Fernanda had decided to make her biggest gamble, not in a casino but on the battlefield, betting Libardo’s life and even her own. We don’t know how she ended up getting in touch with a regional prosecutor, Jorge Cubides, but she met with him and claimed the following, half truth, half falsehood: that Libardo had been considering turning himself in to the authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence, but his enemies, Los Pepes, had learned of his plan and kidnapped him. She no longer had the power or resources to stand up to them and rescue Libardo. She was reaching out to the attorney general’s office at the moment because they were the only ones equipped to confront Los Pepes, who were the prosecutors’ enemies too. She updated Cubides on the progress of her most recent conversations with the people who were supposedly holding Libardo. She offered to turn over documents, invoices, letters, everything she’d found in Libardo’s study.
According to Fernanda, the attorney general’s office would win this two-sided conflict, finding Libardo and dealing a major blow to Los Pepes. And we’d win too, getting our father back.
“What if Dad doesn’t want to rat anybody out?” I asked. “What’s that going to do to your relationship with the attorney general’s office?”
“Well, if he doesn’t want to do it, he can rot in prison,” she said, “but at least he’ll be alive.”
“And what if Los Pepes don’t have him?” Julio asked.
“At least we’ll get rid of them,” she said.
Julio sat thinking for a moment, then said, “It seems like a lot of trouble for not very much gain.”
“We’ll only know that for sure when the operation’s over,” she said.
I thought about Libardo’s reaction. He would come out of a kidnapping and head straight to prison. It wasn’t ideal, but he’d have us close by, his life wouldn’t be in danger, and if he really was able to negotiate his sentence, maybe after a few years he’d be released. That was on the one hand. On the other, given the silence of the past few months, I’d started thinking Libardo might already be dead.
“Ma, there are a lot of things I don’t understand,” Julio said. “If you’re not going to give them anything, how do you expect them to return Dad? You give them a suitcase full of trash and they just let him go?”
“What do you not get?” she asked. “I’ll give them the money they’re asking for, but it won’t be ours.”
“Where are you going to get it from?”
“I’ll explain in a minute,” she said, “but pour me a drink while I go to the bathroom.”
Julio told me he was going to make it a stiff one to loosen her tongue, and I reminded him how dangerous Fernanda was when she got talkative. Holding her drink, Fernanda sat down to explain, not as a mother but as a criminal.
“Libardo’s friends are going to put up the money, both those who are still free and the ones in prison. The deal with the prosecutor is that Libardo will talk, but he won’t snitch on anybody who helps us.”
“And how are you so sure they’re going to give us the money?” Julio asked.
“First, because they’re his friends. Second, because it’s a loan. Jorge tells me they’ll get the money back.”
“Is Jorge the prosecutor?” I asked.
She didn’t reply.
“Each person will contribute just, like, fifty billion pesos, which is practically nothing,” she said. She smiled and savored her drink.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re making decisions for Dad. We don’t know what he’d think about this.”
“Of course I am,” she said. “Have you not noticed he’s not around?”
That same day, a crew from the CTI showed up to install a call-recording system that, when it came down to it, looked just like the recorder we already had connected to the telephone. This is different, Fernanda told me, now they can listen in from over there, she said, referring to the attorney general’s office. Are they going to listen to all our calls?, I asked, horrified. Well yeah, that’s the whole point, she said. Yours, mine, Julio’s, all of them?, I asked again. Oh, Larry, she said, annoyed, stop freaking out.
We exchanged one madness for another. It was no longer the witch doctor unearthing buried things, or us digging in the backyard like a chain gang day and night, or the stress of pitting our wits against the people who called. Now the madness had a name, Jorge Cubides, and it was serious, really serious, because Fernanda was smiling from ear to ear as she told us her plans.