Chapter 56: The Valparaíso Lead

Rayén

"Hello, my darling. I hear you've been looking for me."

Nobody in the room breathed. Millaray had a hand over her mouth. Lautaro stood with the radio clenched so hard in his fist that the plastic creaked.

I couldn't move. For twenty-three years that voice had meant warm milk, a hairbrush, the smell of jasmine on her wrists. It had never once sounded like this, soft and sure, like a woman who had already won.

"Mamá," I said.

"There she is." The static rippled. I could hear her smiling. "You sound tired, Rayén. Are you eating? That man doesn't feed you properly, I can tell."

"Where are you?"

"Oh, no. Not tonight." A pause, a small sip of something. "I only wanted to hear you say it. Mamá. I wasn't certain you still would."

My throat closed. I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to ask whether she'd stood at Conco's empty grave beside me and cried real tears, whether she'd held my face and told me we had only each other left. I opened my mouth, and what came out was, "Did you love us?"

Lautaro's head turned toward me.

"Every day," my mother said, and the terrible thing was that she sounded sincere. "That's what you will never forgive. Goodnight, my darling. Tell the Don I said his father was a very bad dancer."

The line died.

Lautaro said her name once, like a question. Then he threw the radio across the room, and it hit the wall hard enough to leave a dent in the plaster. Millaray flinched. I didn't. Something in me had gone cold and quiet, the way a lake goes still before it freezes.

"She knew your father," I said. "She knew him well enough to dance with him."

"Don't." His voice was ragged. "Rayén, I don't know what that means."

"I think you do."

He looked at me, and I watched him decide not to say it. A muscle jumped in his jaw. For the first time since I'd met him, Lautaro Errázuriz looked like a man who was afraid of the answer to his own question.

I should have felt triumphant. Instead I felt sick, because I recognized that look. It was the one I'd worn for months.

The silver key opened a windowless room at the end of the east wing, lined with screens and humming servers. Millaray went to work without being asked, her fingers flying. She'd stopped crying. I understood now that work was how she kept from coming apart.

"There," she said an hour later, hoarse. "That call was routed through a relay. I traced the handshake. Whoever built it knew what they were doing, but they got lazy on the last hop." She pulled up a map and tapped a blinking red dot on the coast. "Valparaíso. A warehouse in the port district, off Avenida Errázuriz."

Lautaro made a short, humorless sound. "Of course it is."

"It's the relay point," Millaray said. "Everything Beltrán has sent for the last six months bounced through it. Orders, payments, the hit squad's schedule. If we take that building, we take his voice."

"And hers," I said.

Nobody argued.

Lautaro came to stand behind my chair. I felt his warmth through my shirt before he spoke, and I hated how my body leaned toward it, like a plant toward a window.

"It's a trap," he said quietly, for me alone.

"Probably."

"Then why are you reaching for your boots?"

"Because she wants us to come." I turned and found his face closer than I expected. His eyes were red-rimmed. He hadn't slept either. "She let us hear her, Lautaro. She didn't have to. A woman who has hidden for this long doesn't make a mistake like that. She's inviting us."

"And you'd walk in anyway."

"I'd rather walk in knowing than wait here being hunted."

His hand lifted, almost touched my cheek, then stopped in the air between us. We both looked at it.

"I told you I'd never say it," he said, barely audible. "What your father told me the night he died."

My heart stopped and started again. "I haven't asked."

"You have. Every time you look at me." He lowered the hand. "If I tell you now, you'll go to that warehouse thinking of it instead of thinking of staying alive. So I'm asking you to wait. Until we come back."

"That's cruel."

"I know." His voice cracked. "I'm sorry."

I should have shouted. Instead I put my palm flat against his chest, where his heart was hammering, and kept it there until it slowed.

"Then come back," I said. "That's the price."

We left before dawn in two plain cars. Lautaro drove, I sat beside him, and Carlos followed with four men. I didn't like Carlos near my back, but Lautaro wanted him where he could see him.

The road through the hills was black and empty. Somewhere past the tollbooth, Lautaro said, without looking at me, "Your mother used to sing when she cooked."

I stared at him. "How do you know that?"

"I overheard it once." He hesitated. "At your father's house. Years ago. I was seventeen, there for a meeting I had no business attending. I was waiting in the kitchen, and she came in humming. She gave me a slice of bread with butter and told me I looked hungry." His knuckles whitened on the wheel. "I thought she was the only kind person in that whole house."

The ocean smell reached us before the city did, salt and diesel and cold iron. Valparaíso climbed the hills in a thousand colors, all of them gray in the early light. Down at the port the cranes stood like skeletons.

The warehouse sat at the end of a row of identical ones, its steel door rusted, a single sodium lamp buzzing overhead. Too quiet. Not a guard in sight, not a dog, not a cat.

"Wait," I said.

Lautaro was already slowing. "I see it."

"There's no one here."

"Exactly."

He cut the engine. In the silence I could hear waves slapping the pilings, and under them, faint and regular, a sound that didn't belong: a tick, tick, tick, like a clock.

"Lautaro," I whispered. "Do you hear that?"

His face changed. He grabbed my wrist and shoved the door open. "Out. Now. Run."

We hit the pavement as the warehouse door swung wide on its own. The sodium lamp flickered. Inside, in the center of the empty floor, sat a single wooden chair, and on it a bright blue radio, its red light blinking in time with the ticking.

Taped to the radio was a photograph. I knew it from thirty feet away: my childhood bedroom, a little girl asleep, a woman's hand smoothing her hair. And across the bottom, in my mother's looping script, three words that turned my blood to ice.

Count to ten.

The ticking sped up.