by James Siegel
When did Claudia first make contact with them?
Maybe when she told Galina she was going on a holiday excursion with girlfriends. To Cartagena, she said. When she returned ten days later, there wasn’t a tan line to be seen. If anything, she looked paler. The weather was awful, she explained. Galina was sorely tempted to check the papers to confirm this. She didn’t.
Cartagena was north. But so, she knew, was FARC.
These little trips became more and more routine.
To a university seminar, she’d explain.
To visit a friend.
A camping trip.
One lie after another.
What was Galina to do? Claudia was of age. Claudia was in love. What were Galina’s options, other than to wait it out, hope it would pass like most first loves do. She was being handed a tissue of lies, and she was using it to dry her tears.
Claudia began dressing down. All kids did to some extent, but Claudia wasn’t making a fashion statement. More a statement of solidarity. She began going days without makeup, without so much as peeking into a mirror.
She didn’t know that it only made her more beautiful.
Had Galina mentioned how lovely Claudia was? How perfectly exquisite? Almost feline. Sinuous, graceful. Her eyes, of course. Oval, deep amber, and her skin what Galina’s madre used to call café au lait. She must’ve inherited her looks from someone other than Galina. Maybe from her paternal grandmother, the chanteuse, a ventello singer of some renown who’d reportedly left broken hearts from Bogotá to Cali.
One day Claudia went away and didn’t come back.
Another holiday excursion, a seaside jaunt with friends. But when Galina called these friends, frantic, panicked, two days after Claudia’s supposed return had come and gone with no Claudia, they professed total ignorance.
What holiday trip?
Odd. She didn’t feel surprise. Just confirmation. That, and simple, unrelenting terror. She sat by the telephone, trying to will it to ring. Trying to keep herself from picking it up and dialing the policía. She knew where Galina was; bringing the policía into it would’ve been worse than doing nothing.
Eventually, Claudia did call.
Galina ranted, raved, screamed. The way you admonish a child. How could Claudia not call, how could she?
Claudia wasn’t the little girl late for dinner anymore.
I’m with them, because to not be with them is to be with the others, she said.
She spoke assuredly. Logically. Even passionately. It’s possible there was a part of Galina, the long-buried part of her that once cheered beside her father for Gaitán, that might’ve even empathized with her.
In the end she said what mothers say. What they’re allowed to say. Even to revolutionary daughters who’ve gone to the hills.
You’ll be killed, Claudia. They’ll call me to pick up your body. Please. Come back. Please, I’m begging you.
But Claudia dismissed her pleas—the way, as a little girl, she had scoffed at wearing rubber boots in the rain.
Then I can’t feel the puddles, Mama.
Claudia, above all, was a girl who wanted to feel the puddles.
Her father was devastated. He threatened to go to the policía, to haul her back home. You should’ve known, he accused Galina, you should’ve known what she was up to. Galina knew he was speaking out of frustration and wounded love; he knew that going to the policía was dangerous, and going after Claudia useless, since he wouldn’t begin to know where to look.
So they sat in their private cocoon of pain. Waiting for a spring that might or might not come.
Occasionally, friends would pass on messages. It’s better if she doesn’t call you, a certain young man explained, a fellow traveler from the university who sported a four-inch goatee and wore a black beret in the fashion of Che. She’s all right, he told them. She’s committed.
Galina was committed too. To seeing her daughter’s face again. She needed to touch her; when Claudia was a child, she’d settle like a nesting bird in the billows of her dress. I’m a kangaroo, Galina would whisper, and you’re in my pocket.
Now her pocket was empty.
One day they received another message from the young man.
Be at such and such a bar at eight tonight.
When Galina asked why, he said just be there.
She didn’t ask again.
They dressed as if going to church. Wasn’t this, after all, what they’d been praying for? They arrived hours early. The bar was uncomfortably dark and seedy, patronized mostly by prostitutes and transvestites.
They waited an hour, two hours, three. In truth, Galina would’ve waited days.
Then she felt a tap on her shoulder, no, more than a tap, a warm hand alighting on her shoulder like a butterfly. She knew that touch. Mothers do. It had her blood coursing through it.
How did Claudia look? Ragged, thin, sick?
If that had been the case, maybe they would’ve been able to talk her back—the way you talk someone down off a ledge. Maybe they could’ve simply lifted her off her feet and carried her back home.
Claudia didn’t look ragged. Or thin. Certainly not sick.
She looked happy.
What’s your greatest wish for your children?
The wish you end each nightly prayer with?
The one you whisper to yourself when they tell you to blow out the candles for another birthday you’d rather not be celebrating?
I wish, you murmur, for my child to be happy.
Only that.
Claudia looked radiantly, unmistakably happy.
Was beaming too strong a word?
If she’d been in the throes of first love before, now she was clearly in the midst of a full-fledged affair. One look at her, and Galina knew they’d be leaving without her.
Claudia kissed Galina, then her father.
The three of them held hands, just like when Claudia was four and she’d coerce them into another game of dog and cat. Claudia was always the cat. And the cat was always captured.
Galina asked her how she was.
But she already knew the answer.
“Good, Mama,” Claudia said.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Galina asked, then began doing what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. Crying, crumbling, falling to pieces.
“Shhh . . . ,” Claudia whispered, daughter-suddenly-turned-mother. “Stop, Mama. I’m fine. I’m wonderful. I couldn’t tell you. You know that.”
No. All Galina knew was that Claudia was her heart. And that from now on life would consist of hurried meetings in transvestite bars and furtive messages from friends.
Claudia told them little of anything specific. Where she was. Whom she was with. She mostly asked about home. How was her cat, Tulo? And her friends, Tani and Celine?
For their entire time together, Galina refused to let go of her hand. She must’ve thought, in some primitive part of her brain, that if she never let go, Claudia would be forced to stay with them. That as long as they were touching, they couldn’t be apart.
She was wrong, of course. Hours flew by, the opposite of all those days waiting to hear from her when she’d felt stuck in time.
Claudia announced she had to leave.
Galina had one last, enormous plea left in her. She’d been practicing it as Claudia asked about home, about relatives and schoolmates, as Galina sat and held her hand like a lifeline.
“I want you to listen to me, Claudia. To sit and hear everything I have to say. Yes?”
Claudia nodded.
“I understand how you feel,” she began.
She did understand. It didn’t matter.
“You think I’m too old. That I can’t possibly feel what you feel. But I do. There was a time, when I was very young, that I was just like you. But what I know, I know. FARC, the USDF—it doesn’t matter. Both sides are guilty. Both sides are blameless. In the end they are each other. Just as innocent. Just as murderous. And everyone dies. Everyone. I’m askin
g you as your one and only mother in the world. Please. Don’t go back to them.”
She might’ve been speaking Chinese.
Or not speaking at all.
Claudia couldn’t hear her, and even if she could, she was incapable of understanding a word.
She patted Galina’s hand, smiled, the way you do to those already claimed by senility. She stood up, embraced her father while Galina remained frozen to her chair. Then Claudia reached down, put her head in the hollow of her neck.
“I love you, Mama,” she said.
That’s all.
On the way home, they sat in complete, numbing silence. They’d dressed as if going to church, but they returned from a funeral.
There were just a few messages from her after that.
From time to time the boy from the university called with news. Every time Galina opened the paper, she held her breath . . .
THE DOOR CREAKED OPEN.
Galina stopped talking.
Tomás—one of the guards—nodded at her, motioned for her to get up.
Joelle was out of danger now. Joanna would have to give her back, return to her room.
“What happened to her?” Joanna asked Galina, transferring Joelle to her, suddenly desperate to know the ending. “You didn’t finish the story.”
Galina simply shook her head, pressed Joelle to her chest. Then she headed to the door.
TWENTY-SIX
He didn’t know he was alive and kicking until he realized that’s what he was doing. Kicking. Moving his legs back and forth in an effort to put out the fire that was crawling up his skin.
He must’ve passed out from the smoke. He remembered the wall of flame bearing down on them like an act of God. Maybe it wasn’t an act of God—because he seemed to remember he’d prayed to God just before everything went black and here he was alive.
So maybe he and God had made up. Maybe God said enough with numbers and equations and risk ratios and let’s try blind faith for a change, okay?
He wasn’t actually on fire. Not literally. His pants, what was left of them, were smoking. And the skin poking out from their tattered remnants appeared baby pink—the telltale sign of first-degree burn.
Somehow they’d made it past the line of kerosene.
Everything to his left was a charred, smoking black. The wind had taken the fire in a single direction. Meaning Miles was right. They’d headed toward the fire and won.
Or he had. Miles was missing in action.
What about them?
Paul tentatively raised his head and peeked.
It looked volcanic. Picture one of those Discovery Channel specials where islands of lush vegetation are reduced to boiling stews of smoke and fire. Here and there scattered bursts of flame still shot high into the air.
Overall it was lunar-empty.
They were gone.
With this ecstatic realization came an equally horrific one. They were gone; so were the drugs. They were interred in the black soot. His one and only chance of saving Joanna had vanished. When God shuts a door, he opens a window, his long-dead mother used to say. But going along with his newfound doctrine of faith, it was entirely possible the reverse was also true. That when God opened a window, he shut a door.
Paul was alive; Joanna and Joelle were dead.
Soon enough.
He collapsed back onto the still-steaming earth, as if shot.
Someone said hello.
A creature with a completely black face, save for the eyes, moon white like those of a minstrel singer, his whole person surrounded in rising wisps of smoke.
An angel? Come to earth to tell Paul he was wrong, sorry, he hadn’t survived the fire, after all? Given Joanna and Joelle’s probable fate, would the news be that unwelcome?
It wasn’t an angel.
It was Miles.
THEY FOUND MILES’ CAR PRETTY MUCH WHERE THEY’D LEFT IT. Both doors were yanked open and the windshield was smashed.
That wasn’t what upset Miles.
Not that they’d trashed his car, but that they’d actually seen it, taken note of it, jotted down his license number or maybe his registration, which was stuck somewhere in the glove compartment. Now that the euphoria of actually surviving had worn off, Miles seemed to understand that it might not be for long. He retreated to somewhere inside himself.
That made two of them.
Paul had apologized to Miles on the way to the car—sorry for almost killing you. Miles reiterated that he was the one who’d sent Paul and Joanna to Colombia. Only this time he hadn’t sounded very convincing.
Then they’d both shut up.
The spiderweb cracks in the windshield made driving an exercise in guessing. There either were or weren’t cars in front of them, lights were either green or red, road signs were anybody’s guess. On the way out of the swamp they passed four fire engines screaming down the highway.
Paul tried to navigate with his head out the window.
Somewhere between Jersey City and the Lincoln Tunnel, Paul said, “Who were they?”
Miles didn’t immediately answer.
“They must’ve burned down the house in Jersey City,” Paul added. “It had to be them.”
Miles nodded. “That makes sense.”
“So?”
Miles seemed lost in thought. Either that or he was still feeling too depressed to talk. They’d entered the white fluorescent glow of the Lincoln Tunnel—always a kind of sci-fi experience.
After a while Miles said, “I don’t know who they are. I can guess. The other side.”
“What other side? The Colombian government?”
“The Colombian government’s not going to be shooting people over here.”
“Okay. Then who are we talking about?”
“The other side in the war. Those right-wing paramilitary nuts. Manuel Riojas.” He didn’t appear to be very happy about this suggestion.
“Riojas? I thought he’s in jail. They extradited him. To Florida.”
“Sure. He’s in jail. They’re not.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“His people. His gang. His foot soldiers. You know how many Colombians there are in New York City?”
Miles tried to clean his hands by wiping them on the seat divider, but it only succeeded in making it black.
“They followed FARC’s drug contacts?” Paul said, trying to work it out as he spoke. “That’s what you’re saying? Found that house in Jersey City and burned it down? Then tailed them here?”
“Maybe. Why not? They’re on different sides, but they pay for things the same way. Drugs mean money. Money means guns.”
Okay, Paul thought. He wondered if sometimes money just meant money.
“Consider it a two-for-one. They get to kill a few of FARC’s friends, and score some drugs at the same time. Just my theory.”
Given what Paul had read about Manuel Riojas, it was a theory you’d rather not spend too much time thinking about.
“What now?”
“I can bullshit you and say I’ve got a great idea. Would you believe me?”
MILES INSISTED THEY STOP AT HIS OFFICE IN THE CITY.
“I might have a hard time explaining to my wife why we look like we’ve just returned from Baghdad. There’s a shower there. And some clothes.”
Miles’ office was in a brownstone on the East Side. Three months ago Paul and Joanna had walked in there and been told they’d have a daughter in two months.
Miles parked the car in a single-car garage beneath the building.
When they exited the car, Paul could smell that peculiar odor of garages everywhere—mildew, dust, and motor oil. Joanna, he noted with a pang, would have been able to discern a few other things as well.
They entered the house through a side door, opening onto a hallway with gray cement walls covered in a sheen of condensation. A single naked bulb supplied what little light there was.
They took the stairs up to the first floor, which contained a modest waiting room fil
led with out-of-date magazines. Paul remembered sitting there with Joanna, flipping through a strategically placed issue of Time. Infertility—the New Scourge was the cover story.
“Bathroom’s upstairs,” Miles said. “Want to go first?”
“Thanks,” Paul said. “I have nothing to wear.”
“I’ll lend you some jeans.”
When he turned on the shower, the water at his feet turned black. The skin on his legs and arms felt scrubbed raw, and he wondered if he needed medical attention.
When he got out of the shower, he examined himself in the bathroom mirror. His face seemed okay—a little pinker than usual, certainly more despondent-looking. There was nothing a doctor could do about that.
Miles had left blue jeans and a white button-down shirt just outside the bathroom on a chair. They were about two sizes too small. He waddled out to the hallway where Miles was patiently waiting his turn.
He wordlessly passed Paul on his way to the bathroom.
When Miles came out, he was back to more or less normal skin color.
“Let’s go to my office,” he said without any particular enthusiasm.
Being in the very place where Miles conducted his business, where he pulled strings and conjured up babies, didn’t seem to do anything to improve his disposition. He sat behind his desk and looked strangely lost there—as if he’d forgotten what it was he did for a living.
Paul only had to look above the desk to remind himself.
He who saves one child saves the world.
Okay, Miles. There’s another child who desperately needs saving now. And her mother. Her too.
He scanned the rest of the room while Miles sat there silent and brooding. In between an honorary degree from Baruch Law School and a citation from the board of a Bronx hospital was a poster he hadn’t seen before. The All-Nazi Baseball Team, it said, a diamond grid with each player’s name affixed by position. Joseph Goebbels was on the pitcher’s mound. Always threw curves was the scouting report on him. Hermann Göring was behind the plate—great defense, it said. Joseph Mengele was in right—lethal arm. Albert Speer at third—surprising power. The ball girls were Eva Braun and Leni Riefenstahl. The manager? Hitler, of course: a great motivator. Not great enough: The poster reminded everyone that the team Lost World Championship in 1945.