Heart of the World (41 page)

Ignacio bared his teeth. “It looks promising.”

I felt like a spring was tightening in my gut.

“There's a woman there. Fairly young, with long hair. And a young man.”

“Did you show the photos around?”

“Didn't want to risk it. A casual inquiry is one thing, a photo another. You show photos, you're a cop.”

Roldan said, “Let them eat.”

Someone offered me a plate. Rafael punched the button on the CD player, and a Latin beat filled the air. I wondered if chewing coca leaves had killed my appetite forever.

Felicia said, “I saw the man in the photo. He went for a quick walk, bought a pack of cigarettes. He didn't make contact with anyone besides the cigarette vendor. I didn't see the woman or the girl. You can't see inside the apartment. The grating blocks the balcony.”

I started shoveling food down because everyone else was eating, because if the man in the photo was nearby, I'd need the energy. As we ate, one plaintive song melded into another over tinny speakers.

Ignacio picked up the thread. “There's definitely a woman. I spoke to a deliveryman. I saw him leaving. I told him I was interested in a job like his and did he make good tips? For instance, the man in the apartment building, what did he give? He corrected me, said the woman was cheap, paid good money for good whiskey, but not much left over for the man who climbed the steps.”

I wondered why the man who'd gone for cigarettes didn't buy whiskey as well. Was the woman a secret drinker? “Climbed the steps” meant delivery to someone other than the ground-floor landlady. It meant there was no elevator.

“How often does he deliver?” I asked.

Ignacio shrugged. “I didn't want to question him too closely. You give the impression you're interested, he'll want to know why. Here, everyone is suspicious.”

Felicia said, “No one comes to clean. That's unusual.”

Not so unusual if you're keeping a prisoner in your apartment, I thought. Was it just Ana, the man in the photo, and Paolina in the apartment? Were there other guards?

“What about food?” I put my barely touched plate down.

Felicia said, “The woman shops occasionally.”

“How much does she buy? How often?”

She consulted a small notebook. “Two days ago she bought a kilo of rice, a half kilo of beans, a dozen oranges, some mangoes. If I had more time, I could find a butcher shop, a fish market, get a better idea of how many people she feeds.”

The problem was we didn't have more time. With the swap set for San Felipe tomorrow, we had to act tonight.

I stared at my wristwatch. Why didn't Sam phone?

Ignacio poured from an open bottle of Chilean wine. “On the second floor, the window in the back is shut, the curtains drawn. If I were in that room, I'd keep the window open.”

“It's a bedroom?”

Felicia said, “In the apartment next door, yes.”

She carefully described the layout of the apartment she'd viewed, diagramming the rooms on a napkin: a front room leading into a dining area, a hallway to the side of the small kitchen, two bedrooms, a single bath. “The landlady claims it's identical to the flat next door. The floors are old and wooden, very creaky.”

“Are there balconies in back as well as in front?”

“No.”

The rear windows on the second and third floors were built out some forty-five or fifty centimeters from the exterior wall and grated on the front and sides, an echo of the balconies, like deep extended win-dowboxes.

Forty-five centimeters; maybe eighteen inches, I thought.

“They're open at the top,” she said.

“Three apartments in the target building,” Ignacio summarized. “The girl could be in the second-floor flat with the two people in the
photos. She could be in the third-floor flat with any number of guards. The ground-floor apartment is the landlady.”

Felicia's voice was apologetic. “She likes to talk, but not about her tenants. She said nothing about them even in response to the most innocently leading questions. She's in her forties, maybe fifty. She's lived there over twenty years. Raised four kids there. Her youngest still lives with her, a boy of eighteen who comes home drunk in the middle of the night. She doesn't know what to do with him.”

Could be a problem if he wandered in at the wrong moment. On the other hand, the second-floor tenants were probably used to a certain amount of unpredictable noise in the middle of the night. The setup was tempting. I asked Ignacio what he thought about a night raid.

Within seconds the low table was cleared of food, Ignacio rolled out a set of blueprints, and I breathed a sigh of relief; I didn't relish the idea of participating in a raid based on notes doodled on bar napkins.

Ignacio had the plans of the old convent, before its massive square space had been separated into four apartment buildings and its courtyard turned into part of a service alley. Now two of the apartment buildings faced one street, two the next parallel street. Interior access from one building to the other no longer existed, but the buildings were joined in pairs, like row houses in Boston's South End.

Why didn't Sam call?
The more I drank, the more I sweated. I switched from wine to water. The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead and Rafael played a second CD.

“Well?” Ignacio said. “What do you think?”

Roldan said, “Anything else, any trivial detail? You didn't, for instance, see a limping man in the neighborhood?”

The limping man again
. I shot him a glance, but he stared blankly at the wall.

“No,” Felicia said. “But— It's nothing, really.”

“Please, what were you going to say?”

“The music made me remember.” She nodded at the speakers. “I was standing in what used to be the convent courtyard. Now, it's just garbage bins, a clothesline, weeds. You can see where the trees were cut down, where the patio used to be. There was a noise, not like someone hammering, more like someone beating a drum, except not a drum, maybe— I don't know.”

A girl, alone and scared, sketching a beat on the arm of a chair, on the top of a table. I felt a flicker of certainty spread into a flame.
She was there
.

“This is important?” Roldan saw the look on my face.

“She's in a room overlooking the alley.” The flame gave off a steady glow, a welcoming hearth on a winter night glimpsed from a snowy street corner. “She can't open the window, but she can move her hands.”

While Ignacio beamed and Rafael lifted his glass in a silent toast, I focused on the music, closing my eyes.

“I can tell her we're coming to get her,” I said slowly.

“Through telepathy, like my friends on the mountain?” Roldan's voice held no trace of sarcasm.

“No,” I said. “Listen.”
Music
, I thought; I can speak to her in music. I opened my mouth to explain and the phone rang.

Ignatio was closest, but Roldan grabbed the phone. He listened and grunted and I watched his eyes. When he smiled, I started breathing again.

Things had gone well at the farmhouse. Nothing more than a skirmish, with no shots fired. And one of the watchers had readily turned informer for cash: Paolina was in the second-floor apartment, the back room.

Sam and Luis would return soon.

PAOLINA

Day was distinguished from night by the glow
behind the heavy window shade. The shade was taped to the inner sash; impossible to see even a slice of scenery on either side. The valence at the top cut off the view and the bottom slit was narrow, less than an eighth of an inch. If she could only approach and glue her eye to the slit, she could see what lay beyond.

She worked her left hand against the rope, circling it, pulling it, stretching it. Sometimes the rope gave the illusion of loosening, but then the tension seemed the same as it had always been. It was all she could do, maneuver her left hand. The right, they untied occasionally so she could eat; when they tied it again, it was always belt tight. Since her left hand stayed bound to the chair, no one bothered to check the rope.

If she could see outside, it wouldn't be so bad, she decided. If she could see stars and trees and sky instead of the cracked white of four walls and the dusty gray of the ceiling. The absence of color had become an ache. Not as bad as the pain at the corners of her mouth where the gag bit her cheeks, but the constant ache of deprivation.

Light and dark were the sole shades and rhythms of her days. Dawn brought bread on a wooden tray, a ceramic jug with thin milk, a hunk of bread, sometimes a piece of pale soft cheese. Ana brought the bread because
Jorge was no longer allowed to enter her room alone, and the new man, the Voice, the limping man, was nobody's servant.

She'd been wrong about the pecking order. The new man was the boss, but Jorge, who'd seemed to be next in command, had sunk to the bottom of the heap. Ana had become her protector, her tigress. Paolina smiled at Ana with her eyes. Ana had saved her from Jorge's rough abuse.

She wouldn't have made it on the street. She knew that now. Ana told her what happened to girls on the street, how they were gang-raped and humbled, forced to accept the strongest protector so other boys and men would be scared away. And then that “protector” would put the girl out on the street, turn out to be nothing but a pimp. Her insistence that she was different, that she could play the drums and earn her bread, had provoked only Ana's bitter laughter.

Music won't save you, girl. Nothing saves you from men but age and ugliness, and even then, most men will take what they can get.

Sometimes she thought Ana hated her, and then sometimes she thought Ana loved her. It was hard to figure; it was like there were two women fighting within the same body. The image amused her for a moment as the slow day went by in scorching heat. She wondered whether the limping man was awake.

She'd seen him only once, but she knew him by his cadence. Sam's occasional limp was nothing compared to his. When Sam was tired, if you beat out his stride, he had a slight unevenness to his gait. The limping man dragged his right leg, step drag, step drag. The step was almost a giant step, as though he'd gotten fed up with the slowness of his pace, as though he resented the draggy leg for slowing him down. Sometimes there was a third noise, the sharp beat of a cane. Then his step went step, tap, drag; step, tap, drag.

Ana was afraid of him, afraid of his whistling cane. If Ana was afraid of him, Ana, who'd taken Jorge by the neck, shaken him like a cat, and thrown him across the room, beating him with her fists till he begged for mercy and crawled away, the limping man was someone to fear. He was bald as an egg, and his eyes, when he didn't wear tinted glasses, were gray like old stones. His face was oddly tight, shiny and so pale around the ears that she wondered whether he usually wore a wig.

The devil come back from hell, Ana said when she'd asked who he was. The devil come from hell. The devil was walking in the next room. Step drag, step drag. He paced like an animal trapped in a cage, but she was the one who was trapped, tied to a chair, waiting.

She thought of the place as a house but there was no reason behind the assumption. She'd never viewed it from the outside, never seen another room. She'd been blindfolded when brought here, and often she was blindfolded again, although less now than when Jorge made her touch him.

Maybe she was in hell already. It was hot enough. She couldn't tell if they were drugging her anymore. She felt lightheaded all the time and her stomach felt strange, as though it had shut down like an overheated engine. Maybe she was hibernating, except that was something bears did in winter not something girls did in heat and captivity.

Wriggle the wrist, turn it, bend it. Was the rope a little looser this morning? Maybe the moist hot air made it seem more pliable than it was. Maybe it shrank while she dozed fitfully in the chair. She thought about the movie, the black and white one Carlotta liked, with the guy in prison tossing a tennis ball against the wall. How lucky he was to have a tennis ball. That would be luxury. Sometimes she ran old TV shows in her head and once she found herself doing algebra problems, can you believe it, algebra which she hated, really, and envying friends at school, envying the everyday routines of their lives, the scheduled expectedness. Marta must think she was dead.

The noise in the next room built gradually but she didn't notice until it turned into an argument. Alternating voices: man and woman. Ana, but not Jorge. The other voice was the Voice, unmechanized now, but cold and level, even in anger. It said something about a man, that the other man
had no intention of showing up
. The voice was icy and unfeeling, and she thought: the limping man.

“Bullshit.” That was Ana, brave Ana, to defy that chilly voice.

“The honorable bandit. Bullshit is right. How can you buy that, believe it after what he—”

“He was good to me.”

Paolina flinched when she heard the sound, skin against skin, a slap not a punch.

“What do I care what you think?” The cold voice again, menacing as a snake poised to strike. “If he brings the gold, fine, we'll swap. But if he tries something, I warn you: Don't cross me.”

The voices continued, angry and urgent, but low. She could no longer make out words. She twisted her wrist, wrenching it against the chair. Was the rope any looser?

She'd begged Ana to let her go, begged with her eyes, begged with her mouth when she was ungagged. Sometimes the woman sat with her in the dark and patted her hair. The first time, Paolina was sure Ana would untie her. Once, the woman sang her a Colombian lullaby, and it was so close to a tune Marta used to sing that Paolina thought she might die of sadness and regret. She'd begged Ana to bring her a knife.

“Just leave it near me. You don't have to cut me loose. If he asks, you can say you didn't help me. Ana, please.”

When I try again, when I plead for help again, I'll call her mama. That's what she wants
. Paolina wasn't sure how she knew it, but the woman's need was as clear as if she'd read it in a book, seen it flashed across a movie screen.