Open Pit

by Marguerite Pigeon

  A week of picking up and putting down the phone passed before she finally called Sylvie Duchamp and her husband, Benoît Thériault. She knew Benoît had been living with their adult daughter for nearly a year, and Danielle reached him first. “It is a hole I cannot fill,” he said, a bit cryptically, when she explained about the note and her idea to see where the directions would lead. Then, after a minute, he added, “It’s a sinkhole. For me, there is no way out.” His voice had the same thin, scratchy quality that Danielle remembered from the funeral in Montreal. Sylvie was more together. “Anything to bring justice,” she said. Danielle made clear that she was not planning to contact the police. Sylvie paused. “Police? I don’t mean them. I mean, just knowing this note is a lie and he’s really dead.”

  Sylvie never forgave the police or Foreign Affairs for the way she and Benoît were treated after the abduction. How they weren’t permitted to recover Antoine’s body for several days while the other hostages and the captured kidnappers — Delmi and Cristóbal — were questioned. The police didn’t believe the story that was emerging, one in which a future politician had inexplicably gone to end the abduction but had passed a weapon to one of the kidnappers when two strangers appeared out of nowhere. They insisted it was illogical for Carlos, a man who had just disarmed the kidnappers, to have re-armed Pepe, the leader of that group. Besides, the police maintained that the two strangers, both dead, had been found unarmed.

  Marta Ramos, who didn’t leave the families’ side for days on end, had prepared them for resistance from the authorities. The strangers had probably been working for MaxSeguro, she said. Marta didn’t know how they’d managed to find the kidnappers, but said it was entirely possible the security firm had collaborated with the police, especially Antonio de la Riva Hernández, who she knew had been friendly with Manuel Sobero for many years. She pointed out that following Danielle’s call to the embassy, she and the others had been whisked away within minutes after the police arrived. Who knew what Hernández had ordered done at the crime scene, whether he’d disposed of the trackers’ guns and anything else linking them to NorthOre, and therefore to Hernández himself?

  When Sylvie and Benoît pleaded with their embassy to follow up on these allegations, they were told to be patient. Their son’s body had been located and would be exhumed shortly. Embassy staff claimed they had no jurisdiction to act, that the Salvadoran police were not requesting any further help in the investigation.

  The couple eventually took their son home. After that, the Canadian embassy quietly let the whole matter go. They’d lost one hostage, yes, but it had been an unavoidable consequence of the actions of the kidnapper named Rita, who had mutinied and caused the leader, Pepe Molina Domingo, to fire. A single bullet had passed beside Antoine’s lower spine and pierced his bowel. Nothing could have prevented it, from the point of view of the embassy. It didn’t help that the then-Ambassador, Catharine Keil, left her post not long afterwards to take over the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica. Her replacement was not keen to reopen the file. Hernández, meanwhile, refused to speak to anyone about the abduction, and no one will ever know exactly what arrangement he made with Sobero, if any, because he had a massive stroke in 2007 that left him in a twenty-four-hour care facility. After that, Sylvie and Benoît stopped caring what any official had to tell them, and even about each other’s words of comfort.

  Jorge has to ask directions twice more, once from a group of teenage boys sitting on stools outside a one-room house playing a video game on a console hooked up to a small television, the power cord running through a window and inside. They’re taciturn, absorbed in their game, dressed in jeans and armless undershirts. But one, whose back is to Danielle and whose handgun is clearly visible, tucked in above his back pocket, gets up and offers to show the way.

  “Gracias,” says Jorge, but the boy ignores him. He leads them through several more left and right turns to a particularly long, low building with several doors opening out of it. It’s painted blue, as the note said it would be.

  “Quién busca?” the boy asks, lifting his arm to indicate that Jorge should choose a door.

  Jorge turns to Danielle.

  She doesn’t want to use the name on her tongue. It feels magical, like it could unleash danger. After a long pause, during which the boy starts to look agitated, she takes a stab: “El boracho,” she says. The drunk.

  The boy half-smiles and points to the leftmost door. Jorge thanks him, passes him a decent quantity of pesos, and, circumventing a pile of still-smoldering burnt garbage where a chicken pecks, they reach it. Danielle turns, she and Pedro nod at one another, and he and Jorge withdraw. Danielle stands at the door alone, feeling extremely nervous. She knocks.

  No answer.

  She knocks again.

  After a moment, someone speaks from inside. “Sí,” says a sleepy, muffled voice. Danielle pushes the knobless door, finding it unlocked, and enters into a pitch black, windowless room with a linoleum floor. Its warped edges ripple under her sneakers. The space is so dark she’s afraid to take another step. A strong smell envelops her, prominently of tobacco, but also of burned corn and rum.

  “Close the door,” says the voice from the far right corner. Before she shuts out all the light, Danielle distinguishes a figure on a mattress. It’s oppressively hot. She waits for her eyes to adjust before announcing herself. “Soy yo, Daniela.”

  The man, who must not have been curious enough to wonder whom he’d permitted to enter, gives a start. “No,” he says.

  “Yes. It’s me. If I could sit down. . .” she says, feeling weak. Danielle watches as the vague outline of the man shifts, sitting up and reaching. A click, and a television, the volume turned down low, comes on. Its flashing, bluish light fills the room, imprinting itself on and dimly illuminating the face Danielle has hoped she would find here and also has long hoped never to see again. It doesn’t look like the newspaper photos. It’s older, thicker. The hair is too long at the sides and matted, drooping clownishly. Pepe Molina Domingo has survived, again. Milagro. Danielle feels a physical sadness at this theme of his life. She realizes that she has never met him, not properly, with his face exposed, which is strange, because she feels she knows him so well.

  “You think they’ll let you take me out of here,” says Pepe, swinging his feet to the floor. This starts out as a question, but ends like a dare. He lights a cigarette.

  Danielle thinks of the man they saw on the way in, of his muscles and his shotgun. “Someone in Los Pampanos gave Marta Ramos a note.”

  “Marta,” he mumbles, like he’s running through memories.

  “Marta Ramos Ramos.”

  “Yes. She’s still working against the mine. They dropped the charges against her. . . . Anyway, the note said we might find you here.” Danielle fingers the worn piece of paper, now damp in her palm. She looks deeper into the room. There’s very little to it. On her left is a plain wood table. Making no sudden moves, she steps over and leans against it. “You’re alright here?” she asks.

  “I work nights. They come and get me. It’s temporary.” There’s real sorrow in the way Pepe admits to whatever he’s admitting to. Violence on behalf of the gangs, probably. The price he pays for hiding out in this place. Or maybe just fear that he’s wrong, that this situation is permanent.

  “Will it cost you? Talking to me?” Danielle asks, but she receives no answer. The light from the television flickers more quickly over Pepe’s round face. “I brought you something,” she says, and reaches into her shoulder bag. “The Liberador. A whole issue from spring of 2006 devoted to. . .” Danielle can’t make the word “kidnapping” come out. “. . . to what happened.” She holds up the weekly. Its articles each place the abduction in a different context: NorthOre’s destruction of the land in Los Pampanos, post-civil war economics, mass migration of Salvadorans to the U.S. Marta thought Pepe would be interested. Danielle agreed, but now she doesn’t feel like she should cross the small space that separates her from him to presen
t it. She indicates that she’s leaving it on the table. “And two more things. One is a letter. From Antoine’s family.”

  At this, Pepe’s face clearly shows fear. Danielle feels the same. That letter has been like a radioactive rock beckoning from her desk ever since she received it about a week after speaking to Syl-vie Duchamp. It was accompanied by a short note for her, signed by both of Antoine’s parents, saying they felt strongly that if Pepe is alive, he has to know what their son’s death has meant.

  Danielle’s hand shakes as she places it on top of the Liberador. She planned to say something more about Antoine, but it’s like the room is erasing all her careful speeches. “I knew Carlos,” she blurts out instead.

  Across the room, Pepe puts his hands to his face.

  “I knew him in 1980. That’s why he came.” She doesn’t mention the hurt Adrian caused her, the child they had together. Aida’s name doesn’t belong here.

  Even using Carlos’s name aloud is jarring. Danielle decided the moment he was shot never to say a bad word about him again in public. Her last report about Pepe’s life, the one she’d scribbled down and read to Carlos over the phone (a call, she later realized, that he must have taken from very nearby), disappeared with Pepe, and Danielle said nothing to the police about what she knew of the connection between the two men. Only Aida heard everything, and she was awed enough by the profound contradictions in her late father to feel protective of the information.

  A subsequent police search of Carlos’s home and office computers turned up nothing. Not a surprise, Danielle thought, considering Carlos’s expertise in covering his tracks. Those who’d seen Carlos in public with Mitch Wall in the preceding months assumed Carlos had simply called upon his guerrilla background to end the abduction in order to help Wall out of a bad situation and save some lives while he was at it. If the photos had appeared — those with which Pepe had blackmailed Carlos into collaborating — maybe Danielle would have corrected this version of events and exposed Carlos as an operator who’d used NorthOre’s CEO to ensure Pepe’s demands were met and, therefore, hold on to his future. But nothing ever came of them. “You destroyed them, didn’t you?” she hears herself ask now. “Those pictures.”

  Pepe seems preoccupied. Maybe busy reviewing the events that put an end to his plans. It dawns on Danielle that maybe all this time he has believed that Carlos went into the mountains because he really did regret betraying their friendship. “I’m sorry,” she says. She feels compelled to provide some shred of good news. “Marta has seen Cristóbal. He’s fine.”

  In fact, Cristóbal has become a kind of pet cause of Marta’s. She visits him often, has a lawyer filing every paper towards his early release. He claims to be out of touch with his wife Rita since the abduction. When Marta once presented him with a newspaper clipping about returned migrants, from four months after it ended, with the headline: “Migrant Claims Kidnapper Among Those Who Crossed Border,” in which a young woman said she had met Rita while a group of illegal migrants was waiting to cross into Texas from Mexico, Cristóbal remained stone-faced. The woman in the newspaper had reported that Rita told her she was headed to Miami to live with her cousin and planned to send for her husband and children later. It took four more visits before Cristóbal would even use Rita’s name again.

  Danielle doesn’t know what to believe. She can only hope that Rita will forget about him, but she doubts it. “He’s never said anything to the police about you. Nothing.”

  Pepe still doesn’t respond.

  Danielle is suddenly aware of the time. She knows Pedro is waiting. He might be getting nervous.

  “The last thing is this,” she says, and, overcoming the inertia that seems endemic to the room, she walks over to Pepe with the gift in her hand. It’s a soiled, torn piece of thick cloth, maybe ten centimetres square, its colours set in a check pattern, terribly faded.

  Pepe snatches the cloth from her hand and glowers at it.

  Up close, Danielle gets a better look at his face. He’s younger-looking than she thought earlier, with a wide nose. “This is all that wasn’t confiscated. The head of the exhumation team gave it to one of his local workers, who kept it. Then the man gave it to Marta Ramos.”

  Pepe looks at the cloth again, this time with different eyes. He turns it over in his hands, which Danielle, looking down, can see are dirty on the backs. Familiar hands. And then Pepe puts his face into the cloth and breathes. Danielle knows she should back away, let him have his privacy, but she doesn’t. She wants something too. Something of Carlos’s to give to Aida so she can hold it to herself. As it is, her daughter has to make do with an idea of him that’s only half good.

  Danielle wants to believe what she’s seeing. But she has a doubt. No one really knows if this cloth is what Pepe thinks it is. Re-verte can’t say for sure. There wasn’t enough time. And nothing more came out of the ground to prove anything. The rest has been blown apart in a million ways with El Pico, now that NorthOre’s expansion is complete.

  A sharp knock at the door. Pepe instantly lifts his mattress and places the cloth under it, gets up and stands protectively in front of Danielle. “Sí!” he yells with a voice that sets off a chain of memories for Danielle. It’s his voice of detachment, the one he used throughout the abduction.

  The door opens and the man with the shotgun stands in the brilliant sunlight like a large cardboard cutout of a cowboy. Behind him, Danielle can see Pedro tensed, ready for anything.

  “You must be someone quite special to receive such an honoured guest,” says the guard. “All the way from Canada. Maybe you would like to tell us what makes you so special.”

  “She’s a friend of my family in Toronto. She brought me a letter from a relative. Here,” Pepe says, retrieving the letter from Sylvie and Benoît from the table. “You want to read it?” he says. “I dare you to understand a word. It’s in English.” He flaps the letter aggressively in front of the man Danielle realizes is both jail guard and protector, here to ensure that a valuable illegal, an asset to the gang, is not getting any ideas about leaving. Not yet.

  “You’ve already caused a lot of gossip,” the armed man says, beaten, letting the issue of the letter go. “We don’t need a past here.”

  Pepe holds his letter carefully at his side. “She’s leaving. She won’t be back.”

  “No,” says the gunman, stepping aside to indicate that Danielle should exit immediately. “I say she won’t.”

  As they both approach the door, Danielle sees Pepe and he sees her in broad daylight for the first time. His breath smells of alcohol. For a moment, Danielle wonders, in her faded vanity, how she must look, how it makes Pepe feel that his former hostage is thriving. She wants to ask how he plans to get out of here, how he bears it. She wants to know if his motives were ever pure, or if it was always as much about hurting Carlos Reyes as recovering something of his lost family.

  “Tell my sister not to write again,” says Pepe. Then he turns and closes the door.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people gave their time to help me understand gold mining, Central American politics and culture, kidnappings, stock market investment, helicopters, guns and more. I thank them all, particularly:

  In Canada: Grahame Russell and Rights Action, Mining Watch Canada, Sandra Cuffe, Chantal Venturi, Don Venturi, Robert Sparks, Bert Struik, Gina Wang, Gordon Smith, Bill Morgan, Sara Koopman, Ken Leigh, Mary Morgan, Jeff Hodgson and Marc-André Pigeon.

  In Honduras: Carlos Amador and the members of the Comité Regional Ambi-ental del Valle Siria; in La Esperanza, Berta Caceres and the members of COPINH.

  In El Salvador: Jaime Martínez, Jesus Morales, Damian Alegria, Katherine Miller, Juan Carlos Hernández, Remberto Nolasco, Helda Consuelo Molina, Wilma Angelica Santo, José Santo Márquez, Sister Noemi of the Bajo Lempa, and, especially, Padre Rogelio Ponseele in Perquín, the esteemed Mirna Perla, and generous hosts José Martir Pineda Nolasco and family.

  Thank you to the Fundación Valparaíso, where
I revised an early draft, and to Cindy Patton, my generous employer during much of the writing process.

  The editors and readers at NeWest reviewed my manuscript with careful attention. I thank them, especially Douglas Barbour. My own readers were Adam Frank, Jeff Hodgson, Marc-André Pigeon, Jean-Claude Pigeon, Anar Ali, and (twice, and with heart) Nick Kazamia. Sanchita Balanchandran checked a portion of the book.

  Lynn Coady, Madeleine Thien, Greg Hollingshead, Andreas Schroeder, Ann Shin, Nick Kazamia and Anar Ali all guided me through the labyrinthine publication process, for which I am grateful.

  My friends deserve a medal for years of encouragement, especially Nick Kazamia and Anar Ali, whose phone lines must be burned clear through. Thank you to my family for believing in me, starting with my mother, Dolly Pigeon, and my siblings, Marc-Andre Pigeon, Jeanne-Claire Sloan and Jean-Claude Pigeon, soul sister Colette Gignac, brother-in-law extraordinaire Kevin Sloan, compatriot Chris Guppy, and all of my cherished Pigeon, Shea, Venturi, Goth, Mirka, Grenier and Abolins aunts, uncles and cousins.

  Thank you to Merle Frank for coming along, and, most of all, to my closest reader, interlocutor and companion, Adam Frank, who gave me space, time and so much more — even the book’s title. Without these Franks, forget it.