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Missionaries

Page 25

by Phil Klay


  Abel left his position behind the counter and walked to open the front door. He knew the importance of respect. And then the leader took off his helmet and the face, older and even more worn and pitted than it’d been the last time he’d seen it, was the face of Jefferson.

  “Abel,” Jefferson said. Then he smiled, looking around. Abel knew how his store must seem to a man like Jefferson, with its pathetic goods and its reek of diligent poverty. “What the fuck is this?”

  “Sir,” he said. What else was there to say? Jefferson was no mosquito. Jefferson could bleed him dry. He thought of the rumors he’d heard, that Javier had switched allegiances to a Venezuelan narco. He thought of the new faces he’d seen in town, the increased traffic on the road, the increased business in his store, which he’d only thought of as a good thing.

  “Come. Close up. You’re finished for the day.”

  There was a customer browsing the shelves but a look was sufficient to make him put the bottle of Postobón back and head out the door. Abel turned off the lights, pulled the cash out of the register, closed the door, and pulled down the metal gate, locking it and then pulling again to make sure it held.

  “Is this all you have in the world?” Jefferson said, curiously fingering the gate.

  “Not all.” Against his will, Abel felt ashamed of his little store, the pride of his life.

  Jefferson took him to a very different house than the beautiful old finca by the river where Abel had spent mornings as one of Jefferson’s inner circle. This was new construction, modern. Big blank white walls leading toward huge windows opening onto a view of the mountainside. Pretty, in its own way, but cold. There was a patio out back, and a grill, and servants. An old woman in a French maid outfit standing before a tray of uncooked sausages and steaks. Jefferson’s men lounged about the four corners of the patio, rifles slung at their sides. Abel remembered the man whose arm had been flayed. He remembered Osmin’s corpse in the mountains.

  Jefferson handed him a beer, and Abel drank. And then he started up the grill.

  “You’ve gotten thin,” Jefferson said.

  So Abel sat and watched Jefferson cook. It felt familiar. Comforting. He had mattered enough to his old boss to be plucked out of the little life he’d built and transported here, to the bigger game. Against his will, that thought gave him pleasure.

  “Venezuela, it’s a nightmare now,” Jefferson said. “I tell you, I could have been a king in Venezuela. But they’ve fucked that country up. Now, over there, even kings are cockroaches.”

  Abel nodded, looking around at the house. It was nice. The house of a rich man. But not the house of a king.

  “You left me . . .” Jefferson put out a hand, flat, the fingers outstretched, and tilted it this way and that. “Some people would say that you betrayed me. You were like my right hand. What’s a man to do without his right hand?”

  Jefferson spoke as though the idea that Abel had betrayed him had popped into his head. Abel knew Jefferson to be more deliberate than that.

  And then Jefferson laughed. “No!” he said. “You were never my right hand. You think you were that important? You were . . . you were a thumb. The thumb on my left hand. But a hand needs a thumb, yes?”

  Abel licked his lips. He wanted to take a swig of the beer. Maybe a swig of aguardiente—there had to be some here. His nerves were no longer deadened, like they had been when he was a younger man. There was even a woman he’d been seeing. Or, if not seeing in any meaningful sense, a woman who was kind to him, perhaps interested. Deysi. A half-Motilon woman with green eyes that could suddenly sparkle when she smiled. She’d lost a husband and a son, Abel didn’t know whether to violence or disease or both, but she knew sadness and was kind. She worked as a seamstress, and sold other odds and ends in her shop that he’d go in and buy, things he didn’t even need or know how to use. Why was he thinking of her at a time like this?

  “It’s been ten years since I’ve been to La Vigia,” Jefferson said. “This town . . . it’s gone from paras to guerrillas to narcos. I don’t know the players like you do. I need a little thumb, to help me hold on tight to the people here.”

  “I don’t get involved,” Abel said. “I’m a shopkeeper . . .”

  “Not anymore,” Jefferson said. “Now you work for me.”

  Abel felt the vise tightening, and wondered if there was anything he could say. Perhaps if he let Jefferson know that he’d been in touch with military intelligence, that two men from the army had come to his store, told him they knew all about his life and his former associates, and then took him to a small house where they grilled him about Jefferson’s old compadres. Odd things, like what type of alcohol does Rafael Ferrara like to drink? How close is El Hurón to his brother? Is Tomás Henríquez Rúa completely insane or is his madness a facade? He’d answered honestly, it was his duty as a citizen. And he was a citizen now, not a para. But to Jefferson, he was the same Abel who’d worked for him, and for that Abel to be talking to the military made Abel a toad, and bad things happened to toads. The military, he knew, would not protect him. So he tried something else.

  “I think, when I left, it wasn’t because I thought I’d have better luck without you. It was . . . I am weak. I am weaker than you wanted me to be. Loyal. Always loyal to you. But weak. That shop. That shop you saw. That you laughed at. I know. I laugh at it myself sometimes. But I own it. That is what I have built for myself, these past ten years. And I am proud. And I am so proud of that shop. What could I have built for you, if that is all I have built for myself in ten years? I am afraid I would fail you. You need a better thumb.”

  Jefferson considered that and smiled. Abel tried not to look too relieved.

  “Fool,” he said gently. “I will teach you to be strong.”

  Jefferson pulled the meat off the grill, slapping it down on a plate, juices drooling into a pool.

  2

  It’d been just shy of two years since Diego had seen Liz face-to-face. She was the first woman he’d been with after the collapse of his marriage. In his mind, the second woman he’d ever slept with, period. He didn’t count prostitutes, or the occasional late night, drunk bar hookup. As far as he was concerned, that kind of sex wasn’t sex, it was fucking.

  When she emerged through the gates of the airport, she seemed no older than the last time. Still pretty—beautiful to him, anyway—but tired, and not wearing makeup. Or so he thought. Incorrectly.

  “Diego,” she said. “What the hell am I doing in Colombia?”

  On the trip back, she told him a story she’d got secondhand from a veteran journalist living in Bogotá. He had a source who’d gone to a Colombian narco’s birthday party in Las Vegas in the 1990s. The narco had created a fake film company just so he could rent out the Strip and then, under the auspices of a film shoot, run drag races with him and his buddies.

  “Did this actually happen?”

  “Oh, probably not,” she said. “Then they brought a dairy cow up to the penthouse suite at the Sphinx, and hired some crooked veterinarian to sedate the animal and inject alcohol into its udders so they could drink White Russians straight from the cow’s boobs.”

  Diego laughed. “Jesus.”

  “They sedated the cow,” Lisette said. “Last thing it knew, it was partying in the penthouse suite at the Bellagio. Then, once it tapped out of milk, they chain-sawed her and sent the meat down to the hotel steakhouse.”

  “There’s no way this happened.”

  “Someday I should put together a book of all the stories journalists heard but could never corroborate. It’d be called Too Good to Fact-Check.”

  Was this the kind of story she was looking for here in Colombia? It had been over two decades, the murder rate had been more than cut in half, but people still couldn’t get enough of wild drug-lord stories. Colombia, land of violent, extravagant psychopaths. Of Pablo Escobar and his stupid fucking hippos. Lise
tte had never struck him as that sort of reporter in Afghanistan.

  “Would I be in that book?” he said.

  She eyed him carefully, the smile slipping a little before coming back.

  “Depends. Got any good stories?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Abel stood outside the office of the Fundación de Justicia y Fe. He breathed in and out, then willed himself toward the door and up the stairs. He paused on the landing. Luisa would not like what he was about to tell her. Could he even tell her? Easier to throw himself headfirst down the stairs and hope it broke his neck.

  The first time he’d seen her here, his face had gone white. It was only a few years after he’d left the paramilitaries, he’d completed bachillerato, gotten his diploma, and gone to the foundation for help applying to the Agency for Reintegration for a loan to open his store. He’d been nervous then, as well. He didn’t like having to admit to people he was an ex-combatant, and he had heard that the workers at the foundation were more sympathetic to former guerrilleros than to former paramilitaries like himself. But he’d never suspected when he opened the door to the office that Luisa would be there behind the counter, head down, a little older and fatter but still the same girl who’d sat and played the piano and then screamed as her father was cut in half.

  His first instinct had been to run. But then she had looked up and seen him. At first, her glance was a purely professional acknowledgment of his presence. Then a moment of confusion passed quickly as she tried to place him. Abel held his breath, kept utterly still, as if any movement would give him away. And then her eyes widened slightly. She had placed him. She knew him. She knew what he was guilty of.

  They stood like that for a moment, and then another worker at the foundation, perhaps sensing something was off, said, “I can take this one, if you want.”

  But Luisa had said no, and had sat Abel down, and asked him what he wanted. And when he told her he had graduated from school, she told him he should be proud, and when he told her he did not want to return to fighting, she told him that was honorable, and when he told her he wanted to open a store with a loan from the reintegration agency, she told him she would help.

  She had seemed like a saint to him then. And as she got out the forms he started crying, foolishly. And he told her about his family, and about his animal life on the streets of Cunaviche after their deaths, and she had nodded and listened, but said nothing, offered nothing. Only after they had filled out the forms and she had instructed him on the next steps in the process did he have the courage to ask about what had happened to her after the destruction of Rioclaro.

  “A priest, Father Iván,” she said. “He had known my father, and he helped me find a job here.”

  He wanted to tell her that she had survived Rioclaro only because of him, but it seemed as though even mentioning it would be profane. And then, after all her kindness, she made one hard demand on him.

  “You have some of your own money that you’re putting to the store,” she said. “Is that money you saved from your time as a combatant?”

  He had nodded yes.

  “That money is stained with blood,” she said. She told him that if he was going to use that money to open the store, then the store wasn’t really his. It belonged to the people who’d suffered. And so, every month, he owed it to the poor of La Vigia to give away some of what he made.

  “Once you’ve given away as much money as you made in the paras,” she said, “then you’ll have earned the store.”

  Then and there, he’d wanted so badly to tell her that she lived only because of him. But he held his tongue. And when he finally did open the store, her words haunted him. And so, he put aside a little amount each month. As he started earning more money, he’d take his entire stipend from the reintegration agency, a few hundred thousand pesos, and give it to the church. Slowly, he chipped away at the debt Luisa claimed he owed, earning his salvation. And then Jefferson came back into his life.

  He’d shut down the shop. No more earning honest money. No more paying off his debt. At night he hunched in his closed store with the television on, his muscles tense, his mind exhausted, and then he’d lay down, unable to sleep. A brave man would tell Jefferson, No. You can kill me, but I am not returning to that life. I am a man now. I am a member of this community, and I will not turn my back on the life I have built here. Abel wanted to do that. But at even the thought of defying Jefferson, fear would rise up. It was a physical presence inside him, the fear. It burned. It tasted like gasoline.

  So he agreed to work for Jefferson, though he held out the hope that somehow there might be something he could do to save himself. Perhaps Luisa would know.

  The paint on the walls in the staircase outside the foundation was tinged with yellow, and clumped in spots. He touched one of those clumps—a bad, lazy job—and looked up to the placard above the door to the offices, a computer printout of the name of the foundation hung crookedly in a cheap frame. Everything looked even cheaper than it had when he’d first come. Luisa ran the office now, and Luisa had no pride in appearances. Unlike Jefferson, who, though he was just as happy sleeping under a tree with a rock for a pillow as in a palace, always took care to let the world see his magnificence.

  Abel put his hand out to the doorknob, then drew back. Maybe she wasn’t even in. Maybe she was in Cúcuta, fighting with the administrators of the foundation. He hadn’t seen her around town. Hadn’t spoken to her in months. Perhaps this could be put off.

  But then the door swung fully open and Luisa, in all her glory, stomped out to the landing. She was dressed in work pants and an old, ratty polo shirt that fit her awkwardly. She had the expression of a bull about to charge. And then she caught Abel in her sights, stopped, made eye contact, and gave a short nod.

  “Ah,” she said. “You know about Jefferson.”

  Abel, one foot on the landing, one foot a step down, nodded neither yes nor no, but merely swayed indecisively.

  “Not now,” she said. “Not today. I’m busy. But Sunday? Meet at the bakery?”

  His sins would have to wait until then.

  * * *

  • • •

  Lisette didn’t want to raise Diego’s hopes, but nevertheless felt an increasing warmth as he took her around, showed off his house, a lovely traditional construction on the side of a mountain. There was something innocent in his artlessness, and it gave her a tender feeling toward him. To think that a grown man, with the kind of life experiences Diego had, could get reduced to an awkward, fumbling boy. It made her feel more innocent herself. Diego, she knew, was someone who still believed in the magic of intimacy. It was what she’d liked about him when they were together, until it’d become claustrophobic and boring.

  So when the tour ended at the door to her room, she put a hand on the small of his back, smiling as he stiffened. She leaned in, closer than she had to, and said, “It’s really good to see you again.” Which was true. He smiled. She took a moment to enjoy both the awkwardness she provoked in him, and the pleasure. And then she stepped past him into her room, smiled, and shut the door.

  There, inside, with a door between her and Diego, she took a breath. She walked to the low, roughly queen-size bed, and sat down on the hard mattress.

  “Okay,” she said to the wall. “What now?”

  Bogotá had been a disappointment. A two-hundred-dollar-a day fixer who introduced her to politicians, activists, prosecutors, human rights workers, and judges. And, of course, las víctimas. Víctimas of the FARC, or víctimas of the paramilitaries, or víctimas of the narcos, or víctimas of the armed forces. They’d all been activated in the political struggle over whether or not to ratify the coming peace treaty. If you want people to reject the peace, show them victims of the FARC. If you want people to accept it, remind them that there’s blood on the state’s hands, too. It was the same with Iraq—prior to the war, hawks wan
ted everyone to know the suffering of the Iraqi people. Not so much after the war started.

  There is a naive belief among Americans, swaddled from war as they are, that merely to tell the stories of the oppressed and victimized is a political act. Tell the stories, and the appropriate political answer to the suffering will become apparent. Colombians, who’ve lived with war for decades, know better. And they especially know how empathy can be weaponized in the run-up to a vote. But that wasn’t what Lisette was there for.

  It’ll come, it’ll come, she told herself as she turned in for bed. Diego, perhaps, could help.

  The next morning he made her breakfast. Eggs, arepas, and cheese. And instant coffee with an incredibly sweet hazelnut creamer. He didn’t even ask how she liked it, he just gave it to her that way.

  “This is Colombia,” she said, pointing at the cup. “And you’re drinking instant?”

  “This is the way Colombians drink it.” Diego smiled mischievously. “The fancy stuff is for export.”

  “I hear Blackwater set up a company here to recruit Colombian military to work as mercenaries for the Emirates.”

  Diego’s smile disappeared.

  “It’s Academi now.”

  “I hear they’re going to send them to Yemen. Which, am I wrong in thinking, is the most fucked-up war we’re engaged in right now?”

  “Jesus, Liz. Right to business?”

  “Well—”

  “Hey, how are you? Recruited any Colombians for the UAE recently?”

  “I—”

  “No, I’m not involved. But really, is that your story? Piddly mercenary shit?”

 

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