by Linda Barnes
“This we have both heard before,” Angel Navas said.
“I didn’t find the tracking device in the backpack, but I did find something else. A phone bill from the States, a phone bill with the number of Base Eighteen, a number that proves what many suspect, that the army connects to the AUC and the AUC connects to drugs. I traded that phone bill to the Minister. His cadre flew to Cartagena yesterday. I’ve been in touch with them all evening. They’re here, Angel, all around us. The lure of catching both of us, you know?”
Roldan had spent time alone with Cabrera. I hadn’t seen him dress; he could be wearing a wire. I didn’t know whether or not he was bluffing.
“You’d never give yourself up,” Angel said.
“Things exist on different planes, Angel, so the mamas taught me. You enjoyed one level of diversion—the music, the noises overhead. But you didn’t see the other level. We are the diversion, Angel. In exchange for us, Cabrera will return the gold to the Kogi.” Roldan looked straight at Paolina for the first time, and his eyes glittered. “Don’t worry, chica. No matter what, the heart of the world will be preserved.”
He threw himself at Angel as amplified voices, like the thunder of God, reverberated across the room. Before the first word registered, a burst of rifle fire erupted as Jorge shot out the window. Glass shattered. Angel raised his pistol as I dove for Paolina’s chair in a flat-out horizontal volleyball desperation dive that knocked her to the ground.
On the floor, I swiveled, using Ana’s body to shield me as I shielded Paolina. The woman’s motionless right hand partially concealed the blue steel of a gun. I grabbed for it as Angel’s pistol sounded and blood bloomed on the back of Roldan’s shirt. I thought: No, that can’t be, the Kevlar vest.
The rifleman turned and shot Roldan again as I raised Ana’s pistol and emptied the clip. He screamed. The barrel of the rifle swung toward me just as the ceiling gave way and troops poured into the room, shaking the walls, boots pounding the floorboards like jungle rain.
It was thunder; it was chaos. All the lights went out. I lay on top of Paolina, expecting to die, and all the time I kept murmuring, “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right,” over and over, even though I knew it wasn’t.
A soldier stepped on my leg, on my hip; I didn’t move. It’s all right. My fingers fumbled with unwieldy knots in the rope that bound my sister to the chair. It’s all right. My hands felt slippery; waves of panic washed over me as I envisioned them covered with Paolina’s blood. I called out her name, shouted it, screamed it, but I couldn’t hear myself and part of my brain said stun grenade. Deaf, almost blind, I willed my hands to move, to find her nose, her mouth, explore her neck. The pulse raced in her throat and I breathed. Troops had a bloody, cursing Naylor in custody. They were hauling him from the room, but no one seemed to believe me when I said his name was really Angel Navas. Maybe they were all deaf, all blind. How long before someone, bought with his millions, let him go?
It’s all right. How could it be right when Roldan was bleeding on the floor, asking whether his daughter was alive, begging for coca leaves, blood welling out of his mouth, hands clasped over the terrible wound in his chest?
Instead of Kevlar, beneath his black shirt, he wore the snow-white tunic of the Kogi, his choice, his pain. The smallest thing can make a difference. I opened my mouth to yell for a medic, closed it, clamping it shut, remembering the code of the outlaw. Better a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the U.S. His lips moved in a silent chant as I watched the light die in his glittering eyes. When I ripped the gag from Paolina’s mouth, his name was on her lips and she was sobbing. I buried my face in her tangled hair and cradled her like a baby.
CHAPTER 41
The deal was multifaceted. Roldan had given Gilberto Cabrera the connection between Miami and the army’s Base Eighteen. He’d detailed BrackenCorp’s attempt on the Kogi gold. He’d promised him Angel Navas, living proof that extradition to the U.S. was no guarantee of punishment for drug offenses. He’d tossed in Ignacio’s gang as a bonus.
He’d protected Sam Gianelli.
In exchange, the sacred gold would return to the Kogi rather than go to any local museum or foreign collector. The Kogi would be left alone, the heart of the world remain a no-fly zone. And Paolina and I would be handed over to the U.S. Embassy, cleaned up, and put on the first available flight to Miami.
In spite of the agreement, if it hadn’t been for Sam we might still be in Colombia, shuttled between diplomats forever, questioned and re-questioned, separately and together. Once Sam turned up, barriers fell. I don’t know if he bribed the members of Cabrera’s cadre wholesale or paid off the U.S. Ambassador, but we were at Rafael Nunez Airport within an hour of his arrival, moving so quickly I never got the chance to ask Senor Cabrera what he intended to do with the information Roldan had provided.
Who knows what story will appear in the newspapers? Or whether any mention will surface at all, with no Luisa Cabrera to relate the facts.
“Nothing,” as Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously wrote, “ever happens in Colombia.”
Aquí, no pasa nada.
It was a tiny airport: two runways baking in the tropical sun, a single dimly lit terminal. Passengers disembarked down metal stairways directly onto the steaming tarmac, stepping off the pavement into an oasis of palm trees and butterflies. The heat was overwhelming, heavy and damp.
Paolina wouldn’t look at me. She’d hardly spoken to me. Whenever I tried to break through her glazed silence, she took refuge in the bathroom, or feigned sleep. I read survivor’s guilt in her unresponsive eyes, guilt and the glum knowledge of fault. As a seven-year-old, she’d taken full responsibility for the bruises splayed across her cheek, assuring the police that Marta’s current boyfriend had hit her only because she’d been bad.
As soon as she saw him, she took shelter in Sam’s arms, and I told myself, Don’t push. Don’t push. She’ll talk when she’s ready. There’s time. There’s time. I closed my eyes. They felt heavy with unshed tears. First, I thought, I’ll sleep for a week; then, I’ll find the energy to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said.
We were seated in a small alcove. The plastic chairs felt sticky. A group of vendors clustered just inside the terminal doors. One sold bright silk scarves. A woman spun clouds of cotton candy on tiny wandlike sticks.
“It’s all right.” How many times had I said it? It seemed as though it was all I was capable of saying. The words had lost their meaning. It’s all right. An empty chant. A chorus to a song that no longer played.
Every now and then Paolina would peer out from the folds of Sam’s shirt, watching the cotton candy lady, fascinated by the spun sugar that seemed to materialize in the round bin before adhering to the stick. Probably the only cotton candy she’d seen before was packaged, sold in plastic bags at Fenway Park.
“Do you think they’ll send his body back to the Kogi?” I said. “Roldan would want to be buried on the mountain.” It seemed to make sense when I said it, as logical a response to Sam’s “I’m sorry” as anything else. And why would Sam be sorry? None of this was his fault. He’d been locked in one of the farmhouse out-buildings, held prisoner by Luis for hours. Nothing he could have done. Roldan had taken his choice away, stacked the deck, manipulated us all.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. Paolina’s face was hidden in his shirt again.
“From Miami? I don’t know,” I said.
“Paolina, sweetheart,” he said. “See the vendor over there? The one selling cotton candy? Please, could you buy three of them for me? Do you think you can carry three?”
Her eyes appeared and I thought: Whenever I see her eyes now I’ll think of his eyes, his faraway eyes on the mountaintop, his energy and his bravery, her father’s dying eyes. I’ll remember the golden hillside and the freezing stream, the City of Stone.
I watched Sam watch her and I thought: He’s so good with her. I swallowed and remembered how he’d doubled for Roldan in the fort, doubled
for the father she’d lost.
“We’ll watch you,” he said. “We’ll be right here. We won’t go away.”
For a moment I thought she’d speak, but then her hand snaked out and took the money and she moved. I watched her cross the floor, tentatively at first, as though she was learning to walk again. I thought, It’s all right. She’ll be all right.
“Carlotta, I can look into Roldan’s burial from here,” Sam said.
“Isn’t there room on the plane?”
“Carlotta—”
“What?” Paolina was speaking to the vendor. The woman looked at her with laughing eyes.
“I can’t go back,” he said.
I suppose people kept moving, coming in and out of the glass doors, but for a moment it seemed as though all motion stopped. There was only Sam and me, in sticky plastic chairs. I think I started to respond, began two or three unformed sentences and left each one hanging.
“Something happened,” he said. “In Las Vegas.”
The cotton candy maker was whirling the pink stuff onto a stick. At Fenway, it came in different colors, pink, blue, and turquoise. The vendors clipped the plastic bags onto long sticks and carried them through the crowd. Paolina watched solemnly, the way she used to watch me serve a volleyball when she was small.
Sam said, “I didn’t know. I found out when I called Mooney. He warned me. He shouldn’t have. He could get in trouble if anyone finds out.”
“Warned you? About what?”
“A secret indictment. Grand jury. Supposed to be a secret indictment.”
“Racketeering,” I said.
“Murder,” he said.
Murder.
“How? Why?”
“It’s complicated, cara mia. It’s not what it seems. But the thing is, I can’t go back.”
“You asked me to marry you.”
“I’m asking you again. Stay with me. Marry me. I have a place in Italy, property there. We’ll see how you like it. I know you’ll like it. It’s beautiful.”
“Paolina,” I said.
“She’ll come with us.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes. “She wants to go home.”
Those were the only words she’d spoken, besides her father’s name. She wanted to go home. It would be all right, once she got home.
“It’ll be good for her,” he said. “She’ll forget about all this.”
She’ll run away with her new father and her new mother to a new country. Run away and forget, like some make-believe girl in a fairy tale.
“Sam,” I said. “I can’t. We can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
I don’t believe in forgetting; I don’t believe in avoiding. Paolina didn’t need to forget this. She needed to remember it, to face it, to learn to live with it, to make it part of her life. Not to make it all of her life, but to fold it into the rest of her life, to accept and understand it. This is what happened when I was fifteen.
If she didn’t it would fester, become the hardened secret thing my forgotten and never forgotten child had become.
Everything I have, I thought, I have in Boston. My business, my friends. Gloria, Roz, Mooney. I thought about choices. About Josefina Parte choosing her abusive man over Paolina’s boyfriend, Diego, her nephew. About Roldan choosing the white shirt over the Kevlar vest, the way of the Kogi over the life he’d been raised to inherit.
“I can’t,” I said.
“If I go back, I’ll be stopped at Immigration,” Sam said. “I can’t,” I repeated.
Then we were standing, holding each other, but I had no memory of leaving my seat. I clung to him and was crushed in return, and then Paolina was there, and I could tell by her face that she’d heard everything. If not everything, enough. One of the cones of cotton candy fell silently to the floor.
CHAPTER 42
Mooney met us in Miami along with a DEA honcho who hustled me into a tiny room for debriefing while Mooney and Paolina went to get something to eat. I was so tired my knees wobbled and my mouth felt dry as sand, but Mr. DEA offered neither chair nor water. Tanned and glib in his three-piece suit, he pinned me with piercing brown eyes and encouraged me to think things over carefully, very carefully indeed, before revealing anything I’d learned concerning BrackenCorp’s relationship with the agency. What would be the benefit of talking to the press, giving the country a black eye, when this was the work of a few bad apples? Rogue DEA agents were being identified and disciplined as we spoke. If Mark Bracken hadn’t done his deal with GSC—
“What’s a damn merger got to do with it?”
He hemmed and hawed, and finally told: Bracken, worried he was losing control of the multi-billion-buck company he’d built from scratch, had been actively searching for a major influx of cash. The man had spent money like he was minting it; if he got booted as CEO, he was afraid he’d get caught short, be forced to sell property and investments at a loss. When the man he knew as Drew Naylor, a wealthy Colombian with DEA ties, assured him he had a billionaire buyer for pre-Columbian gold, that he knew exactly where Bracken could find it, that the profit would be astronomical—
Navas had manipulated him, played him. Just like Roldan played me at the end.
I said, “You’re telling me Bracken wasn’t involved in smuggling cocaine?”
“That’s an ongoing investigation. I can’t say he and his people are clean. I can’t say they didn’t destroy fields that had nothing to do with coca. And I can’t say Navas didn’t use his coke money to buy his way out of prison and set himself up as the kind of guy who’d have a chance to deal with the likes of Bracken, but why would Bracken go for the gold if he had cocaine money coming out his nose?”
“What will happen to him?”
“Depends how the investigation plays out. I can tell you this: He would have been a shoo-in member of the GSC board. He won’t be now. We’ll make sure of that.”
His voice as relentless as a battering ram, he kept talking. About shaky funding for the Witness Protection Program. About the reputation of the DEA. About the importance of maintaining strategic links between government and the business community.
But the goddamn policy, I said, the lack of oversight.
But your license to work as a PI, he countered.
Aquí, no pasa nada.
“Let’s go home,” Mooney said, when he and Paolina returned laden with plastic-wrapped sandwiches. “Hey, it’ll be all right.” Sure. Nothing happens here. It’ll be all right.
On the Delta flight to Boston, Paolina, squashed into the middle seat between Mooney and me, interacted briefly with the stewardess, managing to mutter a request for a Pepsi.
“Hey,” I said softly as I passed the plastic cup, rattling the ice cubes, “watch the bubbles.”
“They go right up your—” she whispered automatically.
“Nose,” I said, finishing a ritual prompted by an early encounter with carbonation. The exchange must have warmed up her vocal chords.
“It’s all my fault.” Her voice cracked as she spoke. It sounded rusty, a low and painful moan. She didn’t face me, but she didn’t turn to Mooney. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead as though staring at something only she could see, maybe imagining the crosshatched screen of a confessional. “If I hadn’t gotten into the white van. If only I hadn’t—”
“Look at me, Paolina.” I tilted her chin with my hand, so I could see into her dark, red-rimmed eyes. I spoke slowly and deliberately, as though she was hard of hearing and needed to lip-read to follow the words. “Look at me. Listen to me. This was a professional job. If you hadn’t gotten into the van, they would have snatched you off the street. They were going to get you, no matter what. If not that way, another way. If not that night, another night. You did everything you could do and more. You got away once. You escaped. You were strong and brave and none of this, not one bit, was ever your fault.”
She started crying before I finished speaking, averting her face and disappearing into Mooney’s leather jacket. I
hoped she’d heard me. I closed my eyes and thought, I’ll keep on telling her, telling her till she’s ready to hear. When I opened my eyes, she was asleep, breathing regularly, snuggled under Mooney’s left shoulder.
He winked at me and I thought, He hates to fly. He hates to fly. He works so hard. He hasn’t taken a vacation in years.
I swallowed and tried to make my lips form a smile. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have learned Ana’s name. If it weren’t for him, Sam would be in jail.
“Thanks,” I said.
“De nada.” It’s nothing. The polite Spanish reply, diminishing the service rendered. If Paolina hadn’t already been asleep on his shoulder, I’d have been tempted to rest my head there, to breathe in his familiar, reliable smell, to let the tension seep from my shoulders, to finally sleep.
The three of us flew into Logan on a night so cold the Cartagena sun might have beaten down on another planet. Paolina clutched the gold birdman in her hand.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Alan Ereira’s excellent book, The Elder Brothers, for information concerning the Kogi people and for the Kogi chant used in the prologue. Thanks also to Richard, Sam, my South American family, Sarah Smith, Kelley Ragland, and Gina Maccoby.
