In one of the subways she took that day, someone next to her was reading the Daily News, and she had been able to get a peek at the pictures and headlines. What an exposé, right in the middle of the paper. On the right page, a picture of a very young and handsome Greg in his police uniform, and on the left page, Greg’s crumpled body in a pool of blood. An emotionally moving picture of Greg with Hero. And one last picture, darker and much smaller, of María Paz herself. The mug shot from Manninpox, her hair a mess, looking like a lioness in heat, the placard with the serial number hanging on her chest. The visual was very obvious: the demented Colombian versus the good American cop. Pro Bono had always told her that juries were very susceptible to the whims of public opinion, and this kind of publicity must have exacerbated their patriotic spirit. It would not have been difficult for Pro Bono to put the pieces together, and she guessed that Pro Bono had grown certain about which way the verdict would go. He must have been very concerned about what he saw in the paper, enough so to give her the signal to go. At least that was her theory. After spending some time making herself scarce among the shelves of bargains in a secondhand store, she took another bus, and when she got off, she slipped into a movie theater. Near dusk, she was attracted by Andean music that was coming from a schoolyard. There was a cookout where traditional dishes were being served, and María Paz bought a ticket. She mingled among the lute and charango musicians, kabobs, ceviches, pisco sours, and Inca dancers late into the night. Right there, among the members of the Peruvian community, she met a family that believed she had recently arrived in New York and offered her a place for the night. As the band grew weary, the guests danced a few more short waltzes and drank a few more pisco sours, because the organizers were about to make last call. The musicians put away their instruments and left, and María Paz looked at her watch. It was 11:20 p.m. In ten minutes, she would have been a fugitive of justice for twelve hours.
At that same time, in another corner of the city, I was freaking out knowing nothing about what had happened to her. And it would be another seven weeks before my uncertainty was eased when I received a Facebook message from Juanita one Saturday morning. The message said, “Two little ducks in front of Dorita.” Shit, it was not an easy message to decode. Two little ducks in front of Dorita. That’s it. Could it be referring to the duck pond in Central Park? The offices of the Ugly Duckling Presse on 3rd Street in Brooklyn, because I had once told the class at Manninpox that I did some work for them? Or maybe the Peking Duck in Chinatown? Nothing made much sense until a bell went off. The “two ducks” could very well be Colombian slang for the number 22, the shape of which resembles two ducks waddling to the left. So maybe it was not code for a place but for the time, twenty-two hundred hours, or 10 p.m. “At Dorita’s” was much easier to figure out. There was only one Dorita who was known to us. María seemed to want to meet at 10 p.m. at Forbidden Planet, where I was going to take her the night of our reunion to show her the series of my graphic novels, The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita, before Sleepy Joe changed things. If it wasn’t that, then I had no clue what it could be. A date maybe? I started thinking maybe it made more sense that it was a date. The 22nd of this month? No, it had to be the time. Forbidden Planet at 10 p.m.? But then on what day? The next day, a Saturday, I waited for her there from 9:30 p.m. to midnight. She didn’t show up then, or on Sunday, or Monday. On Tuesday, I was running late, and when I arrived there at 10:20 p.m., I thought I saw her at the front door. But the woman was wearing a strange cap pulled down to her eyes and the rest of her face was under a scarf, so it was only when I was very close to her that I knew it was indeed her. I had already decided that I would hide her in the house in the mountains; it was, for the time being, the best option. I had to get her out of the city, because they would be looking for her with a magnifying glass in places where you needed your identification documents and were reported for the slightest suspicions. God forbid she had tried in desperation to check into a hotel. I didn’t even ask her. There was no time for debates. I simply signaled that she climb behind me on my bike and took off. I only revealed our destination when we were already on the way. Her response was to ask where it was, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I told her it was just down the road from Manninpox.
I’m not quite sure how to explain what’s happened since that night. Let’s just say we’re living as if in a dream, the two of us hidden in the attic, making do with things as if we are two kids in a tree house because we couldn’t care less about what is happening in the world below that is bristling with dangers. We shit on those dangers for now. And the dangers shit on us, stuck in that attic of the house like ants after a fumigation.
All the powers of the state are set against María Paz, and I’m still a little puzzled how this charming girl has become the bull’s-eye of so many pissed-off macho men — agents of the CIA and the DEA, migrant and bounty hunters, and a posse led by the vermin Sleepy Joe, who must have been howling in his cave because so many others were trying to snatch his prey. But María Paz has not wanted to talk about any of that. She does not bring up her past, much less her future. I think it is comforting to her to feel as if she is in a boat in the middle of a timeless sea. Once again, she and I are floating in the bliss of a period of “things go right.” Seven months ago we went through a similar ephemeral period that lasted only a couple of hours; then we passed through a very long and anguishing “things go wrong,” and now we have returned to the bliss of the good days.
Like any good graphic novel heroine, María Paz is complex; there are no predictable plots in her story. Everything is extraordinary, very intense, and at the same time so otherworldly and unreal, such as letting the days pass ignoring what has happened, purposely ignoring all the possible consequences, letting the world fall to pieces all around us. And that’s just a figure of speech. Symptoms are beginning to appear, a new phase of “things go wrong” has reared its ugly fucking head. Four days ago, a horrendous crime took place on this mountain. The victim was the man who brings us the bags of food for the dogs; it is something utterly indescribable, they didn’t only murder him, but they ripped off his face. The authorities are still searching for the suspects and have the area under twenty-four-hour patroclass="underline" a good thing on the one hand, because it reestablishes the sense of safety, and a bad thing on the other hand, because for us up here it make us recluses with much more claustrophobic force than before. Now it is clearer than ever that María Paz cannot as much as peek outside or the entire security operation would descend on the house. But I’ve decided not to tell her. What good would it do? For the moment, I see no reason to worry her. Up here, she is secure, free from any danger, ignorant of the mayhem outside that has everybody on edge. María Paz needs her rest. The important thing is that she recovers from the damage of what she has gone through, enjoys herself however she can, is pampered, eats a lot, sleeps as much as she needs to, and is left alone. So I keep the fears and conjectures to myself.