So what to do? In the main room, Agudelo was briefing the students on the foundation’s protocols for things like this. Luisa sat behind her desk and thought. For some reason, the kidnapping of this journalist was a threat to Jefferson. That pleased her, but she tried to ignore that pleasure. What was good or bad for Jefferson wasn’t important. The only thing that mattered was what made life better for everyone else.
Agudelo, finished with the students, came into Luisa’s office.
“We need to get the students out as soon as it is safe to move them.”
Luisa hunched down in her chair, leaned forward, and stared at her hands. They were large, and strong. Pianist’s hands, her father had believed, though in her heart she knew that she never played as well as he pretended she did. It had been a long, long time since she’d played the piano.
“There is less violence in La Vigia now that Jefferson is in charge,” Luisa said. “He’s a monster, but he’s rational. Did you know he’s been telling townspeople to vote yes to the peace?”
“He wants the FARC gone. One fewer rival.”
“Sometimes what’s good for Jefferson is good for us. Sometimes it’s not.” Luisa drummed her fingers on the table. “You have friends. Journalist friends. In Cúcuta.”
“I do.”
“Well,” Luisa said. “You and I need to think very hard about what we’re going to tell them.”
—
After giving her statement to the police sergeant, Valencia went to La Vigia’s sole internet café. She could have called from the foundation’s phone, but she needed to get out of the office, and Agudelo reluctantly agreed. As soon as she connected her phone to wi-fi, text messages from her mother and father popped up. “I love you, be safe,” from her mother. And “I love you, take care,” from her father. It was suspicious. She went into WhatsApp and called her father’s cell phone.
He picked up on the first ring. “Let’s not talk about work.”
That left her silent.
“Let’s not talk about work,” he said again. “We always talk about work, and I don’t want to talk about work. I want to talk about you and how you are doing, my dear.”
It took her a second to get it, and then, once she did, she felt like a fool.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s fine.” Maybe someone was listening in. Maybe her father was being paranoid. Whatever it was, it meant that her father already knew what had happened. Of course he knew.
“When are you leaving?” he asked.
“Nothing has changed.”
“No sooner?”
“I don’t think so.”
What else did he know? Who had done it? Why? She wanted to tell him about it. That she had been there. That she knew what it looked like when someone was beaten bloody in front of you, and that she knew what it felt like when you did nothing, nothing, to stop it. The excitement she’d felt at the time was fading and in its place was guilt. Shame. A sense of remembered helplessness echoing through into the present, where she was still helpless. And as he talked, as he assured her that all was good back home, as he seemed to subtly suggest that she need not worry, that there were some issues that her father was going to take care of, she felt that helplessness coming to the fore. Here was her father, insinuating that he was going to take care of her, even here, in the place she’d come to be her own person.
“I have information,” she said carefully. How could she tell him about Jefferson, and what he was demanding the foundation tell the media?
“No, it’s good, it’s good,” came the quick reply. And he started talking about her upcoming semester, and she tried again to let him know that things weren’t as they seemed, but he cut her off again and said, “It rained today, very hard. The news said it wouldn’t so I went out without an umbrella and got wet. But you can’t always trust what you hear on the news.”
“Oh,” she said, “okay.” And then he told her he loved her, and that everything was fine, and that she should do exactly what her professor told her to do, and he hung up.
She went back to the offices, where Ricardo was sitting alone next to the chair Jefferson had occupied a few hours earlier.
“How are you?” he said. “That must have been very frightening.”
Valencia nodded, pulled out the chair Jefferson had used, and sat in it. Her skin prickled.
“I want to do something,” she said.
“Have you finished your transcripts?”
That wasn’t what she meant.
“I know,” Ricardo said. “It’s boring. But really important work tends to be. Trust me. And Luisa. And your professor.”
“Of course.”
But she didn’t trust Luisa. And Professor Agudelo was a fool. And what was Ricardo but a factotum? And what had any of them done when that criminal had sat in their offices and laid out his terms? Her father had ways of dealing with men like that. It troubled Valencia to feel that way, but she did.
As a girl, Valencia had taken to praying for murderers, for rapists, for criminals and narcos and terrorists. That they’d give up their evil and reconcile with Christ and be redeemed. She’d prayed for Osama bin Laden and she’d prayed for Tirofijo and she’d never, ever told her parents about it, not even her mother, who would have understood but who also would have suggested that perhaps she should be praying for her father and his men instead of those who tried to kill them. It had seemed to her that the extent of the evil committed by the objects of her prayer must, in some way, be proportional to the virtues displayed in praying for them. But looking at the chair in which Jefferson had sat only an hour ago, and at the
