Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  Ignatio was closest, but Roldan grabbed the phone. He listened and grunted and I watched his eyes. When he smiled, I started breathing again.

  Things had gone well at the farmhouse. Nothing more than a skirmish, with no shots fired. And one of the watchers had readily turned informer for cash: Paolina was in the second-floor apartment, the back room.

  Sam and Luis would return soon.

  PAOLINA

  Day was distinguished from night by the glow behind the heavy window shade. The shade was taped to the inner sash; impossible to see even a slice of scenery on either side. The valence at the top cut off the view and the bottom slit was narrow, less than an eighth of an inch. If she could only approach and glue her eye to the slit, she could see what lay beyond.

  She worked her left hand against the rope, circling it, pulling it, stretching it. Sometimes the rope gave the illusion of loosening, but then the tension seemed the same as it had always been. It was all she could do, maneuver her left hand. The right, they untied occasionally so she could eat; when they tied it again, it was always belt tight. Since her left hand stayed bound to the chair, no one bothered to check the rope.

  If she could see outside, it wouldn’t be so bad, she decided. If she could see stars and trees and sky instead of the cracked white of four walls and the dusty gray of the ceiling. The absence of color had become an ache. Not as bad as the pain at the corners of her mouth where the gag bit her cheeks, but the constant ache of deprivation.

  Light and dark were the sole shades and rhythms of her days. Dawn brought bread on a wooden tray, a ceramic jug with thin milk, a hunk of bread, sometimes a piece of pale soft cheese. Ana brought the bread because Jorge was no longer allowed to enter her room alone, and the new man, the Voice, the limping man, was nobody’s servant.

  She’d been wrong about the pecking order. The new man was the boss, but Jorge, who’d seemed to be next in command, had sunk to the bottom of the heap. Ana had become her protector, her tigress. Paolina smiled at Ana with her eyes. Ana had saved her from Jorge’s rough abuse.

  She wouldn’t have made it on the street. She knew that now. Ana told her what happened to girls on the street, how they were gang-raped and humbled, forced to accept the strongest protector so other boys and men would be scared away. And then that “protector” would put the girl out on the street, turn out to be nothing but a pimp. Her insistence that she was different, that she could play the drums and earn her bread, had provoked only Ana’s bitter laughter.

  Music won’t save you, girl. Nothing saves you from men but age and ugliness, and even then, most men will take what they can get.

  Sometimes she thought Ana hated her, and then sometimes she thought Ana loved her. It was hard to figure; it was like there were two women fighting within the same body. The image amused her for a moment as the slow day went by in scorching heat. She wondered whether the limping man was awake.

  She’d seen him only once, but she knew him by his cadence. Sam’s occasional limp was nothing compared to his. When Sam was tired, if you beat out his stride, he had a slight unevenness to his gait. The limping man dragged his right leg, step drag, step drag. The step was almost a giant step, as though he’d gotten fed up with the slowness of his pace, as though he resented the draggy leg for slowing him down. Sometimes there was a third noise, the sharp beat of a cane. Then his step went step, tap, drag; step, tap, drag.

  Ana was afraid of him, afraid of his whistling cane. If Ana was afraid of him, Ana, who’d taken Jorge by the neck, shaken him like a cat, and thrown him across the room, beating him with her fists till he begged for mercy and crawled away, the limping man was someone to fear. He was bald as an egg, and his eyes, when he didn’t wear tinted glasses, were gray like old stones. His face was oddly tight, shiny and so pale around the ears that she wondered whether he usually wore a wig.

  The devil come back from hell, Ana said when she’d asked who he was. The devil come from hell. The devil was walking in the next room. Step drag, step drag. He paced like an animal trapped in a cage, but she was the one who was trapped, tied to a chair, waiting.

  She thought of the place as a house but there was no reason behind the assumption. She’d never viewed it from the outside, never seen another room. She’d been blindfolded when brought here, and often she was blindfolded again, although less now than when Jorge made her touch him.

  Maybe she was in hell already. It was hot enough. She couldn’t tell if they were drugging her anymore. She felt lightheaded all the time and her stomach felt strange, as though it had shut down like an overheated engine. Maybe she was hibernating, except that was something bears did in winter not something girls did in heat and captivity.

  Wriggle the wrist, turn it, bend it. Was the rope a little looser this morning? Maybe the moist hot air made it seem more pliable than it was. Maybe it shrank while she dozed fitfully in the chair. She thought about the movie, the black and white one Carlotta liked, with the guy in prison tossing a tennis ball against the wall. How lucky he was to have a tennis ball. That would be luxury. Sometimes she ran old TV shows in her head and once she found herself doing algebra problems, can you believe it, algebra which she hated, really, and envying friends at school, envying the everyday routines of their lives, the scheduled expectedness. Marta must think she was dead.

  The noise in the next room built gradually but she didn’t notice until it turned into an argument. Alternating voices: man and woman. Ana, but not Jorge. The other voice was the Voice, unmechanized now, but cold and level, even in anger. It said something about a man, that the other man had no intention of showing up. The voice was icy and unfeeling, and she thought: the limping man.

  “Bullshit.” That was Ana, brave Ana, to defy that chilly voice.

  “The honorable bandit. Bullshit is right. How can you buy that, believe it after what he—”

  “He was good to me.”

  Paolina flinched when she heard the sound, skin against skin, a slap not a punch.

  “What do I care what you think?” The cold voice again, menacing as a snake poised to strike. “If he brings the gold, fine, we’ll swap. But if he tries something, I warn you: Don’t cross me.”

  The voices continued, angry and urgent, but low. She could no longer make out words. She twisted her wrist, wrenching it against the chair. Was the rope any looser?

  She’d begged Ana to let her go, begged with her eyes, begged with her mouth when she was ungagged. Sometimes the woman sat with her in the dark and patted her hair. The first time, Paolina was sure Ana would untie her. Once, the woman sang her a Colombian lullaby, and it was so close to a tune Marta used to sing that Paolina thought she might die of sadness and regret. She’d begged Ana to bring her a knife.

  “Just leave it near me. You don’t have to cut me loose. If he asks, you can say you didn’t help me. Ana, please.”

  When I try again, when I plead for help again, I’ll call her mama. That’s what she wants. Paolina wasn’t sure how she knew it, but the woman’s need was as clear as if she’d read it in a book, seen it flashed across a movie screen.

  The light was fading. Sometimes with the fading light came faint music, too persistent to come from the radios of passing cars. In her imagination, there were strolling musicians, like the mariachi bands she’d seen in Bogota. She regretted the lost opportunity to play with the band in the square. Did the accordion boy wonder where she’d gone; did he miss the beat? She thought about the strange songs, the melodies she’d never learned, the beats she could have played, and sometimes it seemed that she heard them, either in the distance or in the depths of herself, in her bones. The blindfold was terrible, the gag disgusting, but if they wanted to torture her, earplugs would have been worse. To never hear music was unthinkable pain.

  Her arms were bound to the wooden chair, but her hands were free to tap a beat. She never got too loud for fear they might hear her, but sometimes she got carried away. When she could hear the whole band in her head, it made the time pass, th
e unbearable time, with what, what at the end of time? What if this was the end of time? What if she would wake, but not wake, every morning in this chair and sleep, but not sleep, every night in this chair? What if this was hell, this hot smelly room? What if the devil had come back from hell?

  She tapped the arm of the chair and wondered what they were waiting for, who they were waiting for. Was the “he” who might or might not show up her father? Was she there, tethered like a goat in a folk tale, tied to a tree to lure Roldan, the lion, to his death? Would her father come for her? Why should he? What was she to him? What was he to her? How can you be the child of a man you’ve never met? If she looked in his eyes would she see her own reflection? If he looked in her eyes would he see his future?

  The limping man was waiting for gold. The idea of gold made her grieve her little statue. If she’d remembered Julio, maybe everything would have turned out differently. She stopped herself quickly, because “if” was the forbidden game. There were too many ifs. If she’d done this differently, if she’d done that differently. If she hadn’t gotten into the white van…

  Her hand beat on the arm of the chair, drowning the ifs in the beat. Drowning them, drowning them, blocking the thoughts, so she had no idea how long she’d been drumming or how long she’d been conscious of the music.

  It was closer than usual. Louder, then louder still. Moving closer? An accordion, a guitar, a thumpety-thump bass. She wove a beat around the strum of the guitar, a secondary syncopated beat, and felt disappointed when they ended the song, then shocked into silence, frozen, as she recognized the whistled fragment.

  What was it? Could it—

  It sounded again, not a part of the music that had gone before, a whistled phrase, a familiar melody, a key that turned a lock in her memory. Where was it, the little Plexiglas music box Carlotta had given her as a child? Where had she put it? She tried to pucker her lips, to echo the plaintive musical phrase, and she was seven years old, playing hide-and-seek, crouched underneath the stairs. What was that music doing here, here in hell?

  She wriggled her left wrist frantically. Maybe it was looser, maybe not. She stretched her spine, wriggled and bent, attacking the ropes that bound her left arm to the chair with her teeth, working as though her life depended on it.

  CHAPTER 39

  Edgy. Too adrenaline-wracked to stand still, I kicked a pebble across the narrow street. It skittered into the alley while I filled my lungs with humid night air.

  Would she hear?

  It didn’t occur to me that she might not remember. It was whether or not she’d hear that worried me, snatching my breath so the final notes wavered eerily, like a music box winding down. I whistled the phrase again; I couldn’t risk more than three repetitions. As far as Roldan knew, Ana had spent little time in the States. The song was obscure; probably most U.S. natives couldn’t identify it, but for all I knew one of Paolina’s captors was a blues freak. It was a risk I’d decided to take. To have the best chance to escape unharmed, she needed to be prepared, to know rescue was imminent, to stay alert and keep her head down. The song comforted me. If she heard it, she’d know I was near. Hope might give her a jolt of needed energy.

  I waited a beat after the third repetition, signaling the strolling band to silence, but there was no audible response. What had I expected? That she’d burst out of the second-floor window like Superman? I sketched a farewell to the accordion player and stepped quickly around the corner. The musicians moved on, laughing and joking. They were part of the scenery here. For a price, they’d return on cue.

  I waited eight minutes, then walked briskly through the service alley to the rear door of the apartment house next door to the target building, and rapped on the door, two loud, two soft. In the tiny vestibule, I handed the waiting Felicia my straw hat. She nodded and gave a thumbs-up. I ascended the steps to the third floor.

  The code there was the same, two and two, but softer because we didn’t want the tenants of the second-floor flat calling the cops to discuss the strange noises in the vacant apartment above. Rafael opened the door, wearing a paint-splattered jumpsuit and a white painter’s hat. Roldan was there, too, also in painter’s garb, his eyes glittering like a pirate’s.

  “Sam and Luis?” I said. “They’re here? They’re ready?”

  “No.”

  “They called?”

  “No.”

  “How long can we wait?”

  “We don’t wait.”

  “What’s going on?” Too late, I made the connections: Roldan, more than eager for Sam to impersonate him; Roldan giving Sam and me our moment of privacy in the depths of the fort, while he snatched a few private words with Luis.

  “Only the slightest of variations, chica. Only what had to be done. This man of yours will not rescue my child. He is not her father. I am her father and the task is mine.”

  “Where is he? What did you do?”

  “The play is the same, but the cast of characters will be different. Luis will keep your man occupied for a little while, that is all. He will come to no harm.”

  “Rafael?” I stared at the hook-nosed man as I spoke his name. He worked for Ignacio and Ignacio supposedly worked for Sam. Luis, as well. But if the watcher at the fort could be so easily bought, why not Luis? Why not Rafael and Luis? Why not anyone?

  Rafael shrugged. So much for his allegiance.

  “Plato o plomo?” I said.

  “Si.” Rafael smiled.

  Roldan had been quiet while we’d pored over the blueprints, quiet while we’d made the rescue plans, too quiet when the leading roles had been given to Rafael and me. Rafael and I were both slim and light, climbers by build.

  “It’s still a two-man job,” I said to Roldan. “You and me.”

  I’d been concerned that Sam wouldn’t want me to go. Overprotec-tive Sam would insist that one of Ignacio’s hired guns should take the risk, or insist that he, himself, take the risk instead of me. Dammit, I should have been worried about Roldan.

  “This time I have made the choice for you. Rafael will accompany me,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “I will have him tie you up.”

  “Roldan,” I said. “Please.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Please? You surprise me again, gringa.I thought you would threaten.”

  “I’ll get down on my knees and beg, if that’s what you want. Please. This is what I came to Colombia to do. This is what I can do. Paolina will have the best chance with the two of us, with those who care for her most. Please. One of us will protect her if anything goes wrong. One to fight. One to protect. Please.”

  He hesitated, compressing his lips before loosening them to speak. “I will be the one to fight.”

  “Yes.” I would have said anything, agreed to anything. “We’re wasting time. There isn’t time to argue.”

  “This is a choice you make with your heart?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “I will not have your blood on my hands.”

  “Same here, Roldan. No blood. We go in, we get her, we leave.”

  I counted heartbeats till he gave a curt nod.

  The pinpoints of light in his eyes made me nervous. He might look like a pirate, but his years on the mountain had made him unpredictable. I was afraid he’d freeze when I needed him most, stop and mutter strange prayers or depend on mystical divination. Rafael and I had practiced together. Rafael was competent.

  “Don’t worry,” Roldan said. “I, too, have practiced. I know what must be done.”

  We went through the apartment to the back bedroom, the small room facing the alley, the duplicate of the room where Paolina was held captive. I went directly to the window and studied it with the same care I’d given its exterior earlier via binoculars. The glass was old and specked with dirt. When I lifted the iron hook that fastened the casement, both sides of the window swung inward on oiled hinges. Slowly I leaned out into the grated windowbox. The extension of the window proper jutted out from the w
all of the house, eighteen, possibly twenty inches.

  “I tested it,” Roldan said. “It will hold.”

  “The balconies might not.” Rafael and I had been chosen, among other reasons, because we were lightest.

  “Then we will fall,” Roldan said.

  I hoped he’d spare me the one about how he’d die tonight if tonight was his time to die. I patted the fanny pack I’d borrowed from Felicia. Inside, a knob of putty, a glass cutter, a strip of celluloid, a can of spray lubricant, the Beretta from the mountaintop. If Sam had been there to back me, I’d have pulled the gun on Roldan.

  The hook-and-eye was nothing; a simple strip of celluloid would disengage it. It wasn’t designed to withstand robbers; the stout wooden grating on the windowbox supposedly eliminated that hazard. The windowbox was like a cage, but the cage, while strong, was vulnerable from above.

  Roldan stripped off his jumpsuit. Underneath, he wore black; I wore black as well.

  “You’re wearing the vest?” he said.

  I nodded. Earlier I’d voted against the Kevlar; it seemed to me we had surprise or we had nothing. I was tempted to shed the vest here and now. Any weight was a killer in this heat.

  “And you?”

  “Take this and chew,” he said.

  The memory of the stamina and clarity the drug had granted me on the mountain defeated any purist scruples. If I’d thought of it earlier, I’d have requested the coca. Even the army provides drugs to keep pilots awake during long flights. Anything for an edge.

  I followed Roldan through the apartment to the front of the building where Rafael stood guard near the open door to the balcony. I inspected the lock while Roldan and Rafael synchronized watches and set cell phones to vibrate. The walkie-talkie batteries had already been checked and pronounced good.

  Eyes glittering, Roldan placed a hand on my shoulder. “Take this for luck.”

  I knew it by touch: the gold birdman.

  “Whatever happens, return it to her.”

  He passed through the balcony door as he spoke, effectively ending any conversation since the balcony was so tiny only one of us could fit at a time. The spindly ladder was sharply angled; insufficient room for good footing. The vine-covered grating made the space feel even more claustrophobic. I waited while Roldan’s bare feet disappeared up the rungs. It was possible his grim smile was his reaction to tension, possible that this man who considered revolution a fiesta was simply rejoicing in the prospect of danger, but his demeanor made me wary.