Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (21 page)

She picked it up with an exaggerated motion, then she did something shocking—she grabbed the sides of her skirt, and curtseyed. An angry, mocking curtsey. His mother used to have to do that—curtsey. But she’d never curtseyed like Liza. It was a fuck-you curtsey.

She came around and set a last dish on the table. “Do you want me to call
the boy
?”

He stared at her levelly. Was she mocking him? “I thought you had decided to call him Paolo.”

“So I can call the boy by his real name, but I can’t practice math with him in any sensible way? Maybe I need a drill to memorize, too.”

He wanted to laugh. How had anyone traded this woman in a card game? He moved toward her as the dead move toward light. “Maybe you
do
need a drill to memorize.”

The space between them surged with energy and need. He wanted to kiss her more than he wanted his next breath. He could feel the rise in her spirit. She would meet him. Everything was between them.

Suddenly Paolo was there, taking his seat. He dug into the chicken.

Somehow, Hugo found the will to turn. One step. Two steps. He went to the side table where he’d left his book and brought it to his seat at the table.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. He’d read it before, but he was a man who enjoyed reading a book over again, letting it speak to him in different moods. “You will place my book here with my coffee at the breakfast table. I read my book at breakfast.”

He opened it without looking up, conscious of her curiosity—about the book? Or did she imagine that he should converse with Paolo at the breakfast table? He wanted her to say it, to push just so he could push back. When he was reasonably certain she wouldn’t speak up, he flipped a page and fixed her with a glare. “The boy and I have a big day. We’ll need lunches prepared to take to the field.” He gave her instructions.

She nodded and left.

He stared at the page, still feeling her. Again he went over the night before. The way she’d come to him. The music of her thighs under the slide of his palms. The way she’d gasped and trembled.
How long?
she’d whispered.
How long have you had these burns?

Nine years,
he’d said.

The words swam on the page. She hadn’t asked what happened. She had asked,
How long?

Alarm bells clanged.

What happened? Were you burned?
Those were natural first questions to ask when faced with scars such as his. But to ask
how long
… Who asked that?

Somebody who knew about Kabakas asked that.

Somebody who suspected.

He closed the book and picked up his fork, though he was no longer hungry. Nobody could learn his identity. It wasn’t simply a matter of protecting himself; he had to protect the boy. He would protect him with everything. The enemies of Kabakas would go after the boy.

He could not allow her to live if she’d guessed about Kabakas. It was too dangerous.

No, she could not know.

He felt the boy’s eyes on him. The boy monitored him the way the villagers monitored the weather, sensitive to the minutest shifts in pressure. He dug in, just to put the boy’s mind at ease.

Llapingachos
. Finally. They were decent, too. They were nothing like Café Moderno’s but decent enough. He piled on a bit of chicken.

There was no way she could know, this American prostitute. She could not have known he’d be at the airfield. And even if she had, no hunter could arrange that. It was far too elaborate. Insane, even. Handcuffed, helpless.

No, he was spinning notions from the empty air. This is what came of bringing a woman like this into his home. He’d always confined his sexual liaisons to Bumcara. Here he was, focusing on the help.

Preying on the help.

Like his father.

The realization turned the food in his mouth to cardboard. He could feel the boy’s eyes on him, sensing his shift in mood.

“
Bueno
,” he grunted, forcing himself to scrape the fork along the plate, gathering up another bite.

The boy resumed eating.

Hugo chewed the food woodenly. Preying on the help. Was he no different from his predator of a father? The Bolivian oilman who’d fucked the maid, cuckolded the husband, ignored his biological child? The oilman who’d destroyed his family’s happiness? His mother had been a maid. What choice did she have? What choice did Liza have?

He disgusted himself.

He and Paolo
spent that day walking the rows on the sunny side of the field with their small scythes, cutting the stems with buds that were ready to go. There was a shape the bud took on when it was just about to unfurl, a certain outward swell, and you had to get them out of the sun and into the citric acid solution, or you were done. They collected them in the large wheeled trays, bundling them in groups of 120, and brought them to the shed to be cooled. Everything with the harvest was in groups of twelve—so much of it followed traditional tales and rituals, and those processes had gotten built into the trade.

His burns pained him, but the window for the harvest was shutting—once the flowers started to bloom, they became worthless to the floral wholesalers, who bought only tight, mature buds with the telltale swell. And he always helped the boy.

There was something strange about the plants, however; the leaves looked shiny. That was not normal.

They came in late and ate dinner silently. He instructed her to stay in her room that night and she did; she seemed as interested in keeping a distance between them as he did. He got through the night with only a small bit of opium.

The next day
after breakfast, he drove down to the village.

Still deserted. His heart fell.

The villagers needed to be out harvesting their crops. How could he prove to them that the danger was past?

The sunny sides would be popping soon, and then it would be too late. Hugo and the boy could live without doing a harvest, but the villagers could not.

He drove to the spot north of the village square where Paolo always seemed to get cell service. There he contacted his PI, who gave him background on Liza.

Hugo listened, fascinated, as the investigator recounted her history. Her father was in the army, stationed in Japan on the American base at Okinawa. He had married a woman from town. Liza was an only child, though the investigator wanted to dig into that more—there was something strange there. He wondered if a child had been given up. Liza had graduated high school with good grades and had even attended college for a year. There were photos of her as a dancer in Vegas. Later, head shots; Liza the Hollywood actress. According to the investigator, the only role Liza had landed was that of a high-priced escort. There were photos from that period, too—mostly parties. Liza in beautiful dresses and hanging on the arms of various men. Liza on a yacht. Liza always laughing. She had a blog, too. The man forwarded the link to him at the end of the call.

Hugo leaned on the Jeep, reading the blog hungrily. It was about an American soap opera. Liza had many opinions on amnesia, it seemed, and carried on lengthy discussions in the comments. She was kind, this woman, replying to each and every person. A hostess in this little space.

He got into his Jeep and drove up the winding path out onto the mountainside where terraced fields hugged the terrain, a great expanse of brown and green. His nerves always calmed in the fields. He drove to the point where the entire terraced range was visible.

The sight chilled his bones.

The upper-edge field, the slice that got the longest day of sun, was awash in red, a blade in the heart of the village. Months of income lost.

He’d said El Gorrion wasn’t coming back, but they hadn’t believed him. Why should they? They did not know him. They thought him an American dilettante; a hobbyist reclaiming his South American roots. He had encouraged this image.

Right before harvest was the worst time to scare the farmers from their fields.

He drove to the part of the fields nearest to Julian’s tracts. If anybody was trying to save his harvest, it would be Julian. He stopped the vehicle and got out, heading toward the bloody edge, kicking aside the Luquesolama stones left over from the Primer Verde some months back. The ceremonial arrangement of the stones before each harvest was one of the many superstitions his mother had despised. The story went that if the rocks were not sized and arranged in a specific design at specific intervals, the earth below would not welcome the
Savinca verde
crop as its child and would not care for it.

Even the villagers seemed to regard it as superstition, but not quite enough to reject the practice. He had no problem with the superstitions, but he found the villagers’ constant celebrations an annoyance because Fernando would shut down Café Moderno.

He strolled down the row. The leaves and swelled buds were shoulder high, shot up from the gnarled, woody bases. The plants were trimmed back to those bases after each harvest, spring and fall. Some of those bases were two centuries old.

Like every farmer, Julian had a specific trimming style passed down through his family. Julian cut deep into the base, creating a triangular shape. Others created a flat top. Others rounded to a circle. Paolo had chosen Julian’s style to emulate the first year of his business.

Hugo ran one of the wide, heart-shaped leaves through his fingers, wondering as he sometimes did what the trimming style of his ancestors had been. He turned the leaf. It didn’t look right—too shiny. He’d noticed the shine up top, too, though it was more intense here. Shine could indicate a lack of moisture and sun, yet there had been plenty of rain and sun.

Were they sick? Was it emotions? The villagers believed the plants could feel. He, too, believed it at times, and he felt a sudden rush of grief for them. Like a small child, a plant could not run away when there was trouble or fighting. It could only grow, vulnerable in its tiny patch of dirt. An unaccountable thickness filled his throat as he peered across to the red swath at the top side of the slope. Flowers blooming unloved in the fields.

He heard rustling and pulled his scythe from his belt.

A man in a red woven hat approached. He wore a coarse gray shirt and a bright gold chain around his neck—the medal of Caribbo.

“Julian!”

Julian holstered his gun. He wore long pants and a utility belt holding two sizes of scythes and several pairs of gloves.

“
Buenas
!” Hugo said, heading toward the man, hand outstretched.

Julian took his hand. There was something about being the only two men in this place, surrounded by the blooming savinca sweet with death, which made Hugo feel a bond with Julian. He was a leading farmer, passionate about progress. Julian had a son Paolo’s age. A good boy, and one of the few who tolerated Paolo.

Julian would be working the field from the protected center. He was wary of El Gorrion’s men, but not enough to lose his crop. One man working the fields, though—it wasn’t enough.

“Where is everybody?” Hugo asked.

Julian waved a helpless hand toward the village. “You know what happened.”

“But it’s safe now. They’re not coming back.”

“They still could,” Julian said. “And you know what they do. You saw what they did to Pedro.”

“They aren’t coming back—’

“You can’t know,” Julian said.

“El Gorrion’s men were attacked,” Hugo said. “They aren’t coming back.”

Julian squinted. “I will risk coming back, yes, but to bring my family back. Hugo…”

“Nobody attacks a village once it falls under the protection of Kabakas,” he said.

“We heard the rumors of that, but it seems… farfetched,” Julian said, squinting down the mountainside.

Hugo felt so helpless. He could destroy a contingent of guerrilla fighters, but he couldn’t coax a few families into a field of flower buds. His hands balled into fists deep inside his pockets as Liza’s words rang through his mind.
He is a real person. See him.
She’d meant it about Paolo, but she could’ve said it of Julian and the villagers. Why should his word have weight? Hugo wasn’t a part of the village. He barely interacted with them or treated them as neighbors. How arrogant to assume they would trust him about El Gorrion not coming back, or risk their families on rumors—or on the casual word of an outsider to a shopkeeper. He’d thought it would be enough.