She got up and left the offices and went to her room. When she opened the door, she saw Sara was sitting on the bottom bunk, reading a book by Moreno-Durán.
“I looked into cases from the demobilization under Uribe,” Sara said. “You know that Jefferson can’t be touched by the law? He served time under arrest. Two years. He served in a special prison with other bosses in the paramilitaries. They had their own rooms and special meals cooked for them.”
“Two years?”
“He confessed to all kinds of things, extrajudicial killings, forced displacements, gender-based violence.” She said the clinical words with loathing. “That’s what he got.”
Two years. That was 730 days. Surely, he’d ruined more lives than the number of days he’d spent in a comfortable prison. How many hours had he spent in jail per life he’d ruined? Per farmer thrown out of his lands, per trade unionist murdered in cold blood. She thought of Alma and the corpse of the girl she’d been, reaching up and clutching at her still, all these years later. What had Alma’s suffering added to his jail sentence? An hour or two? Less time, perhaps, than Alma had been trapped at that party.
Sara pulled out a little flip phone from her pocket. “The camera on this isn’t very good, but I got a photo of him before he left.”
On the screen was a slightly blurry image of Jefferson.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why’d you take it?”
Sara shrugged, her eyes on the blurry image. “Instinct.”
They both looked at the photograph. Jefferson was standing by a window, a scowl on his ugly, puffy face. Valencia could imagine this photo on the evening news, as she’d seen so many other photos of FARC leaders or drug lords or criminals over the years, their faces posted after one of them was captured or killed and the army or police released one of the surveillance photos they’d used to track them down.
“We could give it to my father,” Valencia said.
That hung in the air, but then Sara shook her head. “And what’s he going to do? Jefferson is an old paramilitary. He’s probably got more friends in the army than your dad does.”
Valencia didn’t want to get into an argument, so she ignored that.
Sara stared at the photo. “Why is that son of a bitch so interested in what happened to the gringa?”
“Because she’s an American,” Valencia said. And she told Sara about her conversation with her father, and her suspicions about what might, even now, already be in motion. “The army will try to find her. And when the army comes into a place . . .”
“Ah.” Sara nodded. That was why Jefferson wanted the foundation to tell the media it wasn’t him. He didn’t want to be a target when they came looking for the gringa. “This is a real problem for him.”
Valencia nodded, slowly. “Yes, but . . .”
“Luisa’s going to help him.”
“So he’ll be fine.”
It was a little revolting to say the words out loud.
“That bitch.” Sara tossed her book onto the windowsill. “I’d like to do something to hurt him. Even a little.”
And Valencia agreed. Yes. That would be good. And then they were quiet, each with their own thoughts, until Sara held up her phone, displaying the image of Jefferson, and asked, “Do you use Twitter?”
—
It had been some time since Agudelo had seen violence up close. During his six years with the Sofia Peréz Lawyers’ Collective, from 2003 to 2009, it’d been more common. The Uribe years were hard for the profession. State authorities would accuse lawyers like him of being guerrilla sympathizers, and the paramilitaries would take action. Six judges, 12 prosecutors, and 334 lawyers killed. He’d known one well. Alejandra Cortéz. Raped and murdered. He’d seen a coworker approached and held by two men who spat in his face and told him they’d kill his daughter. And then, his own assault.
At the time, everyone kept telling him what amazing strength he had, what resilience. He had a photo of himself from then. It showed a brutalized man in a hospital bed, his face distorted by the damage, one eye half shut, dark swelling flesh pressing against it, stitches along the jaw and the top of the head, an overlarge bandage comically perched upon the nose. But the man wasn’t lying back, resting and recovering. He was sitting up, eyes down on the papers strewn about his hospital bed, working. He kept the photo in his office; a reminder of what a brave person he had seemed at the time. But only seemed.
The men who assaulted him had clubbed him in the head, knocking him unconscious with the first blow. He never even saw them. Never experienced the horror of being physically helpless, at the mercy of the merciless. He woke up in a fog, with a kind, panicked stranger shouting in his face that an ambulance was coming. As the blood returned to his brain, then to his tongue, his first concern was not for himself but for the stranger. She seemed so worried, he wanted to put her at ease. “I’m okay. That’s not necessary,” he’d told her. It wasn’t until he got to the hospital and they told him what had happened that he realized he’d been attacked, and not hit by a car or some other thing. By that time he was on painkillers, and so the knowledge didn’t land with much force. That was why he was able to appear so unperturbed by what had happened. His experience of violence was not like other people’s.
So it shouldn’t have surprised him that the kidnapping would leave him shaken. After hashing out a statement
