There was a cosmic unfairness to his situation. He’d spent years developing contacts in the Venezuelan military, years establishing a base across the border, years preparing the ground for his expansion inside Colombia itself. And the conditions were perfect, like a sign from God, this majestic reordering of the power within Norte de Santander, the receding of the old ideological forces and the targeting by the police and then army of what would have been his most powerful rival, the Urabeños. This was a wilderness ready for exploitation. This was one of the key drug routes, and with the right series of moves it could be his within a few years. A few years. He laughed. In a few years, I could be Carlos Castaño. I could be Pablo Escobar. I could be Che Guevera, Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama.
His phone rang, and he saw from the number that it was Luisa, the fat bitch from the foundation.
“Who did it?” he said.
“The foundation put out a release, you can see it on their website. It says they were dressed as guerrilla.”
“Who did it?”
There was a pause, and she said, “Father Iván wants to talk to you.”
Father Iván. Who worked it out with the cocaleros and the indios and ex-guerrilleros and a couple of other groups that had been causing trouble.
“Fine.”
He took down the details and considered the matter. He was mostly in the dark, but he knew a few things. They’d reached out through Father Iván, a priest who had worked with ex-guerrilleros. They’d asked to meet in territory that used to belong to the FARC. The cocaleros there, who used to sell to the FARC, had been more troublesome than in the regions closer to La Vigia. They’d complained about the prices he paid, the taxes he’d charged. He’d even had to kill one man who’d tried negotiating a better price from the Peludos, who controlled the territory to the north. Undoubtedly, there was anger over that. And any number of guerrilleros had returned home in recent years, so there was presumably a reserve of ex-combatants with military experience. Perhaps one of them was rallying resistance. A failed revolutionary, returned home but missing the sense of purpose war gives to young men. If so, Jefferson could handle him.
His maid cooked him a simple breakfast—eggs and arepa—and he forced himself to eat. His body needed fuel to fight the disease and to power his day, it was that simple. He was even starting to feel a bit better about the situation when he turned on the news and there, on Caracol, was the image of the reporter. And he turned the sound up, and he continued to eat, and then he heard his name, and he looked up and saw his own picture. A recent picture. Wearing the same shirt he’d worn the day before.
He closed his eyes as a wave of nausea came across him. This had to be the foundation’s doing. They were making a play. They thought he was weak. And they knew that right now he couldn’t afford to slaughter them. But Luisa should know he could be subtle when he had to be.
“I’m famous now,” he called out to his maid. She hadn’t seen the television, and clearly had no idea what he was saying, but nodded anyway, pretending to understand.
This wasn’t the worst thing. Fame was dangerous, but it had its own kind of power. He’d learned that from his old comandante, Tomás Henríquez Rúa, when they were incarcerated together after the demobilization.
Rúa was famous for being crazy. That was one of his aliases. The Crazy Man. He was famous for fucking young virgins. That was another one of his aliases. The Drill. And in prison, that fame followed him around like a tiger on a leash. Everyone respected him, held him in awe. Rúa had more power than the warden, than the prison guards, than anyone. And since Jefferson was in his circle, the blessings fell on him, too. He had eaten better, and fucked prettier whores, than he ever had outside prison. In some ways, it had been the happiest time in his life.
In their second year there Rúa had thrown a party in the common area of the jail. Everyone thought of Rúa as a madman, but he had a genius for connecting with the people. Jefferson had studied this and learned from him. That party was his masterwork. Rúa brought in three tiers of prostitutes. Red, black, and yellow. The highest tier came dressed in red, escorted by armed guards, dripping with perfume, clothing bulging with fake asses and tits, reserved exclusively for Rúa’s inner circle. The middle rank came in black. They were all pretty enough, or if not pretty they were young enough to feel fresh, and they only fucked men who’d been in the autodefensas. The cheap whores, for common use, old and strung out, dressed in yellow. It had been especially inspired, he thought, to insist on the uniform colors of clothing. As the prisoners danced and fucked, as the whores went down on their knees and sucked prisoner after prisoner off in the far corners and corridors, behind columns or right in the middle of the dance floor, you could see how people ranked. The whores were human jewelry marking concentric circles of envy, with Rúa at the center. It was like he was a God. It was being a God.
In the middle of the party Rúa had brought out his weapons, his arsenal, to show off to the whores. Somewhere, Jefferson had a photo of himself in prison, holding a Jatimatic SMG just like Sylvester Stallone on the poster for Cobra, but with two whores in red crouched at his thighs and making sexy faces.
And then some idiot drunk on aguardiente pulled the pin on a grenade. He’d
