Shadows Across America Read online

  “Aha, you’ve come to. I thought that I was going to have to throw a bucket of water over you. I’ve had a look around. I like it. You chose a good spot to get away from it all. That’s a big fucking help. You can scream as much as you like, and no one would ever hear you. But you know that already, don’t you? This is very you.”

  The Beast still couldn’t believe it. This mangy dog was talking as though he were alone, but that couldn’t be, unless he was a stinking peasant, the father of one of the girls he’d taken. But that was even more ridiculous. A peasant wouldn’t have tied him up like this. The Beast started to worry that this idiot had tied his little fingers too tight. It might damage his circulatory system, and he didn’t want to have that kind of trouble just because of an illiterate indio. On top of everything, the bastard came over with that careful walk of his and painfully tore the tape from his mouth. The Beast spit out the gag and cried out, more in anger than pain. The man looked at him in surprise.

  “It doesn’t take much to make you scream.”

  “Who are you with, old man?”

  “I’m on my own. Can’t you see that?”

  “I don’t believe you. Tell me what you want, and I’ll see what I can do, but first you need to loosen the ropes on my fingers. I might get a hematoma, and then I won’t be able to help you.”

  The bastard, who seemed to be getting dumber all the time, didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed a chair and sat down in front of him. “Huh, I thought I’d been quite gentle.”

  “Well, it’s time to stop fucking around. Let’s get this over with. If you behave, when I get out of here, I’ll leave you alone, but if you mess with me, when your friends set me free, I won’t forget you.”

  “Now, why wouldn’t you believe me?”

  The Beast looked into the man’s eyes. His own coldness and lack of empathy made him an excellent judge of when someone was lying to him. This asshole didn’t appear to be lying at all. “You’ve been working alone the whole time?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  The Beast realized that it was going to be easier to get out of there than he thought. Some dumbass idiot had taken him by surprise. It was his craziness that made him unpredictable. The first blow always counted twice, but now his advantage was over. If he’d seen him in time, things would be very different, and even so he didn’t think it would be too much trouble to get away. He just had to get him to release his little fingers, which were beginning to throb quite painfully.

  “Fine, I believe you. Now tell me what you want, and we’ll get this over with. When I’m set free, I’ll give you some money and forget everything. OK? I don’t have much—I’m just a humble truck driver—but please take everything I have. From what I can see, you need it more than I do.”

  “How much do you have?”

  “About a thousand dollars. A little less because I put gas in the truck.”

  “And where is it?”

  “First, you have to loosen my fingers. They’re hurting, and I can’t think like this,” he answered with the innocence of a child.

  “But you’re not in a position to ask for anything.”

  “If I help you, you need to help me.”

  He was met with a look of disbelief. “But you’re in no position to ask for anything—you’re tied up.”

  Now he was sure that this guy was demented. How did you deal with crazy people? On the one hand, he was reassured, but on the other he was a little worried. He knew that madmen sometimes did the unexpected. There was a chance that this man couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong. But he didn’t seem so bad. The Beast had to talk him into letting him go, and then he’d show him who the Beast really was.

  “Sure, I’m tied up, but it’s hurting me. You’re causing me pain, and I haven’t done anything to you. I want to help, but I can’t. Please, I’m begging you, from one Christian to another, untie my fingers, and I’ll tell you where to find the little I have.”

  “But I don’t care about your money.”

  Just as he’d suspected, the bastard really was crazy. He wondered how a nut like this could have found him. He was starting to get annoyed, but he knew that he had to stay calm and take control of the conversation. “Fine, fine. Then what do you want? I’ll help you in whatever way I can. Just loosen these fingers, and we’ll be even—then I’ll help you.”

  “I want you to tell me all about the girl you took to Brazil two months ago.”

  Finally, he was showing his cards. He must be the granddaddy of one of the packages, the last one from Central America, from the looks of things. Now everything really did make sense. He was relieved that he hadn’t lost his patience because now things were more complicated. The little old man had clearly been driven mad by the absence of his little piglet. That made him hard to handle but also gave the Beast more of a chance: all he had to do was convince the man of his innocence, and then, once he was set free, he’d show this fool some real danger.

  Andrés took a sip of water and gulped it down. He seemed to be having difficulty starting his story.

  “Oliver and I have known each other since we were children. I can remember when Michelle was born, not Beto because I’d left home by then, but not when I met Oliver. It was too long ago. He was always with me, since we were babies, maybe. He was always like a big brother to me.”

  Ethan was growing impatient with Andrés’s peculiar narrative style and his tendency to stray from the point, but he knew that he had no choice but to be patient and listen to the story.

  “Yes, when we were kids, we were inseparable; we’d go down to the river and throw stones at the kids on the other side. Oliver was clever and strong, and he defended me when I was still little. You know about my father—he wasn’t a good man, and so we spent all day outside. We didn’t go to school much either, although Oliver’s father made him study and pass his exams. My father didn’t care. He hit me and drank like all the men, but Oliver’s father was strange. He was an old-fashioned man, a real one. He didn’t spend all day in bars like my father, although he did drink at home. He was a large, hairy, angry man. He wanted his children to get out of there and locked them in their rooms to make sure that they studied. He sat there with them even though he couldn’t read. And he used to share his hooch with them so they’d get used to it. He wanted them to grow into men as soon as possible. When one of them came home with good grades from the teacher, they all got drunk and celebrated. I used to go with them. He wanted me to drink too. He was scary when he was drunk. He was the kind of man who really put the fear of God into you. So I drank with them, and then my daddy would hit me and call me a pathetic drunk. But Oliver was already drinking with his father, and in that house they began before ten, every day. The mother didn’t say anything because God only gave her boys, and it was a house of men. His father knew how to raise them, not that he made it easy. Still, the brothers all grew up to be strong and brave. But like father, like son: they were also surly to a fault.”

  Ethan took advantage of this pause to try to speed things along, partly so Andrés would get to the point and partly because he was unsettled by these raw, painful memories. “I’m very sorry to hear all this, but you don’t need to share it with me. I know that Suarez—”

  “Forgive me, Don Ethan. I know that I can’t talk as well as you educated men. I’m sorry if you find these stories boring, but it’s very important, so important . . .”

  “Fine, go on.”

  “Oliver suffered the most. He wasn’t a good student. He was strong and brave like his father. He made himself the boss of all the kids in the street, and they all, even the older ones, obeyed him, but his father . . . whenever he heard that he’d skipped classes . . . he went to see the teacher every week to check up on him. Every Friday, he waited at home to punish Oliver for skipping school, and every Friday Oliver knew what awaited him. He spent Saturday and Sunday in bed; that was how badly the man beat him. Then he’d give him alcohol to help him through it. The mother cared f
or him as best she could and cried every time the father took off his belt. The brothers studied hard when they saw what happened to Oliver, but he didn’t—he studied less and less, and then he had to face the brute and his punishments. When they let him go on Monday, he wouldn’t go to school; he’d go down to the river to fight the kids on the other side. He barely felt their punches: no one could hit as hard as his daddy. But you won’t believe what happened next. Doña Asunción, our teacher, began to lie to his daddy to protect him, because she was genuinely worried that he’d end up killing the boy: ‘One of these days, he’ll go too far,’ she used to say. Doña Asunción was a saint.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, but why didn’t the teacher go to the police?” Ethan asked, surprised how the story had drawn him in. “I know that things were hard. It’s not as though you could go to social services, but the police . . .”

  “That was how the world was, Don Ethan. You might not understand, but that was how things were,” Andrés said, clearly saddened by this reality. “Doña Asunción knew that I was Oliver’s best friend, and she asked me to persuade him to go see her after school. That woman, who was the most generous soul I have ever come across on the face of the earth, convinced Oliver to go visit her. I went, too, after hours if he wanted, whenever he could, so she could teach him. She’d taken pity on him. Oliver, who only agreed to go if I went with him, started to learn little by little. As you know, he’s very intelligent, very bright, and he soon caught on. So she’d lie to his father about how often his son went to school, and then he’d pass his exams, and I swear by everything that’s sacred he passed when a lot of others didn’t because Oliver learned everything so quickly. He even did homework and brought it to the teacher, and his daddy was more relaxed at home, although he never fully trusted his son. Because they were so much alike—he knew exactly what the boy was capable of. He never stopped checking up on him, but he wasn’t as violent as before.

  “So we got through primary school, and as you know, halfway through high school I set out for the States, and they sent me back. I worked for a few years and did everything I could to save up enough to return. During those years, because I didn’t want to go back to my mother and Beto’s father, I lived with Oliver. He took me in. He lived with one girl after another and rented an apartment with money he made here and there, on the street mostly. But he’d got a taste for learning, and he was always asking questions. That was around the time he started really thinking about becoming a policeman. I stayed with him, but he wouldn’t let me pay him any rent unless he needed it. He always had his nose in a book. He used to say that he owed his education to Doña Asunción. His daddy was a bastard, but the good woman had saved him. But we do terrible things when we stray from the path of the Lord. That pure soul, that generous woman who had all the grace of our Savior, was murdered by her own husband when she was an old woman.

  “I was getting ready to leave again. Oliver, meanwhile, had avoided getting into drugs but knew lots of people on the street and also used to hang out at the policemen’s bar. The police knew him and told him to get ready for the exam because of course he was going to pass, and they needed men like him. So he went for it. After he’d joined the force, some people called him a traitor, a sellout. They said he’d be buried upright, but he didn’t care. So he became a policeman, and his career went well, even though he continued to drink. Like his daddy, he drank more at home than anywhere else, although he went to the bar with his colleagues of course. I left the country again, and he got married, and they had their first child, Tavo, then another who died very young, followed by another, a girl: Patricia, the apple of her father’s eye. He loved that girl so much. She was everything to him, and he did everything he could for her. She was lovely, pretty, and well behaved. A delight. To cut a long story short, there was a five-year gap between Tavo and Patricia, and in that time I’d married too and was named her godfather. We’d always stayed in touch, writing to each other and sending Christmas cards, asking after each other’s families. He kept me up to date with things at home, and I told him about the people who’d left. He even helped Michelle to come to the US. He paid for her ticket, saying she could pay him back later. And the same went for his children. I would have gladly taken them in, in the States and raised them along with mine. I would have cared for them as though they were my own. My wife knew that and accepted it.”

  “But they never went,” Ethan said. “You would’ve mentioned them to me.”

  “And that is the real tragedy of Oliver’s life. His children.”

  The Beast examined his adversary and identified his weak spot. He was a good man: arrogant and confused but generous. He had no idea what he’d gotten himself into, and that made him easy to manipulate. The first thing the Beast had learned on his path to becoming who he was now was how to ape the behavior of good people to get them to trust him. No one could blame him; that was just how predators learned to feed themselves. He’d draw him in, fool him. Good people’s weakness was their innocence.

  “I want you to tell me everything you know about the girl you took to Brazil two months ago.”

  “Oh, Jesus, that’s awful. I don’t know who you’re looking for, but you’re way off. I don’t know what lies you’ve been told, but I’ve never been involved in anything like that. You have the wrong man. But I’ll help you to find him! You hear? If you let me go, I’ll show you my passport, and you’ll see that I have never in my life been to Brazil, only Colombia. Colombia’s all I need. This beautiful country is very large.”

  “But you’re not Colombian.”

  “I’ve lived here for many years. I left my home country in search of an opportunity in this beautiful land, and they welcomed me. I haven’t left since then except to visit my family. You don’t know how much I miss them, from the bottom of my heart. I imagine that the girl you’re talking about is a part of your family, and if you let me go, I’ll try to help you. We’ll both go looking for the scoundrel, especially if he’s a truck driver like me. I know all of them around here. We’ll find him in a second.”

  “Tell me about the girl.”

  “But I swear on the blessed Virgin . . . listen: look me in the eye. Look at me, for the love of our Lord on the cross. I swear on my mother’s life, and I love her more than anything. I swear by the sacred heart of the Virgin that I have no idea what you’re talking about . . . I’ll do everything I can to help you because I can see that you’re a good man, and I want to do something to help. If something like that happened to my family, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  To the Beast’s exasperation, the idiot’s only answer was a rude yawn. A yawn that he would make him pay for when the time came. The moron stretched before repeating with exaggerated irritation.

  “Look, I know I’ve got the right man. Just to make things clear, so we don’t waste any more time, your friend Johanna has been dead for over a week. I wrote the last emails you received from her.”

  Now the Beast was truly stunned. He blinked a couple of times before answering. “Wh-who? You’re making a huge mistake. I don’t know anyone called Johanna—I d-don’t . . . I don’t know what I can say to convince you, but really, I promise you that you’re wrong. If you let me go, I assure you that I’ll help you with everything you need.”

  Suarez, moving exceedingly slowly, took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and read out the last few emails, which hit the Beast like a slap to the face.

  “I swear to you by God I don’t understand what’s going on. Are those letters?”

  “They’re your emails. You sent them to me—you should recognize them.”

  “But I don’t have a computer; check if you like. Look everywhere. I don’t know how to use them—I don’t have any of that stuff. You’ve made a mistake, do you see? Let me tell you something that’ll help us both: I understand. I’ve put myself in your shoes, and I know that you’re doing this for the right reasons, but you’re wrong, and it’s easy for me to prove that to y
ou. Look around. Search the house—search everywhere. You won’t find any computers or your granddaughter or anything.”

  Suarez replied with a sigh of annoyance. “Listen, we’re going in circles. Let me make it easy for you. Of course I’m going to let you go, and then I’ll leave, and you’ll never see me again, but you have to tell me everything you know about the girl. She’s not my granddaughter. I’ve been paid to find her.”

  “They’re paying you? So you’re a professional. Well then, you’ll know by now that I’m just a humble driver trying to live his life without stepping on anyone’s toes.”