‘He’s Aníbal’s son,’ said Eduardo. ‘Has he been a client of yours?’
‘No,’ said Karen. And although the question offended her, she didn’t say any more.
‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me. Rumour has it he’s a faggot,’ said Eduardo, wrapping himself in a silk dressing gown.
In the shower, questions ran through Karen’s head. Could Sabrina have been meeting up with a different Luis Armando Diazgranados? She wondered what would happen if she didn’t agree to safeguard Eduardo’s money. When she got out, she heard voices in the living room. As she quickly got dressed, she decided to tell me everything. Standing next to a large suitcase, two men were looking at her. For the first time, she understood that she could be in danger.
‘Karen, darling, they’re going with you, to hide the money in your apartment.’
It was a large case, enough to hold around seventy kilos. One of the men had the nerve to look her up and down. He was armed.
‘Your mission is simple, you put this in a safe place and wait until one of these gentlemen, if not me, comes to get it.’
Karen says she shot Eduardo a pleading look, to no avail.
He winked at her and smiled. ‘Go with them, Piccolina, you’ll be fine.’
34.
Before they would know if the note found in Sabrina’s room was written by Luis Armando Diazgranados, they had to wait a few more days for the handwriting analysis results. As for everything else, they needed an order from the Prosecutor’s Office to access the medical record at San Blas and, if the handwriting results confirmed a match, they could submit a request to interrogate Luis Armando Diazgranados and trace his calls.
Jorge Guzmán hadn’t stopped pacing the living room of his ex-wife’s apartment where they were gathered. His eyes were bloodshot. Consuelo Paredes was wringing her hands and murmuring to herself. Her brow was furrowed and she didn’t seem to be following the conversation.
‘Cojack, tell me you’ll manage it.’
‘Manage what, Doctor Guzmán?’
‘To catch the murderer.’
‘I’ll do everything within my power.’
Consuelo poured a herbal tea for her ex-husband.
‘Oh, hun,’ she said to him. ‘We would have been better off not knowing his name; we would be much more at peace.’
‘There’s more,’ interrupted Cojack. ‘I think I have our taxi driver. I was talking to some friends in intelligence and I’ve got it down to three candidates: they all operate in the area and sometimes do jobs on the side.’
‘You mean they’re hitmen?’
‘They call themselves hands for hire.’
‘And you’ve located all three of them?’ asks Guzmán.
‘I know of one because he’s involved with really big fish. On Thursdays, he plays billiards at a bar in Chapinero.’
‘So tomorrow,’ said Guzmán.
‘That’s right. Tomorrow I’ll pay him a little visit. I’ll have news for you as soon as I’ve spoken to him.’
‘And what about the doctor?’ asked Consuelo.
‘The doctor won’t talk.’
‘What if we make him?’ asked Guzmán.
Consuelo glanced at her ex-husband in surprise.
‘I don’t offer those kinds of services, but I can get you someone, if you want,’ said Cojack.
Jorge Guzmán went quiet, but the fury on his face radiated throughout the room like a migraine.
35.
I called Lucía and told her, word for word, what Aníbal Diazgranados had said. I was scared.
‘You can’t be serious, Claire,’ she said.
‘What if he hurts Eduardo? Your ex is a very silly bad guy,’ I said.
‘I’ll call him right away,’ said Lucía.
An hour later I called her again. ‘Have you spoken to Eduardo?’
‘He didn’t answer, must be playing golf.’
‘Will you let me know?’
‘As soon as I speak to him.’
If either of us had believed Eduardo was in real danger, we might have acted differently, might have headed out to find him. Lucía left messages on his phone. First saying: ‘Call me when you can, please,’ and then: ‘Eduardo, it’s about Diazgranados, answer me, I’m begging you.’ When he finally answered, he was in the car on his way to meeting up with Doctor Venegas.
‘Eduardo, do you realise Aníbal went to Claire’s today and threatened her?’ she said finally.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He threatened to kill her.’
‘What do you mean?’ he said, and laughed. ‘You know what, woman? It’s Halloween. I know that ghost stories are more likely to get to us at this time of year, but relax, drink a chai, wrap up warm …’
‘Can you be serious for once in your life?’
‘I’m being serious, completely serious … If you give me fifteen minutes, I’m just parking. I won’t be long, I’ll call you back.’
‘Eduardo, be careful, okay?’
‘Is it the telenovelas you watch at night?’
‘I don’t watch telenovelas, I watch dramas.’
‘Well, that trash is damaging your pretty head, turn off the TV.’
‘You sound content,’ said Lucía.
‘A young woman has been coming over to warm up my bed.’
‘What a surprise.’
‘You’re such a drag. I’ll call you back. And by the way, happy birthday, gorgeous.’
‘I thought you’d forgotten.’
‘How could I, when today’s a special day for all of humanity?’ said Eduardo.
‘Are you saying that because of the article in La Recontra, the one about you embezzling state funds?’
‘Shut up, woman, that’s why I’m not answering my phone!’ he said. Then he hung up.
Two hours before, he had been lying on his sofa, his shirt open and pants down. Despite the scandal, he was happy. Having that suitcase safe calmed him. In the worst-case scenario, he would be put under house arrest for a few years and then he’d be safe, he and his money. It would all be worth it in the long run.
His chest was covered in white hairs. He was in good shape, and Karen saw he was relaxed. His eyes closed, he let her do her thing. Soon everything would go back to normal. He stroked Karen’s hair, and now she tried to smile.
‘What would you do with all that money, if it were yours?’ he asked, still caressing her. She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I’d end up in trouble,’ she said with a half-smile.
‘But what would you like to do?’
‘I’d like to go far away.’
‘You could go far away and do other things, too, it’s a lot of money.’
‘I’ve always wanted to do it in a pool, you know?’ said Karen, suddenly standing up, evasive. ‘Have you ever?’
‘It’s nothing special,’ said Ramelli. ‘But if you want, we can do it in a pool now, so you’re not left wondering.’
Karen smiled.
‘Or would you prefer to go to a Halloween party?’ he asked.
‘I hate dressing up,’ said Karen. She took his hand. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
She was moved that, at almost seventy years of age, Eduardo let her lead him to the pool so she could fulfil her adolescent fantasy. Until then, she had only ever been in pools crammed with other people.
They came out of the lift, removed their dressing gowns, got into the heated water. Through the glass, they could see the city lights scattering to the west.
‘What’s this, what you and I have?’ Eduardo said after a long kiss.
‘I’m the one safekeeping your suitcase,’ said Karen, and let out a yelp when a middle-aged woman came in, looked at them sidelong, left her robe on one of the pool chairs and slipped into the water.
‘Today’s not our lucky day,’ said Karen, adjusting her bra.
‘Would you believe me if I said that in more than a year of living here, I’ve never had to share the pool with anyone?’
&
nbsp; Before getting out, Eduardo took her by the waist. ‘I like you a lot,’ he said, gazing into her eyes.
Karen burst out laughing.
‘You’re so insensitive,’ said Eduardo.
‘I’m sorry,’ added Karen, still laughing.
Eduardo took her arm and pulled her to his chest.
‘I’m going to fuck you until your head explodes.’
Karen kept quiet. She got out of the pool in silence. She dried herself with the towel while she watched the woman with thick, pale legs doing backstroke.
‘It’s late,’ she said, suddenly anxious.
‘It’s almost eight.’
‘Exactly, it’s late.’
‘Come up for a bit.’
‘It’s been a long day, I’d like to go home,’ she said.
‘Of course, you’ve got to go and count the money in the suitcase, if you didn’t count it yesterday.’
Barefooted, they both got into the lift. The glass box carried them skywards, views of Bogotá all around them. Karen felt distant, disconnected. She was overcome by dizziness, then her mouth went dry. She felt a pain in her chest. She was hyperventilating. She’d gone days without feeling this way. Eduardo stared at her cut ankles, then at her wrists, seemed to be noticing them only now. The doors of the lift opened. Karen’s hands were sweating. He helped her into the apartment, laid her down on the bed and went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. Karen was still not breathing normally. He called Doctor Venegas and asked him what to do.
‘Do I need a prescription for that?’ Karen heard Eduardo ask.
‘I’m feeling better now,’ she said, though her heart was still racing.
It wasn’t yet 9 p.m. when he decided to go to Doctor Venegas’s place. The doctor would give him something for Karen. He took the car.
‘I’ll be right back, don’t move.’
Karen turned on the TV and stared at it for about half an hour. She was hardly taking anything in, until to her shock an old photo of Eduardo came on screen. Everything points to the well-known self-help author as the person behind this cover-up. He is also president of Health Cross, responsible for operating San Blas Hospital in Bogotá …
Karen called to tell him what she was seeing on the news, but he didn’t answer. The fourth time she called, a police officer answered and asked what her relationship was to the deceased.
‘To the what, Officer?’ said Karen, sitting up.
‘To the dead man, Señorita. I’m sorry to be giving you the news like this, but the owner of the phone you’re calling was found shot dead on the corner of Calle 76 and Carrera 5, along with another victim identified as Roberto Venegas, a surgeon from San Blas Hospital.’
It was a little after 10 p.m. The official continued speaking, but Karen had stopped listening.
36.
It was the second time in four months that she’d gone to a funeral. She felt like her whole life could be summed up in that period. She dressed as well as she could, despite her despondency. She put the little energy she had into doing her hair up in a high bun, painting her lips an earthy colour, and choosing appropriate footwear, a blouse with a moderate neckline, the Massimo Dutti trench coat and the small black Carolina Herrera handbag that Eduardo had given her, which she was yet to use. She had seen him for the first time at Sabrina Guzmán’s funeral. Perhaps, if she’d been alert to the signs, she would have understood that no good can come from a relationship with a man you meet at a funeral. This time, as she went into the Church of the Immaculate Conception, she felt she was a different person. People were crowded inside. Karen chose the final pew, and sat down closest to the wall. There were men in suits, bodyguards, armoured SUVs at the church entrance, tinted windows, a few children, some young people, a lot of fans of Eduardo. National radio and TV crews were there. They wanted to talk to Lucía, who didn’t seem interested in making statements to the press. It was a farewell for ‘Colombia’s great spiritual guide to emotional lost causes’, as one journalist described him. Karen didn’t take in the priest’s words. Nor did she hear when a soldier in uniform repeated the word ‘love’ three times as he raised a fist in the air. The cough of an old man echoed throughout the church. The choir was out of tune. Everything seemed wrong, off-key.
Maybe the general dissonance was due to the foul way Ramelli had been killed. He was an elegant man, or at least someone who made the effort to be. Yet he had been caught wearing a sweatshirt, shot at point blank on a street corner in the exclusive Rosales neighbourhood, and left to die like a dog until a good Samaritan called the police. It was all a big misunderstanding.
When the soldier finished, a woman with acid burns on her face got up, grabbed the microphone and said that Eduardo had taught her to survive, that thanks to him she hadn’t put a bullet in her head. A few people applauded timidly. Diazgranados’s wife cried inconsolably. Karen realised that his wife was her client, Rosario Trujillo. She was finding it hard to breathe.
She would tell me later that while all this was happening, she felt seared as if by the midday Cartagena heat. It took her back to being squashed into a bus while the fare collector announced the stops: ‘María Auxiliadora’, ‘Blas de Lezo’, ‘Castellana’. She was carried along by the smells – loquats, sea bream – under a sun that blurred the borders of everything, so that it was all gilded in a golden haze, sweet like coconut, or like mandarin juice. One man was selling posies for a thousand pesos to the young man next to him, and another was selling English–Spanish school dictionaries. An elderly woman was saying to her grandson that she wasn’t about to pay two thousand pesos for a dictionary, as he looked over the pencils being sold by another black man who had also hopped on the big old bus, which was like a whale out of its element, with fewer passengers than street sellers – one had highlighters, another had Bristol almanacs, others had fresh water, coconut water, key rings, phone covers, stickers, magazines, scapulars, biscuits. When Karen wanted to get off, the fare collector shouted out the bus stops once more beneath the suffocating heat that made grime collect under fingernails and wouldn’t let you breathe. And that same heat was felt by those riding the next bus along, which was headed for the same place, almost empty too. All the buses had six, seven, eight passengers and were run-down, begging for more passengers with the image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, of The Blessed Child, of Our Lady of Guadalupe, of Jesus Christ. And the buses that had signs saying CHRIST LIVES cut in front of those brandishing Our Lady of Mount Carmel, because they all had to get there first, but there was only one road, and there were roadworks, plus there was only one lane because the other was closed – that was where they put the bus station, though now it was abandoned and its windows were broken and it was full of debris. If you walked through the Bazurto market, the stalls would say: GOD PROTECTS THIS SHOP, BLOOD OF CHRIST JUICES and GO WITH GOD FRESH CUTS. There was an overpowering smell of death, of guts, of pork, fish and tripe, of entrails splashed on the floor, of cow and pig carcasses where the black men who cleaned the animal guts walked barefooted. A cart went by called LITTLE KAREN, and she wondered how she would feel if she had a father who worked in the market or wherever and called his cart LITTLE KAREN, if she had a father who knew how to make egg arepas, yuca pastries, or nice and fresh peto with lots of cinnamon. Now in Cartagena it was all white buildings with blue windows, all of it, all of it, said her mamá, as if there were no green, yellow, red or transparent glass, and A-huh, said her mamá, and A-huh, said Karen, so many buses, all off to the same destinations, and that searing heat during the wait, and the smell of sea dirt, of sea sweat, of sea water, and the constant pulse of champeta music, champeta at la Boquilla beach, in a club in El Bosque neighbourhood, and hearing the neighbourhood’s picó sound systems boom, taking a siesta in the rocking chair, and mamá preparing tamarind balls in the doorway of the house, oh to hear her say, ‘Child, don’t look for me because if you do you’ll find me,’ because no one called her child any more, and no one looked for her, much less found her. Even she c
ouldn’t find herself, and she didn’t know where she was gone, she was getting more lost all the time, more here and there at the same time and yet nowhere at once. Here no one played cards in the shade of a mango tree, there was no calabash tree here, no Pentecostal church with the mango tree out front, no park, no New Christ the Redeemer Church, no street sellers offering corn bollos, there was nothing here, thought Karen, no Emiliano, no mamá, here there were only irritable people, and death prowling beneath a lead sky, and she felt the searing heat and started to sweat because in her mouth there was the taste of tamarind, not dried tamarind but those sweet little tamarind balls her grandmother used to make, back when she was a little girl, back when she still had a grandmother. Back when she wanted to be a beauty queen, before champeta music and her first communion, before thinking about sex and knowing it was a sin until she was married, before going to Mass at the neighbourhood church, before crossing herself whenever she passed by any church, no matter its denomination, before being top of her class, before wanting to be a beautician, if she ever did want that, before the fever overcame her body to the heat of champeta, before messing around with a black man old enough to be her father, before getting pregnant, before becoming who she was, before understanding she couldn’t escape herself, that this – this body like a palm tree, like a gazelle, this frightened face, this listless sadness, this pride that had failed to find a foothold in this world, this drive to get somewhere that had nowhere to go – this was who she was. She was another bird with no tree, in a cement city where there were no corner shops, no slot machines, no old quarter behind walls where Monaco royalty and Hollywood actors took their holidays, that walled city where she would never belong, since it was only for tourists and the few rich families left. Here there were no classical music concerts in the street, no horse and carriage carrying a pair of Canadian sweethearts, no pig wandering around a patio like it was no big deal, or wet clothes hung along the fences to dry in the wind, just as there were no fences, fences to protect oneself from the outside when locked inside, nor roofs with shards of glass cemented into them to deter thieves, no guard dog to do the same, though ‘if you give fish to a dog that’s not from the tropics, it will get mangy,’ said her mamá, as if she’d had a cold-weather dog, as if she’d been in a cold-weather place, as if she knew anything about dogs. Karen realised that she was one of those animals from the tropics; she wondered again what she was doing here in this icebox, what brought her to Bogotá, to learn the slow and smooth-tongued way of speaking, to smile, to fake friendliness, to eat almojábana buns instead of yuca pastries, to forget who she was. Her Emiliano was now farther away than ever, her Emi who said that no one knew how to massage his feet like his mamita, because he called her ‘mamita’ and, when he was being especially affectionate, ‘mamitica’, and Karen – who hadn’t touched his feet in almost a year, a quarter of his life, as said her own mamá, a quarter of your son’s life you haven’t been here, young lady – Karen, wrapped up in her thoughts, looked at the church doors, where a group of people had remained outside clutching signs that read TEACHER OF ALL TEACHERS, YOU’LL NEVER DIE and SAVE ME A PLACE IN HEAVEN to say farewell to Ramelli. Karen looked at them as if she weren’t really there, remembered Ramelli was dead, and once more there was the nausea, and the bus shuffling along Pedro de Heredia, and her mamá saying ‘the dark-skinned women selling fruit on the beach’, as if she weren’t dark skinned, too, and what was her fear of saying black, anyhow. People were leaving and the rain was gaining momentum and the SUVs parked along the avenue were tearing off. Karen stayed seated, observing without being seen, and she was sweating, all sticky, and there was the smell of tamarind, but once more she was in the rain, always the rain and the exhaust fumes in this grey city, and the grey dust, the grey clouds, the grey clothing of office workers, the grey smog, the fucking greyness of this city was going to make her die of damned sadness, and if she had a father, she would say Is it greyness or greyity? If she had a father, he would know the answer, and if he didn’t know, what the hell, she would have a father and wouldn’t feel like she was dying, or that she was already dead, a ghost wandering the streets, that’s why people stepped on her, that’s why they elbowed her and trod on her in the Transmilenio bus, because they didn’t see her. Eduardo had seen her, Eduardo had caressed her and therefore had seen her, and he had paid her and they had fucked like living beings do, but now he was dead. She stuck out her tongue, tasted the rough air. The heavy, toxic air. The rain drops like needles. She got on a bus, hung on to the metal rail, smelled once more the concentrated sweat. Perhaps she was alive, after all. She was alive because in here it smelled like shit. She was alive because more than forty-seven guys had fucked her in the past sixteen weeks. She was alive because a revolting and embittered fat man had raped her. She was alive, just not for the right reasons.
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