Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  He shrugged.

  “If you had to guess.”

  “The apartment is closer to the fort. That area, the part of the city called San Diego, is one where people come and go, eating in the restaurants, drinking in the bars.”

  “Either way, we’ll have to move tonight.”

  “Maybe you should stay out of it. You’re not unnoticeable, with that hair and—”

  “I’m being deliberately noticeable, Roldan, that’s why you’re talking about it. Trust me, I’ve worked undercover before. Wait till you see me as a man.”

  “I look forward to it.” He was fairly flamboyant in appearance as well, his red shirt tucked neatly into black pants, his sombrero made of dyed straw, white with a red and yellow pattern around the brim. “More though,” he went on, “I’d like to see you as a woman.”

  “A woman engaged to be married.”

  “That is not what I meant. Truly, I expected you to weep when you saw this man, to weaken somehow, to cede authority to him.”

  “After we rescue Paolina, after she’s safe, I’ll cry for a week.”

  He nodded.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Me? I would like very much…” His voice slowed and stopped.

  “What?”

  “I would like to walk the mountain with my child. I would like to show her the lost city, the nihue where I study, the snow on the mountaintop, and the mist.”

  She’d go in a flash, at the faintest hint of an invitation, I thought. To walk with her father, listen to the eerie music of the Kogi pipes. I felt a stab of jealousy.

  “But we will see,” Roldan said. “This man, Gianelli, he is fond of my daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “He has been a father to her?”

  “Often.” And in the future, I thought, he’d be more of one.

  Not that Sam and I had spent the night discussing the future. The whole situation, the strange band of hired guns, the unfamiliar accommodations, the high level of stress, were too much for sustained conversation. The comfort of Sam was that we didn’t need to talk, that I could rest my head on his shoulder and sleep in his arms.

  We were staying in the most unlikely of hideouts, a bright yellow house with green shutters and balconies dripping with flowers. Tucked between a monastery and a school, it bore no resemblance to the kind of stripped-down shelter where Mob families “go to the mattresses” in Hollywood movies. A couple of the rooms had extra cots set up next to sofas, but on the whole, it looked like a normal house, with a stocked kitchen, and framed pictures on the walls. The caretaker was a gray-haired granny who’d once been a skilled smuggler, according to Ignacio. She seemed, at any rate, unfazed by Ignacio’s personnel or “equipment,” which included revolvers, RPGs, assault rifles, Kevlar vests, cell phones, and walkie-talkies.

  I’d spoken to Gloria on one of the cells early this morning. She said Roz had so far been unable to make a connection between Mark Bracken or any high mucky-muck at BrackenCorp, and gold. She was now working on GSC. It was a nagging problem, the gold. Why risk a lucrative government contract for gold, for this particular gold, which couldn’t be sold to a museum? If the Colombian government found out and alerted the U.S. government, there’d be hell to pay.

  Sam had listened in on the call. He’d asked me not to mention his whereabouts to Gloria.

  “The woman with the glasses,” I said to Roldan, “reading the guidebook.” She was keeping close track of us, using a small mirror tucked into her guidebook. The sun had flashed off the shiner once too often.

  “Good,” Roldan said. “In three minutes, we head inside.”

  I hoped our trackers were suffering from the heat as much as I was. Felicia would be chatting with the landlady by now. Rafael and his lady friend would be well on their way to the country farm.

  The people at the farm, I thought, should admit illicit lovers whose car had broken down. The landlady should speak freely to a prospectivetenant. Whether any of Ignacio’s people thought they recognized Roldan, whether anyone decided to share the suspicion, remained a niggling worry on top of other niggling worries, like why Sam hadn’t wanted Gloria to know he was in Cartagena.

  “Can we go in now?” My water bottle was half empty. My lips were parched, but I couldn’t afford to touch another drop.

  Roldan nodded.

  Luis and Sam had entered the fort an hour before us. The skills of the Kogi, levitation and telepathy, might be closed to us, but deception was available. I sucked in a breath. The lowest level of the fort had once been used to store dynamite. Troops stationed to guard it during battle had strict orders to touch off the fuse if all was lost, to blow the castle to kingdom come rather than let it be taken by the enemy.

  We had some dynamite of our own waiting in the easternmost gallery.

  Roldan led the way, moving with the sure steps that had made quick work of steep Tayrona staircases. I followed, thinking my lungs might burst into flame. I’d cherished the idea that the interior of the fort would be cool. The difference wasn’t immediate, but three levels down, it cooled perceptibly. The air was absolutely still.

  “This way.” Roldan left the main corridor and entered a stone passage marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. We were almost sprinting. We didn’t want our upstairs watchers to miss us, to feel it necessary to mount a search.

  “Two rights, then a left,” Roldan murmured. I’d already stripped off my ruana. I draped it over my left arm. With my right hand, I removed a pre-moistened cloth from my pocket. As we ran, I scrubbed my face clean of makeup.

  Sam and Luis were waiting in the appointed place. Luis wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but his build would pass, disguised under the ruana. When I’d selected him as my double, he’d taken some ribbing. He’d also grieved the sacrifice of his mustache.

  Sam hadn’t wanted his role as Roldan’s double either, but no one else fit the part half as well.

  I traded the ruana for the phony mustache Luis had worn into the fort. I poured the remainder of the bottled water over my head, quickly brushed my wet hair into a knot, securing it with a scrunchy and bobby pins. I topped it with Luis’s hat, a shallow straw job in stripes of black and beige. Roldan and Sam traded shirts, hats, and sunglasses.

  “Check,” Sam said urgently. Each of us regarded our twin, our dop-pelganger.

  “Nice mustache,” Sam told me.

  I fluffed Luis’s wig, the most difficult item to obtain and, I thought, the diciest. I’d styled my hair in close imitation, but the shade wasn’t quite true. I wondered whether Luis had done his own makeup.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “Luis,” Roldan said. “Come, let’s leave the lovebirds together for a moment, no?” He motioned to the thin man in the rose ruana, and they walked ten, twenty steps, into a low side passage.

  “Be careful.” I put my arms around Sam and held him close. He kissed me.

  “Hey,” he murmured in my ear. “I’m always careful. What about you?”

  We clung to each other in spite of the heat. I thought I heard a noise behind me.

  I turned and called to Roldan. “Now?”

  “Take another minute, if you like,” he said.

  At the time, I thought it was kindness.

  CHAPTER 38

  When Roldan and I finally emerged from the steaming fort a full hour after the departure of our doubles, none of the three watchers we’d identified remained in place. Both our departure from San Felipe and our return to the yellow house seemed to go unremarked, and the empty streets of Cartagena, deserted in the afternoon heat, made it easy to tag a follower. Their emptiness made sense; it was too hot to breathe. As soon as we got inside, I ripped off Luis’s shirt, peeling down to a tank top, and tried to stick my head under the faucet of the sink in the corner. The phony mustache came off easily.

  Hook-nosed Rafael was seated on the couch, drinking a beer. “They took the bait, eh?”

  Roldan nodded.

  “I’m sure Luis looked fetching,” Ra
fael said.

  If the watchers had followed Sam and Luis, we’d succeeded in thinning the opposition troops. I patted my dripping face with a crumpled paper towel, and listened carefully as Rafael continued speaking. It didn’t matter whether the substitution at the fort had fooled anyone if Ignacio’s troops hadn’t found Paolina.

  Rafael was telling Roldan that he’d accompanied a woman named Maria Inez to the farm owned by Ana’s family. They’d borrowed Maria Inez’s brother’s battered truck instead of hiring a rental.

  He said, “A woman answered the door. Maybe sixty years old, little bitty bun on the top of her head. Senora Octavia, the maid called her. She let me use the phone right away, offered us a cup of coffee, had no problem with me going upstairs to use the bathroom. If she’s keeping any kidnapped kids in the house, she’s one cool ice queen.”

  “Outbuildings?” I thought Rafael sounded too jaunty; I wasn’t sure he’d done a thorough job.

  “A barn, a gardener’s shed, a storage shed near a field.”

  “You checked them all?”

  “I didn’t ask her to let me inspect the grounds with a microscope.”

  I glared at him.

  “Look, Maria Inez and I had breakdowns at neighboring farms, too. None of the neighbors mentioned any goings and comings, any low-flying planes or trucks or extra cars. It’s an isolated district; somebody would have noticed something, said something. If not to me, to Maria Inez; she looks as harmless as a little poodle dog. Ask Ignacio when he gets back. She notices things, Maria Inez.”

  That left the apartment house. I was all for going out to get a firsthand look at it, but Roldan recommended caution. He recommended waiting for Ignacio, Felicia, and Silas.

  Fine for him, I thought, watching him stare off into space.communing with his mamas, no doubt, speaking without words. It would have been a good time to take up smoking again. I didn’t want a beer. I was antsy enough that I went into the kitchen and washed dishes. Roz would have fainted if she’d seen me. Sam, too.

  I was uneasy about him, and I tried to ignore the feeling. It was hard to do it, but the fact of the matter was I hadn’t asked him to come. I needed to treat him the way I wanted him to treat me, as a pro working a job. Still, I was overly conscious of the telephone on the wall, as though it had swelled to three times its size. He or Luis should call soon, give us the all-clear. If everything went according to plan.

  A cup slipped out of my sudsy hands and rattled into the sink. It didn’t break.

  Roldan, it seemed, still had a few trusted confederates at the farm with the bumpy landing strip, the one at which our plane had landed. That was where Luis and Sam were leading the watchers from the fort, to be lured inside, taken, and questioned.

  I scrubbed plates and glassware, but the phone stayed silent. Rafael came in and started emptying the refrigerator. We should eat, he said, removing take-out containers of rice and fish, leftovers from last night’s meal. He heaped food on the just-washed plates and ferried them out to the low coffee table in the big room.

  A key turned loudly in the lock. Voices. The others had returned, and I was in the big room, shaking water off my hands, before they had time to close the door, much less sit down.

  “The apartment building? Is she there?”

  Ignacio bared his teeth. “It looks promising.”

  I felt like a spring was tightening in my gut.

  “There’s a woman there. Fairly young, with long hair. And a young man.”

  “Did you show the photos around?”

  “Didn’t want to risk it. A casual inquiry is one thing, a photo another. You show photos, you’re a cop.”

  Roldan said, “Let them eat.”

  Someone offered me a plate. Rafael punched the button on the CD player, and a Latin beat filled the air. I wondered if chewing coca leaves had killed my appetite forever.

  Felicia said, “I saw the man in the photo. He went for a quick walk, bought a pack of cigarettes. He didn’t make contact with anyone besides the cigarette vendor. I didn’t see the woman or the girl. You can’t see inside the apartment. The grating blocks the balcony.”

  I started shoveling food down because everyone else was eating, because if the man in the photo was nearby, I’d need the energy. As we ate, one plaintive song melded into another over tinny speakers.

  Ignacio picked up the thread. “There’s definitely a woman. I spoke to a deliveryman. I saw him leaving. I told him I was interested in a job like his and did he make good tips? For instance, the man in the apartment building, what did he give? He corrected me, said the woman was cheap, paid good money for good whiskey, but not much left over for the man who climbed the steps.”

  I wondered why the man who’d gone for cigarettes didn’t buy whiskey as well. Was the woman a secret drinker? “Climbed the steps” meant delivery to someone other than the ground-floor landlady. It meant there was no elevator.

  “How often does he deliver?” I asked.

  Ignacio shrugged. “I didn’t want to question him too closely. You give the impression you’re interested, he’ll want to know why. Here, everyone is suspicious.”

  Felicia said, “No one comes to clean. That’s unusual.”

  Not so unusual if you’re keeping a prisoner in your apartment, I thought. Was it just Ana, the man in the photo, and Paolina in the apartment? Were there other guards?

  “What about food?” I put my barely touched plate down.

  Felicia said, “The woman shops occasionally.”

  “How much does she buy? How often?”

  She consulted a small notebook. “Two days ago she bought a kilo of rice, a half kilo of beans, a dozen oranges, some mangoes. If I had more time, I could find a butcher shop, a fish market, get a better idea of how many people she feeds.”

  The problem was we didn’t have more time. With the swap set for San Felipe tomorrow, we had to act tonight.

  I stared at my wristwatch. Why didn’t Sam phone?

  Ignacio poured from an open bottle of Chilean wine. “On the second floor, the window in the back is shut, the curtains drawn. If I were in that room, I’d keep the window open.”

  “It’s a bedroom?”

  Felicia said, “In the apartment next door, yes.”

  She carefully described the layout of the apartment she’d viewed, diagramming the rooms on a napkin: a front room leading into a dining area, a hallway to the side of the small kitchen, two bedrooms, a single bath. “The landlady claims it’s identical to the flat next door. The floors are old and wooden, very creaky.”

  “Are there balconies in back as well as in front?”

  “No.”

  The rear windows on the second and third floors were built out some forty-five or fifty centimeters from the exterior wall and grated on the front and sides, an echo of the balconies, like deep extended windowboxes.

  Forty-five centimeters; maybe eighteen inches, I thought.

  “They’re open at the top,” she said.

  “Three apartments in the target building,” Ignacio summarized. “The girl could be in the second-floor flat with the two people in the photos. She could be in the third-floor flat with any number of guards. The ground-floor apartment is the landlady.”

  Felicia’s voice was apologetic. “She likes to talk, but not about her tenants. She said nothing about them even in response to the most innocently leading questions. She’s in her forties, maybe fifty. She’s lived there over twenty years. Raised four kids there. Her youngest still lives with her, a boy of eighteen who comes home drunk in the middle of the night. She doesn’t know what to do with him.”

  Could be a problem if he wandered in at the wrong moment. On the other hand, the second-floor tenants were probably used to a certain amount of unpredictable noise in the middle of the night. The setup was tempting. I asked Ignacio what he thought about a night raid.

  Within seconds the low table was cleared of food, Ignacio rolled out a set of blueprints, and I breathed a sigh of relief; I didn’t r
elish the idea of participating in a raid based on notes doodled on bar napkins.

  Ignacio had the plans of the old convent, before its massive square space had been separated into four apartment buildings and its courtyard turned into part of a service alley. Now two of the apartment buildings faced one street, two the next parallel street. Interior access from one building to the other no longer existed, but the buildings were joined in pairs, like row houses in Boston’s South End.

  Why didn’t Sam call? The more I drank, the more I sweated. I switched from wine to water. The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead and Rafael played a second CD.

  “Well?” Ignacio said. “What do you think?”

  Roldan said, “Anything else, any trivial detail? You didn’t, for instance, see a limping man in the neighborhood?”

  The limping man again. I shot him a glance, but he stared blankly at the wall.

  “No,” Felicia said. “But— It’s nothing, really.”

  “Please, what were you going to say?”

  “The music made me remember.” She nodded at the speakers. “I was standing in what used to be the convent courtyard. Now, it’s just garbage bins, a clothesline, weeds. You can see where the trees were cut down, where the patio used to be. There was a noise, not like someone hammering, more like someone beating a drum, except not a drum, maybe— I don’t know.”

  A girl, alone and scared, sketching a beat on the arm of a chair, on the top of a table. I felt a flicker of certainty spread into a flame. She was there.

  “This is important?” Roldan saw the look on my face.

  “She’s in a room overlooking the alley.” The flame gave off a steady glow, a welcoming hearth on a winter night glimpsed from a snowy street corner. “She can’t open the window, but she can move her hands.”

  While Ignacio beamed and Rafael lifted his glass in a silent toast, I focused on the music, closing my eyes.

  “I can tell her we’re coming to get her,” I said slowly.

  “Through telepathy, like my friends on the mountain?” Roldan’s voice held no trace of sarcasm.

  “No,” I said. “Listen.” Music, I thought; I can speak to her in music. I opened my mouth to explain and the phone rang.