Three Minutes Page 21

  Dusk fell slowly. Few passing vehicles, few villages. When Hoffmann rolled down the side window, silence forced itself in in the same way the heat forced itself out a few hours ago. He turned on the radio. La FM Bogotá 94.9. An angry discussion between two male politicians who refused to listen to each other, while ignoring whatever the female host had to say completely. W Radio 99.9. More talk of nothing, but calmly, as if the speakers actually cared if what they said became meaningless, if no one listened.

  He turned it off. Alone with El Mestizo’s regular breaths in compact darkness. Anxiety that could not be rationalized no matter how much Piet tried. The inflection from last night had returned. And now he was asleep beside him. It was connected, he knew it, but didn’t know how. Not yet.

  Mile after mile. Evening became night. And the passenger woke up outside of Puerto Triunfo, where Route 45 turned into Route 60. With a start. Rubbing his eyes like a child. Asked, almost aggressively. “Where the hell are we?” Used to being on his guard. But suddenly he wasn’t.

  “We just passed La Esperanza.”

  The paper cup of coffee stood untouched in the plastic cupholder, and El Mestizo’s thick braid rocked as he leaned against the headrest emptying out the now cold liquid, carefully crumpling it. He was trying to make sense of how his constant watchfulness had abandoned him. How he’d temporarily become someone else, someone who depended on someone else. Trapped in a car. And it made him furious, that insistent anger pounding against his temples as it did sometimes. He felt ashamed. For exposing himself.

  “Stop.”

  “Here?”

  “Stop, damn it!”

  A dark, deserted road. More asphalt, more arid meadows.

  “I’ll drive from here.” El Mestizo threw the car door open and pushed his heavy body out of the seat, long steps around the front of the vehicle and forceful movements as he pointed his finger at Hoffmann’s face. “Now!”

  A man who stood there challenging without knowing who he was pointing at. He provoked, felt it his right to offend, to marginalize. In another time, Hoffmann would have acted reflexively, responded with violence. Not anymore. Nine years undercover for the Swedish police—half his adult life as a criminal and an outlaw in the inner circles of organized crime—had forced him to develop impulse control, taught him to identify his goal, his purpose, and then make every action justify it.

  That’s why he didn’t grab that finger and break it. He didn’t pull his knife and stick it into the space between the third and fourth ribs. He kept his mouth shut. He stood up, nodded to the man he was here to protect and simultaneously betray, and walked obediently in the opposite direction around the car while a warm breeze fanned his sweaty back.

  “Seat belt.” El Mestizo had turned the ignition key and waited while Hoffmann buckled up and the infernal beeping stopped. His strong hands clutched the steering wheel as he pressed his foot on the gas, driving fast, too fast. He had exposed himself, let someone get close, an individual who could have overpowered him at any time while he slept, handed him over to the police, the military, the paramilitary. Killed him.

  El Mestizo accelerated faster, faster. The car swayed turbulently as he rolled down the window and the air that flowed in took his breath. Trusting someone like this wasn’t him. To trust was to risk. Risk betrayal.

  “In the jungle no one can hear you cry.” El Mestizo continued to speak to nobody at all. “My grandfather used to say that. ‘In the jungle no one can hear you cry, so act like a man. Grab yourself down there, Johnny. Grab it! You have two balls, right?’ It was Grandpa who took me to a brothel when I was ten.”

  It wasn’t much of a conversation. They didn’t even look at each other.

  “You have kids, Peter.”

  The car swayed again, even more violently, as Sánchez, without warning and with a movement so imprinted it had become mechanical, pulled the revolver out of his holster.

  “Two of them. You’re a father. So you understand.”

  A single hand on the steering wheel as he raised the gun to his own forehead, brought his thumb against the hammer and pulled it back until he heard the click, pressed the metal muzzle on his fragile skin.

  “A father, so you understand that before I had children, hell, I didn’t even respect my own life! I could sit in a bar and play Russian roulette, put in two bullets and spin it like this and pull the trigger. Bang! Bang! And when we offed some motherfucker who hadn’t paid, I never thought there was any time for talking, didn’t give anybody a damn choice. I was the one who said, Why don’t we shoot his cunt of a wife or fucking kid right here in front of him, just so he understands. Nowadays, I give them a choice, a warning. But back then, if they didn’t . . . bang bang, Peter!”

  The car sped out of control while those pretend shots rang out. He put the gun back in his holster. And pulled out a wad of green hundred-dollar bills from his jacket pocket, squeezed the sturdy rubber band that held it together.

  “Dólares!” He waved it in front of himself, in front of the passenger seat. “It’s all about money! Money, my dólares, is power, Peter! Money and violence . . . potencia!”

  The road had been climbing steeply, now it sloped gently downward, but still at a high altitude, heavy breathing.

  “Buy my gun permit. Bribe my policemen and soldiers and politicians. Know I can shoot a guy and pay four thousand dollars and go free.”

  The barrel against his forehead. The wad through the air. He didn’t say anything else. Not until after passing the Medellín suburbs, approaching the city center, the end of the journey.

  “Sure as hell, the goddamn money is everything.” But now he spoke neither loudly or aggressively. His voice was soft, whispering, it was hard to hear what he said, even in the seat next to him. “You get it?”

  Hoffmann, who wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly—that the man who was at war with the whole world, who singlehandedly ensured hundreds of people were executed for some drug territory, had really said that—turned for the first time in a thousand-kilometer drive toward his employer, tried to catch his eyes. But the moment had passed. It had belonged to anxiety and sleep and was unlike anything else El Mestizo had ever said or done.

  They drove through a city about twice the size of Stockholm—Hoffmann’s home, which he missed every day—through streets that began in poverty and ended in wealth, where slums rubbed shoulders with abundance. A city he preferred to avoid. It had one of the world’s highest murder rates. An area where many of his fellow Swedes or Scandinavians had been taken hostage in order to be used as payment when profits from the cocaine weren’t enough. Medellín. This is where it all began, where it took shape. The original turf war. To own this place, the right to sell drugs right here.

  The cartels in Cali, where he and his family now lived, were in a war with the cartels in Medellín. In the beginning, in that original turf war, it seemed to have been easier then. Clearer. Over time, it got messy. Now fifteen different groups fought one another, just here. The war over drug turf had spread like a disease, an epidemic, which broke out and broke down and found life in every part of the world, in every country and every town, big or small.

  They parked by a square and stepped straight into a roiling crowd of people. Commerce in endless uneven rows of stands, then on into a mall, stacks of fresh fruit and vegetables, the smell of food cooking in small restaurants jostling with the man who made shiny jewelry and the woman who braided belts with fabric she dyed overnight. Hoffmann remembered visiting the Kivik Market in southern Sweden as a child, and the Haymarket in central Stockholm as an adult, the feeling of abundance, of the rituals of negotiating a price until both parties were satisfied but neither would admit it. But those markets had been neither so shabby, nor so cramped—every step meant another elbow in his side, another sweaty neck to stare into.

  Mainly he was struck by the stench, which got worse the farther in they went. Fish that had probably been out too long. He’d been hungry when they arrived—that was gone now.


  A hand pulled on his left arm, and he spun around. An older man wanted to sell him soft leather wallets. When he didn’t dismiss him quickly enough, a woman who could have been the old man’s wife pulled at his other arm and held out small baskets braided from bark. He tore himself loose and hurried as fast as possible through the narrow aisles, trying to keep watch over his employer. And then it came to an end.

  When they had passed the very last stands, cauliflower and cabbage on one side and some kind of meat on the other, they arrived at a deserted asphalt surface. Wooden planks joined together into makeshift tables and chairs arranged on it. And twelve boys sitting there. The youngest were the same age as his own son, nine, maybe ten, and the oldest slightly older, thirteen, not more than fourteen. They had been waiting there without doing anything at all. Until all of them, at the same time, noticed El Mestizo.

  The boys stood up, stretched, and started walking toward him. A couple of them, the older ones, carried handguns openly tucked into their pants, and Hoffmann rushed toward them while pulling his own from his shoulder holster. Until El Mestizo turned around and swept his arm in the air, the big braid swung as he motioned to both his bodyguard and the flock of boys to stop. They did. Hoffmann had five steps to go, the boys were in front of their wooden benches.

  They stood there, stock-still, trying to look like adults. Skinny, a little pimply, some with a few solitary hairs like wilted stalks on their upper lips. They tried to catch El Mestizo’s eyes, hoping to be chosen. Then he nodded, pointed to one who’d been sitting on the middle bench, a short boy with large round earrings of which he seemed proud—he’d carefully arranged his long hair behind his ears so as not to obscure them. He wore a black, slightly too big T-shirt and a worn pair of jeans. He was maybe twelve years old. Prepubescent, a voice with a trace of incipient change. A boy who looked like any other boy. Until he started moving. His way of walking, greeting, throwing his head back as he laughed—he moved and carried himself with a kind of straightforwardness, not cockiness, not calculated for position among his competitors. He didn’t need to, his presence was commanding, and unlike any other twelve-year-old. And when he took the bundle El Mestizo held out, the towel with gun and bullets, he grabbed it without fear, but with the respect weapons deserve, the same straightforwardness, like someone who had received bundles like this many times before.

  “Calle 3S. Close to Carrera 52. Staircase 17. Fourth floor. Rodriguez on the door.”

  The twelve-year-old listened attentively, no pen, no notebook, information that should be memorized, never able to be part of the chain of circumstantial evidence of an investigator or family member.

  “He’s got gray, thinning hair. A pair of glasses with red frames that hang down on a cord across his chest. Seventy-six years old. Luis Rodriguez, that’s his name. It’s important that you find that out. His name. Before.”

  No questions. No hesitation. Straight, confident with the bundle that filled his twelve-year-old arms—the mission to kill a father who, when they visited, protected his adult son in a way that moved Hoffmann. The old man had even threatened El Mestizo in his son’s absence.

  “And two bullets. In the clip.”

  The boy smiled, white and well-kept teeth. “I know. One in the chest. One in the forehead.”

  A contagious smile when he looked at Hoffmann for the first time and then back at El Mestizo. A thin arm with a firm hand, they greeted.

  “Camilo. Sicario. Twenty-four times. I have worked with your friend for three years now.” He held on for a long time and looked Piet in the eyes, straight into him. Eyes Hoffmann had met before. In Swedish prisons when serving time there. Bottomless eyes that have killed, that are prepared to kill again, where nothing lands, just falls into that endlessness.

  “No dar papaya. Okay?” El Mestizo coaxed two hundred-dollar bills from the wad with the rubber band.

  The little one smiled again, no unnecessary risks, he promised that every time. Then he left, the small, light body passed by fruit stands and restaurants and wandering people, the same direction Hoffmann himself and the man he was supposed to protect had just come from and would soon return to. He watched the twelve-year-old walk straight ahead through the crowd, without stepping aside one single time. But those he passed did.

  “You know, Peter, nowadays he’s one of the veterans—I can pay him before his mission. He does the job and he returns the gun. Uses two bullets every time. He did so from the first time I hired him.”

  They left the asphalt and just as the narrow aisle narrowed even further, veering sharply to the right, Hoffmann turned around, looked back at the boys still sitting, waiting, hoping the next mission would be theirs. They climbed in the car, El Mestizo behind the wheel again.

  “We have one more errand.”

  Hoffmann glanced at the clock. He was down to barely twenty-four hours until the meeting with Wilson.

  “Since we’re in the area. While we wait for the gun. Clínica Medellín Carrera 7—not far from here.”

  Johnny’s voice. The anxiety had returned. And Hoffmann was sure. That’s why his employer had chosen this unannounced detour. This was their actual destination. Clínica Medellín. The hospital. Camilo-twenty-four-times was not their main mission—that was just something they did while they were in the area.

  Anxiety. Over what? The El Mestizo Hoffmann had come to know, had worked with, worked for—that El Mestizo threatened, injured, killed without fear or remorse.

  “My father was a john.”

  But this version of him was just Johnny, and when Johnny spoke as he did now, as he had a few hours earlier, then what he said came from deep, deep within.

  “And my mother was a prostitute. A couple of times she tried to burn me up. You understand? Make me disappear. She poured a can of gas over me and lit it. Sometimes I thought she might apologize. But no. So others, those who do what we do, they showed me my life. And through all the sickness, in what we did yesterday and what we just did, they took care of me. You get it? It meant everything. So I did whatever the hell they wanted me to. More than they wanted. Are you going to shoot that guy over there? If so, don’t do it, I’ll shoot him for you, because you give me hell when I wear the chain too visibly around my neck, or when I put the gun in the wrong place in the belt so I can’t get to it quickly enough or when I forget that I’m overacting. I killed for them. And I would do it again.”

  A city in motion. And they moved with it. Slamming on the brakes on two occasions to avoid ramming into the vehicle in front of them, honking at drivers who honked back, fending off bicycles and pedestrians who turned in a direction they assumed others wouldn’t turn. And then they were there.

  A large sign pointed to the hospital entrance and a wide parking lot sat in front of a twenty-story-high, milky-white house. Clean. That’s what Hoffmann thought. An unblemished facade, as if someone had just unpacked, assembled, and raised it.

  “My brothel in Cali. I grew up there. At my mother’s work. I was born there. A Catholic priest birthed me in the bed where my mother worked. Room number eight. The empty room that no one can use. The same bed I was conceived in. But they changed the sheets. Sometimes she says, I demanded that they change the bedding. So it would be clean when you arrived.”

  There were two parking spaces for the disabled in front of the milky-white house. El Mestizo parked between them, the front wheels in one of them and the back wheels in the other. He didn’t usually do things like that. He was brutal, yes, but never obnoxious, never a bully. The power he possessed was so obvious he didn’t need to be. Only those who are unsure of their position, their power, need to puff up more than necessary. Hoffmann didn’t recognize this man, now compensating for a version of himself that might no longer exist.

  There was an electrical cooler in the trunk, which had been plugged in and buzzing since Cali, since yesterday morning. Johnny had picked it up in the port of Buenaventura, onboard the same Mexican ship they bought the smuggled liquor for the brothe
l from every week. Johnny had made sure to carry it personally off the boat and was equally careful now as he bore it through the bright entrance hall of the Clínica Medellín, past the cafeteria, the information desk, and the small gift shop, all the way to the elevators.

  Pushed the button for the eighteenth floor. A rapid ascent, one that grabbed hold in your stomach and for a moment it reminded Hoffmann of the feeling he used to get at the Gröna Lund amusement park in Stockholm, on the beautiful island of Djurgården, where he used to take Rasmus and Hugo, and their laughter would last all the way home.

  It smelled intensely of a hospital. A single step out into the long corridor, and then that sickening odor Hoffmann would never get used to. It surrounded him as if to say, here hope lives next door to disease and death. Johnny didn’t ask, didn’t look around, he seemed to know exactly where they were going and expected his bodyguard to follow him. Past the rooms of tightly packed hospital beds. Tired, resigned eyes met his. Take me away, they said. Hoffmann saw it, felt it. They wanted to go home. They would never get used to this smell either.

  He sped up until they were almost walking side by side. Then he caught sight of El Mestizo’s face. And the anxiety was no longer there. It was so much more—almost fear in a man who didn’t know fear.

  The room was waiting for them at the end of the corridor. A single patient and plenty of space. A woman lay in the bed with metal wheels. Her eyes were closed, maybe she was sleeping. On her back, on crumpled sheets. She was sweating, sticky hair against her forehead and her cheeks, blotchy skin. El Mestizo opened the window and a warm breeze drifted in, fanning them. Hoffmann looked at the woman. It was hard to tell her age, but her appearance was rough. He knew that kind of skin, a woman who’d lived a hard life—he guessed she was around sixty. A tube connected her left arm to a plastic bag hanging from a rickety stand of the same metal as the bed, transporting one hesitant drop of liquid at a time. It wasn’t nutrition, he could see that, some kind of medicine was being supplied to this dormant body.