CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I took a few moments to think things out and decided I better show my face at the house in Key Biscayne before Don Carlos and Doña Carmen forgot I was still on the case.

On the way, I tuned in to the news on the radio. A radio correspondent had approached Chief Saban on Key Biscayne and asked if he thought the bomb in the strip mall was a product of “infighting” among local Colombians. Saban was cautious and withheld comment.

A reporter also went to a local travel agent and was told that, yes, some Colombian residents were making airplane reservations to get out, spooked by the kidnapping and the bomb blast. She was asked where they were going.

“Any place they can get a plane to. They’re just getting out.”

One elderly man, interviewed on the street and speaking with a strong Spanish accent, asked himself that question.

“But where can we go? Back to Colombia or to some other country? Where can we hide from these criminals?”

Minutes later, I coasted back onto the Key. This time, at the city line, patrol cars sat on both sides of the road. They were checking I.D.s of individuals entering the city limits. Saban had obviously decided, after the kidnapping and then bombing, that he didn’t want Key Biscayne turning into Key Colombia. The cop at the checkpoint recognized me from the aborted rescue of Catalina Cordero and let me through.

The radio reporter was lucky to have found any Colombians on the street to interview. Once I was on the Key, I saw that pedestrian and vehicular traffic had dried up. The remains of the mall were still smoldering, and a small cohort of firefighters was still in evidence, but the main drag was almost devoid of cars. At an hour when folks would normally be heading for work or delivering kids to school, the roads were almost deserted. People were either getting out or lying low.

As I was turning off the main drag toward the Estrada manse, Alice called again.

“Well, for a change, your instincts were right, Willie. A man named Arturo Cordero, a labor organizer in the construction trades, was murdered by paramilitaries three years ago near Medellín. His oldest child was a daughter, about the same age as your Catalina. After the funeral, she suddenly disappeared. The rumor is she went to the guerrillas for protection and may have joined up. I can’t be absolutely sure, but this appears to be the same girl.”

Now it was my turn to whistle. Meanwhile, Alice’s mind was still churning.

“I wonder if José has any idea about who she really is.”

“Why on earth would he knowingly be with a guerrilla girl? He’s always believed they murdered his father and he himself was then kidnapped by them.”

“I have no idea, boyo, but maybe you should ask him.”

“I’m almost there. I’ll let you know.”

I drove to the Estrada manse. Along the way, I thought about what Alice had just told me. A lot of people had undergone major changes in identity on their way across the Caribbean en route to Miami. Whether they came from Cuba, Colombia, Caracas, it seemed like the waters of the Caribbean—or the spirits of that sea, as Ratón might express it—worked magic on peoples’ personas.

Ratón himself had morphed from murderer to messiah. In the past, I had watched communists become capitalists, colonels become car salesmen, beauty queens become housemaids and vice versa.

That Catalina had converted from poor girl to guerrilla to aspiring aristocrat wasn’t impossible. Interesting, but not impossible. And the fact that she might be carrying José’s child was a captivating idea. The mixing of the two gene pools—the aristocracy and the guerrillas—was maybe just what Colombia needed in order to find peace.

I arrived at the house and found that Manuel was no longer manning the front door. The bomb that morning had necessitated a whole new level of security. Instead, two guys in white guayaberas flanked it. I recognized them right away as the companions of Cósimo who had been with him the day before down at the state park.

The house had gone from a home to a real fortress. I could see bulges on their hips under the hems of their shirts. I figured they were paras and if they were, they would certainly be a lot more lethal than old Manuel.

I entered the living room and saw Doña Carmen seated on the couch by herself. I sat down next to her.

“Has there been any word on Catalina?”

She shook her head wearily. “No, nothing yet.”

She was staring across the room as she had various times in the last days, as if she were again seeing her grandchild all grown up. This time, her expression turned bitter. She spoke about something she had said to me a couple of days ago.

“These people say that the families of my class and my husband’s class have kidnapped the entire country. That we have hoarded the country’s wealth for use by a very small number of people.”

She shook her head. “I’m not a callous woman, Willie. I’m not oblivious to the suffering that surrounds me. I understand what it is they are saying, but how does stealing individual human beings start to change any of that? That seems to me to be nothing but vengeance . . . and the cruelest kind of vengeance.”

I recalled what Snow White had said to me about how the business at hand was revenge, but Doña Carmen wasn’t done.

“What kind of world have we made when certain young people can’t go through a courtship without bodyguards? Or a honeymoon, for that matter? Where men invited to a wedding arrive armed with guns just in case someone tries to kidnap the bride or groom? A world where children are driven to school along a different route every day for fear of kidnapping? A world where a child not even born is already kidnapped? Tell me how we managed to arrive at this madness . . . ”

Her voice trailed off. I touched her hand, and she squeezed mine, even as she stared at that empty chair across from her. I understood that she was really squeezing the hand of her grandchild.

Then Manuel came in wearing his chauffeur’s cap and Doña Carmen let go.

“I have to go to a doctor’s appointment.”

I didn’t like what the last few days had done to her. I could see the life seeping out of her slowly, and it worried me. I helped her to her feet, and they left.

Nobody was in the living room, and Lorena wasn’t in the kitchen. The door to the office was closed, and I figured Don Carlos was in there waiting to hear from the kidnappers. The other SUV was gone from the driveway, which meant José was out.

The corridor leading to the bedrooms was to my left. I walked down it and found the room shared by Catalina and José. It was large and, with the blinds closed, it was dusky. It was also empty, so I stepped in and closed the door silently behind me.

The fact is, I wasn’t sure what I was searching for. If Catalina Cordero really had been a guerrilla, what would tell me that? I doubted she had an AK-47 hidden under the king-sized mattress, but I checked anyway. She didn’t.

The room was equipped with two closets. The larger one was set in the wall across from the window and belonged to Catalina. I examined it quickly and found nothing but clothes, and not a lot of them. Given the lofty economic circles she moved in, there weren’t a lot of glad rags. Then again, if she had been a guerrilla recently, she probably hadn’t had time to work up a large wardrobe.

I checked pockets and found nothing but a few crumpled tissues, a movie ticket stub and some small change.

The bed was flanked by two night tables. One glance told me the lady had slept on the left side of the bed. On the night table stood a small lamp with a stained-glass shade. Still sitting next to it were a tortoise-shell barrette, a loose pair of small gold hoop earrings and a jar of moisturizing cream.

I didn’t know how long José would be gone, so I moved quickly. I opened the top drawer of the night table and found a pile of colorful kerchiefs. Several times when I’d seen Catalina, she’d been wearing one. It was her trademark, and even if I hadn’t known whose drawer it was, I could’ve guessed.

The drawer held nothing else of interest. So I proceeded to a dresser across from the foot of the bed. It was a large piece of furniture, but I soon figured out that the top three drawers were Catalina’s, the bottom two belonged to José. I rifled through underwear, a cosmetics bag, Tampax, T-shirts, shorts, a few tops. Again, for a lady of leisure, she didn’t own much to speak of.

In the third drawer, underneath some underwear, I finally found a red plush jewelry box. I figured I’d finally found the family jewels, but when I opened it I saw only a few trinkets. No diamonds, no family emeralds or other precious stones—just a few more pairs of inexpensive earrings and a bracelet or two.

It occurred to me that Catalina might have collaborated in her own kidnapping because her boyfriend had been chintzy with her. More than one woman in history had turned against her lover because he wouldn’t share the wealth. She could have had herself kidnapped and split the ransom with the abductors. Finis.

That’s what I was thinking until I noticed that the tray of the jewelry box was loose and could be lifted out. Underneath it I found several photographs.

First, I saw a couple of shots of Catalina as a child: one in a pink birthday dress when she was no more than three. Another pictured her in pigtails, possibly at age seven or eight. In both photos, the background was rural. Beneath those I found family shots. In one of them, she was with a man, maybe in his late forties, who had to be her father. He was a ruggedly handsome man, and she looked a lot like him. This, if I was correct, was the same Señor Cordero, the labor organizer, who had been murdered by the paras.

The last two photos were taken at a funeral. At the center of one, dark-skinned Latin men dressed in Sunday suits carried a casket down the steps of a church. Behind the casket marched family members, and I recognized Catalina among them.

Flanking the funeral procession on each side were banners held by other mourners: “¡Arturo Cordero Vive!”—Arturo Cordero Lives! They were the types of banners you saw all over Latin America at the funeral marches for political martyrs.

The last photo was set at a cemetery apparently on the edge of the town. The coffin was being lowered into a hole carved in the earth. The family surrounded that scene, including Catalina. Her expression was a mixture of grief and rage.

I wondered if the rumor Alice had heard was right and just how long after that photo she might have joined the guerrillas. She certainly looked angry enough to enlist.

I stared at the photos. You could have scraped my surprise off the floor with a putty knife. Instead of the guerrillas being the perpetrators of the kidnapping, it seemed like maybe one of their own was the victim. That momentarily boggled my mind.

I was still there when I heard the faintest noise behind me. It was the sound of the bedroom door closing. When I turned, José was standing with his back against the door.

“What do you have in your hands?”

I glanced down at the photos. “I guess you would say I have Catalina’s past in my hands. I think you’ll want to take a look at these.”

I held out the last photo to him—the one of the cemetery, the coffin and Catalina. “This is a photo of her father’s funeral. I’m told that shortly afterwards, she ran away and joined the guerrillas.”

He didn’t reach for it at all. He simply glanced at it, then back at me and after a moment’s thought said something that astounded me: “I’ve seen the photos, and I know she was with the guerrillas.”

He noted my surprise, then turned and locked the door. He gestured toward the bed. “Sit down.”

I did as asked.

He walked toward the window, thought for a few moments, then turned toward me. “Catalina and I met when I was kidnapped. She arrived with guerrillas who came to talk to me where I was being held in the mountains.”

“She was a member of the negotiating team?”

He shook his head. “No. She had her own specific reason for coming to talk to me. You see, Catalina joined the guerrillas for two reasons. First, they offered to protect her from the same people who had killed her father. They also offered her a chance to avenge his killing. Her father was murdered because he was a labor organizer.”

I nodded and glanced at a photo of the funeral. “Yes, I know some of the story.”

He paced in front of me as he talked. “But I didn’t know that at first about her. I thought she was just another guerrilla. Occasionally, she would come to the mountain hovel where I was being held, and she would talk to me. In the beginning, I didn’t want to talk to her at all. In fact, I wanted to kill her because of what I believed they had done to me.”

“You mean the murder of your father?”

“That’s right. It was Catalina who first told me that wasn’t true, that the guerrillas had not murdered my father, that I had it wrong. When I wouldn’t believe her, she had one of the commanding guerrillas tell me the same thing—that they had nothing to do with his death. But I still wouldn’t believe them.”

“Who did they say did it?”

“They didn’t name anyone. All they said was that they were not involved, and Catalina kept coming to me and telling me that. She also spoke to me about her own father and how she believed that possibly the same people who had killed him had also been responsible for my father’s killing.”

“Both men were shot to death.”

He nodded somberly. “That’s right. They were very different men with extremely distinct roles in life, but she still told me they might have both been murdered by the same people.”

“Hard to believe.”

I had laid the photo of the funeral on the bed, and he picked it up.

“Yes, but Catalina is a very strong and persistent person. She got that from her father. She kept talking to me. She said the guerrillas wouldn’t bother to lie to me if they had murdered my father, and I knew that was true. The guerrillas never expressed shame for their crimes.

“She also said that since she had lost her father to killers, she would never lie to me about such a thing. Her father had been killed by the paras. In fact, what she told me was that it was my own Cousin Cósimo and his men who had murdered him after he tried to organize the construction workers in big projects in Medellín.”

“The same big projects your family’s banks were helping finance, along with the cocaine cartels.”

He glanced at me with anger in his eyes. “Some people say my father knew he was mixed up with that cocaine money, but that’s not true! My father would never have had those kinds of people as business partners. Never! I told Catalina that, and she told me someone else at our banks had been involved with those criminals.”

He laid the photo back down on the bed. “After I was ransomed by my mother, I went back to work in the bank. I started studying certain accounts. Monies were hidden in banks in Europe and in the Caribbean, but they had been channeled out of Colombia through our banks and those massive construction projects in Medellín.

“That being true, I figured my father might have stumbled onto those accounts and that he had been murdered by someone who was involved in those criminal enterprises in order to keep him quiet.”

“And those involved would be the cocaine cartel barons, including Ratón Ramírez. Also Conrad Nettles of Inter-American Construction and . . . ”

I hesitated at that moment, but the frank gaze in his eyes told me he was eager for me to finish the list. “And officials at the banks . . . possibly even members of your own family.”

He nodded slowly, stoically. “Through a very circuitous route involving her family, I sent a message to Catalina. I told her about the hidden accounts and that she was almost certainly right about my father’s murder. Through intermediaries, we agreed to meet at a place outside Medellín. She arrived with an armed escort, but she had no reason to fear me. We decided that day to try to make the killers of our fathers pay.

“She left her guerrilla protectors and I brought her back to Medellín. Soon after that, Catalina and I began appearing together as novios—boyfriend and girlfriend.”

I glanced down at the bed, back at him and he read my mind.

“We became lovers soon after,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Revenge is a very strong bond, Mr. Cuesta—very, very strong indeed.”

I was thinking of how hostages sometimes fell in love with their captors. They called it Stockholm Syndrome. The kidnapped heiress, Patty Hearst, was probably the most famous example. This might be considered another example.

“And you eventually made for Miami.”

He nodded. “With Nettles and my relatives here, it was the right place to be.”

“So what happened after you arrived here? How did you and Catalina end up in contact with Ratón Ramírez’s people.”

I recalled for him the run-in at the Colombia coffee shop between Catalina and Snow White.

“It was Catalina’s idea. First, I needed to find out for sure that it wasn’t Ramírez and Ramírez alone who had ordered the murder of my father. Ramírez was a free man back then and he was a partner in the construction projects. If my father somehow found that out and threatened to expose him, Ramírez could have had him killed.

“And Catalina also had to wonder if Ramírez, acting on his own, had ordered the killing of her father. Her father and the other labor leader who was killed must have known that narco money was invested in the construction projects. Had they threatened to make that public if they didn’t get what they wanted? That was the rumor.”

“You really thought Ratón would tell you his private business, especially his private killing business?”

He shook his head. “No, but if he wasn’t involved in the murders, he might tell us who was . . . something we could believe.”

“So you contacted Ratón?”

He shrugged. “Not directly. The guerrillas had provided protection for the cocaine growers in Colombia, and through people Catalina knew, she got in touch with Ratón Ramírez’s organization here. In particular, his girlfriend.”

“Snow White.”

“Exactly. And it turned out Ramírez was anxious to make contact with us once he knew what we were looking into. Through the albino woman, he told us he had nothing to do with the killings of either of our fathers. And he said he believed he had been betrayed, possibly by the very same people involved in those killings. In fact, he said on the night he was captured he was his on way to meet with Conrad Nettles and my Cousin Cósimo to discuss business, but he was intercepted by Colombian and U.S. agents. He believes someone set the authorities on him in order to walk away with more of the money from those large projects, or solely to get rid of him because they were afraid of him.

“That’s what he relayed to us. We agreed to work together to try to determine who, exactly, had committed all the crimes against us. Ramírez wanted his revenge as well.”

Which was just what Snow White had said to me.

“So what happened?” I asked. “Ratón let me know he was involved in kidnapping Catalina. How did that happen? Why did it happen?”

José shook his head. His face was full of anguish. “I don’t know for sure. Suddenly Ramírez and his people acted on their own. They were saying one thing to us, but I believe once they knew I was here they decided to kidnap me in order to make my family pay for the betrayal of Ramírez, only they kidnapped Catalina by mistake. Now they have Catalina . . . and our child.”

“So Catalina is, in fact, pregnant?”

He hesitated. “She told me she is, and I believe her.”

He pronounced that as if he were repeating a tenet of a very private faith. He was so far into this quest for revenge with Catalina that I guess he couldn’t afford to doubt her. As much as I had liked Catalina personally during our brief acquaintance, I still had major suspicions.

He looked at the photo of Catalina. Maybe he was thinking the same thing I was: that he had been naïve to believe that he, a banker’s son, and his girlfriend, a small-town girl, could get involved with a wanton killer like Ratón Ramírez and come out unscathed. When you get mixed up with masters of mayhem, you are probably going to get burned.

José and Catalina had been scorched.