Queen of the South - Страница 38

"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."

"She wasn't upset or anything, then," I persisted.

He looked at me with professional caution. "Why do you say that?" he asked.

"Punta Castor."

I figured he was calculating exactly how much I knew about what had happened. I didn't want to disappoint him. "The famous trap," I prodded. The word seemed to have a laxative effect.

"Bullshit," he said, squirming in his rattan-and-wicker chair, making it creak. "What do you know about traps?… That word is an exaggeration."

"That's why I'm here. So you can set the record straight."

"At this late stage of things, it can hardly matter," he replied, picking up his glass. "In that mess at Punta Castor, Teresa knew I had nothing to do with what Canabota and that sergeant in the Guardia Civil were planning. Afterward, she took the trouble to find all that out. And when my turn came… Well, I convinced her that I'd been an innocent bystander. And the fact that I'm still alive proves that I convinced her."

He turned thoughtful, tinkling the ice in his glass. He took a drink. "Despite the money lost on the paintings, Punta Castor, and all the rest…" he insisted, and he himself seemed surprised, "I'm still alive."

He took another drink. And then another. Apparently, all this remembering made him thirsty.

"Actually," he said, "no one ever went specifically after Santiago Fisterra. No one. Canabota just needed somebody to use as a decoy while the real cargo was unloaded someplace else. That was standard practice: they used the Gallego the way they might have used anybody else. Bad luck is all it was. He wasn't the type to flip if somebody slapped a pair of handcuffs on him. Plus he was from outside, he had that attitude of his, and he had very few friends in the Strait… And there was that sergeant in the Guardia Civil that had got the idea in his head of doing the Gallego in. So they picked him." "And her," I suggested.

He squirmed and made the chair creak again, looking at the stairs to the terrace as though Teresa Mendoza were about to appear on them. A silence. Another drink. Then he straightened his glasses and said, "Unfortunately." Then he fell silent again. Another drink. Unfortunately, no one could have imagined the Mexicana would get where she got.

"So what happened to them afterward?… To Canabota and this Sergeant Velasco?"

The defiance lasted three seconds. He folded. You know as well as I do, his eyes said distrustfully. Anybody that reads the newspapers knows. But if you think it's me that's going to explain it to you, you've got another think coming.

"I don't know anything about that." He made the gesture of zipping his mouth closed, looking mischievous and self-satisfied-the expression of a man who has remained standing longer than others of his acquaintance. I ordered coffee for me and another chocolate-colored whisky for him. From the city and the port came sounds muted by distance. An automobile was climbing the highway below the terrace, with a great deal of noise from its muffler, toward the peak of the Rock. I thought I saw a blond woman at the wheel, and a man in a sailor's jacket.

"Anyway," Eddie Alvarez went on, after considering the matter for a while, "all of that was later, when things changed and she decided to collect on her outstanding debts… And listen, when she got out of El Puerto de Santa Maria, I figure all she was thinking about was disappearing from the world. I don't think she was ever ambitious, or a dreamer… I'll wager she was never even truly vengeful. She just wanted to stay alive, that's all. Thing is, sometimes luck, after slapping you around for a while, decides to smile on you."

A group of men and women from Gibraltar occupied a neighboring table. Alvarez knew them, and he went over to say hello. That gave me the opportunity to study him from some remove: the obsequious way he smiled, shook hands, listened-like a man listening for clues to what he ought to say. A survivor, I told myself. The kind of slimy son of a bitch who survives, as another Eddie had described him-in this case Eddie Campello, also from Gibraltar, an old friend of mine and publisher of the local weekly Vox. "Doesn't even have the balls to double-cross you, our friend," said Campello when I asked about the relationship between the lawyer and Teresa Mendoza. "What happened at Punta Castor was Canabota and that sergeant from the Guardia Civil-Alvarez wasn't involved. He just pocketed the Gallego's money, and money didn't mean shit to that woman. The fact that she rescued that asshole and put him to work for her again is proof of that."