For this reason, it didn’t surprise me that after I lay Valencia down she wriggled over to her mother. She was so small, our little girl. Sofia kissed her forehead and closed her eyes. But then Valencia reached back, grabbed my hand, and pulled it so that my arm wrapped around her, and she hugged her small arms around my big one like a koala hanging on a tree trunk. It was the first time since I had been back that she had reached for me out of the basic physical needs of a child for love, and not out of a sense of duty, the hugs and kisses a daughter owes a father even if she doesn’t know him so well. I felt her calm herself, an easing of the body. My own body echoed hers, and we both feel asleep, the most blissful sleep I’d experienced in months.
Naturally, stupidly, I thought I was cured. My child’s love has restored my trust in the world! It was a romantic notion, but it was soon made clear to me that the night had only been a strange confluence of psychological states. Still, it had revealed relief was possible, and I learned that I found that relief most readily with her. I came to think of the effect Valencia had on me as being like that sense of God I’d had as a child, of eternity wounding the material world, wounding the boundaries of my own brain and body, and making me part of a larger story, in the one case the cosmic drama of the universe outside of time, a cosmic drama I no longer believed in, and in the other case the narrower drama of a family, moving forward inside of time. It was a love grounded in the world, in one person whose fate, unlike the fate of an unruly city or country, you can guide with a firm hand.
At Valencia’s baptism, I had declared my willingness to train her in the Catholic faith. At the baptism of Juana Peréz’s son, I had heard an infant scream as the sign of the cross was made on his skull. On both occasions, I had imagined I was witnessing a sacred mystery. My world is so much more circumscribed now, that faith drained. And yet, in my daughter, there is still a movement to the future. All the unresolved failures of my own life can have an answer in her.
III
If I must die, I would like my body to be mixed in with the clay of the forts like a living mortar, spread by God between the stones of the new city.
—Álvaro Ulcué Chocué
1
Nine months before the dinner party, before they’d smoked cigars and discussed the Mil Jesúses and the intelligence they were giving the Colombian military, Mason had been invited to watch Juan Pablo kill a man. He’d just arrived in country and though the raid seemed unimportant—the Colombians were taking out a midlevel narco who by all rights should have been the police’s business and not the army’s—Mason decided to go. He wanted to be collegial.
And so, he’d flown to Tolemaida Air Base and there had shaken hands with Juan Pablo for the first time. He’d received a quick overview on the man they were tracking—El Alemán, a criminal associated both with the Urabeños and with a splinter faction of the ELN—and was then brought into the operations center. There, on the screen, a video feed from a U.S.-supplied ScanEagle drone eight hundred miles away tracked the progress of a medium-size white truck.
“What’s in the truck?” Mason had asked.
And with the utmost seriousness, Juan Pablo had replied, “A giant teddy bear.”
The bear, he learned, was two meters tall. It was pink. It had a white heart in the center of its chest. It had been tied with a pink bow and placed inside a giant pink box that was then tied with another, larger bow that was, of course, pink.
“We got a tip,” Juan Pablo said. Today was El Alemán’s girlfriend’s birthday. Which meant a party, and a special-ordered present that, once the military had been tipped off, was easy to track. Months later, Mason would realize the tip had undoubtedly come from the Jesúses, and that Juan Pablo had undoubtedly been the conduit. Not knowing that, or the chain of events the raid would set in motion, Mason had merely accepted the information and, with more than a little boredom, watched the slow and painstaking process by which targets are eliminated in modern warfare.
Mason watched the truck navigate mountain roads. He watched the truck arrive at a luxurious finca with a high exterior wall and three separate structures. He watched the debate break out among those in the operations center whether to have a team fly to the X and fast-rope down into the compound, or leave the helicopters on the far side of the mountain and walk to the objective. Hours later, he watched the arrival of El Alemán himself, who came not from the road but from a path in the mountains, riding a mule.
El Alemán had gold chains and emeralds glittering across his chest. They’d later find a 30-million-peso watch on his right wrist and a 40-million-peso watch on his left. He was not nearly as
