The Queen of the South by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

bathroom rented to her by Dris Larbi, who deducted it from her salary. Dris wasn't a bad sort, she thought. He treated the girls pretty well, tried to get along with everybody, and was violent only when circumstances left him no choice. I'm not a whore, she had told him that first day, straight out, when he met with her in the Yamila to explain the kinds of jobs that were possible in his business. I'm glad for you, he'd said—and left it at that.
    At first he took her in as something inevitable, neither a bother nor an advantage, an arrangement he was forced into by personal commitments— the friend of a friend of a friend—that had nothing to do with her. A certain deference, due to obligations that Teresa knew nothing about, the chain that joined Dris Larbi to don Epifanio Vargas through the man at the Cafe Nebraska, led Dris to let her work behind the bar, first with Ahmed, as bartender girl, and later as cashier, beginning the day there was an error in the figures and she caught it and set the books straight in fifteen seconds. Dris asked whether she'd studied for that. She answered that she'd never gone beyond the sixth grade, and Dris stood looking at her thoughtfully and said, "You've got a head for numbers, Mexicana, you seem like you were born to add and subtract."
    "I did some of that back in Mexico," she answered. "When I was younger."
    So Dris told her that the next day she'd be earning the salary of a cashier, and Teresa took over the place, and they never mentioned the subject again.
    She walked on the beach for a while, until she had finished her cigarette, absorbed in the distant lights that seemed almost to have been strewn over the quiet black water. Finally she looked around and shivered, as though the cold of the late hour had just penetrated the jacket she wore buttoned all the way up, its collar raised around her neck and chin. Hijole. Back in Culiacan, Güero Dávila had often told her that she didn't have what it took to live alone. No way, he would say. You're not that kind of girl. You need a man to take charge. While you stay—why, just like you are—sweet and tender. Unbelievably pretty. Soft. Treated like a queen or not treated at all, mi vida. You don't even have to make enchiladas—that's what restaurants are for. Plus you like that, mi vida, you like what I do to you and how I do it, and when I get mine, bang, you'll be so sad. He laughed as he whispered, that pinche Güero cabron, his lips between her legs, So come here, prietita. Come down here, to my mouth, and hang on to me and don't let me get away, and hold me tight because one day I'll be dead and nobody will ever hold me again. How sad for you, mi chula. You'll be so alone in the world when I'm not here anymore and you remember me, and miss all this, and know that nobody will ever do this to you again, not the way I do it.
    So all alone. How strange and at the same time how familiar that word was now: alone. Every time Teresa heard it, or said it down deep inside, the image that came to her was not of herself, but of Güero. Or maybe the image was of herself: Teresa watching him. Because there had also been dark times, black doors that Güero would close behind him, and he would be miles away, as though he hadn't come down from wherever he'd been up there. Sometimes he would come back from a mission or one of those runs that he never told her about—but that all Sinaloa seemed to know about— and he would be mute, silent, without his usual swaggering and bravado. He'd dodge her questions from an altitude of five thousand feet, evasive, more self-absorbed than usual, as though he were deeply thoughtful, or preoccupied, or worried. And Teresa, bewildered, not knowing what to say or do, would hover around him like some clumsy animal, in search of the word or gesture that would bring him back to her. Scared.
    Those times, he would leave the house and head downtown. For a while, Teresa suspected that he had another woman—he had