“Please,” Nora said. “Do you think I could blame myself any more than I already do?”
“I don’t know,” Liv said. “I don’t understand you at all. Why are you here?”
“I just had to talk it through. See if there was anything we missed. See if he knew anything. Just because he’s local.”
“And?” Liv said, looking to Pedro. “Any hot leads? Any clues?”
He shook his head, looking regretful.
“Okay.” Liv turned to Nora. “So you’re having an affair, while our children are missing. That’s what this is.”
“No!” Nora said. “You would be here, too. Looking for the kids.”
“I would not!” Liv said. “Because I wouldn’t have been off in the trees in the first place!”
“Please don’t say anything,” Nora said. “I can’t bear it if this comes out.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing meeting in public? Are you insane?”
“Yes!” Nora said. “Aren’t you? Our kids are gone. Aren’t you a little bit insane?”
“Yes! But not like this!”
“Well I am like this. And it was your fucking terrible idea, the whole cruise, so back the fuck off.”
“We shouldn’t be here,” Pedro said, in a warning tone.
“I’ll leave,” Liv said, and she turned.
“Liv!” Nora said.
Liv tugged at her headscarf as she walked down the tiny street, no destination in mind. Her sunglasses were so big they touched her cheeks. Her tears pooled inside the frames, against the lenses, then spilled down her face to her chin.
Pedro had looked as wretched as they were. She realized Nora was right: She would have met with Pedro, too. Nora could be fucking him now, as far as Liv was concerned, if he could provide information about these feudal families controlling the interior, paying the police, killing people, stealing children. That was the kind of guide they needed.
She kept her eyes on the ground, watching for holes. She couldn’t break an ankle, not now. No tort system, no procedure for wrongs. No recourse for your pain, when it was someone else’s fault.
She regretted being ugly to Nora. She had learned that mode of attack from her mother, and she hated herself when it came out. She should have been empathetic, understanding. Maybe Nora was right, maybe Pedro could come up with something. But she couldn’t bring herself to go back. And they were more identifiable together, Pedro was right.
Poor Raymond, it would crush him. Embarrass him. A new anger at Nora rose up, for making her part of the secret.
A child selling roses tried to press one on her, and Liv held up a hand in protest. But she fumbled in her pocket and gave the girl a coin. It would go straight to whatever adult was pimping the child out, of course.
“Se?ora!” another child called after her, but she didn’t turn.
21.
GEORGE WATCHED THE children play tic-tac-toe, and thought about his brother. He thought their mother, before she died, had understood that something was wrong with Raúl. She had been repulsed by him, but that made her feel guilty, because a mother should not be repulsed by her son, so she gave him anything he wanted. He was handsome and charming and manipulative and she never punished him for anything. George—Jorge, then—took the blame for whatever went wrong. A broken fence, a wrecked bicycle, a smashed window. His brother deflected all damage and disruption onto Jorge, who got the reputation as a troublemaker. It didn’t help that he wasn’t as good-looking as Raúl. His forehead was too big. His mother used to smooth his hair and frown at the dome between his temples, so he had taken to wearing baseball caps to hide it.
When Raúl was eight, he caught small emerald green frogs in the forest and cut them up with razor blades while they were still alive. He showed Jorge how they twitched and wriggled until the very end.
Then they got a small capuchin monkey for a pet, and Raúl tormented it with mind games until it went insane, baring its teeth and screaming when anyone tried to get close. The monkey was sent away somewhere, and no one spoke of it again.
An aneurysm killed their mother when George was twelve, and he thought things would shift then. Their father did not understand Raúl well enough to be distressed by his feelings about him, and he tried to treat his sons equally; it was a point of principle. But even equal wasn’t right, when it came to Raúl.
George went away to boarding school in Santa Barbara and decided to remake himself as an American. He worked at cultivating his mother’s California accent. When he got to Berkeley, he played Truco sometimes with the South Americans, with the Spanish cards and the elaborate system of tiny facial gestures to communicate across the table, but mostly he tried to abandon his past. He tried to become interested in finance, in business consulting, in law, in anything that might create for him a new life.
But there was so much money to be made at home. And Raúl had no business mind at all. He just rode around on his white horse, and got girls pregnant. The daughter of the local grocer almost bled to death delivering Raúl’s baby. The grocer called George, who sat with the girl in the hospital all night. She was nineteen years old and looked gray, all the blood and warmth drained out of her. She’d survived, and so had the baby, but Raúl never even went to see them.
Raúl’s ruthlessness might have helped in their father’s business, except he was not ambitious in that way. He didn’t know how to make money. He made mistakes, alienated allies. He bragged on Instagram about his exploits until George made him shut down his account, but then he would start another. He drank too much of the local guaro. Eventually, it would kill him, but that might be twenty years from now. Who could wait?
And then Raúl had shot the Colombian courier. He said Bola?os was cheating them, but George suspected that Raúl owed the man money on a side deal and didn’t want to pay. So he shot Bola?os in the head. But this was not Colombia. They lived in a country with almost perfect literacy, with excellent medical care, and they had a profitable little business that the police ignored. You could not shoot people in the head. They were not butchers or desperadoes. The death had been stupid, unnecessary.
George had been in California at the time. Something always went tits-up when he was away. So he’d been flying home to do damage control when Luz Alvaros, working for his brother, brought those fucking kids to the house in the Jeep and caused an international incident.
George did not consider himself a moral paragon. He understood that his father’s business was illegal, and that he had taken part in it. He had certainly lived off the spoils. But most business was in some way unethical. Look at DuPont dumping poison in drinking water, look at big pharma, look at subprime mortgages. It was just the nature of making money. Everyone profited at someone else’s expense. But Raúl was unredeemably bad.
And stupid. Raúl had decided that the solution was to ransom the children. There had been a reward offered, fifty thousand dollars for information. Raúl thought they could get more. “People kidnap Americans on purpose,” he told George. “We could make so much money!”
“That is not what we do!” George said. “Do you understand the shit-storm you would bring down on our heads?”
“Your problem is that you have small ideas,” Raúl said.
If Raúl just disappeared, no one would miss him. Their father would mourn the loss of a son, but he would get over it.