“Your girlfriend know you were using her?” Mason said.
“She knows every source got an angle. Shit, I told you she was smart.”
“Sure.”
“It gets better though,” Diego said, leaning in, breathing whiskey breath over Mason. “Now she knows the town, so when she hears about what happened, she heads back to cover the funeral. And there were some very interesting people at that funeral.”
“You sent your girlfriend into the middle of a Taliban civil war just to generate targets.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Diego said. “I let her know there might be a story there. Her choice.” Then, in a mock-heroic voice: “She is her own sovereign individual.” He gestured grandly with his whiskey. “We are all our own, sovereign individuals.”
Mason smiled. “Yeah . . . I’m a soldier. And a dad. And a husband. I haven’t been my own sovereign individual in decades.”
“There’s got to be someplace everybody’s ignoring. Something going on where we’re not involved but maybe should know more about.”
And then Mason was quiet for a moment, and Diego let him be quiet. The wall behind them showed a cartoon artist’s version of Italy, with goofy-looking Roman statues and cathedrals and leaning towers and men in striped pants offering pizzas. Should he say anything more? No . . . Mason had to work it through on his own. There was something on his mind. Diego could see that. Of course there would be.
“Send her to Norte de Santander,” Mason said.
And then he told him why.
3
The night before she left Lisette realized, rather pleasantly, that she wanted to sleep with Diego. There was nothing else for her to do. She’d packed. She’d prepped to the extent that prepping was possible. And the next morning, early, she was getting on a plane and leaving any complications behind. But Diego was, in some ways, a delicate man. Prone to sudden spikes of pride. And he’d given her what she asked for, a decent lead. A possible story. Not so he could sleep with her. If he thought that’s what it was, if he thought she thought that’s what it was, the tenuous thread between them would snap. So fucking Diego was probably not on the table.
Unless, of course, she could offer him something less ephemeral than a good-bye fuck. She had come to like Medellín as she had not Bogotá, that city in the flat bottom of a bowl beneath the mountains, filled with buildings sticking out of the earth like used cigarette butts. Medellín was a wilder, more organic thing, with its neighborhoods in the draws of steep mountainside. During the day, the buildings crawled upward into the lush green slopes, and at night the city lights poured down from the ridgelines like glowing rivers. The people were more hospitable, more blunt, and more honest. Even the politicians seemed to lie more honestly. It was a good place to be, and a place she’d like to return to once she was done in Norte de Santander. Could she promise Diego that? That she’d return? Yes, she thought she could. So maybe, just maybe, fucking Diego was on the table after all.
For dinner, he did what he called an “asado,” which as far as she could tell was just throwing steaks on an all-wood fire. He worked the grill while she relaxed, took in the view, drank beer, chatted lazily, and eyed him in a way she could tell made him uncomfortable. He kept looking back at her, the furtive look you give a suspicious stranger trailing behind you in a bad neighborhood.
He was a large man with a handsome face. Thick hair just starting to gray. Brown eyes and stupid tattoos. Skulls and daggers and U.S. flags. There was nothing chiseled or sculpted about his body, she knew that. His torso was thick and had all the definition of a sandbag. And he was hairy. But he was strong and solid and, at times, startlingly tender. She watched the ripple of muscles in his forearm as he flipped the steaks. He flashed another furtive glance back and she grinned at him, this object suddenly come into her possession and which she was, for now, pleased with. He turned back to his very manly grilling of the steaks, and she let her laughter break out again, the laugh only slightly nervous.
“This is so nice,” she said. And she could see him visibly relax. He nodded yes, so pleased that she was pleased.
She wasn’t sure where the strength of her desire came from. Maybe from the pleasure of having a new direction, possibly even a purpose. Maybe from the length of her last dry spell. Maybe, even, from a book. A professor at the University of Antioquia in Medellín had suggested she read what he assured her was one of the finest poets to come out of Norte de Santander, Gaitán Durán, and so she’d picked him up only to find that he hadn’t written much of anything useful about the department she was heading to, but had written a ton about sex and death, about the implacable march through history toward our deaths that can only be demolished by eroticism and poetry, because all is death or love, because love is the fiesta in which we most remember death, and so on. It was good stuff, somewhat out of step with her more mundane and less self-important take on the act, but it’d probably had an effect. So maybe that was it. Or maybe it was just one of those things. A desire that struck rarely but powerfully, she didn’t know where from, mixing with loneliness and swelling, intensifying, doubling, quintupling. Maybe it didn’t mean anything, this kind of desire, and maybe it should be distrusted, but as the light darkened and the flames from the grill provided an ever greater proportion of the light on their faces, the surrounding night covering and enveloping them, she became sure.
