Laura Restrepo - No Place for Heroes

“Didn’t you say you were going to show me?” she asked, and her voice startled Mateo, who had completely forgotten she was there.

He replied that he would, and began to explain the game to her, not handing over the controls yet, telling her when she should bring out the catapults, when she should use the drawbridges, how to score points. Finally, she got him to turn over the controls, but because she played horribly he quickly grew impatient, upset with her and with her incompetence, and made her turns shorter and shorter as he made his longer. His explanations, at first very enthusiastic, became more sporadic and succinct, until he again immersed himself fully in what seemed like a religious silence.

Lorenza soon opened the door and left the room, and Mateo did not even notice.

“EXACTLY FIFTEEN DAYS afterward Ramón left with you,” Lorenza begins to tell him.

“He didn’t leave with me, Mother. He kidnapped me.”

“Fifteen days after that—”

“It’s not called ‘that,’ it’s called disappearing a kid. You, who tell the story of the disappeared in Argentina so often, are afraid of the word when it deals with your own son.”

“It’s not the same, Mateo, you know that.”

“It’s not the same, but it’s very similar.”

“Similar, perhaps, but not really. Let me go on. Fifteen days later I found out that just as I had expected, he had fled with you to Argentina. It was confirmed by a very unexpected source.”

“Slow down, Lorenza. Slow down, you’ve never told me this part.”

“So be patient and you’ll hear it.”

That whole week passed without a call from Ramón. They called her, however, from La Crónica . The director of the magazine, who had given her as much time off as she needed, and who did anything he could to help her, told her that a very serious-looking man had shown up in the newsroom asking for her and saying he had news about her husband. A funny word, husband, which Lorenza never used to refer to Ramón, and that those who knew them well would not have used either.

She was there in less than an hour to meet a man who gave her a business card that said he was Joaquín Alberio Pinilla, Attorney. But clearly not just any attorney, his smile shone revealing gold fillings and extremely white porcelain implants, his extremely black curls were just beginning to go gray, and in front of the building he had parked an exceedingly silver Toyota, of the kind that narco traffickers owned. When she had investigated and written about organized crime, Lorenza interviewed some of these lawyers, who acted as spokespersons and representatives for the Mafia.

“If I am not mistaken, you signed this,” the man said, pulling out of his pocket a check for one hundred and fifty thousand pesos, a very large sum for her then, considering that her salary was twenty-eight thousand a month. The check was signed in her handwriting and had come from her checkbook. It was dated the day before. “Your husband, the Argentinean señor, gave it to my boss a month ago, postdated, shall we say. Yesterday the date came up and my boss sent me to cash it, and I’m sorry, it was returned for lack of funds. I understand that your husband is no longer in Colombia, so with all due respect, you are going to have to answer for this.” The man fanned himself with the check while he proffered smiles and variant courtesies.

He told her that he respected her and simultaneously disrespected her by addressing her using the familiar Lorencita, a little verbal manhandling that she decided to allow faced as she was with that compromising check and no funds.

“My boss reads La Crónica and admires you very much. He recognizes that you are a top-class journalist, and precisely because of that does not want to proceed with a court case, shall we say. The amount of the check is not the problem, but we’re talking about principles here. My boss doesn’t like to be … toyed with. Do you understand?”

“I do understand, Mr. Pinilla, but tell me, what was my husband’s check for?” asked Lorenza, already guessing.

“The equivalent in dollars, ma’am.”

“There you are, Lorenza, you’ve told me about his wide shoulders a thousand times,” Mateo jumped in. “But you never told me that he swindled a drug cartel leader.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“But why not till now?”

“Do you want me to go on or not?”

That lawyer, without knowing it, had just offered her another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that she was putting together. And now Lorenza knew what money Ramón was using to survive. The check must have been one of the many blank ones that she’d signed for him while they lived together, to pay the rent or other services. Lorenza made a mental calculation. If after getting Mateo back she kept on living with her mother and turned over her entire salary to this guy, she could pay the debt in four or five months. And it would be much better to give up her salary for a short while than to postpone such a debt.

“Look, Mr. Pinilla, please tell your boss that I am going on a trip very soon, but that as soon as I return I will pay him the money, as long as I can do it in a few installments.”

“But he’s not going to like that, miss. My boss is not going to like that you too will be taking off for Argentina—”

“Argentina?” Lorenza’s heart jumped. “Did you say Argentina?”

“Well, that’s where your husband went, Señora Lorenza, and you must understand that my boss—”

“I do understand, Mr. Pinilla, but you must trust that I will pay the full amount. But tell me why you said Argentina?”

“Argentina, that’s where your husband went, as you well know.”

“I guarantee you that you know a lot more than I do. Tell your boss that my husband stole money from him, but he stole my son from me. Tell him to trust me, because we are actually on the same side.”

Pinilla accepted this and sent his regards to Lorencita’s mother, asking if she still lived on Ninety-fourth below Ninth.

“You mean Pinilla knew Mamaíta?” Mateo asked.

“No, kiddo, of course not. He was threatening me, just in case I decided not to pay back the debt.”

But before the lawyer had left, cordially saying his farewells, Lorenza pulled him to the side.

“Just one more thing, Mr. Pinilla. How do you know that my husband went to Argentina?”

“You’re a journalist and you have your sources, right? We have ours.” Pinilla smiled from ear to ear. “We are also similar in that way, how about that!”

“So once again, my father the crook, with his little swindles,” Mateo said. “He grabs the boy, grabs the money, and leaves you in the lurch, owing those animals.”

“That wasn’t his plan. Before Pinilla said goodbye, I knew for sure that Ramón would call sometime soon.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“It says a lot about who your father is. He had fled from the mafioso, and must have had everything in place so that I too could flee.”

“Okay, that makes sense, then you must have run home to take his call.”

“Not yet. If the game was so dirty, then I had one round left to play. And now the minutes were ticking down.”

When it had been suggested to Lorenza that she report Ramón to the Argentinean military, she made a decision — not that. Now she had just made another decision: except for that, anything.

At the magazine was a worker named Botero, known as Botas, a judicial investigator with whom she got along well. It always paid off to team up with Botas, who knew how to infiltrate even the worst dens of iniquity, in order to find out some detail. There were no hot spots, hidden spots, or whorehouses that escaped Botas. Lorenza thought, this is my man, and went to his desk. Botas made a few phone calls and fifteen minutes later the two were in a taxi, headed toward a lower-middle-class neighborhood west of the city. They rang the bell at a yellow house with a front yard, a metallic fence, and three enraged dogs, those who kill and then eat their kill. A little old woman who came to the door in sandals screamed at the dogs to shut the fuck up and chained them so that they couldn’t bite anyone, but still remained ready to attack, in the little living room where they sat to wait. The old woman brought them some coffee in miniature cups and after a brief wait made them follow her toward one of the rooms on the second floor, where they were greeted by a man in a white robe.