18
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ALEJO LED HIS PARENTS UP TO THE ROOF, followed by Nazareth and Nathaniel. His heart ached as he left Wara with the youngest children in the room and pushed open a door that led to the flat concrete roof of the Hostal Salta. A high brick wall held together with globs of roughly-formed gray mortar provided privacy. A few threadbare, freshly-washed sheets flapped in the breeze in one corner of the roof, drying in the fading sunshine.
Alejo trudged to the center of the roof, where rusty metal chairs circled a wobbly table. He absently stared at the surrounding buildings, praying—yes, praying—that there wouldn’t be any problems with security at their present location for at least the next few hours, until he could explain to his parents how it came to be that he had set assassins on the trail of his baby sisters.
A squeaking of metal told him that his family had taken seats in the awkward silence, unsure of what to do.
My parents may have done many things that were wrong, but they and the kids didn’t deserve this.
The silence suffocated, and Alejo needed to escape it. “I work with a group that partners with Hezbollah,” he finally said, avoiding Nazaret’s teary gaze. With a start, he wondered if he should use the past tense.
Everything is happening so fast…
“Until this afternoon.”
For the first time in a very long while, Alejo found himself struggling for words. How could he explain who he was, when his family had not known him for fourteen years?
And who are you now? Alejo thought. Do you even know?
Nazaret was staring at him, white face stricken with shock. “You’re a Muslim? Hezbollah? They’re terrorists!”
“No, Hezbollah has renounced terrorism,” Alejo insisted. “You’re thinking of Hamas. Or Al-Qaeda.” Alejo paused, trying to come up with words. “I was a Muslim. I…am not anymore.” He couldn’t even bring himself to mention the name of Jesus in this discussion as his reason for leaving Islam. The weight of what he had done felt as if it could never be erased.
Alejo cleared his face of emotion and tried to state the facts clearly. “I was the leader of a team in an organization that kills evil men. My team put explosives on the bus that left Coroico on Sunday night. It was supposed to contain only the targets, but Noah and Wara apparently got on the bus at the last minute. The men from my team brought Wara to me, after they found her by the road, alive. They would have killed her too, and I left with her to avoid that. So I suppose my membership in the organization has been canceled.” Alejo’s mouth flattened into a wry, grim line.
“Wara’s bus!” Pablo Martir’s face flooded red. His knuckles tightened violently around the edge of his chair.
“You…you did that?” Nazaret squeaked. Everyone else seemed too horrified to even speak.
“Not only that,” Alejo’s voice was strained, “but when I left the organization, I put your lives in danger. They don’t like traitors and as soon as they found out I left with Wara, I’m sure they started to look for you. I was a leader, and the punishment for leaving is death for my family.”
Now Alejo leaned back into his chair, hating the looks on their faces, hating that he was the one who had caused all this.
Wara said they have prayed for me for years, that I would be safe and following Jesus, he remembered bitterly. And now I show up, a Muslim, a criminal, who has ruined their lives.
“Oh God,” Noly Martir whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. For a second no one could speak. Then Alejo’s mother stood up unevenly from the iron chair, a look of intense sadness quivering on her face. “Alejo, those are your little brothers and sisters below us in that room. Are they safe sleeping here, with you? What is going to happen to them? Oh God,” she repeated, her voice breaking. “You never even knew them, and already you have made their lives forfeit.”
“Noah!” Nazaret cried, breaking into sobs as well, dropping down onto her knees on the concrete floor. “And Wara…why? What have you done to them? Alejo, don’t you know how much I loved you? How much I missed you?”
“Wara told me,” Alejo muttered, struggling to meet his sister’s weepy eyes. He turned towards his mother and held out a hand towards her, then dropped it to his side. “I will do all that I can to keep them safe while they’re sleeping,” he promised gravely.
Alejo felt that until now his father had been ominously silent. Dropping down on a stack of concrete blocks facing his family, Alejo watched him out of the corner of his eye, struggling against his will with all the ancient bitterness that welled up in the presence of Pablo Martir.
Was the pastor shocked that his son had been living as a Muslim?
Well, I was happy as a Muslim, Dad. Did you really, honestly expect me to want to be a Christian? Did you ever realize what you had done, when you heard about Ruben?
Apparently, if Ruben had affected his family at all, they had recovered just fine. Word was that Pablo Martir was still a pastor. Not much appeared to have changed.
Alejo’s father leaned back in his chair with a firm, metallic clink as the legs shifted against the uneven concrete. Alejo jerked his head around to look at him, eyes blank, ready to be verbally decimated. He was almost looking forward to it.
“Amor,” Pablo began, in a deep, only slightly unsteady voice directed at his wife. “Please go back downstairs with the kids and stay with Wara. I need to talk with our son…alone.”
Fine, Alejo steeled himself. Man to man.
Alejo was glad his father appeared sufficiently cool-headed and rational, even after Alejo’s horrifying revelation. He needed to talk with his father about a plan to save their lives.
It was a heavy first conversation, all in all, after fourteen years.
Noly and Nazaret still couldn’t speak, and the two of them made their way unsteadily towards the black door that led back to their room. Nathaniel followed them slowly, eyes dark, glancing back at his long-lost brother with a mixture of morbid curiosity and fear. He gently closed the rusting door with a slight clang behind him.
Alejo opened his mouth to speak as Pablo abruptly pushed one of the wrought-iron chairs across the concrete with his foot, causing a high-pitched scraping sound.
“Please sit down.” Alejo’s father motioned towards the chair, directly across the table from himself, with his chin. Alejo sat down in the chair, hiding his uneasiness.
“Are your brothers, sisters, and your mother safe downstairs?” Pablo asked first. His voice was even and low, but Alejo noticed a bead of sweat riding his father’s forehead.
“For now. I have to get all of you out of here as soon as possible. It’s…not safe for you here anymore, and you’ll all have to…leave the country.” Alejo winced as he heard his own words, suddenly realizing how crazy they sounded.
I haven’t seen them in years, and now I show up and tell them they have to leave the only country they’ve ever known. Now.
“You need to explain this to me again,” Pablo sighed seriously. “You were involved with a Muslim organization that you have become uninvolved with, and because of that they are after us, to kill us?”
Alejo nodded, miserable. “Yep, they as in some pretty well-trained, smart guys. If I don’t get you into hiding, they will find you.”
Now a little of his father’s composure crumpled and he swallowed hard before getting out the next question. “You…killed Noah? The bus…you… did that?”
Had he not believed it before?
Bile rushed into Alejo’s stomach and he curled his fingers around the chair’s sharp armrests with an iron grip to avoid once again emptying his stomach. He had never seen the man, but Noah had been one of his sister’s best friends. In the taxi, Wara had told him how Noah had been in charge of getting his sister home safely every night they worked until late at a café in downtown Cochabamba.
“Franco Salazar was on the bus, heading back to La Paz,” Alejo managed. “He was an evil man, and the bomb was meant for him.”
Alejo’s father’s face looked very pained, and he searched his son’s eyes carefully. Alejo felt sick, not at all ready to get into a discussion of the past with his father. His father’s face, however, was unreadable.
“Did you only come back to warn us because we are your family?”
Alejo nearly shot out of his chair. “No! I told you, I’m not a Muslim anymore, and I have left the organization! I knew I needed to leave for a while, when I realized that I believe what Jesus taught, not Islam. But I found out that if I left, they would come after you!”
Rambling and stammering, Alejo’s statement about believing Jesus obviously came as another shock to his father.
Surely the last thing that makes any sense right now is to hear that his son has just left Islam, after committing murder, and is now declaring himself to be a follower of Jesus.
Alejo groaned and leaned back heavily in his chair. “I didn’t want anything to happen to you,” he ground out flatly, “but they were about to slit Wara’s throat. I had to leave with her.”
“Thank God you did…” Pablo muttered, appearing to be still trying to take it all in. “So, you kill people as part of your job, but you decided to help Wara. And now you left that job…”
“Dad.” Alejo cut him off, his whole body tense. “I can’t talk about all this now. I just can’t. I feel bad—it’s been a long time, and I just show up and ruin your lives. For that, you don’t know how sorry I am. Now, unfortunately, we’ve got to talk about getting you all out of here. I have more than enough money, and I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Pablo seemed hurt by Alejo’s tone, and he stared at his son, maybe trying to find the skinny fourteen year old boy who had left his house in anger. Alejo shifted his eyes uncomfortably, refused to let his gaze ride to the floor.
“Son,” Pastor Martir finally said, voice breaking a little, “where have you been? Your mother thought you must be dead. Or working for drug dealers, in prison…”
“Well,” Alejo clipped, stomach tight, “as you can see, everything is so much better than you imagined.” He immediately regretted his sarcastic words as his father looked away.
“Dad,” Alejo said with a sigh, “there’s nothing I can do to make this reunion a happy one for you.”
His father looked dazed, then asked, “So this was all about Franco Salazar?”
Alejo felt his heart leap into his chest, and the acid that rushed into his stomach told him that there was no way he could talk about this with his father, not now. “I told you, Dad, I just can’t talk about it,” he insisted, eyes dark. Pablo Martir’s face looked so pained that Alejo tried to soften his tone, ignoring the nausea. “Maybe someday we can talk. But not today. Right now the only thing that is important is getting you all out of here, so you can live.”
The strong shoulders of Alejo’s father finally slanted as he crumpled back into the chair, desolate.
Alejo’s footsteps dragged as he trudged down the narrow stairs, leaving his father alone on the hostel roof. Seeing his parents again still had the sheen of unreality. A dark, nightmare-ish unreality, in light of the situation he had put his entire family in.
His mother was right. He was still confused about half of the kids downstairs, which face went with what name. He didn’t know them. But they were his brothers and sisters, for goodness sake!
Alejo loosed a heavy sigh and waited outside the hostel room door, fighting the urge to find cigarettes and do some serious smoking. He’d quit years ago, after finding that wheezing while trying to outrun danger and bullets could be pretty inconvenient.
And now, suddenly, that life was over. He, Alejo Martir, was no longer employed by the Prism, and he might never see his team, who were like brothers, again. And if he did ever see their faces, it could be behind the muzzle of a gun.
Alejo blinked, startled, as the wooden door jerked open and he found himself facing Nazaret. “You shouldn’t have opened to me,” he scolded softly. “Ask first. You didn’t know who I was.”
Nazaret’s round face waned exhausted. She met his eyes sadly, shattering him with a million memories of blanket forts under the dining room table and licking popsicles on the front porch. “I still don’t know who you are,” she said, then left him standing at the door and returned to flop onto an unmade bed. Alejo carefully closed the door then turned to his youngest siblings, trying a reassuring smile.
“Your dad will be down in a minute,” he told them.
They’re probably worried I left him dead up there on the roof. What kind of brother am I?
Alejo forced his gaze from the wide-eyed little Martirs to his mother and Wara, sitting wearily together on one of the beds He was glad to see pills on the bedside table; the stuff he had ordered must have arrived from the pharmacy. Wara and Noly had obviously been in deep discussion just before Alejo interrupted them and his heart sunk three notches lower, easily imagining that little chat. There would be the part about how Alejo had smacked her in the face, then nearly slit her throat. And before that, how he had handcuffed her and kissed her. Alejo felt his face heat. No matter how highly he thought of himself and his problem-solving abilities, there really was no fixing this situation, was there?
Alejo suddenly felt very tired and sank down onto a bed across from Wara. “We should call your family,” he said. Wara speared him with reddened eyes.
“I already did. From the street. I called the Bennesons, who work with my mission, too.”
Alejo nodded once, admiring how she seemed to make good decisions even in stressful situations. “They must want you to come home, right away.”
Noly Martir lowered her brows at her son, expression a mixture of love and annoyance. “Of course they do, Alejandro. Their daughter almost died. But she won’t go.” Alejo eyed Wara, whose jaw was set firmly. “She won’t go until she finds out if Noah is still alive.”
Alejo remained silent, removing his gaze from his mother and sister and folding his arms across his chest. His mother and sister must think him a psychopath.
And maybe I am.
Keys jingled in the lock and Alejo tensed, then relaxed as Pablo Martir entered the room. It was time to leave this room, and quickly. He and Wara would be just on the other side of the thin wall, definitely within his ear shot in case of danger.
Basically ignoring his wayward oldest son, Pastor Martir walked among his younger children, forcing a smile and patting them each on the head. Noly pulled little Naveli onto her lap and kissed her.
“I’ve been talking with your brother,” Pablo addressed the whole family, “and he has some very good ideas of how to help us, which we’ll talk about tomorrow. Now it’s time for all of us to sleep, but first we’re going to pray. No matter what happens, God is always with us, and he keeps us all in the palm of his hand.”
Strangling on the need to escape this little moment of Martir family prayer, Alejo quickly stood up and moved towards Wara. “Excuse me. I’ll get out of your way so you can take care of your family.”
You sound so cold. As if they weren’t your family too.
But it had been so long, an entire lifetime. Naveli peeped at Alejo from long-lashed hazel eyes, lips purple around a giant lollipop. Alejo stared at her, then tore his gaze away and motioned to Wara. “I’m sorry, but you’d better come with me.” Everyone started, and Alejo faced his parents. “I registered us downstairs together. Besides, I told her I’d take care of her. I’m not letting her out of my sight.”
Alejo was surprised when Wara rolled out of bed without arguing and prepared to follow him. The zombie-like expression in her eyes, along with her lack of protest, actually worried him. Wara looked ready to collapse.
Equally as worrying was the fact that no one in his family protested his orders, at least not with words.
After all, I suppose you don’t argue with a man who’s just confessed to being a killer, even if he is your own son.
Wara stumbled next to him towards the door. Alejo left his family locked in the room, more disgusted with himself than he had been in a long, long time.