Chapter 55 2014
“I’m sorry,” Meryl said, setting her phone on the coffee table.
We were in the living room of Kendall House. The day I found out Profe had been arrested, Meryl and I flew to Minnesota. Her mother’s house had tenants, so we stayed at the house Mother had abandoned.
“It’s a black hole of bureaucracy.”
We’d hit yet another dead end in an endless string of dead ends.
So many immigrants had been detained in the preceding months thanks to Obama’s tough stance on immigration.
The system was overloaded, and many of the detainees were lost in the shuffle and didn’t show up in the Ice database until weeks after their arrest. Ten days had passed since Profe had been taken into custody, and no one could tell us where he was or what might happen to him.
The whole thing had left me numb. I went through the motions of being a human, but it felt as if I’d lost my center of gravity, and everything was topsy-turvy.
Meryl would speak to me, but I barely heard her, and when I opened my mouth to answer, it was as if I was a goldfish in a bowl, my mouth glubbing and nothing coming out.
We had hired a top immigration attorney, a man named Jacob Stein, but despite his best efforts, he hadn’t discovered anything except that Profe was likely in serious trouble.
Immigrants with criminal records were almost always deported, and those with serious allegations against them were extradited.
Profe was in the latter category. More than four decades before, he’d been accused of double homicide.
According to the files Jacob obtained from Mexico, Andres Osvaldo Marcel, at the age of thirty-two, allegedly bludgeoned his wife and three-year-old daughter to death, then set his house on fire.
It wasn’t true, of course. Jacob spoke with a man who had worked with Profe at La Prensa, Mexico’s largest newspaper, and he said Profe was likely framed by a man named Jesus Montaro, a corrupt governor with sights on the presidency.
Profe had drawn several damaging cartoons of Montaro, and one was so funny that Montaro’s opponents made it into a poster and plastered it all over Mexico.
The murders happened the day after Montaro lost the election, and the arrest warrant was issued for Profe while the ashes of his home still smoldered and before a single piece of physical evidence had been collected.
Jacob explained that, based on what he’d discovered, it was almost certain Profe would be extradited back to Mexico, where he’d likely stand trial, be convicted, and would live the remainder of his life behind bars in a Mexican prison.
Each time I thought of it, I couldn’t breathe and my brain went fuzzy.
“I’m sorry,” Meryl repeated. “Until we hear something more, there’s nothing we can do. In the meantime, we need to go back to Prague.”
I shook my head hard once. I couldn’t leave, not with Profe in the situation he was in and knowing I was the one who caused it.
“I can’t stay,” Meryl said. “I’ve already missed so much time.”
“Go,” I managed, eyes on the lake out the window, the place Profe and I had spent so much time together. “I’ll be okay.”
A lie.