by Pam Withers
“Raul, if she’s in there too, it means that tattooed guy you saw at the Torotoro doctor’s clinic really did kidnap her—captured her to take her to Vargas.”
Raul says nothing.
“Raul? Do you hear me? We have to rescue her.”
“Andreo, if she’s kidnapped, we go to the police. We—do—not—rescue—her. Is that clear?”
I start to jump up, but he pulls me down so fast I stub my chin on a rock.
“Police?” I question. “This guy Vargas might take her off somewhere before we can get police up there! But we—you and I—can sneak up there now, Raul, and break her out somehow!”
Raul won’t meet my eyes, which makes me want to punch him between his.
“Okay, Andreo, here’s my suggestion. We phone Detective Colque. It’s not far into town. He may not have left Torotoro yet, and he’ll know what to do.”
Raul waits. I want to argue, but a glance toward town makes me realize it won’t take long to get to a phone. If Detective Colque doesn’t answer or has left town, I’ll go back up the hill myself if I have to.
“Okay, let’s go,” I agree, lowering the binoculars. “Mr. Vargas has gone back inside.”
We pick up our bikes and pump to town. We slip into the Internet café and fish coins from our pockets for the call. Raul stands in the doorway staring toward the hill and drumming his fingers annoyingly as I press my ear to the receiver.
“Hola?” a voice crackles over the phone line.
“Detective Colque! Phew!”
“Andreo? I thought you’d be done with caving and on the road to Cochabamba by now. What’s going on?”
I lower my voice to a husky whisper and tell him how Raul and I defected because we wanted to talk to my birth mother once again, and how my parents think we’re biking to Cochabamba ahead of them. I tell him of sighting Vargas, lowering my excited voice when I see Raul signaling me to keep it down. Is he imagining that Vargas has spies in the Internet café?
There’s a moment of silence as Detective Colque takes this in, then the usual enthusiasm in his voice. “This is a major scoop, Andreo. I told you he skipped bail, didn’t I? There’s a search on for him. He’d never hurt Vanessa, Andreo—for sure he wouldn’t—but if he saw her talking to you the other morning, he might have wanted to question her.
“In any case, if you really have located Hugo Vargas, we have to notify the police. It’ll be a feather in my cap—and yours—if they get him as a result. Okay, this is really lucky timing because I’m still in Torotoro; I was just about to head out of town. You’re at the Internet café? I’ll swing by in five minutes; you can load your bikes into the back of my truck. Does that work for you?”
“Perfect!” I slam down the phone and grin at my accomplice. Good as his word, the detective swings by in a shiny red 4×4 within five minutes. We head to the lookout point. Since Detective Colque has a pair of binoculars too, we share the two among the three of us.
“Jeep’s gone,” Raul cries.
I zoom in and feel my heart fall from my throat to my stomach. “Detective, can we go up there? The police are taking too long.”
“I didn’t phone the police,” the detective says. “I felt I needed to make positive visual identification before I did that.”
“Then we’ve let him escape!” I say, distressed.
“But maybe Vanessa is still there?” Raul suggests.
“I’m willing to drive up to see,” the detective says cautiously, “if you two promise to stay in the truck when we get there.”
We agree, slide down in our seats and tolerate the lurching ride up the winding road. Behind us, a trail of dust rises into the noon sky. Not far from the shack, the road ends. He pulls to a stop. I stare. It’s a hut with a corrugated tin roof, iron bars over the only window, a deadbolt pulled into place on the outside of the door and no yard or fence—just gravel and a nearby outhouse.
“Someone would actually live here?” I say.
The detective shrugs. “Probably a miner’s supply hut back in its day.”
We sit and observe it for a moment. There’s no sound up here but the whistle of a low wind. I jump at the squeak of the detective pulling on the hand brake.
“Stay here, as we agreed,” Detective Colque says and opens his door cautiously.
My body tenses as he walks around the outside of the shack, pausing at the dirty window to cup his hands and peer in. After he does two full circles around the building, we watch him pull open the dead bolt of the hut’s door and look inside.
A moment later, he steps outside again, closes the door, pushes the dead bolt back and strolls to the truck.
“Nothing and no one.”
Before I can answer, Raul opens his door and leaps out. He runs to the shack and wrenches the front door open, prompting me to jump out and run after him. Detective Colque is on my heels.
Inside, the shack doesn’t look like something anyone would live in. An empty, overturned dynamite box and bench for table and chairs, a threadbare quilt on a rusty iron bed with a thin mattress, and no running water: just a large plastic jug perched on a linoleum counter scarred with cigarette burns beside a dented aluminum sink. Except for three teacups in the sink, a few tins of food in one cupboard and Coca-Cola bottles filled with the local brew chicha, there’s little sign anyone has been here. It looks like an abandoned shack someone has hung out in briefly. It smells of cigar smoke, mold—and rose perfume, unless I’m imagining that. Anyway, she’s not here, not a captive locked inside as I’d feared.
“You’re sure this is the right place?” Detective Colque asks, scratching his chin.
“Of course we are,” Raul says.
“But how sure are you it was Hugo Vargas?”
“I just think it was,” my friend says, sounding less confident.
“A blue Jeep, you said. Do you have the license plate number?”
Raul shakes his head and I, too, want to kick myself for not thinking of that.
“Well, we seem to have missed whoever it was, but the police—”
“Whom you never called …,” Raul interrupts.
I throw him a look of surprise for his rudeness, but Detective Colque doesn’t seem to notice.
“I will tell the police to keep an eye on it, and around town, just in case. We’ll catch him. He must know his hours as a free man are numbered.” The detective sounds as bummed out as I feel. “So what now?” he asks. “Want a lift back to Cochabamba with your bikes?” Neither Raul nor I reply. I have no idea what I want. But facing my parents at the finish line isn’t top of my list.
“Thanks, detective, but we want to bike,” says Raul. “It’s what we signed on for, even if we have let our team get ahead of us. Anyway, I’m for getting some food before we get back on the road. What about you, Andreo?”
“Starving.”
“Good lads. Well, I’ll drop you in town, then, and I’ll see you back in the big city in two days. I guess you won’t have e-mail access, but in an emergency, definitely phone again. Enjoy your ride.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Back in town, we use some of our emergency money to buy food and water before hopping on our bikes and heading out. I’m in some kind of mental fog, following Raul because he seems to be decisive about where we’re going. I tell myself that if Vanessa was ever in that cabin, it was only briefly, and Raul and I may have been completely wrong about seeing Hugo Vargas.
Anyway, what right did we have to spy on my birth mother or try to see her again? I can e-mail her through Detective Colque; maybe she’ll eventually soften and tell us who Raul’s parents are, if she even knows. Maybe it is time to head back to Cochabamba and face my parents.
My thoughts are interrupted when Raul pulls off the main road.
“I want to go to the Matrimonial Cave,” he states.
“You and Maria getting married?”
“Ha-ha.”
“It’ll take too long, Raul. We need to get to Cochabamba.”
“It
’s only a few minutes away, Andreo. You really have to see it. Trust me. Please?”
I frown, then shrug. “Okay, if it’s that special. But only for a few minutes.”
“I promise.”
At the Matrimonial Cave, a boy half-dozing in the shade of a bush looks surprised to see us pull up on bikes. Judging from the size of the parking lot, he is more used to tour buses disgorging fifty customers at a time. I don’t like the way his eyes latch on to our sturdy mountain bikes. He rises slowly, yawns and shakes a can of coins at us. We pay the fee he asks and wander into the cave, wheeling our bikes with us. Instantly, the coolness and grandeur of the cathedral-like space mesmerize me. We’re the only visitors, and I wander around the echoey expanse in a happy trance, staring up at the vaulted ceilings. Among the spectacular rock formations are some that look like choir stalls, maybe even angels. A high-up section of stalactites definitely resembles a pipe organ.
Raul, who has seen it all before, heads directly to a moist wall in the back of the cave, where a stack of folding chairs looks ready for duty should a bride, groom and congregation arrive.
“Where are you going?” the guard boy asks as Raul stops in front of a locked cupboard beside the chairs.
“I want to see the registry of everyone married in this cave,” Raul says in Spanish. “Is it in this cupboard?”
“Raul, what are you up to?” I demand.
“It’s not for the public,” the boy barks.
Raul pulls out a wad of our emergency money. The boy’s eyes grow large as Raul extends a stack of bills and asks, “Enough?”
“Raul—”
“I’ll explain in a minute,” he says casually.
The boy grabs the money from Raul’s outstretched palm. He fishes a key from a cord around his neck, opens the cupboard and produces a large book filled with yellowed, mildewed, smudged pages.
Raul turns the pages rapidly, his finger running down columns of dates. “You have other, older books?” he asks eventually.
The boy’s eyes narrow, but he drags out a stack from the bottom of the cupboard. Raul digs through until he finds the one he wants, then flips through it methodically. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he hands it to me, his finger pressed to a particular line.
“Vanessa Gutierrez and Hugo Vargas,” I read in disbelief. The date recorded is roughly a year after I was born. The witness is Dr. Zacharie Akumuntu.
A roaring fills my ears. I slam the book shut, which sends dust flying up my nostrils, and shove it back in the arms of the boy.
“You pulled me up here because you suspected this?” I accuse my friend.
“Sorry, Andreo,” he replies softly. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come if I told you what I was up to.”
“Damn right I wouldn’t have!” Shaking with rage and confusion, I flee from the cave, from Raul, from everything to do with the Matrimonial Cave, dragging my bike with me. I swing my leg over the crossbar, grip my handlebars and take off, almost mowing down a newly arrived flood of tourists coming off a bus in the parking lot.
Raul is shouting, but I can outride him. I can outride my thoughts, my family—birth and adoptive—and myself.
I don’t know how far I ride before a rock punctures my tire. After dismounting, I kick my bike, cursing, then sink to the dusty, empty road and feel hot salty tears spill down my cheeks. I curl into a ball and let myself sob as if I were a little kid. There’s no one anywhere near to see or hear me. Only dry, desolate, rocky terrain.
All sense of time disappears under the graying early-afternoon sky. When I’m finally spent, my face a mess of sodden dust, I dig in my pack for some food. Beef jerky goes down with a swill of bottled water. Staring at a swarming anthill near my feet, wondering where I am, I tug out the map, smooth it on the ground and look at it blankly. Some navigator. I’m lost. Inside and out.
“We’re due west of the Matrimonial Cave,” says a voice behind me. “And just northwest of town.”
I take a deep breath and refuse to turn around. He drops down beside me.
“Sorry, mon.”
My teeth grit together. How dare he follow me!
“Doesn’t mean they’re still married. Doesn’t mean anything,” I say defiantly.
He shakes his head. “Time to get real, Andreo.”
“They could’ve divorced years ago. She wouldn’t stay with a jerk like that. Maybe they hadn’t seen each other in ages and he brought her up to that shack to question her after she met with me, just like Colque said. Maybe it’s all my fault for meeting with her.”
“You’re still clinging to the fairy-tale birth-mother thing.”
I pick up a nearby stone and aim it at him. He doesn’t flinch.
“You just had to haul me there, didn’t you? You couldn’t stand for me to be happy when you never got to meet yours.”
“Oh, so now it’s all my fault.”
“For all I know, you scribbled that marriage entry into the stupid book when you and Maria were running around the cave yesterday.”
“Come off it, mon. You’re cracking up.” Raul rises, his face drained of sympathy. “It’s time for us to head back to Cochabamba, Andreo. You know the truth now, and your parents will be worrying soon.”
“My parents.” I spit into the dirt. “They’re not my parents. David’s not my brother. They’re a lousy family.”
“You don’t know anything about lousy families.” His tone holds a warning, but I don’t care.
“We could stay here together, Raul. You said yourself that your family sucks and there’s no point going home.”
“Yeah, and I didn’t mean it, just like you don’t mean what you’re saying now. Got some water, by the way? My hydration pack punctured when I fell off my bike following you here.”
I let him drink from mine. “You could stay here with Maria. We could stay here together. This is Bolivia, our real home.”
“Andreo, pull yourself together and let’s get biking. We have to get to Cochabamba before your parents panic and call the police on us.”
“You go!” I shout. “Get out of my face! It’s none of your business what I do!”
Raul hesitates, then shakes his head, mounts his bike and rides away, heading north. His dust trail swirls and rises to meet blackening clouds. I look down and kick the anthill till its residents swarm in confusion, their home a mess.
I wipe my sleeve across my face and force myself to replay my meeting with Vanessa. I try to cling to the memory of the rose perfume, silken hair and long embrace. I hear her soft voice: I’ve waited for this a very long time and Call me Mom.
Then I flash back to something Maria’s grandmother said: She was a quiet girl, always did what she was told.
Had Vargas told her what to say to me? I remember the way Vanessa urged me to tell her about myself. What did I learn about her? Almost nothing. She works as a secretary for an international firm.…
“No way,” I say aloud, crushing a light brown, medium-size ant that has crawled up my shin and bitten me. The international firm she works for is Vargas’s black-market business. So Raul had figured out that that was a possibility but was right that I’d never have accepted it without seeing the documents in the Matrimonial Cave.
Yes, I’m married. Very happily. Not to your father. Her glowing face as she said that looms in my mind; the memory stings like my ant bite. Married happily to a scumbag. A criminal on the run. To the person who took her in when she had no one and helped sell her baby. Me.
After Vanessa had you, Ardillita had said, she stayed on to help the housemother. Nowhere else to go but the streets, I suppose. She was good to me.
I picture my first glimpse of Vanessa in the clinic: her high heels, diamond earrings and elegant sweater. Her nervous smile and the way she became distant when I asked about Raul’s parents. Of course she knows who Raul’s birth parents are! She helped arrange the adoption, profited from it. And from the other 598 babies.
I crush another ant. I stand and stomp on as many as I can,
destroying the last bits of their hill in the process.
Why did she agree to meet with me at all? The answer comes all too quickly: Ardillita spotted her in town and tipped me off. I told Detective Colque, and he called Dr. A to try and locate her for me.
I step away from the anthill. Dr. A has probably been referring girls in trouble to Vargas all along, including Vanessa when she was seventeen. Of course, Vargas could pay lots of different village doctors for referrals. And hadn’t my outburst to his receptionist brought Dr. A away from his lunch break pretty damn fast? He knew who I was instantly.
So Dr. A notified Vargas, whom he knew to be hiding out in Torotoro, in the shack on the hill. Vargas didn’t want Colque to make the connection between himself and Vanessa, and didn’t want Raul and me to figure out where Vanessa was staying. So Vargas persuaded Vanessa—his wife Vanessa, I think bitterly—to meet me at the clinic and give me what I wanted, hoping I’d be satisfied and carry on with the adventure race and get out of the country, out of his hair. And hoping that would get Colque out of Torotoro and back to Cochabamba too, to cool his chances of finding out where Vargas really was.
I ease my aching head into my hands. All my life I’ve dreamed about my birth mother. I created a fantasy birth mother; Raul is right about that. But can I dismantle her in a day?
Her words to me may or may not have been genuine, but in the sixteen years since she had me, she has helped Vargas sell babies for profit. She married him by choice; she opted to become his criminal accomplice. Between them, they’ve messed up the lives of 600 innocent babies and taken advantage of tons of teenage girls and trusting couples. I owe her nothing; all I can do to counteract the ugliness of the truth I’ve just uncovered is to help shut down this ring now. Yes—I stand up and step away from the homeless ants already desperately running in circles to build anew—that is my new mission before I leave Bolivia.
A cold drop of rain plops on my head. I look up. The storm clouds are ready to spill. Soon I’m getting splattered big-time. Time to move, but where am I going? To town to notify Detective Colque, I decide. Can I turn in my own birth mother along with Vargas? If she is innocent, I reason, the police will sort it out. If she’s not, I will have done the right thing.
