Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  “Freshly made,” Roldan said, as though he could read my mind, “it is what the gods drank on Olympus. Hours old, it is diminished. Day-old juice is not worth drinking.”

  He refilled my glass and waited while I gulped it down.

  “Now,” he said, “we will talk. First, thank you for the beads. Perhaps they will bring luck; I will return them to their rightful owners. Now, why do you ask about me in Bogota? You bring me to the attention of those who should forget my name. And pardon me for going through your things, but how do you come to have this?” The little birdman appeared as though by sleight of hand. “Did the girl give it to you?”

  There. At least he’d mentioned her. “No.”

  “You believe she’s with me? Why would she come and leave this behind?”

  “I found your gift in her locker. When your goons snatched her off the street, she didn’t have a chance to come back for it.”

  His eyes searched mine. “You are right insofar as it was a gift.”

  “You told her to keep it a secret.”

  “Her mother would have sold it for what she could get.”

  “It’s real, then? It’s genuine?”

  “It is what it is.”

  “You wrote her letters. You sent other gifts.” “A gift is not a summons.”

  “I picked up her trail in Miami. She flew to Bogota. She traveled with a man and a woman. Your people.”

  “Not mine. If it is true, what you say, it is bad.”

  “Everything I’ve told you is true.”

  He lifted the birdman slowly in his right hand. The statuette’s golden wings caught the light. “Then I cannot help you. She’s been kidnapped, and she is without her guardian spirit. I cannot see her even in my dreams.”

  “Secuestrada,” the Spanish word for kidnapped, hung in the air like some foul-smelling bird of prey. It didn’t matter that I’d been thinking “kidnapped” all along, because I’d assumed a different kind of kidnapping, custodial kidnapping; kidnapping by a parent. Kidnapped, yes, but stolen by someone who cared, who may have meant well, who was terribly misguided, but generally benevolent. “Custodial” modifies the harshness of kidnapping, gentles and tames it. “Kidnapped,” by itself, alone, is a savage word, a brutal word.

  The air left my lungs like helium from a punctured balloon. If there had been a nearby wall, I’d have leaned against it, a chair and I’d have sagged into its depths. There was nothing, so I held myself upright, and some part of me stayed rational because it asked a question. Not really a question, not the way it came out: a demand.

  “You know who has her.”

  If he knew who had her, we could get her back. He had to know.

  If he showed any concern for Paolina, it was only in his eyes. His face was calm as a mask and he was studying his hands again, his long elegant fingers. The golden birdman lay on his desk. “I receive many threats. Often they are nothing but smoke and mirrors. They are nothing but a pretense, a ruse to force action. If a jaguar is motionless in the bush, a gunshot might make him jump and betray his hiding place.”

  I barely heard him because I was still focused on that one word, kidnapped. Kidnappers aren’t kidnappers for nothing. Kidnappers want something.

  “They want to make you react, to stagger about in the bush. Then you become visible,” Roldan said softly. “For years, I have been invisible.”

  “You’ve heard from them,” I said.

  “I didn’t believe them.”

  “You’re rich,” I said. “You’ll pay for her. You’ll pay whatever they want.” If my hands hadn’t been bound they’d have been at his throat again. Those guards knew what they were doing, leaving me tied.

  “I’m sorry,” he began, “but I—”

  “He won’t pay,” said a second voice. It was clear and level. And familiar.

  CHAPTER 24

  The journalist from Bogota, the small, slim woman with the caramel eyes, walked in the door, dressed so differently that, at first, it was only her voice I recognized. She wore combat fatigues and high polished boots. A sidearm was strapped to her military belt. Her hair, which had hung loose in her Bogota office, was bound at the nape of her neck.

  “I see you finally woke up,” she said.

  “I prefer the black Armani,” I said. No wonder Luisa Cabrera got meaty quotes for her guerrilla stories, in-depth features, cooperative subjects.

  “This is more comfortable,” she said. “This is who I am.”

  I didn’t really care who she was, so I turned back to Paolina’s father and asked how much the kidnappers were demanding.

  “He will not negotiate.” Unbidden, the journalist turned off the low music, and poured herself some juice, commandeering Roldan’s cup. She strolled around the hut like she owned it.

  “You give the orders around here,” I said. It wasn’t a question, it was a way of telling her to shut up, to stop interfering. As far as I was concerned, this was a matter between Paolina’s father and me. I’d have preferred to keep the decision entirely my own, but he had the money. The kidnappers wanted payment from him, not me.

  “Luisa, untie her, please.” If there was irritation in Roldan’s eyes, it was mild.

  “Why?” she demanded. “Why do you even speak to her?”

  “Don’t question me!” His soft voice stung like the lash of a whip. He didn’t move, didn’t take a step or raise a hand, but suddenly he seemed like a dangerous man.

  For a brief moment, I thought she’d refuse. Then she knelt to untie my legs, and I considered bringing my bound hands high, smashing her on the back of the neck, making a grab for her pistol. I might get the drop on Roldan, but the risk of alarming the guard at the door was too great.

  “Her hands, as well,” Roldan prompted.

  She used a six-inch hunting knife to slice the heavy rope, glaring as though she’d prefer to use it to cut my throat. In the room: Cabrera’s knife and gun. Outside the room: an assault rifle. The most potent weapons Roldan seemed to carry were voice, charm, and charisma. I watched as he put them to work on the journalist.

  “Luisa, I’m sorry to speak harshly to you, but I’m troubled.” He closed his eyes and his hand reached for the stone around his neck. “You move a rock, a tree dies,” he said. “You kill a bird, a snake lives. There are far-flung consequences and I cannot see the end from the beginning.”

  “You can tell me what the kidnappers want,” I said impatiently.

  He exhaled slowly, opened his eyes, and turned his spotlight gaze on me. “Miss Carlyle, my friend, Luisa, believes you are a grave danger to me.”

  “Oh?” Cabrera said with a short laugh. “So it’s just my belief? You want her to talk to TV reporters and show your photo to the police? I tried to stall her till I could make contact in the regular way, but she moved too quickly.”

  “You hoped I’d get arrested at the museum,” I said.

  “It would have been convenient. No one would have believed anything an accused smuggler said. But it was only a possibility. What I hoped was you’d go there and stay put till I could send someone to follow you.” She turned her attention to Roldan. “I had to get her out of Bogota. The Zona Rosa was one thing; anyone might go there to ask about drugs. But she knew about Eighteen. Next, she’d have asked for you at Base Eighteen. Should I have waited for her to do that?”

  Roldan rounded on me. “How do you know about this place?”

  “I don’t know about it. I found the number on a phone bill.”

  “Whose phone bill?”

  “A man named Naylor. Look, I’m not here to harm anyone,” I snapped. “I need to know who’s got Paolina. If I don’t know, I can’t decide what to do next.”

  “The decision is not yours.” Cabrera shot me a hard look.

  “It’s not yours, either.”

  Roldan held up his hands, palms outward. “Please,” was all he said, but his glance silenced both of us. He turned to me and focused on my eyes as though there were no one else in the hut, no one else
in the world. “I will tell you what I can. Five, no six days ago, a message came up the mountain by the usual route and made its way to me.”

  “May I see it?”

  He reached into a bag lying by his side. The bag was made of cloth similar to his white shirt and trousers, but coarser and patterned, and filled with a quantity of small green leaves. A few scattered to the ground as he dug to the bottom and retrieved a folded slip of paper.

  “I thought you destroyed it,” Cabrera said.

  The words were typed. “We have your daughter. We will deal for her. We will call. Three rings. Five o’clock.” Each sentence was typed as a separate line. It made the note look strange and solemn, like poetry.

  “What did they say when they called?” I asked. “What’s the price?”

  “He will not deal with them,” the journalist said. “Tell her, Roldan. Nothing sways you, certainly not a child you don’t even know. If you won’t use this to make a difference in the history of your country, a difference you once fought for, a difference your friends died for—”

  “Enough, Luisa.”

  “Wait a fucking minute,” I said. “Are we talking about something other than Paolina here, something other than getting her back from whoever the hell took her?”

  Cabrera ignored me. “El Martillo,” she said, “it isn’t too late. Together we can still make it happen. We need you to lead us; we need the magic of your touch. When the story of Colombia is written, yours will be one of the great names.”

  “I don’t care about that,” he said quietly.

  “And I don’t give a damn about it,” I said. “Paolina’s in danger for no other reason than that she’s your daughter. You can save her, and that’s the only thing that’s important here.”

  “You have no idea what’s important,” Cabrera said.

  Roldan said, “Luisa, you must cool your temper. She doesn’t know what you know. And Luisa, you must not forget that you do not know what I know.”

  For a second or two, Cabrera looked like she wanted to use the knife on him, but she took a deep breath and gulped back any reproach.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “I must go to them. Perhaps it is time for their counsel.”

  “It’s time to act,” Cabrera said. “Make her tell what she knows. Make her—”

  Roldan interrupted her. “There was something that arrived with the note,” he said, fixing his eyes on mine.

  I tried to swallow. I know what Colombian kidnappers send with notes. Sometimes a finger, sometimes an ear.

  “No,” he said, again reading my mind. “Nothing like that. They sent a Kyocera Iridium phone, a satellite phone. That evening, I heard from them, and they asked for something I could not possibly give them, something I have no right to give, in return for the safety of the girl.”

  “Your daughter.”

  “My daughter,” he conceded. “I made a counterproposal, an offer I believed they would find acceptable, a fair trade. They asked for time to consider, and I granted it. I recharged the battery. We are not without resources here. I have kept the battery charged.”

  “Yes?”

  “They have not called again. It has been three days, three nights. They haven’t called. I fear for the girl.” He met my eyes. “My daughter.” “But you know who has her,” I said.

  Cabrera made a noise in her throat. “Here, many victims have no idea who their captors are. It’s not so simple here.”

  “Truly,” Roldan said, “I did not know.”

  Did not. Past tense. He didn’t know then, but now he knew.

  “Something has happened?” Cabrera picked up on it, too.

  Roldan stood motionless, with a thousand-yard stare on his face. I followed his unseeing gaze and wondered what he saw that I was missing.

  “You went through my backpack,” I said. “You saw the photos, the man and the woman with Paolina. You recognized them.”

  It took him some time to come back from wherever he’d been in his head. “I am not certain. Not at all certain. There is a familiarity, a similarity.”

  “It’s a start,” I said. “Does the sat phone work? Maybe it’s broken. Maybe they’ll still call. If not, we’ll go with the photos. We’ll go after them.”

  “He won’t,” Cabrera said sharply. “There are more important things for—”

  “I think I must show her,” he said to the journalist.

  “Show me what?” I said.

  He’d turned into a statue again. The more distant and still he became, the more it seemed to annoy the fiery Cabrera. There was some power struggle going on between them, and while I didn’t relish getting caught in the middle, I thought I might be able to use it to my advantage.

  “If you’re planning to show me the American soldier you captured, I’ve already seen him,” I said.

  Roldan’s eyes opened wider and I realized that he hardly ever blinked. It made his gaze both hypnotic and otherworldly. “That was very careless of my men,” he said softly, staring intently at Cabrera.

  “No,” she said. “I told them to put the two together.”

  “That may not have been wise, Luisa.”

  “You’ll have to kill her,” she said. “You’ll have to kill her now.” There was the unmistakable ring of triumph in her voice.

  CHAPTER 25

  Back in the prison hut, two feet from the guarded door, I sucked air greedily into my lungs. El Martillo had won the round. Cabrera’s demand that I be marched into the jungle and shot by an impromptu firing squad had withered under his stern disapproval, but I was under no illusion that the sentence had been stayed indefinitely. Next time, the journalist might prevail.

  I exhaled. Blood pulsed in my veins. I was alive and unbound, but my knees had abruptly turned to rubber, and I found myself huddled on the dirt floor. My head spun like some castoff satellite, rotating out of control, and the air seemed heavy and difficult to breathe. In bustling Cambridge, in urban Boston, in my chosen surroundings, I feel helpless so infrequently it took time to diagnose the condition.

  It wasn’t simply Cabrera’s casual brutality or Roldan’s lofty indifference. It was only partially the language. I could understand and speak, but it wasn’t my tongue. It took effort, concentration; I had to be missing nuances. The surroundings threw me. I’m a city girl; the urban jungle is where I feel at home. This vast true jungle, the endless green, the heavy vines, disoriented me. Not a single tree was familiar. No oaks, no maples, no aspens or firs. Some of the jungle trees had roots so shallow they poked out of the earth like snakes. Even the ground tilted, and the alien smells keyed no memories.

  Since the first moment I’d realized Paolina was gone, I’d kept a tight rein on my imagination. She’s with her father, I’d told myself. No matter why, the fact was he wanted her. He wouldn’t harm her, not intentionally. Now, even when I shut my eyes, I saw her abandoned and alone, or worse, with men who’d harm her irreparably, who’d do brutal collateral damage, irrevocable damage.

  I’d kept a tight rein on my emotions, too. Now a hammering pulse thudded in my ears. I could have wept. I could have gnashed my teeth, and rent my garments, but I knew it wouldn’t help. All my tears and lamentations wouldn’t buy Paolina a second’s freedom, so I sucked in more air and straightened my spine and tried to recall every word that had passed between Cabrera and Roldan, each smoldering glance, each change of expression. They hadn’t shot me. The decision had been postponed until Roldan could show me something. What?

  Roldan had been furious that I’d been placed in the same hut as the wounded soldier, but now I’d been returned to the same damned hut. Why? I stood and walked to the center of the circular structure. The wounded man’s hammock hung heavy with his weight. His chest rose and fell softly. They hadn’t moved him; he hadn’t died. He was deeply asleep, probably drugged. I paced quietly. Why had I been brought back to this hut?

  Roldan’s enemies had captured Paolina; they were holding her for some sort of ransom. Not money. If Roldan had anything, he
had money. What had they demanded that he wouldn’t give? And what business was it of Cabrera’s? Slow, burning anger began to replace the helplessness and I welcomed it.

  What was the relationship between the two of them? He was old enough to be her father, but that didn’t rule out sexual attraction. There were undercurrents of strong emotion. She was an attractive woman and the charisma came off Roldan in waves. Was it the courtly manners or the thinly shielded brutality? The distant, penetrating gaze? I’d rarely met a man who seemed so completely alive in the present moment. When his eyes met mine, he saw me, not his preconception of me, not an American, not a red-haired woman. Me.

  Why the hell had I been brought here to wait for Roldan, here of all places, here with the captured American? How much time did I have before Roldan decided to show me whatever it was I needed to see before I died?

  I returned to the wounded man’s hammock and listened to his ragged breathing. Asleep? Unconscious? Feigning unconsciousness? Aside from the rude splint on his leg and the spotless bandage on his arm, he didn’t seem to have other serious wounds. There were abrasions on his arms and legs, as if he’d fallen into some kind of thornbush. No bullet wounds.

  I patted his cheek. “Come on. Wake up.”

  He snorted, and half-opened his eyes, slate gray and wide, the pupils dilated.

  “What’s your name?”

  No answer.

  Rank? Serial number? What the hell else was I supposed to ask? When a teammate knocked herself out on the volleyball court, I knew enough to ask the big four: What’s your name, where are you, what were you doing, what time is it? I ran through the litany, and got no response.

  Were U.S. Army troops involved in spraying coca fields? Coca growth had increased in Colombia in recent years as U.S.-sponsored eradication efforts in Bolivia and Peru paid off. As fields disappeared in neighboring countries, enterprising Colombians, formerly middlemen and merchandisers, concentrated on cultivating their own cash crops.