“It doesn’t change anything for us.” She bit into the bread.
Abel licked his lips. “It changes things for me.”
“I see.” Luisa swallowed and looked down the street, scowling. “I drove by your shop two days ago and it was shuttered. Are you hiding?”
“No.”
She became still, and then swung her gaze from the street to his face. Which is when he felt it, the shame. He’d felt it many times in front of Luisa, shame was an old friend, no matter that she’d forgiven him. And again he thought that perhaps he should tell her what he’d left out of his confession. Perhaps he should tell her how Jefferson could have had her killed or raped or, more likely, both, and that he’d protected her. He worried, in his soul, that his confession to her was not a true confession because he’d held that back, held it back from the scorn he knew she’d feel if he told her. But that was the one thing precious to him from his time in the paramilitaries, and he didn’t want to give it up.
“He wants you to work for him again?”
Abel nodded.
“And?”
He hung his head. Luisa reached across the table and took the other bread roll from him, then sat there scowling, a pandebono absurdly in each hand. With almost comical aggression, she took a bite.
“You know how it is,” he said. “Money or bullets. I had no choice.”
“Or,” she said.
“What?”
“Money or bullets. The word or means a choice.”
Was she being serious? He laughed nervously. “Well . . . it’s not a very good choice.”
“Yes.” She stared at him intently.
“Who told you God gives us easy choices?” she said.
“I . . .”
“For ten years, you have been a good man. Before that, you weren’t even a man. You were his . . . thing. Die a good man and see Christ, or become his thing. How is this even a choice?”
He couldn’t believe it, to hear her talk like that.
“I won’t be doing anything illegal for him, just . . .”
“You’ll be doing what you did before. Whispering in people’s ears. Handing out money. I have more sympathy for his sicarios. That’s honest evil.”
Her eyes were withering. And for a moment, as the shame tightened its grip, as he forced air in and out of his throat, as he felt his soul wanting to crawl out of his filthy skin, it did seem like a simple choice.
“If you want my blessing,” she said, “you can’t have it.”
But that wasn’t it. What he wanted was worse. “What I want,” he said, getting control of himself, “is to talk to you about the election for mayor.”
She looked surprised, and then disgusted. “Ah. Already working.”
Yes. And she was a force in the town. One that needed to be negotiated around. One that needed to be kept only minimally hostile.
“Tell your boss this. We’re bringing in some people from the foundation’s headquarters in Bogotá to conduct interviews. A lawyer and some students. They’re taking statements about crimes that have happened here.”
“And you don’t want Jefferson to interfere.”
“No.”
“Then keep his name out of it.”
“Obviously.”
“And in return?”
“You know what you get in return.”
She tossed him his pandebono.
“That’s fine,” he said. He just needed her to stay neutral. Which she would, because she was smart, and because that was mostly how she’d played it with every other group that had established dominance in the town.
She leaned forward, put her palms flat down on the little plastic table, and pushed herself up and out of her chair. She looked at him sadly, curiously.
“You could have run away. Fled to Cúcuta.”
He had thought of that. Losing everything he’d built. Losing the community where he was known. Again. “I have a life here.”
“Not anymore.”
The shame was ebbing. Relief was coming in. He’d told her, and she’d reacted as he’d expected. But to have it done with lifted the weight somewhat. He stood and nodded at her as he prepared to leave.
“One other thing I want,” Luisa said.
“Yes.”
“When we’re doing the interviews. I want you to come and tell us and the registrar what happened to you as a boy.”
He sat down again. She stood over him.
“Why?”
“That’s my condition. Tell your master.”
And she left, leaving him in the little plastic chair, holding a pandebono she’d taken a bite out of. He bit from the other end, and then thought about the mysteries of saints and the relics they leave behind—hair and fingernails and bones and blood. So he bit into where she’d bit, and chewed the bread that still had a touch of her saliva on it. Perhaps it’d give him courage.
Courage for what, though? Not for death, like Luisa wanted. But perhaps money or bullets weren’t the only options. He thought of the two men from army intelligence. And then he thought of the bruja, who sold fabric in a shop in the north part of La Vigia. Perhaps she had a charm, or a spell. There are secret forces in this world. Perhaps he should use them.
• • •
In the silence after she had left the finca—to go interview an uribista politician, she’d said—Diego had sat and savored the afterglow of the anger she’d provoked in him. She was fucking up his tranquillity, but that was fine. After a while, tranquillity is just another word for boring. After a while, everything is boring. War. Peace. Love. Hate. Even Liz, in Afghanistan, had gotten boring. The same old arguments, the same prickly distance whenever he’d drawn close. But there, in Colombia, she was a change.
And she needed his help. She wouldn’t ask directly, but she needed him. He liked that. So he called a few other contractors. He called an officer he’d worked with in the Colombian military. And then he’d remembered Mason. Junior medic in the Afghan deployment where Carlos and Ocho got fucked up. An odd guy he never really got along with. Took himself too seriously to deserve being taken seriously. Took the job too seriously to be really good at it. But now the SF Liaison at the embassy.
Diego dropped Mason a
