Cari Mora Page 8

  The troops had passed through by the time she reached the village. They had blown some walls off the schoolhouse and the wind was blowing through the strings of a burning piano, sighing, sighing and whining through the strings in the gusts that blew sheet music across the road.

  Many of the houses were burning and there were dead in the streets. She was not fired on. She was determined not to see civilians to shoot. Some movement under a house beside the road. She swung her rifle. It was not a soldier, it was a child far under the house, hiding, lying flat behind a cement block supporting a floor beam. She could not tell if it was a girl or boy, she just saw a dirty face and a mop of hair.

  She acted as if she had not seen the child. She did not want to attract attention to it. She stopped and bent over her boot lace.

  “Run into the woods!” she said without turning her head toward the house.

  The comandante was coming along the road from the rear, arriving last to combat as was his practice. She did not want to be alone with him. He was always trying to stick his finger up her rectum, coming up behind her and trying to slip his hand down the back of her pants. To his credit, he did not order her to let him stick his finger up her rectum; it was purely a social gesture.

  She had asked him to stop. She had prayed repeatedly for God to make him stop. This was a regular item in her evening prayers. He did not stop.

  She was moving faster to stay well ahead when she heard a shot behind her. The commander was squatting, shooting under the house where the child was hiding. She ran back toward him, yelling, “Es niño, es niño!” Her vision was blurred at the edges, very clear in the center. She was running down a tunnel of blurred green foliage and clear at the center was the comandante.

  He threw a phosphorus grenade into the house and flames blossomed. He squatted in the yard with his pistol, aiming under the house. Cari was running, her face was numb. He fired once. His long finger found the trigger again, he squatted low to aim, and she stopped in the road, brought up her rifle and shot Comandante in the back of the head.

  She was oddly calm. Smoke was under the house now and she saw the child come out at the back of the house and run into the woods. At the edge of the trees it turned and looked back. The child was really dirty. She saw faces among the trees. A hand waved among the trees.

  The comandante was too heavy to drag into the fire. Another soldier might come along any second and see him lying there, shot from behind. Death penalty. She ran to the comandante. One of the lenses of his little round glasses was blown out and the other reflected the sky. To look at his kit you would think he was the most martial man in the world. A fragmentation grenade was snapped to the back of his ammunition pouch. She took it off him. Cari took his hand and put it under his head. She tucked the grenade under there too. She pulled the pin on the grenade and let the lever fly and ran and ran and ran, flattened herself in the ditch beside the road, kept her mouth open as she was trained to do until after the blast, scrambled up and ran and ran again. The comandante’s death removed one item from her prayers.

  They ran for it, Cari and her red-haired lover.

  They lived a year in the village of Fuente de Bendición, he working in a sawmill and she wrestling pots at a boardinghouse and cooking. They planned to marry. She was sixteen.

  At that period, you did not desert from FARC and live. At the end of the year sicarios found them and shot the boy in the street, along with his groomsmen, as they were coming in an old borrowed car to the church where Cari was waiting, holding a jasmine bouquet.

  When the sicarios came to kill Cari, the church was empty. She was getting her ripped arms bandaged in the village infirmary and she left out the back.

  They waited for her at the funeral home. She did not come. They went to the coffin and shot Cari’s dead fiancé several times more and photographed the wounds before they left, having neglected to disfigure his face sufficiently when they killed him.

  A week later Cari stood at the door of a great house in Bogotá. A servant answered and sent her to the service entrance. She waited fifteen minutes and her old naturalist in his suspenders came to the door. It took him a moment to recognize her, standing on the steps bandaged and dirty, with blood in her wedding shoes.

  “Will you help me?” she said.

  “Yes I will,” he said at once, and turned off the light above the door. “Come in.” In all the time she took care of him as a prisoner, he never hugged her. He hugged her now. Her bandages left blood on the back of his shirt when she hugged him back.

  The old man’s housekeeper took charge of her and soon she was scrubbed and full of supper and asleep in a clean bed. The shades in the house were down: There was a penalty for helping deserters from FARC. It was death. Cari could not stay in Colombia.

  And help her the professor did. She rested a week—it took that long to buy her some makeshift papers, and then he sent her north by bus, days and days and days through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, she tying the bandages on her arms with the opposite hand and her teeth.

  He gave her enough money for bus tickets in Mexico—she did not have to hop La Bestia, the northbound Mexican train where gangs sell spaces on top of the freight cars, where so many fall, and severed arms and legs dry between the tracks. He gave her a note for a family in Miami. Owing to illness the family had to pass her along, to a family who told her she had to work three years for free. Radio Mambí told her that was a lie, and from there she had to scratch for it.

  Ever since that time, Cari always carried with her a little something to eat. Usually she did not eat it until suppertime, if then. She always had a small supply of water with her and a folding knife of legal length that she could open with one hand. Around her neck on a bead chain was the inverted cross of St. Peter, who was crucified upside down. The cross contained a small push dagger.

  Now, in her cousin’s apartment, she slept in the chair beside the baby, nodding as she had nodded on the bus ride north to the Land of the Free.

  Toward midnight her cell phone buzzed. Antonio’s cell phone calling again. She looked at the phone, glowing in the baby’s room. It was hard not to answer. She let the call go to voicemail. The voice said in a German accent, “Kah-ree. Meet me, I can hell-up you.”

  Right. Come help me, chingaso, and I will hell-up you.

  She rocked the baby and sang softly “Counsel to a Parakeet,” a song of her Guna grandmother, promising the parakeet a ripe banana and a life of ease when it is sold to a rich Panamanian.

  Nodding off toward dawn, she saw in her dream the tough little house on Snake Creek Canal. The house had stood up to the weather, even with a hole in its roof. It was built on a slab. Calming to see there was no space beneath it where a child could come to harm. In her sleep, in that relief from the day, she smiled to dream the house solid on its slab and the baby alive beside her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The first sunlight burned the mist off Biscayne Bay.

  Captain Marco’s crab boat, trapline threaded over its turning pulley, worked its way north past the Escobar mansion. The boat crew looked particularly busy as the Miami Beach Police passed in their fast patrol boat. The police returned a wave from Captain Marco and throttled down to spare the fishermen a wake while they were trying to work.

  Marco and the three-man crew were sweating in body armor under big overshirts. Passing the Escobar house now. They had to look east into the sun. A flash of reflected light from the dark upper windows of the house.

  First Mate Esteban was seated inside the wheelhouse, the muzzle of his rifle resting on a pad on the cabin windowsill. He could see the reflection through his rifle scope.

  “I see one upstairs inside the open window. He’s just got binoculars in his hand so far, rifle beside his chair,” Esteban called to the captain.

  The dripping line turning on the big pulley lifted the crab traps from the floor of the bay. Ignacio caught the boxes made of wire and wooden slats and dumped the blue crabs into a lar
ge bin in the center of the boat. He stacked the traps on the stern, ready to be rebaited. A slow, steady progression up the trapline, lift and empty and stack.

  Two boat-lengths past the Escobar dock, Ignacio opened a trap and froze. “Mierda!”

  Captain Marco declutched the lifting line and cut the power.

  Ignacio could not make himself put his hand into the trap. He dumped the trap into the bin and Antonio’s head tumbled into the pile of lively crabs waving their claws in the air. The head still wore the scuba mask. The face around the mask was much eaten by the crabs trapped with it but behind the glass the face was intact, eyes staring up from the bed of waving claws.

  On the seawall Mateo appeared. He pumped his fist at them in a lewd gesture, and grabbed his groin with both hands.

  “I can shoot his dick off,” Esteban said from the cabin.

  “Not yet,” Captain Marco said.

  At the boatyard Benito looked into the ruined face of his young friend. “Call Cari,” he said.

  “She shouldn’t have to look at this,” Captain Marco said.

  “She will want to be here,” Benito said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Detective Sergeant Terry Robles (inactive), thirty-six, of Miami-Dade Homicide, pulled into a parking space under the trees at Palmyra Gardens. As he turned off the motor, his phone lit up with a call from the medical examiner’s office.

  “Terry, this is Holly Bing.”

  “Hi, Holly.”

  “Terry, this morning I took a slug out of a floater: white Latin male, twenties. Sent it to IBIS at Quantico. They got a hit. The bullet could be from one of the guns fired at your house. The bullet they dug out of your bedroom wall? It’s maybe a nine-point match.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Don’t know yet. I called Homicide and they gave me your cell. When are you going back to work?”

  “The medics have to clear me. Maybe soon.”

  “How is Daniela? May I ask?”

  “I’m just going in to see her. I’ll come to you in an hour.”

  “I’ll be teaching a class, but just come on in. Okay if I introduce you? They’ll be disappointed if I don’t.”

  “Oh, hell. Sure. Thank you, Holly.”

  Robles had Sally the dachshund in the car, Daniela’s dog. Sally climbed into his lap and he picked her up and got out of the car to move stiffly to the gate of Palmyra Gardens.

  Palmyra is the best assisted-living facility in the Southeast. It is in a group of graceful older buildings under big trees. The handle on the gate opens only from the outside.

  Several residents were seated on benches in the garden.

  Under an arbor near the hedges a preacher of advanced age addressed a group of pet animals that live on the premises. There were four dogs, a cat, a small goat, a free parrot and several chickens. The preacher held his congregation’s interest by frequently handing out treats he carried in his pockets. He tried to place the treats on the animals’ tongues in the manner of the sacrament, but more often they were gobbled out of his hand. In the case of the parrot, he held the pumpkin-seed sacrament gingerly in two fingers. The preacher had one elderly human in the group, a gentleman whom he provided with M&M’s singly and in twos.

  In the preacher’s other hand he held a limp leather Bible, gripping the spine to gesture with the book and letting the pages fall back on either side of his hand in the style popularized by Billy Graham.

  Sally the dachshund smelled the preacher’s treats and, drawn to the congregation, squirmed in Robles’s arms as he carried her and a small package into the building.

  The director of Palmyra Gardens was in her office. Joanna Sparks, forty, ran a tight ship. Robles thought it would be hard to surprise Joanna. She smiled at Robles. Her small dog jumped down off her lap. Robles put Sally on the floor and the dogs wagged and sniffed.

  “Hi, Terry. Daniela’s in the middle garden. Terry, you’ll see a small bandage on her temple. A little bullet fragment worked out of her skin. It was a jacket fragment, not lead. It’s okay. Dr. Freeman looked at it.”

  “Thank you, Joanna. Is she eating okay?”

  “Every bite and dessert too.”

  When Robles left the office, Joanna Sparks sent a nurse after him.

  Robles found his wife on a bench in the middle garden. A ray of sun through the leaves touched her hair and his heart filled like a sail. Robles had to catch his breath. Showtime.

  Daniela was seated beside a man who appeared to be in his nineties, very neat in a seersucker suit and bow tie. Robles put the little dog on the ground and Sally, excited and squealing, ran ahead to Daniela and tried to jump into her lap. Daniela seemed startled, and the old man beside her put out his thin hand to ward off the little dog.

  “Here here,” he said. “Get down!”

  Robles gave Daniela a kiss on the top of her head. A long pink scar ran along her hairline.

  “Hello.”

  “Hey, babe,” Robles said. “I brought some of Mrs. Katichis’s baklava. And here’s Sally. She is really glad to see you!”

  “May I introduce my boyfriend?” Daniela said. “This is…”

  “Horace,” the old gentleman said. He may have been unsure of where he was at the moment, but he had reflexive good manners. “I am Horace.”

  “Did you say your boyfriend?” Robles said.

  “Yes. Horace, this is a very nice friend of mine.”

  “I’m Terry Robles, Horace. I’m Mrs. Robles’s husband.”

  “Mr. Robles, is it? Very nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. Robles.”

  “Horace, tell you what, I need to have a private talk with Mrs. Robles. Would you excuse us?”

  The nurse was watching. She came to get Horace. Horace was not leaving until Daniela said he should.

  “Daniela?”

  “It’s fine, Horace. We won’t be long.”

  The nurse helped Horace to his feet and they went toward the conservatory. Sally kept jumping up and down in front of Daniela, putting her paws on Daniela’s knee. She vaguely warded the little dog off with her hand. Robles picked Sally up and put her on the bench between them.

  “What’s with Horace?”

  “Horace is my gentleman friend. I know you, don’t I? I’m sure we are friends.”

  “Yes, Daniela. We are friends. How are you? Are you happy? Are you sleeping okay?”

  “Yes. I’m very happy. Remind me, do you work here?”

  “No, Daniela, I’m your husband. I’m glad you’re happy. And I love you. This is your dog, Sally. She loves you too.”

  “Mr.…Mr. Thank you for your good wishes, but I’m afraid…” Daniela looked off into the distance.

  He knew her face so well. She wanted to be free of him. He had seen the expression before, on social occasions, but it had never been about him.

  Robles’s eyes were wet. He stood up and bent to kiss her cheek. She turned her head quickly, as she might at a party to minimize a kiss.

  “I think it’s time for me to go in,” she said. “Goodbye, Mr.…”

  “Robles,” he said, “Terry Robles.”

  He stood in Joanna’s office, the dog under his arm.

  “A couple of fragments are working out of her back,” Joanna said. “We have her sleeping on a sheepskin. Bloodwork is good. How about you? Therapy, range of movement, how goes it?”

  “I’m good. What’s with this Horace?”

  “Horace is completely harmless. In every way you can think of. We tuck him in his bed at eight thirty. He’s been here twenty years. Never inappropriate. She doesn’t mean anything, any more than a baby—”

  Robles held up his hand. She studied him.

  “Terry, she’s happy. Her situation isn’t bothering her much. You know who’s suffering from it? You are. Do we know anything yet? Who—”

  He did not hear her for a moment, caught in the instant when Daniela last knew him: They are in their bed. She is sitting astride him. Car lights glow on the window shade. A burst of automati
c fire shatters the window, smashes the bedside lamp and a bullet hits Daniela in the head. She falls forward, bumping heads with Robles as he rolls them off onto the floor. He looks at her bloody face held tight against him. He grabs a pistol from the nightstand. Through the shattered window he sees taillights disappearing. He realizes he has been hit too.

  Joanna was studying his face. “I didn’t mean to stir it up,” she said.

  “No,” Robles said. “The sorry little piece of—piece of trash that did this had just finished a six-year stretch in Raiford, where I sent him for assault with a deadly weapon. He gets out, a convicted felon with a history of violence, and he gets his hands on an assault rifle and shoots up my house. It took three days to find him and we never got the gun. Where did he get the gun? Where did the gun go? He’s doing life now. I need the person that gave him the gun.”

  Joanna walked him to the gate.

  Under the trees the preacher was addressing the animals gathered before him, and his single human parishioner.

  “…men might see that they themselves are beasts,” the old preacher said. “For that which befalleth the sons of man befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yes, they have all one breath; all are of the dust and all turn to dust again.”

  Joanna closed the gate behind Terry Robles and Sally in the last orange light of day. The dog, looking back over Robles’s shoulder at the spot she last saw Daniela, made one small sound as he carried her to the car.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The reception area at the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Building has video so the dead can be identified remotely; the floor is carpeted to cushion a fall if the bereaved should faint at what they see.

  The lab behind the double doors is state of the art, with door seals and electronic air scrubbers for the smells, and sufficient cold storage to accommodate the passengers and crew from the largest airliner. The autopsy tables are Kodak gray to enhance photography.