“She’s upstairs,” I said.
I went over to the coffee table, picked up the remote, and turned the TV back on. Now they were unsteadily trying to lower him from the roof on a stretcher. There he was, stretched out, bearded, bloody, his belly exposed—in other words, dead. Waiting for him below were more arms outstretched to receive him, touch him, make sure it wasn’t some sort of trick. The bullet that had penetrated his ear had made his face swell up and distorted his features. It was impossible to be certain it was him.
“Turn that off, Larry,” Libardo ordered.
“Why doesn’t anybody want us to know anything?” I whined, clutching the remote control.
“Because people are saying things that aren’t true.”
“Is he not dead or what?” I said defiantly.
Libardo hesitated. The image on the screen trembled as the stretcher disappeared into the fray. The reporters tried to follow it, panting and bumping into each other or getting tangled in the camera cords. The chaos transmitted live made Libardo anxious.
“Turn that off, dammit,” he said, his teeth clenched, and shouted, “Fernanda, Fernanda!”
“She’s got a headache, Pa,” Julio told him.
The telephone started ringing.
“Why are you still watching?” Libardo said. “They’re taking him away now.”
“Well?” I asked. “Is he alive or is he dead?”
The telephone kept ringing.
“Answer that!” Libardo yelled toward the kitchen. “He’s dead,” he said at last, and his voice shook again. He wiped his face and turned off the TV. We could still hear the telephone ringing, until somebody finally answered it.
“It’s all going to be O.K.,” Libardo said.
I tossed the remote on the sofa and Julio ran upstairs to his room.
“December’s fucked now,” I told Libardo, but he shook his head. He sat down in his leather armchair and said, “The only one who’s fucked is the dead guy.”
Libardo spent the rest of that day making phone calls. He didn’t leave the house and shut himself in the garage several times to talk on the car phone. His booming voice had been reduced to a murmur of curt replies, threats, and inquiries about what other people thought, or where so-and-so was, or why somebody wasn’t answering his calls. He paced back and forth, keeping a constant eye on the street corners through the window.
He’d turned the TV back on, but the volume was at a murmur. They were still showing the house in Los Olivos, the roof with the broken tiles, the bloodstains, the crowd being held back by a flurry of police officers and soldiers. The defense minister spoke, then the government minister, the mayor, the governor, the chief of police, the head of the army, and finally the president. Libardo listened closely to all of them, clutching a glass of rum that he filled up repeatedly as soon he’d drained it.
Fernanda didn’t come out of her room for the rest of the day or all night. One of the domestic staff carried a pitcher of water up to her, and later a bowl of soup. Julio and I went down when they called us for dinner. We continued to watch the news on the TV in the kitchen. We were by ourselves when Libardo came in to get more ice.
“Juan Pablo has spoken,” he told us.
“And?” Julio said.
“He said he was going to get revenge and kill everybody.”
“Them or us?” I asked.
“Them,” Libardo said, “or at least that was how I heard it.”
“Is there school tomorrow?” my brother asked.
“Of course there’s school.”
“Are we going?” Julio asked again.
“Yes, of course. Everything’s going to be exactly the same.”
When he turned around, we noticed he had his gun shoved into the waistband of his pants, in the back, above his hip. Then I looked at the screen and my eyes widened in horror.
“Look,” I said.
“What is it?” Libardo asked.
I jutted my chin toward the TV. There was Escobar again, laid out on what seemed to be an autopsy table, though the scale hanging from the ceiling made it look like they’d put him on a butcher’s table. He had his pants pulled down around the middle of his thighs, his white underwear and his belly still exposed; his beard was thick like a prophet’s, and his unruly hair was damp with sweat and blood. The image was just a photo snapped by some cold-blooded person, but it was enough to make Libardo collapse into a chair and, for the first time since he’d heard the news, weep disconsolately. I fled to my room, not because of what they were showing on the TV but because I’d never seen my dad cry like that. I caught a glimpse of Julio, clumsy and inexperienced with other people’s grief, placing a hand on his shoulder, but Libardo kept rubbing savagely at his face, gulping and cursing through clenched teeth.
By then, elsewhere in Medellín, people were already setting off fireworks to celebrate the death of the villain.
3
The British Airways employee was initially thrown off by the four first names on María Carlota Teresa Valentina Rivero Lesseps’s passport, but she managed to identify the passenger’s last name and started calling her Miss Rivero. The employee checked her in and handed her the baggage receipts for her suitcases, the passport and boarding pass, and the courtesy pass for the VIP lounge. Her family always called her María Carlota, or just Carlota, and it was later, in school, when people had started calling her Charlie. Her long name was a whim of her parents, since they hadn’t been able to agree on just one name.
Once she was through passport control, Charlie pulled her carry-on through the displays in the duty-free shop. There was nothing she didn’t own already. She spritzed on perfume from a tester to refresh the dose she’d applied that morning. In her head she reviewed her list of Christmas gifts, nagged by the feeling that she was forgetting somebody. In another store she bought two gossip magazines and a pack of gum. On her way to the VIP lounge she got a text message from Flynn asking how everything was going and whether she was through passport control. Charlie gave him a thumbs-up, and Flynn sent back a heart.
In the lounge, she helped herself to some nuts and requested sparkling water with a slice of lemon. She sank into an armchair that looked out on the runway and, watching the airplanes land and take off, pondered what it was about Flynn that didn’t quite satisfy her. What it was he was missing. Part of her decision to spend Christmas in Colombia was to see whether distance had any effect on her feelings for him.
She leafed through the magazines for a while, occasionally glancing up at the screen with the list of flights that were about to take off. As soon as the one for Bogotá started flashing, she gathered her things and went to the bathroom. A final inspection in the mirror was deemed satisfactory. She liked the combination of the Burberry trench coat and ripped jeans. She headed for the gate, filled with anxiety about returning. She pulled out her phone to text Flynn the message she’d promised him: I’m about to board. An incoming call from an unknown number interrupted her. She was hesitating anyway about whether to add an I love you. She started walking faster—gate 27 was far away and the terminal was crowded. I love you, she finally wrote. Her phone rang again, with a long number and the international code for Colombia. She also got another message from Flynn. Me too, have a good flight, call me when you get in. Several images of the previous night flitted through her mind. Flynn performing oral sex on her, Flynn’s cock, the way he’d smacked her buttocks when she came, the emptiness she’d felt afterward. In another message, Flynn told her he missed her already, and in another he asked if she was on the plane yet. At a third phone call, she started to get irritated; she still had ten gates to go. As she hurried down the terminal, another request from Flynn came in. Send me a photo now, right this moment, I want to see what you look like. Then another call from the unknown number, and just as she reached her gate, when there were very few passengers left to board, she got another text message that wasn’t from Flynn but from Cristina, her sister, that said, please pick up, Dad’s dead.