CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I promised José I would say nothing about our conversation to anyone else, at least for the moment. Given the way my head was spinning I don’t know what I might have said.

I drove home feeling like the little silver ball in an ever more complex pinball game. I was bouncing between a lot of people, finding weird connections between them to the point that I was hearing bells in my head. For example, when it came to Cousin Cósimo, over the past days my opinion had gone from thinking him a pathological killer, to admitting he might be exactly right in his suspicions of Catalina and the dangers assailing his family, to now being forced to consider that he had touched off all this family tragedy in the first place.

There were fewer degrees of separation in Colombian criminality than there were in the average anthill.

And as I drove up to my apartment on Eighth Street I found that the ants had crawled into my neighborhood as well. Parked across the street from my front door, a few yards down the street, were two guys in a green van. It looked a lot like the vehicle I had played soccer with a few nights earlier, although it didn’t have bullet holes in it, so it had to be another vehicle. They seemed to have a supply.

I drove right by without slowing down, went two blocks beyond my side street, turned and backtracked until I was parked right behind my house. I cut through the yard of my rear neighbor, Mrs. Veciana, veered through a space in the jasmine hedge, took the back stairs and moments later, I was peeking through a blind in the front room down at the two dudes outside my door.

The guy in the driver’s seat was fixed on the front of my house, as if I might parachute in at any moment and he didn’t want to miss me. I stepped away, made myself some coffee, went to my desk, checked emails and phone messages, and twenty minutes later went back to the blind. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t simply being paranoid. I wasn’t. They were still there.

I didn’t like that at all. I started to think of where I might hide. In a situation such as this one, I could never go anywhere near my mother’s place or my brother’s house where he lived with his wife and three kids. Anyone seriously considering doing me harm would track me down to those addresses in a Miami minute.

I thought of some other friends, but the same problem presented itself. Then suddenly an idea came to me. I went to my bedroom and my private phone line, found the number I was looking for on the call log and punched it in. It rang five times, and finally she picked up.

“Susana?”

“Is that you, Willie?”

“A couple of your fellow Colombians are outside my house, and I don’t think they’re here to pay me a friendly visit. I need a place to hide, and you are the only person I can turn to.”

Life is full of lurking ironies. For example, the girlfriend you are afraid of hurting who turns around and dumps you, seemingly without a second thought. I’ve been there, believe me.

This one—the lady afraid of being kidnapped providing refuge to another potential victim—was a bit more rare. My thinking was that a person who had successfully hidden from such felons for years was my best bet.

After a few questions, Susana told me to make sure I wasn’t followed but to head her way. “Be very, very careful, Willie.”

I gathered a few things in a bag and beat it out my back door. I peeked from around the corner of Mrs. Veciana’s house, saw nobody suspicious and hurried to my car.

Susana had given me her new address, which turned out to be in a condo tower in the Brickell Avenue corridor, not far away. She instructed me to use the guest parking spot in the covered garage in order to keep my easily identifiable red convertible off the street.

Minutes later, I was sitting on the sofa of her condo with her, overlooking Biscayne Bay, sipping a rum she had poured me. A beautiful white, full-flowering orchid stood on the coffee table. Susana loved orchids; they were both hothouse flowers.

I filled her in quickly on the events of the past days, and her eyes expanded with each of the episodes, especially the soccer field and the SWAT team. It sounded like the itinerary of a metal duck in a shooting gallery.

She punctuated my report with a classic bit of understatement: “Now you know why I’ve always worried about these people.”

“Yes. You were way ahead of your time.”

She wanted more detail on who I’d been dealing with, and I obliged. When I reached the name Ratón Ramírez, she freaked.

“My God, Willie!”

At that point I think she was regretting giving me refuge. But I kept going, touching on my acquaintance with Cósimo Estrada, the paramilitary commander, Catalina Cordero, who had guerrilla contacts and Snow White, the cartel gun moll.

“You are involved with every dangerous interest in my country,” she said, “and all in one week.”

“I’m nothing if not efficient,” I said. “I also see they are all involved with each other so that you can never be sure exactly who you might bump into at any turn you take.”

“It is drug smugglers that did that,” Susana said. “They created a sea of money in my country, and everyone swims in that sea. Some of the other fish are very dangerous, although the sea still belongs to the sharks, the cartel bosses.”

“So I should have understood from the beginning that it was Ratón who grabbed the girl and not the guerrillas.”

She nodded warily. “If I had to guess, yes. That’s what I would have told you. Although any of the people you named and the groups they represent are capable of any crime at a given moment, and that includes some people in the government itself.”

I drained my drink, and she poured me another one. I realized I had come to her not only for refuge, but also for her long experience as a potential target. She also knew it. The shoe was on the other foot now. After years of feeling alone in her fears of being kidnapped, now she not only had company, but someone, at least temporarily, more at risk than she was. I had suddenly become maybe the only person in the world who she could console and protect.

We talked for a long time, and I came to understand something else that night, something very sad. It came at one point we were discussing family.

“I’ve never had children for one reason and one reason only,” Susana said. “I know how much my parents worried about me and how much they had to do to protect me. I didn’t want to put myself through that, as a parent, or my children through that either. You come to feel you have ruined the lives of your parents.”

It made me think of Doña Carmen, how she had spoken about José’s kidnapping, and how she had been tortured by thoughts of him, not knowing if he were alive or dead.

It was very sad what Susana said to me, and again it made me realize just what the Colombian troubles had done to the lives of women there. But right then, Susana had me to take care of, and she took her new role seriously. While I sipped my second rum, she reached over and ran her hand through my hair. A moment later, she kissed me and I kissed her back.

In our previous incarnation her isolation had served to fuel our fire. This time around, I had just barely escaped a high-caliber soccer contest, and now I was being followed around by some of the same soccer players. Ask any soldier, having your life threatened does wonders for the primal instincts.

This time it was both of us, huddled together, who felt the world around us was a hunting ground. We felt like the only two warm-blooded people in the world. In fact, we might as well have been the only two people in the world, period.

Susana and I had never done anything in half measures. Our lovemaking had always been intense. Now, the long time we had spent apart, her continuing isolation, and my fervor, fed by the simple fact that I was still alive after the last days, drew us into each others’ arms. We went until the middle of the night, getting reacquainted.

It wasn’t until mid morning that I woke up with the fresh smell of the bay wafting from the balcony. Susana was asleep at my side. My phone was ringing, and I reached for it on the night table. It was Don Carlos on the other end.

“They just called.”

“What did they say?”

“Now that they know there are two of them, including the child, they have doubled the price. They want four million, and they want you to deliver it . . . now.”