She held a cordless phone in her hand, but she wasn’t on the phone.
I watched her the way the cameras in Central London watched its citizens.
She poured herself a glass of wine and then she sat down at the table, facing the FedEx box. She sipped her wine and stared at that box. She ran her hand through her hair and shook her head.
That was when I saw it.
I saw who she was when she was alone.
Saw the anxiety and anger in her face.
Saw bits of who she used to be.
I saw Thelma.
I stared at her and frowned. Years ago. She was a pedophile.
A pedophile who had two young boys in her care.
I turned off the monitoring program and dialed the number in Powder Springs.
Catherine answered on the second ring. Her accent French, her voice a song.
“Catherine, how are you?”
“Jean-Claude. It is great to hear from you.”
“Checking in. Anything suspicious around the house?”
“Nothing suspicious. Is everything okay?”
“Let me know if you see anything strange. Keep your eyes open.”
“I will. It worries me when you say that. It really worries me.”
I cleared my throat. “How is Alvin’s reading coming along?”
“He’s doing fine, considering.” Her voice owned apprehension. “Has a long way to go.”
“Will you be able to help him? Or should I find a literacy program? He’s too ashamed to go into a program without knowing anything. Need you to help him as much as you can.”
“He won’t be able to read
War and Peace
for a long time.”
“Just the basics.”
“It’s strange. Teaching an adult to read. The boys are smarter than he is.”
“Book smart.”
“And world smart. Alvin has never been out of the South. This is his world.”
“You’re saying he’s ignorant.”
“I’m saying he is a very nice man who has a long way to go. He’s smart in his own way, far from being a big oaf, but he is limited. He can build anything. He memorizes everything. Lack of education puts a person in a small box. He will never have many options. He is lucky that he has managed to support his family all these years. He is thankful for you. He told me you gave him a lot of money. Sixty thousand dollars. He’s living off that money. He’s lucky because he’s not even qualified to seek employment at a Waffle House. I don’t understand why people . . . never mind. He is a good man. A very nice man. It’s a tragedy. His life is tragic.”
“Well, I give you money too. I pay for everything.”
“You do. I know.”
“And your life has been tragic as well.”
“Yes. Yes it has. I’m sorry. Did I offend you?”
I paused. “If there is a problem working with Alvin, let me know.” “There is no problem. No problem at all.”
I reined in my thoughts.
She had earned her money on her back and Alvin had earned his standing up. She had no right to chastise. Lots of uneducated and undereducated people had fought in wars all over the world. Her words pissed me off. But I wasn’t as concerned with Alvin as I was with the boys.
The one who used to be Andrew-Sven and now called himself Steven concerned me.
Steven told me he had shot a man. He had killed a man and saved Catherine. Steven was always on my mind. The way we had met in London. He had pointed a gun at me. Didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Tried to kill me.
I asked, “How are the boys?”
“They are fine. They want to know when you will be back to visit.”
“I’ll be there in a couple of days.”
“Tell them. Tell them so they will stop asking me the same question over and over.”
She held the phone and called back to the boys, told them it was me, Jean-Claude.
Robert made it to the phone first.
He panted from his run, “When are you coming to take us roller-skating?”
He was African, but he had a strong British accent. That was where he had spent most of his life. In the red-light district on Berwick Street. Raised the bare-bones way I had been raised. Like a street urchin. We had all lived from hand to mouth, like street urchins.
“Yeah, when are you going to take us roller-skating like you promised?”
That was Steven. On a second phone. He still had that German clip to his accent.
I laughed and told the boys I’d be there soon. Like I had promised.
Robert asked, “What about the secret place on the other side of Woodstock?”
“We want to go to the other side of Woodstock with you and Mister Alvin.”
I said, “Your mother . . . Catherine might not like that. She doesn’t approve.”
First Steven’s German accent. “We won’t tell my mum. Please?”
Then Robert’s British one. “Please? I won’t tell mum Catherine. I promise.”
I said, “I’ll think about it. No promises on that one.”
I finished with them and got back on the phone with Catherine.
I said, “Everything is okay at the United Nations.”
“United Nations?”
“You have French, British, and German accents, all underneath a Southern roof. Then when I show up, that’s five accents. If Alvin comes by, then that’s six. The United Nations.”
Catherine laughed. She laughed a good laugh.
Just like that, Thelma was gone. There was no trace that she existed.
And at that moment, there was no trace that Gideon existed.
Not long ago, I was on Miami Gardens Drive gunning down a team of assassins, and now I was in a suite in a hotel, towel wrapped around me as I ate Japanese food, talking to my family.
We all had many faces. We all told many lies.
Our truth had been buried so deep. It was time to finish the excavation I had started.
I was over what had happened in Antigua. The gunshot wounds and jellyfish stings and blows from brutal hand-to-hand battles had healed. Enough time had passed since Robert’s mother was murdered in London on Berwick Street. We could handle a new pain now.
I asked, “How is Robert holding up?”
“He still has nightmares.”
“Same thing?”
“He had it real bad before he was brought to London.”
Robert concerned me as much as Steven. He had grown up in Europe, London mostly, his African mother a working woman who was always on the move, but she had homeschooled him well, his education much better than the public schools in Georgia. That told me that she had once had a better life, had an education, and had been derailed. Before London, Robert had witnessed the horrors of Africa. His mother had traveled in areas occupied by non-Arab Darfurians, had seen armed Janjaweed—the devil on horseback—in government-issued military uniforms, places where the governments used rape and murder as the tools of terror. He’d told Catherine that he was hungry most of the time, depended on agencies for food, lived in a camp that was more like a prison than a place of comfort. Had told Catherine that he had seen a village burned by the Janjaweed, said he remembered the gunshots, the terror, his mother taking his hand and fleeing, being chased and caught. He’d witnessed his mother being dragged, her clothes torn from her body as armed African men wearing military pants and boots raped her.
That was part of the way Robert saw the world. As a place filled with devils.
He had moved from an area of murder and rape, had escaped a tribal warfare that, centuries ago, made black slavery possible. He was living a life his mother never had a chance to have.
I said, “Robert.”
“What about him?”
“Any idea who his father might be?”
She paused. “His mother never said. Why do you ask?”
“Was wondering if he had family out there somewhere. I wonder the same about you.”
“There is nothing to wonder about, Jean-Claude. I have no family. There is no reason to wonder. I have told you I have no family. Robert has no one. His mother was murdered by a madman. Robert is here because his mother was murdered. He had been left homeless, an orphan begging for money and food. What matters is that he is not living on the street.”
She said that with controlled anger, as if everything that had gone wrong was my fault.
I asked, “Should I send him to talk to somebody?”
“I will let you know if that is what he needs. Right now he needs to adjust to his mother never coming back, to being in America, to the culture and isms that exist in the South.”
“He should talk to someone. He’s been traumatized.”
“We’ve all been traumatized.”
I was going to tell her it was time to open that FedEx box and close that issue.
She paused. “It was great to hear from you. We will see you soon.”
I told her that I would see her and the boys soon, then we hung up.
I could travel around the globe, could kill without hesitation or remorse, but when it came to this, I had become passive-aggressive. I could gun down men on a crowded boulevard, but when it came to opening that box, I had created resistance, had become my own obstructionist, had become stubborn and let that stubbornness give seed to a new layer of resentments.
It was a defense mechanism.
I was trying to dodge an unpleasant mission the same way I had dodged many bullets.
That box was another Achilles’ heel. That box added heat to my personal hell.
I’d stick to my plan. I’d do it the way I had decided it should be done.
I’d surprise Catherine. Wouldn’t give her any advance warning.
We’d do it face-to-face. Wouldn’t give her another fucking chance to lie.
Then the heat in my hell magnified.
The Motorola phone the blond Lebanese had left rang.
Capítulo 10
treinta y uno
Gun in both hands,
Medianoche waited in the chilling rain. Thirty minutes had passed since the massacre that had ended in their favor.
Cars zoomed by, doing twice the speed limit posted on the highway. The car he’d been driving was parked on the side of the
autopista
, emergency flashers on.
The Beast stood at the opposite end of the car, weapons in both hands.
Señorita Raven and Señor Rodríguez weren’t present, had been sent back to the apartments to await further instructions.
Medianoche looked down from the
autopista
. Smelled grilled beef, chicken,
cerveza
, and
paco
. Saw lights that were kept on by illegal electricity and poverty. The music that played was loud, sounded almost inviting, but the lyrics to the songs were as warm as a rap record back in the States. Lyrics about killing and fucking
putas
until they bled. It was the lyrics about killing that had Medianoche on guard, ready to do the same. Music like that disturbed the senses, disoriented the enemy, kept them off balance.
Guns in both hands, The Beast moved and stood next to Medianoche.
Medianoche had been instructed to stop at one of the fourteen shanty-towns. A quarter of a million lived in slums in the Paris of the South. A quarter of a million squatters that had claimed abandoned buildings and land, had brought in bricks, tin, and cardboard and taken over. These were squatters who fought armed police, squatters who stood up to the same military that made people vanish, hooligans that refused to be bulldozed off the most valuable land in the city. They stood at the outskirts of the slum like they were on the border of another country.
The
villa
had been built on land and spread out until it literally touched the
autopista
. The barbed wire that was supposed to keep them from hopping the fence and running across the
autopista
was used to hang laundry. So as people drove by, there were miles of clothes flapping in the wind, and more clotheslines on the roofs of structures that stood three or four floors high, odd shapes and sizes, all improvised.
A hooligan no taller than five feet tall walked across a building.
He was no more than fifteen. Hair slicked back from the rain. He had on blue and gold, a Boca Juniors soccer uniform, the team of the working class. The boy carried an Uzi. He climbed over the unsteady roof of one of the tin and cardboard houses, made his way to the top of the fence, a section where the barbed wire had been removed with wire cutters.
The Beast said, “Junior.”
“
Buenas noches.
”
“How is your father?”
“My father he is good.”
“How’s the drug trade?”
“It is slow. Not so good.”
“It’ll get better.”
“
Sí
.”
“Your English is getting better.”
“I take English class for the community center on some days.”
“How is your girlfriend?”
“She is . . . she is . . .
¿Cómo se dice embarazada en inglés
?”
“Pregnant.”
“She is pregnant.”
“Congratulations.”
“
Sí
. I will going to be the papa soon. In four years.”
“Months.”
“
Sí.
In four months.”
“
Año
is year.
Mes
is month.”
The Beast handed the boy the black briefcase. Told him to tell his father that he would call him with instructions. The boy nodded. The Beast gave the boy two one-hundred-dollar bills. U.S. money. That was his tip. The equivalent of more than seven hundred pesos.
For a kid who lived off three pesos a day, he was rich. A Slumdog Millionaire.
The Beast told him there would be six hundred U.S. dollars when he returned.
Medianoche stared out at the slums. Poverty that went on for miles.
He looked to his left, a mile away, high-rises, the richest of the rich.
Back on the seventeenth floor,
eighteen floors above the concrete jungle, Señorita Raven and Señor Rodríguez were already inside their condos.