HARD MAN FALLING by J.D.Buchanan
At a well-known building on the deserted shore of Lake Quechua situated in a tiny mountain valley near Samandaca, Colombia, state of Boyaca, a party was in progress. To describe it as “lurid” would be vastly understating its possibilities.
Once a proper resort in the German-Swiss chalet style, in recent years the venue was never referred to in polite society, that is, feminine society, other than by its euphemism, “The Villa.” In reality, it was an elegant bordello, mostly servicing the men made wealthy by the surrounding emerald mines, the largest in the world.
The orgiastic party, very private, was hosted by Cesar Linares, one of the brothers of the late Don Alberto Linares, the so-called “Emerald King” of these mountains, on the occasion of his adopted son’s birthday.
The son, Oscar Fuentes, a thick-set, dark-minded young man with a morbid humor was on that day twenty-nine. He had maintained his surname, Fuentes, despite his gratitude to his “father” for taking him off of the streets of Bogotá when he was eight.
Oscar had been one of those wild young “gamines,” orphans who roam South American cities in gangs seeking out targets of opportunity. He could not remember either of his real parents, if he had ever had any as opposed to a squat and drop in the fields or alleys, nor how he got on the streets. He had bestowed the Fuentes name upon himself for reasons he had forgotten.
He paraded himself as a “businessman” but was unrecognizable as a Linares, an aristocratic Castilian family that claimed to descend from the Conquistadors. He wore loud clothes, chewed with his mouth open and intimidated people when he entered a room. There was no doubt that Cesar, childless in his only marriage, loved him, but essentially he was his father’s thug, capable of anything.
The late don, a man of famous, almost mythical qualities, elegant and supremely cunning, had been the “patron” who kept them and everyone else in those mountains in line. Now he was gone. Slain recently, according to the media, as a result of a quarrel with one of his own bodyguards at a ranch in West Texas where his daughter had fled with her "yanqui" lover.
The same daughter, now age late twenties, had returned home and immediately taken over the empire. The vaqueros and miners were already calling her the “Emerald Queen.” And always “Patrona,” even though her mother was still alive. A woman?! A girl, almost a child, in charge of this ancient clan – unthinkable!
This was Cesar’s real reason for lavishly entertaining the considerable band of hard young men who answered to his son’s call.
At one o’clock there was a full moon but silver-tongued clouds were rushing towards it, driven by the sudden winds that dominate the high altitudes in the Cordillera Oriental. Below it was the opposite, calm and very quiet except for bursts of raucous noise from the Villa, and there was even a light mist drifting on the water. Occasionally a wild animal or bird reminded the listener of the primitive world surrounding them.
Cesar wandered out with his arm around his son, the two of them disheveled and faltering a little, to suck in the night air. They needed it badly. Oscar had been snorting, but his father was just very drunk. They shuffled down to the small dock that occasionally received guests by water taxi.
“You think her yanqui lover will return, Papa?”
“I don’t know what to think, my son. Who would ever imagine that this financial man, this juggler of papers and numbers we saw here could kill four sicarios? And himself receive only a wound in his leg?”
“He was more of a cowboy, I think.”
“I don’t care what he was...”
“They were fools, Papa, city trash. Tomas told me he lured them into nearby rugged hills, his own cowboy terrain.”
Cesar wasn’t listening; his mind was clogged with uncertainties set adrift by the alcohol. “Whoever heard of such a thing? It’s a crime against nature. And Colombia, my God!”
“If that’s what happened,” Oscar reminded him.
“Yes, if that’s what happened.” Cesar sighed as if his imagination had been exhausted by the mere contemplation of it. “Whoever heard....”
Some feminine screams and a couple of gunshots, then
a whole variety of dangerous sounds came from the Villa. The two men didn’t even look around, but Cesar, often driven to philosophy by dissipation, said, “The life of a whore is hard. But God ordained it that way, what are we to do?”
“If he comes back I’m going to kill him this time,” Oscar said.
“Who?”
“The yanqui. Horn.”
“He won’t. She doesn’t speak of it, but I can tell – it’s finished between them. She would never share all this.”
“But if he does?” he persisted.
“Then kill him.”
“This was a good thing you did for us tonight, Papa.”
“What’s that sound?” Cesar, whose life had included its share of violence, froze with a cigarette half way to his mouth, listening for something.
Oscar, who had heard nothing, tried to fill in, “A condor? An owl?”
“It’s nothing like that.”
There was in the distance, beyond the mist, a faint “putt-putt-putt.” So inconsequential it merged with the lapping of the waters beneath their feet, the night songs of birds and insects, fish jumping.
“Someone out on the lake at this hour?” Oscar said.
“Were you expecting anyone else?”
“Not this late. Everyone’s here except Chuy and he’s in the hospital with his wounds. I saw him. He may die.”
“Fishermen,” Cesar decided. He shook his head, “How I envy them their simple lives. The time to do things like that. Some day I too — ”
More alarming sounds combining terror and hilarity came from the villa; this time Cesar turned to look. “We had better go see.”
With difficulty he got them turned around. As they wobbled up the incline to the Villa Cesar stumbled and was prevented from hitting the ground hard by his son’s stoned grasp.
Oscar, feeling that he needed to renew his flagging energy, pulled out a tiny silver flask, trailed white powder across the back of his hand and took a snort before helping his father to his feet.
“What will our lives be like,” Oscar wondered, gazing around at the mountains as they continued walking, “after we have this whole world for our own.”
Cesar came out of his mood with a drunken, braying laugh that nearly strangled him. But through the thick cloud of gasps and phlegmy hacks one word emerged very clearly, “Glorious!”
Oscar thought so too and grinned like a child contemplating Christmas.
After they disappeared inside the sound of the boat drew closer.
One of the young thugs upstairs in the bordello was leaning out of a window to empty his stomach. Afterwards, he hung his head on the sill in order to recover in that same cool sweet air.
He too heard the mysterious sound but dismissed it as a vehicle driving on the other side of the lake. There was no road on the other side of the lake. Then, while he sagged in place, the bow wave, gentle and white, parted the mist.
At first he thought it must be a giant fish or some sort of apparition and tried to shake it out of his head, which only encouraged more vertigo. The apparition disappeared.
With effort, he twisted his face skyward to look for more light, but just at that moment when the pursuing clouds caught up with the moon.
This end of the lake was shallow and the next time he saw anything in the new darkness was the boat itself in among the tall reeds that created a miniature forest around the dock.
The engine had been cut and there was something eerie in the way it glided through, as if it had risen from the bottom and was more natural to the water than the land. There were five black unmoving shapes low to the gunwales.
He told himself again that he was hallucinating and started to pull his head in. He needed clarity. He needed more cocaine. But he stopped.
Still silent, the motor launch eased alongside the dock and came to a stop. The five shapes moved at the same instant, up, out and advancing.
The young man’s mouth fell open, creating an odor that even he could smell; he waved it away. An inarticulate sound came from his mouth.
Below, four men in police uniforms wearing Balaclavas and armed with Uzi’s and one, a larger man, who appeared to be the officer, also wearing a hood with a pistol, trotted up the dock onto the land, coming at a rapid but still deliberate pace towards the villa.
The hoodlum in the second floor window was still having trouble focusing, much less digesting this information, but when it clicked-in it created instant panic. The people in this malign wonderland least apt to wear police uniforms on a secret raid were the real police.
His first impulse was to leap to the bed and try to awaken the sodden whore he had been using, as if that would help him. Then he staggered, bouncing off walls, out into the hall, yelling to alert his comrades in one particular room.
He found them but it was hopeless; they were either manic, stupefied, engaged in a sexual act they refused to give up or thought it was a silly joke on the part of one who looked to be in worse shape than they. Powerful cars were heard pulling up in front with their bright lights on the house.
There were a few silent, prescient moments during which only the house itself seemed to breathe. Until the killing began. Furniture toppled, doors smashed open, high-pitched screams, footsteps, running, shouts of chemically infused rage and subverting all that in the still country night a rattle of automatic weapons. The ghost of Don Alberto had come to dinner.
Four bravos were now gathered in the one crib that had been warned trying to combine against the befuddlement that plagued them. A comparatively sober girl was huddled naked on the bed, trying to give the alarm to the whole house through a mouth full of barbed wire.
There were running footsteps on the back stairs but still no one in the room moved. The narrow door, half-open to begin with, was kicked wide, two of the “policemen” crowded in, weapons leveled, and without a word began firing.
There was no missing the target in that small an area. All three were cut down, hit several times, mostly in the chest or belly, the fattest targets. One Uzi jammed after a dozen rounds but it didn’t matter except to the shooter who cursed God in disappointment and drew his pistol.
The four bewildered partiers hardly had time to open their mouths much less reach for a weapon in clothes that were strewn everywhere. The only constant sounds were the high-pitched wail of the girl scrunched down on the bed with her hands up in front of her, and the sub-machine-guns and then the pop-pop of the pistol.
The bullets had struck where there were hearts, lungs and arteries; blood went right by the prostitute’s defending hands to cover her in a colossal spray that almost drove her out of her mind.
Yet apparently the girls themselves were to be spared.
One of the gunmen in an oddly youthful voice, muttered contemptuously, “You’re a lucky whore. If I had my choice, no witnesses. He moved his finger across his throat and then, grinning, hurried to follow his companion out of the room.
There was more firing along the corridor and below. The girl never stopped screaming.
When the firing finally ceased, tramping boots marched through the building inspecting the victims in every room; blood, brains, flesh, shattered furniture, broken bottles, sprawled bodies, smoke and debris everywhere as if a cyclone had scythed through. One man had been shot on the toilet.
It would never do to leave anyone alive who might seek vengeance, that was also the way of life in Colombia. Only one girl was dead, however, either from a stray or else strangled during the exotic practice of denying oxygen during the act, something she had been engaged in when the raid began.
But the others would never talk, that was a given, too.
The final reckoning came outside on the front patio when Cesar, naked from the waist down except for his socks, staggered along looking like the rescued victim of a trampling with one of the assassins pulling each arm. Behind him came Oscar, dragged by the feet and arms. Barely recognizable where his face had caught a bullet or been smashed by a gun butt. Still, he groaned; he was alive.
Two more of the young hoodlums, one wounded in the arm, the other apparently uninjured but crying, were also brought out and all of them put up against the front wall of the villa. Three cars aimed their brights full on the captives, and behind those lights, vaguely seen, were silhouettes of their killers.
The whole world around the lake was quiet now, the only appreciable sound coming from behind the lights and even there they spoke softly in the face of so much devastation.
The captives tried to see beyond them but that was hopeless. They put their hands up to shield their eyes but were told sharply to keep them down.
Cesar thought he had caught a glimpse of a woman’s slim pant leg and shoe under the lights and perhaps even the tenor of a feminine voice, but he couldn’t be sure. And what did it matter, really, since he was going to die?
He only wished he might have been allowed more dignity at this moment, he who had always ordered and been obeyed, feared when he threatened. A vain man who dyed his proudly thick moustache. The thought of a woman seeing him like this was humiliating.
Glancing down at himself he saw sagging blue socks, thin white legs supporting a bulky top, the softening stomach drooping like a jib over his groin, the phallus of which he had always been so proud shriveled by fear and cold. On top he wore only his white shirt, open over his hairy chest, tails flapping when a momentary breeze came up.
He looked over at his son, sitting propped against the wall with no will of his own. He was out of it now, that was good, he would never know. Cesar was determined not to cry.
One of the raiders strolled over and casually delivered the coup de grace to the Oscar’s head with a pistol; the body jumped and made a terrible sound that was either fear or air escaping from somewhere in a whistling moan. Then Cesar felt warm tears that couldn’t be put down.
The two young thugs who had survived the initial slaughter were next. One killer stepped forward - Cesar recognized now that these were mostly sicarios, which explained the young voices and slight figures - leveled his Uzi but fired only a half-dozen rounds into them. One died quietly, the other screaming for his life.
Drunk as he was, sick at heart and very much afraid of dying himself because of the life he had lived, Cesar drew himself up and, as much as he understood that he might present a ludicrous vision, tried to look his own man at the end. He fumbled absently in his shirt pocket for a cigarette but didn’t have any.
In shock, his mind traveled momentarily to his pastoral youth on the finca. Wandering on a pony across that verdant mountain plateau, through the flocks and herds. Even while there he seemed to hear voices behind the lights.
As long as he stayed on the finca they couldn’t hurt him. Did he hear someone, a woman, say, “Not him?” Probably not. Funny how from the back of his little pony he could look directly into the lights with no pain. Imminent death seemed to turn the world around.
He became aware that the fog was creeping slowly up onto the land, past the Villa, and realized with terrible pain that he had returned. A woman was sobbing inside the villa. Something was thrown or fell and broke. A bird flew up, beating its wings furiously. Were these the last things he would know?
Behind him out on the lake, the boat started up with that same innocuous little putt-putt-putt, and went back into the mist. Car doors slammed, engines started. The three vehicles, whatever they were, shot backwards with their lights still full in Cesar’s eyes.
When they spun to leave, the beams sweeping away, he was momentarily blinded. They sped off on the primitive road like celebrants of a great victory when it had only been a massacre.
Cesar stood there a long time, leaning against the wall, blood-decorated on one side of him, a body on the other, too weak and confused to move. He was in near total darkness now and it was quite cold but he felt nothing.
As men have always done in situations like this he consulted the sky. All it told him was that it was still there so he must still be here.
Why was he alive? All around him was a charnel house. He remembered Oscar then and bent down to kneel over him. Not particularly a religious man except for his belief in hell, there was nothing he could do but kiss the already cooling forehead and cry a little.
Finally he got up and wandered the lakeside like a demented spirit all night, still half-naked and his hands covered with blood, until he was found lying unconscious, legs in the water, at dawn by some fishermen. This was Colombia, they were very frightened.
The late Oscar’s “wounded” friend, Chuy, was at that moment on a plane to Rio with a healthy body and fattened wallet.
Oscar’s funeral was held at the large Linares-built church in the emerald-mining town of Samandaca. All of the arrangements were made by the new head of the family and its empire, the dead man’s cousin, the unavoidably young Constanza who had thoroughly despised him all her life.
Contrary to rumors of what might have happened or might still happen, her Uncle Cesar sat beside her in the family front pew, utterly passive. Tears were behind him, but even beyond the toll of grief he looked a beaten man.
Herself, once thought an ugly duckling by practically everyone, had become a striking young woman and looked particularly beautiful in a black Chanel suit.
One carry-over from a past that many people found odd and inexplicable were the darkened glasses she wore even when addressing the congregation, movingly, it was agreed, on the subject of the deceased’s virtues - all invented.
There was a history here. Because of the sun and altitude most people wore dark glasses for protection but since she was a child Constanza had worn a distinctive antique blue-green pair and rarely taken them off in company. As if they had been surgically attached. Some thought they knew why, no one dared to say.
Now it was different, she wore them only for the great effect it had on those rare occasions when she took them off, for her eyes were extraordinary. A pale gray-green, unlike any other color on the scale. More that that, they somehow appeared utterly translucent. You didn’t see them, you visited them. Their depth seemed infinite. They dominated rooms. Incurring her father’s wrath, they had almost destroyed her.
It was generally agreed that the service had been beautiful, the new head of family having done a splendid job in showing just the right form in everything. Many of the attendees were honored by an invitation to the wake at the finca up in the mountains.
There on the vast back lawn, with a priest on either side and the large family - Don Alberto had had eight brothers and sisters - arranged around him, Cesar received the solicitude of over two hundred guests.
Constanza merely walked through the wake, decorous, polite, showing the flag, but saying that she had work to do. She also asked her uncle to join her in the library when he had a moment.
“You hated him.”
“Everyone did. That shouldn’t surprise you. Personally, I can’t afford it, it’s inefficient”
“Not your father.”
“He used him.”
“Still, you gave him a good funeral today. I have to thank you for that.”
Sitting behind her father’s large desk in the English-styled library that had always been his workplace and sanctuary, she turned sideways in the rolling leather chair and looked out the window at the milling crowd on the lawn, chattering and gesticulating just as if it was a wedding or christening, servants hastening though with trays of Spanish tapas and drinks. From here they seemed as impersonal as ants.
“He wasn’t exactly a member of the family but I saw no reason to make a point of that.”
“He was my son.”
She turned back long enough to push a bottle towards her uncle. Constanza scarcely drank herself but her late father had kept a truly distinguished cellar and she found uses for it. This was fifty year-old French brandy and it was seized and consumed greedily.
“He was crude, ambitious and dangerous. He would have gotten you killed sooner or later, Uncle.” She added casually, “Involved you in some silly scheme or plot.”
He looked at her with a deliberate narrowing of the eyes, leaning forward a little. Alcohol always had made him aggressive; it was only one of his weaknesses. He might be seen as a tough man, someone to be feared, but Constanza had always known that she would be able to control him.
“Why was I spared, I wonder?”
“We might all wonder about that.”
“I can’t think of anything except...unless its because I belong to this family.” He was hopeless when he tried to be ironic or even subtle.
“We have peoples’ respect certainly. Since papa won the Emerald War I suppose there are those who also fear us.”
He insisted on carrying through his little charade. “Do you think they’ll ever catch them?”
She put up with it but was beginning to sound bored. “I have no idea. The federal authorities seem to be trying their best but, Uncle, do I need to remind you that this is Colombia. FARC killed twenty soldiers yesterday in an ambush. Look, I think you should try to put this unfortunate experience behind you and address the future.”
“Where is my future?”
“Beside me, Uncle. Close beside. The family has lots for you to do.”
He sighed and let his hands fall between his knees, his head and shoulders sinking like an old man’s. “I suppose I should be grateful.”
“You’ll learn to be. You have your life. In our remarkable country that can never be an assumption.”
1
At a well-known building on the deserted shore of Lake Quechua situated in a tiny mountain valley near Samandaca, Colombia, state of Boyaca, a party was in progress. To describe it as “lurid” would be vastly understating its possibilities.
Once a proper resort in the German-Swiss chalet style, in recent years the venue was never referred to in polite society, that is, feminine society, other than by its euphemism, “The Villa.” In reality, it was an elegant bordello, mostly servicing the men made wealthy by the surrounding emerald mines, the largest in the world.
The orgiastic party, very private, was hosted by Cesar Linares, one of the brothers of the late Don Alberto Linares, the so-called “Emerald King” of these mountains, on the occasion of his adopted son’s birthday.
The son, Oscar Fuentes, a thick-set, dark-minded young man with a morbid humor was on that day twenty-nine. He had maintained his surname, Fuentes, despite his gratitude to his “father” for taking him off of the streets of Bogotá when he was eight.
Oscar had been one of those wild young “gamines,” orphans who roam South American cities in gangs seeking out targets of opportunity. He could not remember either of his real parents, if he had ever had any as opposed to a squat and drop in the fields or alleys, nor how he got on the streets. He had bestowed the Fuentes name upon himself for reasons he had forgotten.
He paraded himself as a “businessman” but was unrecognizable as a Linares, an aristocratic Castilian family that claimed to descend from the Conquistadors. He wore loud clothes, chewed with his mouth open and intimidated people when he entered a room. There was no doubt that Cesar, childless in his only marriage, loved him, but essentially he was his father’s thug, capable of anything.
The late don, a man of famous, almost mythical qualities, elegant and supremely cunning, had been the “patron” who kept them and everyone else in those mountains in line. Now he was gone. Slain recently, according to the media, as a result of a quarrel with one of his own bodyguards at a ranch in West Texas where his daughter had fled with her "yanqui" lover.
The same daughter, now age late twenties, had returned home and immediately taken over the empire. The vaqueros and miners were already calling her the “Emerald Queen.” And always “Patrona,” even though her mother was still alive. A woman?! A girl, almost a child, in charge of this ancient clan – unthinkable!
This was Cesar’s real reason for lavishly entertaining the considerable band of hard young men who answered to his son’s call.
At one o’clock there was a full moon but silver-tongued clouds were rushing towards it, driven by the sudden winds that dominate the high altitudes in the Cordillera Oriental. Below it was the opposite, calm and very quiet except for bursts of raucous noise from the Villa, and there was even a light mist drifting on the water. Occasionally a wild animal or bird reminded the listener of the primitive world surrounding them.
Cesar wandered out with his arm around his son, the two of them disheveled and faltering a little, to suck in the night air. They needed it badly. Oscar had been snorting, but his father was just very drunk. They shuffled down to the small dock that occasionally received guests by water taxi.
“You think her yanqui lover will return, Papa?”
“I don’t know what to think, my son. Who would ever imagine that this financial man, this juggler of papers and numbers we saw here could kill four sicarios? And himself receive only a wound in his leg?”
“He was more of a cowboy, I think.”
“I don’t care what he was...”
“They were fools, Papa, city trash. Tomas told me he lured them into nearby rugged hills, his own cowboy terrain.”
Cesar wasn’t listening; his mind was clogged with uncertainties set adrift by the alcohol. “Whoever heard of such a thing? It’s a crime against nature. And Colombia, my God!”
“If that’s what happened,” Oscar reminded him.
“Yes, if that’s what happened.” Cesar sighed as if his imagination had been exhausted by the mere contemplation of it. “Whoever heard....”
Some feminine screams and a couple of gunshots, then
a whole variety of dangerous sounds came from the Villa. The two men didn’t even look around, but Cesar, often driven to philosophy by dissipation, said, “The life of a whore is hard. But God ordained it that way, what are we to do?”
“If he comes back I’m going to kill him this time,” Oscar said.
“Who?”
“The yanqui. Horn.”
“He won’t. She doesn’t speak of it, but I can tell – it’s finished between them. She would never share all this.”
“But if he does?” he persisted.
“Then kill him.”
“This was a good thing you did for us tonight, Papa.”
“What’s that sound?” Cesar, whose life had included its share of violence, froze with a cigarette half way to his mouth, listening for something.
Oscar, who had heard nothing, tried to fill in, “A condor? An owl?”
“It’s nothing like that.”
There was in the distance, beyond the mist, a faint “putt-putt-putt.” So inconsequential it merged with the lapping of the waters beneath their feet, the night songs of birds and insects, fish jumping.
“Someone out on the lake at this hour?” Oscar said.
“Were you expecting anyone else?”
“Not this late. Everyone’s here except Chuy and he’s in the hospital with his wounds. I saw him. He may die.”
“Fishermen,” Cesar decided. He shook his head, “How I envy them their simple lives. The time to do things like that. Some day I too — ”
More alarming sounds combining terror and hilarity came from the villa; this time Cesar turned to look. “We had better go see.”
With difficulty he got them turned around. As they wobbled up the incline to the Villa Cesar stumbled and was prevented from hitting the ground hard by his son’s stoned grasp.
Oscar, feeling that he needed to renew his flagging energy, pulled out a tiny silver flask, trailed white powder across the back of his hand and took a snort before helping his father to his feet.
“What will our lives be like,” Oscar wondered, gazing around at the mountains as they continued walking, “after we have this whole world for our own.”
Cesar came out of his mood with a drunken, braying laugh that nearly strangled him. But through the thick cloud of gasps and phlegmy hacks one word emerged very clearly, “Glorious!”
Oscar thought so too and grinned like a child contemplating Christmas.
After they disappeared inside the sound of the boat drew closer.
One of the young thugs upstairs in the bordello was leaning out of a window to empty his stomach. Afterwards, he hung his head on the sill in order to recover in that same cool sweet air.
He too heard the mysterious sound but dismissed it as a vehicle driving on the other side of the lake. There was no road on the other side of the lake. Then, while he sagged in place, the bow wave, gentle and white, parted the mist.
At first he thought it must be a giant fish or some sort of apparition and tried to shake it out of his head, which only encouraged more vertigo. The apparition disappeared.
With effort, he twisted his face skyward to look for more light, but just at that moment when the pursuing clouds caught up with the moon.
This end of the lake was shallow and the next time he saw anything in the new darkness was the boat itself in among the tall reeds that created a miniature forest around the dock.
The engine had been cut and there was something eerie in the way it glided through, as if it had risen from the bottom and was more natural to the water than the land. There were five black unmoving shapes low to the gunwales.
He told himself again that he was hallucinating and started to pull his head in. He needed clarity. He needed more cocaine. But he stopped.
Still silent, the motor launch eased alongside the dock and came to a stop. The five shapes moved at the same instant, up, out and advancing.
The young man’s mouth fell open, creating an odor that even he could smell; he waved it away. An inarticulate sound came from his mouth.
Below, four men in police uniforms wearing Balaclavas and armed with Uzi’s and one, a larger man, who appeared to be the officer, also wearing a hood with a pistol, trotted up the dock onto the land, coming at a rapid but still deliberate pace towards the villa.
The hoodlum in the second floor window was still having trouble focusing, much less digesting this information, but when it clicked-in it created instant panic. The people in this malign wonderland least apt to wear police uniforms on a secret raid were the real police.
His first impulse was to leap to the bed and try to awaken the sodden whore he had been using, as if that would help him. Then he staggered, bouncing off walls, out into the hall, yelling to alert his comrades in one particular room.
He found them but it was hopeless; they were either manic, stupefied, engaged in a sexual act they refused to give up or thought it was a silly joke on the part of one who looked to be in worse shape than they. Powerful cars were heard pulling up in front with their bright lights on the house.
There were a few silent, prescient moments during which only the house itself seemed to breathe. Until the killing began. Furniture toppled, doors smashed open, high-pitched screams, footsteps, running, shouts of chemically infused rage and subverting all that in the still country night a rattle of automatic weapons. The ghost of Don Alberto had come to dinner.
Four bravos were now gathered in the one crib that had been warned trying to combine against the befuddlement that plagued them. A comparatively sober girl was huddled naked on the bed, trying to give the alarm to the whole house through a mouth full of barbed wire.
There were running footsteps on the back stairs but still no one in the room moved. The narrow door, half-open to begin with, was kicked wide, two of the “policemen” crowded in, weapons leveled, and without a word began firing.
There was no missing the target in that small an area. All three were cut down, hit several times, mostly in the chest or belly, the fattest targets. One Uzi jammed after a dozen rounds but it didn’t matter except to the shooter who cursed God in disappointment and drew his pistol.
The four bewildered partiers hardly had time to open their mouths much less reach for a weapon in clothes that were strewn everywhere. The only constant sounds were the high-pitched wail of the girl scrunched down on the bed with her hands up in front of her, and the sub-machine-guns and then the pop-pop of the pistol.
The bullets had struck where there were hearts, lungs and arteries; blood went right by the prostitute’s defending hands to cover her in a colossal spray that almost drove her out of her mind.
Yet apparently the girls themselves were to be spared.
One of the gunmen in an oddly youthful voice, muttered contemptuously, “You’re a lucky whore. If I had my choice, no witnesses. He moved his finger across his throat and then, grinning, hurried to follow his companion out of the room.
There was more firing along the corridor and below. The girl never stopped screaming.
When the firing finally ceased, tramping boots marched through the building inspecting the victims in every room; blood, brains, flesh, shattered furniture, broken bottles, sprawled bodies, smoke and debris everywhere as if a cyclone had scythed through. One man had been shot on the toilet.
It would never do to leave anyone alive who might seek vengeance, that was also the way of life in Colombia. Only one girl was dead, however, either from a stray or else strangled during the exotic practice of denying oxygen during the act, something she had been engaged in when the raid began.
But the others would never talk, that was a given, too.
The final reckoning came outside on the front patio when Cesar, naked from the waist down except for his socks, staggered along looking like the rescued victim of a trampling with one of the assassins pulling each arm. Behind him came Oscar, dragged by the feet and arms. Barely recognizable where his face had caught a bullet or been smashed by a gun butt. Still, he groaned; he was alive.
Two more of the young hoodlums, one wounded in the arm, the other apparently uninjured but crying, were also brought out and all of them put up against the front wall of the villa. Three cars aimed their brights full on the captives, and behind those lights, vaguely seen, were silhouettes of their killers.
The whole world around the lake was quiet now, the only appreciable sound coming from behind the lights and even there they spoke softly in the face of so much devastation.
The captives tried to see beyond them but that was hopeless. They put their hands up to shield their eyes but were told sharply to keep them down.
Cesar thought he had caught a glimpse of a woman’s slim pant leg and shoe under the lights and perhaps even the tenor of a feminine voice, but he couldn’t be sure. And what did it matter, really, since he was going to die?
He only wished he might have been allowed more dignity at this moment, he who had always ordered and been obeyed, feared when he threatened. A vain man who dyed his proudly thick moustache. The thought of a woman seeing him like this was humiliating.
Glancing down at himself he saw sagging blue socks, thin white legs supporting a bulky top, the softening stomach drooping like a jib over his groin, the phallus of which he had always been so proud shriveled by fear and cold. On top he wore only his white shirt, open over his hairy chest, tails flapping when a momentary breeze came up.
He looked over at his son, sitting propped against the wall with no will of his own. He was out of it now, that was good, he would never know. Cesar was determined not to cry.
One of the raiders strolled over and casually delivered the coup de grace to the Oscar’s head with a pistol; the body jumped and made a terrible sound that was either fear or air escaping from somewhere in a whistling moan. Then Cesar felt warm tears that couldn’t be put down.
The two young thugs who had survived the initial slaughter were next. One killer stepped forward - Cesar recognized now that these were mostly sicarios, which explained the young voices and slight figures - leveled his Uzi but fired only a half-dozen rounds into them. One died quietly, the other screaming for his life.
Drunk as he was, sick at heart and very much afraid of dying himself because of the life he had lived, Cesar drew himself up and, as much as he understood that he might present a ludicrous vision, tried to look his own man at the end. He fumbled absently in his shirt pocket for a cigarette but didn’t have any.
In shock, his mind traveled momentarily to his pastoral youth on the finca. Wandering on a pony across that verdant mountain plateau, through the flocks and herds. Even while there he seemed to hear voices behind the lights.
As long as he stayed on the finca they couldn’t hurt him. Did he hear someone, a woman, say, “Not him?” Probably not. Funny how from the back of his little pony he could look directly into the lights with no pain. Imminent death seemed to turn the world around.
He became aware that the fog was creeping slowly up onto the land, past the Villa, and realized with terrible pain that he had returned. A woman was sobbing inside the villa. Something was thrown or fell and broke. A bird flew up, beating its wings furiously. Were these the last things he would know?
Behind him out on the lake, the boat started up with that same innocuous little putt-putt-putt, and went back into the mist. Car doors slammed, engines started. The three vehicles, whatever they were, shot backwards with their lights still full in Cesar’s eyes.
When they spun to leave, the beams sweeping away, he was momentarily blinded. They sped off on the primitive road like celebrants of a great victory when it had only been a massacre.
Cesar stood there a long time, leaning against the wall, blood-decorated on one side of him, a body on the other, too weak and confused to move. He was in near total darkness now and it was quite cold but he felt nothing.
As men have always done in situations like this he consulted the sky. All it told him was that it was still there so he must still be here.
Why was he alive? All around him was a charnel house. He remembered Oscar then and bent down to kneel over him. Not particularly a religious man except for his belief in hell, there was nothing he could do but kiss the already cooling forehead and cry a little.
Finally he got up and wandered the lakeside like a demented spirit all night, still half-naked and his hands covered with blood, until he was found lying unconscious, legs in the water, at dawn by some fishermen. This was Colombia, they were very frightened.
The late Oscar’s “wounded” friend, Chuy, was at that moment on a plane to Rio with a healthy body and fattened wallet.
Oscar’s funeral was held at the large Linares-built church in the emerald-mining town of Samandaca. All of the arrangements were made by the new head of the family and its empire, the dead man’s cousin, the unavoidably young Constanza who had thoroughly despised him all her life.
Contrary to rumors of what might have happened or might still happen, her Uncle Cesar sat beside her in the family front pew, utterly passive. Tears were behind him, but even beyond the toll of grief he looked a beaten man.
Herself, once thought an ugly duckling by practically everyone, had become a striking young woman and looked particularly beautiful in a black Chanel suit.
One carry-over from a past that many people found odd and inexplicable were the darkened glasses she wore even when addressing the congregation, movingly, it was agreed, on the subject of the deceased’s virtues - all invented.
There was a history here. Because of the sun and altitude most people wore dark glasses for protection but since she was a child Constanza had worn a distinctive antique blue-green pair and rarely taken them off in company. As if they had been surgically attached. Some thought they knew why, no one dared to say.
Now it was different, she wore them only for the great effect it had on those rare occasions when she took them off, for her eyes were extraordinary. A pale gray-green, unlike any other color on the scale. More that that, they somehow appeared utterly translucent. You didn’t see them, you visited them. Their depth seemed infinite. They dominated rooms. Incurring her father’s wrath, they had almost destroyed her.
It was generally agreed that the service had been beautiful, the new head of family having done a splendid job in showing just the right form in everything. Many of the attendees were honored by an invitation to the wake at the finca up in the mountains.
There on the vast back lawn, with a priest on either side and the large family - Don Alberto had had eight brothers and sisters - arranged around him, Cesar received the solicitude of over two hundred guests.
Constanza merely walked through the wake, decorous, polite, showing the flag, but saying that she had work to do. She also asked her uncle to join her in the library when he had a moment.
“You hated him.”
“Everyone did. That shouldn’t surprise you. Personally, I can’t afford it, it’s inefficient”
“Not your father.”
“He used him.”
“Still, you gave him a good funeral today. I have to thank you for that.”
Sitting behind her father’s large desk in the English-styled library that had always been his workplace and sanctuary, she turned sideways in the rolling leather chair and looked out the window at the milling crowd on the lawn, chattering and gesticulating just as if it was a wedding or christening, servants hastening though with trays of Spanish tapas and drinks. From here they seemed as impersonal as ants.
“He wasn’t exactly a member of the family but I saw no reason to make a point of that.”
“He was my son.”
She turned back long enough to push a bottle towards her uncle. Constanza scarcely drank herself but her late father had kept a truly distinguished cellar and she found uses for it. This was fifty year-old French brandy and it was seized and consumed greedily.
“He was crude, ambitious and dangerous. He would have gotten you killed sooner or later, Uncle.” She added casually, “Involved you in some silly scheme or plot.”
He looked at her with a deliberate narrowing of the eyes, leaning forward a little. Alcohol always had made him aggressive; it was only one of his weaknesses. He might be seen as a tough man, someone to be feared, but Constanza had always known that she would be able to control him.
“Why was I spared, I wonder?”
“We might all wonder about that.”
“I can’t think of anything except...unless its because I belong to this family.” He was hopeless when he tried to be ironic or even subtle.
“We have peoples’ respect certainly. Since papa won the Emerald War I suppose there are those who also fear us.”
He insisted on carrying through his little charade. “Do you think they’ll ever catch them?”
She put up with it but was beginning to sound bored. “I have no idea. The federal authorities seem to be trying their best but, Uncle, do I need to remind you that this is Colombia. FARC killed twenty soldiers yesterday in an ambush. Look, I think you should try to put this unfortunate experience behind you and address the future.”
“Where is my future?”
“Beside me, Uncle. Close beside. The family has lots for you to do.”
He sighed and let his hands fall between his knees, his head and shoulders sinking like an old man’s. “I suppose I should be grateful.”
“You’ll learn to be. You have your life. In our remarkable country that can never be an assumption.”