White Tombs

by Christopher Valen

  Dust motes floated like a swarm of insects in the afternoon rays of sunlight that shone through the stained glass windows and suffused the interior of the small chapel at the Gemelli School with gold light. The chapel was located inside a small, square brick building that served as guest quarters for visiting priests. It sat on a hill overlooking the metal and concrete barrack-like buildings of the school.

  “I want you to promise me, Father Gallego, that you will look out for my sister,” Santana said. “Always.”

  The Franciscan priest’s kind, hazel eyes settled on Santana, searching for answers to the questions he dared not ask. The air was heavy with the smell of incense and candle wax.

  “Remember, Juan, the end does not justify the means. Let God judge those who do harm to others.”

  “A drunk driver killed my father and my mother was murdered for trying to save a life,” Santana said. “I will not wait until eternity for God’s judgment — if there even is a God.”

  Father Gallego shifted his weight in the pew, obviously uncomfortable with what Santana had said. He wore his ash-brown hair long and the traditional simple brown robe with a rope around his waist. Because of his well-trimmed light beard, everyone in the school called him Father Chivas, short for chivera.

  “Faith means believing without proof,” he said. “Trusting without reservation. You must not lose your faith and let evil prevail. You must look to God for understanding.”

  “What is there to understand?”

  The priest let out a deep sigh like a dying man exhaling his last breath. “Given the tragic deaths of your parents, Juan, I realize how difficult it must be to understand God’s plan. Perhaps there is another way. One that involves mercy and forgiveness.”

  Santana knew there would be no mercy or forgiveness for the men who had murdered his mother. Not if he had anything to say about it. But he remained silent and let the priest continue.

  “You have always been an intelligent, studious boy who wished to become a doctor like his mother, a person who saved lives. You can do so many wonderful things with your life, Juan. I am afraid that what you are seeking to do will only harden your heart and tarnish your soul forever.”

  They were alone in the small chapel, and in the silence, that was as still as a tomb, Santana could hear the beating of his heart.

  “You are my favorite teacher, Father. I have learned much from you. I am not asking you for your blessing or even your understanding. All I am asking is that you promise me you will protect Natalia.”

  “I will make sure your sister is safe. But what about you?”

  “It is better that you do not know.”

  The priest’s reluctant nod indicated he knew that it was useless to debate the issue further.

  “Your mother told me after your father’s death that if anything happened to her, I should handle the estate. Your family was not rich, but there is a considerable amount of money put away for you. You will need it to continue your life. You will have to let me know where you go so I can get the money to you.”

  “These men who killed my mother are very dangerous. If they find out you know where I am, Father, they will make you tell them.”

  Father Gallego gave a reassuring smile. “There is only one other person besides me who will know where you are, Juan. And that is God.”

  “This is escopolamina,” Ofir said. “On the streets it is known as burundanga.” She held up a small vial containing a finely ground powder in her wrinkled hand. “You can put it in a drink or in food. It is odorless, colorless and tasteless. But you must be careful not to use too little or too much.”

  The kitchen was filled with the aroma of mondongo brewing on the stove, a stew made of potatoes and the stomach of a slaughtered pig. Out the window behind Ofir, the setting sun flamed the sky, left the horizon blood red.

  Santana had heard stories about the drug that had been used by Colombian Indians since before the Spanish conquest. The borrachero or get-you-drunk tree grew wild in the countryside. Its orange and white flowers looked like long, thin bells hanging beneath the green leaves. His mother had once explained to him that the alkaloid from the tree was used in medicines to treat motion sickness and tremors from Parkinson’s disease. But she had also warned him that eating the seeds could be deadly. In small doses men became so docile that they would help thieves empty their bank accounts. Women had been drugged and then gang-raped or rented out as prostitutes. And because escopolamina blocked the formation of memories, it was impossible for victims to identify the perpetrators. Still, Santana wondered if the stories were true.

  “I have heard of it,” he said. “But it might be difficult to put the drug in a drink or in food these men will take.”

  “There is another way,” she said. Her round copper eyes were clear and brilliant, nearly orange in color, like those of a cat, and seemed to bore into his skin.

  “What will these men do when I give it to them?”

  “Whatever you want them to.”

  The El Cerro de Oro nightclub sat on the crest of the hill high above the eastern edge of the city. From here Santana could look across all of Manizales and see the water tower atop the hill in the Chipre Barrio where he lived and the city below, encircled by the towering Andes. The land was green and rolling and covered with rubber trees, wax palms and the red flowers of the cambulo trees. Houses for the four hundred thousand inhabitants were tightly packed together and spilled out across the valley floor all the way to the base of the mountains. The spire of the Cathedral de Manizales rose like a statue from the center of the city.

  Santana would often go to the nightclub with his friends around 11:00 p.m. on weekends to dance and listen to American music. There was no drinking age limit in Colombia, and he and his friends often ordered media de aguardiente or media de ron, a half bottle of rum, to mix with the Cokes they drank while they danced. Afterward, at 4:00 a.m. when the dancing ended, they would buy hot dogs from the vendor outside the club before heading home.

  Inside the club was a dimly lit lower level with a bar in the corner surrounded by stools. Across from the bar a large picture window looked out on the lights of the city far below. Walking into the club was like entering a movie theater after the feature had started, and it always took a moment for the eyes to adjust to the darkness. Tables encircled a small dance floor while a rotating disco ball in the ceiling dappled the faces of the crowd with lasers of light as a disk jockey played salsa, merengue, paso doble and American rock, usually in blocks of six songs. On the second floor was the la Taverna Mexicana where they played Rancheras.

  Santana had waited in the parking lot of El Cerro de Oro on three consecutive weekends charting the times Enrique and Emilio Estrada arrived and left the club, looking for any consistent patterns of behavior. The Estradas were easy to spot in their new, black Ford Ranger pickup with the smoked-glass windows.

  They were the twin sons of Alejandro Estrada, head of the Cali cartel. Estrada was known as “la Piraña” in the drug trade because of his practice of feeding those who opposed him to the piranhas he kept in a large water tank on his farm outside Cali. He had tried to keep his sons away from the drug business by sending them to exclusive private schools. But no amount of education could change the fact that his twenty-year-old sons were raging sociopaths.

  At 12:20 a.m. the brothers drove through the archway into the lot in front of the club, angle-parked along the guadua fence and stepped out of the pickup. They were nearly identical in appearance, just under six feet, hard and lean, with dark, razor cut hair. Each of them wore a skin-tight black pullover and pants, thick gold chains and watches, and gold rings with large emeralds on their fingers.

  One of them took a package of Derby’s out of his breast pocket. Put a cigarette between his perfectly white teeth and lit it with a gold-plated lighter. Then they walked across the asphalt lot jammed with cars, past the two heavy-set bouncers at the entrance and in the door of the club.

  Santana could see small grou
ps of teenagers lingering near the front entrance and around the hot dog stand. The night pulsated with the rhythm of salsa music, the ground beneath his feet quivered with tremors, as if there was a quake. Car tires hummed along the asphalt and a full moon left a bright hole in the black curtain of sky.

  Santana had learned from his previous weekend visits to the club that the Estradas were creatures of habit. They usually arrived after midnight and left by 3:00 a.m. Putting escopolamina in their drinks would be easy in the dimly lit club, but getting both of them outside and into a car without arousing suspicion would be difficult.

  He had another plan.

  At 3:10 a.m., the brothers exited the club. Strutting with rum-induced self-confidence toward their Ford Ranger.

  Santana opened the jar of Vaseline he had carried with him and rubbed a thin layer of gel around his nostrils and over his lips and mouth, coating his breathing passages in order to catch any drifting particles. He placed the Vaseline back in the car. Put on a pair of his mother’s surgical gloves. Checked to make sure he had his father’s .38-caliber revolver in a jacket pocket. Removing the vial of escopolamina from another pocket, he poured half the powder in each hand. Then he followed the Estradas to their pickup.

  “Do you have a light?” Santana asked as he approached them.

  He could feel his heart thudding in his chest. Hear the sound of blood rushing in his ears.

  The Estradas turned and glared at Santana as though he were a bloodstain on their shirts. Their dark eyes were flat and soulless and looked like they belonged in a corpse.

  “Go to hell, malparido,” one of them said and they both laughed.

  Santana imagined them laughing as they raped his mother and then looped the rope around her neck and pulled the chair out from under her feet. He saw himself wrapping his arms around his mother’s bare legs as he tried to lift her up in a desperate attempt to ease the tension in the rope, thinking between sobs that if he could only get some slack in the rope she would breathe again and everything would be as it was the moment before he had entered the house, when hope and truth and beauty still existed in the world.

  He flung handfuls of powdered escopolamina in their faces and stepped back, taking care not to inhale.

  “Hey,” one of them said, as they tried to brush away the light powder clinging to their dark shirts. Then both their heads tilted back, their mouths fell open and their jaws went slack.

  Santana hesitated for a long moment, uncertain if the drug had actually taken effect, before he told them to follow him to his car. Despite what he had heard about the power of the drug, it surprised him when they complied without question.

  He ordered one of the Estradas into the back of his mother’s Suzuki jeep and the other into the passenger side. He stripped off the gloves, climbed into the driver’s seat. Like most teenagers in Colombia, Santana had been driving legally since he was thirteen and was confident in his ability to handle the red jeep with a five-speed gearshift mounted on the floor.

  He drove out of the lot, past the eucalyptus trees and the farmhouses and up into the mountains where the night air blowing through the open canopy of the jeep was ripe with the rich scent of coffee beans and ozone from an approaching storm. He kept looking nervously at each of the Estradas seated to his right and behind him, fearing that the drug would wear off before he could get them both safely away from the city. But the brothers sat quietly with arms down at their sides, faces staring straight ahead, as if in a trance.

  Black clouds moved like shadows across the moon as Santana turned onto a dirt road, the jeep bouncing hard off the shoulder. He followed the beams from the headlights through thick stands of guadua for a half-mile until he swerved onto the grassy floor of the forest and into a small clearing near a wooden bridge that crossed a river. There, he shut off the engine but left the lights on.

  He sat quietly in the jeep for a time, remembering this clearing in the forest as a special place where his parents would take him as a child to fly kites during los vientos de agosto, the winds of August. The air smelled of wet leaves, and clouds of mist hung like spider webs around the trees. He could hear the rumble of thunder from the approaching storm now, the river running over the rapids, the incessant buzzing of chicharras, and the sound of his breathing.

  “Bajate del carro,” he told the one sitting in the passenger seat.

  The man obeyed and Santana walked him to a thick guadua tree. Directed him to stand with his back against it. Then he went back to the Suzuki and got the other one out of the back seat and walked him to a spot five feet in front of his brother, who was still standing passively against the tree, squinting into the glare of the headlights.

  Santana removed the wallet from the second man’s back pocket. The ID inside read Emilio Estrada. He tossed the wallet on the ground and took the British made .38-caliber revolver out his jacket pocket. He released the top catch so that the barrel and cylinder swung down, exposing the back of the cylinder. He removed five of the six cartridges, leaving a round to the left of the hammer. Then he closed the barrel and cocked it. He placed the gun in Emilio Estrada’s right hand and stood directly behind him. Told him to raise his arm and fire at the tree in front of him.

  Sparks flew out of the barrel as the shot echoed through the forest. Enrique Estrada let out a grunt as the bullet slammed him back against the guadua. A dark circle of blood formed in the center of his chest as his legs gave out and he slid down the trunk until he was sitting on the ground. He sat there with his head resting against the base of the tree, his breath rattling in his chest and blood trickling out the corner of his mouth. Then he rolled on his side like a listing ship and lay still.

  A long wisp of smoke drifted out of the muzzle of the gun and rose up and into the mist. A bank of dark clouds veiled the moon and a branch of lightening broke across the black sky. A sudden wind shook the leaves in the trees and rain began falling.

  Santana took the gun from Emilio Estrada, the barrel hot in the palm of his hand. He walked over to Enrique Estrada and looked down, wondering if what he had heard about evil as a child was true, if, in fact, Estrada’s soul would burn in hell for all eternity because of the crimes he had committed during his short but violent life.

  As he watched blood flow out of Enrique Estrada’s body and form a widening pool of darkness, Santana felt as though his innocence was draining out of him. He wondered about his own soul now, wondered about the warning Father Gallego had given him in the chapel of the Gemelli School. El fin no justifica los medios, the end does not justify the means. Sweat dampened his shirt and his body began to tremble in the cool night air. It would be hard to kill the twin, harder than he had ever imagined. He felt sick to his stomach.

  “Enrique!”

  The voice seemed as loud as the roar of the gun, and Santana’s heart leapt into his throat as he spun quickly toward the sound.

  Emilio Estrada stood in a low crouch, unsteady on his feet, his dead eyes staring into Santana’s.

  Santana fumbled for the bullets in his jacket pocket, but before he could reload the gun or react, Estrada jumped him, knocking the .38 from his hand, and sending them both to the ground. Santana felt his right hand slam against a guadua, and he cried out as the sharp riendas around the trunk of the young tree sliced open the back of his hand.

  Fueled by anger and revenge, Estrada forced Santana on his back and sat on top of him, his knees straddling Santana’s chest. Using his forearm as a wedge, he pressed it against Santana’s throat.

  Water soaked through Santana’s jacket, and he could smell the mix of rum and cigarettes on Estrada’s breath as the man leaned closer to his face. He punched Estrada hard in the side with one hand, tried to push the forearm off his neck with the other. Struggling to breathe, his consciousness beginning to slip away, he heard the distinct click of a switchblade, saw the glint of the blade in a flash of lightening as Estrada brought a knife out from behind his back and raised it over his head.

  Santana reached ou
t with his left hand and grabbed Estrada’s wrist. He pushed with all his strength. Tried to hold the knife away from him. But Estrada was too strong.

  In that moment before the blade ripped open his chest and he knew his life would end abruptly at sixteen, he smelled his father’s cherry blend pipe tobacco, his mother’s French perfume. He saw her watching a kite rising high above the forest floor in a gust of wind, its white rag tail looking like a vapor trail against a blue sky.

  With his heart thudding against his ribs and pumping massive amounts of adrenaline into his blood stream, his will to survive overcame his deficiency in strength. His bloody right hand shot straight up, and he buried two fingers deep in Emilio Estrada’s dead eyes.

  Estrada let out a scream and sat up, instinctively reaching both hands toward his eyes for protection.

  Santana felt the weight lessen on his chest as Estrada’s balance shifted. He pushed Estrada off and scrambled to his feet.

  In the glare of the jeep’s headlights, Estrada stood up, eyelids blinking, face twisted in anger, wet hair matted against his skull. “Emilio’s got something here for you hijueputa! Something from me and my brother! Why don’t you come and get it you piece of shit!”

  He rubbed his eyes with one hand and swung the knife wildly in front of him with the other, as if clearing a field of sugar cane with a machete.

  Santana stood in the hard rain with his fists balled tightly at his sides, taking short, quick breaths of oxygen between his clenched teeth. Then he felt something cold and dark rising like a serpent inside him.

  “Where are you, hijueputa?” Estrada yelled.

  Santana picked up the gun lying on the ground and loaded a round into the chamber.

  “I’m here malparido.”

  Cocking the revolver, he stepped closer, aimed, and fired.

  The bullet struck Emilio Estrada squarely in the face and blew out the back of his head.

  Chapter 23

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