She filled her empty wineglass halfway, sat an empty one down in front of him, and filled it to the top. He sat down on the pushed-out kitchen chair, put his hand on top of hers.
“Room with at least one B in it. Seven letters. I have an H in the middle and an E at the end. I’m stuck.”
He leaned in close. To her. And the crossword. She was the one who enjoyed them, spending a few hours not thinking about other things, and she was the one who was good at them—he was too restless, lacked the patience.
“Beehive.”
But sometimes when she got stuck, she asked him to look at it with new eyes.
“Okay . . . okay, I see it now. A room and a B. That really was a bad one. But thanks.” She smiled and filled five letters into five empty boxes. Then closed the newspaper. She caressed the hand that lay on top of hers and waited for him to start talking. It usually took a while.
“Today, Zofia . . .”
“Yes?”
She still loved him, of course. But on nights like these it was hard to know how they’d be able to stay together.
“Today. This morning. I killed a man. Another one.”
A nine-year-long lie. A double life, parallel worlds. At home he’d been a husband and father, running a private security firm. And at the same time—he’d been a man immersed in the criminal world, while also risking his life every day on an undercover assignment. It was a greater betrayal than if he’d been with another woman. There were lies inside lies and no matter how you approached it, how could you really take it all in? Another woman would have been easier, she would have existed, seen, understood, hated, given Zofia a clear reason to leave.
She’d chosen not to leave him. And a life with two parallel worlds continued.
“One gunshot.”
She had demanded the truth. To always be given the truth. Nevertheless, sometimes she wished she didn’t have to hear it.
“In the forehead. Between the eyebrows.”
Sometimes she wanted it even more. The past. Her weekdays picking up her kids at preschool or soccer practice. Watching them run off somewhere when he got home, not coming inside for dinner when he called. None of that existed now because they didn’t exist.
“And then . . . Johnny became El Mestizo, again.”
She knew what he was doing. And that it was for them.
“Young men, Zofia. Boys. Ten years older than our own. He shot them in the neck, in the back, because he could.”
She knew that her husband came across death in his work. Sometimes even contributed to it. Directly when he was protecting those who killed. Indirectly when he protected the drug that kills.
“Five people. Just today. In one place. Do you understand?”
And she had tried to tell herself that if he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. That didn’t work anymore.
“Does it make any difference?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you shoot a man . . . where was it you said . . . between the eyebrows, or if Sánchez shoots four in the neck?”
“I do it to survive. So we can survive.”
“They all end up just as dead.”
Maybe her voice sounded harsh. But it wasn’t him she was angry with.
“We have to leave, Piet. Go back home. This isn’t working anymore.”
“To life in prison? A life without each other?”
“To something else! Something that’s not death.”
Piet tried to drink the wine. White, rather sweet. Something in his throat wouldn’t let him swallow.
“It’s going to change you, Piet. It already has. Every time we sit here and talk about people who are no longer breathing, you become a little less of the man I love. Killing someone changes you, you’d have to change in order to stand it. In order to continue. Piet . . . you have empathy, you care about things. For real. You can cry, laugh. Genuine feelings. I love that! That’s you! But for how long? How many shots, how many breaths, before it runs out?”
“I—”
“Piet, listen to me. I have thought about this. If you’re doing it so that we can remain together. And if that makes you not you anymore, into another version of you I don’t want to be with—then what’s the point, right? I’d rather visit you every day in a Swedish prison than think of that ugly, cold, dark void that is even more isolated.”
He put down his wineglass, pushed it across the table as far as he could, to the other side. He had tried several times now—but still couldn’t swallow. “I love you, Zofia. You know that.”
Going home. A life sentence if the Swedish authorities found him there. A death sentence from the Polish mafia if they found him. Staying meant putting off the inevitable. And at the same time. He was sweating even though it was cool, his heart racing even though he was sitting still.
“I love Rasmus. I love Hugo. You know that, Zofia. And it has nothing to do with anybody else’s life. Or death.”
“Yes. It does. I decided, we decided, this was the better option. But if that’s no longer the case, Piet? If it’s worse? If every time you kill someone part of you dies as well? Part of us?”
She took his hand again, both his hands, and they sat like that for a long while before walking up the creaking stairs. Passing Rasmus’s room, he still lay on his stomach, not moving, past Hugo’s room, he mumbled something and tossed and turned, and continued on to their bedroom. And held each other hard as they made love like they usually did.
A CUP OF coffee. Hoffmann grabbed the mug as soon as the hot droplets passed through the machine, drank up, and placed it back on the plastic grille to be filled again. He stood in the middle of a large windowless subterranean room, which was currently deserted. Despite the silence, it still reeked of alcohol and money and women just a few hours after closing time. On the empty dance floor next to the empty stage. On the empty tables in the empty sofas and empty chairs. Behind the empty counter, where he was finishing his second cup of coffee.
La Casa Heaven—the large club in the basement under the hotel. The eighty young, lingerie-clad women who worked here for most of the day—one hundred and twenty from Thursday to Sunday—were tasked with making sure newly arrived guests were assigned a table and served two drinks, the minimum cost to sit down. And every afternoon and evening and night and dawn after customers emptied their glasses, the women would smile and take their hands and lead them up the rickety stairs.
Hoffmann opened the fridge under the counter and pulled out an ice-cold bottle. Strong coffee followed by bubbling mineral water—his body slowly waking up this morning too. He sat down at a nearby table and leaned back on the soft sofa. A musty dining room, ballroom, meeting place. And above it, three floors of small rooms—bed, vanity, bathroom with shower. Johnny made his money in two ways. First, the alcohol. Then the room rentals. Cali’s only brothel whose owner guaranteed protection without requiring a percentage of customer fees. A commercial practice that provoked anger from his rivals as soon as he entered the area—identical brothels lining both sides of the street—to hand out his business cards. Things going well for you here? How much you earning, for real, little one? My name is Johnny, but they call me El Mestizo and I own that place over there. Come by sometime, I don’t take commission—booze and rent goes to me, fuck money goes to you. He sounded proud when he told how the young women had flocked from other brothels, even from other cities, begging for permission to sell their bodies here.
Hoffmann shrank slightly into the empty silence. There was so much he no longer understood. Like female bodies for sale. Like the fact that he’d killed someone, again. Like the fact that Zofia had decided they had to go home again.
To what? To what he could never actually live with?
“Coffee?”
Johnny. That’s who he was here at the brothel. Soon, when they left this place, he’d become El Mestizo again.
“There’s some in the pot behind the counter.”
“Fresh?”
“I just brewed it
.”
Powerful, heavy. But fluid in his movements. His black braid hung down over his red shirt, which in turn hung down like a caftan over the green military slacks out of whose side pockets bulged a knife, an extra magazine, and a box of cut coca leaves. He poured two full cups and carried them over to a table that was always kept vacant and clean, and where Hoffmann was sitting now—the owner’s table.
“You awake yet, Peter?”
“Soon.”
“Good work yesterday.”
Johnny pushed one cup of coffee across the table. It was down here, in the musty darkness, that Hoffmann’s boss—and unwitting guarantor of continued infiltration—felt most comfortable. That restlessness that could quickly turn to irritation or anger was just as much El Mestizo’s companion as Hoffmann, and it was least on display here during the hours between the last customer of the night and the first deliveries of the day.
“You hear that? I appreciate what you do.” His laughter was a low chuckle and didn’t really fit that huge body. “Damn, if I don’t almost trust you!”
Johnny’s brothel is in its twelfth year—started as part of a collection from one of the guerrilla’s permanent customers, a small mob boss in Jamundí who hadn’t paid up in time for the fifty kilos he’d received and sold. The usual warning—I’ll kill the youngest member of your family, then the second-youngest, and so on until you’ve done right by us—had been ineffective. Only on the third visit when El Mestizo lost his patience, put the barrel of a gun to the head of the debtor’s six-year-old son, was the final payment made. But by then he was no longer content with the initial sum—he wanted interest, decided he wanted one of the brothels that formed a part of the debtor’s local empire. The one where they sat drinking coffee right now. It was the sole purpose of the demand for interest. For reasons Hoffmann had never been told. El Mestizo had reached an agreement with the guerrillas. He would run the brothel himself—it was the kind of business no one had any interest in being linked to anyway—and give them 25 percent of the profits. And the top boss had said yes. Not because of the money, but because he realized what was driving El Mestizo and why this particular brothel in Cali was so important to him.
“And Maria? How is she, Peter? You’re taking good care of her?”
Zofia. Who had never made herself more clear. Time to go home. No matter the consequences.
I’d rather visit you every day in a Swedish prison than think of that ugly, cold, dark void that is even more isolated.
They’d held each other close, until he awakened from the peace he found with her—and with a stiff arm around her body.
“I’m taking care of her. Always will.”
Johnny nodded, satisfied with the answer. Again not understanding what it meant, how that affected him—all the things that played into I trust you.
“This.”
A large pink envelope in Johnny’s hand.
“Got it yesterday. Thought you might want to see it.” He turned it upside down, was about to empty the contents onto the table, when someone shouted down from the stairs that led to the first floor.
“The car is here!”
The last swig from the coffee cup. The envelope slid into one of the side pockets of his pants.
“We’ll deal with that later.” Johnny stood up, walked toward the stairs and loading dock in the rear of the hotel. Once a week a car arrived from Buenaventura’s harbor with smuggled liquor. The main source of income—the two glasses of alcohol every customer had to purchase at an exorbitant price before he could buy a girl. The sales value over a day when every four-ounce glass cost twenty-five US dollars added up to more than thirty thousand. Twenty times what he paid now. Johnny looked over the handcarts of packed bottles, counting them, and took out a tight roll of hundred-dollar bills encircled by a rubber band.
“Down here. And you better be damn careful.”
Three hours. Then the doors would open again. The smell would intensify, becoming more pungent with lust.
“And the whiskey, I want you to put that over here.”
The two dockworkers were done, were rolling their empty handcarts toward the exit and the delivery truck, when Johnny waved Hoffmann over. It was time to head out for the first collection of the day.
“But first I think we should go buy a moped. What do you say to that, Peter? A red one with white stripes and a soft, oval seat.”
They took one of the jeeps today and didn’t drive far before El Mestizo stopped for the first time. An industrial area near Cali’s northern exit. There it stood, unpacked and ready to go. Red with white stripes. They helped to lift it up and tie it onto the flatbed of the jeep. The next stop was at a small, neat house that lay halfway to Palmira in a neighborhood where quite a few police officers lived. This particular policeman was young—Hoffmann guessed around thirty—and was pushing a lawnmower around a tiny, greenish-brown lawn.
“I heard from a little birdie that your Leandro is about to start school.” El Mestizo made sure to squeeze the young policeman’s hand just long enough. “My God, it seems like just a minute since I bought him a tricycle. That was red and white, if I remember correctly?”
The proud papa smiled. “You remember right. They grow up fast.”
“In that case . . . you’ll need one of these now, right?” El Mestizo motioned to the proud papa to accompany him to the back of the jeep. “Because you’re going to need to drive your boy to school.”
The two of them lifted down the moped, whose red and white paint glowed in the burning sunshine.
As they continued their journey, Hoffmann turned around in the passenger seat and watched the government employee roll his new moped toward the garage, his hand caressing its long, soft saddle. One of the many who received a fixed salary from his other employer, the PRC. And who every other month would be rewarded with some little gift to remind him that those who give should also receive—this young police officer’s task was to warn them of any raid on the brothel—as long as you serve us, we serve you.
“It’s like giving a dog a treat when he brings you the right shoe.”
“Excuse me?”
“Has that ever occurred to you, Peter? That they’re like dogs. And a dog has to keep getting his treats if you want him to fetch your shoes. No treats—no fetching.”
El Mestizo always sounded like that. They all sounded like that. Profiteers. Hoffmann exhaled slowly. We sound like that.
We, the drug traffickers, who are both inside and outside the PRC, we always marginalize and mock accomplices and buyers—profiteers who look down on the ones we profit from. It was the same everywhere, in Stockholm where he’d worked, but considerably worse here, as if the more we earn from the drug trade, the more contemptuous we have to be toward drug users—the weak.
“But you have to handle it with style, Peter. They should never have to ask for help—you offer it. A moped? I could see you thought it was ridiculous. You’ve been here a while now, but you still don’t understand. And you’re in good company—there are those who’ve grown up in it who don’t understand fully. They don’t see the whole picture when it comes to that red and white moped. It makes me think of the general and the airport. One of the groups there, Peter—you’ve met a few of that crew, but this one took care of smuggling from the airport long before you came—paid a general six thousand US dollars to avoid customs when they sent their cocaine to the US. It worked well for a few years. But eventually the general noticed all the shit this gang was buying—jewelry with huge fucking diamonds, tons of Porsches, big fucking houses, and even estates with horses and winemaking. And one day he told them, You run around showing off your flashy lifestyle, and I only get a paltry six thousand, so from now on, I want ten.”
The red and white moped and the police officer tightly holding its handlebars disappeared behind the curve of the road, and Hoffmann turned back around again, toward the mountains looming in the distance, which was where they were headed.
“The leader of the smug
glers just laughed, cocky as hell. Listen you fucking soldier, he said, you got what you’re going to get. But the general had made up his mind, turned to his men. Handcuff him. Only then did the smuggler understand. Okay, okay, we’ll pay. Now it was the general’s turn to laugh. Too late, asshole. I don’t give a shit about you. I’ll be doing business with somebody else. Shit, Peter, they put them away and threw the book at them. They even took the houses their families lived in. And they got twenty-five years in prison. All of them. You understand? If things are going well for you, your contacts need to get a little bit of payback, so they feel like your success is helping them. They should never have to ask for more money. If they’re happy with you, they’ll protect you. They’ll keep you out of prison to keep delivering drugs and making even more money.”
“Like yesterday?”
“Yesterday?”
“The dead ones.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“That’s why I’m in charge in this car. Because you don’t know these things.”
The sign said two hundred and thirty kilometers to Medellín. And Hoffmann still didn’t demand any answers. Because it was pointless. And because they drove out for these collections a couple of times a week, all over Colombia, and it was usually with three, maybe four hours of driving ahead of them that El Mestizo would provide any necessary background. Never earlier—in El Mestizo’s world owning information meant owning power and control, the confidence that comes from knowing what others don’t know, a sort of mental life jacket. But no later either—in order to ensure Hoffmann’s full protection El Mestizo had come to realize that a certain amount of prep time was necessary. They’d just passed Cartago when he started to describe Prez Rodriguez—no children, unmarried, thirty-eight years old. Twelve of them at La Picota for drug smuggling, a special prison in Bogotá. Rodriguez had belonged to the Medellín cartel, caught and took the fall—had protected others but hadn’t received any damned help while serving time, not money nor food nor whores. So when he got out, he’d offered his services to their competitor, the PRC. Now he owed them three accounts, seventy kilos. A small-time dealer, but right was right, this was about their reputation.
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