Shooting Down Heaven

by Jorge Franco

  “Two things,” he said. “First, you have to find out from them what happened to Rómulo. Ideally, you’d start talking to him again. Second, you have to insist they send you proof of life for Libardo.”

  “I ask for it every time they call,” she said.

  “As for the money they’re demanding,” the prosecutor said, “are you able to get your hands on that much?”

  “We’re working on it,” Fernanda said.

  She was working on it. She was setting up meetings with Libardo’s business partners, visiting those who were in prison, meeting late at night with those who were on the run, talking with wives or front men. She was always elegantly dressed, though she’d been biting her nails a lot.

  The next time Eloy called, Fernanda told him, I’ve got the money, I’ve got it right here, but I can’t give you anything without proof of life. Eloy was quiet for a bit, she asked if he was still there, and he responded that he was going to run it by the others. Fernanda gave us a victory sign. Before hanging up, she said, Eloy, Eloy, don’t hang up, I need to ask you something. What is it, Doña Fernanda? What happened to Rómulo?, she asked. Rómulo?, Eloy repeated, and again fell silent. Eloy?, Fernanda asked. Ma’am, he said, Rómulo was killed.

  Fernanda met with Cubides, and they celebrated the fact that, for the first time, the supposed captor had agreed to consider providing proof of life. In the prosecutor’s view, they couldn’t assume that the information about the man known as Rómulo was true. Maybe Eloy’s lying and doesn’t even know him, he said.

  It was life that was lying, conspiring with liars or with circumstances that made it more likely that deception would bear fruit. At dawn the next day, the telephone rang. Fernanda answered sleepily, and on the other end of the line she heard a whisper saying, Fernanda, darling, it’s me. She sat up, her heart about to explode. Libardo?, she asked. She heard the whisper ask, how are the boys? She told him, speak up, I can’t hear you. I can’t, the whisper said. Where are you? Fernanda asked. With the people who are holding me, I can’t say any more, tell me how the boys are. Speak louder, Fernanda insisted. I have to hang up, the whisper said, give them what they’re asking for, I’m desperate. Talk louder, I can barely hear you, Fernanda pleaded, angry, but then Eloy came on the line and said, there’s your proof, ma’am, we held up our end, I’ll call you later to set up the handoff. He hung up, and Fernanda was left screaming into the handset, don’t hang up, Eloy, I need to speak to him, just for a second, Eloy, please! Hearing her shouts, Julio and I rushed into the room and found her clutching the telephone and piteously weeping.

  We sat on the bed as day broke, speculating and making her go back over every word of the conversation.

  “But was it him or wasn’t it?” I kept asking.

  “How do I know,” Fernanda said. “Sometimes yes and sometimes not. When you hear the recording, you’ll know.”

  “But how could you not recognize Dad?”

  “I haven’t heard his voice for a long time, and I already told you I could barely hear him.”

  “Maybe they talked like that so you wouldn’t recognize him,” Julio said.

  “Maybe,” she said, “but he’s also been a prisoner for months, you know, not talking to anybody; who knows what kind of condition he’s in. A person could even forget how to talk.”

  Again and again we asked her the same questions, and she gave us the same answers. All we could do was wait a little before contacting Cubides and reviewing the recording of the call.

  Whether it was Libardo or not, I was scared stiff to hear that voice.

  62

  Fernanda’s still in the blue dress she was wearing this morning, though she’s got on slippers now, not heels. From the smile she gives me, I gather she doesn’t know anything yet, or she’s faking it so she can unload her wrath at just the right moment. I look around for Julio and don’t see him. She asks if I’ve had lunch. I tell her I have, and she doesn’t ask where.

  “How about you?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I did too,” she says. “I had a business lunch.”

  “What business?”

  “Nothing yet,” she says, “but I want to do something. I’m sick of depending on Julio.”

  She offers me coffee, and I say I don’t want any. What kind of business could Fernanda do? I don’t want to pester her with questions, at least not until it’s clear she doesn’t know about my visit to Rosa Marcela.

  “Where’s Julio?” I ask. “Hasn’t he been around?”

  “He came and then left again. He was furious. He took your dad with him.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not going to let Libardo stay with your grandmother. Plus I hated that hideous box you two chose. Don’t say anything—I don’t feel like rehashing that argument with you. But your dad deserved something more luxurious. You let that woman influence you.”

  “She had nothing to do with it,” I say.

  “I know, so Julio said, and I’m not going to discuss it again with you.” She lights a cigarette and says, “We’re all dependent on Julio, on whatever he feels like giving us. Every month I have to humiliate myself and ask for a little more. And look at you—you could have finished your degree, but no, Julio told you there wasn’t enough for that, but he lives like a king out there.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “To the farm.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “You never listen to me, Larry. He took him. He said he’s going to bury him out there and that you agreed.”

  So Julio didn’t tattle on me to Fernanda, but he did use me to settle Libardo’s fate. He left without saying goodbye, without letting me tell him what had happened with our sister, what meeting her had been like, what I think of her.

  “Is he not coming back?” I ask Fernanda.

  She shrugs and takes a long drag on her cigarette. “Ultimately I think it’s a good idea,” she says. “Libardo loved his farms—they were his life. It’s O.K. for him to have his final resting place on the only one we’ve got left. Plus, Julio’s so much like Libardo . . . It’s better for them to be close.”

  I know her. Her satisfaction is only from having won this round with Gran. She would have tossed Libardo down a sewer grate to avoid handing him over to her. I’m hurt that my brother has left. There won’t be a mass or a funeral now. There’s no reason for me to be here.

  “You and I should think about setting up some kind of enterprise. We’d make good partners, and we wouldn’t need to depend on your brother,” she says, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray.

  “I’ll be leaving, Ma.”

  “Where to?”

  “Back to London. I’ve got a job, an apartment—my life is there.”

  “The only thing you’ve got there is a salary,” she tells me.

  “Well, here I don’t even have that,” I say.

  “Because you don’t put in the effort, because you’re satisfied with nothing. They took everything from us, and you haven’t lifted a finger to try to get any of it back.”

  “Get what back?”

  “A lot of the people who killed your father are dead too, or no longer active. It’s been a long time, Larry. We could do something—the three of us could start over. You and Julio have got Libardo’s blood, and I spent more than half my life with him.”

  “Start over?”

  “Rebuild, Larry, raise up what they knocked down. You’re smart, Julio’s ambitious, and we’ve still got friends who could help us . . .”

  “Friends from the cartel?” I ask.

  Fernanda lifts her hand to her forehead and slowly inhales. She pulls her feet out of her slippers and puts them up on the seat. She runs her fingers through her hair to comb it back. One lock tumbles back down and covers half her face.

  “They’ve moved on to other things now,” she says in a more deliber
ate tone. “We could too.”

  “Ma, everything Dad was involved with was illegal, including his friends. I don’t understand what it is you’re looking to rebuild.”

  “I want things to be like before,” she says. “Get out of this rattrap. The other house still exists. It’s standing empty, but it’s there. With some good lawyers, we could get it back.”

  “How much money have you already thrown away on lawyers?” I ask.

  “Well, thanks to those lawyers we didn’t lose the farm where Julio’s living, and I was able to get this apartment.”

  “You just called it a rattrap a minute ago.”

  She challenges me with her gaze, with her body, with the tone of her voice as she raises it to say, “Yes, Larry, because we deserve to live somewhere better, another neighborhood, with better status. We didn’t bring you up to be a nobody.”

  My head boils and my vision blurs. When did this pointless quarrel start? The argument would have made sense twelve years ago, but now? I look at the unopened boxes, the stacks of paintings, the mound of curtains that she’s never bothered to hang up. It seems like she doesn’t even sweep. Growing hazy, I say, “I think your life is the real rattrap.”

  Fernanda grabs the ashtray and hurls it at me in a fury. She storms off to her bedroom, slams the door, and lets out a howl like a wounded beast. I shake off the ashes and butts. It was a vicious blow. Mine and hers both. The only thing that occurs to me in all this chaos is to take a shower.

  63

  At the foot of the escalator, to the right, was Larry’s last chance to find her. If she’d taken the previous flight and was still in the baggage claim area, if she was still outside with her family, weeping with them over her father’s death, if he managed to ask for her phone number, if this or if that . . . He reached the escalator but didn’t ride down, instead taking the stairs next to it. On his own two feet.

  Let her be there, let her not be there. Let her be gone, let her have just arrived.

  He watched the carousel as he descended; the room was crowded with people, and those waiting milled around on the other side of the glass. He was afraid to see his mother older now; he had some idea of what she looked like via Skype, but what would it be like to be inches away from her, to touch her, to study her from head to toe? Some people age overnight.

  Fernanda. Charlie. I hope there’s nobody here to pick me up yet, and not her either. I hope Fernanda’s here to save me, or nobody, I hope they leave me alone . . .

  Farther along was another carousel, empty but moving. Larry looked at the people in the room and the ones waiting outside, beyond the glass. Charlie wasn’t on this side, and Fernanda wasn’t on the other. An alarm announced the suitcases’ arrival. The passengers swarmed as if somebody were handing out food or money. Larry stood still, searching for what he wasn’t going to find, either inside or out.

  People started moving off with carts full of luggage. They looked like bumper cars. Little by little, the carousel was left alone, with only Larry’s suitcase going around and around. He grabbed it and pulled it along despite the dodgy wheel. He walked through the glass doors that separated the people inside from those outside. He looked around distractedly. There was euphoria, tears, laughter, and hugs. Touts offered him a taxi service, a bus ride into Medellín, hotels, but nobody offered him a hug. Without a doubt, Charlie wasn’t there. Maybe she never had been. He said goodbye: see you never, sweetheart.

  He didn’t see Fernanda, Julio, or his grandparents either. His only option was to wait, since he didn’t have an address to take a taxi. Suddenly he heard a yell, a familiar voice: “You gonna start crying now, man?”

  He turned around and saw him. There he was with the same shiftless smile, a little fatter and balder, his old friend, Pedro the Dictator, who gave him a huge hug and enthusiastic slaps on the back.

  “What’s up, dude!” Pedro said.

  “Where’s Fernanda?” Larry asked.

  “Hello to you too,” Pedro said. “I asked her not to come because I knew you’d be happier to see me.”

  “Stop screwing around,” Larry said, half joking, half serious, and hugged him.

  “Let me help you with that,” Pedro said, and grabbed the suitcase.

  They walked out to the parking deck. Larry looked back one last time.

  “Are you waiting for someone?” Pedro asked.

  “No,” Larry said. “Let’s go.”

  64

  To confirm whether the voice on the recording was Libardo’s, Jorge Cubides explained they’d need to compare it with another recording of him speaking.

  “It can be a video where he says something.”

  “A video?” Fernanda asked.

  “Or a tape recording, anything where we can hear him,” the prosecutor added.

  “I don’t know if we have anything like that,” Fernanda said, looking at Julio and me.

  I recalled that when we were kids, Libardo had a video camera and had recorded us lots of times, but I’d never seen those tapes again.

  “Ma, remember those home videos Dad used to make when we were little?”

  “I do,” Fernanda said, “but I have no idea where they are.”

  “Look for them,” the prosecutor said, “and we can settle the matter.”

  “Can you give us a copy of the recording?” Julio asked. “We want to hear it again so we can be more certain.”

  We went back home, and Fernanda ordered everybody, even the bodyguards and the maids, to search the house top to bottom for any kind of cassette.

  The first things to appear were the cassette cases with the music Libardo used to listen to as well as some mix tapes he’d made. One of the boys took it upon himself to listen to all of them and separate out the ones that might contain something besides songs. And so, accompanied by fragments of tangos, boleros, and vallenatos, we hunted through every drawer, every receptacle where we thought the videos Libardo had made might have been forgotten.

  A couple of days later, while we were still searching, the telephone rang. It was Eloy, who hadn’t called again since the night she’d supposedly talked to Libardo.

  “What did you lose now?” Eloy asked. “What are you looking for?”

  Fernanda went pale as Eloy laughed loudly on the other end of the line. Pulling herself together, she ran to the window to draw the curtains. “Nothing that matters to you,” Fernanda said.

  “It might not matter to me, but it does matter,” Eloy said. “I haven’t seen you all so busy in a long time.”

  “You’re watching us?” Fernanda asked.

  “Oh, honey,” Eloy said, “since when have you and I had any secrets?”

  “Leave us alone,” she demanded. “I’m trying to get the money together.”

  “Didn’t you say you already had it?”

  “Not yet. Call me in three days,” she said.

  Fernanda remained silent a few minutes, then got up and yelled furiously for the staff, asking them who was the snitch, who was the traitor, so she could cut out their tongue, chop them into pieces. I tried to intervene, asking, what happened, Ma, what did that guy say? But she kept yelling, as did Julio, who was asking, who’s the bastard who sold us out, who sold out my dad? I swear, ma’am, one of them tried to say. Who’s the fucking mole? You’ve known us for a long time, the cook tried to say. I said again, what’s wrong, Ma? And she replied, still yelling, that Eloy person knows we’re looking for something, one of these guys is squealing everything, and she turned to them, maybe it’s not just one of them, maybe it’s all of them, you can all get out right now, unless you want me to call the attorney general’s office so they can pick you up as crooks, as accomplices, as motherfuckers, she said.

  She was trembling, leaning against the walls while the employees, who were as shaken as she was, filed out, the two women crying and the bodyguards solemn.


  “Pour me a drink, Julio,” Fernanda said.

  “Tell us everything, Ma,” I said, and led her to the living room, where she collapsed into an armchair and said, “They know we’re looking for something important.”

  Julio appeared with a full glass, and she didn’t even ask what it was. She took two large gulps and sighed. She gave us more details about the call, the little she remembered, because the terror of knowing we were being watched had taken her breath away.

  My brother went over to the sliding doors to the outside, looked at the dozens of buildings that surrounded the house, and, with a couple of tugs, closed the curtains again.

  “I’m positive one of the employees is betraying us,” Fernanda said.

  “They’ve all been with us for years,” I said. “They’ve been here since long before Dad was taken. I bet we’re being spied on from outside.”

  “I’m with Mom, Larry,” Julio said. “There’s a snitch in here.”

  “But Eloy didn’t mention the cassettes,” I said. “Right?”

  Fernanda drank again, grimaced, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes.

  “Did he mention them, Ma?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

  “If the information had come from here, he’d know what we’re looking for.”

  “Anyway,” Fernanda said, her eyes still closed, “we should just fire all of them. They should go. I don’t trust anybody anymore.”

  And so the three of us were alone in that huge house. Fernanda promised to look for new staff, but in the meanwhile, we all cooked for ourselves or ordered in. The dirty laundry piled up, as did the grime and neglect. I liked living like that. For the first time, for the first time I could remember, there were no bodyguards, no strange people invading our spaces. At night I would lie down on my unmade bed, just as I’d left it that morning. We turned on only the lights that were necessary for safety purposes, and from the outside the house looked uninhabited. The curtains remained closed at all times, of course.