by Phil Klay
“I am telling you what you will say.”
“Bogotá will not put out a statement that is not verified,” Professor Agudelo said.
“Then verify it.”
Jefferson stood up and a flash of pain came across his face. He looked weak and almost pathetic for a second, but then he got control of himself and looked proudly around the room. He walked to Valencia.
“Where are you from, pretty?” he said.
“Bogotá.”
“You’re studying law?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “You should be a beauty queen first. Then go study law.”
Valencia said nothing, felt nothing. Jefferson turned to Sara, who stared at him hatefully.
“You,” Jefferson said. “You go study law.”
He turned back to Luisa.
“I want it known that it was country people who took the journalist.”
“And if we do this for you,” Luisa said, “what do you do for us?”
It seemed to surprise Jefferson, who paused, gave Luisa a measured look, and then laughed.
“It will be very bad here if that journalist is not found quickly. Am I wrong?”
“Perhaps,” Luisa said.
“When death comes,” he said, “he doesn’t come to take just one.”
Luisa smiled, her lips tight.
Jefferson stood up. “The police sergeant should be here soon. Let him know what happened. Country people!”
* * *
—
Luisa knew it wasn’t Jefferson. She knew he was smart. She knew he was methodical. She knew he wouldn’t jeopardize his position with some foolhardy, dramatic act. She also knew he was popular. She knew he was trying to build an empire. She knew that, in her little corner of Colombia, he wasn’t even the worst option.
So what to do? In the main room, Agudelo was briefing the students on the foundation’s protocols for things like this. Luisa sat behind her desk and thought. For some reason, the kidnapping of this journalist was a threat to Jefferson. That pleased her, but she tried to ignore that pleasure. What was good or bad for Jefferson wasn’t important. The only thing that mattered was what made life better for everyone else.
Agudelo, finished with the students, came into Luisa’s office.
“We need to get the students out as soon as it is safe to move them.”
Luisa hunched down in her chair, leaned forward, and stared at her hands. They were large, and strong. Pianist’s hands, her father had believed, though in her heart she knew that she never played as well as he pretended she did. It had been a long, long time since she’d played the piano.
“There is less violence in La Vigia now that Jefferson is in charge,” Luisa said. “He’s a monster, but he’s rational. Did you know he’s been telling townspeople to vote yes to the peace?”
“He wants the FARC gone. One fewer rival.”
“Sometimes what’s good for Jefferson is good for us. Sometimes it’s not.” Luisa drummed her fingers on the table. “You have friends. Journalist friends. In Cúcuta.”
“I do.”
“Well,” Luisa said. “You and I need to think very hard about what we’re going to tell them.”
* * *
—
After giving her statement to the police sergeant, Valencia went to La Vigia’s sole internet café. She could have called from the foundation’s phone, but she needed to get out of the office, and Agudelo reluctantly agreed. As soon as she connected her phone to wi-fi, text messages from her mother and father popped up. “I love you, be safe,” from her mother. And “I love you, take care,” from her father. It was suspicious. She went into WhatsApp and called her father’s cell phone.
He picked up on the first ring. “Let’s not talk about work.”
That left her silent.
“Let’s not talk about work,” he said again. “We always talk about work, and I don’t want to talk about work. I want to talk about you and how you are doing, my dear.”
It took her a second to get it, and then, once she did, she felt like a fool.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s fine.” Maybe someone was listening in. Maybe her father was being paranoid. Whatever it was, it meant that her father already knew what had happened. Of course he knew.
“When are you leaving?” he asked.
“Nothing has changed.”
“No sooner?”
“I don’t think so.”
What else did he know? Who had done it? Why? She wanted to tell him about it. That she had been there. That she knew what it looked like when someone was beaten bloody in front of you, and that she knew what it felt like when you did nothing, nothing, to stop it. The excitement she’d felt at the time was fading and in its place was guilt. Shame. A sense of remembered helplessness echoing through into the present, where she was still helpless. And as he talked, as he assured her that all was good back home, as he seemed to subtly suggest that she need not worry, that there were some issues that her father was going to take care of, she felt that helplessness coming to the fore. Here was her father, insinuating that he was going to take care of her, even here, in the place she’d come to be her own person.
“I have information,” she said carefully. How could she tell him about Jefferson, and what he was demanding the foundation tell the media?
“No, it’s good, it’s good,” came the quick reply. And he started talking about her upcoming semester, and she tried again to let him know that things weren’t as they seemed, but he cut her off again and said, “It rained today, very hard. The news said it wouldn’t so I went out without an umbrella and got wet. But you can’t always trust what you hear on the news.”
“Oh,” she said, “okay.” And then he told her he loved her, and that everything was fine, and that she should do exactly what her professor told her to do, and he hung up.
She went back to the offices, where Ricardo was sitting alone next to the chair Jefferson had occupied a few hours earlier.
“How are you?” he said. “That must have been very frightening.”
Valencia nodded, pulled out the chair Jefferson had used, and sat in it. Her skin prickled.
“I want to do something,” she said.
“Have you finished your transcripts?”
That wasn’t what she meant.
“I know,” Ricardo said. “It’s boring. But really important work tends to be. Trust me. And Luisa. And your professor.”
“Of course.”
But she didn’t trust Luisa. And Professor Agudelo was a fool. And what was Ricardo but a factotum? And what had any of them done when that criminal had sat in their offices and laid out his terms? Her father had ways of dealing with men like that. It troubled Valencia to feel that way, but she did.
As a girl, Valencia had taken to praying for murderers, for rapists, for criminals and narcos and terrorists. That they’d give up their evil and reconcile with Christ and be redeemed. She’d prayed for Osama bin Laden and she’d prayed for Tirofijo and she’d never, ever told her parents about it, not even her mother, who would have understood but who also would have suggested that perhaps she should be praying for her father and his men instead of those who tried to kill them. It had seemed to her that the extent of the evil committed by the objects of her prayer must, in some way, be proportional to the virtues displayed in praying for them. But looking at the chair in which Jefferson had sat only an hour ago, and at the door to the room where Alma had testified her orchestrated torture at Jefferson’s hands, the very idea of praying for his salvation seemed grotesque. Perhaps this was what her father wanted her to know when he dismissed her reasons for coming here as childish nonsense. Perhaps losing one’s sense of mercy was part of growing up.
She got up and left the offices and went to her room. When she opened the door, she saw Sara wa
s sitting on the bottom bunk, reading a book by Moreno-Durán.
“I looked into cases from the demobilization under Uribe,” Sara said. “You know that Jefferson can’t be touched by the law? He served time under arrest. Two years. He served in a special prison with other bosses in the paramilitaries. They had their own rooms and special meals cooked for them.”
“Two years?”
“He confessed to all kinds of things, extrajudicial killings, forced displacements, gender-based violence.” She said the clinical words with loathing. “That’s what he got.”
Two years. That was 730 days. Surely, he’d ruined more lives than the number of days he’d spent in a comfortable prison. How many hours had he spent in jail per life he’d ruined? Per farmer thrown out of his lands, per trade unionist murdered in cold blood. She thought of Alma and the corpse of the girl she’d been, reaching up and clutching at her still, all these years later. What had Alma’s suffering added to his jail sentence? An hour or two? Less time, perhaps, than Alma had been trapped at that party.
Sara pulled out a little flip phone from her pocket. “The camera on this isn’t very good, but I got a photo of him before he left.”
On the screen was a slightly blurry image of Jefferson.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why’d you take it?”
Sara shrugged, her eyes on the blurry image. “Instinct.”
They both looked at the photograph. Jefferson was standing by a window, a scowl on his ugly, puffy face. Valencia could imagine this photo on the evening news, as she’d seen so many other photos of FARC leaders or drug lords or criminals over the years, their faces posted after one of them was captured or killed and the army or police released one of the surveillance photos they’d used to track them down.
“We could give it to my father,” Valencia said.
That hung in the air, but then Sara shook her head. “And what’s he going to do? Jefferson is an old paramilitary. He’s probably got more friends in the army than your dad does.”
Valencia didn’t want to get into an argument, so she ignored that.
Sara stared at the photo. “Why is that son of a bitch so interested in what happened to the gringa?”
“Because she’s an American,” Valencia said. And she told Sara about her conversation with her father, and her suspicions about what might, even now, already be in motion. “The army will try to find her. And when the army comes into a place . . .”
“Ah.” Sara nodded. That was why Jefferson wanted the foundation to tell the media it wasn’t him. He didn’t want to be a target when they came looking for the gringa. “This is a real problem for him.”
Valencia nodded, slowly. “Yes, but . . .”
“Luisa’s going to help him.”
“So he’ll be fine.”
It was a little revolting to say the words out loud.
“That bitch.” Sara tossed her book onto the windowsill. “I’d like to do something to hurt him. Even a little.”
And Valencia agreed. Yes. That would be good. And then they were quiet, each with their own thoughts, until Sara held up her phone, displaying the image of Jefferson, and asked, “Do you use Twitter?”
* * *
—
It had been some time since Agudelo had seen violence up close. During his six years with the Sofia Peréz Lawyers’ Collective, from 2003 to 2009, it’d been more common. The Uribe years were hard for the profession. State authorities would accuse lawyers like him of being guerrilla sympathizers, and the paramilitaries would take action. Six judges, 12 prosecutors, and 334 lawyers killed. He’d known one well. Alejandra Cortéz. Raped and murdered. He’d seen a coworker approached and held by two men who spat in his face and told him they’d kill his daughter. And then, his own assault.
At the time, everyone kept telling him what amazing strength he had, what resilience. He had a photo of himself from then. It showed a brutalized man in a hospital bed, his face distorted by the damage, one eye half shut, dark swelling flesh pressing against it, stitches along the jaw and the top of the head, an overlarge bandage comically perched upon the nose. But the man wasn’t lying back, resting and recovering. He was sitting up, eyes down on the papers strewn about his hospital bed, working. He kept the photo in his office; a reminder of what a brave person he had seemed at the time. But only seemed.
The men who assaulted him had clubbed him in the head, knocking him unconscious with the first blow. He never even saw them. Never experienced the horror of being physically helpless, at the mercy of the merciless. He woke up in a fog, with a kind, panicked stranger shouting in his face that an ambulance was coming. As the blood returned to his brain, then to his tongue, his first concern was not for himself but for the stranger. She seemed so worried, he wanted to put her at ease. “I’m okay. That’s not necessary,” he’d told her. It wasn’t until he got to the hospital and they told him what had happened that he realized he’d been attacked, and not hit by a car or some other thing. By that time he was on painkillers, and so the knowledge didn’t land with much force. That was why he was able to appear so unperturbed by what had happened. His experience of violence was not like other people’s.
So it shouldn’t have surprised him that the kidnapping would leave him shaken. After hashing out a statement for the press with Luisa, he went to the bathroom and threw up. It felt good. A physical expulsion of the stress and fear that he had not permitted himself to show. As the men had beaten Lisette, sound had faded and time had slowed. His vision had tunneled. Normal physiological reactions, he knew, but the drive back seemed to stretch into eternity, his hands seemed to obey his mind only after a half-second delay, and he had to carefully breathe in and out as white spots exploded at the far corners of his vision, trying keep his heart steady, his blood pumping, his van on the road, and his mind alert.
Soothed by the vomiting, Agudelo cleaned himself, splashed water on his face, and considered his situation objectively. Perhaps some residual mental trauma had been triggered. Perhaps his older, weaker body was less equipped to handle such things. Which meant he needed to care for his body so that he could be useful. Sharp. He needed a walk.
He left the bathroom and headed through the offices, trailing his hand along the uneven wall. Terrible construction. Ugly, yellow-tinged paint. He walked out and down the steps to the bakery. Two old men sat at a table. In the back, two thin, young ex-combatants, young enough that if you’d added their ages together you’d still have fewer years on earth than he did, pulled bread out of the oven.
Luisa had built a good thing here, but good things were fragile. La Vigia was underdeveloped and bordered Venezuela. It was surrounded by difficult terrain that couldn’t be effectively policed. It would never generate enough legitimate business to be worth the government’s time, but it would always produce enough illegal profit to make it key territory for narcos. What did protecting human rights look like in a place like that? It looked like ugly bargains. Which was what Luisa, who hadn’t so much as blinked when she learned that the man responsible for the death of her father had returned to La Vigia, was good at.
Ricardo walked past the door of the bakery, saw Agudelo inside, and poked his head in.
“I’m heading to the Defensor del Pueblo,” Ricardo said. “To go over a few things.”
Yes, he thought. The work continues. And though he wanted to join him, he instead walked out to the central square and looked at birds and thought about the last hour of his friend Alejandra’s life, and whether there was a God and a devil, whether Alejandra would live again in paradise, or whether that was it, the end of her story a mind full of pain and terror, no redemption, nothing saved.
* * *
—
Rather than continue their work in their rooms, Valencia and Sara snuck out to the internet café and wrote down a list o
f crimes. They edited it three times, combing through for compromising details that might help identify victims. They didn’t want anyone targeted. But they also wanted to add substance to the accusations, so that any journalists they tagged would have his backstory laid out.
“But they already know,” Valencia said. “It’s public record.”
Sara said, “Yes. But there’s knowing, like, Oh yeah, I’m pretty sure I know that. And then there’s knowing, like, Yes, absolutely, I have seen the evidence. And then there’s people talking with each other about knowing. And that’s the most important thing. People don’t have the guts to believe what they believe unless other people are talking about it.”
“Who told you that?”
“My dad.”
“The journalist.”
“Yeah.”
Valencia wondered what her father would say. When she started at Nacional, he’d explained to her the difference between information and intelligence. Information, he said, was just that. Data. Ones and zeros. Intelligence was relevant, actionable, secret information you could use. Think of the difference between holding a booklet with the rules of a card game versus that moment when you’re playing the game and suddenly things click. Ah, this is how you play. Intelligence was what you used to play the game. At universities, they claim to be offering knowledge. But knowledge was only information until you learned to weaponize it.
“Why does it have to be on Twitter?” Valencia asked. “Why not just set up a fake email account and email a reporter?”
“Then it’s just an anonymous accusation,” Sara said.
“This is an anonymous accusation, too.”
“If we put it on Twitter, along with a recent photo, that’s news. Reporters don’t need to verify the accusations. They can report on the existence of the accusations, which is just as good. Two months before the peace vote, this is a good story. A former paramilitary kidnapping a reporter.”
“Within hours the foundation is going to say it was the guerrilla.”