“After the murder, all those videos and what my mother did to Toledo, Papa still wouldn’t believe it. He never once admitted that my mother had gone crazy. When Doña Elena told the police she heard my mother talking to some men at that place where they held her, Papa said the URNG must have forced my mother to do it. Papa wouldn’t go to work. He said he had to be there when she came home. He sat in the living room for weeks and waited. He checked the telephone sometimes. He picked it up and listened to make sure there was a dial tone. But she never called and she never came. My mother was done with us. The only ones who came were immigration.
“Papa was a wreck. When we got to Guatemala, his sister and her husband took us in at first, and then we moved to an apartment. The one where he is now. He didn’t try to find work. He hardly ever went outside. He just sat there by the phone all day, waiting for a call. Then he started drinking.
“He had some money saved, I guess, because he said I had to go to college. He said when my mother came home, she would be angry with him if he let me stay there. They had always planned for me to get a college education, like he did. Papa’s a civil engineer. Or he was. But he wouldn’t let me go to school in America. He hates America now. He made plans to send me to a university in Valencia.”
I interrupted her. “That’s where you met the Formula One racing team?”
“Yes. But before I went to Spain, I had a lot of time to think about what my mother had done. My father told me about Arturo Toledo, how he had been the mayor of Cobán during the bad time in Guatemala, how he had made a lot of people disappear and gotten rich from bribes and ransoms. My father told me how Toledo used to go to families after their loved ones had been disappeared. Toledo promised to return them if their families gave him enough money. Papa said Toledo did that to my mother’s family. After my grandfather was disappeared, Toledo took all of my grandmother’s money and promised to return my grandfather, but he never did.
“I thought a lot about how that would have made me feel if someone had done that to my father. I began to understand what my mother did. It was wrong, I know, but it was understandable. I tried to say that to Papa, but he accused me of betraying her, simply because I had faced the fact of what she did. He said she would never choose to leave us. Not for revenge, and certainly not for money. He said she had only taken the job with Toledo to try to find a way to expose him. She would never do the things to him they said she had done. She was innocent of everything. She was only waiting until it was safe to come back to us, and then she would explain what really happened, and I would be sorry I had ever believed that she was capable of such horrible things.”
Olivia shook her head. “You saw how he is. It’s heartbreaking to be with him, to watch him go on pretending. God forgive me, I was glad to go away to Spain.
“I spent the first year over there taking general-studies courses. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Then I met those guys on the racing team and spent a lot of my spare time playing around with cars. I thought about dropping out and doing that full time, but they were real good guys. They said they’d only hire me if I finished school. So I entered the mechanical-engineering program, because that would be most helpful with the team.
“Then as time went by, I began to think more carefully about what my mother had done, and I realized something wasn’t right. If she really wanted revenge on Arturo Toledo for what he did to our family, why bother kidnapping Doña Elena? Why not take Toledo directly? And she would never have believed that Toledo had only two hundred thousand dollars, so why demand so little?
“I decided my mother must have kidnapped Doña Elena because she couldn’t get to Toledo. He was always surrounded by armed bodyguards. He called them his ‘friends,’ but they were bodyguards. So my mother took his wife instead. And then she asked for such a small amount to get him to bring the money to her personally. Toledo always claimed he had taken nothing from the people, so if my mother had demanded more, he might have simply claimed he didn’t have it. She knew he would have certainly allowed Doña Elena to be murdered before he put his millions at risk. But she also knew his pride was monumental. So she trapped him. With the police there and the videos released to the press, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t have a sum as small as two hundred thousand dollars. When she made that demand, she left him no choice. He had to bring the money to her or else allow himself to look like a heartless coward, which was something he would never do.”
I interrupted her. “You think the plan all along was to get him alone so she could kill him?”
“No no no! That must have been an accident. My mother’s not a killer. She wanted to get him away from his bodyguards so she could make him give her access to wherever he had hidden all that money. An offshore account, probably.”
I leaned back, considering Olivia. I didn’t believe for a second that Toledo’s death had been an accident, but if that was what she had to tell herself, it seemed unnecessary to debate the point. Instead I said, “You think she got away with millions.”
“I do, yes.”
“Interesting. It would explain how she’s been able to elude the law for all these years.”
She nodded. “Living on the run is much easier with money.”
“It also explains your international banking degree.”
“Yes. When I realized what my mother had done, I decided to change my major from mechanical engineering to business management with a concentration in international banking.”
I said, “You planned to find your mother by finding the money.”
“At first I didn’t have such a clear-cut plan. I only wanted to understand how people move large amounts of money around, and how they hide it from governments. My plan came later, after I graduated. I went back to Guatemala to be close to Papa, but he was just the same. That’s when I realized the only way he’ll ever get over this is if I bring my mother home, or else prove to him once and for all that she’s never coming back.”
I said, “So you came back here to find your mother. You came back for your father’s sake. To find a way to save him.”
“He’s dying, little by little. I had to do something. I decided to try to get close to the Guatemalan community here, since this was where she was last seen. I have dual citizenship, so I came back with my American passport and moved into a hotel in Pico-Union, hoping somebody would know where she was. But I couldn’t predict how my mother would react if she heard I was looking for her. It had been five years already at that time, and she hadn’t made one attempt to get in touch. If she heard I was back and looking for her, she might just go deeper into hiding. So I found a guy and bought a driver’s license and a social-security card in the name of Soto, hoping my mother wouldn’t realize who I was until I at least had a chance to talk to her.”
I said, “She’s famous in Pico-Union.”
“I know. They call her La Alejandra. Their defender. To tell you the truth, I was surprised when I came back and found out she’s been doing good things for the community all this time. I think I thought… I hoped…” Olivia looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap. I saw a tear escape her eye and trace its way along her cheek. “Actually, I was disappointed she’s alive. It means she doesn’t want to come back to us. Do you think God will forgive me for that?”