Taking Chances

by Susan Lewis

  He walked back to the makeshift desk where a laptop computer, 9mm automatic, and stacks of papers cluttered the pitted surface. He was attempting to put together her story, trying as best he could to encapsulate the essence of her, while indulging in a self-absorbed purging of grief, and punishing himself with the imagining of her final terrible hours. While his own mission in Colombia had been to expose the Galeanos and the government officials they controlled, Rachel’s had been to bring world attention to what was happening to the children, those who were referred to as desechables – disposable people – or as human waste, or filth. Though she’d gotten some good coverage, her kidnap and death had received so much more, for it had made headlines all over the world. But so too had the story she had syndicated a week before her death, the story that Chambers was staring down at now.

  The first time he’d seen it was when Rachel had shown him herself. He had just arrived at the Casa Medina hotel in Bogotá, having flown in from the northern town of Montería where he’d spent the previous few days. She was waiting for him and the minute he walked into their room she had thrust the typewritten pages into his hand, insisting he read them right away. It was one of the things he’d loved most about her, the passion she’d felt for her work. This particular story concerned an invitation that had been posted all over the Bogotá district of Los Mártires announcing the introduction of a new ‘social cleansing’ campaign. It read:

  FUNERALS

  The industrialists, businessmen, civic groups and community at large in the Los Mártires area

  INVITE ALL

  to the funerals for the delinquents who work in this part of the capital, which will begin as of today and continue until they are exterminated.

  As his eyes scanned the words now he could still hear her anger and frustration as she demanded to know how anyone could get away with this, and why no-one cared.

  ‘What the hell’s wrong with the world that a story like this doesn’t even make a front page?’ she yelled, her brown eyes glittering with rage, her lovely face wrought with confusion. ‘Don’t they matter? Because they’re not American or Jewish, or French or British, don’t they count? We’re as guilty as those goddamned bastards who’re sticking the posters all over the streets, don’t you see that? Merv Hemlisch should be held to account for this, and all those other godless editors who don’t know a moral from a fucking menu. And you, Tom Chambers, could give me some support here. God knows I need it.’

  ‘Hey, you’ve got it,’ he assured her. ‘And you’ve got to learn to give them a chance to go to print. I heard you’ve got a front page lead-in in the New York Times tomorrow. Did you know that?’

  That silenced what she’d been about to say next, and she looked at him in amazement, before her eyes started to shine. ‘Are you kidding me?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘Call them up. Ed’s on the desk tonight. I spoke to him in the taxi on the way over here.’

  ‘You talked him into it,’ she accused.

  ‘No, you did! The story did. It’s big news, honey. I’ll lay money right now you get above-the-fold coverage in London, Paris, Toronto, you name it.’

  She looked at him, her eyes glowing, then put on a smile that showed him how much she wanted to believe that, though wasn’t quite sure she could. ‘We had the fire department in there tearing those posters down,’ she told him. ‘Boy, someone was running scared once we got ahold of it. Take a shot at who organized putting them up? Yeah, you guessed it, Salvador Molina. That slimeball should be taken out and butchered.’

  She turned away, and going to stand at the window behind her he slipped his arms around her, hugging her to him. He knew how personally she took the tragedies she reported, and how impotent she sometimes felt in trying to expose the iniquity and corruption of lowlife like Molina – and God knew there were plenty of them.

  After a while he felt some of the tension sliding from her and as she lifted her head they looked at each other’s reflection in the darkened glass. Her smooth dusky skin, just like her passion, denoted the mix of her native-American and Creole roots. Her thick, ebony hair, cropped short for convenience rather than style, made her eyes seem larger and somehow more vulnerable, despite their fire. Her cheekbones, so high and proud, the regal flare of her nostrils, the perfect fullness of her mouth, and exquisite sensuousness of her body, all contrived to capture his heart in a way he no more understood than he could deny.

  Lifting a hand she touched his handsomely rugged face, the face that had seen more tragedy than most, had watched more suffering and fought more injustice. She loved him beyond her own life, and knew he was as committed to exposing the torment of this nation’s weak and poor as she was. He was the only one on whom she could vent her fury and frustration and know he understood. He was always there in her moments of hopelessness and exhaustion, with strength to spare and a wicked humour to make her laugh.

  ‘I spoke to Francisco on the way in too,’ he said. ‘He was trying to get ahold of you. He’s prepared to give the posters an inside page in El Tiempo tomorrow. It can be your byline, your story, if you want it.’

  Her dark eyes narrowed. ‘Why wouldn’t I want it?’ she said.

  He waited.

  ‘Oh God!’ she groaned, as understanding dawned. ‘You mean it might just serve to extend the invitation?’

  He nodded.

  She shook her head in despair. ‘This country isn’t Christian, it’s barbaric.’

  ‘Which is why I want you out of here by the end of the week,’ he said.

  She turned to face him. ‘That must mean things are hotting up for you,’ she said.

  ‘Someone made contact from the Cali Cartel a couple of days ago,’ he told her. ‘They’re going to connect me up with one of their lieutenants, a defector from the Tolima ranks. I’m flying to Cali in the morning. I want you to meet me in Cartagena next Thursday. If this guy’s got some real goods to unload there’s a chance we might have to ship out right away. If not, I thought we could spend some time together, just you and me.’

  Her head went to one side, the appeal of the suggestion lighting her eyes. ‘And do what?’ she teased.

  He moved his hands to her shirt buttons and started to undo them. ‘Pretty much this sort of thing,’ he responded.

  She waited for him to finish, and as her shirt fell to the floor she slipped her arms around his neck. ‘I had a dream about you last night,’ she told him.

  His eyebrows went up. ‘Is that so?’ he responded. ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’

  Her eyes were clouding as his mouth came very close to hers. ‘It was real kinky,’ she warned him.

  ‘I’m liking the sound of it already,’ he murmured. ‘So what did we do?’

  Standing on tiptoe she whispered in his ear.

  His eyes widened for a moment, then pulling her more tightly against him, he said, ‘I reckon it’s time we made that dream come true.’

  The images of their last night together were too painful for him to deal with now. It wasn’t just the eroticism, it was the crazy laughter, the madness and abandonment, as well as the incredible intimacy and tenderness. Worst of all, though, was the knowledge that he was to blame for the fact that it would never happen again, for it was while he was in Cali, hammering the final few nails in Hernán Galeano’s coffin, that Galeano had ordered the hit.

  The message had taken no time to get through: the gringo is to give up his investigation of certain Colombian businessmen and politicians and get out of the country now or the gringa will die. And that was when Chambers had made the biggest mistake of his life.

  Looking back, in the weeks, months, years that followed, he had never been able to make himself understand why he hadn’t just done what they’d said and got out right away. There was no acceptable explanation for what had made him stay to get his story over before heading out, he could always have done it later – after Rachel’s release. But it hadn’t happened that way. Instead, Pacho, the friend whose cousin’s apartm
ent he was using now, had worked alongside him, translating and editing and filing the story through to El Tiempo and El Espectador in Bogotá, so by the time Chambers had reached the airport and reconnected with the Galeano contact, the damage was already done – and two days later Rachel’s body was discovered in the Fort San Felipe.

  So why in God’s name hadn’t he done as he was told, when he of all people knew what little regard the narcotraficantes had for human life? His only answer was one of such blinding arrogance and stupidity that he’d never been able to admit it to another living soul. He had assumed, because she was American, and a woman, that they wouldn’t dare to harm her. What a fool! What a goddamned, fucking madman. Surely to God he deserved to be in the kind of torment he’d been in ever since, he deserved it never to end.

  ‘Hey, man, it is time to close up the shop and come have some fun!’

  Chambers frowned. He’d been so deep in thought, so lost in her memory, he’d barely been aware of the phone ringing, or even of answering.

  ‘Pacho,’ he said to his friend.

  ‘Come, join me at the café. I order you empanadas. I think you are hungry now.’

  Chambers’s stomach growled, a handsome and pressing response to the accuracy of Pacho’s guess. ‘Give me an hour,’ he said and clicked off the phone.

  The bar was in the exclusive section of the old town, not far, but in this heat he was in sore need of a shower. And there was no way he was leaving this room without first packing up his work – the reams of notes and sketchy outline of a screenplay that he had fed into his computer. He would leave it for safe keeping with Lioba, the motherly old soul who lived across the hall. The floppy disk backups he took with him wherever he went.

  Just how much danger he was in was hard to gauge. Cartagena wasn’t, by Colombian standards, a violent city, but should what was now left of the Tolima Cartel get wind of the fact he had re-entered the country, he’d rate his chances of getting out again a whole lot higher if it were as a corpse than as a passenger on an American Airlines 757. Thanks to his investigation three years ago, no less than twelve key members of the cartel, as well as half a dozen elected politicians, had experienced an ignominious end to their liberty, and in a couple of cases to their earthly existence. Because of that they felt Chambers owed them, and he was pretty damned sure that Rachel’s death hadn’t even come close to settling the sum.

  ‘There is news, my friend,’ Pacho said, as Chambers joined him at a table in front of a noisy bar. A jukebox inside throbbed with the heavy, fast rhythm of salsa, and a half-drunk couple in bright shorts and straw sombreros swung and gyrated around their rowdy friends.

  Chambers watched them and waited for Pacho to continue.

  ‘They receive a call at the Santa Clara today. Someone is looking for you,’ Pacho told him.

  Chambers felt his pulses start to speed. ‘Any idea who the someone is?’ he asked, picking up his beer as it was put down on the table. With the exception of Michael McCann he had told no-one he was coming here, and McCann knew very well he couldn’t be reached at the Santa Clara.

  ‘Not yet. But the fact that someone is asking means that someone either knows or suspects you are here.’

  Chambers drank deeply and trailed his eyes across the elaborate, flower-covered balconies that fronted the whitewashed buildings on the other side of the plaza. Above them the red-tiled roofs baked in the afternoon sun; the only movement across the endless blue sky was that of an occasional bird or faraway plane. No sign of anyone watching him from there.

  His eyes moved to the dappled shade of the trees that draped their luscious foliage over the square. Horses clattered by, and he could see any number of thin, half-naked men slouching on the grass, staring out of their thoughts and seeing nothing of the beauty that surrounded them. All strangers, all potential assassins.

  As he waited Pacho chuckled. His round, warm face was pitted with pinprick scars, his chocolate-brown eyes, as merry as the impish tilt of his moustache, were watching Chambers closely.

  ‘How much longer you plan to stay?’ Pacho asked.

  ‘Another week, maybe two.’

  ‘How the work coming along?’

  ‘It’s coming. The witness, the one who came forward, did you track him down yet?’

  ‘Sí, sí. I find man who live in Manga. He knows the man who see what happened. He is willing to talk. He knows what his friend see. He tell us.’

  Chambers arched an eyebrow. ‘So he knows I’m in town,’ he pointed out.

  ‘But I pay him to keep mouth shut,’ Pacho protested.

  ‘Maybe Hernán Galeano paid him more.’

  ‘No, no, Galeano in prison. Thanks to you that scum is arrested and locked away, along with all the other hoozos from Tolima Cartel.’

  ‘Come on, Pacho, you’re not that naïve. Galeano might be behind bars, but he’s still running what’s left of the show and we both know that there’s a bounty on my head that’s making me more popular around here than Simon Bolívar. Galeano’s been waiting for me to come back, and my guess is your guy from Manga has already sent him word.’

  There was no contradiction in Pacho’s expression. Evidently, having had it pointed out, he now suspected the same.

  Chambers drank more beer, then sat quietly staring across the busy plaza at the Palacio de la Inquisicion, with its spectacular baroque stone entrance topped by the very regal Spanish coat of arms. The devil only knew what manner of suffering had been endured in the salons of torture behind those walls, but what was concerning Chambers now was the possibility that someone had got to Pacho with much the same methods – that maybe someone was paying him enough, or threatening him enough, to lead a Galeano hit man right to Chambers’s door.

  His death, if it came, wouldn’t be swift, of that he could be certain. He had few friends in high places now, his investigation had put most of them behind bars. And of those who were left – well, three years had gone by, there was no knowing now who owned whom, or who was fighting on which side. Besides, no-one was ever going to thank him for the pressure that had been brought to bear upon the Colombian government to hand over Rachel’s killers. Of course, they never had, and that he, an American journalist, had been responsible for so many investigations, trials and imprisonments, was as big an insult to the cartels as it was to the corrupt politicians and lawless bands of insurgents. He guessed the only incorruptible he’d ever met in this hopeless, war-torn land was one of the police chiefs, General Garcia Gómez, who was currently on vacation in Spain and not expected back for at least another month.

  But Chambers was here now, and, even if it cost him his life, he was going to find out who had really killed Rachel. Though there was no question that Hernán Galeano had ordered the hit, the ones Chambers wanted were the bastards who had held her prisoner, raped her, then put a gun to her head and killed her. The score was going to be settled, and his vengeance was going to reach a scale that those miserable sons of bitches could never imagine.

  ‘I think,’ Pacho said, ‘that you must leave the apartment. Maybe it no longer safe.’

  Chambers looked at him and said nothing.

  ‘I know you suspect me, my friend,’ Pacho said, ‘and it is right that you do. You must suspect everyone. Hernán Galeano want you very bad, and he pay lot of money for someone to find you. We no speak to friend of witness. We forget him now. There are others. I find them and make them talk. I bring them to you, before they have chance to get word to Galeano’s people. After you speak with them you disappear. You understand? We find places for you, lots of them. You must stay on the move.’

  Once again Chambers’s harsh grey eyes searched the milling crowds in the plaza. Were they being watched now? Out here in the open like this he was a sitting target for even the most inept of assassins, and cartel sicarios were anything but that. Which meant that if they did have eyes on him, then his suspicions were correct: for the moment they wanted him alive – probably for much the same reasons that he wanted them alive t
oo.

  Pacho got to his feet and dropped a few coins on the table. ‘I will come for you in the morning, just after dawn,’ he said. ‘Be ready to leave.’

  Chambers watched him walk off down the street, then finishing his beer he got up from the table and began the twenty-minute stroll back to the apartment. Though he had the sense of being followed, and checked several times, he spotted no-one, nor did he put too much store by the feeling. It was one he’d had ever since arriving, and he knew it probably had its roots in paranoia rather than truth.

  After collecting his papers and computer from Lioba, he crossed the hall to his own apartment and locked the door firmly behind him. He wouldn’t go out again tonight.

  The following morning, as the golden orb of the sun began to rise from the far horizon, Pacho came quietly up the worn concrete stairs outside Chambers’s apartment. There was no-one else around, the only sounds coming from the early stirrings of life in the streets, and the wail of a baby somewhere else in the block. He stopped outside the apartment door, looked back down the hall, then raised a hand to knock. His fist connecting with the wood pushed the door open. Immediately Pacho stepped back, reaching for his gun as he pressed up against the wall. He waited, listening, hardly breathing.

  He moved forward, pushed the door wider and called Chambers’s name.

  His mouth was turning dry, his heart beat a thick, loud tattoo in his brain. Bracing himself, he pulled out his gun and stepped quickly into the room, thumbing down the safety ready to fire.

  The place was empty. He looked over at the bathroom. The door was open, the mirror reflecting a bare, white-tiled wall. The bed had been slept in. A pan of cold coffee rested on the stove. There was no sign of a struggle, nor of a hasty retreat. But everything had gone, Chambers, his computer, his papers, his clothes.