Heart of the World (20 page)

After forty-five minutes of denials, I followed the signs to a cabstand and told the driver I'd appreciate the recommendation of a reasonably priced hotel near the offices of
El Tiempo
. Then I opened the compact I keep in my backpack and watched the traffic behind us all the way. I don't think we were followed, but at night in a strange city, I couldn't be sure.

CHAPTER 17

I woke to sunlight tilting from the wrong
angle across a room of the wrong proportions, the wrong pillow beneath my cheek, the wrong smells in my nostrils. I swung my legs out of bed, stilled the alarm, and sat, recalling the rushed journey by taxi, the bright lights glinting from skyscrapers, the softly lit cathedrals.

The little gold birdman stared at me blankly from the bedside table.

“Welcome home,” I told him.

The tile floor felt icy under my bare feet as I crossed to the window and pushed the curtain aside. A steady procession of noisy traffic streamed by. Cars of all makes and sizes, boxy sedans, and buses, big and small, red, yellow, and green, commuters waving them down in the streets the way a New Yorker would flag a cab. A mule-drawn cart slowed traffic in the right-hand lane.

Church steeples towered over roofs of Spanish tile. Mountain peaks vanished in the morning mist. When I shifted my attention to the pedestrian traffic, I found the hurrying walkers on the narrow sidewalks well dressed: suits, ties, and slim attache cases for the men; high heels for the women.

I showered and dressed quickly. My wardrobe didn't allow for much in the way of choice, but after my glance at the impeccable pedestrians, I decided to forego jeans and sneakers in favor of navy pants, a low-cut white tee, and the smoky silk jacket. I did my makeup in the small
square of mirror over the sink, draped a scarf around my neck to add some color. After tucking the little birdman into his pouch and placing him in the smallest compartment of my backpack, I took the stairs to the lobby.

The Hotel del Parque, a glass and concrete square, the cabbie's recommendation, fit the bill, cheap and near the newspaper building. Twenty-five thousand pesos hadn't sounded cheap, but once I'd wrapped my mind around the exchange rate, it meant about ten bucks a night, a bargain.

No one in the adjoining diner seemed familiar. The only man with silver hair had a pink seamed face and a flabby build. Not the plane man. When the waitress appeared I ordered
arepas
, the small corncakes Paolina loves. While hungrily forking them down, I studied the morning newspaper. Luisa Cabrera's byline appeared on the third page.

I'd made up my mind last night, after a wee-hours webcrawl through
[Que Hubo!
, the Colombian Yellow Pages: Plodding detail work wasn't the key to this quest. I needed to find Roldan, and I needed to find him quickly. The best way to do that was by starting as many hares as I could, by stirring up a hornet's nest. I'd chase down the Zona Rosa and check the other number on Naylor's phone bill, but I'd also talk to Cabrera. Nothing like a journalist for stirring up a hive. I signaled for
la cuenta
and figured the tip.

Walking down the street, I felt conspicuous in ways that don't apply in Boston. There, my Irish coloring, misleading as it is, makes me one of the gang. There, I live surrounded by universities that field women's teams in basketball and volleyball, bringing in an influx of tall women every year to serve as camouflage. Here, even in flats I was tall, and my red hair stood out like a flare. At a busy intersection, two child acrobats tossed juggling pins, then rushed through traffic to collect tips before the light changed.

Entering the
El Tiempo
building was like passing through airport security all over again. I placed my backpack on a conveyer belt for the X-ray machine. An armed guard patted me down, scrutinizing my passport, comparing my face to the photo. When he nodded me through to the front desk, an elderly man used a telephone to ask Senorita Cabrera whether she'd agree to see me. After a moment, he offered me the phone.

“Can you give me some idea of what this is about?” Her voice was low, curt, and businesslike.

“I've come all the way from Boston to speak with you.” My Spanish might not flow the way it did when I was a child, but my fluency would improve rapidly once the language surrounded me; I was confident of that. Mexico City Spanish and Bogota Spanish weren't the same, but Paolina had schooled me in the differences.

“That's a long way to come with no appointment.”

I simply agreed with her, assuming that journalistic curiosity would win out over caution. The desk man gave me directions to the third floor and a pass to clip to my jacket. V
ISITANTE
, it said. Guest.

Cabrera was waiting when the elevator doors opened; small, dark, and young. Not beautiful; her features were crowded too closely around a sharp nose for beauty. She was striking, with soft caramel eyes and long hair scraped back from a high forehead. Her figure was slim and her black designer suit gave her some of the gravitas age and stature had denied her.

“Give me a minute. I'm in the middle of something.” Without waiting for a response, she moved quickly down a long hallway. A young man emerged from an office and tagged behind her.

Computer screens dominated the twenty-odd desks in the large room. Wall art was confined to news clippings push-pinned to bulletin boards and a few framed Botero prints. Eyes peered at me from behind the screens. If I wanted to blend in better, I was going to need to invest in a bottle of hair dye. I hoped Lady Clairol had a South American distributor.

I turned my back on the curious eyes and focused on a display case containing silver-framed studio photographs. I've visited both the
Herald
and the
Globe
. They have display cases, too, filled with journalism awards, engraved plaques and silver cups. This case was different. There must have been twenty photos inside, each edged in black, each the likeness of a Colombian journalist, killed in the line of duty.

That would account for the security downstairs.

“Sorry.” Cabrera was back. “It's a busy morning. What can I do for you?”

“Is there someplace more private?”

“Follow me.” Her skin was the color of a good Florida tan. Her heels clicked on the floorboards and I had to walk briskly to keep up in spite of the difference in our heights.

She rated a window office with a mahogany desk and a high-backed black leather chair. She sank into the chair, eyes unfocused, as though she were thinking about whatever story she'd just abandoned.

“I've been reading you,” I said. “You're good.”

“You must want a favor,” she said.

“Maybe I can do you a favor.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “People from your country come to do us favors all the time.”

“You know many people from my country?”

“Just last week, I spoke to a journalist from a town in Ohio. It was amazing, his ignorance. He didn't know Colombia was a democracy. We have been a democracy since 1830!”

“He was doing an article on Colombian civics?”

“Your newspapers only do articles on Colombia when someone in their town gets killed during a drug deal gone bad. In fact, I would say the average North American knows nothing about my country that can't be summed up in a

Since her hostility was on such open display, I thought I might as well use it.

“Speaking of drugs,” I said, “you've written about a man named Carlos Roldan Gonzales.”

“You see? Of the many topics you could discuss concerning Roldan, the one you choose is drugs.”

“What other topics would you recommend?”

She picked up a gold fountain pen and seemed absorbed in removing the top and studying the nib. “First, we might speak about the history of Colombia.”

“Starting when?”

“We have a two-party system, as you do, but there is a tradition of violence between the parties. Eight civil wars were fought here, just in the nineteenth century.
Liberal
and
conservative
, for decades, were fighting words.”

The Ohio journalist had probably gotten the same earful. I didn't see what it had to do with Roldan.

“After a brief military dictatorship, the parties reached an agreement to share power. Every four years the presidency shifted from one party to the next.”

I supposed that was a form of democracy.

“And when the agreement came to an end, lo and behold, both parties were much the same, parties of the elite. Neither reached out to the rural areas of the country. The only ones who helped the peasants in the countryside were the guerrillas.”

“The FARC and the ELN?”

She gave me a look, like a teacher whose slowest student had surprisingly done his homework. “What do you know about them?”

I'd just read a slew of articles about Colombia, but I was no expert. “Marxist guerrilla groups.”

“Bolivian Marxists, not Soviet. Some groups stand for agrarian reform, for nationalizing the country's resources, for property redistribution. North Americans come here, they think the old Soviet army is roaming the Colombian countryside. They think all guerrillas are the same, the FARC, the ELN, the MM-19. But then, what else can one expect from people who live where the only decisions they make are whether to snort cocaine or smoke it, and how much money they should send this country to defoliate the ground?”

I kept quiet. She was on a roll and I didn't want to interrupt.

“I would speak to you about the tradition of the outlaw,” she went on. “Roldan, because he existed outside the two-party system, became part of a tradition that I would compare to your Western outlaws. Your Jesse James, perhaps.”

A romanticized killer, I thought, but not a drug dealer.

She said, “So, are you from the CIA or the DEA?”

“Neither.”

“Perhaps you are from my government.” “No.”

She tapped the fountain pen on the red leather blotter. “But you're interested in El Martillo. Are you a journalist?” “A private detective.”

She smiled. “Like on American TV, no?”

“If you don't believe me, you can phone the Boston police. Speak to Joseph Mooney, the Head of Homicide.” “You're here about a murder?” “No. A kidnapping.”

“A kidnapping? Kidnapping is old hat here. Routine. The police
aren't even interested in kidnapping, except to tell you it's illegal to pay ransom.”

“Look, I have a story for you. A scoop.” I used the English word because I didn't know the Colombian equivalent.

“And you expect something in return for this scoop?” She understood the word perfectly.

“This much I'm willing to give you for nothing: El Martillo isn't dead.”

“You're not a psychic, are you?” The Spanish for “psychic” is
medium
. The way her eyes stayed level, I wondered if she already knew he was alive.

“If I were a psychic, I'd have picked a reporter more interested in my story.”

“That's all you've got? That he's alive?” She fiddled with the pen again; she was interested all right.

“Oh, I have more,” I said, “but it's a human interest story, not hard news. It has to do with children and families. Maybe there's somebody else at the paper who specializes in that kind of story.”

“I write stories about families,” she said sharply. “The piece I'm doing now, the one you're keeping me from doing, is about
barrio
kids.”

“Possibly a colleague—”

“What do you want?”

“The answer to a question: Why would Roldan snatch his daughter?”

If Cabrera had been a dog, her ears would have flicked at the word
daughter
.

I said, “I specialize in missing persons work. Roldan's daughter is missing, and I have reason to believe he took her.” “This girl lives in the U.S.?”

I nodded. She stayed silent for almost thirty seconds, her lips tight, eying the tip of the fountain pen. Then she stared at her wristwatch. “Would you like some coffee?”

Inside, I relaxed. Maybe I even gloated. The woman was hooked, well and truly fastened to the end of my line, visualizing her headline, mentally writing the first paragraph. When I nodded, she walked briskly to the door instead of summoning an assistant. I took advantage of her absence to examine her office.

The plants on the desk were dark and glossy. On the wall, two plaques held a position of honor, but their dates puzzled me. They were journalism awards from the years 1972 and 1978. In 1972, if she'd even been born, Luisa Cabrera would have been a child. Possibly we were sitting in the office of the managing editor, or an older associate. In the single photograph on the filing cabinet, a man held a stiff formal pose, while the young girl beside him gazed up adoringly. Possibly two people shared the office, one that used the leather blotter and the fountain pen, another who preferred the sleek laptop.

Cabrera's return interrupted my scrutiny. I'd expected two paper cups of institutional liquid, but she carried a tray, china cups, and a plate of cookies. The steaming coffee was strong, the cookies crisp, and she was no longer in such a hurry, avoiding the topic of El Martillo's daughter altogether, inquiring instead about my job. She wanted to know whether many women in the U.S. worked in criminal justice. She was a skillful interviewer. Skillful, too, at evading questions. I couldn't get her to speak of herself, of her career, of how she came to rate her own byline so young.

She slid back to the topic only after we'd finished drinking our coffee. “So you are investigating the case of a missing child?”

“My little sister.” I showed her two photos of Paolina, her latest school shot and the copy of the frame from the airport video.

“Excuse me. She's your sister, but she's also Roldan's daughter?”

I explained my relationship with Paolina.

“Why would you think the girl was taken by her father?”