You are a good man, she’d told him. He went to the church and stood before the statue of the Virgin and said a prayer of gratitude. Then he walked to the outskirts of town and returned to his shuttered store. Even this, too, was transformed. No longer a gloomy ruin, it looked the way it used to in the mornings when it was still in operation . . . a shop that had been closed down to rest for the night and was waiting for him to start the day fresh.
He went behind the counter and pulled out a ledger, now covered in dust after these months with the Jesúses. It was where he’d kept track of the money he’d given away, following Luisa’s instructions, where he’d calculated how much left he’d still have to pay before he had atoned for his time in the paras. What an odd thing he held in his hands. This many dollars left, I am a sinner. This many dollars paid, I am forgiven. Jefferson returns, I am damned. I give his location to the army, I am saved.
He spent the next few hours going through the store and taking notes on the orders he’d have to make to stock his shelves and reopen it again. It was half a fantasy, half a real plan. And it was in the midst of this fantasy that some Jesúses knocked on his door and told him they’d take him to Jefferson.
“Do you know Steven Seagal?” he’d asked them in the car, but no. That was before their time. They were young, like he had been, with pimples on their faces. They liked superhero movies. They didn’t care about the names of the actors, they liked Ironman and Batman and Thor.
As they drove, he wondered when the army would come for Jefferson, and if this was the last time he would see him. Perhaps the curse would strike tomorrow, and he really would go on to open the store. Perhaps he really would ask Deysi out dancing. Perhaps she’d say yes. Perhaps they’d marry and have children and name them after the loved ones they’d both lost. Perhaps there really was a life ahead of him. Perhaps he’d die an old man. And perhaps, at the Last Judgment, as he stood between the hope of paradise and the threat of hell, Christ would look at his whole life, not just at his small spurts of courage, when he saved Luisa or when he cursed Jefferson, but at the long slow act of courage it took to open a store, return to civilian life, master his fear, greet his neighbors without shame, and slowly, over time, see himself reflected in their eyes as a good, upstanding man.
When they arrived at Jefferson’s house some of the fear returned, and the vision fled, but he got out and asked the guard at the gate for a cigarette. It would calm him, he thought, before he had to go see Jefferson and pretend everything was normal.
This is when the shooting started. And because Abel was at the gate, next to an armed guard, the first shots were at him, penetrating his torso and his skull, leaving him with no time to cry out in pain or fear, no time to tell the army commandos rushing forward that he was their informant, no time even to whisper a prayer before he died, aged twenty-nine, at what he had desperately hoped was only the midpoint of his life.
—
Diego’s palms were sweaty. He felt useless, and fat, wedged into his back seat in the cockpit, the straps digging into his flesh, immobilizing him while down below younger men in better shape flowed through buildings, searching for his girl.
His girl. That was funny. Was she? Wasn’t she? It didn’t matter. He wanted her alive. He wanted to be the one to save her and if he couldn’t be on the ground at least he was here, hovering above, a guardian angel, whispering directions as the men below stormed the compound.
Still, he hated it. Removed from the action, sweating ugly blotches into his shirt, sitting in a glorified crop duster overloaded with electronics, hoping she didn’t die in the gunfight. And how stupid that would be, after everything she’d done, making friends with Taliban, covering Haqqani arms smugglers, driving out into Indian country with Marines and soldiers and getting into firefights, to die in some bumblefuck backwoods of Colombia with some penny-ante drug dealers? Life makes no sense, and there are so many ways something like this can go wrong. If the bad guys inside act like fools, if the soldiers storming the compound pull the trigger when they should have held fire. Even the Delta guys sometimes end up killing the people they wanted to save. And God, he so wanted her to be alive. That was all that mattered.
—
When the raid began, and a squad of Colombia’s finest commandos began shooting their way through the Jesúses stationed in and around the house, Jefferson had just reached the butcher shop fight scene in Out for Justice. Steven Seagal grabbed a cleaver from a thug and drove it through the thug’s hand, into the wall behind him, leaving him stuck, arm raised absurdly, blood pouring down. It was a good scene. Steven Seagal always had clever things like that. Like where he kills the bad guy with a corkscrew. Or where he drives his thumb through Tommy Lee Jones’s eyeball until the goop runs
