A Scarcity of Condors
Page 1
Copyright © 2019 by Suanne Laqueur
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or trans-mitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
Suanne Laqueur/Cathedral Rock Press
Somers, New York
www.suannelaqueurwrites.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Design by Ampersand Book Interiors
Cover Design by Tracy Kopsachilis
A Scarcity of Condors/ Suanne Laqueur. — 1st ed.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Author's Note
Dedication
Epigraph 1
Epigraph 2
Prologue
Jude the Obscure The Verb
The Chain Link Fence
The Widow
The She-Wolf
The Nouns
The Social Power
The Airport
Cleón
The Ragtime
The Drama
The Social Pyramid
The Show Must Go On
The Picnic table
The Ethnicities
The Kings of Death
Cleón
The Fondue Pot
The Gun
The Witches of Killarney
Cleón
The Silence
Saint Jude The Aplogy
Cleón
The Sober Jude
The Orange
The Visual
The Rule Ever Since
Cleón
The Worst Sister
The Outcome
The Sears Catalog
Cleón
The Poor Man's Reuben
The Deliberate Cruelty
The Elephant
Cleón
The Only Entertainment
The Other Cheek
The Hundredth Time
Cleón
The Border of Divine
The Weight in My Lap
The Firing Squad
Cleón
The Ceiling Goddess
The Beggarly Question
The Geography of Sadness
The Locker Room
Cleón
The Crossed Arms
Hey, Jude The Garden
The Night Before
The Hollywood Moment
Cleón
The Locks
The Haven Within
The Prunes
The Names
Cleón
The Same
The Shape
The Brothers
El Cóndor
The Shame in Her Veins
Cleón
The Tower
The Seahorse
Cleón
The Execution
The Landscape
The Lonely People
Cleón
The Other Jude
The Boring Everyday Things
The Infant
Cleón
The Last Name
Epilogue
Recipes
About the Author
Also by Suanne Laqueur
It is estimated that between 1973 and 1978, approximately 4,500 people from diverse backgrounds passed through the Villa Grimaldi detention center in Santiago, Chile: leftist militants, workers, students, men, women, girls and boys.
The first to pass through the gates were Baptist Van Schouwen Vasey, a surgeon, and Patricio Munita Castillo, a law student at the University of Chile. Both men were kidnapped on December 13, 1973. As of this writing, Van Schouwen Vasey remains disappeared. Castillo’s remains were identified by the Servicio Medical-Legal.
A Scarcity of Condors is a fictional novel, based on historical events. Cleon Tholet’s torture and interrogation in the Villa Grimaldi compound is a composite of actual testimony by detainees. His being imprisoned in November of 1973 is an intentional anachronism on my part. This, along with any other historical inconsistencies in the book, was taken with poetic license, and written with the utmost respect and regard for all of Chile’s victims, survivors and Los Desaparacidos.
—SLQR
Somers, New York
September 30, 2019
For Moony, the river on which this boat sailed.
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”
—Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII
“Desaparecidos were not just murdered, but attempts were made to convince the whole world that they did not exist. This almost drove some families crazy. Legal documents were manipulated to the point that individuals really did disappear. Not just that their whereabouts were unknown, but that they didn’t exist at all in the records…
“The attempts of families and friends to find the missing were portrayed as desperate attempts by crazy people to destroy the country through their lies. They were transformed into pariahs of society through the disappearance of the victims. Families looking for desaparecidos were seen as dangerous and problematic, not because of their political beliefs, not for their own values, but merely because they insisted in the existence of people that ‘did not exist.’”
—Marisol Intriago,
director of the Special Unit of Forensic
Identification at the Servicio Medico-Legal,
an institute under Chile’s Ministry of Justice, which advises the courts on medical and legal matters.
Servicio Medical-Legal
Santiago, Chile
July 2010
Isabella Eberhoff smiled above the report on her desk, her gaze caressing the page as if it were a beloved child’s artwork or the revealed physique of a new lover.
The STR analysis revealed a very high degree of allele sharing among the two male profiles, heretofore known as I-14307 and I-29742. This degree of allele sharing suggests the individuals are closely related.
The Sibship Index (SI) was calculated by determining the likelihood ratio of two hypotheses:
Hypothesis-1: I-14307 and I-29742 are siblings;
Hypothesis-2: The samples belong to two unrelated individuals.
The SI was determined to be 5.6 million in favor of Hypothesis-1. In other words, the DNA evidence is 5.6 million times more likely that the individuals are siblings, rather than unrelated individuals.
Isabella turned the page and tucked her hair behind her ear. The siblings being male gave the lab an advantage. The Y-chromosome replicated itself exactly when it passed from father to son, leaving a trail of genetic pebbles through generation after generation.
Anticipation rising in her chest, her eyes scanned the next section, which summarized the DNA profile of Lot 97-M: nineteen male bone fragments exhumed from a mass grave in 1991. The comparison of this DNA to I-14307 and I-29742 could put a forty-year mystery to rest.
We generated a 17 Y-STR loci profile using DNA from Lot 97-M, I-14307 and I-29742.
We observed an exact match between all three males over all 17 markers. The loci are:
DYS456 (16 repeats)
DYS389I (13 repeats)
DYS390 (24 repeats)
DYS389II (29 repeats)
&n
bsp; With the likelihood ratio being 6.1 million times more than if these samples were from unrelated individuals, it is the conclusion of the team that Lot 97-M is the biological father of both I-14307 and I-29742.
Isabella drew in and exhaled a long breath, then checked her watch. It was close to seven o’clock on the west coast of the United States. Nearing ten on the eastern seaboard. Two brothers on opposite sides of the continent, each unaware of the other. Unaware that she, from the other side of the equator, could reunite them.
In case I-14307 was an early-to-bedder, she opted for the brother on the west coast. Her heart thudded as a connection was laid from Santiago to Seattle. Her stomach prickled as the phone rang. These were the last seconds of I-29742’s life as he knew it. A touch of his finger to the screen of his phone would change everything.
The smile curved up her mouth as she patted the report’s pages. You could guess at the truth. You could hypothesize, you could hope, you could pray, or you could believe the hunch in your gut.
Isabella Eberhoff, director of the Special Unit of Forensic Identification, wasn’t in the business of hunches found in the gut or hope found in the heart. She was in the business of the truth found in bone matter.
And at the end of the day, the bones never lied.
I-29742 answered on the fourth ring. “¿Diga?”
“Buenas noches. ¿Es Jude Tholet?”
“Sí.”
“It’s Isabella Eberhoff with the Medical-Legal Institute in Santiago. I have news…”
“The beggarly question of parentage—what is it after all?
What does it matter, when you come to think of it,
whether a child is yours by blood or not?”
—Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
The contents of Jude Tholet’s wallet were what you’d find in any man’s daily essentials kept folded in back pocket. Driver’s license, credit cards, insurance card, two condoms, an emergency $20 bill. His green card, of course, in accordance with Section 264(e) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. He was a rule-follower by nature, but being the child and grandchild of refugees, his chromosomes had an extra be-prepared gene. An inherited propensity to keep his eyes on the exit signs, ready to make a run for the border at the first sign of trouble. He had zero cause to worry about his permanent residence status, but he was never without his papers and a plan.
In a secret slot of his wallet, Jude carried something slightly unique. A slip of folded paper, born of a page torn from a paperback copy of Scott Spencer’s Endless Love. Now cropped to the first half of the first sentence of the first chapter, its active verbs underlined in red pen:
When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time, ruined everything I loved.
Below, in fine black pen, Jude wrote his revision:
When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I was stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time, everything I loved was ruined.
Jude Tholet learned a hard lesson about physical grammar at age seventeen: the noise of breaking bone was made distinct by the verb being transitive or intransitive.
I broke my leg made one sound. My leg was broken made entirely another.
If you broke a bone, it became an experience.
If your bone was broken, it became your identity.
Jude grew up knowing his father walked with crutches and occasionally used a wheelchair because he’d broken both legs. But it wasn’t until his early teens that he learned Cleon Tholet didn’t trip down some stairs, or slide into home base, or ski off a trail or foolishly jump off a roof to a swimming pool below. Cleon had no ownership in the verb. He did not break his legs.
His legs were broken.
While a political prisoner in Chile, Cleon endured six weeks of interrogation and torture in the Villa Grimaldi detention center. He was thrown back onto the streets of Santiago—literally thrown from the back of a jeep. The soldier driving ran him over, breaking every bone in his legs.
Cleon’s bones were among thousands broken in detention centers where Chileans were tortured, beaten, maimed and murdered in the vicious tornado of government upheaval later known as Operation Condor. By fourteen, Jude knew that thousands of people in Chile did not disappear under General Augusto Pinochet.
They were disappeared.
Jude possessed an exact replica of his father’s Y-chromosome. The sound of intransitive breakage and disappearance coded into every cell of his body from birth. Instead of being thrown into the street, he was held upright against a playground’s chain link fence. In the role of a soldier with a jeep was a neighborhood boy with a baseball bat. The code name for an operation was replaced by a Chilean thug with the nickname El Cóndor.
Jude read Scott Spencer’s novel while his broken leg healed. He tore out the first page of Endless Love with its provocative first sentence and edited the verbs to mirror his experience.
I was stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time, everything I loved was ruined.
Vancouver, British Columbia
October 2009
Jude sat on a picnic table, staring at the chain link fence surrounding one of the playgrounds in Vancouver’s Central Park. Forest green diamonds stretched taut between the iron uprights.
In his high school days, the playground was enclosed by a dilapidated, rusty barrier with more gaps than links. It made a tired, saggy twang as Jude’s body bounced off it, the night he was stepped far from the pathway of normal life. The metal went on complaining as he wrestled in the single-minded grip of two senior jocks. A third boy called Juan-Mateo Díaz stood looking on. A six-foot-five champion pitcher whose arm span earned him the nickname El Cóndor. His Louisville slugger was tucked under one mighty wing and a cloud of cigarette smoke circled his head.
Feet planted wide on the bench, elbows on knees, thirty-six-year-old Jude stared down the new fence around the old memories. He slid down from the table, walked the few steps to the approximate place where his best friend Fernando Paloma had sprawled that night, unconscious after Juan-Mateo bunted his head.
Jude’s foot moved through the dry leaves and litter, looking for…
What? A sign? An artifact? Some fragment of forensic evidence they missed?
He walked to the fence and put his back against it, bouncing a little. His hands went to fists and shoved deeper in his jacket pockets, resisting the urge to extend along the chain links. Re-enact how the Condor’s lieutenants had pinned him like a butterfly in a tray, holding him wide open.
He closed his eyes, remembering.
“I’m gonna kill you, faggot.” Juan-Mateo spoke Spanish, which Jude understood perfectly.
I’m fucked, he thought, right before the Condor’s fist smashed into his cheekbone. His brain exploded in yellow stars.
A punch to the stomach, making Jude double over, winded and nauseous.
“Your people should’ve stayed in Poland to burn, Jew-boy.”
“Son de Austria, hueón,” Jude said through his teeth.
They’re from Austria, asshole.
He snapped his buckling legs together to narrowly avoid a knee to the balls. Juan-Mateo put a few more punches into his ribs and head, punctuating his threats.
“Why don’t I finish the job they started on your old man? They broke his legs? Should’ve broken his skull, then his fucking cola son would’ve never been born, po?”
Jude’s labored, heaving breaths froze in his lungs as Juan-Matteo picked up his bat and took a few practice swings.
“You like being on your knees so bad, faggot? Let’s see if I can put you there permanently. Hold him.”
“Hey, man, that’s enough,” one of the goons said, his voice shaking.
“Basta, Cóndor,” th
e other cried. “This is out of hand.”
“Shut up.” The air whistled around the slice of the bat and terror flooded Jude’s body. He knew exactly what was coming and only these two wingmen could save him.
“Don’t let him do it,” he said between heaving breaths.
“I said fucking hold him.”
Jude left himself. His consciousness seized its papers and fled for the border of his body. From far above he watched El Cóndor feint a swing at Jude’s head, then pull back and come in low instead. He heard one of the henchmen give a garbled heave at the visceral, crunching thud of the bat against Jude’s left shin, followed by his own scream echoing across the empty park.
He would always claim, truthfully, that he didn’t remember the pain of the moment, but he never forgot the sounds. The whistle of air around the bat. The gag. The scream. And the distinct noise made by intransitive breakage. The two guards dropped his arms and he crumpled to the ground, shrieking in a way he didn’t know was possible. Moaning and vomiting as Juan-Mateo advanced, tapping the bat in the palm of his hand.
“Hey, cola. How’d you like this woody up your ass?”
Jude dug fingers into the cold dirt and tried hard to die. At the hospital, nurses would discover four of his nails were torn down to the quick and embedded with dirt and blood.
“I want to see you deep-throat this baby,” Juan-Mateo said. “You’ll suck dick even better after I take your teeth out.”
As Jude tried harder to will himself out of existence, his blurred vision focused an instant on Fernando, still sprawled in the leaves. Jude was sure he was dead. If he’d known today would be the last time he’d kiss and touch Feño, he would’ve made more of it. Said more. Did more.
Had more.
Twenty years later, the adult Jude opened his eyes and looked toward the parking lot, from whence came his salvation that horrible night. A husband and wife walking their dog, innocently passing through the park just as the Condor hit his grand slam. They could’ve sensed the altercation, heard the shouts and screams and hurried away, minding their business, not wanting to get involved because technically the park was closed and they were trespassing. Instead, the good neighbors investigated. They crossed the parking lot and called, “Everything okay?”