Angels of Maradona

by Glen Carter

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  What this country needs is another Stalin, Dmitri Raspov thought. An iron fist and decent road maps.

  Uri traced a blunt finger across a piece crumpled paper containing the smudged directions they had acquired two hours before from a boy riding bareback in the middle of nowhere on a washed-out mare his grandfather might have broken. That was at least a hundred miles back. Now they needed water, gasoline, and whatever food they could come by on this wretched scar of a road which had become as doubtful to the three of them as a Chechen ambush trail.

  Pavel stared menacingly at the man who was filling their tank. He had to be a dimwit or a mute, the way he had ignored Uri’s demand for directions. The man beamed toothlessly and simply grunted when the crumpled paper was shoved in his face.

  “That’s enough,” Pavel said, spying the pool of spilled gasoline at the dimwit’s shoeless feet. Lazily, Pavel swung a steel-toed boot to his rear, raising a plume of dust that settled on the mess.

  The man turned abruptly as if to engage, but wisely stood down when he saw Pavel’s steely grin. “You come, yes,” Pavel taunted, tossing a handful of bills into the wet dirt.

  Two minutes later, when Pavel was finished, they drove off, spraying dirt and sand onto the man’s unconscious form.

  “He does not forget us,” Pavel said, removing his hand from the steering wheel to wipe blood-spattered knuckles on the front of his shirt.

  Raspov was choking on the dust that wafted in from the smashed rear window. They’d retrieved the Land Rover, but not surprisingly, the sack of weapons and ammunition was nowhere to be found. The only guns they had were the ones they carried, which would have to do, he decided.

  They’d been driving the same road since morning, skirting a river for the twenty miles through a series of lush valleys that appeared to them as giant bowls brimming with the morning’s mist. The road they could not yet find would carry them higher into the mountains and ten miles more until they reached their destination. At least that’s what that cocksure boy had told them, bending forward on his pathetic mount to get a better look at the three strangers in the Land Rover. “Si. You pay, yes.” Then for five minutes the boy swung his arms like spears on a compass, spouting directions in splintered English. Uri jotted most of it down.

  They were close now, Raspov was sure. “Keep your eyes open.” He thought smugly about the information he’d obtained from the Rezident Kulakov at the Bogotá embassy who knew everything, including the colour of the president’s shorts on any given day, and more recently dining habits of his justice minister. Birth records showed both Mendoza women were born to Eva Mendoza, but Kulakov had cursed, “Better records kept in a Chechen whorehouse.” There was no trace of Mercedes Mendoza beyond infancy. The mother, he said, was being treated by a doctor in Barranquilla. She still lived in Maradona. Kulakov, former 9th Directorate KGB, now FSO, had offered Raspov a team, but Raspov had declined, thanking his old friend for the intelligence. Raspov was sure the girl would run home. Doyle and that fucking little Brit would help her. Raspov was intent on spoiling that homecoming.

  When they found the Mendoza woman, Raspov would have his money, enough to guarantee his place in the new Russia. There’d be a powerful position in the government, maybe even elected office now that democracy was the fashion. Raspov found that distasteful, though things were changing in other ways that Raspov liked, and he wanted to be part of it. As a member of the former communist KGB elite, Raspov would be revered, maybe given special status. After all, Putin the president was one of them. Raspov smiled to himself. No more dancing to Castro’s pathetic tune, no more of his silly little Marxist revolution. The psychopath Montello was desperate for the promise of what only Raspov could supply, so Raspov had fed Montello’s illusion, Guzman too. As a result the cartels had happily agreed to his price. Let them pay for something they would never have. Dmitri Raspov, colonel of the great KGB, 2nd Directorate, had engineered some of the greatest intelligence operations in the history of the motherland. Deceiving the Colombians had been child’s play. It rankled him to think that, were it not for the Mendoza woman, the cartels’ millions would already be in his hands. She had spirited away Montello’s money in the most brazen of ways. Right out from under his nose. It’s what the drug addict Suarez had foolishly confided to him, perhaps stoned, perhaps out of resentment towards his master. Raspov didn’t care. He would have the bonds, and be gone.

  “Remember, the girl lives for now,” Raspov said, leveling a finger towards Uri and Pavel, who both smiled expectantly. “The rest…do what pleases you both.”

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Eva and Kaitlin sat in wooden chairs on the porch, listening to the soft thrum of powdery wings and enjoying perfumes from a dozen varieties of exotic flowers in Eva’s garden. The older woman trembled as if the warm Santa Marta winds swirling around the house were coated in ice. Kaitlin retrieved a shawl for Eva and then watched her closely as she sipped her tea.

  “You were born here, in this house.” Eva smiled on the memory, cradling her cup tightly to her chest as if she were holding a suckling newborn. “I was in labour for two whole days, but you were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.”

  “Tell me about my sister.”

  Eva’s smile wilted to a frown. “Mercedes nearly died the night you were both born. Were it not for the doctor’s quick hands she would have strangled. It seemed forever before she finally took her first breath.”

  Mercedes. For a moment Kaitlin pictured the scene of panic as they fought to save her life – the urgent voices, a baby’s screech followed by prayers of thanks in the amber glow of oil lamps. A disconnected image intruded on Kaitlin’s thoughts. An infant swaddled in a dirty blanket in the death grip of its mother. This infant will not cry again. A bulldozer is pushing dirt into a hole containing row upon row of white sheets. Oppressive heat presses in on her, dust coats her throat. The smell. She is not alone. She and the others share an imperative which is a mystery to her, as they are. In a way Kaitlin is being reborn, swaddled in the fabric of her past.

  Her mother continued, weakly now since it was her habit to fade in the same way as a Maradona sunset. “I was a stubborn girl, Kaitlin,” she said. “I made the decision that Argus would not know and with good reason. I had no one but my parents. And Alejandro.”

  Kaitlin was glad Alejandro was back. He’d been gone for a long time, leaving her alone with Eva. He’d stomped into the house two days before, offering no explanation for his absence. Eva hadn’t asked for any. Kaitlin cooked her healthy meals and after a week’s hard work she’d transformed the kitchen, in fact the entire house, into an acceptable living space. Marginally, Eva’s strength returned. Twice the doctor had come but the pills he left made Eva sleepy. He examined the gash on Kaitlin’s scalp and carefully studied the reflexes in her eyes for signs of deeper damage, or even clues to her memory loss. Finding none, he said there was nothing he could do, not with the meagre possessions he carried in his worn leather medical bag. A hospital was required for that, but Kaitlin sensed she wouldn’t be making the trip to any large medical facility. The doctor told her not to worry. She was doing fine, eventually her memory would return. It was a prognosis she prayed for.

  Eva lowered the steaming cup from her lips and traced a finger around its rim. “It was amazing how you mimicked each other. It seemed you were both connected to one brain. When you wailed your two voices seemed like one. Your stomachs and diapers were as if connected to a clock.”

  Kaitlin was fascinated by what she was hearing. She absorbed everything.

  Eva continued, “Once you were stung by a bee and Mercedes cried also – with the same red spot on her tiny foot. Alejandro insisted the insect had attacked both of you, but believe me, this was not the case. You were without shoes at the time. Mercedes had not managed to kick hers off.”

  The more Eva said, the more Kaitlin felt connected. To what, she wasn’t exactly sure, though connected all the same. In the next second the
warmth she felt became a chill.

  “You were considered bad luck because you were twins.”

  That was crazy, Kaitlin thought. “Twins are a blessing.”

  “To the U’wa, a curse, not a blessing.” Eva tried to get up but surrendered to her fatigue. She fell back in her chair and stared into the trees somewhere. Kaitlin followed her gaze and thought she saw something move in the darkness gathering at the foot of a tree.

  “The U’wa fear twins as an evil omen – demon children,” Eva continued. “The father is believed to be an animal. Where you come from these things are hard to accept, but they are the truth for the U’wa – still.”

  It was an abhorrent “truth,” Kaitlin thought, certainly absent of anything human. But in the rough little societies where indigenous people survived, feeding two children had to be much more difficult. Suspicions were sometimes born of common sense. Walk under a ladder and you’re likely to get something dropped on your head. Break a mirror and you’ll probably cut yourself. Both were hazards steeped in suspicion.

  None of this Kaitlin felt compelled to impart at that moment. Instead she remained silent, struggled to keep her face free of further judgment.

  “The parents of twins are a curse also,” Eva said. “In my case I was unwed which was another shame for my family.” Eva paused. “In the village they said I was a gringo’s whore.”

  Argus. Her father. In the part of her mind where the past had retreated a face stared out at her, absent of definable features. Kaitlin clenched her jaw and shook her head as if to dislodge it. She was unable to stop the question that parted her lips, even if she had wanted to. “Why didn’t my father take you with him?”

  Eva touched her arm and looked at the last of the sunlight as it settled like a golden ribbon on distant hills. “He wanted to and he was very…what is the word?” Eva clenched her fists, pulled her face into a knot.

  “Unwilling to take no for an answer?”

  “Si, a big stubborn fool of a man.”

  Kaitlin tilted her head. “Then why–”

  “I could not leave,” Eva interrupted. “Never.”

  It sounded to Kaitlin like a declaration of innocence. Something she had said a thousand times but had waited decades to be heard. Kaitlin sensed the relief that trailed it.

  Eva breathed deeply. There was much more she had to explain. “My father was a very proud man – and very difficult to live with under the best of circumstances. Having an unmarried and pregnant daughter was his shame. But when I gave birth to two of you, well…that was too much for him to bear, so he left us.” Eva studied the remains of her tea, tilted the cup to expose the leafy remnants at its bottom. “For weeks he was gone and when he returned it was as if we were dead to him. He wouldn’t even look at me. Or the babies.”

  Kaitlin tried desperately to absorb everything Eva was saying. She thought again about the graves, both marked with the same date of death. A premonition. She braced herself for what was coming.

  “The U’wa elders came that night. They stood over there and called out to my father.” Eva looked to a spot twenty feet in the distance near the crumbling shed and then snapped her head away as if the ghosts of those men were still waiting to be acknowledged. “At first he refused and yelled at them to leave. They refused. Then my father confronted them.”

  The only thing missing from the picture were flaming torches, a hangman’s rope slung over the nearest oak tree. Hooded figures on a moist Mississippi night. Kaitlin tasted bitterness at the back of her throat. Softly a moth thudded against the window behind them, tugging her back to the moment.

  Deep worn lines were suddenly drawn on Eva’s face. “We thought…” she said, halting mid-sentence. There was a pause. “We expected him to fight. To chase them off. But Serpez held power over the entire village. There was argument, yes. But in the end Luis simply bowed his head and wept.”

  It was the only time Kaitlin had ever heard Eva say her father’s name, as though the broken, weeping man she had just described was the man she needed to remember as her father. Not the animal who had stolen her children.

  Eva wrapped herself in her arms, stooping forward in her chair.

  Kaitlin would have told her to stop but knew it was too late for that.

  “Your grandfather,” Eva continued, “he took you both that night. We could see in his eyes what he was going to do.” She tugged a sleeve to her face, dabbed at her eyes. After a few seconds Eva pulled herself as straight as she could. “My mother and I fought him when he returned without the babies but he refused to tell us anything. But we knew what he had done. The U’wa believe twins are animals, not human – the children are returned to the earth.” Eva reached over to take Kaitlin’s hand. “He abandoned you both. To die.”

  Kaitlin had heard enough. She clamped shut her eyes and covered her ears, which might have appeared to Eva as though she could listen no more, which she could not. Though, in reality, Kaitlin was also desperate to eliminate distraction because of the whisper coming to her as if through a crowded room. Kaitlin. Go. Suddenly there is the warm metallic smell of equipment, tense bodies. They are olfactory touchstones that seem to lock her to the moment elusive. Fade in. A dark, crowded space. Rows of small glowing monitors. Urgent voices. She is terrified for someone.

  “Kaitlin?”

  The man standing next to her is a cop. Shut this down. Now!

  “Kaitlin?”

  Eva is pulling her back. The tableau, as tenuous as frost sheets on spring grass, crystallizes into a billion luminescent pixels. Kaitlin returns to the there and now. After another moment, “How did we survive?” she asked.

  “It was a miracle that Alejandro was in the shed when the elders came, tending to his horse. He heard them telling my father what he had to do and where he should do it. Alejandro knew he wouldn’t be able to stop him, not with Serpez and his thugs still there. So he waited until everyone left. Then he raced after you.” Eva shivered. “He and that old horse of his found you in the Jaguar Forest and brought you back home to me.”

  It was the first time Kaitlin had seen her truly happy, though the smile vanished as quickly as it appeared.

  “When my father discovered what Alejandro had done he was insane with rage. He and Alejandro fought. Alejandro was badly beaten. Then he grabbed you both again. I tried desperately to stop him but my father pushed me down hard. That’s all I remember. I must have blacked out. When I woke up you two girls were wailing in Alejandro’s arms. He was crying. My mother was dead. So was my father. She shot him.” Eva’s face was streaked with tears. She took a moment to collect herself. “Then she took her own life.”

  Kaitlin couldn’t believe what she had just heard. She swallowed hard, stunned by it. The timeless echoes of two gunshots cracked in her imagination. Two graves, the same date. Remains in one, a beloved mother and sister in the other. It broke Kaitlin’s heart to see Eva in such pain. There was a moment of silence between them and then Eva, steeling herself, continued, “I knew the U’wa elders wouldn’t allow you to live, not after what had happened. I had to separate you to save you. I got word to your father. You became an American. Your sister I sent to Father Govia at Trinity Church.” Eva shook her head. “A little while after, the U’wa elders came to Maradona to deliver a warning. You were already safely in America by then but they said I was cursed as long as my children lived. You could never be reunited with your sister. I couldn’t leave Colombia to marry your father because I wouldn’t leave Mercedes here – not alone.” Eva averted her eyes. “After what happened I think I actually believed them. The curse had killed my mother and father. I was afraid it would eventually kill both my beautiful children. I’m sorry,” Eva said. “I’m very sorry.”

  Kaitlin stared at her mother with understanding. She rubbed her shoulder, a simple gesture that seemed, by the look on Eva’s face, a sinner’s absolution. No, Kaitlin thought. No sin on her soul. How could Eva even think that? This woman had endured a lifetime of pain and even now the barb
arians, with their insane tribal dogma, haunted her with the residue of culpability. Kaitlin couldn’t remember her life past, but she knew it would have been completely different. A twin sister and a mother she had never known. This place. Her home. Kaitlin exhaled loudly and closed her eyes again. It was unbelievable, yes. But Kaitlin never doubted its truth. Why was that so? She shoved her curiosity aside for the moment. “How did I get here?” she finally said.

  A breath whooshed from between Eva’s lips. “That’s another story,” she replied. “But first I think we’ll require more of your tea.”

  SIXTY-NINE

  Jack threw the car into second gear and stomped on the gas around a curve in the road. Mercedes squinted at the map. “There’s a road. The next right. It looks like it could be a shortcut.”

  Jack saw the open maw of a turn up ahead, a darkened throat swallowing the day’s lingering light. He punched on the overhead light. “Tell me you’re sure about it. We don’t have time for mistakes.”

  Mercedes brought the map closer to her face. “Yes, I am sure.”

  The look on her face wasn’t a confidence-builder but he decided to trust her judgment anyway, and a moment later he swung the wheel hard and spun onto a road which was even more potted and narrow than the one they were exiting.

  “I didn’t even know there were roads up here,” Seth said without purpose from the back seat. “The map if you will.”

  Mercedes passed it over her shoulder without looking back. “I think it could be the smallest place in all Bolivar department – this Maradona.”

  “Right,” Seth replied, studying the map.

  “There in the mountains. Do you see it?” Mercedes said. “Follow the shortcut road.”

  “Yes. There it is. Complete with all the amenities, I’m sure.”

  “In this part of the country – some of the best,” Jack cut in. “Coca plants prefer the high altitudes. The farmers harvest the leaves and then process them into paste. Then they mule it down to drug labs which are basically heavily guarded depots for processing chemicals and cheap labour. That’s where they turn the paste into coke. The campesinos have satellite TV and haute cuisine, not to mention a paychecque that’s better than yours, Seth.”