Anjelica Soledad de Crespo, a pseudonym for the drug-trafficking heroine of Jorge Torres’s stirring nonfiction portrait of the Pan-American narcotics cartel, For the Love of Corinthian Leather (2003), fed up with la vida de las drogas, had designed a similar death for herself, though she’d ventured to La Gran Sabana in Venezuela and appeared to tumble over a thousand-foot falls. Nine months prior to the supposed accident, a boat of nineteen Polish tourists had gone over in the same fashion — three of the corpses were never recovered due to the powerful undercurrents at the waterfall’s base, which held the bodies under in a vicious spin cycle until they were ripped to shreds, then devoured by crocodiles. Anjelica was declared dead within forty-eight hours. The truth was, she’d slipped out of her rowboat, making her way to the scuba gear planted for her on a convenient rock formation, which she’d donned and, fully submerged, swam the four miles to a location upriver where her handsome lover, Carlos, originally from El Silencio in Caracas, awaited her in a tricked-out silver Hummer. They hightailed it to an uninhabited section of the Amazon, somewhere in Guyana, where they still live.
I stared at the ceiling, racking my brain to recover every detail from that night. Hannah had changed into heavier clothes while we were eating dinner. When she came to find me in the woods, she wore a satchel around her waist. As she led me away, she’d known exactly where she was going because she’d walked resolutely, checking the map and compass. She’d intended to tell me something, a confession of some kind, then abandon me. Using the compass, she’d intersect with a predetermined trail, which would lead to one of the minor Park roads, then to U.S. 441 and a campground where a car awaited her (perhaps it was Carlos in a silver Hummer). By the time we were rescued and she was declared missing — a lag time of at least twenty-four hours, most likely longer, given the weather conditions — she’d be states away, maybe even Mexico.
And maybe the stranger who’d come upon us had not been so strange. Maybe he was Hannah’s Carlos (her Valerio) and the ambush, the “Give me five minutes,” the “I said stay here,” had been a hoax; maybe she’d intended to go after him all along, and together they’d make their way to the trail, the road, car, Mexico, margaritas, fajitas. In this case, when I was found, I’d report to authorities someone had come upon us, and when no sign of Hannah turned up, when German Shepherds tracked her to a spot on a nearby road, the police would suspect Kidnapping or other Foul Play, or, that she’d planned to vanish, in which case, unless she was WANTED for something, they’d do little. (Detective Harper had not hinted at Hannah having a criminal record. And I could only assume she wasn’t related to the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese or Colombo crime families.)
Sure, it was a brutal thing she’d done, to purposefully abandon me in the dark, but when people were desperate they did, with little conscience, all kinds of brutal things (see How to Survive “The Farm,” Louisiana State Prison at Angola, Glibb, 1979). Yet, she hadn’t been totally without concern; before she left me, she’d given me the flashlight, the map, told me not to be afraid. And during the afternoon hike up Bald Creek Trail, on four or five occasions, she’d pointed out on our maps, not only our location, but the fact that Sugartop Summit was only four miles away from the Park’s main road, U.S. 441.
If I could determine the reason Hannah had wished to flee her life, I could determine who’d killed her. Because it’d been a first-rate rub out, a button man well acquainted with autopsies, because he’d understood the consequence of the ligature marks, how to make them look like suicide. He’d planned in advance the ideal spot for the lynching, that small, round clearing, and thus he’d known she was running away and what trail she was taking to reach the road. Maybe he’d been wearing night-vision goggles, or hunter’s camouflage — like the disturbing kind I’d seen in Andreo Verduga’s Wal-Mart shopping cart in Nestles, Missouri, ShifTbush™ Invisible Gear, Fall Mix, “the accomplished hunter’s dream”—and, “instantly invisible in his woodland surroundings,” he’d stepped onto a tree stump or some other sturdy, elevated position, silently waiting for her, poised with the electrical cord in a noose, which was in turn rigged to the tree. As she stumbled past, trying to find her way, trying to find him—because she’d known who he was — he looped it over her head, wrenching his end of the rope hard so she rose into the air. She didn’t have time to react, to kick or scream, to organize the last thoughts of her life. (“Even the devil deserves last thoughts,” wrote William Stonely in Ash Complexions [1932].)
As I reenacted this scene in my head, my heart began to thud. Sickening chills began to inchworm down my arms and legs, and then, rather abruptly, one more detail fell motionless at my feet like a lead-poisoned canary, like a pugface nose-toasted by a mean right to his chin.
Hannah had instructed Milton to take me to her house, not to play matchmaker (though perhaps that played a part; I couldn’t discount the movie posters in her classroom), but so I, a thought-ridden and inquisitive person, would engage in a little gumshoe: “You’re such a perceptive person; you don’t miss anything,” she’d told me that night at her house. She had not foreseen her death, and thus presumed, after she’d disappeared, when the search party turned up no trace of her, the Bluebloods and I would be left with the maddening question of what had happened, the kind of question that could kill a person, turn a person into a Bible-spewer, a rocking-horsed corn-shucking mountie with no teeth. And thus I, along with Milton, had been meant to discover, sitting entirely alone on that strangely immaculate coffee table (ordinarily littered with ashtrays and matchbooks, National Geographics and junk mail) an item that would be our reassurance, the end to her story: a film, L’Avventura.
I felt faint. Because it was chic, oh, yes, it was brilliant, très Schneideresque: neatly precise yet sweetly hush-hush. (It was an act of personal punctuation even Dad would’ve considered nimble.) It was thrilling because it illustrated a premeditation, a craftiness of action and mind of which I hadn’t thought Hannah capable. She was hurtfully beautiful; sure, she could listen to you, and rumba remarkably well with a wineglass; she could also pick up men like they were socks cluttering the floor, but for a person to orchestrate, however gently, such a subtle end to her life — at least, her life as everyone at St. Gallway knew it — that was something else, something dramatic, yet sad, because this murmur of an ending, this classy question mark, had not happened.
I tried to calm myself. (“Emotion, especially excitement, is the enemy of dick work,” said Detective Lieutenant Peterson in Wooden Kimono [Lazim, 1980].)
L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni’s lyrical black-and-white masterpiece of 1960, happened to be one of Dad’s favorite films and thus, over the years, I’d seen it no less than twelve times. (Dad had a soft spot for all things Italian, including curvy women with poofy hair and Marcello Mastroianni’s squints, shrugs, winks and smiles, which he tossed like overripe cherry tomatoes at women strolling Via Veneto. When Dad fell into a Mediterraneo Bourbon Mood, he’d even do bits of La Dolce Vita with pitch-perfect, seedy Italian flair: “Tu sei la prima donna del primo giorno della creazione, sei la madre, la sorella, l’amante, l’amica, l’angelo, il diavolo, la terra, la casa…”)