Shadows Across America

by Guillermo Valcarcel

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Guillermo Valcárcel

  By agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Kit Maude

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Sombras que cruzan América by Harper Collins in Spain in 2017. Translated from Spanish by Kit Maude. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2019.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503958821

  ISBN-10: 1503958825

  Cover design by David Drummond

  CONTENTS

  1 Synchronicities

  2 The Beast

  3 The Lost Children

  4 Caribbean

  5 Uncomfortable Truths

  6 A Moment of Fury

  7 Stolen Confessions

  8 Colônia Liberdade

  9 Lights in the Distance

  10 Ratlines

  11 Secret Societies

  12 The Open Mouth of Hell

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  1

  Synchronicities

  By way of an example I shall share an event I observed myself. A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden beetle. As she told me about the dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly, I heard a noise behind me, a slight tapping sound. I turned around and saw an insect knocking against the glass from the outside. I opened the window and caught the animal as it flew inside. It was the closest thing one might find to a golden beetle in these latitudes: a scarab beetle, the common cetonia aurata. In a departure from its ordinary behavior, it had clearly felt a need to enter a dark room at that precise moment. I must admit that nothing like that has ever happened to me before or since and that the patient’s dream remains unique in my experience.

  —C. G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, 1952

  Suddenly he was dreaming about her again. She was no longer the small, charming girl he’d known but a skinny, precocious preteen from Central America. She was about eleven or twelve, just as she would be in real life. With the omniscience of dreams, Ethan was certain it was her even though he had no way of knowing what her face actually looked like. It came like a mysterious premonition. Although in real life he wouldn’t have recognized her if they passed on the street, this was definitely the girl. Later he would realize that he might not have seen her face in the dream; maybe she hadn’t even had one.

  A weak, frightened, disembodied voice arrived like an echo: “I’m still alive.” The words flowed around him in a mist. A chill ran down his back, but he was unable to turn around. There was something unsettling about where she was. Something inexplicable and threatening was approaching, an abstract presence that defied comprehension. It set his teeth on edge. Then the girl’s ghostly whisper faded, and he sensed her crumble away. He couldn’t see her anymore, but he knew that she was still there. He felt that she wanted to run away but that such a move would entail unimaginable danger. His muscles grew tense, and a nauseating smell filled the space. Afterward he would wonder whether it had actually happened, whether you could dream smells or if it had just been simple suggestion, but at the time it had felt viscerally real, a detail that had borne the ring of a terrifying truth.

  She spoke again without moving the lips of a face that may not even have been there: “I’m still alive,” and her timid, childish voice merged into the horror of what was to come, the horror from which he wanted to save her. It swelled around them like a swarm of insects, enveloping her, swallowing her up until she was completely obscured from view. Everything around him had turned pitch black; he couldn’t move and was barely able to breathe. He could feel his constricted chest, his empty lungs, his heart struggling to keep beating. It felt . . .

  Ethan woke up, his eyes bulging.

  He patted the bed, utterly disoriented, trying to reconnect with something solid and real. He was sad to leave her. It felt like he was abandoning her, as though the simple act of waking up was actually a betrayal. His eyes still bleary, he stared up at the ceiling and said her name several times: “Michelle. Michi,” trying to summon his memories of the child and keep them separate from the sinister fog. But for the rest of the day, he couldn’t shake off the unsettling dream.

  He didn’t know how long he lay there, trying to think of when he’d last had a nightmare, the last time he’d clutched at the sheets, afraid that he was about to be dragged off. When he was twelve or thirteen? Finally, her image came to him: Michi, a dark, small child. The way she’d waddled like a doll, chasing him around with clumsy, duck-like steps when she was four years old, her dress flapping in the wind like in a cartoon, laughing like crazy, her black hair flopping over her cheeks. She had coffee-colored eyes and Latin features that already hinted that she would inherit her mother’s looks. His fear faded into melancholy. He hadn’t dreamed of her before, but he often remembered her whenever he saw a child do something endearing. He couldn’t understand why his subconscious would place her in such a horrible situation, and it unnerved him still more that the dream had updated her to her current age. And yet she had been bodiless, like a spirit trapped by some primeval fear. Michelle. Wherever she was.

  Coming back to reality, he looked at the clock: nine. He couldn’t believe that he’d slept through the rising sun or that Ari had left without saying anything. But she had. Her side of the bed was empty and cold. Ari must have left an hour ago, and for some reason she’d let him sleep in. He wandered through the house, unable to focus. The dream had gotten under his skin. He was even more surprised when he saw that everything was clean and tidy. She must have made her breakfast and washed the dishes herself; it was the kind of thing she did when she was mad. He thought back to the night before but couldn’t remember anything out of the ordinary. They’d stayed in to do the quarterly accounts and watched a couple of episodes of a TV series, and Ari had gone to bed exhausted. When he’d come up, she had already been asleep, and he hadn’t woken her. There had been no suggestion of sex. He had no idea what might have happened to upset her. Now thrust unceremoniously back into the trials and tribulations of his everyday life, he set off for the office, still puzzled and worried.

  It wasn’t a long commute. The hard part was usually getting out of the residential district, but at that hour the roads were practically deserted. After crossing Madison Avenue and its long lines of office blocks, Franklin Boulevard led to the single-story strip mall where his office was located, an unremarkable horseshoe-shaped lot designed for small businesses, although half the units were vacant. His office window was barely distinguishable from the pet shop next door. It was only just big enough for the sign: GONZÁLEZ BAIL BONDS FIANZAS 24/7. His surname and the bilingual message had been useful in the early years, but now all the bail bondsmen knew they had to speak some Spanish, including Ari, who spoke it well. These days the company survived more on inertia than any real momentum, and they were beginning to get concerned. He parked the SUV next to her pickup. He could see her through the window, with her back to him. The
office was narrow but long. It had been divided into two equal spaces: the office Ari used as a reception and, separated by a screen, his office, which he rarely occupied given that he spent most of his time transporting prisoners and suspects from one place to another. When he went inside, Ari was on the phone.

  “What crime has your son been accused of? Yes, I understand. The important thing now is to stay calm. We’re here to help . . .”

  Ethan slipped around her desk, his eyebrows raised.

  “Do you know how bail bonds work? I understand. OK, fine. We’ve paid your son’s bail before? What’s his name? Yes, I remember—the kid with the Batman tattoo. What? Oh, this is your other son, the younger one. I’m sorry, madam. Well, listen: if you know us already, we can save some time. Clients can download the form from the website . . . yes, that’s right. Yes, the guarantee plus ten percent. Exactly. Yes, all right. We’ll be here waiting. You too. Good luck. Yes, yes, goodbye.”

  He didn’t know what to do. He’d been thinking hard, but he couldn’t find a single reason for Ari to be pissed. But he certainly wasn’t imagining it. She was so unpredictable; it was usually best just to stay clear. Also, if she wasn’t angry about something and he asked, that was a sure way of aggravating her. He was trapped in a blind alley: the only way out was past her desk. He heard her hang up but still couldn’t decide what to do. Before he could react, she came over to stand in the doorway.

  “You haven’t said good morning.”

  Ethan shivered a little. “Hi, honey. You were busy.”

  “Yes, I was, but now I’m not.”

  Maybe she wasn’t angry with him after all.

  “Did Bear call you?” Ari asked.

  “No. I haven’t spoken to him in a few days.”

  “That’s strange. He called me to ask for some help tracking down someone. He asked me to tell you to pick him up at home.”

  Ethan gave her a questioning look that she returned twofold. “Why didn’t he call me?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  “He must be worried about something.”

  “I think so. If not, he would have called you. He’s always afraid that you’ll find something out before he gets a chance to see you. He still hasn’t worked out how slow you are,” she said, her voice taking on a slightly acid tone.

  So Ari was annoyed about something, but Ethan had no intention of finding out what it might be. Now he had a perfect excuse to let the comment pass and spend the day out of the office. If he was lucky, she’d have forgotten all about it by the evening.

  “What did he say?”

  “A kid missed his court date. I didn’t get whether it was for possession or for not paying child support. He was nervous—he just blurted it out.”

  “He must have been in jail for one of the two. What was the bond?”

  “Five hundred dollars. Do you think he needs money?”

  Ethan laughed incredulously. “Bear? He’s loaded.”

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “I’m not laughing at you. Why would he need money from us?” Now Ethan knew she was mad about something. “Come on—I know that look.”

  “Don’t start that again. I didn’t give you any look.”

  Ari was restraining herself, and Ethan respected that. She was always struggling with her anger, and Ethan wasn’t exactly a calming influence.

  “You seem a little on edge today.”

  “It’s nothing,” Ari mumbled.

  Her tone didn’t sound angry, just tired.

  “Why don’t we take off into the mountains for a couple of days? Just forget about everything? Back to that cabin. The guy would let us have it cheap.”

  “And what about the business?”

  Ethan shrugged. That was how he was: he came up with ideas and then shrugged. He was a good tactician; he could plan for the future and had brilliant ideas. But he was lazy about putting them into practice. He needed help, someone to execute things while he got distracted by new projects. Ari knew that very well; she’d known it since the day she’d met him, before Michelle had left him, when he’d barely noticed she was alive and she had been nothing but a troubled teenager.

  Ethan went over and gave her a hug, a little wary of how she might react. He didn’t dare try to kiss her. By now, nothing about their relationship could be fixed with a kiss, but his hunches were usually right. Ari allowed herself to be hugged, sharing her heat and the reassurance he needed. He could feel how stiff her neck was, the tension in her shoulders, and her frayed nerves. They’d been going through a difficult period, and to cap it all off, she’d been up all night listening to him whispering the name of his ex-girlfriend. Her muscles relaxed as he held the hug, and although she tried to keep up her guard, he could feel her defenses dropping; she was softening slowly, reluctantly. But when he pulled away, she was just as cool as before.

  “So I’ll go see Bear. I guess we’ll be having lunch together.”

  “Goodbye.” She sat down and stared into space, struggling with everything she hated about herself, at a loss to explain her inability to communicate.

  Ethan drove away regretting what he’d said, as usual. Ari might not have known it, but she had that power over him. When he was with her, he could be eloquent and convincing; he could calm her down or drive her crazy. But when he was alone, Ari’s silences and arguments, which were often simplistic and poorly expressed, kept on coming back to him, making him feel deeply guilty. Why did he prey on her low self-esteem? Why did he have to hurt her?

  As Ethan liked to describe it, he’d stumbled into this life “as a moronic twenty-year-old looking for adventure and a broken nose.” He’d certainly managed the latter and, just occasionally, the former. His diplomat father had taken Ethan to live in several different countries when he was a boy, and Ethan had run away several times. He’d regularly flirted with hard drugs and spent some time living on the street, a wholly bitter, unpleasant experience. Until his sixteenth birthday his life had been cushy, his future all planned out. His older sister had agreed to follow that path without complaint, but he had resisted, too thirsty for excitement and intensity. The thrills you chased, he now realized, when you’d never had to worry about money. He’d always been well off, so it had never seemed important. Ethan had spent the early years of adolescence railing against the world he knew, rejecting its benefits and obligations, and his later ones struggling to find the place he imagined awaited him on the streets, the only place where he believed genuine experiences, the truth, could be found. He spent several years passing from one gang to another, long enough to be betrayed, to get his face smashed in repeatedly, to betray others, to grow disillusioned, and to learn that lies and misery were not exclusive to the gilded cage in which he had been raised. And yet he had eventually come to the conclusion that the street was where he belonged.

  When he was twenty years old, he’d found himself presented with the opportunity to turn in a dealer for whom he’d been working for the past few months. Said dealer had slept with his girlfriend right under his nose and then taunted him about it before withholding a payment he’d promised. Ethan hadn’t thought twice. Jealousy and pride had driven him to become an informant for a bounty hunter, but it had been the same rebellious nature that had made things impossible for him at home that had spurred him to ask the bounty hunter for a job. After he’d become familiar with the gutters of drug trafficking, the willfulness of youth had sent him right over to the other extreme. He’d been a poacher turned gamekeeper. He hadn’t had any trouble passing the exams for the necessary qualifications, had gotten the requisite licenses, and had stridden into yet another exciting new world that had turned out to be the worst yet. Far from tracking down dangerous kingpins, he’d found himself seeking out pathetic fugitives who usually reacted like strays being taken to the pound. And just like strays, these wretched people treated anyone they had power over, usually children, in just the same way. That was how he had met Ari and the abusive man who’d supporte
d her and her sister, Sasha, when the girl had still been in diapers and tried to follow her older sister everywhere on her wobbly legs.

  Now, if anyone were to ask, he’d say that he helped to keep people out of jail, not to put them in there. Most of the time, when he had to track down someone who had skipped out on bail, it was because they’d forgotten or misunderstood the instructions they’d been given or were afraid. The majority of people who didn’t turn up for trial were fools incapable of getting their lives in order; more trouble was the last thing they were looking for. They simply couldn’t handle the responsibility of important decisions. Their biggest crime was that they couldn’t help making mistakes. When he came by, they answered the door in a civilized manner and were usually more scared than angry when he took them away. Some of them burned with shame, while others broke into tears. His world was not one of criminals and gangsters but rather fools and losers struggling for survival, caught in a bind that got more difficult with every passing day. Over the years, Ethan hadn’t developed the killer instinct of a hunter but rather a painful empathy for victims of the system. To him that meant that the problem must be with the system itself.

  Under his supervision, Ari had gone back to school in order to start studying law. She’d dedicated herself to this goal. He was amazed at how much she had matured in the time that he’d known her. Although they didn’t have a fixed plan, they wanted to make a change, and her academic success was a hopeful sign. Meanwhile, the business kept limping along, often getting to the end of the month thanks to a little extra income from jobs like this one for Bear. Logically speaking, it should have been Ethan hiring Bear to find fugitives, but that rarely happened, so in the end he’d become Bear’s occasional assistant.

  His car pulled up in front of a quintessential image of the American dream: front lawn, pastel shades, a peaked attic with a round porthole. He honked the horn three times. The front door opened, and out came Candy, ruining the picture. She was dressed in a vest and leather pants, tattoos covered her rippling arms, and her jet-black hair was pulled up into a ponytail. She waved to indicate that she didn’t have time to stop. The threshold remained empty for a few more seconds before it was occupied by Bear’s huge form, which did full justice to his name. His outfit, however, did nothing of the kind: a cream linen suit, dress shoes rather than his usual leather boots, his shoulder-length hair gelled back. Bear, at just under six foot six and 280 pounds, had always been insecure about his body. He was endlessly searching for an aesthetic to call his own, and the results could be somewhat variable. Now, nearing the age of fifty, he’d plumped for a look that he imagined gave him a respectable, executive air but was really that of an oversized Bible salesman in a bulletproof vest. He got into the car with some difficulty and greeted Ethan with a curt hello. Bear spoke in short, direct phrases with a slightly mechanical tone that intimidated fugitives, thus facilitating their successful capture and delivery. Before they pulled out, Bear gave the day’s docket to Ethan.