January Justice (41 page)

I took the chili out of the microwave and leaned against the counter, eating it while she got the dishes squared away. It would have been a cozy little domestic scene, except for all the secrets we were hiding from each other.

With her back to me, she said, “They told me about the bomb.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It happened before we met.”

“You should have told me.”

“I don’t see why.”

She dried a glass. “They said it was probably the same men who tried to kill you in the mountains.”

“That’s possible.”

“Teru thinks it could be the same men who broke into my apartment.”

I said nothing.

She turned to face me across the kitchen. “Teru thinks it’s all part of the same thing. He says they would have killed me the way they tried to kill you.”

“So he’s convinced you they weren’t rapists after all?”

Olivia looked down. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest and clutched her elbows close. She looked smaller somehow, and clearly frightened.

I said, “They’d have to get through me to hurt you, Olivia. And I can be very hard to kill when I want to be.”

“When you want to be? What does that mean?”

The best chance of getting her to come clean to go beyond just telling her I knew her secret. Trust inspires trust. I had to trust her with as much of my own secret as I could.

I said, “Things have been hard for me. I’m good in a firefight and I’m good hand-to-hand, but sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the effort.”

“You’re not talking about those two men.”

“No.”

“You’re talking about the reason why you and I can’t be together.”

I nodded. “You told me once I was brokenhearted, and you’re right. There was a woman. She gone forever, and I feel awful all the time. The pain is unrelenting, and it’s very tempting to give in, to allow myself to go crazy, or to allow someone to kill me.”

She crossed the kitchen to stand in front of me. She took my hand in hers. “I wish I could do more than say I’m sorry.”

“You can. But not the way you mean. Tell me what those men want. Let me help you. Give me something I can fight for.”

“I…I want to do that, Malcolm. I want to trust you. I know I need help. I mean, obviously, I do need help. And I feel alone all the time. I’m so tired of feeling alone. But there are things I…I just…it’s just very hard to know what I should do.”

I drew in a deep breath. I let it out and said, “I know who you are, Olivia. I know you’re Alejandra’s daughter.”

She removed her hand from mine.

I said, “I went to Guatemala. I met your father. I know how he’s living, and I know he doesn’t have to live that way. He has money in the bank, and it’s the same amount of money your mother took as ransom for Doña Elena. It’s obvious that’s where he got it, and it’s obvious he’s a good man, because he won’t spend it.”

“No,” she said, crossing her arms back over her chest. “I sent him most of that money. Doña Elena is very generous with my salary, and I don’t spend much on myself. I’ve been sending him money every month.”

“Okay. Good. You’re opening up a little. Now tell me the rest.”

She stared at me. She looked down at the floor. “All right.”

44

We went into the living room.
I settled onto the sofa, thinking she would want to sit beside me, but she chose the upholstered chair. There was no need for me to ask her questions. Once she started talking, it poured out like a flood over a broken dam.

“I was a senior at Belmont High School in LA when my mother kidnapped Doña Elena. My father came and took me out of class that day, and we went to the apartment and watched it on the television set. Even when they showed the video of my mother standing behind Doña Elena with the gun, Papa wouldn’t believe it. I remember he kept saying ‘No’ over and over to the television, and a couple of times, he said, ‘That’s not her,’ but anyone could that see it was her.

“When the police came, they took Papa into a bedroom and left me out in the living room. They asked me all kinds of things about my mother. Did she talk about politics a lot? Did she talk about her job? What did she say about Doña Elena and Arturo Toledo? Was she angry with them for some reason? Did my parents have some special need for money? Was I sick? Was my father or my mother sick? The questions went on and on. They asked me where I was born and when, and I knew they were asking that because they wanted to know if I was an American citizen. I remember my father started shouting in the next room, telling them to get out of his house. Papa made them leave, and I was proud of him for that, but I was also scared. I knew they would make my parents leave the country, no matter what else happened.

“After the murder, all those videos and what my mother did to Toledo, Papa still wouldn’t believe it. He never once admitted that my mother had gone crazy. When Doña Elena told the police she heard my mother talking to some men at that place where they held her, Papa said the URNG must have forced my mother to do it. Papa wouldn’t go to work. He said he had to be there when she came home. He sat in the living room for weeks and waited. He checked the telephone sometimes. He picked it up and listened to make sure there was a dial tone. But she never called and she never came. My mother was done with us. The only ones who came were immigration.

“Papa was a wreck. When we got to Guatemala, his sister and her husband took us in at first, and then we moved to an apartment. The one where he is now. He didn’t try to find work. He hardly ever went outside. He just sat there by the phone all day, waiting for a call. Then he started drinking.

“He had some money saved, I guess, because he said I had to go to college. He said when my mother came home, she would be angry with him if he let me stay there. They had always planned for me to get a college education, like he did. Papa’s a civil engineer. Or he was. But he wouldn’t let me go to school in America. He hates America now. He made plans to send me to a university in Valencia.”

I interrupted her. “That’s where you met the Formula One racing team?”

“Yes. But before I went to Spain, I had a lot of time to think about what my mother had done. My father told me about Arturo Toledo, how he had been the mayor of Cobán during the bad time in Guatemala, how he had made a lot of people disappear and gotten rich from bribes and ransoms. My father told me how Toledo used to go to families after their loved ones had been disappeared. Toledo promised to return them if their families gave him enough money. Papa said Toledo did that to my mother’s family. After my grandfather was disappeared, Toledo took all of my grandmother’s money and promised to return my grandfather, but he never did.

“I thought a lot about how that would have made me feel if someone had done that to my father. I began to understand what my mother did. It was wrong, I know, but it was understandable. I tried to say that to Papa, but he accused me of betraying her, simply because I had faced the fact of what she did. He said she would never choose to leave us. Not for revenge, and certainly not for money. He said she had only taken the job with Toledo to try to find a way to expose him. She would never do the things to him they said she had done. She was innocent of everything. She was only waiting until it was safe to come back to us, and then she would explain what really happened, and I would be sorry I had ever believed that she was capable of such horrible things.”

Olivia shook her head. “You saw how he is. It’s heartbreaking to be with him, to watch him go on pretending. God forgive me, I was glad to go away to Spain.

“I spent the first year over there taking general-studies courses. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Then I met those guys on the racing team and spent a lot of my spare time playing around with cars. I thought about dropping out and doing that full time, but they were real good guys. They said they’d only hire me if I finished school. So I entered the mechanical-engineering program, because that would be most helpful with the team.

“Then as time went by, I began to think more carefully about what my mother had done, and I realized something wasn’t right. If she really wanted revenge on Arturo Toledo for what he did to our family, why bother kidnapping Doña Elena? Why not take Toledo directly? And she would never have believed that Toledo had only two hundred thousand dollars, so why demand so little?

“I decided my mother must have kidnapped Doña Elena because she couldn’t get to Toledo. He was always surrounded by armed bodyguards. He called them his ‘friends,’ but they were bodyguards. So my mother took his wife instead. And then she asked for such a small amount to get him to bring the money to her personally. Toledo always claimed he had taken nothing from the people, so if my mother had demanded more, he might have simply claimed he didn’t have it. She knew he would have certainly allowed Doña Elena to be murdered before he put his millions at risk. But she also knew his pride was monumental. So she trapped him. With the police there and the videos released to the press, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t have a sum as small as two hundred thousand dollars. When she made that demand, she left him no choice. He had to bring the money to her or else allow himself to look like a heartless coward, which was something he would never do.”

I interrupted her. “You think the plan all along was to get him alone so she could kill him?”

“No no no! That must have been an accident. My mother’s not a killer. She wanted to get him away from his bodyguards so she could make him give her access to wherever he had hidden all that money. An offshore account, probably.”

I leaned back, considering Olivia. I didn’t believe for a second that Toledo’s death had been an accident, but if that was what she had to tell herself, it seemed unnecessary to debate the point. Instead I said, “You think she got away with millions.”

“I do, yes.”

“Interesting. It would explain how she’s been able to elude the law for all these years.”

She nodded. “Living on the run is much easier with money.”

“It also explains your international banking degree.”

“Yes. When I realized what my mother had done, I decided to change my major from mechanical engineering to business management with a concentration in international banking.”

I said, “You planned to find your mother by finding the money.”

“At first I didn’t have such a clear-cut plan. I only wanted to understand how people move large amounts of money around, and how they hide it from governments. My plan came later, after I graduated. I went back to Guatemala to be close to Papa, but he was just the same. That’s when I realized the only way he’ll ever get over this is if I bring my mother home, or else prove to him once and for all that she’s never coming back.”

I said, “So you came back here to find your mother. You came back for your father’s sake. To find a way to save him.”

“He’s dying, little by little. I had to do something. I decided to try to get close to the Guatemalan community here, since this was where she was last seen. I have dual citizenship, so I came back with my American passport and moved into a hotel in Pico-Union, hoping somebody would know where she was. But I couldn’t predict how my mother would react if she heard I was looking for her. It had been five years already at that time, and she hadn’t made one attempt to get in touch. If she heard I was back and looking for her, she might just go deeper into hiding. So I found a guy and bought a driver’s license and a social-security card in the name of Soto, hoping my mother wouldn’t realize who I was until I at least had a chance to talk to her.”

I said, “She’s famous in Pico-Union.”

“I know. They call her La Alejandra. Their defender. To tell you the truth, I was surprised when I came back and found out she’s been doing good things for the community all this time. I think I thought… I hoped…” Olivia looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap. I saw a tear escape her eye and trace its way along her cheek. “Actually, I was disappointed she’s alive. It means she doesn’t want to come back to us. Do you think God will forgive me for that?”

“You’d rather be orphaned than deliberately abandoned. If I can understand that, I’m pretty sure God does.”

“I hope so. It feels good to finally admit it to someone. I’m tired of thinking about this all the time and never being able to talk about it.” She wiped her eyes. “I’m so tired of being ashamed of her. I know that’s probably hard to understand.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not hard.”

She looked at me.

I said, “My father is in prison for murdering my mother.”

“Oh, Malcolm.”

“Nobody should have to face a thing like that alone.”

“Do you think…I mean, do you think you could hold me?”

I patted the sofa cushion at my side. “Come on.”

She moved over from the chair, sat down, and leaned against me. I put my arm around her shoulders. I thought about her story. Except for the part about Toledo’s death being an accident, I was pretty sure most of it was true. But I was also pretty sure she had gotten one other thing wrong, and that one thing changed it all.

She took in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “There’s more I ought to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“I got a part-time job working as a clerk for an escrow service, and I moved into a cheap one-room apartment in Pico-Union and spent as much time as I could at churches and the library and some of the neighborhood bodegas, telling people I wanted to meet La Alejandra. I volunteered at La Sociedad Guatemalteca Benevolencia a lot, talking to the old folks.