“Is this all you have in the world?” Jefferson said, curiously fingering the gate.
“Not all.” Against his will, Abel felt ashamed of his little store, the pride of his life.
Jefferson took him to a very different house than the beautiful old finca by the river where Abel had spent mornings as one of Jefferson’s inner circle. This was new construction, modern. Big blank white walls leading toward huge windows opening onto a view of the mountainside. Pretty, in its own way, but cold. There was a patio out back, and a grill, and servants. An old woman in a French maid outfit standing before a tray of uncooked sausages and steaks. Jefferson’s men lounged about the four corners of the patio, rifles slung at their sides. Abel remembered the man whose arm had been flayed. He remembered Osmin’s corpse in the mountains.
Jefferson handed him a beer, and Abel drank. And then he started up the grill.
“You’ve gotten thin,” Jefferson said.
So Abel sat and watched Jefferson cook. It felt familiar. Comforting. He had mattered enough to his old boss to be plucked out of the little life he’d built and transported here, to the bigger game. Against his will, that thought gave him pleasure.
“Venezuela, it’s a nightmare now,” Jefferson said. “I tell you, I could have been a king in Venezuela. But they’ve fucked that country up. Now, over there, even kings are cockroaches.”
Abel nodded, looking around at the house. It was nice. The house of a rich man. But not the house of a king.
“You left me . . .” Jefferson put out a hand, flat, the fingers outstretched, and tilted it this way and that. “Some people would say that you betrayed me. You were like my right hand. What’s a man to do without his right hand?”
Jefferson spoke as though the idea that Abel had betrayed him had popped into his head. Abel knew Jefferson to be more deliberate than that.
And then Jefferson laughed. “No!” he said. “You were never my right hand. You think you were that important? You were . . . you were a thumb. The thumb on my left hand. But a hand needs a thumb, yes?”
Abel licked his lips. He wanted to take a swig of the beer. Maybe a swig of aguardiente—there had to be some here. His nerves were no longer deadened, like they had been when he was a younger man. There was even a woman he’d been seeing. Or, if not seeing in any meaningful sense, a woman who was kind to him, perhaps interested. Deysi. A half-Motilon woman with green eyes that could suddenly sparkle when she smiled. She’d lost a husband and a son, Abel didn’t know whether to violence or disease or both, but she knew sadness and was kind. She worked as a seamstress, and sold other odds and ends in her shop that he’d go in and buy, things he didn’t even need or know how to use. Why was he thinking of her at a time like this?
“It’s been ten years since I’ve been to La Vigia,” Jefferson said. “This town . . . it’s gone from paras to guerrillas to narcos. I don’t know the players like you do. I need a little thumb, to help me hold on tight to the people here.”
“I don’t get involved,” Abel said. “I’m a shopkeeper . . .”
“Not anymore,” Jefferson said. “Now you work for me.”
Abel felt the vise tightening, and wondered if there was anything he could say. Perhaps if he let Jefferson know that he’d been in touch with military intelligence, that two men from the army had come to his store, told him they knew all about his life and his former associates, and then took him to a small house where they grilled him about Jefferson’s old compadres. Odd things, like what type of alcohol does Rafael Ferrara like to drink? How close is El Hurón to his brother? Is Tomás Henríquez Rúa completely insane or is his madness a facade? He’d answered honestly, it was his duty as a citizen. And he was a citizen now, not a para. But to Jefferson, he was the same Abel who’d worked for him, and for that Abel to be talking to the military made Abel a toad, and bad things happened to toads. The military, he knew, would not protect him. So he tried something else.
“I think, when I left, it wasn’t because I thought I’d have better luck without you. It was . . . I am weak. I am weaker than you wanted me to be. Loyal. Always loyal to you. But weak. That shop. That shop you saw. That you laughed at. I know. I laugh at it myself sometimes. But I own it. That is what I have built for myself, these past ten years. And I am proud. And I am so proud of that shop. What could I have built for you, if that is all I have built for myself in ten years? I am afraid I would fail you. You need a better thumb.”
Jefferson considered that and smiled. Abel tried not to look too relieved.
“Fool,” he said gently. “I will teach you to be strong.”
Jefferson pulled the meat off the grill, slapping it down on a plate, juices drooling into a pool.
2
It’d been just shy of two years since Diego had seen Liz face-to-face. She was the first woman he’d been with after the collapse of his marriage. In his mind, the second woman he’d ever slept with, period. He didn’t count prostitutes, or the occasional late night, drunk bar hookup. As far as he was concerned, that kind of sex wasn’t sex, it was fucking.
When she emerged through the gates of the airport, she seemed no older than the last time. Still pretty—beautiful to him, anyway—but tired, and not wearing makeup. Or so he thought. Incorrectly.
“Diego,” she said. “What the hell am I doing in Colombia?”
On the trip back, she told him a
