My hands were shaking when I hung up the phone. Of course, I had no intention of meeting with him. I was deathly afraid of him. The man was trying to intimidate me and was doing a good job. My only hope was to get out of Medellín and to what I hoped was the safety of the plantation. It was a large holding; there would be people there, besides the majordomo and housekeeper, workers, foremen, I suppose their families, too. At the very least, I wouldn’t be alone like I was now.
The phone conversation had one point I found interesting: He had raised the offer to five times what it had been in Seattle. But fifty thousand wouldn’t help me any more than ten would. I needed to get into the hundreds of thousands before I set foot back in Seattle. But a 500 percent increase by me showing my face in Colombia gave me hope that we would get to a price that I could live with—and I do mean live.
I mulled it over some more, but more questions than answers kept popping up. I didn’t know who Scar was or his connection to Ramon—or the connection, if any, the two of them had to my Seattle problems, but it was pretty obvious he or they were trying to extort my inheritance from me. And I didn’t see someone as affluent as Ramon appear in this for chump change—they were after a killing.
Again, that told me the plantation had to be worth much more than they were offering. Enough to kill me for? Was Colombia such a lawless country that a person could actually be killed for her property?
I refused to believe that. It had to be a country full of good, law-abiding people who were being victimized by sudden wealth brought to the criminal faction by the cocaine trade. It couldn’t be a country where everything was so violent, where innocents got murdered.
Could it…?
That line of thinking brought my thoughts back to the third thing Scar said he would give me, the one he didn’t verbalize.
It was a no-brainer.
The third thing was my life.
17
I left the hotel in the wee hours, a half an hour before the break of dawn. The clerk was not in sight behind the counter. I smiled at the front door guard as I went by him and to the street. “Getting some air.”
No comprende was the silent message on his incredulous features. Who would go out while it was still dark? I could have told him that I learned the tactic from my mother.
My cut-and-run, burn-your-bridges mother was very streetwise. She’d traveled extensively before and after I came about. Most of her traveling was as a woman alone and as a woman alone with a child. And she had her own theories about how to get safely to where she was going.
When we lived in Southern California and needed to get to Las Vegas or San Francisco, two trips we made frequently, we had to cover hundreds of miles of desert and the like. Her theory was to start out very early in the morning, just before the break of dawn. She said, “The drunks have all been arrested or have passed out, and the killers and rapists are asleep. If anything happens to the car, we’ll have hours of daylight to deal with it.”
It made sense—whoever heard of someone getting mugged on the way to work?
That was my game plan when I left the hotel with the streets still asleep. All the perverts and murderers would still be asleep—including Scar. And I’d be safely at the plantation before Scar realized I’d ditched him.
Last night I assumed the plantation meant safety—the whole country couldn’t be kill crazy? But the country’s state of mind was a question, not a fact. I just didn’t think it was possible people in the coffee country would be as murderously insane as the cocaine gangs.
I hurried to the garage, looking over my shoulder all the way. The security guard for the guaranteed 24-hour security was either asleep or AWOL, because the guard booth was dark. I checked the backseat to make sure there were no murderers hiding there, then slipped behind the wheel, locked the door, and drove out of the garage. I had paid the night before, so short of my being murdered getting the car out, it didn’t matter if the guard was there when I left.
I white-knuckled the steering wheel in very light traffic, cognizant of the reality that I was driving through a dangerous city on my way to a highway full of danger.
I had had a bad night, tossing and turning as I struggled with my options. The situation really came down to two decisions: go to the airport and take the first plane out that would get me en route to the States or bite the bullet and head for the plantation to see exactly what I had inherited.
Meeting with Scar was too scary to even be an option. I suspected that his idea of negotiating would be a give-and-take process in which I did all the giving.
The problem with going back was that it could only mean instant confinement in jail, especially now that I had made myself an obvious flight risk. Locked up and with no money to hire a good lawyer wasn’t a good option, I decided.
Nearing the highway that would lead me out of town, a convoy of unmarked trucks passed me from the opposite direction. I got a glimpse of men holding guns as the trucks rumbled by. The uniforms were the olive drab that was typical of governments’ military units—and of the guerrilla armies fighting them. I didn’t know what color uniforms the narco-armies wore.
I hoped my mother was right about nothing happening at the break of dawn.
EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES
Calle 22D Bis, No. 47-51
Bogotá, Colombia
Tele. (571) 315-0811
Fax: (571) 315-2197
TRAVEL BULLETIN
Safety of Public Transportation:
Poor
Urban Road Conditions/Maintenance:
Poor
Rural Road Conditions/Maintenance:
Poor
Availability of Roadside Assistance:
Poor
Traffic laws are sporadically followed and rarely enforced, a chaotic and dangerous reality for travelers.
For security reasons, the Embassy strongly recommends against most rural road travel by American citizens. The strong presence of guerrilla and paramilitary groups and common criminals makes travel dangerous.
Roadblocks are frequently established to rob and/or kidnap travelers.
Travel by road outside major cities is dangerous.
18
Stupid, stupid, stupid. It didn’t occur to this city girl that the road signs were going to be fewer and farther between than paved roads. I stopped after two hours to get something to eat and drink at a roadside shack, a Colombian version of a rural truck stop. I bought arepas, a cornmeal concoction that looked like a pancake. Arepas, eaten plain or sliced for butter, cheeses, or meats, were a national food, not unlike hamburgers and tortillas. I bought bottled water, agua puro, rather than juice from the jugos stand. I wasn’t sure what the sanitary conditions were for a roadside juice stand.
In the rural area, I saw more people wearing ruanas, woolen cloaks with an opening in the middle for a person’s head. It was a similar concept to the poncho but usually only fell to about the waist. People kept them folded over one shoulder; schoolchildren had them pinned around their necks. When it got cold or wet, they slipped the ruanas on. I guess it was a south of the border version of what we’d call a windbreaker.
Earlier I had stopped at a gas station and asked about instructions to El Miro, the nearest village of any size to the plantation. I reviewed the instructions again at the food stand. As at the gas station, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure about what I was told. Either they weren’t exactly certain as to where the village was or my Spanish just wasn’t good enough to pick up all the nuances of their speech and arm waving, but I finally decided after hearing several different versions that people were too polite not to tell me something, even if it was wrong.
I finally got smart and got behind a bus whose driver told me he would pass near the village. The bus was a charmer—called a chiva, it looked like an old-fashioned American school bus with a longer front end and one major modification: Rather than allowing people to enter a door and proceed down a central aisle, each side of the bus was open enough for people
to slip directly from the ground onto benches. The entire top was a cargo area and passenger area—people climbed up two ladders at the back and grabbed onto crisscrossed cords to pull themselves onto the roof. The bus was about as safe as driving blindfolded around dangerous curves.
Everything had changed once out of the metro area and off main highways. I went from a modern city to a third-world country. Clothing, vehicles, even the language had differences. I now understood what they meant by Colombia being a land of rich and poor. It wasn’t just barrios and mansions in cities—all big cities are places of haves and have-nots—it was two different worlds, a place of Gucci versus raw cowhide.
It was nearly noon before I arrived at the village of El Miro. The trip was a six-hour ordeal that I thought from looking at a map would take a fraction of that time. I stopped at the village, bought purified water and fruit I could peel, again knowing about rural sanitary conditions and Montezuma’s revenge.
Once again, I went through the explanations and sign language of getting instructions to the plantation on roads that had never seen pavement or signs. Up to now, I’d found that the most accurate instructions were ones scratched into dirt with a stick. After the water seller made some dirt scratches that resembled a complicated maze, I left the village on a rut that passed for a road.
I was hot, tired, and irritable by the time I met a Jeep coming down the same dirt road I was traveling. The Jeep had an open top and looked like something from army surplus. It was going too fast on the narrow road.
I slowed and pulled to the right as much as I could, because there wasn’t room for two cars to pass. I could see through the Jeep’s bug-encrusted windshield that the only occupant was a man. Mostly what I saw was a big straw hat, a light-colored beard, and a hand waving me out of his way.
He hit his horn, but there was no place for me to go.
Rude bastard!
In the States, I would have stood my ground and called his bluff, hoping he wasn’t high on crank, but I was in a country where road rage was more likely to be acted out with rounds from an Uzi or AK-47 than flipping the bird. But there still wasn’t anywhere for me to go but into bushes and trees.
I slammed on the brakes and gawked as the Jeep came at me, sliding as he hit his brakes. The Jeep stopped almost bumper-to-bumper with me.
I took a deep breath as the dust settled. Jesus.
“Get the fuck out of the way!” he shouted, and laid on his horn.
I gritted my teeth and put the rental car in reverse and started backing up, but the rear end of the car didn’t want to go exactly where I wanted it to go. I tried to stay on the road but veered off, into a gully.
Shit. I put it into forward and let out the clutch. My tires spun. I was stuck.
Angry, I got out of the car, slamming the door behind me. “Excuse me, would you—”
The Jeep came at me and I jumped back against my car.
“Fuck off,” he said, as he passed. He steered around my car and hit the gas, kicking dirt and rocks back at me and my car.
“You sonofabitch!”
He was too far away to hear me, but I had gotten a better look at him as he went by—shaggy blond hair under the dark hat, and a ruddy complexion that had been burned deep brown by the sun. He needed a shave, a bath, and an attitude adjustment.
All in all, he looked like a degenerate American college type who had given up his surfboard and education a decade ago to come down to South America and stay stoned while he smuggled drugs. His nationality was confirmed when he dropped the F word on me—he’d spoken in English, without an accent. And I had cursed at him in English.
Come to think of it, the entire conversation had taken place in English, from the moment he ordered me out of the way. That gave me pause. I stared down the road, at the curve he’d disappeared around.
Why would a complete stranger have spoken to me in English?
The Medellín lawyer couldn’t call ahead to tell the people at the plantation I was coming because the phone lines were down or inoperable, which was often the same thing in the country. He said it was likely the majordomo at the plantation had a mobile phone, and probably even a ham radio, but that he didn’t know how to contact either. However, he would get a message through to the nearest police station via radio and ask the officer to let the majordomo, Cesar Montez, know I was coming so he could meet my train.
Okay, it was possible that the lawyer called the local police and word got around that an American was coming. But that theory did nothing to reduce my state of paranoia.
I cursed the rude bastard as I walked a mile to a cluster of three small shacks on a farm where two nice men with a shovel and a donkey returned to help pull my car out of the rut.
The two men, farmworkers who made a few dollars a day and supported families on that little, refused to take the twenty dollars in Colombian pesos I offered. I didn’t push it for fear of embarrassing them, but I insisted upon getting their names. I would find out at the plantation how I could thank them properly.
An hour later I found Plantacíon Café de Oro.
“Coffee country” was lush and beautiful. Not dense jungle, but temperate, thick with green trees, shrubs, bushes. Coffee trees, with their big shiny green leaves and clusters of red, cherry-looking berries, were growing in the shade of a variety of taller trees—banana trees, prehistoric ferns, hardwoods, fig trees, and flowering fruit trees.
It was warm, but the mile-high elevation of the temperate zone took the edge off the heat, making it comfortable.
As I came into view of the plantation’s grande casa, the sight took my breath away. I stopped the car and stared. I had never seen anything so captivating in my life.
The house was a large two-story on the top of a hill, square shaped, with a slanted roof of redbrick half rounds I called Spanish tile. A pillared veranda ran the entire length of the front and, from what I could see, continued around both sides and maybe even the back of the house.
The entire veranda was ablaze in brilliant flowers: bright red, white, and purple bougainvilleas and many other colorful varieties that I couldn’t name. The entire hillside leading up to the house was draped in luxurious flowers that flourished in the warm, temperate environment.
On a green-vine-covered hill to the right of the house, a stream of water cascaded a hundred feet or more down to a glittering emerald pool.
I just stared at the scenery. It was nothing I had ever personally experienced before. I fell in love with it immediately. For some strange reason, I felt like I had come home. My first thought was that I had been conceived here.
I knew it was strange, the idea that I could have some memory of this place imprinted while I was in my mother’s womb, but that was how I felt, a sense of déjà vu.
No one was around, no workers. I understood a six-day workweek was common, so even though it was Saturday, people probably weren’t working because it was siesta time.
I followed the dirt road down a grade and then up to the yard. I pulled up on the side of the house where a three-car garage was located. The garage doors were closed.
A woman came out of a doorway on the side where I’d parked as I was getting out of the car. She stood at the top of the steps leading to the veranda and stared at me.
She was in her fifties, a “handsome” older woman, a word more commonly used with men. She wore a black dress, simple but with a quiet elegance, and had a white, laced half apron over the dress.
Like the Medellín lawyer, she stared at me as if I had been beamed down.
“Senorita, you are not supposed to be here.”
“I’m not?”
“Cesar went to the train station to get you. How—?” She gestured at the car. “All the way from Medellín? Alone?”
“I’m afraid so. I thought I’d see some of the country. I didn’t realize how much of the country I’d end up seeing because of wrong turns.” I laughed.
She came down the steps, shaking her head. There seemed to be a growin
g number of people who shook their head in disbelief at me.
“I am Juana Montez. I was Senor Castillo’s housekeeper.”
“Nash Novak.”
I made the connection with the names immediately—Cesar the majordomo was also a Montez, probably her son.
I offered my hand. I had a firm handshake, but she had come from a generation and culture in which women didn’t shake hands, so her grip was not as strong. But it was warm and comforting, as were her eyes. I liked her immediately.
She said, “I apologize for my surprise. We expected you, of course; we got the message that you were coming by train. It’s just that—”
“I understand. It’s my fault.”
“No matter, it is done. The train will have arrived by now, so Cesar is probably on his way home.”
“How far is the station?”
“Not far as birds fly, but you have seen our roads. Over an hour. Come in, please, have something cold to drink and a snack. As soon as Cesar gets back, we will have our meal.”
“Just something to drink, thanks.”
With a glass of ice-cold lemonade, I followed Juana around the house. Despite its large size, it had the feel of a bungalow, with its shady veranda, high ceilings, large double doors, and tall windows to promote the circulation of air.
The most incredible surprise was in the center of the house—an atrium with plants and a waterfall. The atrium had glass walls to all the adjoining rooms. It was a marvelous effect—the house surrounded by lush vegetation outside, and a rain forest in its heart.
“I love it,” I told her.
“It was Senor Castillo’s design. He said the Romans had open patios in their homes.”
When Juana used Castillo’s name, I heard the sentimentality in her voice despite the appearance of formality inferred by calling him “senor.” In fact, her tone struck me as unusually tender for a mere housekeeper. Despite her age and conservative dress and manner, Juana appeared to be a sensuous woman whom most men would find desirable and not irresistible for very long if they lived in the same house. And from what the lawyer told me, she had lived with Castillo for decades.
The Devil to Pay Page 11