The Hearing

by James Mills

  “They said she was healthy. But they didn’t say anything about the parents.”

  “She’s with people who want her very much and will love her dearly.”

  “They make mistakes, though, sometimes, those agencies.”

  “No, honey. They didn’t make a mistake. That little girl is with loving parents.”

  4

  The wheels of the twin-prop Cessna touched the asphalt, and Gus looked out at the mountains and plains of northern Colombia, struggling, as he had every day since Michelle left Cambridge, to keep his mind off what might be happening to her. He was tagging along with his father on a business trip, hoping it would give the two of them time to talk to each other. They had never been close, often quarreled, and with his father approaching seventy, Gus wanted to do what he could to heal their relationship before it was too late. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life asking, Why didn’t I do more to get close to my father? Why didn’t I ever tell him I loved him? Because he did love him. Sometimes he wasn’t sure why, but he loved him.

  As Gus turned his head to look toward the front of the passenger cabin, he heard a sharp Pop!, saw a window burst inward and the back of an empty seat tilt violently sideways, its headrest exploding in shredded fabric.

  His father’s soft, almost inaudible voice said, “Someone’s firing at the plane.”

  The plane stopped.

  A black BMW screeched to a halt out of sight beneath the left wing. In a moment, the Cessna’s door opened and two soldiers entered behind a tall, slender man in his seventies wearing a beige suit and wide smile.

  The man said, “Please do not be alarmed. I am afraid we have a party of hunters in the woods, where it is quite forbidden. They are after the wild boar. The security forces are seeing to them now. Shall we disembark?”

  The elderly man stepped up the aisle to Gus’s father.

  “It is so good to see you, Stephen. I apologize for this inconvenience.”

  His words seemed unnaturally refined, and were it not for the other man’s Latin coloring, he and Gus’s father might have been brothers. His father’s own regal aspect had intimidated Gus since early childhood. His speech had always been as controlled and secure as a bank vault, and his countenance, smiling or angry, was as controlled as the voice. When Gus was a child he had made innocent attempts to move in behind the face and the voice, but had never even come close. His mother, a compulsive supporter of crusades, causes, and charities, identified herself in Gus’s young mind as a glitteringly dressed specter always on the move, arriving and departing, fleetingly applying pecks to the cheek.

  “It’s all right,” Gus’s father said to the slender man, looking a little gray. “Nothing to apologize for at all. May I introduce my son? Gus, this is Señor Vicaro-Garza.”

  Vicaro-Garza, owner of thousands of acres of cattle land as well as vast forests, had flown them to his ranch for the weekend. Gus’s father sat on the board of a paper company dependent on Vicaro’s timber.

  Gus, still recovering from the gunfire, shook hands.

  It was midafternoon and the sun was blazing. Señor Vicaro led Gus and his father up wooden steps to the top of a platform where fifty guests sat on folding wooden chairs overlooking a small bullring. Vicaro raised fighting bulls, selling them to the Mexican bullrings and hoping eventually to export them to Spain as well. Because bulls were said to inherit their physique from the father and their courage from the mother, Vicaro periodically held tientas at his ranch to test the courage of the female calves. Those that passed were used for breeding. The others were butchered.

  Across from the platform, soldiers with automatic rifles perched on the top of the ring’s wooden wall. In the BMW racing across the tarmac from the plane, an American congressman who had boarded the plane with them in Bogotá had told Gus that the gunshots shattering the plane’s window had no doubt come from rebel guerrillas in the countryside around Vicaro’s ranch. Vicaro had recently shifted financial support from their leader to a coca-trafficking member of the Colombian senate. The congressman, a young man in spectacles, explained that his “committee work” in Washington involved fact-finding trips to Latin America. “When it comes to what’s happening in the region, Vicaro’s the oracle. Anything he doesn’t know, his guests know.”

  The soldiers on the wall were joined by children crawling precariously along the ledge, risking a ten-foot drop into the ring. One of the children, a bully-faced boy of about fifteen who was too fat to climb to the ledge with the others, leaned against a wooden barricade about two feet in from the ring’s wall. He wore a black T-shirt and expensive-looking black leather boots with pointed metal toes. The other children amused themselves by dropping things on his head—paper cups, wads of chewing gum—and he retaliated angrily by snatching at their ankles, which dangled just out of reach.

  “Who’s the kid?” Gus asked the congressman, who was in the seat beside him.

  “Vicaro’s son. Ernesto.”

  “He looks too young.”

  “Vicaro has children younger than that.”

  “Where’s the mother?”

  “Ernesto’s? Who knows? The mothers of Vicaro’s children are too numerous to mention. Or count. Or remember.”

  Vicaro waved to a man on horseback who held a metal-tipped lance resting on his right stirrup. The man smiled and waved back. A few seconds later, a wooden door swung open and a calf three feet high, its horns well formed, trotted aggressively into the ring.

  The rider maneuvered the horse sideways, lowered the lance, and caught the charging calf between the shoulder blades.

  Blood flowed, and the crowd cheered. For once, Gus was glad Michelle wasn’t with him. She loved animals, and this would have enraged her.

  As the rider backed off, preparing to receive another charge, a wad of paper struck Ernesto on the head. He made a sudden leap, grabbed an ankle, and brought its owner tumbling heavily into the ring. His fists pummeled the smaller boy.

  The calf, attracted by the movement, swung toward the boys. Ernesto ducked behind the barricade, intentionally blocking the other boy’s way. The calf lowered its horns and charged. As the audience gasped, the boy scrambled to his feet, raced to the gate, and slipped out. Ernesto laughed.

  The rider lowered his lance, and the wooden gate swung open. Ernesto waited for the calf, blood flooding down its black flanks, to move past him on its way out of the ring. Then he pulled his leg back and with astonishing aim, strength, and cruelty drove the steel point of his boot hard into the calf’s hindquarters beneath the tail.

  That evening, at a cocktail party in the ranch’s wood-paneled reception hall, Gus stood with a glass of Dom Pérignon, marveling at the odd collection of guests— bankers, generals, actors, cowboys, journalists, senators, and cops.

  He watched as Ernesto, carrying a glass-laden silver tray, approached one of the tuxedoed bankers. The banker took a glass, smiled. The cuff on Ernesto’s extended hand pulled back to reveal a gold, diamond-ringed Rolex. The white dinner jacket concealed much of his excess weight, and the polite smile covered the brutality displayed only hours ago in the bullring. He continued on his rounds, the obedient son passing drinks, speaking briefly with each of the guests.

  Gus marveled. Ernesto seemed transformed in this adult atmosphere of champagne and social chatter. Maybe it was adolescence—one foot in the nursery, the other in the world. Right now the boy appeared so thoroughly at home he might himself have been the host.

  “He’ll run the whole show by the time he’s twenty.”

  Gus turned to see the congressman. He said, “You think so?”

  “He could just about run it now. Don’t let the thuggish behavior you saw at the tienta fool you. He’s every bit as clever as his father. And even nastier, if that’s possible. The old man brags about the kid’s meanness, encourages it, says he wants a tough son. When he was eight, he played the violin, loved it, good at it, and one night Vicaro grabbed it out of his hands and smashed it to splinters against th
e bedpost. Pushed an AK-47 at him, helped him hold it, and blew out the wall to the bathroom. True story. Kid hasn’t been the same since.”

  Gus didn’t know what to say.

  “Watch him. He looks like he’s passing champagne, but he’s not. He’s studying everything, remembering everything. An extremely ambitious, Machiavellian little bastard. He could be president of Colombia by his thirtieth birthday. What a boost that’d be for the family business.”

  “What is that business, exactly?”

  “You name it. Timber, tobacco, airlines, hotels—if it makes money, Vicaro’s hand is in it, probably up to the shoulder.”

  “And cocaine.”

  It was a breach of etiquette.

  “Well … I suppose … discreet and indirect.”

  Gus drifted in the tide of guests, thinking of Michelle, worrying about her, longing to be with her. He’d shattered something that could never be repaired. A thousand times he had wanted to call her, to hear her voice. But how could he call her? To say what—that he worried about her, wanted to be with her, that he was sorry? By now it would be weeks or months since she had ended the pregnancy. It was done. He knew she would never forgive him. You can’t smash something rare and beautiful and then stand sorrowfully over the fragments wishing them back together.

  The next morning Gus and his father flew back to the family home in Connecticut. They had had time together, and Gus felt closer to his father at the end of the trip than he had at the beginning, but there remained a great distance between them that Gus despaired of ever bridging.

  A year later Michelle was back in Cambridge, ordering fettucine at a table in Guido’s. Gus saw her from the bar and couldn’t believe it. All the times he had wanted to call her, talk to her, be with her, the times he had sat alone for hours, thinking about her, grieving over the smashed fragments of their love—and now here she was.

  He steadied himself, slipped off the bar stool, and took a slow walk to the men’s room, circling past her table, making sure. On the way back he stopped at the table, touched her shoulder, playfully, like it didn’t matter. She turned. A microsecond of nothing at all, then an explosion in her eyes. He saw such joy there, his legs went limp.

  The next day they had lunch. She’d come to Cambridge to see a friend, “and I guess I hoped maybe I’d run into you.” She wasn’t returning to Harvard. “I’m through with that.” They didn’t talk about the pregnancy. Their love was like a living miracle not even that pain could kill. Something had changed, something so big even the universe would never be the same. They knew they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, and the pain that had driven them apart had never happened. They wouldn’t even talk about it. How could you talk about it? It had never happened.

  They spent the next weekend in Montgomery, so he could meet her family. A red-clay, deep-country road, overhung with Spanish moss. Steam rising from the flanks of riding horses in a paddock. An antique wood-decked pickup truck. A white porch running the length of the house, with ceiling fans and wooden chairs. Her father was huge—crew-cut hair, white socks, a smile warmer than the weather, and a redneck drawl Gus could hardly understand. Two brothers, teenagers, all grins and muscles. Her tiny mother, bony, beautiful, black curly hair, never at rest, never empty-handed. Trays of drinks and food.

  Did they know what had happened? They would never have approved. They were so religious. There didn’t seem to be any problem Michelle’s father didn’t expect God to solve. “And does he?” Gus asked. “One way or another. Not always my way, but what right’ve I got to tell the potter how to make pots? Ain’t that right? Is that right?” Had Michelle had the pregnancy ended by herself, never told her family? Their reaction to him gave no clues. Their affection seemed as genuine as it was unreserved. No, they couldn’t know.

  He sat with the family on the porch, his sweat chilling under the fans, drinking cold white wine pressed from grapes that grew on vines by the house. If this wasn’t heaven, it was close enough.

  The ranch had a hundred head of cattle, six Thoroughbred horses, and two springer spaniels called Touch and Go. Michelle took him for a walk down a wooded hill, past pecan trees, to a pond stocked with blue gill. “What do you think?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He looked at her.

  She said, “Not just the pond. The whole—everything.”

  “I think your dad’s great. It’s all great.”

  She beamed. “He only wears those socks when he—”

  “I love his socks.”

  They walked another fifty yards past the pond to a swamp with cypress trees.

  “My dad shoots turkey in there. My mom marinates it in wine—what you were drinking?—and she makes pies from the pecans. In the spring—”

  “It’s great, Michelle.” Words came to his lips, but he held them back. Then he said, “I wish I’d been born here.”

  She laughed. “In this hick place?”

  “Yeah, in this hick place.”

  “You live in a palace.”

  She’d never seen his family’s home, but she’d heard.

  He said, “It’s a very complicated palace.”

  When Gus graduated from law school, they married, moved into a two-bedroom house on the other side of Montgomery from Michelle’s family’s ranch, and tried to have a child. After twelve months, they saw a doctor. Gus’s sperm count was normal, but an inoperable obstruction in Michelle’s Fallopian tubes made pregnancy impossible. The doctor was sympathetic but firm. They would never have a child.

  They left the doctor’s office and drove home in silence. Gus knew what she was thinking. She’d had her chance. There wouldn’t be another. He had never been sadder, had never loved her more. There were no words worth speaking.

  Gus gave up the idea of managing his family’s money, and eventually talked himself out of the guilt. His father would continue, and when he was too old they’d have to hire an outside professional. Gus wanted a life of law. He wanted to be a judge. His real dream was to sit on the Supreme Court, interpreting the laws of the most powerful nation on earth. He hardly dared to think that that would ever happen, but it focused his ambition.

  Gus worked seven months as a Montgomery County public defender, despised it (the clients were sullen, lying, and usually guilty), but made enough of a name for himself to win an assistant’s job in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Michelle wasn’t too sure about the job change. It made her nervous, Gus sending people to jail.

  “I don’t send them to jail, they send themselves to jail.”

  “That’s not what I mean. What if they decide to, you know, do something?”

  “Hurt me?”

  “Or us.”

  “They won’t, Michelle.”

  Anyway, it was better than if he’d been a state prosecutor, dealing with robbers and killers. People who committed federal crimes in Montgomery were mostly check forgers, bank embezzlers. Not the violent people.

  5

  Gus and Michelle’s best friends were Carl and Esther Falco. Carl was Special Agent in Charge of the DEA’s Montgomery office, and Gus often handled his cases. One day, when Gus had been in the U.S. Attorney’s office about a year, Carl called him at work.

  “You gotta see this, Gus.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Gardens.” A suburban development north of Montgomery. “Be quick.”

  “That’s not a what, that’s a where.”

  “You’ll know when you get here.”

  “Tell me now. I’m busy.”

  “Not too busy for this.”

  He hung up.

  Carl and Esther had a son named Paul who was nine and a six-year-old girl called Ali. Gus and Michelle often baby-sat for them, sometimes overnight or through weekends. The two families had dinner at each other’s homes about once a week, and sometimes they went to church together, usually at the insistence of Esther.

  Carl was from New York, a man o
f few words, and he had many of the same values as Michelle’s father. “Carl has a very simple life,” Esther told Michelle with a resigned smile. “All he wants to do is put traffickers in prison, and he works about twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week. I wish he was home more, but at least he’s doing something that counts. Anyway, that’s what I keep telling myself.”

  When Gus got to the Gardens he found six DEA agents and about a dozen men from the ABI, the Alabama Bureau of Investigation. Most of them were inside a barn, standing around a horse stall. The barn was stacked with large, half-opened cardboard cartons. Each carton contained twenty-four wrapped packages that looked like loaves of Wonder Bread. But they weren’t bread. A false floor had been lifted to expose wooden stairs down to an underground chamber. Carl took Gus’s arm. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, six feet underground, Gus stood in an area the size of his bathroom. The walls were cardboard cartons like the ones in the barn. Straight, ahead, a floodlit tunnel the agents had made by removing carton after carton reached to the far end of what appeared to be an enormous cavern. Two other tunnels extended to the walls left and right.

  “It took us half an hour,” Carl said, “to get to the far walls. If the cartons are packed in here solid, there’s one thousand three hundred of them. And if each one holds what the ones upstairs hold, there’s over sixty thousand kilos in here.”

  Sixty thousand kilos of cocaine was worth $1,200,000,000 wholesale—over ten times more than had ever before been seized in the United States. Even Gus had trouble appreciating the implications. This would have to be a major—the major—storage and transhipment point for the entire eastern half of the United States.

  But you couldn’t put cocaine in prison.

  “You get any flesh with this, Carl?”

  “Come with me.”

  The agents had three men, each handcuffed in the back of a different DEA car. One of the men was so fat his belly touched the rear of the front seat. The windows were down, and Gus could smell the sweat.