by Layton Green
“Here for the tour?” the man said, in the rural Colombian Spanish Grey had heard in the jeep. A local, not an imported worker. Good.
“Just watching,” Grey said.
The man took short, hard puffs on his cigarette. “You like coffee?”
“Probably too much.”
“Could be worse vices.”
“I’ve got some of those, too,” Grey said, and the man chuckled.
“You speak good Spanish.” He pointed his cigarette at the building. “You know how the process works?”
“Not really.”
The man took off his smock and laid it on a tree stump. He then proceeded to give Grey a lecture on coffee production. Grey nodded along as if the man was telling him how to solve world hunger. Halfway through the narrative, Grey told him to hold that thought, then went to reception and returned with two beers. The man shook his hand gravely and said his name was Salvador.
“How long have you lived here?” Grey asked when Salvador was finished.
“All my life. And you? You don’t look much like a gringo.”
It was the question Grey was waiting for.
“I’m American, but I’ve lived all over. I was in Mexico recently.”
“Ah,” he said.
“Beautiful place,” Grey said, “but it’s got some issues, if you know what I mean.”
Salvador’s face wrinkled. “We know something about those issues here.”
“In Colombia, sure, but in coffee country? It looks pretty insulated.”
“Maybe, but the branch of a diseased tree is still infected, is it not?” Salvador flicked his cigarette butt away. “That dirty son of a peasant farmer infected all of Paisa country.”
From his research, Grey knew he was talking about Pablo Escobar.
“But you didn’t come to Colombia to talk about this,” the man said, “or at least I hope you didn’t. You came to see the coffee, the wax palms, the beaches. It’s beautiful, our country, no? And the food? Have you had bandeja paisa?”
“I have,” Grey said, remembering the huge plate of peasant food he had once tried in Bogotá. “I ate about a fourth of it.”
The man laughed.
“There’s something else I came for,” Grey said. “Or someone else, a man named Julio Ganador. Do you know him?”
Grey kept his request neutral, so that depending on Salvador’s response, Grey could go either way. Julio could be a friend Grey met in Miami once and whose address he had lost—or he could be someone else entirely.
Salvador’s response, a tightening of the mouth and a pause as he extracted another cigarette, told Grey all he needed to know.
“Sí,” he said, not bothering to hide his disdain. “I know him. And his father.”
Grey put his hands up. “You seem like an honest man, so I’ll be honest with you. I’m looking for him, and I think you know what it concerns.”
Salvador’s eyes narrowed even farther, revealing a shrewdness Grey had suspected was lying under the surface. He was surprised when Salvador kept speaking, not expecting him to take the risk.
The coffee worker looked around, lit his cigarette, and said, “So you’re that type of gringo, eh? Is it CIA, DEA? Never mind, I don’t need to know. That family is friends of no one around here. Julio’s father was Pablo’s man in Salento, he ran a personal finca that grew coffee just for him. Before he built Hacienda Nápoles, Pablo sometimes came here when it got too dicey in Medellín. When he was killed, Julio’s family left Salento. They knew what would happen if they stayed.”
Grey gave him his full attention, feeling he was onto something.
“Julio wasn’t a bad kid, you know. What do you do when your father has tied himself to a monster? He never had a choice.”
“And the father?” Grey asked. He was getting the feeling that the real contact to the General, that old-world club of drug lords and cult leaders, was the father. Julio Ganador was the message boy, the carrier pigeon.
Salvador blew a smoke ring, eyes squinting so tight they were almost shut, lips parted in a soft smile. “Rolando? I know exactly where that devil is.”
Without prompting, he gave Grey a street address in Medellín. Grey repeated it twice to make sure he got it right.
“Thank you,” Grey murmured.
“With any luck, I’ll be the one thanking you. But you watch yourself in that city, señor.”
“I’ll try. If you don’t mind, there’s something else I’d like your opinion on.” Grey took a swallow of beer as Salvador put a knee up on the log, leaning on an elbow. “Another problem in Mexico that might have found its way here. Ever heard of a religion called Palo Mayombe?”
“Palo what?”
Grey repeated the name.
Salvador shook his head, not even stopping to think. “Never. And around here, I would know.”
Grey checked his watch; it was midnight. “Is there any way back to Salento tonight?”
“No.”
After another beer with Salvador, Grey threw his bags in his room, then tried Nya again on his burner cell. She had returned his call, which was a huge relief. It was the middle of the night in Harare, but he left another message, this time telling her to watch her back, and to try him again first thing in the morning.
Next he tried Fred. The DEA agent answered on the first ring. “I was about to get worried.”
“I’m stuck up here for the night.”
“I figured. All okay?”
“I’ll catch you up in the morning,” Grey said. “Don’t get too comfortable, we’re taking the first flight to Medellín.”
Lana left her hotel with a black handbag tucked against her side. In the purse was her cell, her wallet, a makeup kit, a pack of Newports, a tiny canister of mace, and a plastic pistol with a ceramic barrel she had smuggled from Miami. Most gun experts thought the ceramic gun was a myth.
They were wrong.
Eyes on every door and window lining the street, she tightened her shoulders for the short walk. Bogotá was strangely dark and quiet at night, as if it were a tiny village rather than a city of almost seven million. As she passed a line of old brick buildings on either side of a muddy, potholed street, the trapped smog creating an aura of palpable gloom, Lana thought all she needed was a few gas lamps and carriages to bring her back to the end of the nineteenth century.
She skirted Plaza Simon Bolivar, the public square at the edge of La Candelaria. During the day, the plaza was the center of Bogotá’s government, a colonial-era pearl ringed by an array of imposing government buildings and ornate lampposts, quite breathtaking except for the panhandlers and cigarette butts and drug addicts and pigeon shit.
A block later and she was there. Hair down, leather pants squeaking against her thighs, Lana saw heads tilt her way through the haze of cigarette smoke when she entered Cuernos. Smoking was banned in most public places in Colombia, and most of those places didn’t care.
The music was loud and hip, Latino rap layered over techno. The place was a microcosm of La Candelaria: a series of interconnected small rooms full of hidden alcoves, furtive eyes, danger, and secrets.
The man behind the bar with the pretty face and the wisp of a Fu Manchu goatee didn’t make it obvious, but Lana felt his eyes latch on to her as she sauntered through the room.
She eased onto a bar stool and took out the Newports. Lit up as she made eye contact with the bartender. “Got a beer and a shot of whisky for an old friend?”
Without asking, he slid an Aguila draft beer and a double shot of Johnny Walker Black in front of her. The bartender’s name was Carlos. He was tall and sinewy in the way of someone who does too much coke, and a year ago they had been lovers.
“Is that what you would call us? Old friends?”
Lana blew a cloud of smoke. “No.”
“Good.”
Carlos’s English was better than before, she thought. He disappeared in the back for a spell and when he returned she switched to Spanish, to make sure nothing got lost
in translation. No one else was close enough to hear the conversation. “It’s good to see you.”
“Are you here for the night, the week, the month?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ll see.” Her eyes found his. “The night, at least.”
He looked away and started drying shot glasses with a towel.
“Or maybe things have changed?” she said. “Perhaps you’ve got a wife and a new baby? A station wagon and an apartment in Zona Norte?”
That brought a spark to his eyes. “I missed your spirit, Mariana. No one ever gave me hell like you did.”
“That’s why I came back. In case you might be getting soft.”
His grin was wolfish. “I think you know better.”
“Do I?”
“We’ll see.”
She ashed her cigarette. “I’d like to.”
As they flirted over the next few hours, she studied the patrons flitting in and out of the rooms and alcoves. Young and edgy, most of them in leather or tatted up, plenty of bikers and narco types, a few young professionals who liked to live on the wild side at night. She saw some of the same faces from before, though if anyone recognized her, no one showed it. The crowd at Cuernos was far too cool for that.
After her spell in the swanky northern suburbs during her previous investigation, she had delved into the party scene, moving from the artist cafés and wine bars of La Macarena to the seedy rave clubs in Chapinero, from bacchanalian parties in Zona G to flitting among the casinos and coke dens swarming Bogotá’s tattered excuse for a financial district.
She didn’t learn much along the way, except that if she really wanted to meet someone like Doctor Zombie, then she was going to have to immerse herself in La Candelaria, Bogotá’s old town, a five-hundred-year-old labyrinth of cobblestoned streets and crumbling colonial buildings that, except for a few isolated bars and clubs, became a ghost town once the sun went down.
So Lana had entered the world of La Candelaria and did what she was trained to do: infiltrate, deceive, exploit. She befriended DJs, street kids, junkies, dealers. Prowled the old quarter at all hours of the night. Searched, probed, studied, peered behind the curtain of vice.
She learned plenty about the Colombian criminal class, and precious little about her quarry. Doctor Zombie, it was said, was someone whose name was not spoken aloud on the street, and who could do worse than just kill you: he could make you do whatever he wanted. Someone with a reputation of using strange, psychotropic drugs from the jungle. Someone with a network across La Candelaria and in the barrios crawling up the mountainside like worker ants. Someone even the narcos avoided.
All the chatter pointed to Cuernos as the place where, if one was very unlucky, one might run into someone associated with Doctor Zombie. The last time around, she had stayed there for weeks, seducing Carlos, finally asking him outright if he knew anything about Doctor Zombie.
But Carlos had been just as in the dark as everyone else. It was as if the ghost of Señor Guiñol inhabited the place, a phantom everyone talked about but no one had seen. Frustrated and needed on another assignment, Lana had been forced to abandon her search.
Now things were different, she thought.
Now she knew what to look for.
She glanced around the bar. The familiar energy still crackled in the air, something different about this place, darker, more ominous. She wished she had weeks to worm her way back into the scene. Instead she had two or three nights, at best.
After the encounter with the blue lady in Miami, she knew her picture might be circulating. She had vamped up too much to be recognizable at a glance, but if someone noticed her and made a play, then so be it. Sometimes you had to take a risk.
An hour before closing, well after Carlos had started dipping into the whiskey, Lana made her move. “Up for a nightcap?”
Carlos’s eyes scanned the crowded bar. “I might be awhile.”
“Since when did I go home early? You know,” she said, drawing her words out and leaning in, “there’s something different going on in Miami these days. Something I think you would like.”
His eyes took on a hungry look. Thought she was talking drugs.
“It’s a bit of an acquired taste,” she said, “like nothing I’ve done before. Especially if you trip while you’re doing it.”
“Well? Do I have to guess?”
“It’s called Palo Mayombe.”
“What?” he said. He looked genuinely confused, and her swallow of beer tasted bitter. While she hadn’t expected Carlos to be a player, she expected him to at least be informed.
She backed off, smiling and stroking the back of his hand. “It’s a religious ceremony. Trip enough and you’ll see spirits, I swear.”
He was looking at her strangely, as if she had just confessed to entering rehab. Damn. She had lost ground and would have to rehabilitate. “So where’s the after-party these days? The usual?”
“More or less,” he said, then brightened. “There’s a new place underground. Really cool, great scene.”
Underground clubs sprouted up now and then in La Candelaria, places you would never know about without an invitation, makeshift speakeasies in abandoned buildings that were perfect for illicit drug use. This was good; maybe some of his friends were more in the know.
“All the better,” she said. “Plenty of snow from the Andes?”
“Oh, yeah.”
He scribbled the address on a cocktail napkin. “Go ahead if you want. No sense in watching me close up. Knock twice, four times, then one and two.” His eyes moved down her body, lingering on the exposed flesh between her breasts. “They’ll let you in.”
She finished her drink and left, wanting to spend some time socializing in the club before Carlos arrived and monopolized her attention. Just in case things went south, she texted Fred and Grey the address of the place she was going. They had all bought international burner cells in Miami and exchanged numbers.
The brick and cobblestone streets of La Candelaria were empty, quiet as a monastery at night. She shivered and pulled her jacket tight; it must have been forty degrees.
The underground club was all the way across the old quarter. She hurried through long blocks of shuttered doors and cantilevered windows with iron bars, the occasional hanging lantern lighting the way. Her left hand palmed the canister of mace, her right hand slipped inside her handbag and grasped her gun. The eyes of the eerie blue papier-mâché ghosts dotting the rooftops of La Candelaria seemed to follow her on her journey. Sentinels of Bogotá’s violent past, places where someone had been murdered or where someone executed used to live, she couldn’t seem to shake their gaze.
The street housing the club was so narrow she thought she could reach out and touch the pastel buildings on either side. The terra cotta rooftops hid the moon, and her heels clacked along the cobblestones, bursts of gunfire in the silence of the night. She had to guess at the address: an iron-studded wooden door in the middle of the block, spaced between two numbered doorways at either end of the street.
After exhaling her tension, she knocked as instructed, her other hand gripping her gun. A few seconds later the door creaked open, revealing a weed-filled courtyard strewn with debris. A burly man in a suit beckoned her inside, lighting the way with a gas torch.
The light from the moon allowed her a glimpse of a cracked archway on the far side of the courtyard. She rolled her eyes, guessing a set of stairs led to the noise and lights of the nightclub she assumed was below. The Bogotá club scene could be so dramatic. Still, she kept a wary eye on the doorman, as well as a few feet of separation.
It was the weirdest thing, and she was sure her subconscious was playing tricks on her, but she had the fleeting impression that she had been there before.
When the doorman closed the door, the shadows came alive. Two men in cowled robes sprang at Lana from behind the door, one of them forcing a rag over her mouth. She tried to yank her gun out of her purse, but the other man grabbed her wrists and
held her tight. The doorman jabbed her stomach with the butt end of the torch, releasing the breath she had been holding, speeding up the reaction of whatever odorless chemical was suffocating her from the rag.
Odorless chemical.
Scopolamine.
Doctor Zombie.
In a panic, she tried to snap a front kick, but could no longer feel her legs. Her assailants dragged her through the darkened archway. Just before losing consciousness, her brain sputtering in a chemical fog, she saw more archways and chambers than she would have thought possible, an entire hidden city filled with cowled figures and addicts slumped in corners, eyes burning red in the darkness.
Grey woke just before dawn. The first thing he saw was a text from Lana from three a.m. the night before. All she left was an address, but Grey understood her language: if she went missing, that was where they should start looking. He tried to ring her back but no one answered.
It was early. He would try again later.
He caught the first jeep available, pulling into Salento with the morning fog crawling up the ridgeline like the fingers of an advancing wraith. Fred was waiting for him on a café patio in the plaza, eyes bleary and coffee in hand. The smell of frying eggs wafted from inside the café.
“Flight’s at eleven,” Fred said. “We’ll have to use the same passports, unless you’ve got another idea.”
“I don’t like it, but if they knew we were here, we’d know by now.” Grey sat next to him and ordered a café Americano, rubbing his hands against the chill. “You find anything?”
“Plenty of country bumpkins, some overly fried empanadas, and a few bedbugs. Oh, you mean did I find anything to do with Palo Mayombe? Nada. Not even one of those sideways, ‘the crazy witch doctor’s around the corner’ looks we got in Mexico. You’re the cult guy, but from what I can tell, there’s about as much Palo Mayombe here as there is free Wi-Fi.”
Grey nodded and took a sip of coffee. It was dreamy.
