It was dark when they returned to the hotel. They had something to eat in the restaurant and Johana went up to the room. Julieta stayed downstairs with her notes and ordered a double gin and tonic. She was nervous, anxious about the boy’s fate. Something from their talk with the priest kept nagging at her: what was the gossip that hounded him? Her first thought was the most obvious: sexual abuse. She called Jutsiñamuy’s cell phone.
“Hi, friend,” the prosecutor said, “I’m all ears.”
Julieta told him what they’d found out.
“OK, I’m writing this down. Francisco Berrocal? All right, we’ll see what we’ve got,” Jutsiñamuy said. “We didn’t have anything on that other guy, Fritz Almayer.”
“He doesn’t have a record?”
“He’s cleaner than a porcelain Christ. Not one complaint, not even a ticket for running a red light.”
“Well,” Julieta said, “it’s not for sure it was him anyway. It was just a guess because of the black clothing. We need the boy to confirm.”
“Remember, all priests wear black.”
“Let’s wait a little longer,” Julieta said. “And . . . speaking of tickets, can you find out whether he’s got a car registered to him? Or to his church? Is there a Hummer or some SUVs?”
“That’s good,” the prosecutor said. “I mean the Hummer. Everybody’s got SUVs, you don’t have to be mobbed up for that. But Hummers are a different story.”
“And did you learn anything about why they’re hiding what happened?”
“No, I haven’t looked into that yet—I need a little more meat on the grill first. But I’ll dig around soon.”
They said goodbye.
As she sipped her gin and tonic, her mind started to make strange associations. The missing boy, the man in black, the biker in the tinted helmet, the chatty priest. She doodled several circles and drew some lines. A possible trail emerged:
The man on the motorcycle kidnapped the boy because he saw him talking to us.
The biker works for New Jerusalem. They want to know what exactly the boy saw and what he might have said that would implicate . . . the priest?
Always back to Fritz.
She thought: Thanks to the car rental agreement, they know who I am and what I do, and why I’m here. They know I’m investigating. They have my documents, my address in Bogotá. They’ve been spying on me since the day we went to inspect the road. “Maybe they’re watching me,” she wrote at the bottom of the page. She tapped the table with her index and ring fingers to help herself think. Fritz, Fritz. She drew a larger circle in the center of her page and wrote: “Mr. F. Who is this mysterious person?” From the F she drew an arrow to another bubble, in which she wrote, “Attack on the road to San Andrés.” And from there another arrow to an empty circle where she wrote, “Mr. F’s attacker.”
Another circle was still floating on the page. In it she wrote, “Father Francisco.” Another F! And the kid Franklin too! Everybody’s an F in this story. Aren’t there any other letters they could use? Wanting a smoke, she went out into the street, still holding her drink. It was a cool night, and groups of teenagers were walking past toward the park, talking over-loudly. She asked the doorman for a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke, but I’ll get you one.” He went out and intercepted the group. “Would one of you be so kind as to offer the lady a cigarette?”
They gave her a Belmont, the brand she hated most, but she was in no position to be choosy. She thanked them and smoked, watching the crowds congregating toward the square, as if the ground were sloped so that everybody would inevitably end up there. Suddenly, amid the tide of people, she saw a different group approaching. Men in suits and ties, with a preening, tropical sort of foppishness, at least from afar; elegant women in swaying skirts and heels. They were all wearing lanyards with their names and a logo around their necks—what was it? They were headed straight for her, and she moved aside to let them pass. ACOPI, she read, the acronym for the Colombian Association for Small and Medium Industries. Black, gray, blue clothing. Each with their own idea of sophistication. Not just in their attire but also in their gestures and expressions, waving one another through at the door, exaggerating like bullfighters: “Please, go ahead,” “Oh, no, you go,” “Absolutely not, you first,” their interactions an implicit display of hierarchies, salary differences, seniority, and career paths.
Off to one side, Julieta observed the ritual. The complex shorthand of the Colombian middle classes. She recognized in it something that had always disturbed her: the national obsession with respectability.
She suddenly wished to be very far away.
She wanted to do something shameful.
She felt an irrational urge to abandon her gin and tonic and go to the park to drink cheap aguardiente in the crowd. To sing reggaeton, smoke a joint, and do a line of coke or dance barefoot on the sidewalk. A strange beast was breathing inside her and telling her, run, get out of here, scram. A wild animal huffing and stamping and furiously beating the bars of its cage, wanting to be free. She imagined herself very drunk, with dirty hands groping her; the smell of sweat, dirt, rank old age. She conjured up a fantasy of a disgusting piss shower and several of those young men pulling off her pants and licking her buttocks and groin with their disgusting mouths.
She downed the rest of her drink and was about to flee to the plaza when she spotted someone familiar in the ACOPI group. Who was he? He was dressed differently. Instead of a dark suit, he was wearing a tan jacket, white linen shirt, dark jeans, and tennis shoes. He was talking to two older executives, but it was obvious from a mile off that he wasn’t from that world. Julieta studied him closely. Shit, she was already a little drunk. As the man approached the door, her disorderly mind returned the search results. She couldn’t stop herself saying it out loud, practically shouting: “I know you! You’re a journalist . . . Which outlet are you with?”
The man looked at her amicably but didn’t answer. Julieta grabbed his arm and said, “I’ve read some of your work.” Not knowing how to respond, he murmured a few polite words.
Then Julieta said, “What are you doing with these people?”
She was clearly drunk.
“Working on a story. How about you?”
“Another story,” Julieta said. “Let’s go get a drink, yeah?”
The next day, her merry-go-round memory would recall that they went to a bar on a dark street, then another, and then a third and possibly a fourth, and that they drank an endless succession of gin and tonics that were delicious merely because she needed them to be, on a fevered path that bore them aimlessly but relentlessly into the depths of the night.
She awoke after ten the next morning. Johana wasn’t in the room, and when she got up to pee and drink some water from the sink, her head felt like a block of concrete. Vaguely, she saw disconnected images of her nocturnal adventure: dancing in a crowded space that was suddenly empty. An exhausting walk. Lots of gin and aguardiente. A stop in the main square and, she wasn’t quite sure, maybe a kiss . . . She didn’t remember. Then, back in the hotel, a room that wasn’t hers. A man’s body at her hips. A rather cinematic blowjob and, when she touched herself and smelled her fingers, the memory of an exuberant entanglement that came to her in fragments, through a fog.
Exactly what she’d wanted.
But Christ, the headache now!
In a fit of lucidity she saw herself clutching a pillow, biting something and twisting the sheets with her fists. The smell of alcohol, cigarettes, and sweat. It was too bad the memory was so fuzzy, since she was alone now and her head was killing her. In the bathroom she splashed water on her face and, though she felt ill, managed to swallow a cocktail of two ibuprofens, a Dórex painkiller, two lemon-flavored effervescent aspirins, and three glasses of water with Alka-Seltzer. Then into the shower, which luckily was large enough for her to sit on the tile floor and let the stream of purifying water wash away the remains of the night.
“Everything OK, boss?”
Downstairs, Johana was at a table in the courtyard. She saw a jug of coffee, now cold, scraps of egg, and a piece of croissant.
“Are you still serving breakfast?” she asked a waiter.
“Of course, ma’am. Eggs, coffee or hot chocolate, toast, cassava cheese bread. Orange juice? Just tell me what tickles your fancy.”
The huge black glasses hid her eyes and made her feel protected, as if she were looking out from inside an armored car. A Hummer? From a reality that was far from her harsh, insistent memory. She felt the blood surging and ebbing in her veins.
“I’m not going to ask what you got up to last night, boss, but I was getting worried.”
“What time did I come in? I don’t even remember.”
“Like after six. It was already light out.”
“Did I wake you? Sorry.”
The waiter appeared with coffee, juice, toast, and scrambled eggs with onion and tomato. Julieta looked it all doubtfully. She speared a bit of egg with her fork, waved it in front of her face, and put it back on her plate. She drank a sip of juice and felt it slide sharply down into her stomach, like a cat slipping and digging in its claws to keep from falling. She nibbled the croissant, but the flavor that hit her palate was not at all what she’d expected. It was a crescent-shaped sweet bread, not a croissant. Never in her life, she thought, had she felt so far removed from the concept of a croissant as she did biting into that awful bread. She pushed it aside. A sip of coffee—that was good. The toast would be best, with a bit of jam, but there was another problem. Her taste buds bristled at the sugar that overwhelmed the flavor of the bread. She decided to leave it.
“I’ve got the worst hangover,” she said. “I’m dying.”
Johana laughed. “Hangovers are a symptom of withdrawal, boss. Have a beer—that’ll fix it. Hair of the dog and all that.”
Julieta glared at her through her glasses.
“No one’s going to serve beer for breakfast!”
“Then have a Gatorade to rehydrate. It’ll help your headache.”
“I’d rather be in pain that drink that crap, it tastes like toilet cleaner.”
“At least try to finish your eggs,” Johana said. “The cysteine will help your liver process the ethanol.”
Julieta lifted her glasses and stared at her. “Are you a biologist too? These fucking eggs are disgusting.”
“I was a nurse, boss. I know what I’m talking about.”
She grasped the fork again, pushed the skewered bit aside, and retrieved another. A curl of steam rose from the bowl.
“It’s too hot.”
“Blow on it.”
“It doesn’t taste like anything when it’s this hot,” Julieta said.
“Chew slowly. Pretend it’s medicine. For you it is.”
Just then Julieta’s cell phone rang.
It was Silanpa.
“How are you?” she said.
She set the fork down on her plate again, nodding at Johana’s insistence, yes, yes. Into the phone she said, “I’m still here, in Popayán, with a massive hangover. I had the brilliant idea of getting wasted last night, in the middle of this investigation. I hate myself.”
Silanpa recommended that she eat some protein. What people on the coast call a basic breakfast. Bone broth, eggs, arepas with cheese. “And drink lots of water.”
Julieta nodded again. She was getting fed up with people telling her what she needed to do. “Everybody in this country is an expert in curing hangovers. Fantastic. Did you find out anything about that guy?”
Silanpa answered not much. Pastor Fritz Almayer was clean, no record, but there was something odd.
“What?”
“It’s like he appeared on Earth just over fifteen years ago,” Silanpa said. “There’s absolutely nothing from his previous life; apart from his ID, there are no other documents of any kind, no registration at any school or university or even library, no recorded travel out of the country. So basically, he was born at thirty-eight. Either he’s an alien or he’s a textbook example of someone who changed his name to start a new life.”
“Sounds intriguing.”
Julieta pulled out her notebook and in the empty bubble next to “Mr. F’s attacker” and a question mark, she added “Possible enemy from previous life.”
“What’s weird is he’s got an official ID with that name,” Silanpa continued. “I managed to get a copy. Fritz Almayer, born in Florencia, Caquetá, on December 30, 1965. According to the records, he first applied for that ID at the civil registry office in Florencia on January 18, 1984. Even though he didn’t exist until 2003. He renewed it twice and requested a replacement for a stolen card eleven years ago. That’s all we’ve got.”
The three bodies appeared in the ditch beside the road from Santander de Quilichao to Popayán, at kilometer 46.7, but a number of indicators suggested that they’d been shot much earlier and somewhere else. The closest town was seven hundred meters away. The person who sounded the alarm was a motorcyclist who’d stopped to piss and gotten the scare of his life.
“It’s evident they were dumped here early in the morning,” Jutsiñamuy said.
The medical examiner nodded. “So it would seem.”
The prosecutor had arrived by police helicopter with part of the specialized team. They’d been sent from Bogotá when it was learned that the corpses could have been dead for up to a week. Before taking off he called Julieta and gave her the information, but also a warning: “Most likely, these guys are a completely separate case, but you never know. Best to go see for myself.”
“You’ve got a good nose for this stuff,” Julieta told him. “See you there.”
The two women hopped into their Hyundai to drive over a hundred kilometers of perilous road to the crime scene. It was like an existential curse: being hungover and having to race down a road that resembled a water slide—and to top things off, it was just two lanes, which meant braking and accelerating again with every truck or bus they encountered. Three times she had to stick her head out the window, convinced she was going to throw up, but eventually she started feeling better. “No better hangover cure than a bit of momentum and some adrenaline,” Johana said, to which Julieta replied, “Enough about the stupid hangover, focus on getting there quickly!”
They were still a ways off when they spotted the Volkswagen police van, with its green and orange stripes and the words “Mobile Crime Lab” emblazoned on the side. “It’s way worse than a hearse,” Julieta would say later. “When you see that van, brace yourself for something grisly.” Yet more evidence of the ingenious and infinite ability of humans to hurt other humans.
When they reached the police tape, Julieta texted the prosecutor and he came out to retrieve them.
“This way,” he said.
The bodies were lying on the ground, covered with sheets and waiting to be placed in plastic body bags, after which they’d be transported to the morgue. A forensics expert was collecting traces of blood and tissue. Others were taking photos of the scene and the positioning of the corpses. Julieta was used to this precise, incisive way of dealing with the material world. Latex gloves, tweezers, evidence bags. Nobody liked it, of course, but it had to be done. They all carried out their work in silence. No matter how often it happens, this is what death is like in a country of murderers, Julieta thought, always inopportune, ugly, uncomfortable.
“Any idea who they are?” she asked.
“We’re in the process of identifying them,” Jutsiñamuy said. “Naturally, they didn’t have any ID.”
Johana went over to the bodies and studied them from various angles, trying to process their wounds. Julieta took Jutsiñamuy aside and spoke to him quietly. “The fact that you came here and had me come too means you think these guys might be from the battle in Tierradentro.”
The prosecutor scratched his chin.
“That is what I thought, yeah. I figured they’d started dumping the bodies, but now I’m not sure.”
“Go on.”
“The forensic team tells me time of death wasn’t a week ago, it was in the last seventy-two hours. Of course it’s their initial assessment, but if that holds, the timing doesn’t fit.”
“Oh,” Julieta said, “that seems irrefutable. Unless they were wounded and took a long time to die.”
“That’s a possibility,” the prosecutor said, “but they could also be from a hundred other places. We’ll have to wait for the results.”
Julieta lit a cigarette. “The Ullucos people cleaned up and erased their tracks. It would be odd now to just toss bodies in a ditch. Why go to all that trouble before, then? These guys will have families, people who will recognize them. They may be dead, but they still talk.”
Jutsiñamuy looked at them again. “They could be low-level hitmen the bosses don’t care about. The most people will say is ‘we knew they were involved in something unusual.’ Generally in these cases, the dead man’s background becomes invisible. It’s part of the criminal mind-set.”
“Unless they were left here for us to find,” Julieta said. “It’s not like it’s hard to bury three bodies. The person who dumped them here wants somebody to see them.”
Before they left, Jutsiñamuy sent his two agents to ask around at the morgues and police stations in the area. Any death registered in the past week from a 7.62 caliber rifle or .52 caliber machine gun could be useful. Upon receiving their boss’s instructions, agents José Cancino and René Laiseca headed to their vehicle, a silver-colored Subaru 4x4 SUV, rather dirty and with battered mud flaps. They’d driven in from Cali. As they left, Julieta gave Cancino her card and said, “If you learn anything, call me any time.” Cancino was a young man, nearing forty. He looked at Laiseca, who was older, and Laiseca looked at Jutsiñamuy, as if their eyes, too, had to follow the chain of command. Jutsiñamuy nodded the OK. At that, Cancino relaxed. “Of course, ma’am, I’ll be happy to let you know if anything develops.”
Laiseca climbed behind the wheel, backed up somewhat clumsily, and drove off down the road, heading south. Everybody else remained standing next to the black bags containing the bodies.
“What caliber are the wounds?” Julieta asked.
“We’ll know that soon,” Jutsiñamuy said, looking at the forensic technician for confirmation, “Right? They’re only just getting them ready to move. Don’t rush me.”
“My ballistics expert here can tell you the caliber in less than a second,” Julieta said, nodding at Johana.
“Don’t exaggerate, boss. From what I saw, they don’t look like they’re from the same battle,” Johana said. “The one guy’s gunshots are close range. The other two are a possible match. One is missing three fingers on his right hand and has a cut on his left palm—in other words, he died firing his gun. Typical combat corpse. He was shot from far away, downward trajectory. That one could be one of our guys. Shot from a helicopter, maybe.”
Jutsiñamuy listened with interest. He signaled to the team to leave the bodies where they were.
“Hang on a minute, if you don’t mind. I’m going to take a look at what Johana’s talking about.” He turned to one of the team members. “Open them up.”
The sound of the zipper set their teeth on edge. Three bodies: their faces pale, parched, swollen masks. Johana bent down and pointed out the gunshot wounds. Indeed, one guy’s wounds were different. Four impacts that exited through his back.
The forensic pathologist put his mask back on and leaned closer. The body had sunken eyelids, as if the eye sockets were empty. Focusing, he reviewed the wounds one by one. Suddenly a pointing finger intruded on his gaze. It was Johana, gesturing to the mustache. Several of the hairs were clumped together.
“Look, sir. Melted frost.”
Everybody peered at it.
“They took this guy out of a refrigerator,” Johana said. “That’s why his eyes are sunken. He’s been dead longer than the other two.”
There was an awkward silence. The photographer came over and took several closeup shots. Jutsiñamuy got impatient. “What do you think of the lady’s theory?” he asked the forensic pathologist.
The man stood up, removing his mask. “She’s right. They kept him cold—he’s different.”
They zipped up the bags again.
“I’d better take them to Bogotá to take a proper look at them,” said the prosecutor.