Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“Fuck,” María Paz said, “where are you pulling all that from, Mr. Rose? This morning you didn’t know a thing about such conditions…”

“True, but I read the pamphlets they gave me at the reception desk. I even brought one. Take it,” Rose told her, handing her a booklet with a yellow cover titled Interested in Learning and Sharing About Autism? And then he repeated that when it came to the execution of the trust, she had nothing to worry about.

“It can’t be, thanks, but no,” María Paz said flatly. “I can’t leave my sister behind, because Sleepy Joe will hurt her.”

So then they went back into their endless and wary conversation about Sleepy Joe, who he really was and how much harm he could do to Violeta.

“You’re the one who told me he was harmless,” Rose pressed.

“I never said he was harmless. I said he was no murderer; it’s different. But he is pissed because he thinks I stole his money. Why is that so hard for you to understand, Mr. Rose? Sleepy Joe is frantic, and he’s going to get even more nuts when he finds out I took off, according to him, with his money. If he can’t get to me, he’ll get even by hurting Violeta. You can bet the house on that. Today, I knew as soon as I saw her that things weren’t going to work as planned. I realized right away that I could not count on Violeta. She has to make a scene about everything. Do you know what I mean? Always. A fucking scene, that’s what she does, throws tantrums whenever she doesn’t get what she wants or if she feels as if she is being forced to do something. Not so bad this time, actually, she remained calm. She didn’t whine, didn’t cry, didn’t let loose with a list of maddening questions like she always does, sometimes the same question, over and over and over again, until you think that your head is going to explode. But there was none of that this time because her mind was made up. And like I said, no one in this world is as stubborn as she is. Just gave me the giraffe. The giraffe, her dearest possession, the thing that keeps her sane. Like Linus and the blanket he can’t part with, that’s the giraffe for my sister. Yet she gave it to me, and that means she was serious. She knew exactly what she was doing. A willful act, Violeta condemning herself forever by deciding not to come with me. I get it — all the other stuff — I’m not blind. It’s true what they say in the brochures, Mr. Rose. She is terrified of the unknown, takes refuge in her routines, and I was offering the most uncertain and risky adventure. The worst thing for her. I thought she would be excited just to be with me. I thought the best thing for Violeta was always to be with me, by my side. Until today, that’s what I felt and believed. From the time Violeta was a baby, she was fine if she was with her older sister, Big Sis. Apparently that’s not the case anymore. But I can’t leave her here; you have to understand that, Mr. Rose. I have to take her with me, even if I have to kidnap her.”

Rose tried to suggest that wasn’t the greatest idea, but María Paz’s despair was a solid wall that common sense could not penetrate. At least he was able to convince her to go to a little motel hidden in the woods, where they were able to reserve a couple of rooms without questions about the dogs or having to present IDs.

Despite its plainness, the place had a cosmic name that Rose remembers well: North Star Shine Lodge. He had learned from Pro Bono about the importance of the names of the motels. They had something to eat at the motel cafeteria, drawing the unwanted attention of the few other diners because of the three dogs sprawled under the table, and because María Paz couldn’t stop crying as she clutched the stuffed giraffe. Rose tells me that everybody there was just as suspicious. He was sure they were in the operations center of who knows what types of illegal activities. At the other end of the room sat three Asian men dressed in black, wearing sunglasses and thin, shiny ties. On the table in front of the men, in plain sight, there were stacks of bills wrapped in plastic.

“They must be Yakuza,” María Paz whispered, but she had no head for anything but her own tragedy, the unexpected and insurmountable obstacle casting an ominous cloud on her survival mission.

Fortunately, they were in agreement about one thing, Rose tells me. Violeta would be toast if she were left behind. Sleepy Joe had pounced on Cleve and he would pounce on the girl; that was as clear as daylight. But Rose could think of no solution for the impasse and didn’t have the means to comfort María Paz. It would be best to let her rest so he could calm down and brainstorm. At that point, they were approached by the motel clerk, a fat lonesome figure in a baseball cap, who invited him to a game of miniature golf, the only entertainment in those parts, other than a bar with a pool table in a neighboring town.

“No, thanks,” said Rose after María Paz went to her room, “I’m going to take the dogs outside, set them up for the night.”

“Don’t even think about it,” the man said. “They’ll freeze their asses off, won’t last ten minutes, noses turned to ice and throats freezing inside. Come on, a little miniature golf, my friend, it’s indoors. Have you ever played it? Much more fun than it sounds. You’ll go nuts in these parts just staying in your room.”

“He insisted so much that I finally said yes,” Rose tells me. “Better than being locked in my room staring at the TV. So I stumbled down a long hallway behind the fat man, brandishing my toy putter. This was no mini golf course, though, maybe mini-mini golf. The fat man said we could do half a course, nine holes.

“There’s only three,” Rose said.

“We do it three times,” the fat man responded.

The guy was very chatty, so after a while Rose asked him about the three Asian men in the cafeteria.

“What about them?” said the fat man, removing his cap to wipe the sweat from his head and face.

“Are they Yakuza?” Rose asked.

“Why don’t you ask them? And keep an eye on that pretty girl you got with you. I play the fool: see no evil, hear no evil, but you can tell she’s illegal from a mile away. Careful the Yazuka don’t snag her.”

“A lot of weird business around here?”

From hole to hole, one, two, three, and around again, the motel keeper explained to Rose that trafficking of migrants was one of the most lucrative types of global businesses. He told Rose about the Onondaga and the Iroquois League, as well as about other important figures who were capable of moving anything illegally across the border, even a herd of elephants if they had to. The Onondaga went through the Saint Lawrence River by boat — during the wee hours in the dead of winter. That’s when it was best to leave, because the weather was usually the most clear. They were strong rowers, so the Onondaga avoided the noise of motorized boats, but that did not mean that they were not technically advanced, equipped with night-vision binoculars and every other kind of useful gadget. In the bottom of the boat, they crammed illegal Chinese, Pakistanis, and even Muslims who kissed the ground when they arrived. People came from everywhere to cross the border, and there were the Onondaga, waiting, their lands overlapping the frontier, thirty acres of islands and coves hidden in the woods. They were capos of the leather trade in previous generations, then cigarette smuggling, and now they used the same routes for human trafficking.

“Just watch closely and you’ll see,” the motel keeper said to Rose. “Two thousand US dollars per head, and they can get six heads across in a single trip. One of them always stopped by the North Star for drinks. His name was, or he called himself, Elijah, and he was so ingenious that he had built a false bottom on his aunt’s Buick LeSabre with enough room to accommodate up to six humans.”