And he was going to start with her.
He copied all the photographs in which she was with him, naked, and even with Jacinto, and erased the faces, leaving only her face. He chose five in which she was seen on all fours and with her face turned towards the camera, and two in which she was sucking Jacinto’s cock. Then he e-mailed them to the town hall of La Cascada, the Community Center, the kindergarten her daughter Gloria Soraya attended, the restaurant Luna Roja, the bar El Feliz, and Jacinto’s auto repair shops. Also to the Häagen-Dazs ice cream parlor and the Escrúpulos tearooms, where she spent her afternoons. Also to the people of the El Paraíso residential community, wherever he could find the addresses. Everybody and everything with a more or less public e-mail address in La Cascada received the photographs, and to make it even worse, he opened an account on Facebook in her name and added the rest of the photographs from the computer, including those of Jacinto with other women so that he could see it and know he had been found out. This Facebook idea was a brilliant one, he thought, which he could also use for Dagoberto. But he preferred to wait and see the reactions. His idea was to hand over the computer to the Public Prosecutor’s Office or the newspapers or the Human Rights Commission and that was why he decided to stay a little longer in Bogotá.
After five days he moved to the Hotel Charleston, on Calle 85 near Carrera 15. He was so nervous, he found it impossible to leave the hotel, even for a short walk; all the same, he did go a couple of times to have a drink in the Zona Rosa and walk around the Centro Andino. Finally, after three days, he received a message on Facebook that said:
Let’s see if you’re brave enough to come out and show your face, you son of a bitch, do you have something against my family or what? We’re already on your trail and we’ll soon find out where you got all those fucking photographs that you’ve been putting on the Internet. We’re going to cut your balls off and eat them fried, with chopped onions, you bastard.
The message was not signed but was obviously from Jacinto. It came from a Facebook account called The Executioner. So Ramón decided to have a bit of fun and replied: “Your wife is indeed a very elegant woman, what nobody can understand is what she’s doing with a para.” He waited nervously and that same night the answer came: “Son of a bitch, you’re still hiding, feeling pleased with yourself, but you’ll see, we’re on your trail, we may be coming for you right now, as you read this, so start shaking.”
The next day he made copies of the computer’s hard disk and went to the Human Rights Commission. There, he had to identify himself and they listened to his story. A lawyer from the Commission went with him to the Public Prosecutor’s Office to lodge a major complaint against Dagoberto, Hernán Mora, and Jacinto Gómez for kidnapping, torture, extortion, and theft. He handed over a copy of the hard disk and the prosecutors immediately started running and making calls. Ramón realized that his days as a fugitive were over, that he had to regain his true identity now, go back to being Ramón Melo García. It was the only way he could accomplish his revenge.
After a long statement in the Public Prosecutor’s Office about how he had gotten hold of the computer, Ramón was able to return to his hotel. It was late by now, but he had the feeling that he had achieved something. The next day he called the political desk at El Espectador and announced that he had information about paramilitarism in the eastern Plains. Somebody came to pick up a copy and that same night he was able to return to Panama City.
When he got home, he said to himself: the die is cast, now the one thing I have to do is make sure they don’t kill me, or don’t find me so easily. Dagoberto was confined to a high security prison at Cómbita, but many of his men were still on the outside, doing all they could to get him out as quickly and cheaply as possible. He did not know if Hernán Mora was also being detained.
A week later, El Espectador splashed all over its pages a lengthy article accusing Dagoberto, with photographs of the torture house in Lejanías, and information on the mass graves and the laboratories that were still functioning. There were also charges against a whole series of elected members of the senate who had been friendly with Dagoberto, and had received votes and money from him.
Ramón had not even known about that, as he had not checked the whole of the hard disk. The article quoted sources within the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Human Rights Commission, which were investigating and had asked the National Institute for Prisons to separate Dagoberto from the other demobilized paras, since in his case there were enough elements to bring more serious charges.
Less than a week later El Espectador reported the arrest of Hernán Mora and Jacinto Gómez, both accused of paramilitary activity in the region. The traitor Arnulfo Solano, his trusted former employee, was also detained, although on lesser charges. Everything came from the same computer, and Ramón felt a light inside him. He knew it was not good to take pleasure from hatred and revenge, but he had not been the one who had started all this. Then he wondered if now might be the time to take the step he so much desired, and decided it was. Now that his identity was obvious, he could make a frontal attack.
He took out his cell phone and looked at it for quite a while. Then he put it back in his pocket and took a good swig of aguardiente to give himself courage. Maybe the number had changed? Finally he dialed, with his heart standing still, and heard the rings. One, two, three. . At the fifth ring the automatic message came on and he hung up. He went out on the balcony and drank another aguardiente, and was standing there looking at the bay, lost in thought, when the cell phone started ringing. He looked at the screen and froze. It was Soraya. Hello? There was a silence, it was her, she had recognized him. He hung up. Again unsure what to do, he waited. He imagined Soraya with the telephone in her hand, cursing or crying, he could not know which. The voice was the same, with a slight quiver because of the years; he remembered her husky tone, which had always sounded both erotic and comforting. But now everything was different: she had given him up to the paras! Nothing could make up for that. There was no excuse, and apart from that there was the fact of his mother’s death.
He checked the Facebook address and found a message from Jacinto from four days earlier, before his arrest, which said: “We know who you are and we’re going to kill you, you son of a bitch, wait and see.” He reread the text with a smile and thought, this bastard doesn’t know a damn thing, he has no idea what’s in store for him. The fool.
An hour later his cell phone rang again and he made up his mind to answer. It was her. Was it you who took those pictures? was the first thing she asked, but instead of answering that, he said, were you in on their plan to kill me? There was a silence; then she said, they told me you were in the FARC and wanted to kill my brother. That’s nonsense, how could you believe such garbage? The thing is, Soraya, you were cheating on me with Jacinto and any excuse would have been all right. She was unable to respond immediately. She thought about it for a second and said: it’s your fault, Ramón, I told you to ask for my hand and you did nothing, just waited and waited, and when you wait too long the soup gets cold, doesn’t it? Oh, Soraya, you don’t kill a person for that, the fact of it is, you knew they were going to kill me and you didn’t care, and later my mother died because you didn’t even go to see her; she died of sadness, or rather, you all killed her; you killed her, Soraya; so don’t ask me to respect you or understand you, the only thing I want is to see you crawling on the floor, because you’re a bitch, a cheat, a traitor, and a murderer.