insisted. "Write a fucking literary piece."

I finished off the taco and we discussed the pros and cons. I hesitated until the coffee and the Don Julian No. 1 came, just when Rene was threatening to call the mariachis over. But his little stratagem backfired on him: The story for Reforma had turned into a private book project, although our friendship didn't suffer on that account. Quite the contrary: The next day he put at my disposal all his best contacts on the Pacific coast and in the federal police force so I could fill in the dark years-the stage of Teresa Men-doza's life that was unknown in Spain, and not in the public domain even in Mexico.

"At least we'll review it," Rene said, "cabron."

At that time, about the only things known publicly about Teresa Men-doza were that she had lived in Las Siete Gotas, a poor barrio in Culiacan, and that she was the daughter of a Spanish father and a Mexican mother. Some people also knew that she'd dropped out after elementary school and a few years later gone to work as a salesgirl in a sombrero store in the Buelna mercado, then become a money changer on Calle Juarez. Then, one Day of the Dead afternoon-life's little ironies-fate set her in the path of Raimundo Davila Parra, a pilot for the Juarez cartel. In that world, he was "Guero" Davila. "Guero" was Mexican slang for a blue-eyed, blond-headed gringo, which Guero wasn't, exactly, since he was a Chicano from San Antonio, but the name stuck.

All this latter stuff was known more from the legend woven around Teresa Mendoza than from documented sources, so to throw some light on that part of her life story I went to the capital of the state of Sinaloa, on the west coast of Mexico, at the mouth of the Gulf of California, and wandered through its streets and into its cantinas. I even followed the exact, or almost exact, route taken by Teresa on that last afternoon (or first, depending on how you look at it), when the telephone rang and she fled the apartment she'd shared with Guero Davila. I started at the love nest they had lived in for two years: a comfortable, discreet two-story house with a patio in back, crepe myrtle and bougainvillea at the door, located in the southeast part of Las Quintas, a neighborhood that had become a favorite of middle-class drug dealers, the ones who were doing okay, but not well enough to afford a luxurious mansion in Colonia Chapultepec.

Then I walked along under the royal palms and mango trees to Calle Juarez, and in front of the little grocery store I stopped to watch the girls who, holding a cell phone in one hand and a calculator in the other, were changing money right out in the open. Or to put it another way, taking stacks of American dollars fragrant with cocaine or high-quality hashish from the sierra, and laundering it into Mexican pesos. In that city where breaking the law is often a social convention and a way of life-It's a family tradition, says one famous corrido, to break the law-Teresa Mendoza was one of those girls for a while. Until a black Bronco stopped one afternoon, and Raimundo Davila Parra lowered the smoked-glass window and sat there and stared at her from the driver's seat. And her life changed forever.