by Phil Klay
“Jesus?” she said.
He nodded. Yes, go on.
“Jesus,” she said. “Jesus . . . Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesusjesusjesus.”
He clenched his teeth and sucked in some air. She did not seem to believe him, but that was fine. She just had to tell people what he wanted her to. “Okay,” he said. “Good. It is a good prayer.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
He shifted in his chair, straightening his posture. “I would tell you that the people of La Vigia have been forgotten by their government, but that would not be true. The government has never cared about us. Bogotá cannot forget a people it never knew. To them, we are nothing. The province of a province. The land of no one.”
“And this land? What is it to you?”
“The birthplace of a new Colombia.”
Then he ordered his men to drive the journalist to a clinic an hour south, where she could get her injuries attended to.
“If you want to talk more,” she said, “I don’t need the doctor. I can wait.”
Cracked ribs could lead to pneumonia, he told her. Get it looked at, we’ll talk later. Meanwhile, he would have someone call a reporter to meet her at the clinic. And the first thing she needed to tell them was that Jefferson Paúl López Quesada was the one who rescued her.
“On the way back,” he told his men, “pick up Abel, and bring him here.”
After she left, the nausea and pain returned. He popped a few pills, and then popped a few more, and sat in his house, and turned on the TV, and was bored by the news, and ultimately decided not to wait for Abel before watching one of the DVDs he had given him as a gift. So strange, that so few of his men thought to give him gifts. It was something to keep note of.
* * *
—
Abel.”
Deysi was seated in her shop, sewing. She was short and plump, with a youthful face that must not be so different from the one she’d had as a girl, before the violence had come and taken her family from her. Her fingers, though, were worn and calloused, with cracked skin and blotches, and they moved rapidly and assuredly when she was doing the sort of intricate work that required a needle and thread, and not a machine. It was remarkable to see her make patterns blossom on fabric, like watching the flurry of a musician’s fingers somehow drawing music from simple, nylon strings. Abel liked to watch her work. He liked the serious expression that came to her face. He liked even more when she looked up and said his name and gave him a smile. She was smiling now.
“I’d like”—Abel looked around the shop. He hadn’t come with an excuse to be there, so he looked around and randomly grabbed at a roll of purple fabric—“two meters of this.”
“For what?”
Good question. What on earth could he do with two meters of purple fabric? “It’s a secret,” he said.
She smiled again, amused, and he felt full, overflowing. He wanted to tell her that he was going to see his boss tonight. That they would watch a movie and he would leave and maybe that would be the last time he saw Jefferson. There were forces at work in the world changing things for the better.
“Very mysterious, Abel.”
There it was, his name again. When she said his name, he felt like less of a stranger, looking in on real life. He felt like he belonged.
“You know,” he said, “you were always kind to me, and I never understood why.”
She stopped her needlework and looked at him curiously.
“The first year after”—he didn’t want to say it—“after I left the paracos was very hard.”
She nodded her head.
“I was very lucky. Mr. Bejar gave me a job. Not everyone liked that. One day, after he’d paid me for the week, a couple of men followed me home and hit me with a brick.” He laughed gently. “I woke up with no money and a big headache.”
For a long time, he’d lived in fear. He lost weight. He moved. He grew a mustache and combed his hair a different way. He thought about changing his name. A stupid thought, in a town this small.
Those were paranoid days, when he’d refused to sit near windows, and something as simple as an overheard argument from his neighbors would set off fantasies of the guerrilla coming to torture him. Another paramilitary he knew disappeared and Abel was certain he’d been taken by the guerrilla, a gasoline-soaked rag stuffed in his mouth, and left like that until the fumes burned through his insides. But Deysi had always smiled at him.
“That’s terrible,” she said.
Now what? Ask her to go dancing on Saturday? This wasn’t how the conversation was meant to go.
“That was a long time ago. It wasn’t so bad, and maybe . . .”
“What?”
“Maybe I deserved to have a hard time, coming back.” He ran his fingers over the purple fabric. “I’ve tried to pay for what I’ve done.”
“No,” she said. “You are a good man. I’ve always seen that.”
He nodded. He didn’t think anyone had ever told him that before, and now he had nothing to say. He felt silly, and happy to have come, and he paid for his two meters of cloth and left, full of life. Deysi was a very good person, he thought. And that, plus the knowledge of the curse working its terrible power, led to a change in Abel.
When he walked out everything seemed very different than before he’d walked in. There were birds singing and of course he’d heard them before but it seemed like a sudden shock that birds sang like this, all the time, and he never noticed it. As he walked down the street to the central square near the offices of the Fundación de Justicia y Fe, he saw the trees in bloom and a young boy climbing up one of them while two men hustled off somewhere very important and an old woman stared at the sky and smiled as if there were nothing more important or glorious to do than enjoy the sunshine. Everything was the same as it had been before, but sweeter.
You are a good man, she’d told him. He went to the church and stood before the statue of the Virgin and said a prayer of gratitude. Then he walked to the outskirts of town and returned to his shuttered store. Even this, too, was transformed. No longer a gloomy ruin, it looked the way it used to in the mornings when it was still in operation . . . a shop that had been closed down to rest for the night and was waiting for him to start the day fresh.
He went behind the counter and pulled out a ledger, now covered in dust after these months with the Jesúses. It was where he’d kept track of the money he’d given away, following Luisa’s instructions, where he’d calculated how much left he’d still have to pay before he had atoned for his time in the paras. What an odd thing he held in his hands. This many dollars left, I am a sinner. This many dollars paid, I am forgiven. Jefferson returns, I am damned. I give his location to the army, I am saved.
He spent the next few hours going through the store and taking notes on the orders he’d have to make to stock his shelves and reopen it again. It was half a fantasy, half a real plan. And it was in the midst of this fantasy that some Jesúses knocked on his door and told him they’d take him to Jefferson.
“Do you know Steven Seagal?” he’d asked them in the car, but no. That was before their time. They were young, like he had been, with pimples on their faces. They liked superhero movies. They didn’t care about the names of the actors, they liked Ironman and Batman and Thor.
As they drove, he wondered when the army would come for Jefferson, and if this was the last time he would see him. Perhaps the curse would strike tomorrow, and he really would go on to open the store. Perhaps he really would ask Deysi out dancing. Perhaps she’d say yes. Perhaps they’d marry and have children and name them after the loved ones they’d both lost. Perhaps there really was a life ahead of him. Perhaps he’d die an old man. And perhaps, at the Last Judgment, as he stood between the hope of paradise and the threat of hell, Christ would look at his whole life, not just at his small spurts of courage, when he saved Luisa or
when he cursed Jefferson, but at the long slow act of courage it took to open a store, return to civilian life, master his fear, greet his neighbors without shame, and slowly, over time, see himself reflected in their eyes as a good, upstanding man.
When they arrived at Jefferson’s house some of the fear returned, and the vision fled, but he got out and asked the guard at the gate for a cigarette. It would calm him, he thought, before he had to go see Jefferson and pretend everything was normal.
This is when the shooting started. And because Abel was at the gate, next to an armed guard, the first shots were at him, penetrating his torso and his skull, leaving him with no time to cry out in pain or fear, no time to tell the army commandos rushing forward that he was their informant, no time even to whisper a prayer before he died, aged twenty-nine, at what he had desperately hoped was only the midpoint of his life.
* * *
—
Diego’s palms were sweaty. He felt useless, and fat, wedged into his back seat in the cockpit, the straps digging into his flesh, immobilizing him while down below younger men in better shape flowed through buildings, searching for his girl.
His girl. That was funny. Was she? Wasn’t she? It didn’t matter. He wanted her alive. He wanted to be the one to save her and if he couldn’t be on the ground at least he was here, hovering above, a guardian angel, whispering directions as the men below stormed the compound.
Still, he hated it. Removed from the action, sweating ugly blotches into his shirt, sitting in a glorified crop duster overloaded with electronics, hoping she didn’t die in the gunfight. And how stupid that would be, after everything she’d done, making friends with Taliban, covering Haqqani arms smugglers, driving out into Indian country with Marines and soldiers and getting into firefights, to die in some bumblefuck backwoods of Colombia with some penny-ante drug dealers? Life makes no sense, and there are so many ways something like this can go wrong. If the bad guys inside act like fools, if the soldiers storming the compound pull the trigger when they should have held fire. Even the Delta guys sometimes end up killing the people they wanted to save. And God, he so wanted her to be alive. That was all that mattered.
* * *
—
When the raid began, and a squad of Colombia’s finest commandos began shooting their way through the Jesúses stationed in and around the house, Jefferson had just reached the butcher shop fight scene in Out for Justice. Steven Seagal grabbed a cleaver from a thug and drove it through the thug’s hand, into the wall behind him, leaving him stuck, arm raised absurdly, blood pouring down. It was a good scene. Steven Seagal always had clever things like that. Like where he kills the bad guy with a corkscrew. Or where he drives his thumb through Tommy Lee Jones’s eyeball until the goop runs out. Jefferson had once driven his thumb through a man’s eye like that, and it hadn’t been quite as cool as in the movie because the goop had squirted more than oozed, and some had gotten into his mouth.
At first, Jefferson didn’t notice the sound of the shooting. Maybe three or four crucial seconds as his mind, dulled by pain and painkillers and exhaustion, registered the sound he knew so well. Perhaps it was the Urabeños. Perhaps it was the police. Perhaps it was Javier. It could even be the Navy SEALs.
He got up, unsure of where he’d put his pistol, which was still tucked in his pants. He wasn’t afraid. He grabbed it and pulled and accidentally jerked the trigger as it came from his pants and an explosion registered as the bullet grazed a testicle, penetrated his thigh, and lodged in his femur. He stumbled and fell against the side of the couch. Everything moved slowly. But he brought the pistol up. There was a blur of movement and then two explosions in his chest and he slumped to the floor. Colombian soldiers in tactical gear flowed into the room, checking corners, securing the area. Jefferson stared at the ceiling. He felt another explosion in his chest as one of the soldiers dead-checked him. Adrenaline coursed through his body, quickening his mind in a way he hadn’t felt in years, while blood poured from the holes left by high-velocity rounds. This was good. This was a death in combat. This was a good death.
On the television, Steven Seagal disarmed a gun-wielding butcher as Richie and his goons got away.
8
Alma was not surprised when some of Javier’s men grabbed her off the street and told her they knew she was a toad. It was foolish of her to have gone to the foundation, and to have told her story in the first place. Even if Luisa hadn’t said Jefferson’s name, everyone there would have known who she was talking about.
“But we’ll make you a deal,” one had said. He was the tallest one, and seemed the oldest, but he was still young. Baby fat on his cheeks. A loud voice meant to project authority but, in fact, showing only his fear. The other two huddled beside him, one scrawny and the other very young, with skinny arms and a round belly and a nervous, boyish smile that Alma would have found sweet in other circumstances. They reminded her of the guerrilleros she’d fought alongside.
“Javier told us to make it look like you got hit by a car.”
Alma nodded her head, understanding how the game was going to be played, and the oldest one explained the bargain. You’re going to stand here, on the side of the road. And we’re going to get in our truck, put the pedal to the floor, and accelerate toward you. If you stay there, if you don’t run, you’ll die a quick death. We’ll go as fast as we can. If you run, we drive to your home and kill your children.
And so Alma stood in the road. It was the end of the day. She had a bag of yuca she’d paid for with a bag of coca leaves. Food for her children. She asked them if they’d bring the yuca to her family after they killed her and the oldest one laughed. But then the skinny one said, “Why not?” And so she gave him the bag and stepped out into the road.
“Here?” she said. And they told her, yes, there, and put their truck in reverse, stopping only a hundred meters away, then shifting to drive. The road was muddy. She wondered how fast their truck could accelerate in the mud. Would the strike kill her? Or would she still be alive? Would she bleed out in the road or would they go in reverse, run her over to finish the job? She knew she was stupid for speaking out against Jefferson, but she had no regrets. She did not allow herself regrets. Her youngest would be too young to remember her mother. Her oldest would have to tell stories of her. The truck spat mud as they hit the pedal, wheels spinning, and then it was advancing toward her, too fast for further thoughts, and she faced it the way she’d faced battle, for this was just another form of combat, wasn’t it? And the front of the car impacted with her chest so powerfully her whole rib cage shattered inward, her heart exploded, and her mind disappeared before she struck the ground. And the boys looked upon her body sadly, because she’d shown courage and none of them were sure if they could have done the same. And then, because they weren’t without pity, they drove by where she lived and flung the bag of yucca out of the car, the heavy bag flying only a few feet before crashing to the ground, the seam of the bag splitting and yucca spilling out into the dirt for her children to later find, and wash, and eat.
* * *
—
People were afraid of Javier. He knew that, and it was a problem. All the best commanders he’d worked for knew how to inspire both fear and love. And though he knew he could inspire an intense loyalty among his men, especially among those he worked with closely, and most especially among those he had killed with, among townspeople he inspired only fear. This made him an excellent hammer. Javier handed out justice, a justice so severe that when Jefferson stepped in and stayed his hand, it seemed like the mercy of God raining down from heaven. People didn’t just fear him and love Jefferson. They feared him so that they could love Jefferson.
As a younger man, Javier thought power was the ability to make a man beg for his life. That was the most pure, most direct form of satisfaction in this world. But as he grew older, he had come to see how limited it was. More like the pleasure a child feels eating a candy bar
than the pleasure a grown man feels having a well-cooked meal.
Now that Jefferson was dead, what pleasures awaited him? He thought this as he was still in hiding, lying low, waiting for the storm to pass. When the news had come of a military raid, Jefferson dead, along with six others, Javier thought it was the beginning of the end. But nothing else happened. No more raids. No attacks on laboratories or warehouses.
Already, he knew it was safe. Already, he knew the surveillance teams were leaving the jungle. The aircraft absent from the skies. This little corner of Norte de Santander was too poor, too remote, too far from Bogotá for the military to devote resources to. It was why Jefferson picked it. Javier only needed to keep Americans out, and keep the countryside pacified, and then he could focus on what Jefferson had excelled at—inspiring devotion.
Two weeks before, he had ordered a shirt from a store in Cúcuta. It was Armani Exchange. A “Regular Fit Short-Sleeve Geo Camo Yoke Shirt.” The torso was a shimmering gray. The sleeves had a camouflage pattern. It fit him tightly, and he buttoned it to the neck. The sleeves cut off midbicep, showing the swell of muscle. How many forty-seven-year-old men looked like this? How many men sculpted themselves this well at any age? Protein powder, creatine, energy powders, regular weight training, and the discipline from the military combined into a body everyone should admire. He had the right mixture of maturity and vigor. He had spent maybe twenty minutes admiring himself in the mirror, smoothing out the creases of the fabric so it was one pure, straight shimmer of beauty from his neck to his waist. Jefferson, who the people loved, had been fat. Jefferson had never had a particularly impressive body, but toward the end he was just fat. And haggard. Javier was superior. A gentleman.
He went to La Serpiente de Tierra Caliente, the one place in town Jefferson had permitted women to disobey the rules of the old manual for the autodefensas about skirts and lewd behavior. “You have to give people at least one outlet,” he always said. Javier took several of his men and went to that one outlet, dressed beautifully, with a body sculpted beyond anything anyone else in the town could achieve, and waited to be admired.