Trash (13 page)

‘What’s he saying, Gardo?’

‘I need my Bible. My Bible is the book we used.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. The door had opened: a guard was standing there, watching us.

‘Of course you don’t. How could you? I’m explaining nothing, Olivia – the boy must have my Bible, and I think it will … oh God. I can’t … It might reveal where the seeds have been placed. If he is serious, and he must be serious! He would not … trifle – he wouldn’t write in that way unless it was true.’ The guard walked towards us. The old man didn’t notice. ‘
It is accomplished
was the phrase we used – it’s the words of Christ, yes? – the best translation. You read your Bible? In St John, at the crucifixion:
It is finished – accomplished
– and we used it, flippantly perhaps,
referring to the finding of … the restoration of all that had been stolen. That is what we spent our lives hoping to accomplish. Do you see now?’

A light was dawning, even on me. I said: ‘Are you saying that José found some money—?’

He cut me off and turned to the guard. ‘I need my Bible, sir. It’s by my bed.’

The guard said, ‘It is the end of the visit, sir.’

‘I need my Bible, though,’ he repeated.

The guard nodded, but did not move. He said something in his own language again.

The old man said, ‘Please, I have to give my friends something. They have come all this way.’ He spoke in his own language, and the guard looked at him steadily. When the guard spoke again, it was brief and terse.

The old man looked at me. ‘He cannot help us now,’ he said. ‘He says that the visit is over, and nothing must leave the prison. But he says that he will help us. His name is Marco, and he says you have to go.’

‘Can’t we take the Bible?’ I said to the guard. ‘Where is it?’

‘He says he will give it to you later. His name is Marco, and I have told him that it’s important. He has promised. You have promised, haven’t you?’

The guard nodded, and ten minutes later I was outside the prison gate, with Gardo by my side. We waited, but nobody appeared with a Bible, and the guard had gone. He had
spoken in a low voice to Gardo, and Gardo had spoken earnestly back, and they had shaken hands.

‘He said it is impossible to give it now,’ Gardo told me as we looked for a taxi. ‘But he says he will bring it to Behala.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You didn’t ask? What did you say to him? Is this … I don’t understand what’s going on. Will he bring it?’

‘He will want money,’ said Gardo softly. ‘I think he will want a lot of money, but he will bring it. This is very dangerous now, for you also. He could betray us.’

The following morning, many things happened, and this is the end of my story.

Gabriel Olondriz died peacefully in the prison hospital. His death was reported in many newspapers. I assume the prison guard – the one who had the old man’s Bible – realized at once that he had in his possession a precious relic of a famous old political soldier. That meant the price of the Bible could only go up. Perhaps he had overheard the old man, and understood part of the story. Perhaps he had simply seen the light in the gentleman’s eyes, and knew by instinct that there was a fortune to be made.

I never saw the guard again, because I finish here – things moved fast and I have never been so frightened.

When I got home, I went out to dinner as planned, and
despite everything I’d seen, I slept well. In the early morning, however, three policemen came to my hostel, and I was asked to accompany them to a police station. My friend Mr Oliva had faxed everything to his security chief, and someone efficient put Gardo and me into some computer. I had given our Behala address, and that address must have tripped the alarm. Of course, Behala was under surveillance, and any activity from the dumpsite – anything strange – was going to ring bells and alert people.

They were there on my doorstep, three of them. I was terrified – I had no idea what to do. I got a message to Father Juilliard and he came straight away, thank God, and contacted my father. The police warned me that they would find out everything: I protected the boys as best I could, hoping to God they wouldn’t be taken again. I guess I was lucky that I had understood so little. I did not mention a Bible, and I said that Gardo and the old man had spoken in their own language – that as far as I knew, they’d been talking about a house, grandson to grandfather.

Because of my father, somebody from the British Embassy arrived, and argued very strongly that I was naïve and innocent. I had also broken no law. No charges could be brought – the official kept repeating that, gently, persuasively.

After some time I was released and my passport was returned. I took advice and I was on a plane out of the country the same day.

*   *   *

And that is my story, and thank you for letting me tell it. I left part of my heart in your country, boys, and now I can never go back. I say to myself, so what did you learn? What did you learn from the Behala dumpsite, and how has it changed you?

I learned perhaps more than any university could ever teach me. I learned that the world revolves around money. There are values and virtues and morals; there are relationships and trust and love – and all of that is important. Money, however, is more important, and it is dripping all the time, like precious water. Some drink deep; others thirst. Without money, you shrivel and die. The absence of money is drought in which nothing can grow. Nobody knows the value of water until they’ve lived in a dry, dry place – like Behala. So many people, waiting for the rain.

I said goodbye to so few and I can never go back. That is a pity, and it feels so wrong, because in Gardo, Raphael – and maybe most of all Rat – I left part of my heart, and writing this only makes me long to see you again, and this page is wet with my tears, boys.

Goodbye, and thank you so much for using me.

This is Rat once again, aka Jun-Jun, and I tell the part where I was the leader. Where it gets bad, bloody and oh so dangerous!

It was soon after Gardo got back, with me and Raphael waiting for him by the canal, the sun going down. He got back, and the police came in. Almost before we had time to talk, we heard the siren, and oh my God, it was a river of blue! If they’d come slow and quiet, OK – maybe they’d have got us, but oh God, thank you again that they love to make a noise and have to show up like some carnival, sirens blasting out over the town. We just did the obvious thing: soon as we saw them, we made off, no time to say goodbye, just a half-minute to grab my money, and out we went. Behala’s a mile wide, and there are so many ways, so I led them down to the docks, we got a garbage barge across the bay, and then walked.

Gardo has a friend of an uncle or someone who has a store selling dry goods, and we slunk in there and slept over, wondering what on earth we should do, now we were really on the run.

That’s what it was for us:
on the run
, wanted men with no place to go! We had the letter still, and the map – and Gardo told us all about the Bible-code, or what he understood of it. We told him about the fridge of money and Zapanta’s house, and we sat there thinking and thinking, wondering how we’d do what we needed to do – everyone sure we needed that Bible, and nobody knowing what the next step could be.

I had the idea right then, because it was clear to me we had to stay safe. I said we should lie low in one of the big tourist areas where so many street kids work and beg. There’s a great gang of them there, and I’d spent some time in it after my station days. So that’s what we did: we went up to the strip joints around Buendía and found a spot by a cheap hotel. We put ourselves on the edge of the crowd and tried not to draw attention. I cut off Raphael’s hair, just in case anyone came looking – made him look like a little madman, though he’s cute enough still – cute enough to beg from foreigners, though he wouldn’t do it.

I said you got to, he said no. I said my money wouldn’t last, and Gardo told me to shut up. So I sewed the cash into my shorts, and looked after us all with it, eating on the street and smoking to look rough as we could. We
stuck together and stayed in the dark – stayed with the street boys for a night in the ruin of a place they used, but none of us felt safe. They weren’t mean like the station boys, mainly because there’s so many coming and going, but I think we were just so used to being a three. The crowd made Raphael nervous. We found a tiny room instead, high up in a stack of old shacks over a laundry. It wasn’t much bigger than a coffin, but it was better than no doors, no windows, and the rent was low. We could just about sit up straight, so there we went and whispered our plans.

I made one little change, which Gardo laughed at me for – but wasn’t I the hero in the end? I have never liked being nailed up inside a house, and I did it for Raphael too, who still wasn’t sleeping good: I got an old tyre lever, and loosened part of the roof. Emergency exit, just in case – because we knew things were getting hotter and hotter. We knew this was real, scary heat, all around us – even in the weather there was a wind, and the freak typhoon hovering over the sea, and we all felt something big was coming. There was no way back from it now, and for the boys it meant they couldn’t even see their people again – I heard them whispering and wondering, and Raphael cried at night for his auntie and his cousins.

They could never go back to the dumpsite: they had lost their homes, I guess.

We knew most of all that everything depended on that damn Bible, and the little bit of paper we had, with the
lines of numbers. We had to get that Bible, and set those two things together.

So Gardo risked it, and one day borrowed my dirty clothes and walked all the way to Colva Prison.

He sat and sat, working out where the guards came out, and he spent another two days watching the different shifts, pretending to be deaf and dumb. When he spotted the guard he was looking for, he followed him.

He followed him away from the prison, then he let the guard see him and followed some more. The guard – Marco – he just kept going and going, then found some little tea-house in the Chinese quarter. Just the two of them. That was so brave of Gardo, because we’d all worked out how the guard must know there was a price on Gardo’s head. We’d gone over it and over it: the prison must have got wise to his connection to the dump, and talked to the police. They would have given anything to know what the old man and he had talked about.

The big question, therefore, was if we could trust Marco.

When Gardo came back, he told us bad news.

‘The man wants twenty,’ he said.

He meant twenty thousand, of course. That was the price of the Bible.

Raphael cursed and said: ‘You sure he’s got it? You sure he’ll give it?’

Gardo thought he had, but what was dangerous was whether he’d really hand it over. He could so easily take a
bit of money, say half – and then hand us in. How big a reward would they be offering for news of Gardo? The one thing none of us talked about was what would happen to us if we got arrested. We all knew that if we got taken again, we’d never get out, we’d be dead. I was getting nightmares too by this stage, waking up crying, all three of us like little boys.

But we stuck together like a gang.

‘You think he’ll give it?’ said Raphael for the hundredth time. ‘Even if we get that kind of money – you think it’s safe?’

Gardo shrugged. ‘We either forget it,’ he said, ‘and live here for ever. Or we give it a go.’

Twenty thousand pesos, though, and I had a little under two. My going-home money, squandering it on sitting around. Like I said, we all knew we were near something huge, but the thing we were near had fences all around it. Raphael read papers to me, and every day there was an update on the Zapanta robbery, with more little hints about how it happened.
Police following leads and hoping to arrest someone soon
. The fat man saying nothing, but the old scandal of what he did or didn’t steal himself was being raked over again, and his big face looking dirty and not smiling any more. The stories would finish the same way every time:
Nothing ever proved against him
. Gardo told us again and again what the old man in prison had said, and we all knew who we believed.

I wanted that fat pig’s money so bad I was aching, and
all I could think about was fridges, and that brave houseboy on a truck, stopping at a graveyard. How he got the key and his wallet into the trash: we always wondered whether he slung it when they were chasing him, or put it there for someone special to find. We talked it through, but never found an answer – I think it must have been some last-minute desperate thing, and then they must have beaten it out of him at the police station, just before they killed him. If I get to heaven, it’s the first thing I’m going to ask him. I have no doubt he’s up there. None.

Anyway, to return to the story. After a week of this and getting nowhere, I decided to make my move, and get the twenty for Marco. I’d been turning it over in my head, not sharing it – but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the only way.

I told Raphael and Gardo I was going back to Behala dumpsite, ‘just to fetch something’, and I thought they weren’t going to let me. They said I was crazy and it was way too dangerous. They told me if anyone saw me I could be grabbed and handed over – there was bound to be a reward offered now for any one of us.

They couldn’t imagine what it was I wanted to get, of course, and I didn’t want to tell them for fear of bad luck. I’m just so used to keeping what I do private, I could not share what I was going to do – nor the fact I had to do it before the end of the month, which was coming up fast. All Souls’ Night on its way – that’s the Day of the Dead. I had to get it done before that.

I just said, ‘I’m going,’ again and again. Midnight came, and I slipped out through the roof while the boys were sleeping.

I did say, I think, when you look like the devil’s child you can’t even ride a bus?

You can hold out your money, but you still get swatted off like a fly – that time I rode with Raphael was luck, and the fact that he has a nice smile and I hid behind him. So I walked some of the way, and jumped trucks some of the way. My luck held, and got better: I found a garbage truck by the city zoo, and guess where it was going? It was going to Behala, so I got inside it. Closer to my old home, I had to be on the lookout. Other kids might jump up too, and if I was seen, the boys were right – I had no family, so I might have been sold like a dog.