Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  “He’ll see me because I’m here from Miami with news from a friend. Tell him he wants to see me. Matter of fact, he needs to see me.”

  “Just you, or the loudmouth, too?”

  “Just me. You’ll be doing him a favor.”

  He stared at me. I returned his gaze till he dropped his eyes and used a phone. Across the dance floor, someone lit a sparkler, two sparklers, a flood of them, to raucous shouts, applause, and laughter, and I thought about the nightclub fire at The Station in Rhode Island with a hundred dead after a brief shower of fireworks. This place was made entirely of wood and the patrons were standing on chairs waving sparklers at pennants that hadn’t passed any U.S. fireproofing standards. If Paolina had been there, I’d have ordered her to leave.

  Santos said, “I should come with you.”

  “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, ask for me. If I’m not back in half an hour, make a fuss.”

  “Call the police?”

  “I hope not.”

  The manager’s office was up a flight of stairs and through another turnstyle. Wood, flimsy decorations, and sparklers, all the makings of a conflagration, plus a subsequent riot when the patrons were unable to flee quickly through the crowd-restricting turnstyles.

  He was the fattest man I’d ever seen. He sat on a stool, maybe because he couldn’t fit in a chair, and his butt lapped over the edges of the seat and drooped perilously toward the ground. I hadn’t seen any heavy people in Colombia thus far, and his appearance, pasty white and ultra obese, was shocking. He was twice the size of Gloria. The only person I’d ever seen remotely that size was a massive Pacific Islander, and he’d been tan as well as mountainous. The manager wore a white tentlike shirt over shapeless tan trousers. His dark hair was caught in a greasy pony-tail and tied with a dangling red cord.

  The room that housed the fat man was constructed as a kind of crow’s nest; you could see the dance floor below through a series of low smoked windows on two walls. I watched the fat man as he watched the dancers through narrowed eyes. His smile gave me the creeps.

  The bartender said, “This is the one. Wants to see you, Gordo.”

  Gordo being Spanish for “fat,” it was possible the manager had a sense of humor, but the cultural differences were such that I wasn’t sure.

  “Search the backpack.”

  The bartender obliged, then patted me down as well, a professional job.

  “So who are you?” When the manager spoke, his chins rippled. It was the same voice that had answered the phone when I’d called, low and growly.

  “Carlotta from Miami,” I said. “From Naylor.”

  He shifted his eyes, a sufficient gesture to usher the bartender out the door.

  “Am I supposed to know who Naylor is?”

  His reaction when he’d heard the name had already told me.

  “I’m looking for someone,” I said.

  “Someone in particular?”

  “Roldan. On personal business.”

  “Roldan?”

  “Carlos Roldan Gonzales.”

  “Roldan, as in El Martillo?” His chins shook when he laughed, but his dark eyes didn’t join in the fun. “If you have personal business with that Roldan, you’ll need the archangel Gabriel as a go-between. The man is dead these two, three years.”

  “Listen, pass the word: I want to see him.”

  “It’s true what you say? He’s alive?”

  “He’ll know my name. Tell him Carlotta. Tell him the Hotel del Par-que in Bogota. Tell him quick, unless he wants everyone in South America to know he’s alive and well and back in business.”

  “You talk a lot, Senorita.”

  “Tell him I talk a lot.”

  “But I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, who would? The owner?”

  “The owner doesn’t talk to anyone.”

  “Does the owner talk to the law? What I hear, you have girls here. You have dope here. Maybe the owner would rather talk to me than talk to the police.”

  He must have pressed a button concealed under the rug because two muscled goons appeared at the door and they hadn’t been sent by any archangel.

  He said, “You’re gonna leave now.”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  “You don’t talk to the police, either.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” I said.

  I’d accounted for the unusual width of the staircase by the fact that El Gordo had to travel up and down, but the dimensions were ideal for hustling a woman downstairs locked between two bodyguards like meat in a sandwich. That’s what happened to me, the bum’s rush, down the stairs. It got a little tricky at the turnstyles, but the goons had obviously practiced. One preceded me, one followed, and lingering was not encouraged.

  Santos, the driver, was already outside, pacing under the watchful eye of the entry guards. They no longer looked like freezers to me; after the mountain man inside, they seemed undersized, underfed.

  “Jesus, you’re back. I didn’t know what to do. Time was running out. They told me to leave.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “You’re acting crazy, making trouble, a place like this.”

  Valid complaint, I thought, but how do you stir things up without acting crazy? I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life chasing the shadow of Roldan. The terrible thing about childhood is the speed at which it passes. I’d missed out on so much of Paolina’s childhood; I hadn’t been paired with her, Big Sister to Little Sister, till she was seven years old. Seven had been a good year, filled with discovery, ice cream, and field trips. Eight was shorter, nine briefer still. Fourteen had whistled past; fifteen was speeding by like an express train. I didn’t want her to be all grown up, a cool and distant adult, before I saw her again. I couldn’t face that; I wanted things to happen quickly.

  Just not as quickly as they did.

  We hadn’t traveled more than two or three miles. Our headlights pierced the darkness, weak cones of light. Santos had taken the alternate road, the scenic route, and traffic was so light that he’d flipped on his brights. His continuing silence may have been prompted by anger, but I found it soothing. I needed rest; I needed sleep.

  “There are two motorcycles behind us. A car, too, I think. A big one.” The tension in his voice snapped my lolling head up.

  “Did they follow us from the bar?”

  “I don’t know. No headlights a second ago; now, they’re on top of us.”

  I swiveled in the passenger seat, blinking my eyes against the lights. Cycles, yes, they had to be. The engines roared over the cab’s steady thrum. The twin lights veered close together, then widened.

  Reckless joyriders? The big vehicle behind them followed way too close. Chasing them? We took a curve at speed and the white crosses flashed by.

  “Are there any turnoffs?” I asked. “Crossroads?”

  “A little farther, half a mile. There’s one to—” He gave the place a name, but I couldn’t sort the sound into sense.

  “You know it?” I asked. “Well enough to evade them, hide there?”

  “I can try.”

  “Don’t let them pass us.”

  “If I bang up the cab—”

  “I’ll pay. Don’t worry about the cab; worry about losing them.”

  He bit his lip and concentrated. He knew the road and his reflexes were good. When a cyclist moved to pass, he slid over to block it.

  “Almost there,” he said. “Maybe they’re just trying to scare us.”

  The crossroad appeared so abruptly, with no cautionary sign or light, that I’d have missed it. Santos edged the wheel to the left and we were off the main road, racing downhill. There was a squeal of protesting tires. One of the cyclists, oversteering, must have spun off the road. My hands were clenched. I wished I could clamp them on the wheel, take control of the cab. Do something.

  I said, “Get the lights off. Find someplace to hide.”

 
Santos’s eyes raked the rearview mirror and opened wide. “Oh, no,” he said, “we got trouble.”

  The lights in the rearview mirror had changed. The big vehicle bearing down on us, the one that had ridden so closely on the cycle’s fenders, had a light bar on the roof I hadn’t noticed before, with blue and red rotating beacons.

  “Cops?” The colored lights picked out a single motorcycle preceding the vehicle.

  “Not traffic police. Look! Look at the car!”

  It was larger than a sedan, larger than an SUV. Not quite a truck.

  “Military?”

  “DAS. What the hell have you done?”

  DAS. My mouth had gone bone dry when we’d merely been outrac-ing a couple of cyclists down the mountainside. Now my tongue was a desert. DAS. The Colombian Secret Police.

  “They don’t want me,” I said. Why would they? They were political; I wasn’t political. I was looking for my sister.

  “I have to stop,” he said. “I have to.”

  He braked sharply.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t!”

  Too late. Santos’s foot stayed on the brake and we rolled to a halt. The remaining cyclist pulled up flush with the cab on the driver’s side. The vehicle, big and square like a Jeep, stopped no more than a foot from the rear bumper.

  The uniformed men knew my name before they asked to see my passport. The cyclist, slim and young, was clean-shaven. The other man, a passenger in the Jeep-like vehicle, was older, barrel-chested, military in bearing. He opened my door, told me to get out of the cab, and ordered Santos to be on his way. They’d escort me from here.

  “Where?” I said. “Why?”

  Teeth flashed in his swarthy face. “Senorita, simply because I say so,” he returned politely.

  “Then I’ll stay here,” I said, just as politely.

  His hand clamped my wrist, turning it as he pulled me off the seat. Bracing his left foot against the car, he yanked me out the door. I didn’t make it easy, but he outweighed me by forty pounds; I was afraid my wrist would snap if I resisted too strongly. I barely had time to grab my backpack with my left hand before I was out on the grassy verge by the side of the road.

  I yelled, “Go to the U.S. Embassy. Tell them. Give them my name—” “You will say nothing,” shouted the cyclist. “Do nothing, unless you

  wish us to impound your cab. Unless, of course, you wish to join her. It’s

  a matter of state security.”

  Santos looked shattered.

  “Drive,” the cyclist urged him in a fierce whisper. “Say nothing. Don’t even look back.”

  “I owe him money,” I yelled. “Let me pay.”

  I tossed enough to cover the rental on the seat, then plunged my hand in my pocket, and came up with the metal canister. The spray hit the big man full-blast in the eyes. He grunted, but his hand barely loosened on my wrist. I yanked and pulled, but I couldn’t twist myself free.

  Tires squealed as Santos drove off. Even if I did get loose, where would I run? More hands grabbed me as the big man’s grip weakened, and it must have taken at least two to carry me to the Jeep. I realized I was screaming, and I kept on screaming at the top of my lungs, screaming and cursing even though there didn’t seem to be anyone on the deserted stretch of road to hear.

  The Jeep was waiting with doors ajar. They hustled me into the back seat where a third man grabbed me and twisted his hand into the hair at the nape of my neck. I felt a sharp jab on my right thigh before I saw the syringe in his hand. By the time I connected the jab with the syringe, I felt woozy and sick. My foot connected with somebody’s shin, but my hands were imprisoned, and I was being shoved to the floor.

  The carpet was fascinating, it was dazzling and wavy. It had slivers of silver and crawling ants. As I stared up at the face of the man with the hairspray-reddened eyes, his nose distorted, spreading and flattening. His right eye slanted and grew, glowing with flickering jack-o’-lantern light. His eyelashes curled like spidery lace. His face was three-dimensional, then two, a human mask bigger and more savage than the golden masks in the museum, with a rough gaping hole for a mouth. I tried to wriggle, to squirm my way up to the seat, but I was drowning in thick air, flailing uselessly against monster tentacles. The windshield turned to fun-house glass, and I saw that my face was spreading and flattening, too, squishing into mud and clay, bones dissolving under fragile flesh.

  The mountains disappeared into darkness.

  PAOLINA

  She wouldn’t, she absolutely wouldn’t cry. The situation was humiliating enough; the gallina, the cheap yellow hen she’d stolen from the corner store snatched from her in turn by two ragged boys. She wouldn’t make the disaster worse with tears, wouldn’t show weakness. She’d seen what the kids did to the ones who showed weakness, the ones who stank of fear, seen how they made a small boy wade into the filthy river to escape hurled chunks of brick and concrete. She made her eyes as hard as stones and her lips like carved ice, but her mouth betrayed her, watering from the spicy smell of the meat. She licked her fingers greedily and wondered how to find food. And where. And when, most of all, when.

  She’d need to widen her territory. And that scared her because the little square was the only space that felt safe. The kids called it the square, but the adults called it Engativa. There was a small fountain in the center of the square at the junction of three stone pathways. Sparse grass surrounded the fountain, blotched with weeds and patches of muddy earth. Three spindly eucalyptus trees grew skyward, but didn’t provide much shade.

  The square was ringed by a concrete path, and then by cracked concrete roads edged with parked cars and the small busetas that chugged in and out at all hours. She liked the little buses. One had brought her here, and another could take her somewhere else, once she figured out where she wanted to go.

  She’d been lucky so far. Oh, she’d been smart and quick, but she knew that a lot of it was luck, and she didn’t want to press her luck, not here in a strange city. Although this area, this Engativa, didn’t look like the same city at all, not like the skyscraper-filled Bogota she’d visited when she was a little kid. Maybe her memory was wrong. Maybe the city had changed.

  Here in Engativa, packs of wild dogs roamed the streets. She’d taken to carrying a tree branch in case she had to fend them off or fend off the other packs, the packs of kids, mostly dirty-faced boys who played endless soccer games in the street. Didn’t they go to school, these kids? She’d considered turning up at a school because, at home, teachers were an easy touch, always loaning you money for lunch if you forgot it. If she could find a school, she could get something to eat.

  She’d stepped onto the bus as though she were in a dream. The doors had yawned and she’d moved like lightning, the way you had to move when the volleyball flashed over the net and you knew you had to give it every ounce of energy and strength you had, and maybe a little more. She’d thrown herself onto the bus the same way she’d thrown herself across the floor of the gym during the final match of the season, but no one had congratulated her on her winning effort. People on the bus had looked at her like she was crazy.

  Maybe she was. Maybe she should have stayed with Jorge and Ana. She’d have food, even if it was drugged.

  Once on the bus she’d groped her way through the crowd, stepping to the back, hiding behind the tallest men she could find. What would Ana do? What would Jorge do? They’d grab a cab and follow the bus, follow her when she got off, grab her as soon as she was alone. If they came on board, she’d scream and cry and make a scene as soon as she saw them. She wouldn’t wait till one got close enough to stick a gun in her back, no way.

  But what if they waited? What if they trailed the bus, and waited till she got off?

  She’d started to settle down after the bus made first one stop, then another, and neither Ana nor Jorge appeared. Her heart had stopped trying to beat its way out of her chest. Maybe they couldn’t find a cab; maybe they didn’t know which bus she’d boarded.

  “
^Esta occupado este asiento?”

  She was concentrating so hard on watching the doors she hadn’t even noticed the empty seat till the girl asked. Paolina shook her head— no, it was vacant—and the girl sank wearily onto the bench. She wasn’t much older than Paolina, still in her teens. She wore a worn blue ruana and her purse was strapped across her chest. Soon the man sitting next to her got off, and the girl tapped Paolina’s arm.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure.” Paolina was surprised that her voice came out steady.

  “Sit here.”

  Maybe it wasn’t as steady as all that. The girl urged her into the window seat, almost as if she could tell Paolina was hiding from someone. She seemed concerned and friendly. After a while, Paolina dropped her eyes and confessed that she wasn’t really okay; she was upset because she was running away. She’d decided not to tell the truth. She’d told a story instead, about running away from her stepmother, about a big argument and a slap, and racing out of the house and forgetting to bring money. The girl was really nice, and Paolina wound up trading her jacket for the girl’s faded blue ruana and ten thousand pesos, which sounded like a fortune. Paolina’s jacket was warmer and newer; she’d had to work hard to convince the girl she’d be doing her a favor by switching. After the girl got off the bus, Paolina felt guilty. What if Jorge and Ana followed her friend, caught her? She tried to see out the small back window, but she couldn’t tell if any car was deliberately following the bus. All the headlights looked the same, like bright round cat’s eyes.

  She’d fallen asleep then, her head lolling against the side of the bus, and the next thing she remembered was the driver, huge and hairy, yelling at her that it was the end of the line, and she’d have to get off. The end of the line was the square called Engativa. Getting off the bus had been scary, but Ana and Jorge were nowhere in sight.

  It was seriously weird, she thought, the stuff you could get used to. If kids at home ever told her she’d be willing to sleep outdoors and pick through trash bins for old clothes and half-eaten fruit, she’d have laughed, or maybe gotten angry. But there was something about this place, the colors, the Mexican-style music that blared from the corner cafe, something about fitting in. She felt strangely safe, like a book hiding on a bookshelf or a stamp hiding in a stamp collection. The weather was beautiful, the breeze as soft as puffs of cotton. Plus there was something about being on her own, living by her wits, that attracted her.