One Year of Ugly

by Caroline Mackenzie

  ‘No, no one else was majorly hurt,’ she said at last. And again, I had the sensation of my muscles softening, loosening, my lips parting as I exhaled in quiet relief.

  ‘That’s good to know,’ I said, trying to sound casual, and then wanting to veer the conversation into safer territory: ‘Does Mauricio know about Vanessa and Che?’

  ‘He left to go see them just before you came out. Sancho, bless him, he’s been pacing those hospital hallways all night – from Vanessa’s bedside to Che’s cot and back again.’ She sighed through pursed lips, shaking her head. ‘I thought Román had all the houses monitored in case of anything … it was exactly the scenario he wanted to avoid. There was so little time to plan the raid. Less than twenty-four hours from the time the AG decided to have his party at the Pie. There wasn’t much Román could put in place to protect all of you in that timeframe, especially since he was in Venezuela that entire day … and there must’ve been a leak, someone who told Ugly I was back in Trinidad, or that I was the informant. Could’ve been anyone … a rat in Special Forces, the pilot, I don’t know. So they hit the Palacios houses hard. Exactly what we were afraid of, but—’

  I squinted at her as she talked, as baffled as if it was the re-incarnated and reassembled spinster cat sitting there telling me it was an informant working with Román against Ugly.

  ‘I’m completely lost,’ I interrupted. ‘What are you talking about – Special Forces? You and Román were working together? Start from the beginning.’

  So she did.

  Here’s what happened after Aunt Milagros lost her shit, shot the Dominican kid and was smuggled back to Venezuela by pirogue.

  As instructed by Román, she lay low and got a discreet job in Caracas, working with a Catholic NGO called the Roman Catholic Army Against Human Trafficking, or RAT (because RCAAHT isn’t exactly a workable acronym). RAT’s senior members were keen to get as much intel as possible from Aunt Milagros. They knew all about Ugly and his liaisons in Caracas – turned out Ugly was responsible for half the sex slaves trafficked out of Venezuela, some of whom had survived it all and clawed their way back to Caracas, which is sure saying something about how desperate they were. Back in Venezuela, they turned to RAT to rebuild their lives. They all cited a man named Ugly as the boss behind their ordeals, though they’d never seen him in person.

  At this point, Aunt Milagros interrupted herself to say, ‘Román wasn’t involved in any of that. He just arranged the paying relocation clients.’ I could’ve sworn she said that for my benefit from an almost imperceptible shift in her tone, but I stayed poker-faced and she continued with her story.

  Aunt Milagros’s intel brought her deep into RAT’s inner circle. She was the first person they knew to have had first-hand dealings with Ugly. It was RAT’s first real stab at building a case it could bring to the Venezuelan or Trinidadian authorities, to get them to stop turning a blind eye. Aunt Milagros helped connect crucial dots, filled essential information gaps, until finally all RAT had to do was get tangible evidence against Ugly. Testimonies were one thing, but witnesses could always be snuffed out or bribed. Indisputable proof was what they’d need to campaign to bring Ugly’s operation crashing down – a fat enough file had to be bait for someone, whether it was the Trinidadian or Venezuelan police or even Interpol. So when it came down to it, what RAT really needed was a rat.

  ‘I knew Román was the man for the job,’ she said. ‘He did risk his life to save mine, after all.’

  I thought of the countless times I’d wished I had some way of reaching Román other than the Ugly-compromised number. ‘How’d you actually get in touch with him, though, to get him on board without Ugly finding out?’

  Aunt Milagros tapped the side of her nose. ‘RAT has its own intelligence network, bruja.’

  So Aunt Milagros reached out to Román and he was indeed at the end of his tether. ‘He told me he was through with Ugly. He’d hated working for him for years, but it was either work for Ugly or Ugly’d see to it that Román never worked for anyone again. We were his only lifeline.’

  Román was just the Golden Egg RAT needed. He had all the intel on the illicit Pink Pie, its laundered income, and its illegal stripper recruitment strategies – three easy iron-clad charges. So things steamed ahead and RAT, having an ingrained mistrust of Venezuelan authorities, got Trinidad’s Anti-Human Trafficking Unit on board. Román fed the Unit spoonful after spoonful of information on the Pie’s systems of money laundering, recruitment and daily operations, garnished with copies of bank statements from the Cayman Islands, nabbing himself full amnesty from the T&T Government for his cooperation.

  Ugly’s legal coffin had been built. All they needed were the nails to hold it together: the files and security footage from the Pie.

  With charges in place and warrants signed, the Unit had been in the process of devising Operation Pie Smash when Román learned of the good old Attorney General’s birthday soirée, thanks to Ugly’s urgent orders for Román to go immediately with the light-aircraft pilot on his payroll to collect the host of extra dancers for the auspicious occasion. Only hours later, Román was on the ground in Caracas, drawing on his links in the seedy caraqueño underworld to source two dozen high-grade strippers willing to do a twenty-four-hour turnaround in Port of Spain.

  ‘That’s how I got involved,’ said Aunt Milagros. ‘Román wouldn’t be back in Trinidad with Ugly’s shipment of fresh meat until a couple hours before the raid, so he couldn’t put anything in place to get all of you out of the Pie when it all went down. Plus he didn’t trust anyone but me to help him without selling him out to Ugly.’

  So in Caracas he made contact with Aunt Milagros who slipped herself onto the plane under the guise of stripper manageress, without RAT or anyone other than Román ever knowing she’d left the country.

  ‘Couldn’t he have just called us, though, from a burner phone or something to warn us and then we could’ve made our own escape plans?’ I asked.

  ‘Por favor,’ she said with an eye-roll. ‘And have one of you slip up and give something away? Or have your father or Mauricio come up with some elaborate Charlie’s Angels escape plan that would’ve got you all shot or arrested?’ She tutted and shook her head. ‘Too dangerous, Yola. We had to keep it simple. The fewer people who knew, the better.’

  She tilted her chair onto its back legs like a classroom delinquent as she lit a cigarette and wrapped up her story. ‘Anyway, that’s how everything fell into place so beautifully – busting the Pie, rounding up the illegal dancers, gathering all the financial and operational records, the security footage. Arresting Ugly and the AG to boot was just a bonus the Unit could’ve never seen coming.’

  It was the wildest thing I’d ever heard – Aunt Milagros an informant on Ugly, turning Román, jetting over here at the drop of a hat amidst a planeload of strippers. She knew it was wild, too, was watching me with just the faintest glimmer of self-satisfaction, sucking the cigarette hands-free and blowing smoke through her nose. Part of me wished Aunt Celia could’ve seen her: the woman she’d always called a meek church mouse, the cowering virgin terrified of life. And now here she was grabbing life by the balls, mounting it and riding it hard. I could picture Aunt Celia gripping Aunt Milagros’s hand: Finally! The sister I was meant to have!

  ‘So,’ I said, about a thousand questions chambered at the tip of my tongue, ‘why’d Ugly keep all those records anyway? Why leave a paper trail and keep security footage and all of that?’

  ‘Román said Ugly’s paranoid. Thought the manager would skim off the top if everything wasn’t meticulously recorded for Ugly’s review. And the footage,’ she paused to give a little snort, smoke barrelling thickly from her nostrils, ‘that was just plain smart – think of all the men who went in and out of there. Cameras in every inch of the place. That’s golden blackmail fodder if Ugly ever needed it. And Román knew all about it, where everything was stored and filed in the club. He was a godsend.’

  And there we were again: Romá
n. As mildly reassuring as it had been for her to say no one else we knew had been majorly hurt, I couldn’t ignore that question still clawing at my insides – where was Román now?

  She seemed almost to be waiting on me to ask more about him as she stretched her arm out over the table to flick the butt of her cigarette, dropping a lump of ash into her empty coffee mug. Letting her words – that Román had been a godsend – hang heavily in the air.

  I gave in: ‘And you said Román wasn’t hurt in all this?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ she said, taking a final drag before crushing the cigarette under her shoe. I nodded slowly, working my ass off to appear neutral, and sensing that Aunt Milagros had more to say. Luckily she continued before I had to ask. ‘Should be on his way to Spain as we speak. He’s not safe here now Ugly knows he was the rat.’

  ‘Oh.’ Could she hear the disappointment? ‘Makes sense.’

  Aunt Milagros was considering me carefully, tapping an upended cigarette packet to draw out yet another one. ‘It does make sense,’ she said, almost cautiously as though afraid of treading on my feelings. ‘He needs to stay safe. He’ll be a key witness against Ugly when it all goes to trial.’

  ‘Mhmm.’ I ran my finger along the rim of my drained mug. I didn’t want to look at her.

  ‘Spain is a great place for a fresh start,’ said Aunt Milagros, cupping the tip of a fresh cig, flicking a silver Zippo open to light it.

  ‘Yup, Spain sounds great.’ There was a humming in my ears. My vision was blurring wetly. I pushed my chair back. ‘Be right back. I have to pee.’

  I sat on the lip of the porcelain tub, holding my face in my hands. I didn’t want to cry or scream or throw things. I felt none of the usual impulses of my temper. I simply felt empty. Disembowelled. Exsanguinated. Like all of my organs had been scooped out, my veins and arteries pulled out one by one like threads, and I was just skin. Hollow. But he’s safe. He’s safe. He had to leave. Ugly would kill him otherwise. As useless as telling yourself It won’t hurt, I promise as a train hurtles towards you, about to plough you over, crush your bones into the steel tracks. Because no matter what, hearing Román was gone hurt, would keep hurting. Of course I was relieved that he was okay, but still … he was gone. Maybe not permanently, not six-feet under, but out of my life all the same. It felt puerile to be so upset, wishing he were there when I knew how dangerous Trinidad was for him now, when I knew he’d have had no way to warn me beforehand that he was leaving. But I was devastated anyway. Would I ever see him again? How would I see him? When?

  A pounding on the bathroom door jarred me out of my wallowing. ‘Yola, I’m totally about to pee my pants here!’ Zulema. ‘Can you open up? I’ll pee in the sink if I have to! I’m like bursting!’

  She didn’t notice the look on my face as I opened the door and she flew in, slamming the door behind her with a ‘Thankyouthankyouthankyouuuuuu!’ but when I passed the hall mirror, I was taken aback at how sallow I suddenly looked, like I hadn’t seen sunlight in a month. I had to pull it together. Román was safe. That was all that mattered. And Papá was unhurt. I had to focus my energies on that now: on taking care of Mamá and figuring out the next steps to get Papá out. I’d wait until later that night to let myself ache over Román, to immerse myself in the warm, spongy memories of us, because now I felt certain that that was all I’d ever have of Román again – memories.

  * * *

  Later, before the Manriques emerged – we remembered from their days as our ‘guests’ that they’d reliably sleep until nearly ten in the morning – Zulema, Mamá and I got the scoop on how they’d gotten involved in everything.

  ‘Boy, was that a shocker,’ Aunt Milagros grunted. ‘Who’d have thought those posh snobs would have been working with illegal refugees for aeons.’

  ‘Seriously? Those two?’ gaped Zulema.

  ‘Turns out they weren’t hoteliers at all. They’re as blue-blooded as it gets, millionaire philanthropists. They had to leave the country when Maduro found out they’d set up a network of halfway homes across Latin America for refugees and Opositores on the run. Their assets were frozen and they had to get out ASAP, hence how they landed up at your house. Luckily they had more than enough money left in offshore accounts to buy this place and keep fighting the good fight.’

  I was flabbergasted. ‘How’d you find out about all this?’

  ‘RAT knows about the work they were doing – are still doing for refugees. They dealt with them a lot when they were still in Venezuela.’

  The Manriques, bleeding-heart humanitarians? There was an oxymoron if ever there was one. If the Manriques were a couple of regular Harriet Tubmans weaving an Underground Railroad across Latin America for our compatriots, then who knew – maybe Ugly was the Dalai Lama mentoring orphans in his free time. Anything was possible.

  We stayed clustered around the house shyly that day, embarrassed that the Manriques, our former nemeses, had seen us at our worst the night before. They were hospitable, laid out great spreads of food, gave us one-size-fits-all beige scrubs apparently kept on hand for refugees with no possessions and which made us look like prison inmates, and were, I guess, kind in their own way. But just as Stalin could kiss and coddle Soviet babies for postal stamp photo ops on the one hand and then implement genocidal famine on the other, our munificent custodians were still Vicente and Veneranda – as bounteous in their vainglory as in their magnanimity. Generous as they were, they still found insidious ways to needle, self-aggrandize, and berate, driving the bamboo shoots of their smarmy do-goodery under all our fingernails. So it goes without saying: things were tense, especially as we awaited updates from Aunt Milagros, who’d been reaching out to her contacts for information on my father’s status via a burner phone, calling her RAT comrades to see what they could do to help.

  By that evening, we had a better idea of where things stood, with us and the other in absentia family members – it wasn’t all roses.

  First: Aunt Milagros got confirmation that Ugly had indeed found out, probably from the pilot, that she was alive and in cahoots with Román. That meant we couldn’t ever go back to our house, as Ugly’s people would be on the lookout, which, I realized with such a powerful wrench of the gut that I felt I’d been hit with a wrecking ball, meant I had no way of ever getting Aunt Celia’s manuscript back. I could have kicked myself for hanging onto the final chapter like it was the last drop of some magic Celia-conjuring elixir. Why hadn’t I read it when I had the chance? Why hadn’t I at least scanned and uploaded the whole fucking thing? I comforted myself that at least my near-complete novel draft was safely nestled in the fluffy white cloud of Dropbox, accessible wherever and whenever. I asked Aunt Milagros if there was any way someone could bring the manuscript to me; it was right there on the nightstand, I could picture it, that chunk of Celia’s consciousness and memory immortalized in warm, familiar pages curled at the edges from being re-read dozens of times, but: ‘No one can go to the house and then come back here, Yola, it would lead them right to us. I’m sorry, but consider all of your things in that house gone.’

  Second: Papá wasn’t going to be deported. At least not for a while. As Aunt Milagros learned from RAT, the Director of Public Prosecutions wasn’t going to let Ugly slip away this time – he wanted full depositions from every single person who’d been arrested at the club. That meant sourcing court interpreters, conducting and transcribing the actual interrogations, translating those transcripts, and holding everyone at that detention centre until the DPP’s office had everything it needed. And with the glacial pace of Trinidadian bureaucracy, not to mention the frequent long weekends due to almost fortnightly public holidays, there was no risk of Papá being deported any time soon, giving Aunt Milagros ample time to brainstorm with RAT and get them working with the UN Refugee Agency to hopefully build a compelling asylum application for my father and all of us to relocate to another country far from the reaches of Ugly’s henchmen. It wasn’t the ideal scenario, especially not for Papá, but at least we k
new he was safe, and Aunt Milagros was confident that his and our horizons would be sunny once she and her RAT comrades put their heads together with the UN folk.

  Third: as Mauricio learned via indiscreet hospital staff that morning when he went to visit Vanessa, Sancho would’ve fared better had he stayed behind at the Pie with my father. Although the police never responded to the reports of gunshots at Mauricio’s house, possibly because Ugly’s gunmen had seen to it that they wouldn’t, but more than likely because they just couldn’t be bothered, the Port of Spain General Hospital had dutifully reported Vanessa’s bullet wounds, and a couple officers had actually shown up to prepare a report of how the shooting had happened and interview the ER doctors who’d tended to her. With Vanessa heavily medicated, dipping in and out of a dense morphine-induced sleep, there was only one person those docs could point the police to for an explanation: Sancho. Sober, but panicked into absolute stupidity. He fumbled and bumbled, not saying anything about Ugly or the Pie, but not saying anything comprehensible either. His sub-standard English and visible panic were tantamount to a yellow Star of David in Nazi-occupied Poland: a glaring beacon for the authorities in charge to fuck with you and send your ass packing. Within minutes of Sancho’s nervous blathering, they were grilling him about his residential status and demanding to see ID. Sancho and Vanessa were now waist-deep in shit. Vanessa still convalescing, Che in the temporary care of social services, and Sancho either in a police station holding cell or already deported. As soon as we found out, Aunt Milagros asked her RAT colleagues for advice, but it was a whole other ball game compared to Papá’s case. Mostly because Sancho didn’t have time on his side. ‘Deportation happens quick here,’ Aunt Milagros informed us after getting off the phone. ‘He might be on a flight or boat to Venezuela by morning.’

  Knowing where everyone stood post-Pie-raid, we discussed what to do next over a tension-fraught dinner – ‘Roast lamb, imported from New Zealand, and pommes de terre dauphinoise. We like to feed our guests well. No frozen mass-produced foods like Jamaican patties and what have you.’ As we tucked in, we decided that while we waited out Papá’s internment and said our prayers for Sancho and Vanessa, because there wasn’t much else we could do for them at that point, we would come up with the best possible relocation plan for our family. It was more fantasizing than brainstorming, since we wouldn’t have much say in where we wound up if the UN Refugee Agency really did come through, but at least it was a way to feel like we were doing something proactive.