by Jerry
“Less than this.”
“Twenty euros? I thought you serious.”
Padovani smiled.
VI
Make virtue of necessity. That was his real political ideology. When he had to be a revolutionary, he was the most fervent. When he had to become a big-time rancher, he was the most zealous about his land. And when the wheel of fate turned again and the time came when he might lose it all, he got thin on pure hunger until he recovered the wiry body of his youth, so he fooled FarmaCom about his age.
It was the only way to get out of the country. The new government’s police were looking to lock him up the way they had Sink-Tooth. His old comrade—and later business partner—had to be waiting for him impatiently, the same as the few members of the organization that had freed themselves from jail. Padovani hadn’t turned on him, but he knew that Sink-Tooth didn’t trust his friends’ good luck, so he had more and more enemies, real or imaginary. It wouldn’t be over until enough people had been killed off. Better to disappear than be in that lottery.
The Indian signed the contract for the exchange with a fake identity—he’d bought it from the real George Bartolomé for more money than the one thousand five hundred euros that FarmaCom offered for exchanges—and he let an implant from the IPv12 network be implanted in his head, and thus had escaped both jail and Sink-Tooth at the same time. He wasn’t going to wait until they gave him a vacating pill to go back. They could keep his dick—if it was still good for anything—and his butt, and they could fill them with venereal diseases if they wanted. The Indian Padovani did not accept returns.
Faithful to his philosophy, by helping the fat man that was a girl, Padovani would get an advantage for himself. After including Leidi, the escape plan seemed much more solid:
The black man Vladimiro pretended to go crazy in the shower and began to hit himself on the walls. The guards that protected Leidi got scared. They tried to corner Vladimiro, and when they did, they got careless. Ringo and the Indian attacked them from behind. They didn’t have to waste any ammo from the tranquilizing guns to leave them unconscious. A few punches were enough. Then, they dragged them to the dressing room.
Leidi had gotten there first and was already dressed. She always hurried to cover herself. Ringo also seemed to be anxious to get the uniform off of one of the guards. Padovani couldn’t help watching, worried that he’d ruin everything by being nervous. Moving more calmly than his partner, he disguised himself faster. The clothing was a little big, but he could hide that.
After dressing, Padovani shook the hand of every one of his companions in the shower one by one. Then he embraced the black Vladimiro, who was still on edge and didn’t stop laughing and saying, “Now they can fine me all they want.”
The Indian had tried to convince several companions to collaborate with his plan, appealing to the motives that—he thought—would be most convincing to each one. Until, finally, Vladimiro offered to volunteer to do his bit in “the fight against imperialism.” The black man wouldn’t hear a word about escaping with them, although Padovani had offered the opportunity to him sincerely because he thought he would make a good ally. But the only thing Vladimiro really wanted was to return to his body as soon as he could and never leave it again.
“Good luck.”
That had been his goodbye. Padovani sat on the wooden bench in the dressing room next to Leidi. While Ringo fought with the boots, Vladimiro and the rest formed a tight formation to hold up the unconscious guards in the center, and shouting and joking, they left the dressing room in the direction of the cells.
Ringo finished dressing himself and fell on the bench, puffing. Then he smiled at Leidi and winked. He seemed more calm. They waited while the voices of the group became fainter. Padovani, whose true body barely sweated beneath the scorching tropical sun, had to dry the sweat from his hands.
“Time to go.”
They walked on either side of Leidi as far as the stairs as if they were accompanying her back to her cell. Together they went up to the second floor and entered the director’s office without knocking. The Indian had planned to be the first to speak, but Ringo acted first. Leaning over the desk, he took out the gun and held the barrel against the woman’s cheek.
“Do what we say or I’ll kill you.”
Not the least tremble in his voice or the smallest stammer. Padovani was impressed. The director, too, but for other reasons. Her eyes looked like they would fall out and roll away. She moved her hand a little toward the desk, and Ringo pushed the pistol harder against her face. She stopped moving, paralyzed.
“Good. Now I suppose you’re going to understand, suddenly, that Leidi would be much better off in the block for women.”
The director looked toward Leidi, whose fat body was leaning on the door to the office as if she wanted to keep someone from entering.
“Get everything ready so we can move her there,” Padovani added. “Don’t try anything. You’ll be coming with us.”
Ringo moved the gun back a little. The director took a deep breath.
“This is ridiculous. No . . .” she began to say.
The pistol hit her jaw hard enough to chop halfway through a tree. The woman’s head fell to one side, and Padovani felt a punch in his stomach. That had been a gesture of sheer desperation by Ringo. If the director was unconscious or worse, she couldn’t do anything for them.
There was a bottle of water on the desk. He splashed it on her, and she murmured something incomprehensible. He shook her until she opened her eyes. The Indian took the role of good cop, which belonged to him after what Ringo had done.
“Please, director. Do what we say. We don’t want to hurt you.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head.
“It won’t help you. . . . The network police. . . .”
Padovani stopped his companion’s arm, which seemed about to finish off the job with another blow. Then he made the director look into his eyes, and he spoke as calmly as he could.
“Director, I’m not going back to my country, no matter what. You can’t threaten me with anything worse than that.” He paused. “Do you understand what I said? I won’t surrender.”
After an eternal instant, the director nodded yes. Then Padovani noticed that his heart had been in a runaway gallop for a while. His arm felt prickly. He tried to concentrate on breathing more slowly until the heartbeats slowed down. The hardest part was still ahead.
“What’s your name?” he asked Leidi.
The face of the big man, which was still in the doorway, lit up with a blush. She pointed at herself with her fat hand.
“Me?”
Padovani nodded.
“What’s your name? Leidi, and what else?”
“Leidi,” she said, and she waited a moment before adding, “Leidi Zorzano.”
Padovani turned back to the director.
“Can you confirm that she’s a woman?”
Ringo threatened her with the tranquilizing gun again.
“Tell us. Do what the old man says.”
The woman shrank in her chair and said she would. As the two men disguised as jailers watched her closely, she searched in her computer for Leidi’s file and showed them a photo. It couldn’t be more different from the way she looks now, Padovani thought. He compared the smile of the gorgeous young woman in the picture with the stupefied grimace of the man who was half-collapsed in the doorway.
“Print the content of the file,” Ringo ordered. “And look for the data on her exchange, too. The man who’s in Venezuela.”
The director searched a little more in the FarmaCom database. A photograph of the fat man appeared on the screen. Padovani got closer to read his name: Philip S. Abramov. It didn’t ring a bell.
When the director had finished printing the files, Ringo ordered her to sign and stamp the pages. Then he grabbed the papers from her hands before the Indian could get a look at them and stuck them inside his uniform as if it was food he was stealing from a supermarket.
Padovani was annoyed, but there was no time to argue. He asked the director if she needed to do anything else to justify moving Leidi to the women’s block. She stood up, looked for some business cards on the desk, and put them in her pocket.
“There’s nothing to prepare. I’d already decided to move her this morning.” She looked at Leidi. “I’m very sorry . . . for the trouble you’ve had. Although I suppose it makes no sense to say so.”
The three exchangers silently watched the director as she crossed the room decisively. Leidi got out of the doorway. Before anyone opened it, Padovani moved and put a hand on the doorknob.
“Just a minute.” He turned to Ringo. “Put the gun away.”
His companion obeyed. He looked at the group again, and when he was done, he opened the door.
“Ladies first.”
The director seemed to hesitate. Leidi pushed her through.
VII
Everyone let them pass. It must have been true that they’d already decided to move Leidi to the women’s block. She got a few curious glances, but no one looked twice at the guards who escorted her. Finally, they got through the doors of the building and were out in the common patio. The sun blinded them for a few seconds until their eyes adjusted. Now what? the Indian asked himself.
Ringo came up to the director to make her change her direction.
“This way is better.”
He pointed to a delivery van. It didn’t seem like a bad idea. Padovani touched Leidi’s arm to show her the new route. Soon they could see the logo on the side of the van: “Northern Group. Excellent meat.” Padovani stopped cold. He saw movement in the driver’s cab. It wasn’t empty. The van driver got out without looking at them, as if they didn’t exist, and ran to open the door of the cargo compartment for them.
The blond hair on the Indian’s skin stood up. He looked at Ringo. One sight of his face and he knew that he’d been planning the rest of the escape without him.
“You go inside, with her.” Ringo pointed at the director. “I’ll go up front.”
The Indian looked around. The patio was empty. The guards at the doors didn’t seem to be paying attention unless they had eyes on the backs of their heads. He’d need to take advantage of the situation to escape, and he’d have time later to worry about Ringo’s secret plans.
He grabbed the director by the arm and made her get into the cargo compartment. Then he helped Leidi, and got in behind her. He closed it from inside and hit the wall of the driver’s cab a couple of times. The van started right up.
After getting as comfortable as he could on the floor, Padovani took out the pistol.
“Don’t think about yelling.”
The director lowered her head. The Indian looked around the compartment. Not one trace of dead cows. Leidi had circles of sweat under her armpits and breathed with her mouth open as her chest heaved. None of them seemed like “excellent meat” but they might be going to the slaughterhouse anyway.
The van stopped. A muffled conversation could be heard. The van started again. Traffic noise. They must have left the center. Padovani noticed that his hand hurt because he was holding the gun so tightly. The director raised her eyes.
“We’re almost there. Don’t worry.”
He congratulated himself deep down because he had sounded convincing, even though he himself was nervous. His heart began to jump out of his chest. He breathed deep and tried to relax. They stayed quiet for the rest of the trip until the van stopped again. They heard the doors of the driver’s compartment open and shut.
Padovani was intent on the sounds and the director caught him by surprise. She leaped on him. But she only wanted to say something.
“I understand what you’re trying to do, but it’s a mistake. . . . Ringo isn’t who you think he is. His enemy is FarmaCom, and what happens to you doesn’t matter to him. Go back to the center and we’ll talk. There won’t be any reprisals.”
The woman slipped a card into the pocket of his uniform. Padovani had no time to react. He looked at Leidi. She’d seen everything, including the card. The door of the compartment opened and Ringo’s smiling face looked in. He was dressed in a suit now, not a jailer’s uniform. He threw a pile of clothing inside.
“We’ll go on foot now, old man. Put this on.”
If anything was clear, the Indian thought, it was that Ringo didn’t need his help to escape from the nursery. So he needed something else from him, and Padovani began to suspect what it might be.
He took the card from his pocket and touched it. A nanoscopic tracker could have been hidden in the fine cardboard. These days they could be anywhere. If that were true, the director’s words and suggestion could only be a trap, a ruse to make him doubt his companion. He did what he thought most prudent: he paused a second to read the telephone number, then ripped up the card and threw away the pieces.
“I’ll do anything before going back to my country.”
He hopped that Ringo and the woman would each interpret the message differently.
VIII
The van driver gave Ringo a mobile phone and some instructions. Padovani couldn’t hear the words clearly but the driver seemed to want to communicate the urgency of something. Ringo seemed to take it as a joke, as if he wasn’t in a hurry.
He took the papers the director had signed out of the jacket and showed them to the driver, who wanted to read them, but Ringo wouldn’t let them go. He just let the other man look at them briefly, then put them back into his jacket.
After a little more discussion, the driver got back into the vehicle. The Northern Group van sped away with the director as the only cargo. Padovani thought it best not to ask where they were taking her. He glanced at both sides of the street. They were in a subdivision of two-story homes surrounded by yards. He didn’t see a soul.
The clothing Ringo had given him were his size. He put the tranquilizer gun in the back of his waistband.
“Inside the jacket you have some cash,” Ringo told him. “You need more? I can get it.”
The Indian found a wad of hundred-euro bills in an interior pocket. He thought about the yellow Parcheesi pieces. Ringo had everything planned, and it wasn’t going to be easy to give him the slip. He weighed the wad, pretended to count it, and then said it would be enough. He’d need a lot less to find Terry. But it was nice to have extra for other expenses.
Leidi also seemed comfortable in her new clothes, a suit made to measure including a double-breasted jacket with which she could have easily gotten a role in a B-movie about the Mafia. Padovani held out his hand and tried to repeat the same goodbye that the black Vladimiro had given him.
“Good luck.”
Leidi didn’t bother to return the gesture. Ringo was the one that spoke.
“What’s up?”
Padovani didn’t want to find out if the bulge that Ringo’s jacket hid was more dangerous than the guard’s tranquilizer gun. But you can’t always get what you want. He took a quick look behind him. The end of the street was very far away.
“Nothing. We can separate here. I hope you have a lot of luck.”
“What’s the hurry?” Ringo smiled. “Do you have something to do?”
The Indian sized up the two men in front of him again. Really, Leidi was a woman—if the file that the had seen in the director’s office wasn’t a lie—but in any case she was still pretty fat. But Ringo was armed. Padovani decided to return the smile and answer with a question.
“Are you tell. . . .”
Ringo had the gun out before the last syllable left his mouth, came up to him and took the guard’s gun. Then he went back to Leidi and gave it to her. Both of them aimed at him.
“I suggest we go see this friend of yours that you told me about.”
Padovani clenched his fists. He had known a lot of members of armed organizations of Marxist inspiration or aesthetics who came from all parts of the globe to train in his country in the old revolutionary times. The friend Ringo referred to was a cont
act from that time who was now calling himself Terry. Before signing the contract with FarmaCom, he’d sent him a message to see if, when the moment came, he could help him disappear in his new body without leaving a trace that Europol could follow. He didn’t know how deep Terry was still involved with Sink-Tooth, but he had to take that risk.
The answer took a month to come: “If you manage to escape from the nursery, look for me.” It came accompanied by the instructions to find him. Terry wouldn’t have given them to just anyone. That must be the only reason Ringo needed him. To get to Terry.
“Don’t worry about that,” Ringo continued. “We know who your friend is, his relationship with revolutionary groups. . . . We’re on the same side. We only want to pass on some information.”
“What about?”
Ringo and Leidi looked at each other for a second. If they exchanged some sort of gesture, Padovani didn’t see it.
“Let’s just say your friend will be delighted to meet Leidi. You’ll find out when we see him.”
Padovani nodded. That might or might not be true, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to let himself be used twice.
“Okay.”
He explained to Ringo that, to meet Terry, first they had to go to a big park named something like “El Respiro.”
“That would be ‘El Retiro,’ old man.”
The Indian noticed that Ringo knew the city. They were pretty far away to get there on foot, but he didn’t say anything. He just walked ahead of them obediently, stopping at every corner to ask new directions from Ringo. They went at a slow pace. If the driver had wanted Ringo to hurry, it didn’t seem to matter. Leidi panted from the effort to move her client’s lumbering body. Padovani felt irregular heartbeats in his chest again, but since they weren’t moving fast, he didn’t feel tired.
When they finally saw the park fence, Ringo asked where they should enter, and he stopped to think. He pointed out an underground passage that went under the street and came out in the park. Ringo ordered him to go walk slowly, warning him with a gesture about what was under his jacket.