CHAPTER TWENTY

We were now even closer to the kidnappers’ deadline, and Don Carlos was in full ransom collection mode. When we arrived back in Key Biscayne, he gave me my next assignment.

“Go home and pack a small bag. You are flying to Medellín this evening. Tomorrow morning, you will pick up some securities at our family bank and you will be back here tomorrow night in time to meet the demands of the kidnappers.”

“I thought Tenblad promised you at least two million.”

“Yes, but in the end, we will need more than that. Believe me, I know these bastards. You’re going to Medellín.”

The suddenness of that order froze me. “Okay,” I said finally, “but why don’t you just have someone down there bring them or send them?”

“Because as an American citizen, you can travel to Colombia very easily and right away, without a visa. Anyone I ask down there would have to apply to the U.S. embassy for a U.S. visa, which would be very time consuming. And I don’t want to trust these documents to a courier service. We’re moving a very large amount of money here.”

He got out and then leaned in the window. “The flight leaves at six p.m. Do what you have to do and be back here in the afternoon. I need to give you a letter of introduction to the bank manager. A reservation has been made for you at a top hotel in Medellín. Don’t bring a gun. They will take it away from you at the airport. And anyway, your driver down there will have one.” Then he disappeared through the front door.

His last words, I’m sure, were meant to be reassuring, but they were far from that. I was going to retrieve financial documents, which probably only Don Carlos could negotiate. Why would I need a weapon? Why would the driver need a weapon? Then again, I was picking up those securities in Medellín, once the murder capital of the planet. Enough said.

I went home, checked the messages on my private line, had some leftover Cuban food for lunch, packed a change of clothes and toiletries, and stowed the small bag in my trunk. I called Alice and left her a message telling her about my one-day trip to Medellín. I said I’d be in touch when I arrived again in Miami.

I was ready to head back to Key Biscayne, but first I had to make an important stop. I made my way toward my mother’s place of business. She had left me a message in which she had summoned me to her side. My mother is a fiercely independent lady and rarely issues such orders. When she does, I head her way.

My guess was she had caught wind of my ignominious involvement in the previous day’s kidnapping. My mother doesn’t read newspapers or watch television, but one of her myriad clients or Cuban acquaintances had obviously advised her.

Now I pulled up to the botánica in Little Havana where my mother is the proprietress. Standing just outside the front door, as he had for some twenty years, was a life-sized plaster statute of St. Lazarus. He represented resurrection, which, in a way of speaking, is what my mother peddles.

The inside of the dusky, narrow store is stocked—in fact, crammed—with plaster Catholic saints of all sizes. My mother knows which santo must be prayed to for every imaginable problem. But the botánica is also fully supplied with the natural potions prescribed by the priests of the Santería religion. Roots, branches and vines hang in pre-packaged clumps from the ceiling. Racks stocked with powdered extracts—bull’s horn, chicken beak, bear claw, you name it—are sorted according to the ailments they are meant to address: fatigue, depression, nerves, sexual anomie or simple bad luck, especially in affairs of the heart.

My mother’s treatments are gauged to resurrect physical energy, good spirits, sexual desire and even the determination to go on living. It’s a tricky business, and she has had to make adjustments in the products she features. For example, the invention of Viagra several years earlier hurt her business in powdered bull horn, a traditionally popular stimulant for potency. But the subsequent increase in sexual activity among her aging clients had spiked her sales in potions for back pain.

I found her sitting behind her cash register labeling some incense, which was supposed to increase financial wealth. When I was a police officer, I always worried that I might have to bust my own mother for fraud. Fortunately, her record had remained clean. Nobody had ever brought charges.

I leaned down, gave her a kiss and sat down at the counter next to her. She wore her long, graying hair in a thick braid that hung down over her white peasant’s blouse. My mother was born and raised in the city of Matanzas. She had never been a peasant, but the look was important to the spiritualist image.

“I got your message, and I’m here.”

She nodded but didn’t look up from her incense labeling. “I understand you are involved in some species of scandal. My customers are coming in and telling me.”

“It’s not a scandal, Mamá. It was a crime, a kidnapping of a Colombian woman. I was trying to help her. I still am.”

My mother had never been pleased with my decision to become a policeman. She was even less happy when I left the steady salary of the department to become a private investigator.

“You’re always tempting the spirits by looking for trouble,” she said. “You must be very careful in a case such as this, Willie. Anyone who would steal a human being is possessed by very powerful, evil forces.”

She sounded a bit like Alice, but from a spiritual angle.

“I always make sure to be careful, Mamá.”

She scowled. “You know that’s not true. You are not careful, or you would not do this detective work you do. And with people from Colombia, there is need to be extra careful. I have, on several occasions, performed spiritual consultations for Colombian women. On more than one occasion, those women came to see me because some family member of theirs in Colombia had been kidnapped. They wanted me to help them bring back their relatives.”

She put down a finished pack of incense sticks and began to assemble another.

“These poor women were very desperate, Willie. They had no idea where their loved ones were. They had disappeared from one moment to the next.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that, into thin air.”

“What do you do for them?”

She pointed at a plaster effigy of a white-bearded saint on the shelf behind her.

“I tell them to pray to Saint Anthony, the patron of people who are missing. And I tell them to make a sacrifice to the orishas, Ellegua and Ogun, who also have helped locate those who have disappeared.”

She was speaking of two Santería deities. She shrugged.

“Of course, I try to make sure to not raise unreasonable hopes. Those who steal other human beings live so far away from the good spirits that it may take a very, very long time for the women to see their loved ones again—if ever.”

She fixed on me again.

“Willie, this is a phenomenon that afflicts the Colombians and almost no one else. Some wealthy Colombian women come to believe that if you love someone too much, it will make them disappear. Can you comprehend that? They are left so hysterical and confused by the kidnappings they feel that their own maternal love is what made their children vanish. Imagine that!”

She put down another packet and grabbed my hand. “Just think of that, and don’t make me regret that I love you so much.”

I jumped off the counter and kissed her. “Don’t worry, Mamá. You can keep loving me. I won’t do any disappearing.”

I headed for the street. Given her mood, I had not mentioned that I was heading to Medellín. Instead I said goodbye to St. Lazarus at the door and lit out.

When I arrived back in Key Biscayne, Don Carlos was waiting for me in his office and handed me a letter addressed to one of his bank administrators. Then he took me to the door of his office, ushered me out brusquely and shut it behind me.

I was heading out when José caught up to me in the foyer. He was holding a yellow piece of paper in his hand.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one else was within earshot and then showed it to me. It was covered with notes that had apparently been jotted down in a hurry. Most of it looked like addresses. It also contained what was apparently a reference to a person. The words “La Doctora” were written near the bottom. In Spanish, that would refer to a female physician, but no last name was attached to the title, so there was no way to know which doctor it referred to.

“You’re going to Medellín today, right?” José whispered.

“That’s right.”

He pointed at the paper. “Take that with you, and when you get there, show it to Pedro. He is the taxi driver who will pick you up. Tell him to find out where these places are.”

I glanced at it again. It made no sense to me. “Does this have something to do with Catalina’s kidnapping?”

He shoved the paper into my hand. “Just do what I’m telling you to do.”

I took it from him and gave it a closer glance.

“This is the paper that guy with the scar handed you at the golf course, isn’t it? He isn’t a landscaper, is he?”

José didn’t like the hired help asking questions. “You just show the paper to Pedro.” He turned and walked away.

Me, I headed from Miami to Medellín.

From the fat to the fire.