“Did this actually happen?”
“Oh, probably not,” she said. “Then they brought a dairy cow up to the penthouse suite at the Sphinx, and hired some crooked veterinarian to sedate the animal and inject alcohol into its udders so they could drink White Russians straight from the cow’s boobs.”
Diego laughed. “Jesus.”
“They sedated the cow,” Lisette said. “Last thing it knew, it was partying in the penthouse suite at the Bellagio. Then, once it tapped out of milk, they chain-sawed her and sent the meat down to the hotel steakhouse.”
“There’s no way this happened.”
“Someday I should put together a book of all the stories journalists heard but could never corroborate. It’d be called Too Good to Fact-Check.”
Was this the kind of story she was looking for here in Colombia? It had been over two decades, the murder rate had been more than cut in half, but people still couldn’t get enough of wild drug-lord stories. Colombia, land of violent, extravagant psychopaths. Of Pablo Escobar and his stupid fucking hippos. Lisette had never struck him as that sort of reporter in Afghanistan.
“Would I be in that book?” he said.
She eyed him carefully, the smile slipping a little before coming back.
“Depends. Got any good stories?”
• • •
Abel stood outside the office of the Fundación de Justicia y Fe. He breathed in and out, then willed himself toward the door and up the stairs. He paused on the landing. Luisa would not like what he was about to tell her. Could he even tell her? Easier to throw himself headfirst down the stairs and hope it broke his neck.
The first time he’d seen her here, his face had gone white. It was only a few years after he’d left the paramilitaries, he’d completed bachillerato, gotten his diploma, and gone to the foundation for help applying to the Agency for Reintegration for a loan to open his store. He’d been nervous then, as well. He didn’t like having to admit to people he was an ex-combatant, and he had heard that the workers at the foundation were more sympathetic to former guerrilleros than to former paramilitaries like himself. But he’d never suspected when he opened the door to the office that Luisa would be there behind the counter, head down, a little older and fatter but still the same girl who’d sat and played the piano and then screamed as her father was cut in half.
His first instinct had been to run. But then she had looked up and seen him. At first, her glance was a purely professional acknowledgment of his presence. Then a moment of confusion passed quickly as she tried to place him. Abel held his breath, kept utterly still, as if any movement would give him away. And then her eyes widened slightly. She had placed him. She knew him. She knew what he was guilty of.
They stood like that for a moment, and then another worker at the foundation, perhaps sensing something was off, said, “I can take this one, if you want.”
But Luisa had said no, and had sat Abel down, and asked him what he wanted. And when he told her he had graduated from school, she told him he should be proud, and when he told her he did not want to return to fighting, she told him that was honorable, and when he told her he wanted to open a store with a loan from the reintegration agency, she told him she would help.
She had seemed like a saint to him then. And as she got out the forms he started crying, foolishly. And he told her about his family, and about his animal life on the streets of Cunaviche after their deaths, and she had nodded and listened, but said nothing, offered nothing. Only after they had filled out the forms and she had instructed him on the next steps in the process did he have the courage to ask about what had happened to her after the destruction of Rioclaro.
“A priest, Father Iván,” she said. “He had known my father, and he helped me find a job here.”
He wanted to tell her that she had survived Rioclaro only because of him, but it seemed as though even mentioning it would be profane. And then, after all her kindness, she made one hard demand on him.
“You have some of your own money that you’re putting to the store,” she said. “Is that money you saved from your time as a combatant?”
He had nodded yes.
“That money is stained with blood,” she said. She told him that if he was going to use that money to open the store, then the store wasn’t really his. It belonged to the people who’d suffered. And so, every month, he owed it to the poor of La Vigia to give away some of what he made.
“Once you’ve given away as much money as you made in the paras,” she said, “then you’ll have earned the store.”
Then and there, he’d wanted so badly to tell her that she lived only because of him. But he held his tongue. And when he finally did open the store, her words haunted him. And so, he put aside a little amount each month. As he started earning more money, he’d take his entire stipend from the reintegration agency, a few hundred thousand pesos, and give it to the church. Slowly, he chipped away at the debt Luisa claimed he owed, earning his salvation. And then Jefferson came back into his life.
He’d shut down the shop. No more earning honest money. No more paying off his debt. At night he hunched in his closed store with
