We’d been invited to dinner at Francisco’s house. His chauffeur picked us up from our hotel, and collected our friend L from his hotel, and we stopped on the way to buy flowers for Francisco’s wife, so it was dark by the time we arrived. The house was in a leafy neighbourhood of older houses with well-established gardens: nothing flashy, nothing palatial, just a quiet air of upper-middle-class solidity.
As the car pulled up to the curb, we noticed a man standing on the pavement outside Francisco’s front gate.
He was extremely tall, and wore a long dark tailored overcoat. His shaved head gleamed under the street light, and he had a cell phone in his hand.
Surprisingly there was no smile, no “buenas noches”. In fact, he didn’t nod or speak at all, or even look directly at us. Instead, he continued glancing up and down the street as we made our way through the gate and towards the front door.
An hour and several drinks later, the penny dropped. I waited till I had a quiet moment alone with L, who knows pretty much everything about everybody.
“What’s with the bodyguard?”
L, of course, knew the backstory…or at least some of it. A few years ago, Francisco was driving home from the office when several men in a car blocked his way. They had guns. A shot or two was fired, but he rammed their car and got away.
“Didn’t he report it to the police?”
It’s complicated. He did, and it transpired that the men in the car were actually policemen. (Fortunately not from the station he reported to. Presumably they were freelancing. But why? For whom? It’s unclear.)
Even L doesn’t know the whole story, and it never went to court. Francisco is a businessman, not a politician — and not a multi-millionaire either, but possibly rich enough, in this South American country, to make kidnapping an attractive proposition.
So these days he’s cautious. He has a driver. And also, apparently, the man in the overcoat.