The Accountant's Story

by David Fisher

  In front of the building the police fired their weapons into the air and started screaming, “We won. We won!”

  Luzmila had been late returning to the building. As always, she took a cab to a point a few blocks away from the building and walked the rest of the way. But this time people were running to the block. She stopped a young policeman who was carrying his gun and asked what had happened. “It’s Pablo Escobar,” he said to her. “We just caught him! We just shot him.” Luzmila dropped the packages she was carrying for him. She sat down on the curb and cried.

  Soon our mother and sister Gloria approached the building. The police let them through. A friendly cop helped them. The body they saw on the ground was Limón, not Pablo, and for a few seconds they could believe that the wrong man had been identified, that Pablo lived. Then one of the police told them, “His body is up there on the shingles.” They led her up the steps to see the body of her son.

  I was in my cell and I heard the news on the radio. Pablo Escobar was killed by the DEA and the Colombian police. Of course I couldn’t believe it. It did not seem possible. The TV was turned on and it was on all the channels. Pablo Escobar is dead. It didn’t seem possible to me. He had survived so much. We are all mortal, certainly, but the death of a few of us strikes harder than so many others. It was not that I ever believed Pablo could cheat death, but I thought it would come at a time much later. It was hard for me to accept. Finally I too began crying for my brother, for everything that had happened

  Pablo had been prepared for his death. He had left a tape for Manuela. On this tape he is telling her that God wants him to live. So he was going to go to heaven and he decided to leave this tape for her. Be a good girl, he says. Be a good daughter to your mom, he says. Don’t worry about death, you are going to live on earth for one thousand years—and I will be protecting you from heaven.

  That night a radio station spoke with Juan Pablo, who was still terribly upset at the death of his father. Juan Pablo struck out with anger. His language was harsh to the police. He threatened revenge. I contacted Juan Pablo and told him of the problems this could create for himself and his family. I asked him to call back with an apology. He did this, explaining he had spoken too quickly because he was upset and wanted to apologize for his actions.

  We have always to remain calm, I told Juan Pablo. I reminded him that even at the most dangerous moments his father would never show distress, never show anger or fear. Calm, I advised him.

  Pablo’s body needed to be identified in his coffin. Pelolindo, the girl with the pretty hair, went to the funeral home the next day. She would know him by his hand. In the times she had manicured him she had noticed that his index finger, his pointing finger, was short and square. If I see his hand, she had steeled herself, I will know it’s him. At the funeral home the coffin was opened. Our family had not been allowed to change his clothes, so he was bloody in that coffin. When she approached the coffin she took his hand and held it. It was the hand of Pablo Escobar.

  There were many thousands of people at the funeral. It is tradition in Colombia that at the funeral six songs are sung for the body. Pablo had told the girl with the pretty hair, “If they kill me I want you to sing for me. I don’t want anybody else to sing to me at that place, I want you to sing.”

  It was his wish. She was in shock, but it was a promise she had vowed to fulfill. “You are the brother of my heart,” the song begins. It continues, “Every journey of my life and every day you are there for me.” Which of course is how I will feel forever.

  While the funeral began as a solemn affair, soon the people of Pablo’s city came inside to the funeral home and took the coffin outside on their shoulders. Approximately ten thousand people joined the procession carrying Pablo on his final journey through the streets of Medellín.

  On December 3 the New York Times announced the death of Pablo Escobar on the front page. “Pablo Escobar, who rose from the slums of Colombia to become one of the world’s most murderous and successful cocaine traffickers, was killed in a hail of gunfire. . . .

  “The death is not expected to seriously affect cocaine traffic.”

  Ten

  THE DAYS WERE LONG FOR ME. There were times it seemed like I was flying through time without any destination. I had been in jail for fourteen months but almost all of that time I had lived with hope that Pablo would be able to find a way for all of us to be free one day. So this was not just the death of Pablo, it was the death of my hope. Now each day seemed longer than all the days I’d been there.

  Pablo had been the center of the universe for so many years it was difficult to find any solid land without him. At night I would lie in bed thinking about Pablo when we were kids, remembering our many escapes, feeling the special days of Napoles. I thought about our father and the things we used to do at his farm when we were only seven years old, and sometimes when I did I would remember his face and talk to Pablo as if he were in my cell with me, “Pablo, remember what we did.” At night I would tell him that I missed him, and pray for him, “God be with you, you shall be with God.” And then I would sleep and dream about him.

  In my mind, he was there with me.

  For the next weeks I was too sad to worry about my own legal situation. The days were so long for me. On December 18, I went to the prison’s church to pray for my brother. Afterward I began speaking with the church’s priest, and he told me, “Mr. Escobar, I’m going to tell you something true. I had a dream of Pablo and he told me to play the number 21 for a raffle for a motorcycle. I won that motorcycle.” There had only been one hundred numbers in the drawing, but it was still shocking to me because that number had meaning: Pablo was born on the 1st of December and died on the 2nd of December.

  I was thinking about the meaning of this when I returned to my cell. But as I went there a guard said to me, “Mr. Escobar, you got a letter from the prosecuting attorney.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s in there,” he told me, pointing at a small room. “You have to read it in there.” I walked into this room. A prison guard of the government gave me an envelope with the initials INPEC, the prison system, written on it, and the other required seals from the control posts. Because of security I always had been careful not to open my own mail; instead I had paid someone to do it for me. But this, this I was sure was an answer to an appeal that I had made and I was anxious to know the outcome. I picked up the envelope, which was heavier than I had expected. I remember the weight in my hand. I tore it open and when I did the only thing I saw was a green wire. Maybe I knew it was a bomb before it exploded. That I don’t remember.

  The bomb exploded in my face. My eyes were gone. The explosion had lifted me off my feet to the ceiling, breaking the ceiling tiles with my head. The world was black. I smelled the blood. God, I thought, don’t let me die here.

  No one came to help me. I began to crawl to the door, but when I reached down to support myself with my right hand I knew my hand was badly damaged; my fingers had peeled like a banana, the fingernails had been blown off. I knew I had to live. I tried to drag myself the few feet to the door. I heard people shouting my name. Roberto! Roberto! But they seemed so far away. Later I learned that the bomb had blown all the electricity or perhaps somebody had switched off the electricity thus preventing my rescue. Nobody could help me right away; they were looking to find me. Finally they came.

  I was left alone for several hours in a room in the prison. I think they were waiting for me to die. Earlier that day a doctor friend of mine had come to visit. I had told him that I was going to start my research on AIDS again, and he had been pleased to hear that. Then the doctor arrived in the room where they had left me and began working to save me. He wiped away my blood and gave me some medication for the intense pain I felt all over. Three excruciating hours it took them to take me to the clinic. I asked for a mirror but of course I couldn’t see anything. The bomb had also damaged my hearing. At the clinic they did the work necessary to save me. My family came
there quickly and I told them to leave right away for their own safety. They refused. “If you die, we die with you,” my mother said.

  The doctor offered little hope. After his examination he told my family that it was not possible I would get my vision back. My eyes were as dark as raisins. “We have no option,” he said. “We have to take his eyes out. They are completely destroyed. If we don’t remove them they’ll get infected and he could die from that.” My face and hands were burned, my nose was in pieces, and my ears had been sliced. I had shrapnel all over my body.

  My mother refused to let him have my eyes. She promised she would go anywhere in the world to find the doctor to help me. Immediately she began this search. It was in Bogotá that she found Dr. Hugo Pérez Villarreal, a military doctor. In this clinic they did the surgeries on soldiers wounded badly in the war against the guerrillas, so my injuries were not unusual for them. Dr. Pérez agreed he would operate, but he did not offer me much hope for recuperation.

  Two or three days later I was taken to Bogotá from Medellín for the first of my twenty-two operations. That was the beginning of the most terrible time of my life.

  It was never discovered who had sent the bomb. But this jail was maximum security. In that prison there were five different control posts to get through; it was guarded by the army, the police, the DAS, the correctional officers, all equipped with cameras, metal detectors, and X-ray machines. When you passed all that there were still many steel bulletproof doors. Nonetheless, they were able to introduce the bomb without any suspects ever being apprehended. The government was so corrupt it could have been sent to me by anyone. Many of our enemies would have wanted my death.

  I had no future. I was in prison where my enemies could reach me. My brother, who might have forced protection, was dead. I couldn’t see to help myself. I recall that the former president Cesár Gavíria had guaranteed my life but still that happened without any corresponding consequences. In 1994, the former president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, was coming to visit Colombia and to impress him with how strong our justice system was, my sentence was made fifty-eight years, although by Colombian law the maximum was thirty years. That difference didn’t matter at all, for me it was longer than life. I kept fighting and after time they reduced my sentence to twenty-two years and finally after much negotiation, to fourteen years and eight months.

  So many of these years are buried deeply in my memory, where I don’t want to find them. Two months after my first failed operation the doctor tried a cornea transplant. At that time the doctor didn’t give me just a new eye, he gave me hope. The transplant failed, mainly because I was immediately transferred back to the prison when I desperately needed thirty days of bed rest and care in the hospital. In the jail the prison officials failed to give me the required eyedrops for the new cornea. But the hope survived. I knew that I needed to live, not for me, but for my family. They had depended on Pablo and Pablo was dead. It was my responsibility.

  There was unbearable pain. After the first operation on my cornea one of the nurses, I don’t know if by mistake or on purpose, put alcohol in my eye. I don’t have the words to describe my pain. There were days then I felt certain I would die, and it was not an unwelcome thought. On the way back from the second operation on my cornea one of the guards let the stretcher fall onto the floor. On the ground I couldn’t move, afraid I would destroy the cornea. In addition to destroying my body, the government tried to destroy my hope. My sentence had been reduced to fourteen years, eight months, but that had been challenged. I remember one day before Bush had arrived in Colombia, I had gotten a letter from the government. A guard had to read it to me. It said that the government was never going to give me a reduced sentence, execute me in the electric chair, or release me. There was no hope for me, this letter said. No matter how long I lived, it would be in prison.

  I had nothing left but hope so how could I give that up? I was moving back and forth too often between the prison in Medellín and the hospital in Bogotá. It was a perilous time for me. Although I was blinded and wounded badly, that was not enough for our enemies. I was being protected at that time by the Colombian army, not by the police. It didn’t make a difference, no one would be sorry if Roberto Escobar was dead. My enemies made several efforts to make that happen. Once a cook in the hospital said he had been offered $100,000 to put poison in my food.

  There are three things I fear the most: surgeries, prison, and glasses for vision (as I had been so proud of my athlete’s good sight), and I was suffering from the three. I am grateful to two plastic surgeons, Dr. Juan Bernardo and Dr. Lulu, because they reconstructed my hands, fingers, nails, and face almost to perfection.

  I was in a special part of the prison with members of the guerrillas. Not the leaders, but important people with power. They helped me survive, doing everything for me from helping me get dressed to even giving me the injections. And also I had my mother, a very remarkable human being.

  She would die for me. After we knew about the plot to poison me I wanted to eat only food brought in specially for me from the outside stores. “Oh don’t worry about that,” my mother said. “I already ate the food a half hour ago and nothing happened to me.”

  I was angry. It wasn’t only me she had; there was the rest of the family. I told her that was the wrong thing for her to do. And she said to me, “I’m an old woman. I’ve lived a long life. I don’t want to see another of my sons die.” And so to save the life of her son my mother would risk poison.

  There were other attempts to kill me. I was outside on the patio with one of the guerrillas when I heard the noise of a bullet hitting a wall. It wasn’t a big sound because the shooter had used a silencer. When we heard the spat against the wall the guerrilla threw me to the ground for protection. The guard who fired the shot was not captured and there was no investigation. I was told later that he had been hired by Pablo’s enemies.

  There were nights of terror. Two days after I had been through another surgery I was lying in my bed in a military hospital in Bogotá with many tubes stuck into my arms and legs. At seven o’clock all the visitors were supposed to leave, but with money that easily could be changed. So at about that time a member of my family went out to bring me some food. I lay there by myself, in my own darkness, listening to the radio.

  I heard only the shot. A loud snap that echoed through my body. Then I heard a lot of screaming from the guards and I thought they were trying to kill me once again. Without pause I jumped out of my bed and the tubes got pulled out of my body. I pushed myself against the wall and started feeling for the door to the bathroom. I moved along it as quickly as possible, knowing any instant another shot might be made, until I found the door. I put myself inside and locked the door. Then I lay down on the floor. And I waited helpless for whatever was going to come.

  In a couple of minutes I heard people coming into my room and crying out. “They killed Roberto too,” someone said. “They killed Roberto.”

  I screamed for help and the door to the bathroom opened right away. Thank God, one of the guards said. I found out what had happened. Not too far from my room two young guards were playing gun games. One of them had taken his gun and put it under his chin, saying that “if I take a guerrilla I’m going to kill him like this.” He was just joking with his friend, this kid. And boom, he accidentally killed himself.

  There was a lot of running after that. When the tubes ripped out of my arms I started bleeding. There was blood all over the place and when the guards came into the room they guessed I had been shot too.

  But these situations were happening too often. There were people who believed that without Pablo’s power behind me there would be no danger to them to assassinate me. Because it had been the government’s fault that a bomb had destroyed my eyes and my ears they eventually agreed to let me live in the hospital clinic. So from 1994 to 2001 I lived inside the clinic.

  I also remember when I was being transferred to Bogotá from Medellín for my thir
d cornea transplant. I was traveling in a private plane, and when I arrived to the airport at 7 P.M. there was supposed to be an army unit waiting for me with an ambulance to take me to the hospital. The plane arrived but there was not anybody there waiting for me in the darkness. There were six people, my mother, the pilot, the co-pilot, two guards, and myself. The pilot, co-pilot, and one of the guards got off the plane to get to a phone and find out why nobody had come to pick us up. I was totally blind and needed that transplant urgently, because my cornea was almost perforated; my eye had collapsed and had been reinflated by gas extracted from some rooster’s crest. I was in Dr. Hugo Pérez Villarreal’s silk hands. When I was sitting in the plane with my mother, behind us a guard was playing with his gun, and it went off, the bullet hitting the plane’s cables and barely missing the gas tank. My mother threw me to the ground trying to protect me, and so did the guard, who had frightened himself.

  I believe that accidental shot saved my life. I think they left me alone in order to set me up and kill me by an armed force, but with that noise the airport security arrived to see what had happened. My mother and I were on the floor of the plane. On the radio the guards said that there had been an attempt on my life.

  After the ambulance arrived I was taken to the military hospital and put in a room to prepare for my surgery. Five days after my transplant, when I was a little better, a nurse came in to bathe me. She closed the door and whispered to me that she was really grateful to my brother, who had given her mother a house. She was trembling when she told me that a man had approached her and told her to inject me with something to kill me.

  That night the priest, who was always by my side, said to me, “Roberto, you are going to suffer plenty, but nothing is going to happen to you. I am always going to be by your side.”

  I made an agreement with the government in 1995. For my safety they allowed me a whole floor of a clinic in Medellín. They supplied me with twelve security officers, six from the police and six from the army. In addition, I always had six of my personal bodyguards. I had eighteen people next to me every day, seven days a week, for six years. In the clinic I had fourteen bedrooms and I had to pay the state $1,400 a day for every single day. But I was safe there, and I had my operations, one after another after another.