Cartagena

IN , LUIS SAYS, the beach is gray at dawn. He points to the barrel of his G3 when he says this, steel gray, he says. He smiles. The sand is white, he says, this color, tapping his teeth. And when the sun comes up on your right, man, it is a slow-motion explosion like in the movies, a big kerosene flash and then the water is sparkling gray and orange and red. Luis is full of shit, of course, but he can talk and it is true that he is the only one of our gallada who has seen the Caribbean. Who has been to Cartagena.

And the girls? Eduardo asks.

Luis tosses back his greasy black hair. He knows we will wait for his answer. He is the oldest of us (except for Claudia, who doesn't count because she is a girl), and he has told this story many times with pleasure.

The girls, he says. He looks at me and it is proper, he is showing respect. Together we smirk at the immaturity of Eduardo.

No, says Claudia. The fishermen. Tell us the part –

The girls, Luis says, speaking over Claudia, they are the best in all of Colombia. They wear skirts up to here, like on MTV, and boots up to here, and it is not like the country, where the autodefensas will shoot them for it. They are taller and whiter and have beautiful teeth and can talk about real things. Nothing like here.

  He pauses. Luis has grown a mustache that looks like it has been drawn on with wet charcoal, and now he strokes it with his thumb and finger. I remember a line from a movie.

With that mustache, I say, you look like a shit-eating faggot. Eduardo laughs happily. And it is you who would be shot for your long hair.

Luis ignores me. He says, speaking slowly, In Cartagena, everything is nothing like here.

We are five, including Claudia, and we are going downtown to do some business on behalf of Luis. Apart from me and Luis and Claudia and Eduardo, there is little Pedro, who walks behind the group with his hands in his torn pants pockets in order to fondle his testicles. It is not even funny anymore.

I have not seen any of them, except for Claudia, in the last four months. Claudia –the only one who knows where I have been staying – told me yesterday about this business. I did not want to come but she told me how strongly Luis had insisted.

They look younger than I remember. Only Pedro has grown - he looks like he has been seized by a fistful of hair and stretched up two inches. I wait for him to reach me and say to him, Ay, you are almost a man now!

Ask him if he has any hair on his pipi, says Eduardo.

Pedro keeps his hands in his pockets and does not react.

See, even now he is molesting it!

Come on, says Luis. He sounds distracted. Claudia is smiling to herself. I look away from her.

To do this business there would usually be more of us, but our old gallada, the core of it anyway, is three short. Carlos was shot in the throat outside the Parque del Poblado: it was night and he was selling basuco to the crackheads when the rich kids came in their yellow jeep and cleansed him. Salésio joined his elder brother in the local militia, where he sent back a photo of himself in a balaclava, holding an Uzi sub and a Beretta .45. You could see the shape of his stupid smile through the black cotton.

And then there is Hernando. I do not want to think about Hernando now.

We stop at the border of our barrio, in a dump at the bottom of a ridge. A thin ditch of water runs through the debris. Without a word, Pedro and Claudia take lookout positions. Luis and Eduardo straddle the sludge, one foot on either bank, and clear away the moldering cardboard and plastic junk. Soon they uncover the nylon three-seater that we stole, months ago, from a public bus. They tip it forward to reveal the large concrete tunnel into which the water runs. I stand sentinel as they crawl, one by one, into the hole.

This is one of our old mocos. Only the five of us know its location. It is a runoff from the main storm sewer, but smells like a sewage pipe. I am glad it is dark.

Over there, I say.

Eduardo and Pedro go where I point, navigating by the blue light of their cell phones. At a waist-high ledge they peel back a thick, water-resistant cover, and Pedro lets out a whoop, then muffles his mouth. The sound echoes against the wet concrete.

Luis grins. You come back after four months, he says, and already you think you are the dog's balls. He is grinning widely. These are yours?

On trust, I say.

Handheld grenades, he says, picking them up, weighing them in his palm like they are pieces of fruit. A new AR-15. And these?

Glock nine millimeters. You can throw away your thirty-eights now.

I heard the forty-fives are better.

They look like toy guns, Claudia murmurs from the darkness.

Well, Luis says to me, still grinning. Well, well. El Padre is a generous man.

Aside from Luis's G3, we take one of the Colts and the two pistols. As this is Luis's mission, I do not ask whether this is too much or too little firepower. Pedro is a child and will carry the bullet bag. He insists on bringing a couple of grenades. Just in case, he says.

In case what? jeers Eduardo. In case the target is hiding inside a FARC tank?

It is getting dark when we finally arrive in the correct neighborhood. We are on foreign turf and I am uneasy because it is the worst time of day to identify a target. I am also pissed off at Luis because he made a detour to check his emails. Luis is pissed off at me because I told him we could take a chiva bus and he replied, No, puto, they don't go that way, and just now a green one came by and almost ran us over on the narrow street. And we are all pissed off at Eduardo, who failed to dodge a pile of warm dog turd.

You sure you have done the recon? I ask Luis.

Fuck you, he says. Maybe I have no office job but I am no child.

And the target is not protected?

Listen to you and your fancy language, says Eduardo. Is the target not protected?

Under the darkening sky, everything melts into shapes of brown and gray. We pass buildings made of brick, of cement blocks, of wood and plastic. Faces of people merge back into the material of their houses. Street kids scavenge for food by the roadside, some of them inhaling the pale yellow sacol from supermarket bags - their eyes half-open and animal and unblinking. We pass unattended stalls, half-filled wheelbarrows, hot pillow joints, then there are no more houses and we reach an abandoned railway line running along the edge of a cliff. We cross the tracks and look down. The road dips steeply into a gorge jumbled full of bamboo poles and torn tarpaulin sheets and hundreds upon hundreds of boxes. It is our destination. The tigurio: the city of cardboard.

The few inhabitants we see do not interfere. We walk through dimly lit trenches, toward the northeast corner. Shadows of faces move behind candles and gas lamps. Luis lifts his fingers to his lips and points to a shack at the end of an alley. He creeps forward. Yellow gaslight glows from behind the gaps in the cardboard. Coming closer, I see a black man on his back chewing a sugared red donut. Luis goes in and grabs him by the hair and flips him onto his stomach. If it is the right person, Luis has done his recon excellently. The target looks older than all of us –even Claudia, who has sixteen years. His skin is a darker black than mine, and burnished with sweat in the gaslight. His mouth is still crusted with little sugar bits. Luis rests his boot on the side of the target's face as he reaches inside his pants to pull out the rifle. He frowns as the magazine gets stuck in the elastic of his waistband-this is a common hazard with the G3 – a beginner's mistake. Eduardo has dropped to his knees, pinning the target's legs down.

Who is the son of a bitch now? Luis says. His voice is light and breathy as it is when he is excited.

You are, puto, squeaks the target. His lips strain to spit, and fail.

Claudia comes in and crouches down; there is not enough room to stand. We all sweat from the heat of the gas lamp. Luis succeeds at last in removing his rifle from his trousers and jams the barrel into the target's eye socket.

Do I kill him fast? he says. He is looking at me. Claudia and Eduardo are looking at me too. Pedro stands watch at the edge of the tigurio.

For a moment I am taken aback. Killing has never been the business of the gallada, unless things have changed with that too, in the four months I have been away. Maybe they are seeking to impress me, now that I have my office job. Or maybe that is why they asked me to come with them.

Do I kill him fast? Luis says again. His voice is tight - it sounds as though he is really asking for my answer.

What is his crime?

 Luis falls silent. He lifts his gun and paces two steps this way, two steps the other way, stooped underneath the cardboard roof. The target twists his head up from the dirt and looks around for the first time. He sees Eduardo, who is holding his legs, and Claudia, and then Luis. He sees Luis's hand, trembling on the trigger guard.

He has many crimes, says Luis. But he called my mother the offspring of a dog.

I don't even know you, the target says. He swings around in my direction. And I am protected. Ask anyone.

I glance quickly at Luis, who opens his mouth.

The target follows my gaze and turns back toward Luis. When he speaks his voice is low and sly. What are you doing? he murmurs. His face is shiny in the gaslight. We both know you are no sicario.

Breathing hard, Luis grabs the G3 with both hands and jams the barrel into the target's mouth. I can hear the metal muzzle clatter against his teeth.

Ask him who is the offspring of a dog now, I say. I find myself thinking of four days ago, the calm face in front of my Glock. Ask if he will tell you that. Saliva starts to run from the target's mouth, quickly turning pink.

I will tell you, the target croaks out, whatever you want me to! He is not a tough anymore; no soldado, that is for certain. His words are slurred because his mouth is forced half open-it moves like the mouth of Claudia's demented mother. Please, he says.

Don't you get it? Luis shouts. The fringes of his hair drip with sweat.

From the ground, mouth ajar, the target shakes his head. I'm sorry, he groans.

Why are you sorry? I don't want you to say what I want you to say!

We all watch Luis.

I want you to want to say it.

Okay, man.

Okay?

Okay, man.

What are you going to do? He removes the gun from the target's mouth and presses it into his cheek.

I'm going to say what you want –

Luis's frown deepens.

I mean, I'm going to want to say it, I'm going to –

What are you? Luis breaks in.

It takes a second for the target to comprehend. I am the son of a dog, he says.

What kind of dog?

A dog. A bitch. A dirty, flea-bitten, whore of a bitch.

What else?

I am a dog that is ugly, that is an imbecile, that looks like a disease-ridden rat, that smells like shit...

You eat your own shit, too, don't you?

For a moment Luis sounds like a gangster in an American movie I recently saw in the city. His face even carries the same sneer.

Yes, yes. The target reaches for a piece of donut next to his face, rubs it into the dirt before stuffing it in his mouth. Claudia turns away. It is strange the things a girl will tolerate and will not.

From a distance comes the sound of ringing bells. I move to a gap in the cardboard to check with Pedro. After a moment he shakes his head and calls out in his high voice, Gasoline trucks.

Luis says, What else?

His mouth full of dirt, the target says, I am a dog that eats its own shit, and drinks its own piss, and, and –

But he cannot fully untangle his mess of words because at that moment Luis lifts his G3, flips it around and smashes the aluminum butt into the target's head. I think I hear a soft crack. For a brief moment Luis looks surprised, then he waves one finger from side to side in the manner of a parent scolding a child.

You are lucky, puto, he says, that my friends here are full of compassion. He spits on the ground next to the bleeding head. But they will not be so full next time.

You broke his head, says Claudia. He cannot hear you. She half-stands and shuffles over to the target – I think at first she is bending over to examine his wound-then she does something startling: she leans back and kicks him, hard, in the chest. Eduardo gets up from his knees and copies her. We know the target is still alive because his feet dance in response.

Luis gestures at the target with his G3, then says to me, Are you sure?

They all look at me. Their faces are flushed and full in the warm yellow light. It is strange, I think – their readiness to kill – for as far as I know, none of them has ever committed the act. This business was personal.

As we leave, Luis picks up a plastic bag that contains two donuts. The icing on them is green and yellow. For Pedro, he explains gruffly. He likes this sort of shit.

Outside it has turned into night. At the bus stop I ask Luis again what was the man's crime.

A shipment of basuco, he says. Or marijuana. I forget.

I thought you said a game of poker, says Eduardo.

Shut up, says Luis. Shut up, you fat punk.

***

MY NAME IS JUAN PABLO MERENDEZ, and I have been hiding at my mother's place for four days. People call me Ron because of the time when I was a child and, on a dare, finished a medio of Ron de Medellin and then another, and did not vomit.

I am a sicario, a hit man, an assassin. I have been a sicario for four months, although my agent, El Padre, says that in truth I am a soldado, fighting for a cause. It is no cause, however, but my own hands that have brought death to fourteen people for certain, and perhaps another two. For this El Padre offers me a safe house in the barrio, where I live alone, and pays me 800,000 pesos a month and another 300,000 for each hit. Of this at least 400,000 pesos a month goes to my mother, who prays to her God about my delincuencia but takes the money for her medicines and her clothes and her cable TV and asks no questions.

They call it an office job, as the sicario is waiting always by the phone. In Medellin, it is a prized thing to have an office job.

My agent is named Xavier – I do not know his last name, for everywhere he is known as El Padre. I have never met him. They say he is a large, light-skinned man with perhaps twenty-five years. They say he is the only agent in Medellin who is permitted a personal army. I am not sure who he works for, but it is clear from the pattern of hits he has ordered that he is connected with drugs.

El Padre has a powerful reputation. They say, when he had only six years, he was under the bed where the guerrillas came at night and killed his father, then raped his mother and stabbed her to death. The story goes that he memorized the killers' feet and their voices and their smell and tracked them down and made his revenge, one by one. The story goes that he allowed them each one final prayer and then, when they were only halfway finished, took his knife and opened their throats from behind. For this element of prayer they named him El Padre.

But the better story is that he was present, ten years ago, when his friend assassinated defenseman Escobar for the horrible sin of scoring a goal against his own country in the World Cup. This story goes that some time later he killed this friend over a spilled drink. It is something to murder a sicario of such reputation, but to do it over such a small failure of respect – an eyebrow revenge – that is a formidable thing. They say he now has hundreds of deaths to his name.

I have worked for El Padre for four months and have been a good sicario, a loyal soldado, never failing him until four days ago. Four days ago I was assigned a hit and did not make this hit. Of course, he is not interested in my reasons.

According to our usual practice, he called me on my cell phone the following day to confirm the hit.

Bueno, I said, getting up and walking outside so that my mother could not listen in. On the street I said to him, I could not find the target.

The phone line went quiet. You could not find the target, he said. His voice was soft, like he was recovering from a cold: Maybe the information was incorrect. Sometimes it is that way... the information is incorrect.

It had been a whole day and still I could not think of a better excuse.

I said, Maybe it is best to wait until Sunday. We both knew that Sunday is the best day to do the business as the target is usually at home.

You were ordered to do it yesterday.

I could not find the target, I lied again. Maybe he will be there on Sunday.

We have never met, have we, Ron?

No, sir.

You have been a good soldado, he said. I think it is time we met. This week, I think.

Yes, sir.

I will call you with the details.

Yes, sir.

I am no child, wet behind the ears. I have now fourteen years and two months. I know how things work. That there is not supposed to be contact between a sicario and his agent. I know that I have been summoned.

*   *    *

WHEN I RETURN FROM THE BUSINESS with Luis and the others, my mother is sitting in her dark room watching an American soap show. I quickly scan the street as I close the front door.

I switch a lamp on for her. In the yellow flood of light I see she is still wearing her makeup and her going-out clothes. For a moment I watch her as she watches the screen. She does not blink. The concentration of her face is calming.

Your friend called, she says, not turning her head from the TV. It is a large, forty-inch Sony model and was in almost new condition when Carlos sold it to us.

Claudia?

I wrote it all down, she says and gestures vaguely. On the screen a white woman with large lips is hugging her elbows and crying. I catch my mother's hand and make a show of kissing it gallantly, like I see in the old movies. It smells of fish and nail polish.

Oh darling! I say in high-voiced English. Come back to me for I am ... embarazada ... with your secret love child! I say this last part in Spanish so she will understand.

She shushes me and waves me away, then, as the commercials come on, she half turns and says, Do you think I should dye my hair more blonde?

Why do you want to, dear Mother?

I don't know, she says. Maybe it will make me look younger.

Younger? You already look young. In the streets, people do not think you are my mother. They think you are my sister. My mother has heard this before but still her face beams. I continue: They say, Is she your sister? And I say, Are you joking?

Tonto! she cries out. I go into the kitchen to get some panela from the large urn. You should learn from your friend Xavier, she calls out.

 Xavier?

I feel a tightening in my stomach, like the tightening when you walk into a room with your weapon ready and the target is not there. Then I think, I am stupid to feel surprised.

He has nice manners on the phone. Who is this friend? He said you are lucky to have a mother such as me.

He said that.

I add milk to the panela and bring it out to her with some Saltina biscuits.

We need more candles, she says absently. They say there will be another blackout tonight.

What else did Xavier say? I ask, putting the tray down, but the commercials have ended and my mother is once again lost to her soap show.

I pick up the notepaper next to the phone. She has written down an address in her large, girlish writing. It means nothing to me. For a moment I consider telling her to turn off the TV and start packing once more, but already, I know, it is too late. My only hope is to meet with him tonight. I put the paper in my jacket, my heart beating pâ pâ pâ from what I have just heard, and bend over the chair to kiss my mother's forehead.

Outside, I catch a bus to Aures. Claudia's house is the old cement one painted blue, halfway up the hill.

She turns from the large window when I arrive and says, Buenas noches, guapo. I am calmer now. The night air has cooled me. Claudia comes and lifts her hand to almost touch my face, then lets it drop. She knows I do not like to be touched around the head.

Let's go to the park, she says, like a question.

I nod. I am watching her. The window gap behind her is bigger than her whole body, and the dark openness is somehow beautiful; it is rare that any window in this city is not nailed up with grilles or latticework. Behind the window is a sheer drop of twenty meters into a marsh of mud and rocks and rubbish.

We walk up the hill together. The night air is cold and clean. All this time I am thinking about Claudia's window, and how it used to be filled with glass until one day her mother came home from the market, pulled the glass pane so far back the wrong way the hinges broke, climbed up onto the ledge and stood upright before throwing herself out. Even then, she only managed to ruin the right half of her body.

We arrive at the spot. It is dark. Ever since I showed it to Claudia she thinks of it as our spot, but in fact I prefer to go there without her. It is high, above the barrio, past the reach of the electricity cables, at the top of the hill where there are fields of yellow ichu grass and you can feel the wind from all four directions. Recently I have come here every day to sit in the long grass and sometimes drink or do the basuco. From this place I see the deep, narrow, long valley where the city of Medellin lies, cradled by mountains. The tall buildings rising out of the middle. I see the nameless streets, carreras running one way and callés the other. And in the evening I see the streetlights come on, running in gridded patterns until they reach the mountainsides where they race up and spread out until all the barrios that surround the city shimmer like constellations.

It is like that tonight, everything upside down. The stars are under us and above, a sky like dirt.

So you are really going to Cartagena? Claudia says.

Yes.

Why?

Why? To myself I think, To see the ocean. But I say, What did you want to talk to me about? I have important business tonight.

What business?

There is no reason not to tell her. I say, I am meeting with my agent.

So it is real, she says. You have been summoned.

I am silent. Everywhere around us is the whine of grasshoppers, and farther away the noise of people and machines sounds to me like the wash of the ocean. From far enough away everything sounds like the ocean.

There is a night bus to Tolii from the Terminal del Norte, says Claudia.

I shake my head.

I know about Hernando, she says. Everybody does.

What do you know?

She opens her mouth as if to speak, then stops. Then she says, The contract placed on him. By your agent.

You do not know everything, I say.

I watch Claudia's face carefully and it is hard, the face of a soldado with its thin cigarette mouth.

I must ask my agent for leave, I explain. Or he will find my mother.

Claudia pauses briefly. How is she?

My mother, I think, who I had assumed was safely hidden. She is glad I have been home, I say. Four whole days. I continue to watch Claudia. Excepting the business today, in the tigurio.

But she ignores me. Instead, she says, And you – how do you feel?

It is a question only a girl would ask.

Feel? I say.

She is right, though. Tonight, of all nights, I should feel something. If I think about it, then I am scared, yes, and sad, but it is as though that person who feels is someone other than me. In truth I sit here and I do not know what to feel. In truth I come up here to feel nothing.

The last time she asked me that was at Carlos's funeral, six months ago, at the Cemeterio Universal. It was the first death in our gallada. Everyone agreed he had died well. Then, too, I did not know what I felt standing before his grave. The hole was so small-he was never big, even though of us all he had the most hair on his legs and chest. My head was full of voices. One voice said, You should be crying, the other said, I want to, I want to, and behind both I could see myself, the fresh dirt on the mound, the bouquet of fake flowers, the statuettes of Marias and angels bobbing above the streets of headstones; I could hear the singing of birds and smell the plumeria and then feel the tears come, fake tears, watching my body and my hands so clearly as they moved, as through polished glass.

It is like that now; I am watching myself and it is like I am watching a different person.

You want to do some basuco? Claudia asks, reaching into her bag.

I have to go, I say to her.

Then I will come with you, she says.

***

CHICAS, THEY ARE A DISTRACTION from the important things, and as Luis says, sometimes to go between the legs of a chica is more dangerous than walking under a bridge in a strange barrio. As for Claudia, we used to go together, as far as that goes. I am fond of her but in truth I would not call her a friend. There is only one I would call my friend, and that one is Hernando.

Hernando used to be the head of our gallada, if such could be said, although nobody would have admitted it. (Especially not Luis, who had the same age.) There were more of us then, perhaps twelve, and Hernando organized the mocds and arranged with restaurants and market sellers for food in return for protection. The children he sent cleaning windshields, shining shoes, juggling machetes, minding cars, making sales. The older ones he organized to steal cigarettes, flowers, and gum for the children to sell. Only a few of us did the serious robbery. We worked only for ourselves. After my father's death, my mother and I struggled for money and it was Hernando who helped us survive: he took me into the gallada and taught me all the techniques – how to run the tag team, when to wear the private-school uniform, how to spot marks, such as those gringos who go to ATMs with laundry bags and conceal their bills in dirty socks. I learned quickly, and soon Hernando chose me to work with him on all the big scores.

When the others were not around, Hernado talked differently to me. Sometimes he liked to watch people going about their business, particularly in crowded places, at times when we were supposed to be doing recon. Once, in a plaza at noontime, he pointed to a farmer at a market stall, then a man at a construction site, and asked if I thought they were happy.

I don't know.

What about them?

I looked where he pointed.

They are probably happier, I said, half jokingly.

Pah! He spat on the parched grass. The suits, they are richer, yes. He turned back to the construction worker, lean and black-skinned and slow-moving in the heat. He thought for a moment, frowning all the while, then said, But to work with your hands, and to work with others – that is real work. He spat on the ground again. He had told me once that his father was a farmer in the west country – it was after I had told him about my own father, the details of his unforeseen death – but since then, the past had never been discussed between us.

It may not make a man happy, he said, but at least there is honor in it.

In that way, too, he was different. While most of the gallada was concerned with buying the new things, Hernando talked to me during those three years about happiness and honor – even about politics – about a future unconnected to money.

Then the day came, seven months ago, when we became brothers. We were all playing football in a park on the edge of the city. Hernando was one of the better players and looked like a bronze statue in motion. Someone kicked the ball off the field. It went a long way, then stopped at the leg of a man sitting on a stationary motorcycle. The man got off his bike, removed his sunglasses, and kicked the ball – in the opposite direction – into the traffic away from the park.

Hernando had been chasing the ball. I had followed him because I wanted to speak in secret about a new strategy for the game.

What are you doing? Hernando called out to the man.

Hey, puto! the man said. Why aren't you working? Life isn't a bowl of cherries.

You should not have kicked our ball away, said Hernando.

I am doing you a favor. The man paused briefly, then swiveled to look over his shoulder. At that moment I realized he was there with another man, a uniformed policeman, also sitting on a motorbike.

Come here, the policeman said to Hernando. He was smiling. The first man began to smile too.

Hernando walked over without hesitating. He was wearing only pants and his sweating body looked large and powerful next to the shape of the sitting policeman. I watched and said nothing.

You would argue with a business leader in our community? the policeman said cheerfully. He undipped his holster. Hernando did not move. Turn around, the policeman said. You will argue at the station.

I watched as the policeman handcuffed Hernando. Then I felt my arms being jerked behind my back – the other man had approached silently – and I felt the cold click of metal around my wrists. This man led me to his motorbike and sat me down behind him, facing backward, away from him. He smelled of alcohol.

 As the motorbike started moving, I slouched into the man's back to keep my balance. I saw the park diminishing – everyone had vanished from the football game – but I could not see where we were going.

Hernando's bike was in front of ours so I could not see him either. The handcuffs cut into my wrists. Soon I realized we were going away from downtown Medelhn. We were not going to any police station. We began to climb a hill leading us west, higher and higher, into steep slumland. Fear surged through my body: I twisted around, trying to locate Hernando, but the man growled and elbowed me on the side of my head. A voice sang out. We skidded onto a dirt road. The back tire kicked dust into my face and I coughed, my eyes still smarting. When the dust cleared I made out scrapwood shacks, a series of clothes lines, two women glancing up then down from a cooking fire – the power cables didn't run this high – then suddenly, as we swerved again, the city – far below – the vast concrete valley sealed in by a film of smog as flat and blue as a lake.

We turned away onto a narrow track. My breath now coming hot, fast. I could feel the man's sweat on the skin of my back, soaking through my shirt. Sunlight flared from corrugated tin roofs and plastic sheeting on the hillside below us. The ground grew thicker with olive-colored shrubs and banana trees.

The man said something but I could not hear it in the wind. At that moment I realized there were no more houses anywhere in sight. The motorbike slowed.

Jump! someone yelled. It was Hernando. Automatically I leaned to the side of the bike. I tried to jump but my pants got caught in the chain. Then the bike pitched onto its right side and I began to roll down the grassy hill, my hands cuffed behind me. I heard a couple of gunshots. I kept rolling until the ground leveled off. My head felt like it had been stabbed at the back. Moments later I felt someone's boots roll me onto my stomach. I waited for the shot. All I could smell was earth, and grass, and it smelled richer than I had ever smelled anything before. I waited. But the gunshot did not come, and then I felt someone unlock and remove my handcuffs. Hernando helped me to my feet. Blood leaked from his right armpit. He led me up the hill to where my captor, the businessman, lay under the bike, one leg bent so far back the wrong way the foot almost touched the hip. Hernando handed me a gun.

It is his, he said.

And the policeman? I asked.

Your corrupted friend is dead, Hernando said sternly to the man, as though it were he who had asked the question.

The man groaned. The flesh around his mouth had gone loose. I did not know then – as I do now – that this was a sign of fear.

You must do this, said Hernando. He looked at me like a brother. He said, Ron, you must do this so we are in it together.

I took the gun, which felt unexpectedly warm and heavy in my hand, and which gave off a smell like a match being lit in a dark room. I pointed it at the man's head. His sunglasses were broken and bent around his ear and the fragments shone in the afternoon light. I aimed at the blackness in the middle of his ear and shot.

After a while, I turned my back to the man's face and tried to lift the motorbike from his broken lower body. I felt filled with a tremendous lightness, as if every breath I took was expanding inside me. Then I remembered something.

The policeman. How did you –

Hernando let out a short, burp-sounding laugh. He bent his knees as though about to sit down on an invisible chair, then tipped onto his ass. He seemed suddenly drunk.

The stupid puto stopped, he said, because the handcuffs were uncomfortable against his back. But he would not turn me around to face the same way as him – he said he did not want a faggot rubbing up behind him. Hernando burped again. So he handcuffed my hands in front. At the top of the hill, I stopped him like this.

Hernando tilted his head backward and lifted his arms up, high up, arching them over his head. I saw the gashes in his right armpit that the policeman's fingernails must have made when the cuffs looped over his face and under his throat.

I watched him and he laughed again. Inside, the light air filled me like sacol. Help me lift this, I said. But he did not look at the bike. He remained sitting on the grass, half naked, embracing his legs tightly.

For me too, he said. That was my first time too. He frowned, looking straight ahead. His face was as white as a plastic bag. Then a change came over it as though he was going to be sick. Then his face changed again and he smiled, but now the smile only affected his mouth.

Finally, I lifted the bike and rested it on its side stand. We have to go, I said. You ride behind me.

He nodded. I helped him to his feet and onto the motorbike. All the way down the hill he gripped me tightly, like a chica on her first ride.

***

AFTER THAT, OF COURSE, more things changed than just the fact that Hernando and I became friends. You do not kill a policeman and business leader and expect the streets to owe you protection.

El Padre approached me – through a nero whom I knew but did not know to be employed by El Padre – and told me he would protect me. He would take me off the streets, like he took other kids off the onion farms, but he would raise me above these farm kids: I would be given an office job. There was strength in me, he said on the telephone. I could go back to my own barrio, where, with my new status, I would be safe. We are similar, he said. We are both soldados, we do what needs to be done, and we have both lost our fathers to the conflict of Colombia. He said, I will be your benefactor.

Hernando, meanwhile, had disappeared from the gallada. His reputation had increased as a consequence of killing the policeman, and we all assumed he was hiding. Then several weeks later, someone reported seeing him at one of the gringo-led programs in the city that are known to combat violence and drugs and poverty by staging plays in public parks.

I tracked him down and told him about my new job and said that I could ask my agent to give him an office job as well, or at the least, employ him as a soldado. What is this shit? I said, grinning. I gestured at his windowless, white-plastered room, crammed with stacks of cardboard and paper. The room smelled strongly of bleach. Hernando sat behind a scratched steel desk and behind him was a poster depicting a gun with a melted barrel, and underneath, the words: THIS MAKES YOU A MAN?

Forget all this, I said. You can start again. My agent will get you a stainless police record.

Hernando looked at me for a long time. Then he told me he was happy to see me. He had cropped his hair and it changed his face, making his features seem somehow tired, muted. Finally he said, So now you have an office job. What is it like?

I told him about everything: the salary, the bonuses, the weapons. The respect from the barrio. He listened carefully. Then he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. I sat down, watching him, wondering what he did in this room every day. He looked older.

But what is it like? he said at last.

I realized he was asking about the killing. At that point, I had not yet received my first assignment and the question irritated me. It is easy, I said.

Who is your agent?

I told him.

He paused again.

What?

You must listen to me, Ron. The man you know as El Padre is a dangerous man.

I laughed, thinking he was joking.

Listen to me.

Of course he is dangerous. He is a legend.

Yes, said Hernando, speaking slowly. And even so, in the game, he is a small player. Which makes him even more dangerous for you. He leaned suddenly forward, the steel desk wobbling under his weight. Listen, Ron, you must stop. You must quit your office job.

You are being funny, no?

I was embarrassed for him. What had the nero said who had found him? That Hernando, looking like a peasant, had instructed him to return to school or he would surely end up the victim of the never-ending culture of violence – at which the nero had applauded and told Hernando to return to his new faggot friends. I had hidden my uneasiness. No one in the gallada would have dared to talk to Hernando in that manner before.

This is what your gringo friends tell you? I asked.

I do not need a gringo to see with my eyes. He looked away from me. But they are right about some things. About El Padre, for instance, who is a dog of the drug lords. He is a man who kills the innocent to protect the rich.

They are not innocent, I said quickly. He is cleaning the streets of the very people you denounce. I caught myself at the last moment from saying "I." His words affected me. I calmed my breathing. You say this when you do not even know him.

He came to me too, Hernando said.

Neither of us spoke for a while. His clothes were faded and worn, his left shoe ripped at the toe. I became conscious of my Nike shoes, my Adidas Squadra jersey with its mesh panels.

It is dangerous for you to say this shit in public.

Hernando said softly, as though to himself, No one should have to do what you do. He stood up and walked around the desk.

They pay you? Where you work, this program?

Hernando smiled. His smile was heavy at the corners of his mouth. I am happy here, he said.

I can help you. I have made almost one million pesos already.

You are like a brother to me, he said simply, and I want to see you safe. He frowned, trying to follow a thought with words. We cannot help each other, Ron. Maybe it is too late. But maybe you can still help your own family.

Maybe you should leave the city, I said.

He smiled again, then leaned forward to embrace me. Maybe, he said.

The next week I used a proxy to buy a house in the barrio next to El Poblado, and moved my mother there in secret. I did not speak to Hernando again until four days ago, when I was given the order by El Padre to assassinate him.

***

WHEN WE WERE STILL LIVING at the old place, and I had nine years and my mother twenty-four, it rained for a week and another two days. School was canceled – the rain so heavy the roads were waist-high with mud, people trapped in their houses. On the tenth day the rain stopped and it felt like a holiday. People wandered outdoors, as though for the first time, and the sun was warm against their skin and the grass and the trees deeper in their color and the faces of strangers flushed like ripe fruit. During this time a militia set up roadblocks along the Avenida Oriental and hijacked a public bus at the exit to our barrio. They raped two of the women and killed my father, then dumped his body and his guitar outside the back alley of my school. The papers said some of the hijackers were police agents.

They broke his guitar? my mother asked when the uniformed men came, their shirts wet at the armpits and their leather shoes splashed with mud. Of course by that time we already knew.

Why? one of them asked. Would you like it? He looked surprised. Maybe –

He stopped talking at his partner's look.

That evening it rained again, heavily, the air a mix of gray and green before the night came down. A couple of neighbors visited – my mother exchanged soft words with them at the front door – then afterward no one else came. All night she did not speak and I did not know what to think. She sat on the brown carpet in the main room, in the dark, with my father's notepapers and sheet music. The gaslight from the kitchen made her face seem misshapen. For hours I sat on my parents' bed with the door open, watching her arranging the papers in careful piles, calmed by how her fingers moved individual pieces from pile to pile, without pause, as though following some special sequence. I watched her fingers and her strange face, and I watched the rain leaking from the thatched kitchen ceiling behind her, and I waited for her to tell me what would happen to us.

He had been a musician, a teacher at an elementary school. His death had been a mistake – everyone told us this. What no one told us was that he, too, had made a mistake: to challenge his attackers – to even draw attention to himself – when he had only his mouth and his hands for protection. What no one told us was that in this city no death is entirely a mistake.

The rain did not stop for two days. My mother stayed cross-legged on the carpet, which, in the rain-dimmed light, changed color to dull orange. She wore the same gray dress and did not eat. On the third morning, a car with mounted speakers drove past and announced that Andres Pastrana Arango had won the presidential election. I remembered that my father liked to call him the hippie candidate. I took some money from my mother's purse and went out into the street to buy some food. I played football with some kids.

That night, when I put two mangoes and a bag of boiled water in front of her, my mother saw me again. She told me to sit by her. We sat in silence. Then, in the dark, she leaned toward me and kissed whatever part of my body was closest to her, the outside of my knee, she kissed it twice, then two more times. And then she spoke my name, Juan Pablo, she said, and I looked at her and she said, You must say nothing of it, and think nothing, for you are a man now. I said, Mother? but her only answer was my name, spoken again like a chant, Juan Pablo, Juan Pablo, Juan Pablo.

***

THERE ARE BLACKOUTS EVERY MONTH in the barrios, sometimes for days in a row. As Claudia and I enter the barrio where El Padre's headquarters is based, the entire mountainside stops humming and everything turns black. In the sudden dark, ghosts of light dance at the edge of my vision like memories, trapped at the back of my eyes. There are no stars. Gradually the glow of city rises over the black line of mountains, and beneath the clouds the effect is one of torchlight smothered by gray blankets.

We continue up the hill in the half darkness. Dim lights begin to shine onto the street from candles placed in windows. At last I see a high lookout on the hill that must be my destination: two youths stand outside the gate holding mini Uzi submachine guns. Even from this distance I can see that they are nine millimeter with twenty-five-round clips. The house is two-storied, with a balcony on the second floor overlooking the hill. Another guard patrols the balcony. The shadow of yet another glides and starts behind dimly lit windows. On the perimeter, the outer wall is topped by shards of glass of different shapes and colors, and shimmers in the candlelight.

From the midst of the slum, the house rises like a palace.

Stay here, I say to Claudia.

To my surprise, she does not argue. I will wait here, she says, and then pulls back into the shadows of an alley.

At the gate, I say my name and am searched roughly, professionally, and then escorted to the house by one of the guards. He opens the front door, gestures for me to enter, and returns to the gate. Inside it is dark, and the air is heavy, as in one of those houses where the windows have been left closed through the heat of the day. It smells as though someone has been smoking a spliff laced with cocaine.

You are Ron, a female voice sounds out from the corner, where a triangle of light slants down at an angle. I see someone coming down some stairs, her pointy boots first, her tight jeans, and then her bare stomach and then her tank-top breasts and then her face and her tied-up hair, all white and amber in the light. She is extremely beautiful.

Yes.

Xavier is waiting for you, she says. She comes directly to me and takes my hand. Her touch is warm and smooth, and the tips of her fingers lightly trace a circle on my palm. Here is a chica, I think, who would fuck me as soon as slit my throat.

Upstairs, El Padre is sitting at a large wooden desk. Behind him are bay windows overlooking the balcony. The room is filled with candles-candles placed on every flat surface, in every window, like in a basilica. I glance around, almost expecting to see a statue of a crucifixion. It is ten o'clock at night and El Padre is wearing a suit with an open-necked shirt. Even sitting, he is tall and broad at the shoulders, and, consistent with the rumors, his complexion is light, but mainly I notice his hair, which is braided into cornrows. I find this surprising. There is oil in his hair – it holds each individual braid as tight as a cable-and the oil glistens in the candlelight.

Sit down, he says.

The wooden planks creak under my weight as I walk to the chair in front of the desk. He is looking through some papers. Aside from his hair, he looks like he could be any businessman leaving the office at the end of the day. His features seem somehow strange to me – then I realize that even though his skin is fair, he has the wide nose and thick lips of a black man. His eyes, also, are black. I watch the play of candlelight on El Padre's braids, on his fair skin, on his slow-moving hands. He gathers up a pile of papers and taps them on the table to align them, then pulls a pen from his breast pocket and signs the top sheet with a gesture that makes plain his disgust. He puts the pen away. Then he looks up at me with cold, snake eyes.

So we meet, he says.

Yes.

His eyes flick to something behind me. I remember from when I first walked in that there are two others in the room: the chica and another guard who carries a rifle and has a joint in his mouth. El Padre looks at me again.

You know, Ron, you will never become an agent. His voice is soft.

Because I'm too dark?

Because you think you are smarter than your superiors.

I do not say anything.

You were given an assignment and you refused to carry it out.

I did not find the target, I say quietly.

He pauses. A good soldado does not choose which orders to obey from his general, does he?

No.

He swivels around on his chair, leans back and speaks out through the bay windows as though addressing the night. I am your general, he says. I must look after an entire army. If two women fight, I shave their heads. If somebody cheats me, I shoot them in the hand. If a soldado fails me, or betrays me . . . what choice do I have?

I watch as a gecko runs along the top frame of the window. It stops, testing the night air with its tongue. El Padre turns back around to me and frowns.

You have been getting high on the sacol, he says.

I recognize the insult. I do not do that stuff anymore, I say. It is for children.

The heat from the candles on the desk, the scent of wax, the smells of marijuana and cocaine from the guard's spliff – all combine and condense in my head.

You disobeyed me, he says – I who have been your benefactor – and decided instead to spare your friend.

I do not say anything.

Do you know what your friend has been saying? For the first time El Padre raises his voice. Do you know what ears listen to those kinds of words? Do you know what it costs to quiet those words? You pull on the hand that feeds you.

I remain silent.

Worse, you make me lose face. Respect.

You can send other sicarios for him, I hear myself say.

When you have already told him to run?

I told you I could not find him.

I have already sent Zeno, he says.

I do not know Zeno. But I hear he is good.

Yes, Zeno is good. His thick lips purse together, then part. Already he has achieved his mission. Two days ago.

I feel my mouth pool with cold spit. I remember I am sitting before a snake. I remember that Hernando is skilled in the ways of leaving the city unseen. And that he has had four days.

Yes?

I do not lie, he says, as though reading my thoughts. In fact, Zeno told me this himself when I visited him earlier today. In the Hospital San Vicente de Paul. He looks at me intently with his dark empty eyes. Then he says, Where he was admitted for a severe fracture of the skull.

Once again, I feel myself sliding out of my own body.

This is peculiar, El Padre goes on, because Zeno said Her-nando did not resist. An easy hit. So his injuries must have been caused afterward. But of course you do not know anything of this?

It is not easy for me to contain my surprise. I am looking at El Padre but what I see is the black body underneath the cardboard roof, the red donut crumbs and the sugar on his lips. My mind races like a fast-rewinding movie. So they all knew, I think – Luis and Claudia and Eduardo. I should not have gone into hiding. But I had to go into hiding – to give him time to escape. Above all this I think of Claudia, who knew, who knew where I was hiding, and who had made a choice not to tell me. I realize El Padre is still waiting for me to speak.

If you do not trust in my ability, I say, I can go away. My voice sounds like a series of echoes inside my head. You can take my salary for this month as compensation.

That is generous of you, Ron. Perhaps I will return the favor and give it to your mother.

He has not taken his eyes from me. I say to him, I am a soldado. You said this. There is no reason to involve my mother.

We look at each other. On the desk between us a thick candle sputters in a sudden draft, but neither of us blinks. His eyes are black puddles.

A bell rings in the outside darkness. I cannot hold my eyes to his – I look away. Everywhere I look are the flames of candles. It is truly like the inside of a church, I think, although I cannot remember having been inside one for years. My head feels   humid. I look at El Padre again and realize I no longer know the words to any prayers. Hail Mary, full of grace, I think, but after that my mind is as dark as an empty barrel. I wonder if the stories are true. I wonder where he conceals the knife. I wonder if he will ask me to turn my back to him, or if he will come to stand behind me.

***

HERNANDO WAS READING THE NEWSPAPER over an evening meal as I watched from my concealed position, behind a thick shrub, in his backyard. Four days ago. My Glock loaded and ready. I watched him for a long time before coming in. When he saw me his face was grave with surprise, his eyes blinking down and up from the gun. Then he stood to embrace me.

They sent you? he asked quietly.

I nodded.

And?

He looked at me, calmly, as though I were a brother he had grown up with every day of his life. He looked at me as though he already knew what I would say. I wondered whether he knew better than me what I had been thinking as I stood outside in his yard, underneath the warm, polished leaves, testing the trigger in the half dark.

I told you, I said. I told you.

He smiled. My fingers tightened around the Glock. I looked at his forehead. Then, as though following a separate will, my hand lowered the gun to the table, let go of it.

Run.

I was not sure if I said it aloud or merely thought it.

His smile froze. Run?

He will send others. You must go. Now.

What of you?

I did not know. I had never thought it would happen this way. My mind was still clear – as it was whenever I did the business – but before the broad calm of Hernando's look I could feel the clarity slipping away.

He asked, Are you sure? After a while he frowned, then said abruptly: Come with me.

He nodded, as if it had been I who had made the suggestion, then nodded again, more vigorously, saying to himself, Yes, yes. But where? Far away. The coast. North is better. Cartagena. Come with me to Cartagena. We will be fishermen. He laughed aloud. After all this! he said.

Cartagena?

Yes, he said. Why not? He spoke playfully now, as if we were kids again, as if we were in one of our mocos and bragging to each other about our day's score.

I cannot go, I said.

I will not go without you, he said. When I brought my eyes to his I realized he was serious.

Even then, I understood the consequences. He was my brother but I owed him nothing – he knew that. I had not seen him for three months. He knew I had come in from the streets and – like them – had promised nothing, was incapable of betrayal. He laughed, and as I watched him laughing, his face made childlike in the act, I suddenly saw a glimpse of the old Hernando and in that moment I realized how completely he had left that person behind. I remembered him tall and bronze-skinned, then handing me the gun on the hill, then weak-kneed and pale, and now as I watched him his face was again new. It was unlike any of the faces I had seen in their last moments – always too tight or too loose – his was settled somehow, clear of weakness, the face of a soldado ready to die – for what, I did not understand – but whatever it was, I knew then it was not mine to impede. I would let him go. I thought of El Padre. I thought of my mother, and of Claudia. I thought of Cartagena and wondered how many times a person could start over. After a while I started laughing as well.

Yes, he said again. Yes, yes. He paused, his face sly: Claudia likes Cartagena.

Fishermen, I said.

Yes, he nodded, grinning widely. Do you remember how Luis described it?

I brought my hand to my mouth, tapped my teeth with my fingernail. This sent Hernando into a renewed fit of laughter. We were like two drunken schoolgirls. Do I remember? I said. Only after the fortieth time.

***

AFTER A LONG SILENCE, El Padre sighs, his breath fluttering the candle flames on his desk, then smiles with his mouth and says:

You are right. You have been a good soldado.

I do not say anything. He leans back in his large chair and clasps his hands behind his neck. Even the darkness of his armpits somehow suggests violence. Hail Mary, full of grace ...

When I was your age, he says – even younger – I too had to eliminate my friends. He pauses. His voice has changed; it is softer now, damper. I did not mark your friend as a hit, he says. But I chose you to make the hit.

I bow my head, not knowing what to say. I remind myself that, of course, I already knew this. I think of the World Cup story, and wonder distantly if El Padre's face looked then as it does now: like a gangster in an American music video.

He continues speaking. As he speaks, it seems that his words harden into deep noises. Afterward, he says – he is saying – afterward, I learned to not care so much about the death-only the details. Death is just a transaction. A string of consequences.

I nod. I am becoming heavier. His words are weighing me down. My body is a rock in this chair.

Take me, for example, El Padre says, looking at me carefully. If I die, do you know how many deaths will follow? He tells me the number. I do not know whether he is saying it with pride or sorrow or disbelief.

But part of me is capable of thinking that this is an extraordinary thing. That one life can hold so many others up. That the other lives can be ignorant of this. It reminds me of a game of wooden blocks I used to play with my parents, where the push of a single piece could bring the whole tower crashing down.

El Padre watches me and I watch him back, and when the realization comes through the hot swamp of my mind it comes with no satisfaction. You are no Hernando, a voice says in my head, and at that moment I know it to be true. Then another voice says, You are no El Padre. And as it speaks I watch him – this man sitting in front of me with a head of gleaming corn-rows, in this warm atrium of candles – I watch him, in control, alive, and absolutely alone in a power he cannot share.

I understand, I say.

You have been a good soldado, he repeats. He takes a deep breath. You understand that you cannot continue in your job, however?

Yes.

And I will require the weapons back.

Of course.

I will send Damita to tell your friend who waits in the alley. She knows where they are?

I pause. Hail Mary. Then I say, I must tell my friend myself or she will not go.

He watches me impassively.

The weapons are at our moco, I add.

He thinks, and then nods. Then go with Damita, he says. To the alley – no farther. And come back afterward for a drink.

In the front yard outside, before we reach the gate, Damita says, He likes you.

I laugh shortly, the first time tonight. There is something about the coolness of the air that brings me back closer to myself. It is almost over, I tell myself.

No, he does, she says. I can tell. He always acts that way, the first time. She gives me a sidelong look. Her face is the kind they put on the cover of shiny magazines. The first time I met him, ay! I heard the same speech! If two women fight, I shave their heads, she mimics, then laughs, a quick darting laugh that makes me imagine sparks from a fire racing into a night sky.

She stops at the gate to have a cigarette with one of the guards. Stand where I can see you, she says, waving to me like a schoolgirl stepping down from a bus.

At first I cannot find Claudia, then I hear her harsh whisper from the opposite alley.

Just come out, I say. They know you're here.

She comes as far as the corner, her forehead and kneecaps glowing white under the streetlights, and I walk to meet her there. She frowns – it makes her face look angry.

He is letting you go?

I don't know, I say.

She begins to cry – and I realize it is the first time I have ever seen her cry. Not even after her mother tried to kill herself did I see Claudia's face like this. It is all soft.

Hernando is dead, I say. I have to force myself to say it rather than ask it.

I know.

Hearing her say it severs something deep within me. For a moment it is as though I have lost contact with myself. I force myself to concentrate. In that case, I say, tell Luis I thank him. For organizing the business today.

She nods.

He knew that you would want revenge, she says. But he did not want to tell you about Hernando's death, if you were in hiding, and did not already know, and there was no need ...

She trails off, seeing where that leads. Everyone knew, I think again. But I do not feel bitter at all.

El Padre knows you are here, I repeat. He wants you to go to our moco and bring back the guns.

I do not want to look at her crying face. I look into the half dark behind her, make out the contours of a ditch, the banks of rubbish packed hard as rock. I think I see the face of a child appear behind a candle, and then disappear. The sky feels like it is sinking closer and closer to earth.

My mother, I say.

Don't worry about that, she says. I will take her away.

A strange look crosses her face and her narrow shoulders lurch toward me. Her teeth scrape across my lips. I feel embarrassed. I try to kiss her back but I have difficulty controlling my mouth. Her lips are on my ear. She is saying something. She is saying something but I cannot hear her, and when I try to listen I cannot remember what her voice sounds like. I am pulled back into myself.

She is saying, Take it. She presses it into my hand, guides it into my pocket. It is hard and cold and shaped like an apple. It is one of Pedro's grenades. I do not dare to look down.

How do you feel? she asks me for the second time tonight. She asks it with a small laugh.

I do not know what to say. Can I say, My body feels like it is all water? Can I say, Perhaps, perhaps I am glad?

The revenge killings will not finish for a few weeks, I say.

She nods again. You are scared.

Her left hand is still wrapped around mine and it is trembling. This, I think, from Claudia, who has the steadiest hands I know. I look at her and then, in her eyes, I see a window, framed by her mother's body, and I find myself thinking about how easy it seemed for her mother to jump to a death she did not want that badly.

Yes, I lie to her. Yes, I am scared.

I look back toward the house and it is clear from Damita's posture that she has finished her cigarette, is bored with the guards, is cold and is waiting for me. The house, with its candlelights, looks somehow sacred under the gray clouds, and the moon, which has come out beneath them, looks like a huge yellow magnet.

My fingers rub against the cold metal in my pocket. I have to go, I say.

Claudia embraces me again, her fingertips digging into the gaps between my back ribs. She is breathing shallowly now. Tell him you will never come back. Tell him he can trust you. She says it quietly but there is enormous pressure behind her words.

Yes, I say. But first you must go get the guns.

She will not let go of me.

I hate this place, she says, wiping her eyes on my shoulder. We will leave together. Your mother too.

My mother, I say.

I look up at the house, shimmering high on the black hill before us. Claudia clings to me. Her body is warmer than usual. From the gate, Damita looks in our direction and I step back, away from Claudia, seeing her now as though from a growing distance. She is small, and soft, and alone, and I force myself to look away from her.

You must get the guns, I say.

He will let you go.

She has gathered her voice with effort. I smile into the night.

He will let me go, I say after her.

At the front door Damita loops her arm around my elbow and leads me inside. This time the guards do not search me. As we walk up the stairs, Damita's hip bumps against mine and her bare stomach shifts and lengthens in the angled light. El Padre is behind the bay windows, standing outside on the balcony. He gestures for me to join him.

From the balcony, the brightness of the candlelit house makes the hillside seem even blacker. We stand there in silence – El Padre and I, and a guard motionless against the far railing. As my eyes adjust, I can make out hazy lagoons of light in the distance.

El Padre makes a quick gesture with one hand. I spin around: another guard holding a submachine gun is jogging toward me. I fumble against the leathery skin of the grenade in my pocket and maneuver it between my fingers: the pin.

Better than basuco, says El Padre. He continues to look out over the hill. It is only when the guard is next to me that I realize he is holding out a spliff. El Padre takes it from him, takes a long drag, then holds it out to me.

I nod – I am unable to speak – and unclench my fingers from the pin of the grenade. When I draw in the smoke it rushes deeper and deeper, without seeming to stop, into the cavities of my body.

Much cleaner, no?

He smiles now: a charming host. In the deflected light, I notice for the first time a fiabbiness in his cheeks. His braided hair looks wet. We stand on the balcony and look out over the blacked-out barrio. There are valleys out there, and swells, and rises, all unseen by our eyes. The night air gives off traces of wood smoke, sewage. In the immediate candlelight, the glass on top of the walls glimmers hints of every color, and it is beautiful. For a moment I imagine the house is a ship floating on the silent ocean, high in the wind. This thought calms me, which is strange, for I have never seen the ocean – and I am reminded of evenings when I have stood in the cobbled yard outside my mother's back window, watching her asleep with her makeup on, or taking her medicine with aguardiente when she thinks no one sees, or coming out of the glowing bathroom with her hands in her hair, a towel and a quick unthinking motion. It calms me, watching her like this.

El Padre says something. His words splinter endlessly down the dark well of my thoughts. Vamonos, he is saying. Vamonos, I need something to warm my stomach.

I look at his smiling face, the black moons of his eyes.

Come on, he says. I have a special room for drinking. We will wait for your friend there.

The two guards on the balcony do not move.

We will toast your farewell, says El Padre. I hear you like to drink. He begins to walk indoors. Where will you go? Have you decided?

I don't know, I say. Maybe Cartagena.

Cartagena, he repeats. Then he beckons, and the two guards fall into line behind me. Cartagena, I think, where Hernando waits for me. Even now, at the last, we are connected. I can feel Claudia's teeth, her dry lips against my mouth. I rotate the grenade in my pocket – Hail Mary, I think – my palms slippery with sweat – and finally, when my thumb finds traction on the safety lever, I thread my middle finger through the pin and pull it out, hard. It falls free. El Padre looks back at me and smiles.

So, he asks, have you ever been there?

Gripping the lever tightly, I follow my benefactor into the house. A third guard opens a door from the main office and goes in ahead. No candlelight shines from inside. El Padre goes next and I go after him, as though deep into the throat of a cave, the two guards unfailingly behind me. The smell of Damita's perfume is strong in the darkness. Somewhere in front of me, El Padre's voice asks again about Cartagena, and this time I say, No, and as I say it, my thumb wet and unsteady on the lever, the memory returns to me, the picture as I have imagined it so many times in the past. Luis is sitting on the old colonial wall and looking out toward the ocean. As the sun rises, he says, you can see ten black lines leading into the steel gray water, each line maybe twenty meters apart, and as the water turns orange, then red, you can see that each line is made up of small black shapes and that they are moving away from the water, together, all in harmony, and then as the sun rises higher on your right you can see that each black shape is a man, there are hundreds of them, and they are hauling one enormous fishing net in from the ocean, slowly, step by step.