Heart of the World (44 page)

The fire department could have driven here from Bogota by now. The cops could have scaled the building twice. Roldan hadn't given the signal; I was sure of it. I longed for Sam, but I was grateful he was safe, glad he wasn't part of this. My mouth was so dry, I could hardly keep talking.

I said, “You were working with Vandenburg, so you knew about me all along.”

“Yes, I enjoyed our little game. Roldan, you know, she blushed when she confessed she was the mother of your unborn child? She was so determined to find you, I thought I might as well let her help. You were lucky; you were absent from the camp. Then I got lucky; when the little one escaped, we recovered her.”

“Luisa's dead,” Roldan said.

Angel shrugged. “Almost everyone I knew from that time is dead.”

“You remember her uncle, Gilberto?”

“Is he dead, too?”

“When we brought Luisa's body home, he asked me to turn myself in, but I told him the army would shoot me on sight.”

Angel smiled. “At San Felipe tomorrow, a captain would have been allowed to shoot you while you were escaping. I told him not to count on it; I had faith you'd come here to Ana, especially when someone tried to lure my troops away. The captain will be disappointed.”

“Did you know Senor Cabrera is now Minister of Justice?” Roldan's tone was conversational. “He assured me he has an independent group, a highly trained cadre untainted by paramilitaries, unswayed by politics, left or right.”

“This we have both heard before,” Angel Navas said.

“I didn't find the tracking device in the backpack, but I did find something else. A phone bill from the States, a phone bill with the number of Base Eighteen, a number that proves what many suspect, that the army connects to the AUC and the AUC connects to drugs. I traded that phone bill to the Minister. His cadre flew to Cartagena yesterday. I've been in touch with them all evening. They're here, Angel, all around us. The lure of catching both of us, you know?”

Roldan had spent time alone with Cabrera. I hadn't seen him dress; he could be wearing a wire. I didn't know whether or not he was bluffing.

“You'd never give yourself up,” Angel said.

“Things exist on different planes, Angel, so the
mamas
taught me. You enjoyed one level of diversion—the music, the noises overhead. But you didn't see the other level.
We
are the diversion, Angel. In exchange for us, Cabrera will return the gold to the Kogi.” Roldan looked straight at Paolina for the first time, and his eyes glittered. “Don't worry,
chica
. No matter what, the heart of the world will be preserved.”

He threw himself at Angel as amplified voices, like the thunder of
God, reverberated across the room. Before the first word registered, a burst of rifle fire erupted as Jorge shot out the window. Glass shattered. Angel raised his pistol as I dove for Paolina's chair in a flat-out horizontal volleyball desperation dive that knocked her to the ground.

On the floor, I swiveled, using Ana's body to shield me as I shielded Paolina. The woman's motionless right hand partially concealed the blue steel of a gun. I grabbed for it as Angel's pistol sounded and blood bloomed on the back of Roldan's shirt. I thought: No, that can't be, the Kevlar vest.

The rifleman turned and shot Roldan again as I raised Ana's pistol and emptied the clip. He screamed. The barrel of the rifle swung toward me just as the ceiling gave way and troops poured into the room, shaking the walls, boots pounding the floorboards like jungle rain.

It was thunder; it was chaos. All the lights went out. I lay on top of Paolina, expecting to die, and all the time I kept murmuring, “It's all right, baby, it's all right,” over and over, even though I knew it wasn't.

A soldier stepped on my leg, on my hip; I didn't move.
It's all right
. My fingers fumbled with unwieldy knots in the rope that bound my sister to the chair.
It's all right
. My hands felt slippery; waves of panic washed over me as I envisioned them covered with Paolina's blood. I called out her name, shouted it, screamed it, but I couldn't hear myself and part of my brain said
stun grenade
. Deaf, almost blind, I willed my hands to move, to find her nose, her mouth, explore her neck. The pulse raced in her throat and I breathed. Troops had a bloody, cursing Naylor in custody. They were hauling him from the room, but no one seemed to believe me when I said his name was really Angel Navas. Maybe they were all deaf, all blind. How long before someone, bought with his millions, let him go?

It's all right
. How could it be right when Roldan was bleeding on the floor, asking whether his daughter was alive, begging for coca leaves, blood welling out of his mouth, hands clasped over the terrible wound in his chest?

Instead of Kevlar, beneath his black shirt, he wore the snow-white tunic of the Kogi, his choice, his pain. The smallest thing can make a difference. I opened my mouth to yell for a medic, closed it, clamping it shut, remembering the code of the outlaw.
Better a grave in Colombia
than a jail cell in the U.S
. His lips moved in a silent chant as I watched the light die in his glittering eyes. When I ripped the gag from Paolina's mouth, his name was on her lips and she was sobbing. I buried my face in her tangled hair and cradled her like a baby.

CHAPTER 41

The deal was multifaceted. Roldan had given Gilberto
Cabrera the connection between Miami and the army's Base Eighteen. He'd detailed BrackenCorp's attempt on the Kogi gold. He'd promised him Angel Navas, living proof that extradition to the U.S. was no guarantee of punishment for drug offenses. He'd tossed in Ignacio's gang as a bonus.

He'd protected Sam Gianelli.

In exchange, the sacred gold would return to the Kogi rather than go to any local museum or foreign collector. The Kogi would be left alone, the heart of the world remain a no-fly zone. And Paolina and I would be handed over to the U.S. Embassy, cleaned up, and put on the first available flight to Miami.

In spite of the agreement, if it hadn't been for Sam we might still be in Colombia, shuttled between diplomats forever, questioned and re-questioned, separately and together. Once Sam turned up, barriers fell. I don't know if he bribed the members of Cabrera's cadre wholesale or paid off the U.S. Ambassador, but we were at Rafael Nunez Airport within an hour of his arrival, moving so quickly I never got the chance to ask Senor Cabrera what he intended to do with the information Roldan had provided.

Who knows what story will appear in the newspapers? Or whether any mention will surface at all, with no Luisa Cabrera to relate the facts.

“Nothing,” as Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously wrote, “ever happens in Colombia.”

Aquí, no pasa nada
.

It was a tiny airport: two runways baking in the tropical sun, a single dimly lit terminal. Passengers disembarked down metal stairways directly onto the steaming tarmac, stepping off the pavement into an oasis of palm trees and butterflies. The heat was overwhelming, heavy and damp.

Paolina wouldn't look at me. She'd hardly spoken to me. Whenever I tried to break through her glazed silence, she took refuge in the bathroom, or feigned sleep. I read survivor's guilt in her unresponsive eyes, guilt and the glum knowledge of fault. As a seven-year-old, she'd taken full responsibility for the bruises splayed across her cheek, assuring the police that Marta's current boyfriend had hit her only because she'd been bad.

As soon as she saw him, she took shelter in Sam's arms, and I told myself, Don't push. Don't push. She'll talk when she's ready. There's time. There's time. I closed my eyes. They felt heavy with unshed tears. First, I thought, I'll sleep for a week; then, I'll find the energy to cry.

“I'm sorry,” Sam said.

We were seated in a small alcove. The plastic chairs felt sticky. A group of vendors clustered just inside the terminal doors. One sold bright silk scarves. A woman spun clouds of cotton candy on tiny wandlike sticks.

“It's all right.” How many times had I said it? It seemed as though it was all I was capable of saying. The words had lost their meaning.
It's all right
. An empty chant. A chorus to a song that no longer played.

Every now and then Paolina would peer out from the folds of Sam's shirt, watching the cotton candy lady, fascinated by the spun sugar that seemed to materialize in the round bin before adhering to the stick. Probably the only cotton candy she'd seen before was packaged, sold in plastic bags at Fenway Park.

“Do you think they'll send his body back to the Kogi?” I said. “Roldan would want to be buried on the mountain.” It seemed to make sense when I said it, as logical a response to Sam's “I'm sorry” as anything else. And why would Sam be sorry? None of this was his fault. He'd
been locked in one of the farmhouse out-buildings, held prisoner by Luis for hours. Nothing he could have done. Roldan had taken his choice away, stacked the deck, manipulated us all.

“I'll see what I can do,” he said. Paolina's face was hidden in his shirt again.

“From Miami? I don't know,” I said.

“Paolina, sweetheart,” he said. “See the vendor over there? The one selling cotton candy? Please, could you buy three of them for me? Do you think you can carry three?”

Her eyes appeared and I thought: Whenever I see her eyes now I'll think of his eyes, his faraway eyes on the mountaintop, his energy and his bravery, her father's dying eyes. I'll remember the golden hillside and the freezing stream, the City of Stone.

I watched Sam watch her and I thought: He's so good with her. I swallowed and remembered how he'd doubled for Roldan in the fort, doubled for the father she'd lost.

“We'll watch you,” he said. “We'll be right here. We won't go away.”

For a moment I thought she'd speak, but then her hand snaked out and took the money and she moved. I watched her cross the floor, tentatively at first, as though she was learning to walk again. I thought,
It's all right
. She'll be all right.

“Carlotta, I can look into Roldan's burial from here,” Sam said.

“Isn't there room on the plane?”

“Carlotta—”

“What?” Paolina was speaking to the vendor. The woman looked at her with laughing eyes.

“I can't go back,” he said.

I suppose people kept moving, coming in and out of the glass doors, but for a moment it seemed as though all motion stopped. There was only Sam and me, in sticky plastic chairs. I think I started to respond, began two or three unformed sentences and left each one hanging.

“Something happened,” he said. “In Las Vegas.”

The cotton candy maker was whirling the pink stuff onto a stick. At Fenway, it came in different colors, pink, blue, and turquoise. The vendors clipped the plastic bags onto long sticks and carried them through the crowd. Paolina watched solemnly, the way she used to watch me serve a volleyball when she was small.

Sam said, “I didn't know. I found out when I called Mooney. He warned me. He shouldn't have. He could get in trouble if anyone finds out.”

“Warned you? About what?”

“A secret indictment. Grand jury. Supposed to be a secret indictment.”

“Racketeering,” I said.

“Murder,” he said.

Murder
.

“How? Why?”

“It's complicated,
cara mia
. It's not what it seems. But the thing is, I can't go back.”

“You asked me to marry you.”

“I'm asking you again. Stay with me. Marry me. I have a place in Italy, property there. We'll see how you like it. I know you'll like it. It's beautiful.”

“Paolina,” I said.

“She'll come with us.”

I couldn't meet his eyes. “She wants to go home.”

Those were the only words she'd spoken, besides her father's name. She wanted to go home. It would be all right, once she got home.

“It'll be good for her,” he said. “She'll forget about all this.”

She'll run away with her new father and her new mother to a new country
. Run away and forget, like some make-believe girl in a fairy tale.

“Sam,” I said. “I can't. We can't.”

“Can't or won't?”

I don't believe in forgetting;
I don't believe in avoiding. Paolina didn't need to forget this. She needed to remember it, to face it, to learn to live with it, to make it part of her life. Not to make it
all
of her life, but to fold it into the rest of her life, to accept and understand it.
This is what happened when I was fifteen
.

If she didn't it would fester, become the hardened secret thing my forgotten and never forgotten child had become.

Everything I have, I thought, I have in Boston. My business, my friends. Gloria, Roz, Mooney. I thought about choices. About Josefina Parte choosing her abusive man over Paolina's boyfriend, Diego, her nephew. About Roldan choosing the white shirt over the Kevlar vest, the way of the Kogi over the life he'd been raised to inherit.

“I can't,” I said.

“If I go back, I'll be stopped at Immigration,” Sam said. “I can't,” I repeated.

Then we were standing, holding each other, but I had no memory of leaving my seat. I clung to him and was crushed in return, and then Paolina was there, and I could tell by her face that she'd heard everything. If not everything, enough. One of the cones of cotton candy fell silently to the floor.

CHAPTER 42

Mooney met us in Miami along with a
DEA honcho who hustled me into a tiny room for debriefing while Mooney and Paolina went to get something to eat. I was so tired my knees wobbled and my mouth felt dry as sand, but Mr. DEA offered neither chair nor water. Tanned and glib in his three-piece suit, he pinned me with piercing brown eyes and encouraged me to think things over carefully, very carefully indeed, before revealing anything I'd learned concerning BrackenCorp's relationship with the agency. What would be the benefit of talking to the press, giving the country a black eye, when this was the work of a few bad apples? Rogue DEA agents were being identified and disciplined as we spoke. If Mark Bracken hadn't done his deal with GSC—