The Candidate (39 page)

He thought of Jaynie in her prison cell and wondered what she was doing. Again he thought of how she tried to touch him in the back of the police car and how he shrank away from her hand. He felt a surge of guilt as crippling as the moment as when he told her he was leaving town; leaving her and their marriage behind; abandoning her to the twisted maelstrom of the drugs that controlled her. No one escapes their past, he thought. Not me. Not Jaynie. Not Father Villatoro in his freshly-dug grave. Not even that sick bastard Carillo, who was still stuck in exile, once again murdering people to try and win favor.

Out of the corner of his eye Mike saw his luggage. It was still unpacked in the corner of the room where it had lain since he came back to his mother’s house. He went over and opened the case on his bed. There it was. The simple, battered box that contained all the records of Natalia’s sad, murderous life. It was just a pile of random photos and papers now: the remnants that he did not give to Carver.

No, he thought, no one ever gets away from their past. Definitely not Natalia whose struggle was defeated by her daughter’s descent into the gangs. Only Hodges seemed able to ignore his history. He emerged from it unscathed as if encased in a suit of armor. Nothing penetrated it.

Mike picked up some of the pieces of paper and let them fall to the bed through his hands. A photograph flew out of one notebook like an escaped butterfly. It fluttered in front of him, landing face up. Out of it three people stared, captured together on some distant parade ground. It was Natalia, Hodges and Carillo. They all stood together and grinned into a bright sun that shone from over the shoulder of whoever held the camera. It looked like a snapshot from a vacation.

Mike flipped it over. A pencil message was scrawled on the back.

“Camp Victoria, Julio, 1988” it read. Mike guessed it was taken at some sort of training camp all three attended, most likely with Hodges as a liaison to Carillo’s group; briefing them, advising them, signing off on their plans for murder and mayhem in the name of freedom. He flipped it over again trying to read some sort of emotion into the distant faded faces that stared back at him. But there was nothing; just the emptiness of the past, a record of a fleeting moment.

Then he saw it.

It was a tiny detail, but now it caught his eye and made his heart skip a beat. Hodges arm looped around Natalia’s waist. There was no denying it. His fingers were clearly visible, resting lightly on her hip. In a moment it changed the picture. Now he noticed how Natalia leaned into Hodges and her back rested against his side. Carillo was suddenly the odd man out.

Mike knew. He knew with every fiber of his soul that Hodges and Natalia were not just comrades-in-arms back then. They were also lovers. He fired up his laptop and Googled for Christine’s campaign biography. He scanned through it. In July 1988 Christine was away from Guatemala. Her father was ill, diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she went back to help nurse him. She was away for an entire year. Hodges and Natalia had free reign for an affair. Perhaps that was why they got careless and let this photograph be taken.

Then another thought struck Mike. He could barely breathe now as he ransacked his way through the scattered papers. Finally he found it. Natalia’s daughter’s birth certificate. Gabriela Maria Robles. Father unknown. But that blank did not concern Mike. It was the date that mattered. March 21, 1989. More or less nine months after the photograph taken at Camp Victoria.

“Holy shit,” Mike breathed.

He thought of the girl they saw in the church with her paler skin and dirty blond hair. Gabriela, Natalia’s daughter who became a prostitute in the slums, was Hodges’ child.

Suddenly it all fit together. That was why Natalia snapped. That was why she targeted Hodges. Gabriela’s problems finally broke her and she took out that grief on the man who abandoned them both. It was not just revenge for a deadly past she regretted. It was personal: the action of a distraught mother struggling to find a place for her emotions and her pain.

Jesus Christ.

He picked up the phone and punched in a number.

Carver answered.

“Don’t let her concede!” Mike blurted before he even said hello.

“Mike?” Carver said in surprise. “Is that you? What are you talking about?”

“I’ve found something else. I just need time to prove it. If I am right, Hodges is over. For real this time.”

There was a silence on the end of the line before Carver spoke. “Governor Stanton’s concession speech is already written. If we fuck Hodges’ team around it will threaten her chances of being his running mate. She wants to be vice president. We can’t endanger that on a wild goose chase.”

“Twenty four hours,” Mike said. “Wait that long. You lose nothing. Just trust me.”

Mike knew trust was not a word Carver put much faith in. “You can still
win
this fucking thing,” Mike said.

That was better. The dying coals of Carver’s ambition glowed warmly at Mike’s words; breathed back into life by the promise of victory.

“You’ve got 24 hours,” Carver said. “I can hold things off that long. But no more.”

Mike smiled for what felt like the first time in weeks. There was only one way to prove it. He started to pack.

CHAPTER 26

HE FACED HER across the bare prison table. She faced him. Natalia Robles. It felt completely different to know her name. To know her past. To know what she did. To put a history behind those dark eyes.

Mike was afraid she would not see him. Or that he would not even get the chance to ask for a visit. But the guards remembered him from his previous trips and put a phone call through to the head warden. The rough voice down the line snorted at the name of Hodges.

“He really do all that shit down in Central America?” the warden asked.

“Yes, he did, sir,” Mike replied.

Another snort. “You work for him?”

Mike almost said yes. But the time for lies was over.

“Not anymore,” he said.

“Good,” came the response. “That son of a bitch is a disgrace after what he’s done.”

At last someone cared. Just when he needed it. Perhaps Maximón looked out for him after all. So Mike was led down a familiar route deep into the bowels of the prison.

Now she sat silent, perhaps thinking of their last meeting when her hands tightened around his throat. The guards kept her handcuffed this time. But not a flicker of emotion crossed her face.

Mike’s heart pounded. He had one shot, one chance to make sure that he had not sacrificed everything for nothing. That Natalia had not either. That the moment she squeezed that trigger in Iowa she did not really miss.

“Father Villatoro is dead,” Mike said.

Her mouth opened slightly and her bottom lip quivered.

“He was killed by one of Carillo’s men. But before Villatoro died he gave me a box of your things.”

Mike reached into a bag and pulled out some of the old photographs and notebooks from the box. They looked a thin remembrance of a life, scattered across the table. Natalia cast them a glance and then her head sank down and rested on one arm. She began to weep, soft sounds etched with pain that came from deep within her like rumblings within the earth; the distant surface signs of gigantic plates shifting.

Mike shook. He wanted to reach out and put a hand on her shoulder. But he did not. He hewed to his chosen course.

“You knew Hodges,” he said. “He was above you in your chain of command.”

Natalia slowly raised her head. “America does not care what he helped do to my country,” she said. “It does not care what I did to my country.”

“Is that why you tried to kill him?”

Natalia paused a moment. “I missed my shot,” she said at last. “Now I will be in jail forever. I am happy about that. It is not even half the punishment I deserve. I have no regrets at being behind these bars. But he will escape his punishment.”

Mike leaned forward. “It is not over,” he said.

She jerked her head up and fixed him with eyes he now saw were wet with tears. Mike pushed the papers forward. “Your daughter,” he said. “There is no name for her father on her birth certificate.”

Natalia flinched as if bit by a snake. “No!” she cried. “My life was a curse on my daughter since the day she was born. She is nothing to do with this. She is the reason I am silent. She will be freed from her mother at last. She never deserved to be born to me.”

Her face collapsed into despair. Her eyes welled with fat tears that streaked down her cheeks. Mike was astonished to see such emotions in her, to glimpse the depths that raged beneath.

“Who is her father?” he asked quietly but firmly.

She shook her head. “I never told. Not her. Not anyone.”

Mike pushed forward the birth certificate and then a book of papers from her time at Camp Victoria.

“She was born nine months after you went to this training camp. Hodges was there too. His wife was back in the United States.”

She did not look down at the papers. She just sat wordlessly opposite Mike. Her chest rose and fell with deep, panicked breaths as she sought desperately to keep self-control. It felt like sitting opposite a gigantic glacier that was slowly beginning to crumble into deep ocean waters, shedding a creaking facade of ice.

Mike knew there was no turning back.

He pushed forward the photograph of Natalia, Carillo and Hodges together and all the while he held her gaze. She returned his stare for what seemed an eternity. But Mike did not flinch, instead he mentally willed her to look down.

She did.

“He was your lover,” Mike said. “Your child is his child.”

Natalia reached out to the photograph and ran a finger along its edge as if she was touching a body.

“If you say this publicly, it will destroy him,” Mike said. “You don’t need a gun. Not anymore.”

He took her hand and curled his fingers around her palm to feel her muscles tense and as hard as iron.

“Make a statement to me. Then I’ll tell the world. You will get your wish.”

“And Gabriela?”

“I will make sure she is fine. Once the world knows the truth, no one will harm her. I’ll see to it personally. You have my word.”

It was a rash promise. But he felt a rush of will inside him, a sense of certainty and purpose that he had not felt for many, long months. Perhaps not since the first time he saw Hodges speak and decided to join his campaign.

For the last time they stared at each other across the prison table. Then Mike felt her hand relax in his grasp, like a sudden melting of ice. Stone became flesh. Her eyes softened. They understood each other.

* * *

THE VIDEO was short. Mike held the tiny camera in front of him and Natalia spoke directly into its tiny, unflinching electronic eye. She gazed into the machine and via its lens outside into the whole world.

“Senator Jack Hodges was my lover,” she said. “We had a child, my daughter, Gabriela. He has never seen her. He pretended she never existed. He forgot her just as he forgot our country. He forgot me just as he forgot what he did there. Gabriela is a good girl. I love her and tried to care for her. But the gangs took her. She is now a prostitute in Guatemala City. She has trouble with drugs. But she is his flesh and blood, just as much as she is mine. That is her curse. But it has never been her fault.”

She pronounced the words slowly. When it was over her head sank back down to the table and suddenly Mike saw her afresh. She was a petite middle-aged woman, utterly exhausted now. Utterly alone. She did not seem a killer or a threat. Or a mystery. He noticed that a streak of gray shaded her jet black hair and deep crow’s feet gouged the edges of her eyes. Her hands that held a gun so expertly, and tried to squeeze the life out of him, were tiny, the fingers delicate and the nails bitten down to the quick. He touched her arm. It felt frail now in his grip. She lifted her head.

“Michael,” she said. It was the first and only time she would ever use his name.

“Save my daughter.”

He squeezed her hand, trying to pass some warmth through their skin together.

“I will,” he said.

Then he stood up and walked out. He never looked back. Never turned his head until he was outside once more and freed from the boundaries of the prison, the weight of the camera in his pocket as heavy as the past.

He had one phone call to make. He dialed the number and waited for Lauren’s voice. She sounded hesitant and afraid, but Mike was calm, soothing, his voice simple and in control.

“I have something for you,” he said. “I’m going to attach it on a file as an email. You’ll understand when you get it.”

He waited for her to say something. But just the sound of short, sharp panicky breaths came down the other end of the line.

“You’ll know what to do with it,” Mike said and then added: “This time it is the right thing to do.” Then he hung up.

It was done.

* * *