Shooting Down Heaven

by Jorge Franco

  “You said he didn’t have a place to sleep and that’s why he lay down in my bed,” Rosa Marcela tells her accusingly.

  “It’s true,” I say. “I don’t have a home right now.”

  She opens her eyes as wide as the mug she’s holding in her hands. Vanesa looks at me dubiously, unsure whether I’m joking or telling the truth.

  “Are you going to live with us?” Rosa Marcela asks me.

  “Wipe your mouth,” her mother says.

  “No,” I say, “but I wanted to meet you. Do you know who I am?”

  She nods and drinks her chocolate again. Then she asks, “Did you know my daddy?”

  “Yes, really well.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He looked at lot like you,” I tell her, “though you’re prettier.”

  Rosa Marcela blushes and takes refuge in her mug. One day I’ll tell her she didn’t miss much not knowing him, though I know everybody feels a father’s absence. Even when Libardo was alive, I felt his. Vanesa pours me some hot chocolate. Her hands shake as she places it on the table.

  “You can sleep in my bed,” Rosa Marcela tells me. “I’ll let you borrow it.”

  Libardo would have been mesmerized by this child. Maybe she would have saved him. She would have saved all of us with those large black eyes, which sparkle with all the tenderness in this goddamn world.

  “Thanks, Rosi,” I say, “but I have to go in a little bit.”

  Her gaze dims, and even so we all fit inside it. Is it the power of blood that has caused us to love each other already? But why doesn’t Julio want to have anything to do with her?

  Vanesa puts a steaming arepa in front of me. It’s bathed in butter and covered with slices of cheese.

  “I almost burned it trying to keep an eye on Little Miss Mischief here,” she says.

  “It looks delicious,” I say.

  Vanesa pulls a stool over and sits down next to us. I take a bite of the arepa and the two of them watch me, waiting for my reaction. I make a noise of pleasure, of enjoyment, though inside my soul is shattered. The arepa tastes like home, like family, like love—it tastes like life.

  “It’s delicious,” I say, and they both smile. “But it’s really hot, I burned my tongue,” I say, to explain away my watering eyes.

  57

  Fernanda had decided to make her biggest gamble, not in a casino but on the battlefield, betting Libardo’s life and even her own. We don’t know how she ended up getting in touch with a regional prosecutor, Jorge Cubides, but she met with him and claimed the following, half truth, half falsehood: that Libardo had been considering turning himself in to the authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence, but his enemies, Los Pepes, had learned of his plan and kidnapped him. She no longer had the power or resources to stand up to them and rescue Libardo. She was reaching out to the attorney general’s office at the moment because they were the only ones equipped to confront Los Pepes, who were the prosecutors’ enemies too. She updated Cubides on the progress of her most recent conversations with the people who were supposedly holding Libardo. She offered to turn over documents, invoices, letters, everything she’d found in Libardo’s study.

  According to Fernanda, the attorney general’s office would win this two-sided conflict, finding Libardo and dealing a major blow to Los Pepes. And we’d win too, getting our father back.

  “What if Dad doesn’t want to rat anybody out?” I asked. “What’s that going to do to your relationship with the attorney general’s office?”

  “Well, if he doesn’t want to do it, he can rot in prison,” she said, “but at least he’ll be alive.”

  “And what if Los Pepes don’t have him?” Julio asked.

  “At least we’ll get rid of them,” she said.

  Julio sat thinking for a moment, then said, “It seems like a lot of trouble for not very much gain.”

  “We’ll only know that for sure when the operation’s over,” she said.

  I thought about Libardo’s reaction. He would come out of a kidnapping and head straight to prison. It wasn’t ideal, but he’d have us close by, his life wouldn’t be in danger, and if he really was able to negotiate his sentence, maybe after a few years he’d be released. That was on the one hand. On the other, given the silence of the past few months, I’d started thinking Libardo might already be dead.

  “Ma, there are a lot of things I don’t understand,” Julio said. “If you’re not going to give them anything, how do you expect them to return Dad? You give them a suitcase full of trash and they just let him go?”

  “What do you not get?” she asked. “I’ll give them the money they’re asking for, but it won’t be ours.”

  “Where are you going to get it from?”

  “I’ll explain in a minute,” she said, “but pour me a drink while I go to the bathroom.”

  Julio told me he was going to make it a stiff one to loosen her tongue, and I reminded him how dangerous Fernanda was when she got talkative. Holding her drink, Fernanda sat down to explain, not as a mother but as a criminal.

  “Libardo’s friends are going to put up the money, both those who are still free and the ones in prison. The deal with the prosecutor is that Libardo will talk, but he won’t snitch on anybody who helps us.”

  “And how are you so sure they’re going to give us the money?” Julio asked.

  “First, because they’re his friends. Second, because it’s a loan. Jorge tells me they’ll get the money back.”

  “Is Jorge the prosecutor?” I asked.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Each person will contribute just, like, fifty billion pesos, which is practically nothing,” she said. She smiled and savored her drink.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’re making decisions for Dad. We don’t know what he’d think about this.”

  “Of course I am,” she said. “Have you not noticed he’s not around?”

  That same day, a crew from the CTI showed up to install a call-recording system that, when it came down to it, looked just like the recorder we already had connected to the telephone. This is different, Fernanda told me, now they can listen in from over there, she said, referring to the attorney general’s office. Are they going to listen to all our calls?, I asked, horrified. Well yeah, that’s the whole point, she said. Yours, mine, Julio’s, all of them?, I asked again. Oh, Larry, she said, annoyed, stop freaking out.

  We exchanged one madness for another. It was no longer the witch doctor unearthing buried things, or us digging in the backyard like a chain gang day and night, or the stress of pitting our wits against the people who called. Now the madness had a name, Jorge Cubides, and it was serious, really serious, because Fernanda was smiling from ear to ear as she told us her plans.

  58

  Larry scanned the waiting area for the flight to Medellín, and she wasn’t there either. All that talking, and they hadn’t arranged to meet again.

  I don’t have her phone number, her email address, nothing I could use to find her.

  He sat down to wait for the boarding call and to think. He wasn’t seeing anything clearly. Charlie must have taken another flight, or would be leaving later; after all, there was no point in rushing on the way to somebody who was already dead. Or maybe she was wandering around lost in another terminal of the airport, confused amid the throngs, praying for a familiar face.

  Looking for me . . .

  Or in the VIP lounge, where she should be, and she might show up to board the plane later, shielded behind a pair of sunglasses, like someone who doesn’t know what she’s doing, just letting herself be carried along.

  Above the gate a screen read “Medellín.” Between his sleepiness and his hangover, Larry felt the life draining out of him. A knot of strange emotions he could not define and did not dare call by their real name: fear. He took a deep breath and le
t it out slowly, as he’d been taught in the therapy he’d done so he could cope with life. Inhaling and exhaling until his soul returned to his body.

  Even so, he remained on alert for every passenger who arrived at the gate.

  I’d like to have her cry on my shoulder again, drink more gin with her, have turbulence bind us together once more; I’d like for her to appear, for her not to appear, for her to vanish, for it all to have been a hallucination . . .

  The Avianca worker arrived at the counter, straightened some papers, turned on the microphone, cleared her throat, and loudly announced, good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

  A line formed in front of the gate, everybody eager to board the plane, except Larry, who was still seated, clutching his backpack and hoping Charlie would show up.

  Fingers crossed she comes, fingers crossed she doesn’t come, fingers crossed this plane doesn’t take off, the sky slams shut, the world ends, my legs obey so I can walk . . .

  The line slowly advanced.

  I know what I want now, Larry said to himself.

  And though he did it unconsciously, he got to his feet.

  59

  December 1. Two days from now would be yet another anniversary of the beginning of this mess, the story that started with a dead man on a rooftop. The fall of an empire built of dominoes, where the first brought down the second, and the second the third, until the line of tiles swept us away—Libardo, Fernanda, Julio, me: pieces in the sinister game of dominoes Escobar had played.

  “Hey, tell me something. Has this all changed?” I ask the taxi driver who takes me to Fernanda’s apartment.

  “In what way, buddy?” he asks, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

  “I mean, compared to the Escobar era,” I say, as if I didn’t know anything.

  “Well, what can I say,” he says, and thinks a moment.

  The radio is playing December music, the same stuff it’s played all my life, monotonous rhythms that my grandparents and parents used to dance to, and that will play on every station till early January, till our eardrums burst, till the last Christmas bender.

  “Look, buddy,” the taxi driver says, “when it comes to changes in this city, the changes a person sees, or when people ask what’s changed, I mean, in terms of those things, man, how can I put it . . .”

  Though he can’t find the words for it, there have been changes. A glance out the window makes that clear enough. Where there used to be a tree is now a building, and there are coffee shops, clothing boutiques, restaurants, gyms, clinics, pharmacies, hotels, bars; there are acrobats at the traffic lights, you can still see a cluster of mangos growing behind a wall here or there, and even a man who comes up to the cab selling a titi monkey. The driver asks him, and why would the gentleman here want a monkey? I mean, ’cause they’re awesome, the man says just as the light turns green and we start off. Maybe the taxi driver doesn’t dare answer me because he knows what I mean. Not the things I see but instead what is not visible: what is gloomy, forbidden, sordid.

  “Well, buddy,” he says. “To be honest, because there’s no point in burying your head in the sand when pretty much everything’s in plain sight, or even if it’s not, everybody knows about it anyway, because there are no secrets in this city, or if there are, they don’t last long, if you know what I mean.”

  Of course I do. That’s how we’ve always seen things, starting with the “it’s all relative” we used that allowed us to justify our miseries and our crimes. That’s the only way we could survive and break free from what I’m trying to pin down with the taxi driver: how things used to be.

  “See, if we put our hands on our hearts,” he says, and lifts his to his chest, “and tell it like it is, and we don’t go around lying to each other, man, because even though we’re known for being straight shooters, we haven’t had the balls to call a spade a spade. And a society, any society, if it can’t do a little critical self-examination,” he adds, “is a failed society, yes siree.”

  “Can you turn the radio down a tad?” I ask.

  “Are you kidding, man?” he says in astonishment, and sings along: Joyous December is here, month of festivities and cheer. He laughs and asks, “This place you’re going to, is there a soccer field with stands there?”

  “Yes indeed,” I tell him.

  “I think I dropped someone else there not so long ago, and there was a really nice little pitch—it even had lights for night games. Anyway, buddy, like I was saying . . .”

  A number of places spin through my memory—a house that hasn’t been demolished yet, the bakery we went to all my life, the pharmacy where we always got our shots, the lot where we used to play soccer and that is now a proper field with lights and bleachers, places that, for whatever reason, are still there.

  “It’s that lack of community spirit I was talking about earlier, which you’ve probably noticed when someone says something’s not working out and everybody refuses to admit it and they all say, what? Everything’s just fine, there’s no problem here. There are thousands of those people, man, not just thousands, millions, because they’re not just here in Medellín, but all over the goddamn country,” he says.

  His babbling dishevels my fatigue; I’m fading in the sweltering afternoon, drifting away.

  “We’re almost there, it’s real close.”

  I open my eyes and ask, “O.K., so where did we land? Has this changed or not?”

  He thinks a while, looks at me again in the rearview mirror, smiles, and says, “What can I tell you, man.”

  From down below I see Fernanda lounging next to the window in her apartment, gazing out.

  “How much do I owe you?” I ask.

  He looks at the meter, mumbles a calculation, and says, “Just seven thousand pesos, buddy.”

  Fernanda sees me get out of the cab and quickly moves away from the window. Maybe she already knows where I’m coming from and is getting ready to attack. And I, the traitorous son, am arriving without any defense, with only the emotion of knowing I have a sweet, wonderful sister.

  60

  Larry was the last to board. He no longer had Charlie leaning on his shoulder and would be flying not over the ocean but over the mountains and valleys between Bogotá and Medellín. His anxiety increased as the minutes passed and the distance shrank.

  In the first-class cabin there were twelve seats that were already occupied. Charlie wasn’t in any of them. He walked to the back, scanning the seat numbers and looking at the passengers, hoping to find her, reassured knowing he probably wouldn’t. He reached 24A, his assigned window seat. She’s not here, he said to himself sadly. She’s not here, he repeated, relieved. Charlie’s face began to dissolve in a fog, the way things do at the start of a magic spell.

  What if I didn’t recognize her? And what if she didn’t recognize me either and we’re now traveling on the same plane like two strangers? . . .

  The crew announced that the door was closing. The flight attendants walked up and down, preparing for takeoff. The pilot spoke, his neighbor crossed herself, a flight attendant spoke, and a child cried at the top of his lungs. Larry put on his headphones, but he didn’t know what music he wanted to listen to, what would be fitting for the moment, since he didn’t even know what sort of moment he was experiencing.

  The plane took off and pierced the clouds at a speed that defied reason. Larry stared out at the white sky, and the chaos of the city shrank away. Then he pushed his seat back as far as it would go, which wasn’t much. He considered sleeping for the thirty minutes, though it wouldn’t be enough to catch up on all the hours he’d been awake, but he didn’t want to become disconnected from places and names: Medellín, Fernanda, Julio, Pedro, El Poblado, Charlie. Especially her. He closed his eyes and let the music play at random. Anything that would also muffle the airplane engines.

  Just as he felt himself starting to drift in his sea
t, afloat on exhaustion, the flight attendant offered him boxed juice, water, or coffee. Hating her, he accepted a cup of water. He looked out at the cushion of gray and white clouds, with a pale blanket above that hid the sky. He closed his eyes again, and mingling with the music he heard the names that were keeping him awake: Fernanda, Medellín, Pedro, Libardo, Julio, Charlie. Especially hers.

  Suddenly, he felt as if he were falling and started in his seat. He clutched the armrests. He thought they’d hit an air pocket or maybe he was falling like when a person is just dozing off. But the bump was only the call of the earth. Down below, very close now, were the mountains. Larry pressed his face against the window. The massive, dramatic peaks heralded the inevitable.

  61

  The first time the prosecutor Jorge Cubides came to the house, I thought he was another of Libardo’s friends. He was wearing a sweatshirt and seemed too young, too muscular to be a prosecutor. When I opened the door, he asked for Fernanda, smiling broadly, very sure of himself.

  When she appeared, he said, “Sorry for showing up like this—I’m all sweaty. I was leaving the gym, and since it’s close to here, I figured I’d come by.” She invited him in and offered him juice and fruit salad. From their conversation, I was able to gather that he was interested in our case because it could help him obtain the promotion he was angling for. Jorge Cubides had set his sights high: he wanted to be deputy attorney general for all of Colombia.

  “That Eloy guy is calling you from payphones around the city,” he added. “But we haven’t been able to confirm that he’s a member of Los Pepes.”

  “There’s nobody else who’d be holding him,” Fernanda said.

  “But we have to confirm it to be able to take the next step. You told me you’d talked to another guy before,” Cubides said.

  “Yes, Rómulo,” Fernanda replied, and he wrote down the name in a notebook.