Chapter 67: Planning the Heist

Rayén's 

Nobody moved.

The radio hissed twice and went dead, and the silence it left behind was worse than the whisper. Millaray was staring at her brother. I was staring at the same place, and I hated that my eyes went there on their own.

"Say it's a lie," Millaray said.

Lautaro was standing now. I hadn't seen him get up. His bandaged shoulder was rigid, and for the first time since I'd known him, he didn't look like a man who had already decided what to say.

"I was at the customs house eleven days ago," he said.

The floor dropped out from under me.

"Not below the first level," he went on, fast, before I could speak. "I went to see the decoy room. I wanted to know what Beltrán had left out for us to find. I signed the guard's book at the door because I couldn't afford not to. That's all. I never touched the elevator."

"You were in the building."

"Yes."

"And you said nothing."

"I was going to tell you in Valparaíso, and then the ship—" He stopped. He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, and I realized his hand wasn't steady. "I'm done explaining things in the wrong order. You asked for everything. That's everything."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to put my head down on the table. Mostly I wanted to believe him, and I could feel how badly, like a splinter I couldn't get hold of.

"Conco said the last name," Millaray said quietly. "Not the only one."

"Someone's been pulling files for three days," I said. "You were there eleven days ago. If I wanted to frame you, I'd write your name at the bottom and leave the rest to chance."

Lautaro's eyes came up to mine.

"I'm not saying I trust you," I added. "I'm saying I don't think I'm stupid."

Something moved across his face and was gone. He didn't thank me. He just nodded, once, like a man accepting a sentence he hadn't earned.

It was past two in the morning when Millaray finally gave up and fell asleep on the sofa with her boots on. I sat alone at the table with the blueprint and a cup of tea gone cold, and tried to think like my father.

Her drawing was good. It showed the customs house, three levels, the service elevator that needed the seal. But the water gate on the lowest floor, the one sealed from inside, had been sketched with a question mark beside it. Millaray hadn't known what lay on the other side of that wheel.

I stared at the question mark until it blurred.

Count them, mi niña.

I sat up.

The memory came the way they always do, from the side, when you've stopped hunting for it. I was nine. My father had taken me out of school on a Wednesday with no explanation, put me in the back of a plain car, and driven to Mercado La Vega. We went through the fruit stalls hand in hand. He bought me a cherimoya and made me carry it. Behind a cold room that smelled of fish and ice there was a trapdoor, and under the trapdoor a ladder, and under the ladder a drain wide enough for two people to walk side by side if they stooped.

Count your steps, he'd said, lighting a lantern. It's a game.

I had counted. Two hundred and twelve, a turn left at the iron grate, forty more, a right where the wall changed from brick to something older, wet stone. I had counted out loud in a whisper because I was frightened and wanted to look brave. At the end there had been a door. A big one, black and round-cornered, with a wheel on it.

He hadn't opened it. He'd put my palm against the cold metal and said, This is where your mother never goes.

I'd thought it was a joke.

I pulled the blueprint toward me and picked up Millaray's pencil. My hand shook, so I made it steady. I drew the market. I drew the trapdoor. I drew a line, left at the grate, forty more, a right. I marked the wet stone. At the end of the line I drew a circle with a wheel in it, right where she'd put her question mark.

A water gate. Not sealed against intruders, then. Sealed from the inside, the way you seal a door you plan to use yourself.

"I didn't know the fish market was one of his," Lautaro said.

I didn't jump. I'd known he was there for a minute, felt him in the doorway the way you feel weather. He had a blanket over one shoulder, and he looked like he hadn't slept at all.

"There were eleven properties," I said. "I only saw three. The winery, the chapel in Yungay, and this." I touched the circle. "He called them his holes. He said every serious man needs somewhere the walls don't have ears."

"And you remember the route."

"I counted." My voice thinned. "I was nine. I was proud of myself."

He crossed the room and sat down on the chair beside mine. Not across. Beside. The wood creaked. Our knees were a hand apart, and I made myself keep looking at the paper.

"May I?"

I slid the pencil across. He read the line I'd drawn, the numbers beside it, with the careful attention he gave everything. Then he reached out and corrected one thing: a small arrow I'd pointed the wrong way at the grate.

"You turned right there," he said. "Not left."

"No, I—" I stopped. Looked. "How did you know?"

"The tunnel follows the old riverbed. It can't go left. The Mapocho's there." He set down the pencil. "I walked the other half of it with your father, once. From the vault up. Two hundred and twelve steps. He counted it out loud too."

My throat closed.

"He told me about you," Lautaro said. "That day. He said he'd taken his daughter down there once, and she'd counted the whole way without being told to stop. He said you were the bravest person he knew, and the one he'd failed most."

I couldn't look at him. I looked at my hands instead. They were trembling again, and it was nothing to do with the cold.

"He doesn't get to say that," I whispered. "He killed my brother."

"I know."

"He doesn't get to be a father now."

"I know."

He didn't touch me. He just stayed, there beside me in the lamplight, with his hands loose on his knees, and let me be angry without asking anything for it. After a while my breathing slowed. After a while I noticed that I'd leaned, just slightly, until my shoulder rested against his arm. Neither of us said a word about it.

"Two entrances," he said at last. "The elevator, with the seal. And this one."

"The one nobody knows about."

"Almost nobody." He frowned at the market on the drawing. "Someone had to keep that trapdoor oiled, Rayén. Somebody had to be down there. Your father couldn't carry a ladder up and down himself."

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it.

Oh.

The memory had been missing a face. I could see it now: a big man with a gray mustache, standing at the foot of the ladder with the lantern, holding out his arms for me to jump into. I'd landed on his shoulders. He had laughed, a low, warm sound that echoed in the pipes.

"Osvaldo," I said.

"What?"

"He was the keeper. Osvaldo Quiroga. He took care of the tunnels. That's why he knew—" I stopped. My heart was pounding. "That's why he let us go on the pier. He wasn't protecting me. He was protecting the way in."

Three slow knocks sounded on the flat's front door.

We both went still. Millaray's boots hit the floor. In the hallway, through the narrow gap of the peephole, a yellow flicker was moving. The light of a lantern.

And a voice I'd have known anywhere said, soft as a lullaby, "Niña. I've come to take you down."