The Slip

July 2, 2020. The next day.

I wake up and tilt my head to the side, soaking in the shaft of sunlight coming in through the window, and then curse when I realise that Salome’s not here.

I scramble out of bed and get dressed, fast as I can, pulling on a shirt and slacks, only taking half a second to rinse my mouth and another five to relieve myself before I’m scrambling down the stairs, thinking about calling the driver on my phone to inquire for where Salome’s gone, and whether that would be too suspicious, but this was stupid, I was supposed to sleep lightly and track…

“Going somewhere?” Salome asks, munching on a ciruela as she sits by the dining table, one leg crossed over the other. She’s wearing a dark brown dress that’s more modest than her usual attire.

“I thought you’d left without me,” I say quickly. “I didn’t want to miss out on any of the good protest action.”

“Scarlet will be happy to hear that you’re so into the cause,” she says, giving me a smile so genuine that I feel guilt wrench inside me.

I have to remind myself that this is the way Salome plays the game: with such sincerity that nobody thinks to question her occasional fib. But I know she’s going to meet Ricardo today. She can’t trick me so easily.

“I wasn’t going to leave without you,” Salome says. “But I was going to wake you up if you were going to take much longer. We should get going soon. Want a ciruela?”

I catch the bright red fruit that she tosses me and take a bite into it.

“Don’t eat the seed in the middle,” she says. “It looks harmless, but really, it’s quite poisonous.”

At eight in the morning, the demonstrations for the day are just beginning to kick into gear. People are streaming into the plaza, joining the hundred or two people who brought tents and set up camp here last night.

The police, I see, are beginning to swell in rank too.

“Flag, Miss Universe?” one of the organisers says as she catches us walking in. She’s dressed in a green shirt and has the organiser’s lanyard on, hooked in to a Bluetooth earpiece that Scarlet and the others on top use to issue commands.

Salome looks at the large Colombian flag, and then shakes her head.

“You want it, Claude?” she asks me.

“Sure, I’ll take it,” I say to the organiser.

I wrap the flag around my shoulders, wearing it like a cape, and Salome smiles.

“You look good like this,” she says.

Over the next few hours, we march around, chant slogans, make signs, and wave them, while the plaza grows more and more packed. The people have woken up for a new day, and they are taking to the streets in their thousands. I stick close to Salome, making sure that she’s always in sight, and she doesn’t seem to mind that I do so. Is she even going to meet Ricardo during the protests? It makes sense that they would arrange to meet sometime after, when there aren’t so many eyes on her at all times. They’d prefer a private conversation without any eavesdroppers.

I keep an eye out for Ricardo anyways, but spy him nowhere. I quietly notice that the counter-protestors on the eastern end of the plaza have grown in number. They’ve gotten more organised over the course of a day—sending representatives to talk to the media teams in the corner, punchier slogans on their signs, and more of them, too. So many more of them.

I ask Scarlet about it as I catch her passing by, some time around noon.

“Great question,” Scarlet says, brushing an invisible piece of dust off the shoulder of her white suit. How she’s kept it pristine even after camping out here overnight is beyond me. “We caught a bus dropping off a couple dozen of the counter-protestors an hour ago, just a couple streets away. It looks like the corporations are starting to pay for their own public presence.”

“They looked much more organised today,” I say. “That would explain it.”

“Good eye,” Scarlet nods. “This also means that we’ve got to start keeping an eye out for plants in our protestors. There are always going to be some rotten apples, but we need to catch the ones who want to instigate **** before they can make anything bad happen.”

“Because we’re always for peace first,” I say.

“Exactly,” Scarlet says, giving me a small smile.

In some ways, it’s a smile that reminds me of her mother, sweet and genuine, even if it’s not quite so radiant. Speaking of which, Salome is…

Where is Salome?

“Something the matter?” Scarlet asks me, looking concerned. “Did you see something suspicious earlier, someone who might cause trouble?”

“Where’s Salome—your mother—gone?” I ask, scanning the sea of faces around us. I see hers nowhere.

Scarlet takes a quick glance around, and shrugs.

“She might have gone off that way? She’ll be fine,” she says. "You don’t have to be her keeper, you know?”

But I am already off, pushing through the crowd in the direction that Scarlet pointed out, doing my best to spot that brown dress that she was wearing earlier. I see people in blues and greens and vermillion and taupe, but not a lick of the brown that Salome was wearing. She’s not a tall lady, either, so I have to try to pick her out from the mass of faces that are jostling by me, but I see nobody matching her supermodel curves or sunny smile, where the fuck has she gone?

I shed the flag that I’m wearing around my shoulders, passing it on to some random dude pouring a bottle of water over his head. The flag makes me easy to spot. I now know why Salome didn’t take it earlier, and I curse my stupidity for taking it myself. That’s when I realise that Scarlet might have pointed me in the wrong direction.

Fuck. Could Scarlet have been in on it too? Was she trying to distract me? I spin around and see Scarlet hamming it up in front of a television camera; no sign of Salome anywhere near here, or in Scarlet’s general direction either.

But all is not lost yet. There are only so many exits to this plaza, only so many thousands of people in here. If I can get out of here fast enough, I might be able to catch Salome slipping away, after all, I wasn’t talking with Scarlet for that long, was I?

So I shove and slide my way through startled protestors, making for the northern entrance that we came in by, knowing that this is all going to be one massive gamble. But I’ve got **** at this point.

I’m fast on my feet, and it takes me only a few minutes to jostle my way to the opening to the main streets. There’s no way Salome could have made it here quick as I did, I think, people recognise her, she gets stopped, and she can’t step on toes the way I did.

But that thought is all I have to cling on to as the minutes drag by, and Salome remains nowhere to be seen. People are constantly coming and going, and by the time I check my phone, it’s been half an hour, and I bite back a curse. I’ve lost her. She must have left by another exit.

I dive back into the crowd. There’s a chance that she’s meeting Ricardo somewhere in here, amongst this mass of people. Maybe I can catch them in the thick of it, if I can be quick enough, if my eyes can be sharp enough…

I don’t know how many minutes I spend roaming around the plaza. I get my free handout of a sandwich and a bottle of water at some point, and continue searching on my feet as I chomp down on the food, all the faces that I’ve seen rapidly becoming a mish-mashed blur. There’s only one thing that I’m sure of. I’ve seen nothing of Salome.

I’m ready to call it quits, to find Scarlet by the front lines and join the latest chant-in-the-face-of-the-police with her, when I feel the hand resting on my shoulder.

“Holy shit man, you were not easy to find,” Ricardo says.