CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Pedro showed up on time the next day and I invited him to a buffet breakfast in the hotel dining room. The food was good, but the coffee was even better. One hundred percent Colombian.

Pedro had lots of questions for me about the kidnapping. I gave him the details of the actual abduction.

He shook his head.

“That poor young girl. God gave her no luck.”

“You met her?”

He nodded. “Oh, yes. I met her right after José met her. That was soon after the family had paid the ransom for him, and he was returned.”

I remembered Cousin Cósimo’s nasty crack about José developing a taste for dark girls while he’d been held hostage.

“I take it that Doña Carmen and Don Carlos weren’t delighted with the relationship. That they thought she might just be in love with their money.”

Pedro shrugged. “Yes, of course. That would always be the suspicion with any family as wealthy as the Estradas.”

“What do you think, given what you saw?”

He thought about that a moment. “When I was around them, they were always very busy whispering to each other. I don’t mean the way girls and boys whisper. It seemed they were always in serious conversations. To me, she didn’t seem like some stupid, good-looking girl who was just out to get his money. She wasn’t just some woman using her body to get what she wanted. She was more than that.”

“Although she is quite attractive.”

“Oh, yes, but let me tell you, that José is too smart to fall for someone who is only good-looking and hungry for money. He has had that type of person pursuing him all his life.”

“You’ve known him a long time, I take it.”

Pedro shrugged off that question as if it were absurd. “We grew up together. My mother was a maid to Doña Carmen. José and I used to play together both at the house outside town and also on the cattle ranches and coffee plantations the Estradas own. Of course, that changed when we became teenagers. When the time came, he went to private school, and I went to public school, and after that, we didn’t see each other as much. From then on, we lived very different lives.”

I nodded. This was the story, not just all over Latin America, but all over the world. Kids had no use for class differences. But once those kids grew up, it was class conflicts that caused the frictions and most of the bloodshed on the planet, and especially in a place like Colombia. Pedro had seemingly avoided that kind of antagonism, but José had been unable to escape the revenge of those left behind.

Pedro wasn’t finished. “But I still know José as well as anyone. If anything, he has become a more serious, less frivolous person over the years, especially since Don Mario, his father, was murdered.”

“He took that hard?”

He winced. “Very, very hard. He was filled with hate for those who had done it. And then they kidnapped him as well. I’m still surprised that he survived. I was afraid he would express his hatred for them, attack them and try and kill them until they had no choice but to kill him too.”

“But he made it back alive.”

“Yes, the family paid the ransom, and he was released. When he returned, he was extremely quiet and serious. I could sense all kinds of emotions in him because he is a very emotional person, but he said very little. I could sense in him an even deeper desire for revenge. Then shortly after that, he met Catalina and he began to speak again, but only with her. I don’t know why, but that’s the way it was.”

“I’m told Don Mario, José’s father, was shot to death in his own house.”

“It was the house he kept on the outside of town, where they went on the weekends. He went up in the middle of the week for something, and when Doña Carmen couldn’t reach him, she called me and we drove up there. I was with her when she found him.”

He shook his head. “In all my life, I have never had such a sad moment.”

“I’m told Don Mario was a good man.”

He nodded. “Oh, yes. He was the leader of the Estrada clan. He was the one who guided the fortunes of the family.”

“More than his brother Carlos?”

The cab driver shrugged. “Oh, yes. Don Mario was the older one. It was he who made the big decisions. When he was killed, it was a catastrophe. Before you leave, I’ll show you where it happened.”

I suggested that first we go to the bank and get the securities so Don Carlos could buy Catalina’s freedom.

Over the next couple of hours, we did our duty. The bank was half-way across town, and traffic was bad. When we got there, the manager had a briefcase ready for me. I delivered the note Don Carlos had handed me, and he checked my passport. The manager gave me the securities, and a while later, they were being locked into the safe at the hotel.

It was now eleven a.m. I had completed my assignment, and my plane didn’t leave until nine that night. I’m nothing if not efficient.

Pedro and I were sitting next to each other in the lobby when I took out the yellow piece of paper José had handed to me.

I told him what José had said to me.

“I don’t understand what any of it means. For example, here it says “La Doctora” but it doesn’t say which doctora. In a city this size, there must be hundreds of female doctors. And what do these numbers mean? I have no idea.”

Pedro turned the paper so he could read it. After a pause he started to nod.

“In this case, La Doctora doesn’t refer to a person, it refers to a part of the city. Across town, there is a comuna, a section of the city, called La Doctora.”

He poked the piece of paper with a finger.

“And these appear to be addresses in that part of the city and elsewhere.”

“So why don’t we go there?”

From the hotel, we battled traffic and headed to the far side of the valley. What I couldn’t help but notice about Medellín were the large number of red-brick buildings. They were very attractive against the green mountain background. Even high-rises many stories tall were made from that red clay instead of glass or steel.

Pedro explained it to me. “The cocaine barons have had much influence here, but even before them, the brick-makers were powerful men,” he said. “They still are.”

Along the way, Pedro recounted events that had occurred on different streets during the worst of the Medellín mayhem. On several occasions, he said, bombs had gone off just before he and his cab had reached a certain spot or just after he had passed.

“It got so that every morning when I left my house, I would tell my wife, ‘We will see each other later, God willing’.”

At another point, while driving to La Doctora, we found ourselves next to a police car.

“Back in the bad days when Pablo Escobar put a price on the heads of all the police officers, you never drove next to a police car,” Pedro said. “If you were next to one, you slowed up or turned off onto another street. It wasn’t because you were afraid of getting stopped by them. You didn’t want to catch a stray bullet or a bomb meant for a policeman.”

I didn’t bother to tell him I was a former policeman. He might kick me out onto the curb.

After a while crossing the floor of the valley, we started to climb into one of the mountainside neighborhoods. The higher we climbed on the winding roads, the more upscale the neighborhood became. We passed some walled, gated properties that looked to be a whole block square and had breathtaking views of the city.

Pedro pointed at one. “That estate there belonged to a sicario who worked for Pablo Escobar. They called him ‘The Worm.’ He killed a lot of people for Don Pablo, and finally, he was killed himself. His widow and children still live there. People say he left millions of dollars buried in a crypt on the property, and that’s what his family lives from.”

After another turn in the road Pedro announced that we had entered the area known as La Doctora. Taking the piece of paper from me, he read the addresses and went to the first one, which was located on a winding side road.

We arrived at the address and found a construction project, a luxury condominium structure some twenty-five stories high, overlooking the city. Banners hanging out front announced that units in “The Monte Carlo Towers” were now being sold. The outer shell was built, but it was clear that no one was yet living there.

Some large construction equipment was still on the site, including a crane and a few trucks. They all bore the logo of the Inter American Construction Company, the company owned by Conrad Nettles, business partner to the Estradas. I’d been told of his projects in Colombia, and this was one of them.

“Are you sure this is the address?” I asked Pedro.

“This is one of them.”

“Well, whoever José was thinking of, they haven’t arrived yet.”

“No, they haven’t. Maybe the next one.”

We turned around and headed back the way we had come. Once again on the main road, Pedro aimed farther up the hill, and we arrived at another condominium construction project. On first sight, it was smaller—only about ten stories—and less imposing. But one aspect of the design caught my eye: the balconies were extremely long and wide. I mentioned it to Pedro.

“Those aren’t balconies. Those are swimming pools. Each unit in this complex has its own ten-meter swimming pool. Everyone in the city is talking about it. They cost almost two million dollars per unit.”

For several moments, I couldn’t comment. I was trying to figure out the physics of such a construction. With my rudimentary engineering knowledge, I decided they would have to fill the pools on each side of the building at the same time so that the structure wouldn’t topple over.

When I got over my amazement, I returned to the business at hand. I told Pedro about the man with the scar on his face and how he had given the list to José.

“Why would José be interested in these places?” I asked. “Was he thinking of buying one of them?”

Pedro had already started to turn the car around.

“I don’t know. Tell me the other addresses.”

I read to him from the folded piece of paper, three different streets and numbers.

“Those are all in the center of the city, the old Poblado district.”

Moments later, we were hurtling back down the hill. Pedro didn’t say much, as if something had suddenly occurred to him and he had to hurry to a specific event or place before it disappeared.

After battling more traffic, we entered an upscale café district that featured both old, colonial-era buildings and also very new structures. Pedro stopped in front of a new apartment complex with a glass façade about six stories high.

“We are in Poblado, and this building opened not very long ago. They say a couple of members of the Congress have units here.”

Before I could comment, he took off again and stopped for the last time two blocks away, pulling into a parking space outside a new shopping mall. When Pedro got out, I followed him and we drifted around an open-air patio surrounded by stores.

Right away, you understood you were in crème de la crème country. Everything in the windows was Gucci, Cartier, Versace and Valentino. It was what you might find on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was rich.

After a while, I simply stopped. “So what are we doing here? Is this where José came to buy his cologne and cuff-links or what?”

Coming very close to me, Pedro held the piece of paper up and spoke in a whisper, “There is one thing that all these addresses have in common, Don Willie. All of them were built, or are being built, with the help of the narcos, with the help of cocaine millionaire profits.” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together in the universal gesture for big money.

I looked around. Given the prices on the merchandise, you might have to be a cocaine millionaire just to shop in those stores, but that still didn’t tell me who had built them.

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody knows that. Given the history here the past twenty years, the only ones who have the wealth to build these large projects are the narcos. They are the only ones who made money for so many years. The rest of us were just trying to stay alive. To make the deals, they link up with legitimate partners, but the money is dirty. They are washing the money.”

In English, most times the term was “money laundering” I stared around at the gaudy goods.

“So what can that have to do with José? Are you saying somehow he was involved?”

Pedro shook his head. “I don’t know what it means. José was never involved in these projects.” His face stormed over. “Some people say things, but you can’t believe those things.”

I stopped walking, and he stopped with me.

“What sort of things do those people say about José?” I asked.

He shook his head hard. “Not about José.”

“About who then?”

He got an even more pained expression on his face. “They said it about Don Mario, José’s father, after he was dead.”

That startled me for a moment. “You mean they said he was mixed up with cocaine bosses in the construction business?”

“Yes, but they only said it out of jealousy just because he was rich. Envy. That is what instigated those insults. It is only las malas lenguas making those remarks. Nobody else.”

Possibly Pedro was right and it was only “the bad tongues” making those accusations. Maybe Don Mario had done nothing wrong, but maybe I was hearing family loyalty and little else.

“I was told Don Mario died when the guerrillas tried to grab him,” I said to Pedro.

He nodded avidly now. “Yes.”

“Do you still believe that, given what people say about his business partners? Could it have been the narcos who killed him?”

“I told you, I don’t believe those bad things.”

There was no shaking him, and I saw no reason to wreck his belief in the dead Don Mario.

“You mentioned you would show me where he died.”