Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

Ramón dialed the detective’s number and Daisy said exactly what he had told her to say. She asked the detective to bring the package in a case to the hotel before three that afternoon. The detective said O.K. and they hung up. Ramón started pacing the room nervously. Daisy called reception and said that someone was going to bring a case in her name, and would they please let her know, and they sat down and waited. Ramón hired a taxi and asked the driver to wait outside. At 2:40 the telephone rang. The package was downstairs. Ramón went down to the street, got in the taxi and made sure that there was nobody or nothing unusual. Daisy came down a few minutes later, picked up the package and walked out of the hotel. She joined Ramón in the taxi and they set off for the airport. That evening they were in Bogotá, at the Hotel Suites Jones in Chapinero Alto.

Daisy said: as you can see, darling, I make a good trafficker. That isn’t what this is, sweetheart, I already told you a dozen times. Oh really? why all the mystery, then? Because it’s something important. Remember what I said, no questions, now do you want to go to Medellín? Daisy said of course and the next day, very early, Ramón sent her by taxi to catch the shuttle with a ticket and two million pesos in cash.

As soon as Daisy had left, Ramón went downstairs, paid the bill, and changed hotels. This time he went to the Bogotá Plaza, on Calle Cien, near the freeway. As soon as he had settled in, he sat down and switched on the computer. It was only then that it occurred to him that he should have checked everything in Villavicencio. He had been concentrating so much on his security measures that he had forgotten the most important thing, but anyway, he would soon see. Once he had switched on, he had direct access to all the files, but there were others that were encrypted. He looked at the photographs and saw things that filled him with horror: Soraya naked, with Jacinto taking her from behind, Soraya giving Jacinto a blowjob, Jacinto sticking his finger into her anus, who had taken these photographs? He saw that they were all from the same angle and he assumed there must have been a camera hidden in the room, maybe the paras used the photographs for blackmail. In the other files, there were hundreds of photographs of other naked people, even others of Jacinto with a woman who was a friend of Soraya’s and worked in the same internet café, clearly he had been screwing both of them.

He kept looking at the photographs, his heart on the verge of breaking, and then opened another file that really knocked him sideways: Soraya and himself, naked in the motel, ten, twenty, thirty photographs, all from the same angle. He huddled on the floor, in a fetal position, and wept bitterly. He did not want to see any more and shut down the computer. He took a quarter bottle of aguardiente from the minibar and started drinking slowly. Outside, night was falling but he did not feel any desire to go out. He was alone and felt like shit, with a hatred in him that kept him awake, like a glass of cold water thrown in his face. He called room service, ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke, and waited, sitting on the floor. Then he got in the bathtub and filled it with hot water. The sandwich was good. They had all deceived him and now the Grim Reaper was coming for them. The next day he would think about what to do and see what else was on that damn laptop.

He spent two days looking at files and found many things that filled him with ideas. There were Excel pages containing details of drug consignments, drugs, prices, weights, and routes, the dates were recent, after Dagoberto had supposedly volunteered for the demobilization process. There were photographs of a grave with nine bodies, with faces taken from close up so that they could be recognized, and other photographs showing corpses being cut up to make them unrecognizable.

And there was the connection with his friend Jacinto. He had been buying, at a knockdown price, the cattle the paramilitaries had confiscated from other farms. Then, when Jacinto had become a major auto repair shop owner — with his shops — he had become the one who fixed the cars for them, cleaning off the blood and human remains. After every job Dagoberto handed the vehicles over to Jacinto and he handed them back as good as new, repainted, and with new plates. Jacinto never invoiced him, but in the accounts there were all the payments to his shop, each with a description: Toyota van, seven bullet holes and traces of bodies. Fixing, repainting, and cleaning of traces. 1,500,000 pesos to Jacinto, or Chevrolet Suburban after Operation Mayor of Fresno. Chassis cleaned and repainted. 1,200,000 pesos. Jacinto. And there was a file of more than a hundred and twenty pages, with invoices attached, which demonstrated that the cocaine was cut on Jacinto’s farm!

Another file detailed the cleansing operations by area, such as: 32 executed by Hernán Mora in Operation Lejanías. Buried in seven pits, cut up, does not count as massacre. List: followed by the names and the approximate ages. This Hernán was the brother of Soraya, so they were all there. The only one missing was Soraya, how could he take his revenge on her? It was Soraya he felt angriest at because nobody had forced her, she had done it even though she loved him. The photographs of her and Jacinto in the motel and the fact that she had married him, even though he would never have asked her mother for her hand: all that was more than sufficient proof that she was involved in the thing right from the start. All of them had been against him, and what had he done to them? Nothing, nothing. He had loved her, and he had loved Jacinto, who had been his friend since they were children. They had paid him back for that love and friendship with death and ruin. As he thought this, his breathing grew heavier and hatred filled his bloodstream, giving him even more strength. He would destroy them, that was clear.

And he was going to start with her.

He copied all the photographs in which she was with him, naked, and even with Jacinto, and erased the faces, leaving only her face. He chose five in which she was seen on all fours and with her face turned towards the camera, and two in which she was sucking Jacinto’s cock. Then he e-mailed them to the town hall of La Cascada, the Community Center, the kindergarten her daughter Gloria Soraya attended, the restaurant Luna Roja, the bar El Feliz, and Jacinto’s auto repair shops. Also to the Häagen-Dazs ice cream parlor and the Escrúpulos tearooms, where she spent her afternoons. Also to the people of the El Paraíso residential community, wherever he could find the addresses. Everybody and everything with a more or less public e-mail address in La Cascada received the photographs, and to make it even worse, he opened an account on Facebook in her name and added the rest of the photographs from the computer, including those of Jacinto with other women so that he could see it and know he had been found out. This Facebook idea was a brilliant one, he thought, which he could also use for Dagoberto. But he preferred to wait and see the reactions. His idea was to hand over the computer to the Public Prosecutor’s Office or the newspapers or the Human Rights Commission and that was why he decided to stay a little longer in Bogotá.

After five days he moved to the Hotel Charleston, on Calle 85 near Carrera 15. He was so nervous, he found it impossible to leave the hotel, even for a short walk; all the same, he did go a couple of times to have a drink in the Zona Rosa and walk around the Centro Andino. Finally, after three days, he received a message on Facebook that said:

Let’s see if you’re brave enough to come out and show your face, you son of a bitch, do you have something against my family or what? We’re already on your trail and we’ll soon find out where you got all those fucking photographs that you’ve been putting on the Internet. We’re going to cut your balls off and eat them fried, with chopped onions, you bastard.