Queen of the South Read online

  But there was another photo whose existence I knew nothing about, and before I left that house, two hours later, Teresa Mendoza unexpectedly decided to show it to me: a snapshot wrinkled and falling apart, its pieces held together with tape crisscrossing the back. She laid it on the table with the full ashtray and the bottle of tequila of which she herself had drunk two-thirds and the SIG-Sauer with the three clips lying there like an omen—in fact, a fatalistic acceptance—of what was going to happen that night.

  As for that last photo, it really was the oldest of all the photos ever taken of her, and it was just half a photo, because the whole left side was missing. You could see a man’s arm in the sleeve of a leather aviator jacket over the shoulders of a thin, dark-skinned young woman with full black hair and big eyes. The young woman was in her early twenties, wearing very tight pants and an ugly denim jacket with a lambskin collar. She was facing the camera with an indecisive look about halfway down the road toward a smile, or maybe on the way back. Despite the vulgar, excessive makeup, the dark eyes had a look of innocence, or a vulnerability that accentuated the youthfulness of the oval face, the eyes slightly upturned into almondlike points, the very precise mouth, the ancient, adulterated drops of indigenous blood manifesting themselves in the nose, the matte texture of the skin, the arrogance of the uplifted chin. The young woman in this picture was not beautiful, but she was striking, I thought. Her beauty was incomplete, or distant, as though it had been growing thinner and thinner, more and more diluted, down through the generations, until finally what was left were isolated traces of an ancient splendor. And then there was that serene—or perhaps simply trusting—fragility. Had I not been familiar with the person, that fragility would have made me feel tender toward her. I suppose.

  “I hardly recognize you.”

  It was the truth, and I told it. She didn’t seem to mind the remark; she just looked at the snapshot on the table. And she sat there like that for a long time.

  “Me, either,” she finally said.

  Then she put the photo away again—first in a leather wallet with her initials, then in the purse that was lying on the couch—and gestured toward the door. “I think that’s enough,” she said.

  She looked very tired. The long conversation, the tobacco, the bottle of tequila. She had dark circles under her eyes, which no longer resembled the eyes in the old snapshot. I stood up, buttoned my jacket, put out my hand—she barely brushed it—and glanced again at the pistol. The fat guy from the other end of the room was beside me, indifferent, ready to see me out. I looked down, intrigued, at his splendid iguana-skin boots, the belly that spilled over his handworked belt, the menacing bulge under his denim jacket. When he opened the door, I saw that what I took as fat maybe wasn’t, and that he did everything with his left hand. Obviously his right hand was reserved as a tool of his trade.

  “I hope it turns out all right,” I said.

  She followed my gaze to the pistol. She nodded slowly, but not at my words. She was occupied with her own thoughts.

  “Sure,” she muttered.

  Then I left. The same Federales with their bulletproof vests and assault weapons who had frisked me from head to toe when I came in were standing guard in the entry and the front garden as I walked out. A military jeep and two police Harley-Davidsons were parked next to the circular fountain in the driveway. Five or six journalists and a TV camera were under a canopy outside the high walls, in the street: they were being kept at a distance by soldiers in combat fatigues who were cordoning off the grounds of the big house. I turned to the right and walked through the rain toward the taxi that was waiting for me a block away, on the corner of Calle General Anaya.

  Now I knew everything I needed to know, the dark corners had been illuminated, and every piece of the history of Teresa Mendoza, real or imagined, now fit: from that first photograph, or half-photograph, to the woman I’d just talked to, the woman who had an automatic lying out on the table.

  The only thing lacking was the ending, but I would have that, too, in a few hours. Like her, all I had to do was sit and wait.

  Twelve years had passed since the afternoon in the city of Culiacán when Teresa Mendoza started running. On that day, the beginning of a long round-trip journey, the rational world she thought she had built in the shadow of Güero Dávila came crashing down around her, and she suddenly found herself lost and in danger.

  She had put down the phone and sat for a few seconds in cold terror. Then she began to pace back and forth across the room, opening drawers at random, blind with panic, knowing she needed a bag to carry the few things she needed for her escape, unable at first to find one. She wanted to weep for her man, or scream until her throat was raw, but the terror that was washing over her, battering her like waves, numbed her emotions and her ability to act. It was as if she had eaten a mushroom from Huautla or smoked a dense, lung-burning joint, and been transported into some distant body she had no control over.

  Blindly, numbly, after clumsily but quickly pulling on clothes—some jeans, a T-shirt, and shoes—she stumbled down the stairs, her hair wet, her body still damp under her clothing, carrying a little gym bag with the few things she had managed to gather and stuff inside: more T-shirts, a denim jacket, panties, socks, her purse with two hundred pesos. They would be on their way to the apartment already, Güero had warned her. They’d go to see what they could find. And he did not want them to find her.

  Before she stepped outside the gate, she paused and looked out, up and down the street, indecisively, with the instinctive caution of the prey that catches the scent of the hunter and his dogs nearby. Before her lay the complex urban topography of a hostile territory. Colonia las Quintas: broad streets, discreet, comfortable houses with bougainvillea everywhere and good cars parked in front. A long way from the miserable barrio of Las Siete Gotas, she thought. And suddenly, the lady in the drugstore across the street, the old man in the corner grocery where she had shopped for the last two years, the bank guard with his blue uniform and twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun on his shoulder—the very guard who would always smile, or actually, leer, at her when she passed—now looked dangerous to her, ready to pounce. There won’t be any more friends anymore, Güero had said offhandedly, with that lazy smile of his that she sometimes loved, and other times hated with all her heart. The day the telephone rings and you take off running, you’ll be alone, prietita. And I won’t be around to help.

  She clutched the gym bag to her body, as though to protect her most intimate parts, and she walked down the street with her head lowered, not looking at anything or anybody, trying at first not to hurry, to keep her steps slow. The sun was beginning to set over the Pacific, twenty-five miles to the west, toward Altata, and the palm, manzanita, and mango trees of the avenue stood out against a sky that would soon turn the orange color typical of Culiacán sunsets. She realized that there was a thumping in her ears—a dull, monotonous throbbing superimposed on the noise of traffic and the clicking of her own footsteps. If someone had called out to her at that moment, she wouldn’t have been able to hear her name, or even, perhaps, the sound of the gunshot.

  The gunshot. Waiting for it, expecting it with such certainty—her muscles tense, her neck stiff and bowed, her head down—that her back and kidneys ached. This was The Situation. Sitting in bars, among the drinks and cigarette smoke, she’d all too often heard this theory of disaster—discussed apparently only half jokingly—and it was burned into her brain as if with a branding iron. In this business, Güero had said, you’ve got to know how to recognize The Situation. Somebody can come over and say Buenos días. Maybe you even know him, and he’ll smile at you. Easy. Smooth as butter. But you’ll notice something strange, a feeling you can’t quite put your finger on, like

  something’s just this much out of place—his fingers practically touching. And a second later, you’re a dead man—Güero would point his finger at Teresa like a revolver, as their friends laughed—or woman.

  “Although that’
s always preferable to being carried alive out into the desert,” he’d added, “’cause out there, they’ll take an acetylene torch and a lot of patience, and they’ll ask you questions. And the bad thing about the questions is not that you know the answers—in that case, the relief will come fast. The problem is when you don’t. It takes a lot to convince the guy with the torch that you don’t know the things he thinks you know.”

  Chíngale. She hoped Güero 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 Federales 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 Güero 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 Güero, 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, Güero wasn’t satisfied to just do things—he was a bigmouth, 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 Pacífico 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 Güero, 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 Juárez. There she stopped in front of a café 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 café, her back against the wall and her eyes on the street. To study The Situation, as Güero 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 Güero 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. Güero’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 Río Grande—El Paso, Juárez, 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 Güero 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 cabrón? 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 taquería, 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.

  Iknew Culiacán. 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 René Delgado, editor of the newspaper Reforma, in Mexico City. René 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 pollo 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,” René 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 Julián No. 1 came, just when René 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 Mendoza’s life that was unknown in Spain, and not in the public domain even in Mexico.

  “At least we’ll review it,” René said, “cabrón.”
/>   At that time, about the only things known publicly about Teresa Mendoza were that she had lived in Las Siete Gotas, a poor barrio in Culiacán, 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 Juárez. Then, one Day of the Dead afternoon—life’s little ironies—fate set her in the path of Raimundo Dávila Parra, a pilot for the Juárez cartel. In that world, he was “Güero” Dávila. “Güero” was Mexican slang for a blue-eyed, blond-headed gringo, which Güero 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 Güero Dávila. 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.