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“It’ll be due back in 28 days. That makes it October 10th.” The words don’t sound like mine, nor the tone of voice- friendly, even genial, but there’s a little of me in the metallic clang of the stamp on the inside cover- loud and a little angry. The stamp is old, antique, probably, big and heavy but shiny, chrome with brass appointments. My boss is very precise that he wants it clean of fingerprints after every shift.
But I’ll tell you a secret: I used to kill people for money. It gets a bad rap, on account of the moral ambiguities, but the pay is nice, really the job isn’t all that difficult, and you get to make your own hours. And I was good at it- and there’s something about doing good work that’s fulfilling. Though I suppose “good” is arguable- at least semantically, because while my work was certainly of high quality, I don’t think most people would call use “good” to describe it. But working in one of Medellin’s library-parks is good work- I’ve had people thank me, even call it God’s work. I’ll explain: Medellín is infamous as the home of Pablo Escobar. In ’91 it was the most dangerous city in the world with over 6000 murders in a year- averaging eighteen bodies a day. Business, my kind of business, was booming (which isn’t a joke about the daily car bombings- I may be that clever, just not that cold). I contracted for Escobar. This was during his time imprisoned in La Catedral. He envisioned himself as a manor lord, in essence, and began demanding taxes of his fellow traffickers, in exchange for the work he did fighting the government. Those who refused to pay, he had kidnapped and brought to La Catedral, where they were tortured and executed, their bodies left in the street outside his “prison.” Escobar suspected the opposition to his lordship to be too unified, and thought it was being orchestrated by Carlos Bonilla. I was contracted to capture Bonilla at the same time the Moncado and Galeano brothers were taken. But someone tipped Bonilla- his family and his essential belongings disappeared before I got there. In these days, the Medellín cartel was not a trusting organization. Many of Escobar’s own lieutenants were being killed for refusing to pay his tribute, and he was becoming paranoid. If I returned to him without Bonilla, he would have simply assumed I’d been paid off, and have me killed instead. So I disappeared. I’d made enough money, and saved and invested it smartly enough that I could live modestly. But I’d learned something in my time, and that was that a man who runs causes larger ripples than a man who’s staying still. So I never left Medellín. What better place to hide than among its nearly 3 million citizens? But a man with no livelihood causes questions, so I applied for work at many places, and eventually found employment at a library. Medellín’s several library-parks are not where I started work, but I work in one now. The library-parks have been credited as revitalizing the city, giving its citizens a detour from the perpetuating cycle of poverty and crime they had been caught up in. “Excuse me,” a man asked from under a white moustache, “could you direct me to your references section. My grandson’s doing a report on our city’s history.” I gave the man a faint smile, without coming out of my musings, and pointed in the proper direction. He nodded a “thank you” and herded the child off. But his face spun in my mind a moment, and while the hair was whiter, the face plumper, the moustache bushier, I knew then the man was Carlos Bonilla. A college student handed me several heavy books and her library card, and I scanned them through, stamped them with the due date, and handed them to her. “Due in 28 days, October 3rd.” My grip didn’t release around the heavy antique stamp. I found myself stalking towards the reference section, feeling the weight of the stamp and thinking it would do. I flattened myself against a wall of books, and peered around the corner. Bonilla sat in a chair, his grandson on his knee, and a large print history book on the table. He asked his grandson if he knew how many days there were in a year. “A hundred,” the child replied. He laughed, and the muscles in my arm coiled; I pictured the stamp hitting the back of his skull, pushing through (perhaps needing a second or third stamp). “There’s three hundred, and sixty-five more. But in the bad old days, there were as many murders in Medellín in a single day as there are in a year now.” The boy cooed, unable to entirely grasp the breadth of what his grandfather was saying. The muscles in my arm untensed. Bonilla and I were both old men, now, different men. And this was a different Medellín. And I wanted no hand in bringing any of us back to what we’d been. |
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