For a few seconds there is nothing. She rattles the gate again. Then a voice overhead. “Who is it?”
“Es Maricela y sus amigos. Let us in.”
The man who sticks his head out the window a couple of seconds later looks no more Costa Rican than I do. “Where have you been? I have been trying to reach you for the last six weeks,” he says. “Katia is in trouble.”
“I know,” she tells him. “Lemme in, please.”
“Give me a minute to find my key.” He disappears from the window.
“Your friend is an American,” I say.
“Yes. His name is Larry Goudaz. He calls himself Lorenzo. He is from California. The Silicon Valley,” she says.
“I see.” I remember the name Lorenzo Goudaz from one of our meetings with Katia at the jail. “I think Katia mentioned him as a friend.”
“Yes, I’m sure she would have told you about him.”
Lorenzo Goudaz was on Harry’s short list of people in San José as possible contacts, names given to him by Katia, who might be able to reach her mother. According to Katia she had introduced Goudaz to Emerson Pike before she and Pike left for California. Goudaz didn’t particularly like Pike. If Katia had listened to him and stayed home, none of this would have happened.
As I listen to her, Maricela describes a man who is a professional networker. He has situated himself between the local Costa Ricans and the Americans, some who live here and some who trek to the city periodically from up north, and has made himself useful to all.
“Lorenzo has been here twenty years at least,” says Maricela. “He has been a friend and from time to time has helped people in the neighborhood. All the norteamericanos, what you call expatriates…”
“Yes.”
“They all know him. When they come to town they visit him. They call him the mayor of Gringo Gulch. Katia calls him ‘the MOGG.’” She explains that this is short for mayor of Gringo Gulch. “But don’t say it in front of him. Katia jokes, but I don’t think he likes it.” She looks at me and smiles, the same intriguing smile as her daughter’s.
We hear him coming down the stairs.
“Why do they call him the mayor?” says Herman.
“Because he has been here so long and knows so many people. If you are in trouble, you go see Lorenzo and he will fix it, or knows somebody who can.”
A second later the front door opens. We are greeted with a broad grin under a shiny bald head. His stocky, round white body is naked to the waist, and there are only a few wisps of gray hair on the chest.
The second he looks at Maricela he loses the smile. “You look as if you’re sick. What’s happened?”
“There’s been a fire at my house. Please let us in.”
“Of course.” He fumbles with a large brass ring of keys trying to find the one that works the gate.
“How did it happen?”
“I’ll tell you when we get inside.”
He struggles with the ring, then drops it on the ground. “Fucking keys,” he says as he bends over to pick them up. When he stands up he’s staring straight at Maricela. “Excuse my French,” he says. He gives Herman and me a cockeyed, impish grin through the bars.
“Please hurry,” she says. “I need to use your bathroom.”
He finds the right key, turns it in the lock, and opens the gate.
Maricela shoots through the door and up the cement spiral staircase ahead of us.
“What can I say? Any friend of Maricela’s is a friend of mine.” He smiles a little, as if to acknowledge that this is a mantra in which Maricela’s name is interchangeable with the name of every other person he knows. “Excuse my appearance. It’s laundry day and I’ve run out of shirts. So you get to see the washboard abs and the rugged me.”
Herman and I laugh. Goudaz has the natural charm of a glad-hander. He does it easily and with a certain grace, even naked from the waist up.
“Sorry to barge in on you like this. My name’s Paul, this is Herman.”
“That’s what I like, people on a first-name basis.” He shakes our hands while he’s looking at our duffel bags.
“I hope it doesn’t look like we’re planning on staying,” says Herman.
“Don’t worry about it. Come on in. I’m sure Maricela has told you about me. I’m the local curiosity.” He locks the gate behind us and closes the door.
“Everything except how you got the name Lorenzo,” I say.
“It’s because Ms. Blind Costa Rica loves to toy with this single hair on my chest, so she calls me Lorenzo the Magnificent. If you have any other questions, just ask, ’cause I’ve got lots of lies,” he says.
Herman and I laugh as we trudge up the stairs hauling our luggage.
“So tell me what happened.”
Shortly after midnight the demons stopped dancing in his head and Yakov fell asleep. It was deep and restful, though he couldn’t be sure how long it lasted.
He wakened suddenly to a sound overhead unlike anything he had ever heard before. A deep whomping percussion that became louder and shook the entire hut as it drew near. It was a helicopter. The Colombian military had found the base.
Nitikin rolled over and was suddenly blinded by a flashlight beam directed into his eyes. “Get up. We are leaving.”
Yakov held up a hand to shade his eyes. It was Alim’s interpreter. The man lowered the flashlight. “Put on your clothes. Leave everything else. Take nothing. Everything you need will be provided. Come. Hurry.” The man stepped just outside the door of the hut and waited. “Quickly!”
Yakov began to put on his pants as the deafening sound of the helicopter moved overhead. He glanced at his watch and realized it was just after three in the morning.
Nitikin put on his shirt and buttoned it. He looked for his watch and couldn’t find it.
“Hurry up!”
He grabbed his boots and his field jacket, then reached under the bed into a bag he had already packed. He felt around inside the bag for the shape of the small clamshell cell phone. He disconnected the wire that had been charging it, and then slipped the phone into his pants pocket. He reached for the charger, plugged into the wall on the other side of the bed.
“Hurry! What are you doing?” The interpreter came back into the hut.
“I am looking for some socks.”
“You don’t need socks. We don’t have time. Put your boots on now. Let’s go.”
The man stood there and watched him as Nitikin laced up his boots over his naked feet. Yakov hadn’t worn socks in years. But he needed time to get the charger for the cell phone. Now he would have to leave it and pray that he had enough battery power to make the call to Maricela.
He followed the interpreter out the door and through the maze of huts. By now several of the FARC commandos had taken up their Kalashnikov rifles and were headed in the same direction. Helicopters overhead always charged the entire camp with fear. They were employed against the FARC both for attacks as well as subterfuge. Recently they had been used to trick the FARC into releasing hostages the rebels believed were merely being transported from one camp to another.
By now the bird was on the ground. Yakov could hear the gentle woofing of the blades as they idled quietly, whipping the air in the clearing beyond the huts. As he came around the corner of the last building, he suddenly realized why Alim had waited so long to transport the container.
This was no ordinary helicopter. Yakov had seen it before, but it was always in the distance, miles away, where you couldn’t gain a true appreciation of its size. The huge Sikorsky Skycrane was used for logging in remote areas, in particular for hauling high-end exotic hardwoods from inaccessible river valleys. Yakov had heard stories of logs hollowed out to carry even more valuable crops, thousands of pounds of cocaine whisked through the air to unknown destinations.