“Assuming Carlos is prompt, you’ll be home Monday morning.”
In the end, she kept only two things from them: that Evan had seen Toño at her apartment—Toño had apparently been too incoherent to notice extra knocks and buzzers—and that Bobby had tried to rape her. She might’ve found the courage to tell them about Bobby, but the man in the suit became endlessly curious about the information on the thumb drive. He pressed her for details about what Richard had told her and what she’d seen in Bobby’s room.
“And where is it now?”
“Still hidden in Cesar’s room.” Luz’s fingers squeezed tight. Bobby’s taunting laugh echoed. “I didn’t have a chance to collect it this evening.”
After some cross-talk, the man said, “Bring it home Monday. We’ll figure out a way to get it from you. Don’t—whatever you do—hand it over until we get a look.”
“Anything else?” Toño asked the men.
“Think of the data she stole,” said not-Carlos with a head-toss toward Luz. “Once we make that information public, the Benavides will never recover.”
The man in the suit rose to leave. “And if what she says about eliminating Martin and thwarting his son’s aspirations is true, it does open great possibilities for us.”
Mixed in with the confusion, a tiny light of scheming avarice flickered and grew bright.
“See what else you can find out about who’s behind this.” Toño dismissed them with an unsteady wave. His cheeks were ashen under thick stubble. A thin line of spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth.
Jumping up, Luz asked if she should go, too.
“Not yet, Lulu.” Toño’s head lolled back onto the pillows after the men closed the door behind them. “I would like you to explain how you received the injuries my men noticed.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was after midnight when Luz was led upstairs to a bedroom. Alone, she succumbed to the tears Toño’s gruffness had forestalled. He’d gone scary silent when she told him how Bobby had cornered her in the stairwell. Head back and eyes closed, moving only his fingers—come on, more—he’d gotten the whole story. For the first time, Luz admitted not only the facts but her shame and fury.
Toño had always been a man of action—and few words. He motioned Luz to come sit next to him and wrapped his arms around her. “I understand.” Then, after a while, Toño murmured, “Hortensia Carrillo.” Pause. A moment of silence passed as they remembered Luz’s cousin who had been beaten beyond recognition, returned to her family in a trash bag. “Consuela Luna.” Another pause for the schoolteacher wife of one of the guerrillas who had been abducted by a group of drunken soldiers and never seen again. “The Ramirez twins.” Eleven years old, burned alive. Their litany of remembrance lasted a long time.
“I’m so sorry, Lulu. We won’t forget.”
Toño did understand.
Nevertheless, she was responsible for the deaths of more than twenty men, some of them Toño’s most trusted companions. And rather than treating her like the meddler she was, like the child who thought she could play with the big boys, he’d merely enlisted her assistance in trapping their killers. It was far kinder than she deserved.
Toño’s parting command to his men lingered: Find out who was behind the attack.
They obviously suspected Richard. When Luz tentatively voiced the obvious contradiction that an anti-Benavides position, like Richard’s and that of his team on the drug enforcement task force, translated to a pro-guerrilla stance, Toño had replied, “But he is the one person who knows you’re Emilio Concepcion’s daughter, the only person who would know to use you to get to us.”
And that appeared to settle it for him. Surely, though, Richard had divulged her identity to other people on his team. One of them could be double-crossing Richard, perhaps a co-conspirator in the U.S., like John-not-my-real-name from the State Department meeting, who would regard Luz only as a disposable pawn. John could easily have arranged for the tech guy in Miami to plant something on her.
Toño’s men had been extra-careful, taking her shoes and clothes, but she didn’t wear the same thing every day. If someone tracked her, the device was among the items in her purse—like Toño had said, credit card, cellphone. Even her photo ID for work.
Much more likely that someone here in Guatemala was responsible, someone with his—or her?—own agenda. The other agent at the Benavides’, Richard’s “someone on the inside,” might have conflicting allegiances: Alicia, for example, who worked for Martin and screwed his estranged son. Or the mysterious greaser-of-wheels could have been Raul de la Vega himself. As head of the household staff, he’d gotten her into the house with no formal interview, and he’d provided her ID. Or Father Espinosa, the old priest who tutored Cesar. Both men had known Martin for years, however; it didn’t make sense that either would work with U.S. forces to murder their old comrade. On the other hand, what was stopping the security-conscious Benavides from adding a location chip to each employee ID to monitor their whereabouts?
As questions swirled like smoke, Luz inexplicably dropped into a sound sleep, waking to a knock on the door and sunlight. A boy brought in a tray with coffee, fruit, and rolls.
She’d expected to chafe at Sunday’s enforced inactivity. Instead, after breakfast, having no place to sit, she curled up in bed and napped. When Luz woke again, the room was hot and stuffy. The window was nailed shut so she opened the door. A breeze wafted along the hall. She ventured into the bathroom at the end of the corridor and bathed. She reclined in the tub, slack-jawed, and let the ripples of warmth wash over her. The bruise on her belly had faded overnight, and yellow showed along the edges. She touched a hand to her ear. The scab was no longer inflamed.
With the much-needed rest, her physical injuries were healing, and possibly her mental ones as well. Doors slammed and voices called on the lower floors—Luz ignored them all. The business being conducted was not hers. Toño sent for her in the middle of the afternoon. They played cards and talked, deliberately casual and light. She figured Toño was trying not to upset her as much as she was going out of her way not to distress him further.
After dark on Sunday, she lit a candle by her bed, intending to mull over the jumbled pieces of her puzzle, but her thoughts drifted to Evan instead, and Luz fell asleep with a smile. In the morning, the candle wax lay in an opaque puddle on the saucer.
Richard slammed down the Sunday newspaper. “What the hell is wrong with you, boy?” His southern accent, normally held in check by the clipped syllables of his military training, resurfaced.
“What?” Evan piled aggrieved innocence into the word.
“You’re as jumpy as a—shit, Evan, I don’t know what. You’re making me crazy with your muttering and pacing.”
In fact, Evan thought he should be the one snapping at Richard. The interminable weekend had taken a toll on his patience.
Saturday afternoon: Richard went out shortly after Evan returned from Luz’s sugar demonstration. Evan tried to paint, but all he managed to do was slap paints on a canvas and muddle them.
Saturday night: Richard came home with groceries from the fancy supermarket and made Thai stir-fry. He sent Evan out for beer. Both men drank too much.
Sunday morning: Evan woke with a hangover. He went for a jog—to clear his head, he’d told Richard—running past Luz’s place twice and ringing her buzzer. No answer. An unusual late-season rainstorm began as loud splatters on the concrete and became a torrential downpour before he got home.
Sunday afternoon: Richard complained the weather was too bad to go out, so he parked himself in Evan’s living room and read the Sunday New York Times. Evan, who’d been counting on having the house to himself, set his cellphone to vibrate and stuck it in his pants pocket in case Luz called. Then he took out his sketchbook, with lackluster results. Midafternoon, he gave up, popped open a beer he didn’t want, and nibbled some peanuts. Apparently, he was also pacing.
What Evan really wanted to do was level with his
uncle. This polite charade was driving him crazy.
“You got something to say, say it,” snapped Richard.
Monday morning, an old woman brought Luz rolls and coffee. “After you eat, come downstairs,” she said. “It’s time to leave.”
When Luz arrived in the central courtyard, men—Carlos among them—were loading vans with food and bedding. Guns. Toño stood off to the side, dressed in camouflage, wearing sturdy boots.
“Oh, no,” said Luz. “You can’t go back to the mountains. You need rest—”
“Come.” Toño clapped his hand on her upper arm and led her to a small room off the courtyard. Shoulder-high stacked boxes, an old metal desk, two rickety folding chairs. Toño settled gingerly in one chair, and Luz took the other.
“I would be worse than useless to my men in this condition,” he said. “I’m playing dress-up. I will send them off with a salute—and crawl upstairs to rest.” His smile lit only the bottom of his face. “The rest of us will be leaving shortly—in case this location is compromised. As for you, based on the description you gave us, that Richard Clement did not enter your building over the weekend. Go home now. I trust you to negotiate these next few days.”
Toño squeezed the sides of the chair, starting to haul himself to his feet, then winced and faltered. “Bobby Benavides, that pig,” he said, as he dropped. “Word is he left the city early this morning and is not due back for three days. By then, I want you away from that house. Understood?”
Luz nodded—feigning the compliance Toño expected was easier than going toe-to-toe—although his deadline might not mesh with her plans. If the material on the flash drive wasn’t unquestionably fatal for Bobby and if she hadn’t gotten clearer about how to proceed with the bombing—well, she’d stick around as long as necessary to guarantee a suitable payback.
Meanwhile, Toño was sending someone to pick up the thumb drive tonight. So today was her last chance to inspect it. At the market this morning, she’d see if Evan could bring his laptop over so she could read the drive before work. Luz imagined spotting Evan in the crowd—tall and pale, wearing his lumberman’s jacket. Maybe he’d be looking the other way, so she could gaze unobserved. Then he’d turn and see her, his smile would brighten, and he’d hurry over. And since Toño and his crew were relocating, she could tell him the whole story of her weekend. Tell him everything this time.
Back in the central patio, Luz retrieved her belongings from Carlos while Toño gave instructions to the young couple who’d driven Luz home from the mountains the previous week.
“Hasta luego, Lulu. Take care of yourself.”
“You, too, Toño. I love you.”
He hugged her then, hard. The barbed stubble on his cheek had grown out to soft fur. Tears pricked her eyelids. Hasta luego. Until later. Later, when?
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Richard emerged from the bathroom in long pajama bottoms, damp hair plastered to his skull and a towel over his shoulder.
“You make coffee?” he called.
Evan gestured to the press pot on the table. “All set.” He squeezed his hands tighter around his mug, lifted it to his mouth, and took another big gulp. Richard had gone quiet the evening before when Evan told him he wanted nothing more to do with the courier work. As a consequence, Evan had slept poorly, mulling the as-yet unnecessary defense he’d prepared for the angry grilling that hadn’t materialized.
The older man pulled out a chair and settled heavily into it. “Ah,” sighed Richard. “I’m going to miss this good Guatemalan coffee.” He picked up the paper and riffled the sections apart. He selected the sports pages and slid the rest across the table to Evan.
“Miss it?” Evan asked. This was new information.
“Two more days and I’ll be out of your hair.” Richard shook the newspaper into a different rectangle.
“Two days?” Evan’s thumb circled round and round the rim of his mug, his thoughts as unproductive as a dog chasing its tail. It was one thing to wish Richard gone. Mission accomplished. That part of his life over. Ready to get back to painting and to Luz.
Here was the frightening flip side, however: Richard wouldn’t leave unless he’d completed what he set out to accomplish. What Luz was supposed to accomplish.
“Why?” Evan asked. “What’s happened?”
“Not much.” Richard positioned the crisply folded newspaper at right angles to edges of the table and smoothed the corners with his hands. “But things are coming to a head. I’m going to need your help to—”
The dark liquid in Evan’s mug sloshed dangerously close to the rim.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I got what you said last night, and I appreciate your misgivings.” Richard chewed on his cheek before continuing. “You caught me by surprise, Evan. I didn’t realize that your scruples”—Richard made it sound like an infectious disease—“would interfere with your fighting the good fight.” A pause as Richard communed with the contents of his coffee cup. “However, you simply cannot bow out in the middle of an operation. I’m counting on you. You with me so far?”
With you? Not exactly. “If you mean ‘do I understand,’ yes,” said Evan, “but—”
“Right,” said Richard. “This is the last thing I’ll ask of you.”
Evan’s breakfast of eggs and toast congealed into a lump in his stomach. After what he’d blurted to his uncle, Richard was nuts to expect him to help. His mouth opened, but no words came out.
Richard’s smile was the sort that barely crinkled the eyes. Challenging, not amused. “So, about today …”
Luz trekked home from the market. Evan had not shown up. She’d made the circuit twice, just in case. Luz drummed her fingers on the little table where the phone sat and thought about risking a phone call to ask Evan about his laptop; then she thought about unintended negative consequences.
No. No call when Richard might overhear. She’d revert to Plan A, or a variation on it. She’d copy the thumb drive at work using Cesar’s computer. Meanwhile, she’d stay home until it was time to leave in case Evan phoned. Call me.
As she stared at the telephone, it jangled. She grabbed the receiver. “Aló?”
A gravelly old man’s voice inquired with polite Spanish circumlocution if he was indeed speaking to Señorita Luz Aranda and then announced he was Doctor Hector Guzman.
Darn. She’d forgotten to call him back. “I’m sorry I didn’t return your call, Dr. Guzman.”
“There is some urgency.”
With the rest of her life in such an upheaval, Luz doubted anything the doctor could tell her qualified as urgent. “What is it?”
“I’d feel more comfortable discussing the matter in person.”
A cone of silence descended around Luz, bringing with it a disconcerting shift of reality, so she stood in two places at once. She was here, in a bright ground-floor apartment in Guatemala City, looking through louvered windows into a backyard alive with hibiscus and bougainvillea. Holding a phone receiver, a doctor saying Please come to the office. At the same time, she was in her mother’s brown box in New Hampshire, the third-floor apartment with uneven pine flooring covered with braided rugs, all maroon and brown. Gray outside. And on the phone a doctor whose solemnity told her everything except the dreadful details.
“As it happens, tomorrow is the earliest I can see you in my office.” Dr. Guzman cleared his throat several times. “It is imperative, however, that I pass along some information immediately. You brought a substance to Laboratorio Zetino to be tested.”
Luz rotated her hunched shoulders backward and then forward as she made the circuitous transition from her memory of that other doctor’s life-changing call to the medical lab. To the sugar. To Richard.
“Because you had listed me as your physician, the lab sent the results to my office.”
Ohhhh. Information. Luz jumped up so fast she bumped her knee on the table.
“Miss Aranda, the sugar tested was contaminated with cadmium.”
“Cadmium?” A quick m
ental review of any residual chemistry knowledge came up empty. Luz asked, “What’s that?”
“It’s one of the heavy metals—like lead or copper or mercury. Or arsenic.”
At the last word, Luz’s knees buckled. She knelt on the floor, head resting on the seat of her sofa.
“Cadmium can make its way into the sugar supply,” continued the doctor, “if the cane or beets from which the sugar is made grow in toxic soil, soil contaminated by years of fertilizer. It happens in Europe from time to time, usually causing a disease cluster—several cases, in other words, linked in proximity—but I have never heard of a case in Guatemala.”
“Cadmium?” Luz couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.
As though she’d asked a sensible question, Dr. Guzman said, “It’s a silvery powder. There are lots of industrial uses for it—batteries, electroplating, solar panels, some paints that are particularly brilliant.”
The doctor’s pedantic explanation continued. “Cadmium is toxic at levels one-tenth that of lead or mercury.”
“Toxic?” Only one strangled word at a time escaped her constricted throat.
“Yes, it’s quite poisonous. Also, unlike other heavy metals—zinc, say, or copper, which human bodies require in small amounts—cadmium has no useful function.” He cleared his throat again. “All heavy metal poisoning affects the central nervous system. Long-term exposure results in slowly progressing physical, muscular, and mental degeneration—muscular weakness, tremors, shaking, fatigue, confusion. All of which raises the question: What is it doing in such a high concentration in the sugar sample you had analyzed?”
Poison.
“It will be necessary to run two tests to be certain,” said the doctor. “However, in my professional opinion, you are unlikely to be suffering from ALS.”
Not ALS. Instead, I’m being poisoned.
Toward the Light Page 21