The police officer picked me up off the ground by one arm, and he must have held me up, because my legs were buckling. “Come with me,” he said, more kindly than I would have expected. “Please . . . don’t arrest me, please,” I babbled.
“I’m not going to arrest you, calm down,” he replied. He took me twenty yards down the street to La Taquería, a Mexican diner, where the waiters tried to keep me from entering when they saw my pitiful state, but they gave in when Arana showed them his badge. I collapsed into a chair with my head on my arms, shaking with incontrollable tremors.
I don’t know how Arana recognized me. He’d seen me a couple of times, and the wreck sitting across from him didn’t look anything at all like the fashionably dressed, healthy girl with hair like little platinum feathers he’d met before. He realized straight away that it wasn’t food I needed most urgently and, helping me as if I were an invalid, took me to the washroom. He glanced around to make sure we were alone, put something in my hand, and pushed me gently inside, while he stood guard at the door. White powder. I blew my nose with toilet paper, anxious, hurrying, and sniffed the drug, which hit me in the forehead like an icy knife. An instant later I was invaded by the huge sense of relief that every junkie knows, I stopped trembling and moaning, and my mind cleared.
I splashed some water on my face and tried to fix my hair a little with my fingers, not recognizing that red-eyed cadaver with greasy two-tone hair in the mirror. I couldn’t stand the smell of myself, but it was futile to wash if I couldn’t change my clothes. Outside Arana was waiting for me with folded arms, leaning on the wall. “I always carry a little something with me for emergencies like this,” and he smiled at me with his eyes like little slits.
We went back to the table, and the officer bought me a beer, which went down like holy water, and forced me to eat a few bites of chicken fajitas before giving me two pills. They must have been a very strong analgesic, because he insisted I couldn’t take them on an empty stomach. In less than ten minutes I was resurrected.
“When they killed Brandon Leeman, I looked for you to take a statement and get you to identify the body. It was just a formality, because there was no doubt who it was. It was a typical drug-related crime: dealers killing each other to defend their turf,” he told me.
“Do you know who did it, Officer?”
“We have an idea, but no proof. He took eleven bullets, and somebody—lots of people—must have heard the shooting, but nobody cooperates with the police. I thought you must have gone home to your family, Laura. What happened to your plans for college? I never imagined I’d find you in this kind of shape.”
“I got scared, Officer. When I heard they’d killed him, I didn’t dare go near the building, and so I hid. I couldn’t call my family, and I ended up on the street.”
“And an addict, I see. You need—”
“No!” I interrupted him. “I’m fine, really, Officer, I don’t need anything. I will go home. They’re going to send me the bus fare.”
“You owe me some explanations, Laura. Your so-called uncle was not called Brandon Leeman or any of the other names on the half dozen pieces of fake ID he had on him. He was identified as Hank Trevor, with two prison sentences in Atlanta.”
“He never told me about that.”
“Did he ever tell you about his brother Adam?”
“He might have mentioned him, I don’t remember.”
The cop ordered another beer for each of us and then told me that Adam Trevor was one of the world’s greatest counterfeiters. At the age of fifteen he started working for a printer in Chicago, where he learned the ink and paper trade, and later he developed a technique to falsify dollar bills so perfect that they passed the pen test and ultraviolet rays. He sold them at forty or fifty cents to the dollar to the mafias from China, India, and the Balkans, who mixed them in with real bills before introducing them into circulation. The business of counterfeit money, one of the most lucrative in the world, demands total discretion and sangfroid.
“Brandon Leeman, or rather Hank Trevor, lacked his brother’s talent or intelligence. He was just a two-bit delinquent. The only thing the siblings had in common was their criminal mentality. Why should they break their backs at an honorable job if criminality pays better and is more fun? Can’t blame them, can we, Laura? I confess a certain admiration for Adam Trevor; he’s an artist, and he’s never hurt anyone, except the American government,” Arana concluded.
He explained that the fundamental counterfeiter’s rule is never to spend the money he makes but to sell it as far away from him as possible, without leaving any clues that might lead to its author or the press. Adam Trevor violated that rule by giving a large sum to his brother, who instead of hiding it, as he was surely instructed to, started spending it in Las Vegas. Arana added that he had twenty-five years of experience in the police department and knew very well what Brandon Leeman was up to and what I did for him, but he hadn’t arrested us because junkies like us were unimportant; if they detained every drug addict and dealer in Nevada, there wouldn’t be enough jail cells to put them all in. Nevertheless, when Leeman put fake money into circulation, he put himself into another category, way out of his league. The only reason not to arrest him immediately was the possibility that through him they might be able to find the origin of that money.
“I’d been watching him for months, hoping he’d lead me to Adam Trevor. Imagine how frustrating it was when they murdered him. I’ve been looking for you because you know where your lover hid the money he received from his brother . . .”
“He wasn’t my lover!” I interrupted.
“That doesn’t matter. I just want to know where he put the money and how to find Adam Trevor.”
“If I knew where there was money, Officer, do you think I’d be on the street?”
An hour earlier I would have told him without a moment’s hesitation, but the coke, the pills, the beers, and a shot of tequila had temporarily cleared away my anguish, and I remembered I shouldn’t get involved in this mess. I didn’t know if the bills in the lockup in Beatty were fake, authentic, or a mixture of the two, but in any case it would not do me any good to have Arana thinking I had anything to do with those bags. As Freddy used to advise me, it was always safer to keep quiet. Brandon Leeman had died brutally, his murderers were still on the loose, the policeman had mentioned the mafias, and any information I spilled would provoke Adam Trevor’s revenge.
“How could you think Brandon Leeman would confide something like that to me, Officer? I was his errand girl. Joe Martin and Chino were his associates—they participated in his business deals and accompanied him everywhere, not me.”
“They were his partners?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure, because Brandon Leeman never told me anything. Until this very moment I didn’t even know his name was Hank Trevor.”
“So Joe Martin and Chino know where the money is.”
“You’d have to ask them. The only money I ever saw were the tips Brandon Leeman used to give me.”
“And what you charged for him in the hotels.”
He kept interrogating me to find out details of the living arrangements at the den of delinquents that was Brandon Leeman’s building, and I answered him cautiously, without mentioning Freddy or giving him any clues about the El Paso TX bags. I tried to implicate Joe Martin and Chino, with the idea that if they were arrested, I’d be free of them, but Arana didn’t seem interested in them. We’d finished eating a while ago. It was close to five in the afternoon, and in the modest Mexican restaurant there was only one guy working there and waiting for us to leave. As if he hadn’t already done enough for me, Officer Arana gave me ten dollars and his cell phone number, so we could keep in touch and I could call him if I got into trouble. He warned me that I should let him know before I left the city, and he told me to take care; there were some very dangerous neighborhoods in Las Vegas, especially at night, as if I didn’t know. As we said good-bye, it occurred to me to ask him w
hy he was out of uniform, and he confided that he was collaborating with the FBI: counterfeiting was a federal crime.
The precautions I took that allowed me to hide out in Las Vegas were futile in the face of the Force of Destiny, in capital letters, as my grandfather would say, referring to one of his favorite Verdi operas. My Popo accepted the poetic idea of destiny: What other explanation could there be for having found the love of his life in Toronto? But he was less fatalistic than my grandma, for whom destiny is something as sure and concrete as genetics. Both, destiny and genes, determine what we are, and cannot be changed; if the combination is virulent, we’re fucked, but if not, we can exercise a certain amount of control over our own existence, as long as our astrological chart is favorable. The way she explained it is that we come into the world with certain cards in our hand, and we play our game; with similar cards one person might lose everything and another excel. “It’s the law of compensation, Maya. If it’s your destiny to be born blind, you’re not forced to sit in the subway playing the flute; you could develop your nose and turn out to be a wine taster.” That’s one of my grandmother’s typical examples.
According to my Nini’s theory, I was born predestined to addiction. Who knows why, since it’s not in my genes: my grandma is teetotal, my father has only a very occasional glass of white wine, and my mother, the Laplander princess, made a good impression on me the only time I saw her. Of course it was eleven in the morning, and at that hour almost everyone is more or less sober. In any case, in my cards addiction somehow figures, but with willpower and intelligence I could play my game in a way that kept it under control. However, the statistics don’t encourage optimism; there are more blind wine tasters than rehabilitated addicts. Taking into account other dirty tricks destiny has played on me, like having met Brandon Leeman, my possibilities of leading a normal life were minimal before the opportune intervention of Olympia Pettiford. That’s what I told my Nini, and she answered that you can always cheat at cards. That’s what she was doing by sending me to this little island in Chiloé: cheating the cards.
The same day of my encounter with Arana, a couple of hours later, Joe Martin and Chino finally caught up with me, a few blocks from the Mexican diner where the officer had helped me. I didn’t see the scary black van, and I didn’t sense them approaching until they were right on top of me; I’d spent the ten dollars on drugs, and I was high. They grabbed me, picked me up, and forced me into the vehicle, while I screamed and kicked in desperation. Some people stopped, but no one interceded. Who’s going to mess with two dangerous-looking thugs and a hysterical homeless girl? I tried to jump out of the van while it was moving, but Joe Martin paralyzed me with a punch in the neck.
They took me back to the building I knew all too well, Brandon Leeman’s patch, where they were now the bosses, and in spite of my bewildered panic I could see that it was in even worse shape. The obscenities daubed on the wall, garbage, and broken glass had multiplied, and it smelled of excrement. Between the two of them they dragged me up to the third floor, opened the gate, and we went into the apartment, which was empty. “Now you’re going to sing, you fucking slut,” Joe Martin threatened me, an inch from my face, squeezing my breasts with his apelike hands. “You’re going to tell us where Leeman hid the money, or I’ll break every bone in your body, one at a time.”
At that instant Chino’s cell phone rang, and he talked for a couple of seconds and then told Joe Martin that there’d be plenty of time to break my bones, but they had orders to get going. They were waiting for them, he said. Joe Martin and Chino gagged me with a rag in my mouth and adhesive tape, threw me down on one of the mattresses, tied my ankles and my wrists together with an electric cord and then tied them to each other, so I was bent backward. They left, after warning me again what they’d do to me when they got back, and I was left alone, unable to scream or move, the cord cutting into my ankles and wrists, my neck sore where Joe Martin had hit me, suffocating from the rag in my mouth, terrified at what was going to happen to me at the hands of those murderers, and as the effects of the alcohol and drugs wore off. In my mouth I had the rag and the aftertaste of the chicken fajitas. I tried not to vomit, though I was gagging and could feel it coming up my throat, afraid I would die of asphyxiation.
How long was I on that mattress? It’s impossible to know with any certainty, but it felt to me like several days, although it could have been less than an hour. Very soon I began to tremble violently and to bite the rag, now soaked with saliva, so I wouldn’t swallow it. With every shudder the wire dug deeper into my skin. The fear and the pain kept me from thinking. Running out of air, I started to pray for Joe Martin and Chino to return, so I could tell them everything I knew, take them personally to Beatty, see if they could shoot those locks off, and if they then shot me in the head, that would at least be preferable to being tortured to death like an animal. I didn’t care about that damn money—why hadn’t I just confided in Officer Arana? Now, months later in Chiloé, with the calm of distance, I understand that was their way of making me confess. They didn’t have to break my bones; the torment of withdrawal was enough. That was, I’m sure, the order Chino had been given by phone.
Outside the sun had set. No light filtered in between the boards over the windows, and inside the darkness was total. Meanwhile, sicker and sicker, I kept praying the murderers would come back. The force of destiny. It wasn’t Joe Martin or Chino who turned on the light and leaned over me, but Freddy, so skinny and demented that for a moment I didn’t recognize him. “Shit, Laura, fuck, fuck,” he was mumbling as he tried to get the gag off my mouth with a trembling hand. He finally got the rag out, and I could take a massive breath and fill my lungs up with air, retching and coughing. Freddy, Freddy, sweet Freddy. He couldn’t get me untied. The knots had turned to stone, and he only had one good hand; he was missing two fingers on the other one and had never recovered the use of it entirely after that beating. He went to get a knife from the kitchen and started fighting with the electric cord until he managed to cut it and, after eternal minutes, free me. My ankles and wrists were bleeding, but I didn’t notice until later. In those moments I was overcome by the anguish of withdrawal. My next hit was the only thing that mattered to me.
It was useless to try to stand up; I was shaken by convulsive spasms, with no control over my extremities. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, you have to get out of here, fuck, Laura, fuck,” the boy was repeating like a litany. Freddy went to the kitchen again and came back with a pipe, a blowtorch, and a handful of crack. He lit it and put it in my mouth. I inhaled deeply, and that gave me back a bit of strength. “How are we going to get out of here, Freddy?” I murmured; my teeth were chattering. “Walking is the only way. Stand up, Laura,” he answered.
And we walked out the simplest way, through the front door. Freddy had the remote control to open the gate, and we slipped down the stairs in the darkness, glued to the wall, him holding me up by the waist, me leaning on his shoulders. He was so small! But his brave heart more than made up for his fragility. Maybe some of the phantoms of the lower floors saw us and told Joe Martin and Chino that Freddy had rescued me, I’ll never know. If nobody told them, they probably guessed—who else would risk his life to help me?
We walked a few blocks in the shadow of the houses, getting away from the building. Freddy tried to stop several taxis, but when they saw us they kept going or sped up; we must have been a dreadful sight. He took me to a bus stop and we got on the first one that came, without noticing where it was going or paying any attention to the expressions of repugnance on the faces of the passengers or the driver’s glances in the rearview mirror. I was disheveled, smelled of piss, had smears of blood on my arms and shoes. They could have ordered us off the bus or called the police, but we had a little luck there and they didn’t.
We got out at the last stop, where Freddy took me to a public washroom and I cleaned myself up as best I could, which wasn’t much, because my clothes and hair were disgusting, and then we got on another
bus, and then another, and we went around and around Las Vegas for hours to shake them off. At last Freddy took me to a black neighborhood where I’d never been. The badly lit streets were empty at this time of night, lined with humble working-class houses, porches with wicker chairs, yards full of junk and old cars. After the terrible beating that boy had taken for going into a neighborhood he didn’t belong in, it took a lot of courage to take me there, but he didn’t seem worried, as if he’d walked down these streets many times.
We arrived at a house, no different from all the rest, and Freddy rang the bell several times, insistently. Finally we heard a thundering voice: “Who’s got the nerve to bother us so late!” The porch light came on, the door opened a few inches, and an eye inspected us. “Praise the Lord, is that you, Freddy?”
It was Olympia Pettiford in a plush pink bathrobe, the nurse who had taken care of Freddy in the hospital when he got beaten up, the gentle giant, Madonna of the defenseless, the splendid woman who ran her own church of the Widows for Jesus. Olympia opened her door wide and hugged me in her African goddess’s embrace, “Poor girl, poor little girl.” She carried me to the sofa of her living room and laid me down there with the delicacy of a mother with a newborn baby.
In Olympia Pettiford’s house I was completely trapped in the horror of withdrawal, worse than any physical pain, they say, but less than the moral agony of feeling I was despicable or the terrible pain of losing a loved one, like my Popo. I don’t want to even think of what it would be like to lose Daniel . . . Olympia’s husband, Jeremiah Pettiford, a real angel, and the Widows for Jesus, a group of bossy, generous, older black women, with sorrows of their own, took turns supporting me through the worst days. When my teeth were chattering so much that my voice could barely be heard begging for a drink, just one drink of something strong, anything just to survive, when the tremors and stomach cramps were tormenting me and the octopus of anguish wrapped its thousands of tentacles around my temples and squeezed, when I was sweating and struggling and fighting and trying to escape, those marvelous widows held me down, rocked me, consoled me, prayed and sang for me, and didn’t leave me alone for a single second.