The Candidate (31 page)

* * *

THE HOT chocolate that Father Villatoro handed him tasted bitter and Mike forced himself to swallow it politely. Next to him Lauren had no such compunction to hide her reaction. She spluttered loudly and put the mug down like it was poison. Villatoro laughed kindly.

“It is an acquired taste for foreigners,” he said.

“We have hot chocolate in America too,” said Lauren. “But it does not taste like this.”

She gestured at the steaming, blackish-brown liquid. Again Villatoro laughed.

“No, my dear,” he said. “This is the country where chocolate comes from. This is the real thing, the natural way it was meant to be served. What you have in America is something else entirely. What you have is all sugar and fat. You took the body of the coca bean but you sucked out its soul.”

Mike put down his own mug. He would not be picking it up again. He swallowed hard and tried to clean his palate of the powdery taste. The priest seemed nothing but amused.

“I give all my guests from other countries a little local taste of life here. It reminds them that we are our own country with our own way of doing things. That what you might find familiar is in fact very different.”

“Yeah, that’s not the first time,” Mike said. “In Santa Teresa there is a statue. It smokes and drinks alcohol. They call it Maximón,” he said.

The priest raised an eyebrow. “Ah, they took you to see that old idol. I was twenty years in that village and I could never break their respect for it. It did not take me too long to learn to just work with it not against it. You know the people around that lake were worshipping Maximón long before our Lord and Savior was born.”

“And here?” said Lauren. “Do you have a statue of Maximón in this church?”

Villatoro chuckled.

“No. My flock here is from all over. Some Indios, some Mestizo. The things that bind them are not language or history or culture. It is poverty. That is the glue that holds us together here. But you did not come all this way to listen to the problems of an old priest. You came to ask questions about Natalia Robles.”

Mike could still scarcely believe he knew her identity. Now she was no longer some mysterious force of nature; some lurking, dark spirit trapped in an Iowa jail with an unknown past. She was flesh and blood, rendered so by the knowledge of her name. Her past life was about to be born to him, revealed like an unspooling film reel. His chest tightened with anticipation and the room shrank around them, shutting out the rest of the world.

“The man we met in Santa Teresa was called Rodolfo. He would not speak of her. As soon as I showed a picture of her he kicked us out. He was terrified of her,” Mike said.

Villatoro sighed and gave a bitter laugh.

“They have their reasons, I suppose,” he said. “They see her as a demon. A sort of curse from the underworld on their village. Their old ways tell them that to even talk of such a devil spirit is to risk bringing her back. Those are Maximón’s rules.”

Mike’s mind filled with the vision of the strange, smoking, drinking statue Rodolfo revealed to them. He realized they had betrayed his acceptance by breaking their taboos over Natalia Robles. By showing Rodolfo a picture of a woman he thought a demon they risked bringing the curse of the past back to life. No wonder he chased them away.

“What are your rules, Father? Do they make you afraid to talk about her too?” he asked.

“No,” he said. “They do not.”

But, before he spoke again, Villatoro took a deep breath as if stealing himself to some hard labor.

“Natalia Robles was a brutal killer,” he said. “The worst of the worst. I remember her when she was just a little girl in Santa Teresa. A sweet child but born to a bad father who beat her. Perhaps he did even worse things than that…”

The priest’s voice faded for a moment and let the unspoken accusation hang in the air. He shrugged.

“No matter. I will not make excuses. The lovely child turned into a terrible teenager. She fled the village for Guatemala City and joined the gangs in the slums. I have lost count how many follow that path, thinking that the city will give them an easier life than the village, though it never does. Natalia was different. She found a talent for killing that came to the attention of the army. Or, more accurately, a very secretive special part of the army. An elite unit that flourished back in those times of the war. Natalia was useful to them. Not only was she an expert killer, but she was a Mayan country girl. She knew their enemy. She spoke their language. She had been one of them. The army trained her well.”

“Who trained her?”

It was Lauren’s question and her voice that broke a spell for Mike. He looked over at her. She eagerly craned forward.

“General Rodrigo Carillo,” Villatoro said. “He headed up a unit that the army used to fight the dirtiest parts of the war. It was Carillo who took Natalia under his wing.”

Lauren gasped. Mike held his head in his hands. Oh God, he thought. Carillo and the shooter were linked. And Hodges and Carillo were friends. None of this was down to chance. Natalia was not some victim. She was a perpetrator. She was not some random crazy. She was a cold-blooded deliberate killer. Mike looked over at Lauren. She glared at him and he knew she was making some of the same links, realizing the enormity now of what they discovered. Natalia was a murderer and an assassin. Carillo had been her boss. Hodges had paid Carillo money. Was it still remotely possible that Hodges was an innocent drawn into this mess? Mike felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead.

“I remember seeing her when she drove into Santa Teresa on the day of the massacre,” the priest continued, oblivious to the impact of his words on his audience. “It was the first time I saw her in the flesh for five years and she was changed. I barely recognized her. I thought that because the village had been her home that she might have some mercy. I begged her to control her men. But she laughed at me. I think she was avenging something that day.”

Again the priest stopped. The corners of his eyes were moist and he wiped them with a corner of his sleeve. “Forgive me,” he said. “It has been a long time.”

“What did she do?” Mike asked and remembered the look in Natalia’s eyes when she attacked him. The icy, cold, dead darkness that lurked there and the merciless urgency of her grip. He felt his skin tighten at the memory.

The priest shook his head. “She has blood on her hands. I saw her kill many that day. Men, women…children.”

Then he fell quiet. He stood up and walked over to his desk. He brought out a battered cardboard box and rummaged in it for something. Mike and Lauren watched him transfixed. Eventually Villatoro found what he was looking for. It was a tattered Polaroid photograph. He walked over and showed it to them. Mike could scarcely believe his eyes. It was Natalia – not as a young killer, but as the middle-aged woman she now was – and she stood by the priest in front of the church of San Gabriel. They both smiled broadly at the photographer, their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders like brother and sister.

“I don’t understand…” Mike began.

The priest laughed. It was a pure sound that dispelled the darkness that seeped into the room.

“You see,” he said. “The Lord shows us his miracles in ways of His choosing. Not ours. This box contains all that remains here of Natalia’s life. A few pictures, her army documents and her diaries. Most of them show that Natalia was simply a killer. But this photograph shows she was also my dear friend.”

“How?” whispered Lauren.

“About five years after the massacre she came here. She had a child and it changed everything within her. She was given the gift of life. She found something to love and be loved by. It was profound. She came to understand what it was that she had done and what she became. She threw herself on the mercy of this church and of the Lord and we took her in as we do all sinners,” the priest said.

He got up again and gestured at them to follow. They left his office and went into the main body of the church. It was empty of worshippers. Only a few candles flickered in the darkness. Villatoro walked up to the front and stood beneath the looming, black statue of Christ on the cross. “She rededicated herself to the faith and gave herself to God. The love of our Lord burned so brightly in her. Can you imagine that?” he asked.

Mike, for a moment, thought he heard Natalia’s voice in his head, whispering softly of vengeance and righteousness like she had in her jail cell. He understood now why she recited the Bible at him on his visits to her in Iowa. She flung herself into religion to cope with her past and her dreadful guilt in the wake of becoming a mother.

“She quoted from the Bible when I saw her,” he told the priest.

Father Villatoro nodded.

“She knew it all by heart. I think she found the answers to her questions there. At least, for a while. It was not easy. She talked of ending it all, of punishing herself with death. But I persuaded her of God’s forgiveness. That was the easy part. My own forgiveness was harder. But, in time, that came too.”

Villatoro kept his eyes fixed on the statue of Christ but kept addressing them.

“I counseled her as she took her journey to come to terms with what she did. It was a mother’s voyage, taken to give her daughter a chance in the world. But sadly it did not work out as we had hoped.”

Villatoro turned back to them and his face was full of sadness, the ends of his mouth turned down as if weighted with rocks. He walked to the front pew and sat down, again facing the statue of Christ.

“Patterns repeat themselves. Life in the
barrio
is hard. The daughter, Gabriela, fell into the same trap of the gangs. Drugs took hold of her. Gabriela became a prostitute and a drug addict. For Natalia that was a far worse punishment than any death sentence. To be given something to love and then to have it taken away from you. It was so cruel.”

“Is Gabriela dead?” Mike asked.

“No. She comes to the classes I hold here. Occasionally she tries to give up her habits, but most times not. I fear for her. For someone who lives like her, most of them do not make it past 30.”

At that moment a door opened at the far end of the church. A young woman walked in: the same one with the light skin and dirty blond hair they saw last time. The priest looked up and she lifted a limp hand in greeting. Mike saw her more clearly now. She looked painfully thin, her arm ragged as the flesh hung from it in translucent folds where the muscles wasted away.

He looked at the girl and, despite the ravages of her life, he could sense some of the resemblance of her mother. He knew it. This was Gabriela. She was Natalia’s daughter. Mike opened his mouth to speak. But the priest shushed him before he uttered a word.

“Enough!” he said. “What you want to know is man’s work. But for the rest of the day I will do God’s.”

There was no room to voice any opposition. Mike and Lauren shuffled out of the church and walked quietly past the young girl at the door. Mike glanced at her once but she would not return his gaze. Instead she looked down at the floor, searching for some answer in the dust of the church’s hallowed ground rather than these strangers from a faraway land.

* * *

THE FIGURE that walked across the parking lot of the suburban Columbia mall looked like a spy from some third-rate B-movie. He wore a thick trench coat that failed to hide his portly figure and he pulled up the collars to hide his jowly face. Dee watched him come towards her car for a happy minute. She had no idea why Howard Carver wanted this private meeting with her. But she knew it must be good news. She put her palm on the horn and beeped at him until he saw her. He waddled over and looked around worriedly. Dee could not help but laugh. Jesus, she thought, this guy is in even worse shape than I thought.

Carver opened the door and squeezed his large frame into the passenger seat beside her. He wheezed slightly and grunted a hello.

“Thanks for meeting me out here, Dee,” he said.

Dee shrugged. His tone was apologetic. A far cry from the previous times they talked when he was full of arrogance and bluster. She felt a surge of pride and satisfaction. This old parasite was on the losing side and he knew it, she thought.

“What do you want, Howie?” she asked.

Carver took a moment to gather himself. “I want you to stop putting this race shit out there, Dee. It’s beneath you and it’s beneath your candidate.”

His tone was not so much angry, as aggrieved. He practically whined out the words. “It’s not fair! You know Governor Stanton doesn’t have a racist bone in her body. She’s worked all her life to raise the chances of African-Americans.”

Dee shrugged.

“Well then, maybe next time she speaks to a bunch of crackers in the mountains, she might want to defend the welfare state, not condemn it.”

“She didn’t say that!” Carver said, his face suddenly red and his tone angry. But the storm quickly subsided and he struggled to strike an accommodating tone.

“Look, I think we both know that after South Carolina is over we are going to have to come together. The party is going to need unity as much as anything else. We’ve got four days left until the election. Let’s keep it civil. We’re on the same side here in the end,” he said.