The Blue Zone

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

It all came apart for Kate there.

An inner quake shook her so emphatically she felt as if it were cleaving her in two. She pulled the chain out from around her neck with the same broken half sun. She placed Mercado’s and hers in her palm, side by side.

They formed a perfect match.

“You knew my mother?” She looked at him closely, staring into his clear blue eyes.

“I more than knew her, Kate. We were familia.”

“Family…?”

He nodded. He took her by the hand. This time she didn’t flinch. His hands were hard, but there was a tenderness to them. Then he explained a part of her history Kate had never known.

“It was true what your father told you. He did come here as a boy. But not from Spain. From Colombia. From our own country. His mother was my father’s mistress. After my own mother died of an infection in her lungs, Ben’s mother became the love of his life.”

“Rose.” Kate nodded. Her mind darted back to the pictures she had found of the woman, recalling the face of the man with her, with her father as an infant. Her grandfather.

“ Rosa .” He shook his head and pronounced it in Spanish. “She was a beautiful woman, Kate. From Buenos Aires. She studied painting. She was full of life. Of course, they could never marry. Even at this time, in Colombia, this kind of union could never be permitted.”

Kate understood what he was telling her. “Because she was a Jew,” she said.

“Sí, ella staba judía.” The old man nodded. “When she bore him a child, it was necessary that she move away.”

“My father…” Kate sat back against the bench.

“Benhamín. After her father. So she came here.”

All of a sudden, questions about her father’s past started to become clear. That was why she knew nothing of her grandmother’s life. They hadn’t come from Spain. He’d hidden the truth all along. The rest of it seemed to fall in place like the last pieces of a puzzle: Her father had set up his own arrest. He’d gone to meet Margaret Seymour, just as Cavetti and the FBI had claimed. And that photo of the two men underneath the gate. The chilling name, overhead-MERCADO. That other man in the snapshot was before her now. His brother. Now it all made sense. Her eyes stole to the broken pendant-the gold half suns.

“It holds secrets, Kate,” Sharon had said when she placed the pendant around Kate’s neck. “One day I’ll tell them to you.”

Her mother knew!

“Your mother gave me this,” Mercado said. “She knew one day it would be me to tell you, not him. You must realize now”-the man smiled-“what happened to her, it was not me.”

“No!” A wall rose up inside Kate. Her hands trembled, but her voice was firm. “You’re saying he killed his own wife. That can’t be. He loved her. I saw them. For over twenty years. That was no lie.”

“I am telling you, Kate, this bond, it is stronger than what you know as love. All these years inside the program, I’ve never once divulged what I’ve just said to you. I never betrayed him.”

“Why are you telling me this? Why did you show yourself? What is it you want me to do?”

“I want you to help me find him, Kate.”

“Why? So you can kill him. So that he doesn’t kill you. Whatever’s happened, he’s still my father. Until he looks me in the eye and tells me he did these things. From him, not you… You’re saying that everything I’ve trusted in my whole life has been a lie.”

“Not a lie. A protection. For your own-”

“A lie!”

Oscar Mercado took her by the wrist and gently opened her palm. He picked up the two pendants of the broken Aztec sun and reached over and placed them around her neck. The two halves dangled momentarily, then came to rest against her chest in a way that made them appear as one. A single golden sun.

“You want the truth, Kate, here it is. Here is your chance. The gate is open, Kate. Do you want to walk through?”