Truco

For the children of Venezuela and all who suffer under the powerful and merciless.

Also by James Suriano

Inbiotic

The Antarcticans

Dark

Aeon

To Catch a Breath

The Cult of Mao

The Water Crown

Empire of Mud

Contents

Dedication

Also by James Suriano

Epigraph

1. Vertical

2. Bookish

3. Lost Voices

4. Quadratics

5. Clouché’s Service

6. Banned

7. Dark Wells

8. Whispers

9. Layers

10. Changing Perspective

11. Miami

12. Solve for X

13. Question 100

14. Saint Anthony

15. Café by Lola

16. Die by the Sword

17. Mail

18. News from Afar

19. Friends in all the Wrong Places

20. Missing

21. The Sunshine State

22. Attention, All Travelers

23. A Letter

24. Loss

25. Family History

26. Queens and Kings

27. Waiting

28. The Vault

29. The Operation

30. Quiet

31. A Thousand Thank-Yous

32. The Money

33. The Corpse Reviver

34. Escape

35. Oak

36. Say a Prayer

37. It’s Never Goodbye

38. Nothing

39. A Bookstore and a Beginning

Afterword

About the Author

"We are not meant to be perfect; we are meant to be whole."

—Jane Fonda

Vertical

I could have been born to a taxi driver in Panama, a sailor in the Atlantic, or a shepherd in Peru. But my soul had landed here, in the densely packed vertical slum of Torre de David, in Caracas, Venezuela, and sometimes I believed any of those lives were better than mine.

I stood holding a rusty metal rope that jutted from a concrete bridge, twenty-nine stories in the air, between two unfinished buildings, face-to-face with a menacing man.

He was greasy, sun worn, and grimacing. He stumbled, talked to himself, and walked in circles. My almost-ten-year-old body froze, unsure which direction the wind from the storm, which had just passed through, would gust next. The man veered toward the edge. One time, I had lain on my belly here and scooted just far enough for my eyes to peer over the threshold. The freefall to the city below took my breath away.

The man looked directly at me, grunted, blinked his eyes in an exaggerated beat, and fell into the nothingness. A moment later, I stood alone, wondering if I should tell my mother what I had just seen.

…

Mamá was blessed with something that made men turn and whistle every time she passed them. That evening, when she rumbled through the sagging aluminum door to our one-room apartment after a twelve-hour shift sweeping hair at Maximo’s Salon, she tore off her uniform, put on one of her black spandex dresses, and let out a sigh. I jumped up and down on our bed, stretching hard, with my arms toward the bare pipes along the ceiling.

Lola, stop that, she said, glancing out of the corner of her eye.

Her uniform lay in a crumpled pile on the floor.

For God’s sake. I just got done with work. Take my uniform down to Marcenia to be pressed for tomorrow. She didn’t look at me this time. She slipped a wide gold earring into her ear just as I caught hold of one of the pipes. She merely shook her head in response.

When we were in private, Mamá often complained about her calloused hands and fussed about her looks, always wanting to change a little bit here or tighten up a patch of skin there. I never understood the attention she paid to those things because she always looked like the women on billboards who were selling soda or makeup. The women all the older boys said were sexy. The other mothers had big paunchy stomachs from all their birthing and fried food. But Mamá only had me, and we had a garden on our little balcony that gave us fresh fruits and vegetables year round. We grew more than we needed so we could trade at the market on the weekend for things we couldn’t grow in a balcony garden.

Mamá was so kind. She never hit me like the other moms I knew. Instead, when I was acting up or causing trouble, she’d tilt her head down with a knitted brow and say, Lola, you can do better. Usually, I knew I could.

She was heading out and looking for a good time. I could tell by the way she put on her lipstick. If she tilted her head back and expertly applied her deepest red and shook her hair as she inspected the thick oily color, it meant she’d be home just a few hours before I woke up. Then she’d snuggle into bed beside me and whisper in my ear that I was the most wonderful girl in all of Venezuela. She always thought I was sleeping, but when the lock on the door clicked, it was an alarm clock ringing in my brain. I never knew where she went at night. I imagined her at a disco, with her beautiful clothes and lavish hair, dancing to the latest songs, the ones I’d hear on the radio when I hung out by Diaz’s Dugout, the store on the fifth floor of our building. Mr. Diaz was a pleasant man who often gave me a free piece of gum or some leftover candy from a package he didn’t want to finish. So I lurked around there a lot, waiting for a treat.

I never believed what people said, that we didn’t have a right to live in this building, that we were squatters. We not only lived here, but from what I could tell, we had improved the empty concrete skyscraper the builders had left when they ran out of money in the 1990s.

Mamá put on a sparkly gold shawl. One I’d never seen before. I knew her clothes like I knew every morsel of food in our refrigerator. I washed all her garments and wore them around our apartment when she wasn’t there. I’d spin in front of the bare window at night, when the light from the bulbs over our living space made a mirror out of the pane of glass. We were nineteen floors up; I’m sure no one from the ground could see in.

Is that new? I asked.

Mamá nodded. Yes, it was a gift.

From who? I inched off the bed feetfirst to pick up her uniform from the bare concrete, my green dress with its pink flamingo print hiking to the top of my legs.

Lola. Mamá pointed to my dress. People can see in here. Look. She gestured to the hill that rose up out of the city and was on an equal plane as our window. Men are looking.

What are they looking at?

Mamá mentioned this often, but I was never sure what she was getting at. She came over to me as I stood in the corner, shaking out her uniform. She squatted in front of me and held my arms. My sweet, sweet girl. Be careful what you show. Sometimes men see women’s bodies as things to be had. She kissed my forehead, then headed to our small kitchen.

She hadn’t saved enough bolos to pay for plumbing to be installed in the kitchen. We had a bucket of fresh water from the laundry sitting beneath the countertop, which was made from an old door in a house where she used to live. She said she had brought it with her because she knew it would be useful one day. The door was green, with chipped paint. Sometimes I’d stand above it and look into the spaces where the paint had chipped, and I could see the different colors in each layer. Mr. Cosate, who ran the laundry, only charged us one bolo per bucket, so I sometimes snuck some of the water to wash my toy teacups when Mamá wasn’t around.

She chopped a plantain, rolled it in coconut flour, and put the pieces on a plate for me. There’s fresh milk in the refrigerator. Don’t drink it all. She put the plate on the door beside her. She knew how thirsty the coconut flour would make me.

The sounds of gunshots bounced off the building’s exterior walls. I was glad we were high up, away from the yelling and sirens of the night. Sometimes I even heard the crickets from the trees on the neighboring mountain. Mamá said there were nights, before I was born, when she slept on the streets. Eventually, she convinced one of the other residents in the Tower of David to help her get a space of her own.

Someone was banging on our door. The hollow metal bulged with noise.

Okay, my friends are here. We’ll be out late. Go see Ms. Yanes next door if you need help with anything. Mamá hurried to the door and opened it.

A few other mothers from the building were all dressed the same way, chatting and laughing. Sylvia, the most beautiful one, was puffing on a cigarette, the foul tendrils of smoke curling into our apartment. She stopped, put her hands on her hips, and looked my mother up and down. Well, well, well, look at you, Martha Plaz. Ready to tear up the dance floor and seduce the men with that fancy gold shawl.

I thought I saw Mamá blush, and then she tried fanning the women out of the apartment to no avail. I waved to the other ladies as I stared at Sylvia’s orange toenail polish, wishing I had some of my own. Mamá pecked me on the cheek. One of the ladies patted my head. "Lola, muy bonita," she said, smiling and tilting her head to gaze at me. Then they all pranced off, gossiping and planning their night.

Maybe tomorrow I would tell Mamá about the man I’d seen fall off the twenty-ninth story. I wondered, when he looked at me, what he saw, if he saw me at all.

I followed them out, to use the bathroom down the hall, and to take Mamá’s uniform to the laundry. Floors seventeen through twenty-five had communal bathrooms; the next three floors up had the nicest apartments. There were no apartments from floor twenty-eight all the way up to the top at forty-five. Only open spaces, where the men lifted weights or had parties. When I got back to our apartment, I locked the door and yanked hard on the steel handle. I looked around; I could see from the refrigerator to our bed in one swoop of the eye. I made my way to the bed, where I fell asleep reading a soggy copy of Where the Wild Things Are I’d found in a trash heap outside one of the proper apartment buildings a few days ago.

…

The clattering of our door woke me. I held still, looking at the fan buzzing next to the window. The city light filtering in was dim, but enough to see. In our building, there was always the risk of crime. Most of the residents were good people, but there were strangers who wandered through or vagrants who were involved in dangerous activities.

Lola, open the door. It was Mamá. I pushed the book off my chest and tottered across the room to pull the bar away from the door. The warm, stagnant summer air from the hall rushed in. She put her hand on my arm and gave me a wet kiss on the cheek. I detected the smell of smoke and alcohol, a distant memory of my father. I don’t remember seeing her; she was lost in the blackness of my sleep, melded into the memories of my dreams. She murmured something to me as I drifted back to the mattress. It could have been through tears; I wasn’t sure.

Bookish

My best friend, Sulo, was tickling my nose. I felt the sun, which peeked over the mountains, burn through our windows and light up the back of my eyelids. Somehow, Mamá had found a way, among the residents who had moved in here long before us, to get a room with a view. Sulo giggled. I let him while I pretended to make sleepy swattings, my eyes still closed tight. He always smelled like fish, and most of the time shimmering scales clung to his clothing like the sequins the dancers on TV wore. I imagined him covered in sparkles, twirling beautiful girls around, dancing the joropo, the cameras following him. I saw numbers wrap around his clothes until I knew there would be 1,089,056 fish scales covering him. He tickled me again; the number vanished; and I couldn’t help but let out an outright laugh. He knew I would wake up, and so I did, grabbing his finger and biting it, tasting the salty tang of the ocean. My eyes flew open and caught his. They were oversize and so brown they almost looked black. Whenever Sulo was serious, he looked like an alien, his face tapering to a tight mouth and a little block chin. But when he smiled, his face opened up, and he transformed into the happiest boy I knew. I buzzed with excitement, knowing he was closing in on the end of the school year. I scanned the room for my mother, looked at the spot on the floor where she had thrown her clothes that needed to be cleaned. A single cockroach was waltzing over the bare concrete like it had all the time in the world.

I saw a man fall off the bridge. I pointed up.

Did you tell anyone? he asked.

Sitting up and crossing my legs, I noticed Mamá’s pillow was still fluffed and the sheets smooth. She could be a ghost when she wanted, floating in and out of our house, never disturbing me.

No! I looked down and rubbed my eyes.

What if someone’s looking for him? Sulo asked.

Sulo always wanted details, and I didn’t want to talk about what had happened. It was horrible to see the man fall. Maybe he was okay; I was hoping I’d see him playing cards with one of the old men in the building or buying booze at a bodega.

No one’s looking for him. He wasn’t from here. Of course I didn’t know that.

But—

Why’d you stop by? I said, changing the topic.

Want to go on a book search? I heard there’s a new place in Del Norte that sells books from the dump.

There aren’t any bookstores in Del Norte.

I’m telling you, Sulo said. I found a place. It’s tucked into one of the side streets off Avenida Lecuna.

I shrugged and thought about the money I’d made from Marcenia the other day when I helped her press clothes. I was sure it could buy me something, or maybe I could get Mamá one of those romance novels she liked. I heard the sound of the clothes press in my head and imagined all the little clouds of steam it puffed out when straightening the wrinkles.

Sulo awkwardly stared at the floor as I pulled on my shorts. I moved the flexible plastic away from the window so I could step onto the balcony. I always held the lip of the window tightly. There was some space between myself, the rows of pots, and the nineteen-story drop, but gusts were always whipping off the mountains and rolling through the building. I assumed one of them could easily pick my small body up and carry it off into the city. In the largest pot at the end of the balcony, there were three small clementines ripe for picking. I plucked two of them off, carried them inside, and tossed one to Sulo. He was looking at one of the necklaces on my mother’s dresser. The clementine caught him in the back of the arm and he spun around, laughing.

Hungry? Even though I knew he was, I felt bad as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

He didn’t say anything. He just bit into the orange fruit and peeled it meticulously, taking each piece of the rind and putting it in the pocket of his dirty jeans. I ate mine too, tossed the peel into the compost in the kitchen, and put my arm around Sulo. We headed into the long pale-green hallway. After I clicked together the padlock on our door, we went down nine flights of stairs and crossed into the parking garage. There, we waited for one of the motorcycles that were always cruising through the building to ferry us down the last ten stories. No one came, so we walked down to the circular would-be lobby, had the building ever been finished. Some of the older boys were playing fútbol. We waited until one of them scored a goal, then ran through their makeshift field to the rebar archway that served as the entrance from the street to our building.

As soon as my foot hit the sidewalk, the city’s electric buzz coursed through me. Even though the officials were always telling us to vacate the tower since we were living there illegally—and the place was a broken mess of unfinished pipes and rebar—the building’s charm lay in the thick concrete that separated us from the life and chaos of the streets of Caracas. Sulo kept close to me as we walked. He was only two years older than me, but he was my big brother in a world where brothers were the difference between trouble and safety. He was thin, but he stood a few inches above me, and the hard work he did with his grandfather at the fish market, which he never talked about, had made his arms sinewy and his hands thick. I felt protected whenever one of those arms was around me.

There were no sidewalks on the side streets of Del Norte, like in the business district or on the moneyed residential streets, where thick tree canopies shaded the towering walls that guarded the lavish homes. Here there were sparse trees, planted in haphazard holes in front of stores owned by well-meaning shopkeepers. The bases of the trees collected trash and dead bugs, which swarmed the city in the most humid days of June.

I bet you’re going to read another one of your boy books, I gibed Sulo.

He lifted an eyebrow. What does that mean?

You know, where some kid who’s about your age finds himself on a quest to save the world. Total fiction.

Sulo blushed. I could see it mostly in the white spot on his skin just above the neckline of his gray T-shirt. It had always been there, as far as I knew. Am not, he said.

We turned right at the PDV gas station. The edge of the street and the corner of the station’s lot were lined with stacks of used tires. I climbed up the wall of tires and instantly heard my mother’s voice in my head, scolding me for coming home covered in black rubber residue. Sulo followed me up, then jumped around me to keep his lead on our trek to the bookstore.

A little ways ahead, a fire was burning in a sawed-off oil barrel. The smoke was wispy; I caught a whiff of it but didn’t mind. The fires in this part of town usually were heavy and black, weighing on my lungs and making me nauseous, but this one smelled closer to the woodsmoke of a fireplace.

A man who was older than my mother and holding an armful of books emerged from a doorway in the row of buildings Sulo and I were walking next to. His face was red, and he was screaming obscenities and threats to whoever was in the store. He pitched the books into the burning barrel and headed back inside. A uniformed policeman came out next and stood by the door, arms crossed. He wore a green suit that made him look like a general, his stance wide and defiant, as though he were ready to challenge anyone who approached him. Sweat stains covered his back. When we got closer, Sulo’s head bowed, confirming this was the store he was hoping to show me. He walked up to the policeman, stood level with his torso, and craned his head upward.

The man’s serious facade cracked. "Que pasa?" His tone was gentle, like Sulo was his own son.

Are they open? Sulo asked. I want to go inside and buy some books.

"What’s a niño like you wanting with books? Go. Run. Cause some trouble with your friends. Reading is for girls."

I hadn’t heard this before—that reading was for girls. All the men my mother admired had been readers. She’d used the word voracious. I didn’t know what it meant. She had stacks of books she had pulled from different corners of her life, and she built walls with them. Walls of education, walls of privilege, walls of hope for me. I relished those authors who wrote about a character in dire circumstances who had risen and achieved great things, against the impossible odds. There could be a chance that I could do the same.

When can I go in? Sulo was persistent with the officer.

He patted him on the head and held up his index finger. The man who’d been shouting reemerged from the store with three more books and chucked them at the barrel. One missed and skidded into the street. A car blew its horn and ran over it. The officer seemed satisfied, wrote something on an official-looking piece of paper, and handed it to the man.

The man snatched it from the policeman’s hand and disappeared into the store. The officer opened his arm to let Sulo know it was okay to enter now.

We stepped through the frame of the glass door, which had a sticker bigger than my head of a blue alien with the top half of his eyes looking over the top of a book. Look, Sulo. It’s your brother. He gave my hair a playful yank in response.

Printed on the binding of the book was ELECANTÉ BOOKS. When the door closed, and the thick, humid, smoky smells of the congested street left my nose, a sweet replacement moved in. It was soft and entwined with an industrial flowery pungency. The man who’d been yelling stood behind the counter, wiping the sweat off his forehead. He threw the document from the police officer into a drawer under the cash register. The bookstore had a new tile floor and intricate, brightly woven rugs under a seating area with two couches. It looked like the living areas I saw when I looked through the magazines at our local bodega. Every wall was covered with bookcases that stood just a half a meter from the ceiling, and there were three long bookcases that ran the length of the store.

There was nothing extraordinary about the shop’s layout. It could have been used for a market with rice and produce lining the shelves. But this store had something more valuable than food—books, and most of them looked borderline new. Brazilian books, American books, some of the British greats, and—judging from the titles—all translated into my home language. A few creases down the spines but handled gently by their readers. This place was heaven for me.

Sulo must have recognized it in my face. Pretty great, eh? He looked pleased with himself.

I thought you said they sold books from the dump?

He shrugged. That’s what I heard. Guess I was wrong.

The man came out from behind the counter and walked toward us. He blotted the sweat from his head with a white cloth napkin and pushed the long, dark strands of hair that were sticking wildly in every direction back into place over his otherwise bald head. He wore a white polo shirt that was untucked and floated in the air over the waist of his khaki pants because of his rotund belly. I was sure he was going to throw us out. I looked down at my chartreuse flip-flops, which were black with dirt and worn thin. My toenails, untrimmed and equally dirty, gave away the kind of conditions I was living in. I knew there was a bolo or two jangling around in the bottom of my old woven bag, but the bag would be an object of suspicion for any shopkeeper.

The man came closer and squatted so he was eye level with us. What kind of books do you kids like to read?

I’d never thought about choices. I read what was given to me, what I found lying on the street or in the heaps of the dumps, their pages flickering in the wind that passed over the fetid mounds of waste from the people of Caracas.

I like alien books. It was all I could think of to say, having the fresh image of the sticker on the door in my head.

Oh, you like UFOs and woo-woo-woo. He held his hands up and flicked his fingers around.

You do? Sulo stared at me, unconvinced.

The shopkeeper disappeared down one of the rows. After a minute, he yelled, Kids, come here. Look at this.

We followed his voice down one of the aisles, careful not to let our hands touch any of the books, all of which were lined up perfectly. I stepped out of my flip-flops and let my feet touch the carpets. I wanted to feel them—the plush, scratchy, woven wool. The shopkeeper had his glasses pulled down, and he was reading a page in a book. The cover was black-and-white, with strange-looking cartoon characters on it.

Here you go… He waited for my name.

I’m Lola.

Well, here you go, Lola. I think you might enjoy this. My daughter, Mayerlin, who might be a little older than you, read it a few years back. It was all I heard about in my house for weeks. And if you like it, there are three other books that go along with it. By the way, I’m Mr. Elecanté.

The book was light blue, with squiggly white lines and the face of a girl who was around my age. Gathering Blue was written in big letters. I imagined the house of a shopkeeper—with running water and food in the cabinets, dry separate rooms, and their own bathroom. If this was something a girl, like me, in a situation like that was reading, then I wanted to read it too.

And what about you? Mr. Elecanté looked at Sulo.

"Fútbol," he said excitedly.

Of course. He walked toward the back of the store. This time we followed him. The freestanding shelves that made up the aisles ended in a seating area identical to the one at the front of the store. In place of the two couches were four overstuffed chairs surrounding a small round table. Orange and yellow flowers were bursting from a glass vase in the center of it. Varieties I’d never seen before. I walked over to them and breathed deeply. The smell of apricots and honey with a sharp twist went straight to my brain and made me lightheaded.

African roses, Mr. Elecanté said. My brother is a florist in the Chacao district. He gets all sorts of things rich folks in that part of the town can afford to ship across the world.

He had a book for Sulo. I thanked him again for mine and instinctively crawled into one of the big chairs.

Small vases with pink lilies dotted the bookshelves and filled the store’s nooks. I stared into them, wanting my life to be that perfect. The precision of the petals, the glossy white porcelain vases they rested in, the stems drinking the clear water. As soon as I dove into the book, I immediately felt I could be Kira, the main character, because she was unwanted, like me and Mamá. The words were so captivating and familiar that I didn’t notice the sun outside disappear over the mountains and derelict buildings.

Sulo nudged me. C’mon, Lola. The store is closing. We have to go.

Mr. Elecanté smiled and waved at us as we left. I’d never felt so welcome anywhere.

When we arrived back at our building, a horde of police stood outside. Their thick blue canvas uniforms and hard blue helmets made them look like blue beetles. It was uncommon for the military police to be here. In our neighborhood, the city usually let gangs and local bosses take care of justice. I looked around and saw yellow posters glued to the streetlamps and the rusted posts of the missing fence that once surrounded our building when the construction was active. I turned to Sulo, who shrugged. We went over to a streetlamp