by Linda Barnes
He shut his eyes.
“I saved your life, too, Roldan.”
His face looked gray and his hair wild. I wondered what he was seeing on the backs of his eyelids. The bodies of the dead? Mama Parello framed against the snowcapped peak? Luisa Cabrera? I imagined her photograph in the showcase of dead journalists. Maybe they’d place it next to the one of her father.
“What do you want from me?” He sounded as exhausted as I felt.
“Find them. Find her. Give me a chance to get her back.”
“How?”
“Question Gee-mo. Help me trace BrackenCorp.”
“We would need many things. Telephones. Access.” “You had the personnel to bring me here, the contacts. You can bring me somewhere else.”
“They may have already killed her.”
“They may not.” There seemed to be no reason in this country, nothing but death and dying. “Will they come back?” I asked.
“Not today. The light is dying.”
I was surprised to find that he was right. The endless day had faded abruptly. More stragglers came in, men and women, some weeping and lamenting, more with faces fixed as stone. They got on with the task of helping the wounded and burying the dead. I wondered about the stone-faced ones, wondered who they were to take this so calmly, with so little outward show of emotion. I decided they were people who’d done this before, witnessed destruction, buried their families, and kept on going.
I kept going, too, trying to convince Roldan that Paolina was still alive, trying to convince myself of the same thing.
I hadn’t quite succeeded when Flaco came running, yelling at Roldan to hurry. The satellite phone had rung in the big hut. Flaco had answered; he thought it might be important.come; there was a girl on the line claiming to be El Martillo’s daughter.
Roldan grabbed my hand and squeezed it as we ran. “If they demand the gold—it’s not mine. I can’t give it to them.”
“You can lie,” I said quickly. “Tell them anything. Arrange to meet them, to hand it over. Lie.”
PAOLINA
She opened her eyes and discovered she was blind. A scream built at the back of her throat and her lips parted to shriek her terror. Don’t scream, a voice shouted silently in her head; don’t scream until you know who might hear. The blackness was a deep muddy hole, a starless void, endless, relentless nothing. Let me be blindfolded, she prayed, but she knew there was no blindfold. There was no obstruction, no feel of cloth or tape. Her eyes were wide and staring, but she could not see. Panic caught at her chest and she thought, I can’t breathe either. There’s no air here.
Where was here?
Where was she?
She was lying on her back, mostly on her back, her legs, bent at the knee, twisted uncomfortably to one side, her ankles tied. She tried to quell the rising panic, jerked to lift her right arm, but it was bound to her left, fastened at the wrist. Captive. Captive again.
A kaleidoscope of fragmented scenes skittered through her brain. Bits and pieces. The bathroom of the church; no refuge. A maroon car, a tiny closet-like room, a shed that smelled of horses. Ana and Jorge, yes, but Jorge more in control now, surer of himself, less under Ana’s influence. He’d hit her, punched her, a sharp jab to the chin. He’d put a mug between her bound hands and ordered her to drink. When she’d refused, repelled by the steely stink of it, he’d explained, told her she had a simple choice: Drink now or die now.
The look on his face had been calm and certain, the knife in his hand lethal. If she didn’t drink, he would kill her. She’d believed him. She remembered choking the liquid down her throat, remembered thinking it was a trick, that the foul-tasting stuff was poison, that she would drink and die.
She wasn’t dead; she was blind. When she tried to bring her hands to her face, they obeyed. It was such an odd sensation, knowing her hands were right there in front of her face, feeling them brush her nose, and yet not seeing them. She checked for a blindfold, just in case, although she knew. Then cautiously she extended her hands into the blackness.
Above her, not a foot away, a hard blackness in the scary soft blackness, a cover, a lid. A coffin. Terror seized her with a shudder and she thought, I’m going to be sick; I’m going to throw up.
She forced herself to suck in a breath, to swallow the bitter taste. It’s a small dark place, she told herself. So utterly dark she couldn’t see. She wasn’t really blind. Her pulse was beating in her ears so loudly she missed the noise at first. But underneath the thud of her heartbeat came another thud, and then another, a regular beat. Ka-thump, whoosh. Ka-thump, whoosh. It was familiar, almost soothing. She deliberately closed her eyes and made the endless blackness go away. Ka-thump, whoosh, like the seams in concrete pavement. Yes. There was movement in addition to sound, and slowly the image of a car trunk emerged. A car trunk, an ordinary car trunk. Two weeks ago, she would have been horrified at being tied in a car trunk, but now the realization that it wasn’t a coffin, that she hadn’t been buried alive and left for dead; well, there are worse things than a car trunk, trussed like a chicken. Worse things.
She closed her mind against them. She wasn’t lying in her coffin. She wasn’t blind. What was the point of letting imagination loose, realizing that it could have been, that it might yet be? She took inventory. She was achy and hungry and thirsty. Her mouth tasted foul. Jorge’s angry face swam into her spotty memory. Her chin hurt where he’d punched her. A car, a car trunk. How? She didn’t remember. She couldn’t remember. Trying to remember, uncomfortable as she was, she must have slept.
When she woke again, it was just as black, but the panic receded quickly when she remembered the car trunk. Ka-thump, whoosh. She thought that some trunks had emergency releases, in case a little kid got stuck inside or something. But how would a little kid know? How would you find an escape button if you were blind? How would you manage to open the trunk with bound hands, and what would you do if you managed to open it? Fling yourself onto the highway to get flattened by a following truck?
Shut up, Paolina told the voice in her head, shut up if you can’t say something useful. Useful. What would be useful? What do people keep in car trunks? A spare tire. Tools to change a flat tire. Maybe there was some kind of tool, something she could find and keep and use as a weapon. How could she explore the trunk with her hands and feet tied? She was small; she was limber; she had nothing else to do. She extended her hands over her head and stretched her legs till her feet hit something solid. She could feel the top and the bottom of her confines with her knees still bent. Top and bottom, or side and side? She wondered if she was lying crosswise in the trunk. She wondered what kind of car it was. There was a smell of rubber and motor oil.
She made her body move crablike in the darkness, rotating and lurching. It was painful tedious work, balancing on bound hands and feet, throwing her hips in the direction she hoped to move, worse than any dumb exercise a sadistic gym teacher could devise. She shuddered, suddenly afraid of what her hands might find, what her feet might touch.
Softness under her hands, a rag of some sort. She held it to her face and smelled oil. Someone had changed the oil, wiped their hands. She scrabbled with her hands and feet into the darkness. Where was a screwdriver, a tire iron? The road was bumpier now, and sometimes, just as she was inching forward, the car cornered sharply and she collapsed and rolled into an area she’d already painstakingly searched. There was nothing, nothing in the trunk but a scared girl and an oily rag. No tools. No food, certainly. No water. Maybe they would leave her here to starve. Her heart started pounding again. She had counted on finding something, but more than that, having a task, having something she could do, had distracted her. Now, in total darkness, with nothing left to touch, the abyss of panic beckoned.
Listen, the voice told her. Listen. As if it were music.
The whoosh of the road, the seamed thump calmed her heartbeat. Ka-thump, whoosh. She thought of the squalid square of Engativa, the sparse trees and stone fountain, with regre
t. She never got to play with the band. And now, she’d never have the chance. The sad rhythm of never, she thought, and her bound hands tapped the rhythm of the words into the rubber mat. The sad, sad rhythm of never. She slept again.
When she woke, the whoosh had changed to a grumble of gravel; the thump of the seams had disappeared. She tried to wedge her body against the side of the trunk because the road was so bumpy, because she was tired of sliding. She eased into a corner and tried to find a new rhythm in the crunch of the tires. When she heard a voice instead, she flinched. Then she thought: Wait a minute, the car’s still moving. The trunk is still dark.
She could hear a voice though, voices. She didn’t think she was hallucinating. She must have crawled deep into the trunk, up against the rear seat of the car. She settled in and tried to ease the pounding of her heart so she could listen.
It seemed like an hour before she could distinguish a single word and then it was only because the curse was loud, a forceful exhalation steeped in anger. Not Jorge’s voice, she thought. A second male voice, angry and crude, joking with Jorge while she collected bruises in the trunk. This new man, this ally, must be the one who gave Jorge his newfound confidence. If Ana were still in charge, Paolina knew she’d be inside the car, not abandoned in the trunk, trussed and blind. What if Ana wasn’t even in the car? Paolina’s stomach clenched at the thought. Whoever the new man was, she hated him.
She tried to make sense of what she could hear, but there were only occasional words, disjointed words that made no sense. “Helicopter” was one of them. They couldn’t be in a helicopter. Once she thought she heard Ana’s voice, and Paolina’s pulse slowed in relief.
When the movement stopped, she thought it might be a traffic light. But there was no noise of traffic, there hadn’t been the noise of any other car for a long time. No horns beeping, none of the stop-and-go of city traffic.
The car door slammed like a clap of thunder. Silence, footsteps, then the click of a key in a lock. The trunk creaked and yawned. The slice of gray light widened. Even the dim light made her squint and look away. Twilight? Or gray dawn?
“Chica, are you awake?” Ana’s voice.
The smell of the air was wonderful; the rush of a breeze intoxicating. She struggled to sit upright, but she was dizzy and disoriented. Ana’s arms helped her. She was so thirsty.
“You must shut your eyes,” Ana said.
“What? Where—?”
“Shut your eyes. Now.”
The instant she obeyed, a sash, a strip of cloth, something, was pressed across her face, across her eyelids. Hands fumbled to tie it at the back of her head, even though she’d seen no more than a clump of distant trees, a rock, a road. A hot tear ran from the corner of her eye at the thought that she would see no more than that. She wished her tongue could reach up and lick the tear off her face.
“I’m sorry, chica,” Ana whispered. “Are you listening? You must do exactly as he says. He will kill you if you give him the least excuse.”
“Who is—?” Ana’s soft apology was more terrifying than Jorge’s loudest shout.
“Don’t ask questions. Listen and obey. You’re going to talk to your father.”
“My father’s here?
“Don’t you listen? I said don’t—”
“Is he here?”
“You’ll talk over a kind of telephone. I’m closing the trunk now. Stay quiet.”
“Please. Don’t close it.” Don’t shut out the breeze, don’t shut out the air, don’t put me back in darkness—
Hands pushed her down into the depths of the trunk. She struggled to sit, but the trunk closed with a snick. She was blindfolded in a velvet hole. Waiting to speak to her father.
To Roldan.
She’d thought about them for so long, the first words she’d say to her father. She’d play-acted the scene in a rosy haze, pretending he might show up at her quinceanera, her fifteenth birthday party, so handsome her friends would swoon. He’d be contrite, so sorry he’d inadvertently abandoned her. Because in her fairy tale, it wasn’t the way Marta said at all. Marta had lied. Marta did lie; she often lied. Her father hadn’t known Marta was pregnant when he went off to the jungle to fight. He hadn’t known about her birth. If he had known—
If.
In her heart, she knew it was nothing but a game, a pastel-tinted fantasy. He wasn’t the sort of father to attend birthday parties. He didn’t know when her birthday was. He didn’t care. Until he’d sent her Julio, the golden birdman, he’d been a total stranger, closed off in his own distant world. And now, what could she say to him? Would he realize who she was?
Dad. Father. Papi. What to say? Dad-I-don’t-even-know, I’ve been locked in the trunk of a car. I’m filthy and hungry and thirsty, and I don’t know what these people want from me.
Except you. And I never had you.
The trunk opened. Rough hands seized her and hauled her upright. She couldn’t see, but she knew it wasn’t Ana. Ana smelled like soap. Her touch was gentler. Jorge smelled like stale cigarettes. This new man smelled sharp and bitter, like medicine. He had clamps for hands; they’d leave bruises on her arms.
What would she say?
She heard noises. Footsteps. Ana and Jorge, she thought. Was Jorge bringing his sharp knife? Would she never get to speak to her father? Whispers and murmurs. Clicks, like machinery.
Then something was shoved against the side of her face. It was bigger than a cell phone, but it had to be a phone, because there was a Voice in her ear, telling her what to say. She shuddered as she listened. Because the sound in her ear wasn’t human. The Voice was metallic and cruel, a robot-machine-noise, grinding like gears, explaining what would happen if she failed.
She tried to breathe normally, tried to picture the plastic Darth Vader mask her little brother sometimes wore, the gadget that made his voice so laughably like the movie voice, but the Voice wasn’t like that at all. The Voice made shivers run up and down her spine. The Voice was terrifying.
“Talk,” commanded the Voice. Then there was a click of machinery, like a tape recorder turning on or off.
“Daddy?
“Who is this?”
Was that her father’s voice, so deep and sad, so melodic?
“I’m Marta’s daughter, your daughter. Dad, don’t do what they—“ A hand closed on her arm, above her elbow.
“Where are you, child?”
The pressure on her arm increased. “I ran away. I ran. I tried. They caught me.”
“You are very brave, chica.”
The hand grasping her arm dug in like pincers. She could feel short blunt fingernails. Pain.
Click. “Tell him,” the Voice ordered. Then another click.
“Daddy, they say they’ll kill me if you don’t do exactly what they say.”
The phone at her ear was snatched away, and now it was soap-smelling Ana who was holding her, murmuring hush, hush, finally clamping a hand across her mouth while the tape-recorder-sound clicked again.
With the phone no longer at her ear, she heard the Voice with no mechanical alteration.
“We have both the American and the girl,” it said. “We won’t risk another helicopter.”
A pause. Her father must be speaking. What would he say?
The Voice again: “Now you will bring us the gold.”
Gold? she thought. Gold? Like Julio?
“Cartagena,” the Voice said.
Cartagena was a city on the Caribbean coast; she knew that. Was she in Cartagena now? There was no smell of the sea, no sound of waves.
“San Felipe,” the Voice went on.
She didn’t know what that was. Or where. All she knew was that the Voice, with or without mechanical alteration, was one of the spookiest sounds she’d ever heard, a hollow whisper, level and cold.
“No one else. You. You will come alone,” the Voice said, “or she dies.”
“Let me talk,” she yelled. “Daddy! Daddy! They’ll kill—“ But then Ana’s arms were shovin
g her down, holding her while she screamed. The trunk slammed shut and she was alone in the dark again.
CHAPTER 33
Hot. I was a huge day jar, like one of the pottery urns that lay shattered on the mountaintop, stuck in a fiery kiln. My neck burned, my sides baked, my arms blistered. My eyes opened, then squeezed themselves quickly shut. Who the hell had turned off the air conditioning? How had I managed to fall asleep and what dreadful dream had woken me with such urgency? I swung my legs over the edge of a hard bed and rested my head in my hands, fists against eye sockets to block the glare from the tiny window. Nothing blocked the sticky heat. I kicked the sheet away from my damp body. I was sweating, seated on a narrow daybed in a stuffy room, wearing what seemed to be a man’s bathrobe. Disoriented and woozy, as though I’d unexpectedly fallen asleep in a movie theater.
How much of the wooziness was the residue of coca leaves? I was thirsty, but not hungry. I was not an urn, not on fire; it wasn’t the threat of flames that had woken me. It was a voice within the fire, a machinelike voice similar to the one Roldan had described, the voice on the sat phone. There’d been a mechanical voice in my dream, trying to tell me…what? It was important, but gone, and I couldn’t tease it back.
Other, more recent, snippets of conversation tickled my memory: Roldan’s voice explaining that siesta was the custom of the country people, that he wished to keep to the custom to discourage gossip, that we were safe here. This place, this farmhouse near Baranquilla, was part of a lowland plantation belonging to the Cabrera family, to Luisa’s uncle Gilberto, a former member of the Colombian senate, a man Roldan seemed to trust. Cabrera’s family would shelter us, temporarily at least, to repay Roldan for bringing her body home.
A quick light knock on the door was followed swiftly by the creak of hinges, and a small woman of fifty, wearing a white blouse, a dark skirt, and carrying a tray with a pitcher of orangey-pink liquid and two crystal-clear glasses. She set the tray on a small table, wished me a pleasant afternoon, and informed me that my clothes were now dry. Would I like them brought in?