Open Pit (31 page)

Pepe's eyes narrow. “What do you think the Committee for the Environment has gained, so far, from people like you? They get visitors all the time. The
jefe
there, at
Mil Sueños,
has never agreed to meet with anyone face to face. Not once. El Pico will be gone in weeks — days. Dynamited. My way was the only way.”

Danielle's mind continues to race. “And this man, your friend, who tried to get rid of you, is he still alive? Is our being here connected to him?”

Pepe stands, adjusts his pants.

Danielle senses she's touched on something, though, in reality, the possibility that Pepe might be looking for revenge interests her less than what it means that her capture is directly related to that Canadian-owned mine. She can't wait to tell the others. It might help, might make them feel that there's some meaning in their abduction, in what happened to Antoine.

“You'll write it now. The phone will ring later and I need this done.”

“What if these stories don't change anything? What if your demands aren't met?”

Pepe shakes his head. “Write,” he mumbles and settles in to watch her do her work, his mask an expanse of gloom.

Danielle tries to hurry through the report, but she keeps getting stuck on Pepe's story and has to start over. The betrayal he's described is so much like her own. Memories return to her from the day in November,
1980
, when she handed all her features — a year's worth of writing, her future as a journalist — to her senior contact in the guerrilla faction. He'd been assigned to vet them before she brought them back to Canada for publication, a deal she'd struck at the outset. He took the stories, sealed into a plastic bag, and Danielle never saw them again. He needed time to read them over and recommended that Danielle visit the guerrilla's literacy centre to alleviate her boredom while she waited. He thought he was doing her a favour. But it was on that walk that she saw Adrian murder the boy. Adrian must have made something up afterwards. That she'd gone to that village expressly to undermine the faction. That she was untrustworthy. Danielle's contact wasn't a man who would've been easily fooled. But Adrian had clout. He was convincing. Then, not long after she'd returned to camp, after Adrian had come for her that last time, on a day when a group of
campesinos
was going to be led over the mountain pass to the refugee camps in Honduras, Danielle was informed that she would have to go too. No explanation. Nothing to negotiate. A low-ranking guerrilla simply advised her that her term with the faction was up.

Danielle tries again to leave her own past aside and get through Pepe's, but it ends up taking all afternoon. Pepe pops up every now and then to prod her, swearing and pacing around. The feeling that he has no intention of letting them have a ceremony for Antoine becomes more concrete with the passing hours, which also slows Danielle's hand.

When the phone finally buzzes on Pepe's belt, he answers and hands the phone over. Danielle delivers her text, ad-libbing the end. Then Pepe takes his phone back like it's a part of him, hooking it onto his belt. He lets her return to sit with the others.

Danielle is starving, has missed two meals. She doesn't really care. She's bursting to tell the others about the mine: the company could still concede to whatever Pepe's demands are; they could still be freed. But Cristóbal orders her and Tina to follow Delmi. Everyone freezes with the same question: follow where? They've never been asked to go out alone, just the women, except to bathe, and Pepe said that can't happen here. What else is there to do, alone, out of view? Still ashen with grief, Pierre and Martin stare nervously as Danielle gets back up, then Tina, to trail Delmi out the door of the shack. They walk several minutes in a different direction than Danielle has just been with Pepe. “
Allá,
” says Delmi pointing to a tree. Tina looks at Danielle with intense negative anticipation as they step towards it. They both flinch as Delmi tosses something at their feet. “Open those,” she says. The women look down. It's a can opener. A stupid can opener. Danielle looks around. There are several cans to one side, really dirty, like they've been dug out of the ground. Tina sees them too, relief smoothing her face. Delmi throws something else: a tied plastic bag. Danielle unknots it. It's filled with rubbery tortillas. Finally, Delmi passes them a stack of plastic plates. All in all, the makings of a very unappetizing meal. But they're only being asked to help assemble it now that Rita is incapacitated. A deep tremor of satisfaction runs through Danielle at this manifestation of Rita's demotion.

Tina works scrupulously to achieve fair distribution of the food, sometimes brushing up against Danielle as she works. Danielle enjoys their physical closeness, the fact that whatever barriers previously existed between them have dropped away. Her mind turns to Aida, to how little real physical contact they've had.

Arriving back at her parents' house after a lengthy transit through Honduras in
1980
, Danielle didn't know how to go on. She didn't have the guts to tell them what had happened or to end her pregnancy. After Aida was born her parents were so willing to help that it was easier and easier to let them bring the child her happiness. Danielle occasionally felt a deeper attachment to that small person. It was like sensing something alluring in the distance that she couldn't, or wouldn't grab hold of. The thought of doing so was exhausting. No one blamed her. People saw Danielle and Aida together and figured everything was fine. But they couldn't see the missed connection, that Danielle wasn't making the effort.

They went on for so long that way that the gap between them came to seem natural. Danielle travelled. Worked. Had affairs. Took her time. Then her dad died of a heart attack, less than a year after her mother's last cancer. Danielle rushed to Aida's school to find her in the principal's office sitting beside a terse school counsellor. Aida was barely twelve that year, and Danielle wanted to embrace her, to say and to do the right thing. But Aida's face, still a child's face, forbade it. The counsellor put Danielle through the wringer, tossing judgmental looks her way, calling Social Services and administering all kinds of useless paperwork before letting Aida leave with her. That one moment seemed to establish a no-pass zone between mother and daughter, one that Danielle accepted. The loss of her parents had fixed a border in place. She would have to stay on her side until Aida told her otherwise.

But now, as Tina plops the last portion of beans onto the last plate and hands it to her amiably, Danielle questions her easy assumptions. It wasn't only Aida who was angry that day. Danielle resented her too, for forcing an end to what she had always defined as freedom. To be alone. Come and go. Figure things out slowly, in order, and without too much painful looking back. The shock of knowing they would be together full-time, from there on in, made Danielle claustrophobic. It's not that she didn't love Aida. They didn't even fight much in the first years after that. Instead, silence floated like a laden raincloud through the house Danielle had inherited from her parents — never quite bursting. Aida was practically never around anyway, always in her room, studying, or out adding some achievement or other to her résumé. Things got ugly when she moved out just four years later with her first serious boyfriend. That event marked the beginning of their more vocal period of mutual attack.

But to Danielle it was also a huge relief. She didn't admit it. Not in her failed attempt at therapy with Aida. Not even to Neela. In a way, taking herself out of the country after leaving those letters on the dining room table was another act of evasion. She's given Aida access to a partial truth. Danielle did plan to explain, when she got back, why she lied about Adrian being dead, how it would've been cruel to tell a child that she had a liar and a killer for a father when he was still out there, unabashedly alive. But picturing Aida reading through the letters, perhaps even pitying her, makes Danielle feel wretched and regretful.

Tina must sense it. She puts her hand on Danielle's back. Delmi frowns at her under her mask, but Tina leaves the hand there defiantly.

“I think I've really been a shit to my daughter.”

Tina nods. “How old is she?”

“Your age.” Danielle catches herself. “Wait. How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Oh. She's younger then. How old's your brother?”

Tina gives her a strange look. “Twenty-four,” she says, warily, as if she thinks Danielle might have another motive, but also obviously happy to speak of her sibling.

“Aida turns twenty-four in August. She'll be in Paris by then.”

Delmi doesn't intercede in this exchange. Her sister's failure seems to have subdued her. It's like she doesn't know where her safety is anymore now that Rita isn't controlling her and Pepe has no time for her.

“Tina,” Danielle says, as Delmi prods them back to a standing position with their arms full of plates, then marches them towards the campsite. “I think I know why we're here.” Danielle is relieved to say it, her eagerness to share the news returning. “It's about that gold mine.”

Tina starts to ask what Danielle's talking about, but Delmi hushes them: Pepe is visible through the trees. Danielle and Tina hurry forward to place the food in front of everyone. Then they sit, Danielle across from Pierre, on the packed earthen floor of the abandoned shed. She eats quickly, waiting for a moment when Pepe will be out of earshot.

Ten minutes later, he finally steps out with Cristóbal. “Pierre,” says Danielle.

Pierre turns lethargically towards her. His hair clings to his sweaty, pale face. His slender nose seems tragic now.

“I think this has all happened because he's against the mine — the one we were going to see. In Los Pampanos. He wants to find out what happened to his family. They were killed in the war.”

Pierre takes the information in without reaction, like Danielle's words have seeped through his skin rather than being captured by his ears.

“But
PJA
's against the mine too,” says Martin, overhearing. “We're on the same side?”

“Sort of. He knows. But this still gives us something — we could convince him. Slowly. Or the mine meets his demands.”

Pierre finally enters the exchange with two half-nods. The first signs of life. Then, in the lowest voice, like a faint whistle, he says, “It's good that it's not for money.”

Tina and Martin both nod back. It's a strangely beautiful moment, like a fragment of a eulogy. Everyone seems to analyze the nugget of information Danielle has passed on, along with Pierre's comment on it, and to extract from these the same faint hope.

An hour later, they leave and begin walking into the descending night. The moon is now nearly full, strong enough that the kidnappers haven't bothered with the
LED
s. Danielle follows Martin. She can see him clearly enough, the way his arms swing heavily, the outline of his hair.

They seem to be on an actual trail, and for a time Danielle doesn't have to concentrate as much as usual on her aching feet. Her mind wanders again to thoughts of Aida. Danielle tries to conceive of a plan, a concrete set of steps that will bring them closer. She is considering the words she should start with — something straightforward, “I missed you” or “I'm sorry” — when she hears a voice up ahead, somewhere off to the side.

“Stop where you are,” yells a man, in Spanish.

Martin's swinging arms go rigid. Danielle looks into the dark black where the sound is coming from. Nothing. The moonlight can't reach far enough into the trees. Maybe she's fallen asleep standing up. But when she turns, there are Cristóbal and Tina, behind her, Cristóbal's gun glinting, real as anything. He has his hand on Tina's back, pushing her protectively towards the ground.

Danielle turns towards Martin and chokes out the words “Get down!”

“
Pepe,
” says the voice, urgent now. “I'm above you. In range. Put up the rifle. Your pistol too. Throw them in front of you. Same for the others.”

Pepe. If this is the police, how do they know his name? She used “Enrique” in all her reports. And if they know his identity, why aren't there more sounds? Helicopters? Troops moving through the trees? A torturous silence follows, each moment vibrating with unnerving, unanswerable questions like these, from hostages and kidnappers alike. Then the man's voice comes again, eerie as it snaps the intensity like cutters through a wire. “Don't move.”

Danielle has visions of another member of her group being shot, of someone else not getting up the way Antoine did not. She fears it could be her. She hears herself promise to embrace Aida if she makes it out alive. Truly embrace her. She wishes she were young again, that it was
1980
and that she could start over. She would still come to this country. But she would do things differently. She would accept people as they are.

“The photos will go out. I won't stop them.” It's Pepe, screaming back.

The only photos Danielle can think of are those Pepe spoke of in his last report, the photos of his mentor selling secrets. But why mention these to the police?

“They don't matter to me anymore,” the man yells back.

And then, after yet another strained silence, Pepe, who is ahead, as always, maybe twenty feet from Danielle, amazingly, raises both his weapons in the air and throws them to the ground. They barely clatter.

He's giving in. Danielle can't quite believe it.

“
Primo, Delmi,
” says Pepe.

A noise makes Danielle turn. Tina is pressing herself into the base of a pine tree as Cristóbal, his ever-present hat on a slight tilt, starts walking forward. A metallic clunk as his gun comes into contact with Pepe's.

Delmi does the same, then goes to stand beside her brother-in-law, unarmed.