If I don’t give you a detailed account of what came next, Agustina sweetheart, it’s because in the end there were no further police or legal repercussions for me beyond that routine inspection ending with the usual bribe to the authorities; the lingering problem was more subjective, or emotional, maybe, because the gym clientele didn’t want the excitement to be over and they kept adding to the story and updating it in their imaginations, with talk about Ms. X passing by and the neighbors hearing music until late the night before, a sobbing woman bricked up in the wall, cars coming in and out of the parking lot, a creepy vibe in a certain room, and speculation as to who that poor girl must have been.
Anyway, Agustina darling, I won’t bore you much longer, but the honest truth is that the ghost of Dolores, or Sara Luz as she was called now, started to grow and suffocate me and give the Aerobics Center a bad name, to the point that even I, each time I smoked a joint to relax a little, was plunged into the most unpleasant fantasies in which my own gym became an Inquisition torture chamber and my beloved machines were turned into racks and Dolores was crucified on the Nautilus 4200, What the fuck, I thought, this is her revenge, and I tried to kick-start a dialogue so that we could come to some kind of agreement: I promise you, blessed soul of Dolores, that as soon as the scandal dies down I’ll send money to your John Jairo, or Henry Mario, or whatever your kid’s name is, so he can go to school, I promise you, my dear Sara Luz, that if you help me stop the gossip, I’ll bankroll a technical-school degree for your William Andrés some day.
On top of everything, while all this was going on, time was passing, and the date went by on which, according to Mystery, Pablo had promised to make good on our investment, so as you can imagine, Agustina baby, Spider Salazar and Ronald Silverstein were all over me, Has it come yet, What’s the meaning of this, What the hell is going on, and there I was taking the blame and saying how sorry I was in an effort to put out this second blaze, I understand, Spider my friend, it’s the pits, Silver old man, you’re both right, it’s shit, I realize this delay is shit, but everything will work out in the end, you’ll see; that’s what I told them, Agustina princess, but the truth was that I had no idea what might be going through Escobar’s head since Mystery wouldn’t even keep his appointments with me. I spent hour after hour waiting for him at the cemetery hoping he’d show up with the money at last, or at least with an explanation, but there was nothing, the days passed and nothing. Go on, Midas, Spider commanded imperiously, find Pablo and let him know that this little delay is putting us in a tight spot, Relax, Spider old man, as soon as his messenger shows up I’ll pass on the complaint, You never told me, Midas my boy, that you weren’t in direct contact with Escobar, Well, yes, or I mean, no, I used to be but now the situation has changed a little, try to understand, Spider my man.
That week our Thursday dinner at L’Esplanade was extremely tense; since Spider and Silver couldn’t pester me in front of Joaco and Ayerbe, who didn’t know what was going on, they satisfied themselves by making merciless fun of me, and I was feeling awful, so that even though I ordered my favorite dish, partridge in a chestnut chocolate sauce, I couldn’t eat a bite, and the truth is, my stomach wasn’t up for partying, what with my friends fucking with me, Dolores’s hounding of me, the crisis at the Aerobics Center, Pablo’s delay, and on top of it all, the stranglehold of the loans I’d had to take out to get together all the cash for Pablo.
This was a Thursday, Agustina princess, and the very next day, bam! there was that bombing at L’Esplanade and we all survived in one piece, those of us who weren’t at the restaurant, that is, because anyone who was there came out in multiple pieces; I escaped by twenty-four hours, sweetheart, it was my amazing luck that the bomb went off on Friday, because if it had gone off a day earlier I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. It was a massive explosion, and the diners, the cooks, that frog Courtois and his incredible wine cellar, the ladies with crocodile purses and crocodile skin, and even the cat were blown up, and when Escobar claimed responsibility for the attack, everyone asked what reason he could possibly have had to break his truce with the Bogotá oligarchy, planting a huge bomb in a restaurant full of rich people right in the heart of the residential north side of town. Some said that he was furious and blinded by pride because he’d been blackballed at a country club, or because the DEA was putting the squeeze on him, or because of the extradition threats, or because he was banned from running for office, or because the government wasn’t abiding by its agreements with him, or all of the above, but whatever it was, the residents on the north side of the city started to shake because until then they’d thought that Pablo’s war wasn’t with them, but the dead and the wounded and the rubble of L’Esplanade proved otherwise. Escobar’s problem, I tried to explain to them without success, is that he got tired of the balancing act, of us taking his money with one hand and trying to kill him with the other.
And Spider, like a pesky fly on a noble steed, was after me constantly, Explain this to me, Midas my boy, now that Pablo has come unglued, what the fuck is going to happen to our investment? who’s got an answer for me? and Rony Silver chimed in, too, and then there was Mystery, vanished into thin air, and finally I sank into a state of profound melancholy and retreated alone to my bedroom to turn off everything that I possibly could from my bed with the remote control and sleep twelve or fourteen hours straight with the blinds shut in a single long peaceful night.
And there in my room in the dark, Agustina princess, with the telephone unplugged, I thought about Pablo, remembering our second and last meeting, which wasn’t at his Naples estate this time, no samba dancers or giraffes or Olympic-size pool, but in a shabby house that smelled like the den of a rogue tiger, I never knew which of the neighborhoods of Medellín it was in because they brought me there with my eyes blindfolded, but anyway the Boss’s hiding place this time was only furnished with a few chairs and beds and there he was in a T-shirt and baseball cap, fatter than before, and he made me laugh because he showed me a picture that had been taken a few months earlier; guess where, Agustina darling? In front of the White House in Washington, if you can believe it, because according to what he told me he could enter and leave the United States whenever he felt like it.
The picture was really incredible, Pablo Escobar, the most wanted man in history, in a white shirt and with his face bare, no dark glasses or cap or fake beard or plastic surgery, just standing there, as he is, leaning like any tourist against the railing around the White House, which you could see behind him with its Greek columns and the triangular pediment of its north face, so as I looked at that picture, Agustina angel, I said, Unbelievable, Don Pablo, President Reagan is looking for you everywhere and there you are right at his front gate, and he replied, Reagan’s problem, Midas my friend, is that he’s the one behind bars.
And yet things had changed for Pablo since that carefree afternoon in the capital of the empire, because in this dark, empty place that was his hideout he didn’t strike me as his usual self; there was even one silly detail that made me think the end might be near for him, and it was a cardboard box holding the remains of some fried fish he’d been eating, I’m sure one of the gunmen guarding him had bought it for him at some stall, which was fine, but what I couldn’t understand, Agustina princess, was why Pablo hadn’t ordered for those cold, greasy leftovers to be taken away. I don’t know if you follow me, it was nothing, really, just the sort of thing I always notice, carelessness that I tend to interpret as a sign of decline.