The General resisted telling her that with the escort along she would be able to name her own price—little or nothing.
When the jeep was delivered to the garage at the villa, first thing, Lillian painted out all its military identification.
“Otherwise it’ll look as though we stole it. Two civilians in an army jeep would surely get stopped.”
Almost reasonable enough, Wiley thought. She had made him promise not to slow them down with questions. He was satisfied with the fact that they were going somewhere. However, in his opinion the jeep looked even more stolen now. The khaki-brown paint she’d used was in the right color range but a few shades darker than the original, slightly faded finish. The spots she’d touched up really stood out. Also one coat didn’t cover adequately. The white-stenciled army numbers and letters showed through, vaguely, but they could be noticed.
Earlier that morning they had gone to Sears, bought a sleeping bag, other equipment and clothing. Also stopped at a gunsmith’s shop, where Lillian ran in for some extra nine-millimeter ammunition, as though she was picking up a last minute thing for dinner.
Now under way, Lillian swerved to miss the potholes when she could, but she seldom let up on the accelerator.
Wiley asked her what the hurry was.
She wanted to get there, she said.
He had asked where once and gotten only a change of subject. He assumed she had made arrangements. This trip was her response to his desire to get away from Bogotá, he thought. Was her change of heart a result of their good lovemaking?
They hit a hole that jolted to such an extent that for a moment they were weightless. For that moment she lost control of the jeep.
No, she still didn’t want him to drive.
She had on a peaked army cap, her hair up and concealed. He was reminded of the first time he set eyes on her. She was more like that now than she’d been at any time since, not only in appearance but in attitude. She seemed turned up and on, happy with herself.
He scrunched down, gave attention to the countryside. A small, poor house alone in a field. Several small, poor houses together, grouped for courage, he thought. Back from the road were the large haciendas, only glimpses of their main houses, situated in the gaps of the slopes. A few of the haciendas had walls along the road. Whitewashed walls that seemed to go on for miles, interrupted by a gate. Here and there, handpainted in red on the wall, was a hammer and sickle and the words El gente es el poder (The people are the power). A little farther on, workers, obviously some of those gente, were repairing and whitewashing that same wall for pay. In a day or two they would be covering over the red graffiti. Quite possibly one of them had inscribed it in the first place. And would again.
They passed through Chocontá and some even smaller places that barely qualified as places. More chickens than people. They’d been traveling over an hour.
“How far does this highway go?” Wiley asked.
“To Venezuela, the map says. But considering its condition, it might end any mile now.”
“We’re not bound for Venezuela.”
“Leiva,” she said.
“Where’s that?”
“About fifteen miles from Tunja.”
According to the many road signs he’d seen, Tunja might be the hub of the world.
“Ever been there?” he asked.
“Tunja?”
“Leiva.”
“No. It’s only a speck on the map.”
“So, what’s there?”
Her expression clouded with aggravation. “I hate this gear we bought.”
“Why?”
“It’s new. Bad for the image. If we’d had time we could have gone to a second-hand store.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Our boots, for instance …”
He put a foot up on the dash.
“… they don’t look as though they’ve been anywhere,” she said.
“Even the most vagrant have to buy new boots someday.”
“Not often.”
“Especially them.”
She didn’t agree. “As long as boots have good strong uppers, you can have them resoled and reheeled time and again. One damn good pair is all a person really needs for a lifetime.”
Was this his wealthy woman?
“Our backpacks, ponchos, even our long johns are new,” she complained. “Imagine the impression we’ll make. A couple of naïve gringos.”
He realized why she was annoyed. This was the hitchhiker Lillian, the Lillian in the tank top, who slept more peacefully on the floor of a nearly bare room because it was psychologically soothing. That explained the change in her disposition today, her lighter spirit.
“New sleeping bag, too.”
“A double,” he reminded.
Not even that offset her distress.
The town of Villapinzón, then Tunja.
They had to ask directions to Leiva. They got three wrong opinions before a boy told them, for two pesos, to keep going on the street they happened to be on. “Even if it appears impossible, keep going,” he said and eyeing the jeep, he asked, “Are you in the army, señor?”
The street soon became a dirt road, extremely gullied and rutted but easy compared to the trail it eventually reduced itself to. A trail that would have been impossible for a regular car, it was almost too much for the four-wheel-drive jeep in some places.
Lillian fought it, slapped the gearshift into low-low, avoided the jags of large rocks that loomed right in the middle of the way, kept at least one wheel in contact with the ground at all times. It was a continual but inconsistent climb. The trail properly respected the steepness of some slopes, traversed back and forth to the tops. On others, even steeper, it went directly up at such an angle that the jeep was as close as possible to being vertical, causing the sensation that any moment the jeep would flip over backward. Lillian clung tight to the steering wheel. Wiley hung on to anything with both hands.
There would be seventeen miles of that to Leiva.
With about five to go, they came to a short level stretch. Lillian stopped for a breather.
“Let’s have an apple,” she said.
He reached back into her pack. Just before leaving she had appropriated a few things from Argenti’s larder. Because her pack wasn’t quite full was her excuse. Romanoff beluga caviar, Carr’s water biscuits, shelled pistachios, supercolossal ripe olives, Oreo cookies and two apples.
Wiley felt for and found one of the apples. It was large, hard, with a green waxy skin. The Granny Smith variety. Had there ever actually been a person named Granny Smith? Probably only a merchandising gimmick. Who could dislike a granny? And Smith was certainly inoffensive. A Granny Weinberg or a Granny Lopez would be another matter, Wiley thought.
He used his sheath knife to cut the apple, handed half to Lillian.
“Do me a favor?” she asked.
“Want me to peel it for you?”
“No. Do me a favor.”
“Sure.”
“Promise me no matter what happens up here you won’t mention that I have money. You can tell them anything else but that.”
“Them?”
“It’s important.”
“Okay, I promise, but …”
“Your absolute word.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Break it and from then on I’ll look right through you.”
She meant it. “Mind telling me why?” he asked.
“As far as you know, I’m the same girl who had that house in Bethel, New York. Five years older, but the same girl. Just forget everything else I’ve let you in on.”
“I think you ought to let me in on this.”
A young fellow by the name of Miguel Contreras. Lillian had met him in Washington, D.C., during an antiwar demonstration. He was about nineteen at the time. She got to know him over a period of three years.
Miguel was Colombian, born and raised in a small Andean village in the Central Cordillera a hundred miles north
west of Bogotà. However, at the time Lillian met him his home was in Queens, New York. About eighty thousand Colombians lived in Queens—Jackson Heights and Woodside. Many were indocumentados—people without papers, always on the alert for “Emilia,” which was their name for the United States Immigration Service. “Emilia,” one Colombian would whisper to warn another in the subway. The word that Emilia was coming was enough to half empty any theater or restaurant along Eighty-second Street in Queens.
Miguel and his family were indocumentados. Family of five, including two younger sisters. His father had served with the Colombian army in Korea.
Miguel had become part of a student leftist group in Bogotá when he was thirteen. While at the Universidad Nacional he was extremely involved. He had cried from tear gas more than anything else in his life. Thus, when he came to the United States, he fit right in with the antiwar movement. He often referred to it as merely “a sort of revolution,” as though it lacked much by comparison. He had angered Lillian a number of times with such talk. However, he made up for it with energy and courage. It was always Miguel in the vanguard of a demonstration, stirring it up, taunting the police lines, challenging the hardhats. Miguel could be counted on for any action, the more agitating the better. A bit of a show-off actually.
For instance, once he had walked right into draft-board headquarters on Whitehall Street. With a fresh short haircut, he got past the guards by including himself among government workers who were returning from lunch. Assumed an air of belonging there, exchanged automatic hellos with strangers to enhance the impression, appeared to know where he was going, finally reached it—the heart of, and reason for, the place. The files. Miguel, with yellow pencil between his teeth, yellow pad in hand, appeared intent on work, opening, looking into and closing a file here, another there. In each file, far in the rear, where it was less likely to be discovered and surely would do the most damage, he placed a small incendiary device. Delayed action. Then, with the same unhurried civil-servant attitude, he walked out of the building.
As a result of Miguel’s daring that afternoon, some ten thousand young men were saved from the chance of being lost in Vietnam. Miguel also thought of it as doing the Vietcong a favor.
At various times Miguel had reminisced to Lillian about his past life in Bogotá, the revolutionary cause he’d had to abandon. He spoke like a disciple about a man named Santos, Professor Julio Santos.
Then, in the fall of 1972, U.S. Immigration Agents, well supplied with blank warrants, made a random sweep of a block of dwellings in Queens. A hundred and twelve “deportables” were taken into custody. Among them was the Contreras family.
All except Miguel.
Miguel was on the F.B.I.’s wanted list. Gangsters had been replaced; rebels were the public enemies in those days. At post offices the wanted posters, making do with snapshots, looked like pages from high-school yearbooks. If apprehended, Miguel would go to prison. Otherwise he would have turned himself in to Emilia, gladly accepted a free trip home to Colombia. He ran for Canada, stopped off for a night at Lillian’s house in Bethel.
That was the last she heard of him. Until six months ago …
She had just returned again from a few days here, there. The Hotel du Cap at Antibes and La Réserve at Beaulieu. Seaweed baths in Deauville, oxygenation treatments in Paris. Going on impulse. Just enough Capri, a bit of Sardinia, even a weekend hunt on a grouse moor near the village of St. Boswells, Scotland, followed by Holland because someone mentioned miles of lilies blooming in Voglenzang, and that sounded worth seeing. As it turned out, the fragrance was so intense it gave her a headache.
Where to then? Oh, yes, she’d gone to Newport for the America’s Cup trials, then on with a bunch of guests to East Hampton, where she had a summer cottage she’d never seen in summer. Thirty rooms was still a cottage in the Hamptons. She’d wound up in Palm Beach at her father’s house, which was practically on the way anyway. She met his latest and tried to want to stay more than three days.
Usually it was a relief for her to be back in Mexico City, to come to a standstill, flop down, reflect on all the inconveniences that she’d endured, no matter how first class they were. And vow never again. But this time the place she had always depended upon as a base seemed just another temporary atmosphere. Really not all that different from a suite at the Carlton in Cannes or a guest wing in Sussex.
Space, just space, with her alone in it.
The mood would pass, she thought, she had merely taken an overdose of the wrong distractions. She did some bare-handed gardening, made an extremely intricate macramé throat band, enameled some chairs, cooked a huge pot of zuki beans, slept all day instead of all night. The feeling persisted. It seemed similar to the aftereffect of a long ride, the sensation of being still on the go. More honestly, it was the urge to go. Not that, she thought, God, no, she didn’t want to be doomed like so many of her aimless acquaintances. Direction was what she needed, a cause again. Even if she had to settle for a cause that was something less than she’d known before, it would still have to be something extraordinary.
The suggestion came to her one night soon thereafter, when she was in that pastime room off her bedroom. It was such an obviously good idea that she was peeved at herself for not having thought of it before.
At once she set about to locate Miguel, hired someone in that sort of business who found out that Miguel was in Bogotá. In La Picota Penitenciaría for the disturbances and injuries he’d caused during the last election.
She was rather glad to hear that. Miguel was the same Miguel. He had five months yet to serve on his sentence. She doubted his behavior in there would get him any time off.
She wrote him in prison.
He replied.
They corresponded regularly.
She had seen Miguel for the first time again three days ago. Met with him in a shack deep in the Las Brisas barrio, practically in the shadow of Argenti’s skyscraper. It hadn’t been a happy reunion, couldn’t be, because Miguel had just gotten word that several of his comrades had been killed for poaching emeralds in the mountains—among them a girl he loved and the man Julio Santos.
“What mountains?” Wiley wanted to know.
“Near Chiquinquirá, ten miles from here,” she said, as though it were a thousand.
The open flesh of the apple had turned brown in Wiley’s hand. At least, he thought, her reason for wanting to be in Bogotá wasn’t Argenti. Where did Argenti fit into all this?
Lillian told him Argenti was coincidental, merely a convenience.
Did Miguel know she was staying at Argenti’s?
Yes.
How did she explain that?
Miguel had been amused, believed it might be useful somehow, having someone inside on that level. “I told him that was my reason.”
“He bought it?”
“Why not?” She arched. “Looks can get you almost anywhere. You should know that.”
A reminder, not a barb, he thought. Nevertheless, it stuck. “I take it we’re meeting Miguel.”
“We’re supposed to be in Leiva by six.”
Wiley looked away, across the slopes. Semitropical foliage, weeds and vines, the trees not tall but numerous, vast clumps of bushes, snow on peaks off to the right. The sun was on its way down, a few hours from the horizon but on its way. The air had been still. Now a breeze came, all at once an isolated puff, strong and cold. Wiley tightened. “I don’t like it,” he said.
“Look, darling, I’m not asking you to conspire in a huge, ugly complicated lie. All you have to do is leave one thing out, not mention one simple little thing.”
Of course that wasn’t the reason Wiley had misgivings. More of the picture was fitting into place now. What he was getting into. What she was getting him into. With Lillian, would he always have to be filling things in? He remembered how conveniently she had exonerated her tendency to omit. No excuse for it. Well, he could get out right now, walk down the slope, not even look back at her, retreat, eve
ntually reach Tunja and then someplace else. However … even if he could leave Lillian just like that, it would be the wrong move, he thought, considering the possibilities that might lay ahead. Strange, this countryside didn’t appear capable of yielding up anything as precious as emeralds.
He sliced away some of the apple’s face so it was fresh again. Took a bite. She had nibbled hers to the core between words. He told her, “Let’s hope I remember to call you Penny. It was Penny, wasn’t it?”
“Lillian’s okay now.” She slapped the gearshift into low to get them under way again.
“What about a last name?”
“I’m using my mother’s, my middle—Mayo. See? No lie, I’m just omitting Holbrook.”
“And who am I supposed to be?”
“My man.”
She said it as though anything else wouldn’t be the truth.
19
They bivouacked on the hillside in a stand of trees, where they wouldn’t be spotted from the air.
Miguel had chosen the location. He and his two comrades had cleared the area and made a firepit of loose stones by the time Lillian and Wiley arrived.
Miguel wasn’t pleased when he saw the jeep, so obviously a painted-over army vehicle. The first thing he wanted to know was whether it was stolen. Lillian assured him it wasn’t, but it still bothered him. He drove it into some thick, tall brush and covered it with branches.
Supper was already on, simmering. Locro de choclos, a thick potato soup with whole ears of corn in it, salt and lots of pepper. They ate it as the sun dropped out of sight, and afterwards, when it was surely night, Miguel, Lillian and Wiley went up to the farmhouse.
It was an adobe place, two rooms, a large everything room and a small bedroom. Because it was situated on such a steep hill, the bedroom was on a higher level. The bedroom had been an addition in 1874. There was a wood floor. The owner, Frederico Lucho, was proud there was a wood floor. When he was five he had helped his father put in the floor, handed his father nail after nail. Frederico Lucho was now seventy. He looked ninety but he moved like forty. He had no children. There had been many tries, three wives, one that ran away, two that died, so Lucho believed it was his fault that he had no children. But he never admitted that to anyone.
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