Days of the Dead

It was almost dark now, and maybe the air was cooler, but the thought of trying to open the window was too daunting. Victoria could do it when she came back. If she came back.

Where the hell had she got to? Surely the obviousness of her condition would have saved her from being hassled in the street.

Placida thought about the baby growing inside her own belly. For the child’s sake she knew she should go back to Cartagena, where her family could certainly offer him or her a better start in life than she could manage on her own. She herself had been happy enough in the house in La Matuna, and the garden with its sweet-smelling hibiscus flowers. Maybe it had been different at the time but she found it hard to remember having a care in the world as she grew up, at least not until Rogelio came into her life, and her father’s discovery, not that much later, that she was no longer a virgin.

She laughed at the sheer absurdity of it all, and felt something shift inside her. It wasn’t a cramp like the others and for one delightful moment she thought it must be the baby’s first kick, but then a hot white light seemed to explode inside her, so sweet and so painful, and her heart seemed to thunder in her head. Her back arched once, and as she slumped back down on to the bed the darkness fell across her brain like a swirling black sheet.

A couple of blocks down Miami Beach’s Washington Avenue, Victoria Marín was looking in vain for a street sign. It had taken her much longer than she’d expected to find a drugstore and now, clasping the bag containing the new supply of laxatives, she couldn’t seem to find the hotel again. The pavements had seemed to suddenly fill up once the sun went down, and with all the non-stop motion and incessant noise she was finding it hard to think.

It had to be that way, she thought, staring hopefully down the neon-drenched street. That building in the distance might be the hotel. It looked white, and its shape seemed familiar.

As she started to walk a hand suddenly grasped her around the waist. ‘And how much would you be?’ the man asked in Cuban-accented Spanish, his hand working its way up her T-shirt towards a breast.

She stopped and looked at him, tears erupting from her eyes.

His leer gave way to surprise, and then the hand was gone, and she had a fleeting glimpse of his angry face as he turned away. Why was he angry? she wondered. What had she done?

Several people were staring at her, she realized. She hurried on, passing through the aromatic clouds which hung like advertising hoardings outside the restaurants. She was hungry, she thought, and there was only forty cents left in her pocket. They would have to ask the man for some money when he returned that evening.

She reached the building she thought she’d recognized, but even up close she couldn’t be sure – they all looked alike, and she hadn’t thought to check the name when she went out. But the fat woman behind the reception desk was familiar, and so was the look of contempt she threw Victoria’s way.

She thinks we’re whores, Victoria thought, and remembered, clear as if it had been yesterday, Marysa shouting at Placida that ‘whores got paid’, that the five of them were slaves, not whores. ‘Slaves have no choice!’ she had yelled, eyes glittering with angry tears. ‘None of this is our fault! None of it!’

It had been a comforting thought then, and it still was. Victoria started to climb the stairs, taking it slowly. Even though the pellets had all come safely through, her body still felt strange. It was like a country after invaders had been expelled, she thought – it would take time to get back to normal.

She remembered sifting through her shit for the condom-wrapped pellets and shuddered involuntarily, even as her mind thought how strange it was, getting upset about something like that after all they’d been through.

She stopped on a landing, and tried to remember how many flights she’d climbed. Through a window she could see a fat crescent moon setting behind the city, and she stood there for several minutes staring at it, lost in a thoughtless reverie.

Eventually she turned away, and again there were tears in her eyes – these days she couldn’t seem to stop crying. But at least she was on the right floor, and it took only a few moments to reach the door with the badly painted number 314.

‘I’m back,’ she said cheerfully as she walked in, and it was several seconds before her mind accepted the information her eyes were passing on. Placida was lying on her back, one leg raised, its foot twisted inwards. Her eyes were wide open and seemed full of surprise.

Her skin was still warm to the touch, but there was no doubting that she was dead. Victoria sank to her knees, her arms on the bed, like a child about to say her bedtime prayers. This time the tears didn’t come, just a soft mewling sound, which seemed to be seeping out of some crack in the night, but which she knew was emanating from her own mouth.

She would never know how long she stayed in that position. The next thing she remembered she was gathering her few things together and, on a sudden impulse, taking Placida’s passport as well as her own. She crossed her friend’s arms, closed her eyes and mouth, straightened her legs and covered her to the neck with one of the hotel’s grimy sheets. Then, after one long and despairing look back from the doorway, she fled the hotel.

Jesús Barbosa walked jauntily across Washington Avenue and through the front door of the Grant Hotel. He was carrying a calfskin briefcase and wearing an open-necked white shirt, freshly pressed cream chinos and a new pair of alligator-skin shoes. A large gold earring in the shape of a fire-breathing dragon hung from one ear, and the smile he offered the fat lady behind the desk reflected, literally, the fifteen hundred dollars he’d just spent on cosmetic dental work. In the words of the last detective who’d found reason to question him, he gave the impression of someone who’d seen one too many Miami Vice reruns.

He took the stairs two at a time, hoping that the bitch had finally got herself on the pot. He didn’t like making unnecessary journeys, not in heat like this. It was days like these which made him nostalgic for the mountains he had grown up in, where the heat was dry, there was always a breeze and in the evening the temperature dropped more than a couple of degrees. The trouble was, there was nothing to do in those mountains – no music, no cars, not enough women.

Barbosa reached the third floor and walked down the short corridor to the women’s room. Normally he would treat himself to the female mules, but this pair were too obviously pregnant for his taste, though he could see that they’d both been lookers before. He didn’t bother to knock on the door, just turned the handle and stepped inside to find the body laid out beneath its shroud.

‘Shit!’ he muttered angrily, ripping the sheet aside. ‘Shit,’ he repeated with rather less vehemence, and looked at his watch. He was meeting the gringa in an hour and a half, and he didn’t want to turn up smelling of corpses. But there was close to half a million dollars’ worth of heroin inside this one, and no puta was worth that. He sighed, unclipped the mobile from his belt and ordered some transport.

That done, he plucked the six-inch blade from its sheath on his right calf, ripped away the dead girl’s clothes, made a rough twelve-inch slit in her abdomen and began searching through her innards for the sixty-nine pellets of heroin that she had swallowed on Providencia.

Half an hour later he had recovered sixty-six, which, with the one that had burst, left two unaccounted for.

It was enough. He wrapped the mutilated body in a sheet, washed his hands and was just looking at his watch when the rap sounded on the door. In the corridor Miguel and Roberto were standing on either side of the small refrigerator, breathing heavily. Once they had carried it into the room he helped them cram the still-flexible body inside – in heat like this rigor mortis took a long time to kick in. Then he followed as they wheezed their way back down to the truck, which was parked in the alley beside the hotel.

They drove off, headed for one of the usual dumping spots in Dade County, and Barbosa, his briefcase now two pounds heavier, hailed a taxi. With any luck he still had time to store the merchandise and take a shower at his fitness centre before his assignation with the Pamela Anderson look-alike.

It was almost midnight when the cops found Victoria Marín on the moonlit beach. At first they assumed she was helplessly drunk, but there was no smell of liquor on her breath. They searched the canvas shopping bag for drugs but found only two Colombian passports and a few cosmetics. She apparently had no money.

Throughout this process Victoria refused to speak, and it was only by exercising enormous will-power that she refrained from screaming when one of the cops took her arm to lead her to the car.

She couldn’t stop herself from crying. She didn’t think she ever would.

2 (#uc61cd569-5e3b-5802-92b3-e952d5eb3a22)

The road arrowed into the distance across the flat Pampas countryside. Farmland stretched away to either side, the farms themselves mostly pinpoints of light on the low horizon. In the vast sky a full moon was playing hide-and-seek with an armada of clouds.

They couldn’t be much more than forty kilometres from the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Jamie Docherty reckoned, and soon he would be able to see a red glow in the sky above the highway. He remembered nights as a young man driving back down from Loch Lomond to Glasgow – a close friend had always insisted that the glow was nature’s way of warning people that cities were bad for their souls.

Docherty took a glance in the rear-view mirror. Both nine-year-old Marie and seven-year-old Ricardo were fast asleep, which wasn’t exactly surprising. Between them, he and Isabel had driven nearly eight hundred kilometres that day, and over four hundred and fifty the day before. The two children had certainly started out hyperactive, but they just hadn’t been able to stay the course.

Beside him Isabel was also more than half asleep. She was in her mid-forties, a couple of years younger than he was, but she seemed just as beautiful as the day they had met, more than fifteen years ago.

Docherty smiled to himself as he remembered the first time he’d seen her, striding in through the doors of a hotel in the southern Argentinian town of Rio Gallegos. It had been at the height of the Falklands War – in the immediate aftermath of the landing at San Carlos – and Docherty had been leading one of two four-man SAS patrols which had been secretly airlifted on to the Argentinian mainland for the purpose of observing enemy activity at the Rio Gallegos and Rio Grande airfields. Having done everything which was required of it, his patrol had been on the point of heading for the Chilean hills when a complication arose. Two members of the other patrol had been captured, and there were fears that they would be tortured into revealing the name of MI6’s only agent in the area, an Argentinian woman based in Rio Gallegos. So someone had to warn her of the danger.

Docherty had taken the task upon himself, and changed his life in the process. The two of them had ended up escaping together across the mountains and falling in love along the way.

Now here they both were, driving towards Buenos Aires on a warm winter evening. It wasn’t the first time they had been across the Andes since setting up home in Chile two years before, but it still felt vaguely akin to putting their heads in the jaws of a lion. Of course, as far as the Argentinian authorities were concerned, Docherty was just a retired English soldier who happened to be married to an Argentinian national. And though his wife had once been exiled for involvement in terrorist activities, that had been long ago, in the time of the ‘Dirty War’, which nearly everyone but the still-active ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’ was so keen to put behind them. No one in authority had any inkling that husband and wife had met on Argentinian soil, midway through a military action which had probably helped to swing the Falklands War decisively in Britain’s favour.

After Docherty’s retirement from the Army they could even have settled in Argentina if they had wanted, but neither of them had. There were too many painful memories for Isabel, and Docherty preferred Chile. There wasn’t much to choose between the behaviour of the two armies in recent decades, but he found the people west of the Andes more friendly – more Celtic in spirit than the Anglo-German-oriented Argentinians. The climate was better too, and the mountains, lakes and islands of the south were like Scotland revisited.

Isabel still had friends and relations in her homeland. Her father had died during her exile in England, and her mother had cut all ties, but there were a couple of her father’s sisters with whom she still kept in touch and one cousin to whom she had always been close. Rosa lived with her academic husband and three children in a large, rambling house in Recoleta, and it was she who had invited them to the capital. Just for a holiday, she had said, but the two women had known each other a long time and Isabel suspected an ulterior motive. She had told Docherty as much, but neither of them had any idea what it might be.

Maybe she wanted Isabel’s help with her elder daughter, who seemed to have inherited her wider family’s interest in left-wing politics. The country might be run by a president more interested in cars and women than politics, but the same bastards as always lurked in the shadows.

It could be anything, Docherty thought, as a Mendoza bus blared by in the opposite direction. A holiday was a holiday, and any excuse to take time away from the damn word processor and his wretched memoirs was more than welcome. He’d been working on them on and off for over a year, and on a more or less nine-to-five basis for several months, but he didn’t have much more to show for his efforts than a huge pile of handwritten notes. When he tried actually writing it never seemed to come out the way he intended, leaving him to mutter ‘you had to be there’ at the annoyingly unresponsive screen. And when he had finally managed to put together a coherent chapter on the Bosnian business his publishers in London had come back with a long list of suggestions for alterations, most of which seemed designed to either obviate the risk of Her Majesty’s Government taking exception to Docherty’s version of events or to encourage Jean-Claude Van Damme to accept the movie part.

Docherty was well aware that a Van Damme movie might make him rich, but the thought of faking his own life story didn’t sit too well. If he was going to write the damn thing, he wanted it to tell the truth. He wanted his children to see him as a man who knew he had lived and worked on a moral tightrope, not as some glib action hero pumped up with either Hollywood cynicism or gung-ho fascism. A month had passed since Docherty and Isabel had seen Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning Braveheart, and he still felt angry about how bad it was.

Well, at least he didn’t have to think about any of that for another week. And the sky was growing red above the highway ahead. He leant over to nudge his wife awake, as she’d asked him to. ‘Not far now,’ he said.

Isabel yawned and reached for the tube of mints on the dashboard. ‘I wonder what Rosa really wants,’ she murmured.

In the Colombian city of Cartagena it was almost five-thirty in the afternoon and the lengthening shadows were throwing the crenellated walls of the old fortifications into dramatic relief. Carmen Salcedo, who had just finished her spiel on the era of piratical sackings and let her tour party loose to explore the walls on their own, watched the mostly American tourists happily ambling away, camcorders whirring, cameras poised.

It was certainly a beautiful evening. She stood leaning against one of the abutments, enjoying the blues of sea and sky, the gold-flecked waves and the buildings of the old city glowing in the evening sun. For all its problems – which ranged from drug traffickers through political corruption to air pollution – Cartagena was still a magical city.

Carmen had lived there for all of her twenty-six years. Her parents still lived in the hills behind the city, but she now shared a two-bedroom flat with Pinar, a fellow tour guide. They were going to the cinema that evening, she remembered, and looked at her watch. She should have given her charges twenty minutes, not half an hour.

But it was too late to worry about that now, and so far this group had proved more reliable than most. She walked back across to the bus and found Mariano squinting at a sex comic which he was holding only a few inches away from his eyes.

‘Getting short-sighted?’ she asked sweetly, making him almost jump out of his seat.