ALL THAT'S LEFT

CHAPTER THREE: AT THE BURIAL.

El Patrón died on a Wednesday.

I did not know it was El Patrón.

I did not know, standing at the photocopier on the second floor of a building that hummed with secrets, that the man who had been sick for months, a fact discussed in the corridors with the hushed anxiety of people whose livelihoods depended on a single heartbeat was the same man whose name had been the last thing my father heard.

The announcement came through the intercom at eleven in the morning: Señor Armando Villanueva had passed away at ten forty-seven. All staff were requested to observe a moment of silence.

There would be a company-wide meeting at two o'clock.

Around me, people stopped working. Some bowed their heads. Some cried, actually cried, the tears of people who had depended on a man for years and were suddenly uncertain what came next.

I stood at my desk and felt nothing, which seemed appropriate, since I did not know this man, had never met him, had only heard his name spoken in the third person, in the habitual reverence with which people speak of power they cannot see.

I went to the meeting at two o'clock because everyone went.

The conference room on the fourth floor was full, every chair taken, people standing against the walls, a collective holding of breath.

The head of HR, a thin woman named Señora Pilar whose face I had never seen express anything other than efficient neutrality, stood at the front and delivered the information in sections: the founder and director of Auto Electrica Border Logistics had died of heart failure; his son, Diego Villanueva, was flying in from London to assume directorship; operations would continue as normal; grief counseling was available.

Diego.

The name moved through me like a current. A boy on some steps. A book about the sea. An older child who had made me feel, briefly, like what I said was worth hearing.

I told myself it was a common name.

* * *

The funeral was held on a Saturday. The whole company attended.

This was not optional, which I understood without it being stated, there are organizations where presence at certain events is a form of declaration, and this was one of them.

Uncle Luis, still not fully recovered, insisted on accompanying me, and I did not argue because I was not yet afraid of what I might find there.

We drove in silence.

Seth stayed home, which had been a fight he wanted to come, said funerals were important, that we should pay our respects and I had told him with more vehemence than I fully understood that he should rest, that I would tell him everything, that the fresh air would not compensate for standing on his feet for two hours.

He had looked at me with his careful eyes and said nothing more.

The church was large and old and smelled of melted wax and something floral underneath.

The casket was closed. The flowers were white.

There were many people I did not recognize, people who moved with the particular ease of those who are accustomed to large rooms and expensive clothes, and they mingled at the edges with the Auto Electrica staff in a way that felt like two different species sharing a watering hole, polite and watchful.

I stood beside Uncle Luis near the back and watched.

I saw Diego and instantly recognized him.

A tall man in a dark suit, slightly too broad for it, with the angular jaw I had forgotten I remembered until I saw it again.

He was moving through the crowd doing the work funerals require receiving condolences, pressing hands, bending his head to accept embraces from people twice his age.

He was graceful at it, unhurried, present in the way that speaks of either genuine feeling or extraordinary self-control.

Diego.

Yes. The boy on the steps, grown into a man with his father's funeral weight on his shoulders.

I watched him and felt something uncomplicated and brief, a recognition, the mild warmth of recovered memory and then he turned and his eyes found mine across the room and he stilled.

He crossed to me. Of course he did. I did not move.

"Beth?" His voice was different. Deeper. Carrying now the slight rounding of consonants that came from years in a different country. "Carlos's daughter? Luis's niece?"

"Yes," I said.

He looked at me with something open in his face, something that was not appropriate to the occasion, a kind of pleased surprise that a funeral should have contained.

"I thought about you sometimes. I wondered where you'd gone." He paused. "I'm sorry about your parents. I heard, years later. I'm sorry."

I opened my mouth to say something. What came out surprised me.

"I'm sorry for your loss," I said, and I said it the way you say a phrase when you have detached from its meaning entirely, when it is pure sound.

He looked at me a moment longer. Then he was drawn away by someone who needed him, a gray-haired man with the bearing of authority, and I stood where I was and breathed.

There was a procession. We all had to walk past the casket and look into it to see the deceased for the last time: this was a culture.

It was Uncle Luis who moved first. He was before me. I followed behind, then he took my arm, gently, firmly, and steered me toward the exit, and outside in the hard white light of Saturday morning, he looked at my face and said nothing for a long time.

"Beth," he said, finally.

"I did see it," I said. My voice was very even. I was proud of that.

"I saw the tattoo on the elbow of the man who layed lifeless in the casket inside the church."

Uncle Luis closed his eyes.

"I saw it," I said. "The tattoo on his elbow. The same one."

"Beth."

"It was him." I did not raise my voice.

There was no need. "El Patrón.

Armando Villanueva. That was the name he said. He said: El Patrón sends his regards. Armando Villanueva killed my parents."

The street noise continued around us, a bus, somewhere; a vendor calling; the ordinary indifferent machinery of a city that had kept moving while my world ended twice. Uncle Luis stood very still.

"I know," he said.

Those two words.

I turned to look at him.

"I have always known," he said. "I tried to stop your father. I begged him not to say anything, not to threaten to go to the authorities.

I knew what Villanueva was capable of. But Carlos —" He stopped. "Your father was a man who believed that right and wrong were worth dying for. He just didn't know he would be the only one paying that price."

The silence between us was enormous.

"You knew," I said. "You worked for him. You've been working for the man who killed my parents for twenty years."

"To feed you," he said. "To keep a roof. To pay for Seth's treatments." His voice did not flinch, but something in it bent.

"There are no clean hands in this city, Beth. There are only choices and what they cost. I made mine."

I wanted to be angry at him. I searched for it and found something more complicated, something I could not name, the understanding that love commits crimes, that survival is not always noble, that Uncle Luis had fed us with tainted money and I had been grateful for every meal.

"He's dead," I said. "Villanueva. He's dead and it's too late."

"Yes."

"But the organization —"

"Still stands. His son is taking it over."

"Diego."

Uncle Luis looked at me.

"Don't," he said. "Whatever you're thinking, don't. He's not his father, Beth. Whatever Armando was, Diego has been in London for twelve years. He doesn't know."

"He's the heir to the man who killed my parents," I said. "He's going to run the same organization."

"And you are going to go home. And take care of your brother. And not do something that cannot be undone."

I did not argue with him. I have learned, from years of living with someone who loved me, when arguing is useful and when it is merely noise. I nodded. I let him take me home.

I spent the whole drive deciding what I was going to do.