Do Not Become Alarmed(39)

21.



GEORGE WATCHED THE children play tic-tac-toe, and thought about his brother. He thought their mother, before she died, had understood that something was wrong with Raúl. She had been repulsed by him, but that made her feel guilty, because a mother should not be repulsed by her son, so she gave him anything he wanted. He was handsome and charming and manipulative and she never punished him for anything. George—Jorge, then—took the blame for whatever went wrong. A broken fence, a wrecked bicycle, a smashed window. His brother deflected all damage and disruption onto Jorge, who got the reputation as a troublemaker. It didn’t help that he wasn’t as good-looking as Raúl. His forehead was too big. His mother used to smooth his hair and frown at the dome between his temples, so he had taken to wearing baseball caps to hide it.

When Raúl was eight, he caught small emerald green frogs in the forest and cut them up with razor blades while they were still alive. He showed Jorge how they twitched and wriggled until the very end.

Then they got a small capuchin monkey for a pet, and Raúl tormented it with mind games until it went insane, baring its teeth and screaming when anyone tried to get close. The monkey was sent away somewhere, and no one spoke of it again.

An aneurysm killed their mother when George was twelve, and he thought things would shift then. Their father did not understand Raúl well enough to be distressed by his feelings about him, and he tried to treat his sons equally; it was a point of principle. But even equal wasn’t right, when it came to Raúl.

George went away to boarding school in Santa Barbara and decided to remake himself as an American. He worked at cultivating his mother’s California accent. When he got to Berkeley, he played Truco sometimes with the South Americans, with the Spanish cards and the elaborate system of tiny facial gestures to communicate across the table, but mostly he tried to abandon his past. He tried to become interested in finance, in business consulting, in law, in anything that might create for him a new life.

But there was so much money to be made at home. And Raúl had no business mind at all. He just rode around on his white horse, and got girls pregnant. The daughter of the local grocer almost bled to death delivering Raúl’s baby. The grocer called George, who sat with the girl in the hospital all night. She was nineteen years old and looked gray, all the blood and warmth drained out of her. She’d survived, and so had the baby, but Raúl never even went to see them.

Raúl’s ruthlessness might have helped in their father’s business, except he was not ambitious in that way. He didn’t know how to make money. He made mistakes, alienated allies. He bragged on Instagram about his exploits until George made him shut down his account, but then he would start another. He drank too much of the local guaro. Eventually, it would kill him, but that might be twenty years from now. Who could wait?

And then Raúl had shot the Colombian courier. He said Bola?os was cheating them, but George suspected that Raúl owed the man money on a side deal and didn’t want to pay. So he shot Bola?os in the head. But this was not Colombia. They lived in a country with almost perfect literacy, with excellent medical care, and they had a profitable little business that the police ignored. You could not shoot people in the head. They were not butchers or desperadoes. The death had been stupid, unnecessary.

George had been in California at the time. Something always went tits-up when he was away. So he’d been flying home to do damage control when Luz Alvaros, working for his brother, brought those fucking kids to the house in the Jeep and caused an international incident.

George did not consider himself a moral paragon. He understood that his father’s business was illegal, and that he had taken part in it. He had certainly lived off the spoils. But most business was in some way unethical. Look at DuPont dumping poison in drinking water, look at big pharma, look at subprime mortgages. It was just the nature of making money. Everyone profited at someone else’s expense. But Raúl was unredeemably bad.

And stupid. Raúl had decided that the solution was to ransom the children. There had been a reward offered, fifty thousand dollars for information. Raúl thought they could get more. “People kidnap Americans on purpose,” he told George. “We could make so much money!”

“That is not what we do!” George said. “Do you understand the shit-storm you would bring down on our heads?”

“Your problem is that you have small ideas,” Raúl said.

If Raúl just disappeared, no one would miss him. Their father would mourn the loss of a son, but he would get over it.

Their father was in hiding now, and hadn’t told George where he’d gone, so it couldn’t be beaten or threatened out of him. His dear father, always considerate. He’d taken two of his men with him, and the other two had quit when they realized the shit they were in. Luz Alvaros had bolted, too, after starting all of this with her shitty choice of a grave site. And now two tame cops had heard Marcus pounding on the window. Even Raúl should understand that this was a big fucking problem. But he didn’t. When he came in from bribing those cops, he’d smiled an oily, frog-murdering smile, as if everything was under control.

George’s first idea had been a return through intermediaries. Find someone to dump the kids outside the Argentinian embassy office. The van that dropped the kids would have no license plate, they would be unhurt. Return the kids unscathed, and maybe the Americans wouldn’t come after them in helicopters.