The bird-watcher had no time to react.
He was sent flying into the air, looking like one of those circus tumblers performing a gravity-defying finale.
He came down with a loud thud.
Then lay still.
FORTY-FIVE
She needed to dream tonight.
She’d noticed the looks from Tomás. The fact she’d received no dinner for the first time she could remember. The frazzled look on Galina’s face, and her trembling hands.
She’d kissed Joelle good night in a way that really was good-bye. She’d said her prayers, confessed her sins. She’d made peace with it.
She needed to dream.
If she was lucky, this dream would involve being woken in the middle of the night, not by a gun muzzle, not by the sharp blade of a knife, but by Galina’s soft whispers.
It would involve Galina quietly opening the lock that chained her leg to the radiator. Whispering directions into her ear. Then slipping silently out of the room the way people do in dreams.
It would involve standing up and padding softly through the door.
Slowly making her way down the empty hall and then pushing open the door to outside, the way she did once before.
It would certainly involve following those directions whispered into her ear. Walking not into the jungle, but the other way entirely, down past the back pens where chickens were nervously pecking at the ground, then onto the one-lane road.
She would walk down this road as if floating, her feet barely touching the ground. She would walk without looking back. Without fear or rancor.
She would come around a bend, and a car would be waiting there for her. A midnight-blue Peugeot. Its engine would be softly rumbling, and its driver would slip out of the front seat to greet her, making sure to put a finger to his lips.
He would reach into the car and pull out a bundle of blanket and hair. Her baby daughter, whom he’d gently place into her arms.
“Thank you,” she’d whisper to Pablo.
Thank you. Thank you.
TWO YEARS LATER
Sunday in June and the Central Park merry-go-round was full.
Paul and Joanna sat on the bench holding hands.
You could smell cotton candy, roasting peanuts, and candied apples. A catchy calypso number drifted over from the circling horses. Something from a Disney movie, Paul thought. Under the sea . . . under the sea . . .
Occasionally, Joanna put her head on his shoulder and left it there, and Paul got the strong sensation that the world was, in fact, perfect.
It seemed light-years away from the events of two years ago.
From Bogotá. And Miles.
From that day on the exit ramp of the Long Island Expressway.
And yet, sometimes it wasn’t far away at all. It was right there in the room with him, lurking around his office, riding with him in the car, sleeping in his bed.
Memory is like that, a friend from childhood that you never really lose contact with. Even when you desperately want to. Popping up at moments in your life when you least expect it.
In the middle of a balmy Sunday in June, for example.
He wondered sometimes how much he’d tell his daughter.
Would he tell her, for instance, about the spectacular assassination of a certain Colombian ex-drug lord in the bathroom of a Florida courtroom? How Manuel Riojas was going through pretrial motions when he was escorted to the men’s room to relieve himself and never came back.
Would he tell her that the assassin apparently gained access with the use of a DEA identity badge? This badge evidently genuine, if clearly defunct, having belonged to a DEA agent who’d been dead for more than two years.
An agent who’d been known to don other uniforms from time to time. The uniform of an ornithologist, for example, resolutely searching the jungles of northern Colombia for the yellow-breasted toucan.
A bird-watcher.
Would he tell her how the bird-watcher’s badge came to be in the possession of a hired assassin?
Would he explain, refer to that day on the LIE when the DEA agent lay dead in the middle of the exit ramp, and the badge that he’d placed on the dashboard lay right next to him, virtually begging to be picked up for some future if undetermined use.
Would he tell her about that day later on, when he brought that badge to a familiar office in Little Odessa, Brooklyn? When he sat on the other side of a door with El Presidente stenciled on it. Talking business with Moshe.
You know what the Russians call the Colombians? Miles asked him the day he shot himself.
What, Miles?
Amateurs.
And maybe Miles was dead right about that. The Russians ran a very profitable cash business. Maybe because they were willing to do anything for the right price. Just about anything at all. Break-ins, heists, even assassinations.
Including truly spectacular ones, the kind others wouldn’t even touch.
As long as you had the cash, of course. Lots of it.
But where could Paul possibly get that kind of cash?
Would he tell her? Would he explain where?
Would he go back to that day again? The smoking Jeep, the puddle of blood and oil. I already cashed out, the bird-watcher had said to him before he went tumbling into the air and took forever and a day to come down.
And when Paul looked back at Ruth, she was covered in a whirlwind of green leaves. But they weren’t leaves. Because the bird-watcher had cashed out, received his wages from his new paymaster, from Riojas. And years of DEA training had given him the perfect place to stash it.
How many cars had he ripped the floorboards out of over the years? Looking for bags of coke, Baggies of pot, bricks of hashish? Enough of them to realize what a fine place it was for hoarding things you don’t want found.
Only he wasn’t counting on an accident. He wasn’t factoring in Paul putting the transmission in reverse while they were doing sixty miles an hour.
The impact ripped the Jeep apart, blew out the sidewalls, sending hundred-dollar bills hurtling into the air, where they settled like snow onto Ruth’s head.
Would he tell his daughter how easy it was to stuff the money into his wallet, into his pockets, as they waited for the ambulance to arrive?
Would he remind her?
The merry-go-round slowed, stopped spinning, came to a halt. Accompanied by the bittersweet cries of disappointed children.
Two of them came toward the bench.
Joelle, of course. Looking quite the little lady in a pink jumper, her black hair pinned up with tiny pink barrettes, pink being her most very favorite color—at least this week.
And carrying her, dragging her away from the merry-go-round that she just had to take another spin on, was her big sister, looking every inch a real lady, almost sixteen, those astounding brown eyes widened with what Paul fervently hoped was happiness.
Or, at the very least, peace.
This was the daughter he thought he would have to tell everything to one day. Perhaps not. Maybe whatever he’d done to keep her safe would be better left unspoken and unacknowledged, part of a secret history she’d left behind for good. Protect her, Galina had once written to Miles. And finally, at last, someone had.