place of great calm. We often had barbecues outside, where we would sit and play dominoes. I became a master of that game while we stayed there for about eight months. When Pablo was buying this farm a dog bit him, so Pablo insisted the dog stay with the farm. He named it Hussein, and eventually the animal calmed down.
We were living in the house with an older married couple we had known for many years, Albertino and Ilda. The farm had been bought in their name. They were both artists, painters. In addition to living in the house, they were given a salary and all their expenses were paid. For our protection Albertino would begin a painting but leave it unfinished. The picture that was there at the moment was a beautiful farm with a small cow. The only thing to be finished was the green grass, which I could paint to look real if necessary. Pablo would wear the painter’s cap and in the morning both of us would put paint on our hands and our clothes in case the police showed up. Pablo had grown a beard and when he was splattered with paint he would look authentic, like he did his work there.
The importance of this farm was that it was near enough to Medellín for Pablo to be in contact with the attorneys negotiating a compromise with the government to do away with the extradition laws. These meetings usually took place late at night, sometimes at one A.M. When Pablo had to go to places he would wear his artist disguise and Albertino would drive. The negotiations took a long time because Pablo knew exactly what we wanted, which was for the government to change the constitution. Meanwhile, we hid.
Very early one morning the police suddenly came to the farm. It was not a raid; there was only one patrol car with two men, so I figured they were not looking for Pablo Escobar. I opened the door for them. Albertino and Ilda were having breakfast and when Ilda saw the police she slipped away to wake Pablo. In this house we had built secret stashes to hide money as well as hideouts for ourselves. Pablo moved into one of them. When the police came to the door I welcomed them. I was pretending to be a painter with the cap and the artist’s glasses. I began reaching out to shake hands, but stopped politely because, as I indicated, I did not want to get paint on them. They explained their presence. “We’re doing a search in the neighborhood because we found a body at the side of the road.” In fact, he said, they had found a head on one side of the road and a body on the other. He continued, “It happened last night. We were wondering if you saw anything weird or heard something unusual.”
“No,” I said, and that was truthful. That corpse had nothing to do with us. “I was up very late working on my painting.” I invited the police inside and served them a cup of coffee. They admired the house and left. When they had driven away I used our knock code to tell Pablo it was safe to come out. Later we learned from the people in town that the body was that of a husband who had been killed by his wife and her young lover.
Wherever we stayed we made certain there were places for us to hide quickly if necessary. It was this way with all the hunted men from the drug organizations. One time the police got a call that a major leader was hiding in an apartment. The exact address and apartment number were given. When the police went into the apartment there was warm food still on the table. They searched this apartment for hours but found nothing. The man had disappeared. The police were used to being given false information—people were always calling them to say they had seen Pablo Escobar in a store or walking into a building, for example—and this seemed no different.
A month or more later this same person again called the police and insisted the leader was at that address. From the outside the police saw a candle burning. The army knocked down the door. The candle was still burning, the bed was warm—but the apartment was empty. This time they had the answer to the mystery. They stuck the point of a pen into a