Chapter 4

Of course, you don’t invent a new and legal business as easily as pulling a rabbit out of a top hat. No, there has to be a lot of thought and not a few meetings. We first talked through what we did do as a family and, once you took away the prostitution, money laundering, stand-over tactics, and smuggling there wasn’t a lot that we could turn out hand to and still keep our self-respect.

If you looked at what we owned and operated there were several ships, a fleet of trucks and a team of people sourcing armaments and highly wanted designer products. We had a market consisting of criminal gangs, militia, off-the-radar government organisations and just about every price conscious wealthy family in the country. After two weeks of going round in circles the answer was so simple we all had a good laugh. All we had to do was carry on as we were but legitimise it!

It was a straight-forward matter to put things into a reasonable order. Firstly we needed to get import authorisations from the various government departments and that was simple, but costly. We then needed the paperwork to openly deal in armaments which was even quicker because the bottom line of all of this was that the bottom line would be a little thinner than previously. The profit margin would shrink without all of the extra dangers and subterfuge that smuggling needed. We would have to pay import duties but these were passed on to the customers anyway. The government was happy because they paid less for their guns and raked in the fees as well

For a lot of the gang it was a shock to be signing documents in front of customs officers in regard to the cargo they had in the holds, be it designer dresses to machine guns. We now had the means to bring in the cartons of clothing that Isabella had bought and setting up her shop was very easy once my father had decided to support the project, no-one slacked on a job for the Clavijo family!

Isabella did get to put on some dinners and parties but they were strictly controlled by the family now and some left the events saying that Isabell had lost some of her gloss. The Festival went off well and I joined the huge crowd of dancers on the Sunday as well as taking a lot of notes about the ‘Death of Joselito Carnaval’ on Shrove Tuesday. I had an idea that it may be something to do next year for fun, as long as I could pull some other crazy people into my scheme.

I did go and see Isabellas’ friend Valeria and found her to be totally charming. I helped her out by putting the Clavijo name about as a supporter of her and she started to get things done. She wanted to set up a new LGTBQ network that catered more for the lesbian groups and part of that was a clinic where they would be welcome and well looked after, something that not all clinics in the country were happy with. Her float was to promote the idea and maybe raise some money. I spoke to Edmondo and we donated a rambling building near the docks (but not too near) that we had never been able to find a use for before.

This became one of my own pet projects and it gave me a new access to the city society that ‘Crazy Julieta’ would never have had. It was during the preparations for our opening ceremony that I met Pablo Marknez, a young doctor who had come up from Cali, in the south of the country, to join us because his sister had died recently after not being properly looked after, being classed as a puta lesbiana. Pablo was almost fanatical about the project and we spent a lot of time together.

I invited him to my home for dinner one day, the week before the big opening, and he and Edmondo got on famously. Pablo may have come up from Cali but he had come from a good family and knew his manners. As far as he was concerned, we were a rich family of merchants and traders. Like everyone else in the country, it did not matter to him how you made your way as long as you made it.

Life and love took its course and we started going out together to various balls and parties. The good folk of Barranquilla slowly came to the conclusion that ‘Crazy Julieta’ had blossomed and I had more than one query about the ‘special school’ that I had attended. I usually said that it was very experimental and some of the treatments were finding it hard to get authorisation. I usually grinned and told them that it was not known just how long any changes I have had may last but that I was enjoying my time as a normal person as long as I could.

The day before the Grand Opening I was inspecting the new premises with Pablo and we decided to try out one of the private bedrooms. I was still dilating occasionally and always carried some lube in my bag, just in case. He took me to a place that I never thought would exist; a place where I was pinned to a bed by his weight and his love and thoroughly lost myself in the moment until I had the best feeling that started in my groin and spread through my whole body. It was if I had been re-energised and then gave all that energy up in a huge shudder and spasms of ecstasy. I knew I loved Pablo and he knew he loved me so we kissed, told each other what we felt and then used the ensuite to clean up before going back out into the world.

I went through the opening day in a daze. I was no longer the person I was. I had started out as a gang member, lived on the streets as a petty crook and, although I had been reborn as Julieta, I still was my own person and made my own decisions. Now I was one of a loving couple with my decisions sometimes being made for me. I deferred to Pablo in a lot of things and he took his place as the man in our relationship. He was my man but, by the same virtue, I was very much his woman. We made love whenever we could and it got better every time. The Clavijo family already had us pencilled in and it was not a surprise when we were told that it was time to set a date.

In this society nothing was immediate except death. The date was set a year into the future and it did not matter to me because I was not going to get pregnant in the meantime. As the clinic prospered, so did Pablo and he took extra courses which led him to be promoted within the organisation. I was really just the owner of the property and Valeria was the clinic manager so I did not have anything to do with the process and was happy that he had done so well.

The problems started when he started talking about the children he wanted. When I told him that I was unable to bear him a child he did not get angry but assured me that anything can be fixed and wanted me to undergo tests. Of course, not having any female internals that was never going to happen and I refused. He could not understand it and then he started to become angry with me not allowing him to fix my ‘little problems’. In the end he took himself, and part of my heart, back to Cali.

With him leaving me I lost no standing with the social set. They considered him a fool for going home and leaving a cushy marriage with a good family name. I did, after a while, bring myself back to the level of determined woman I had been before. I had lost my heart and had it broken but there was no way he could ever have looked at my body to find that although I may have looked like a woman, there was nothing internal to back it up.

I carried on as a social butterfly, dancing with every eligible man in my circle and quietly bedding a few now that my sexuality had been awoken. The family business took up a lot of my time as it grew. Edmondo was amazed at just how much business we were now putting through as a legitimate enterprise and the lower bottom line ended up not being a factor at all. We did the deals, we made the money and I enjoyed my life as best I could.

Then came the fateful day that Edmondo had a severe stroke; leaving him almost a vegetable. It took some days to sort things out but the men that worked for us were generally dealing with me by now so I just seemed to take over running the business. Eduardo was not happy at this because he now considered a legitimate business to be something he should be head of, not wanting to be part of an illegal operation now forgotten. He demanded to be given his rightful place as the head of the family but my mother resisted him, as did I but I was not going to be open about it.

It took the local government six months to come down on my side. The Business Council was adamant that it had been my work that put the family where it now was and that Eduardo was nothing more than waste of space. Eduardo could not take this without trying something and he took out a contract on my life. Unfortunately for him, as he did not know how the underworld worked, he promised money on completion with the expectation that then he would have the funds to pay for my murder. I, on the other hand, was well versed in staying alive and knew of his offer the day he put it out. One of my men went and saw him, saying that he would do the job easily but wanted half up front.

Eduardo, of course, could not come up with any cash and put up Isabellas’ business as collateral. When this information was brought back to me we had a gathering of the main partners in our enterprises and the upshot, without me being asked what I thought, was that Eduardo needed to be shown his place. My guy went back and said he would do the job but needed the deeds to the shop in order to start planning. Of course Eduardo could not present the deeds as they were hidden away in our family safe. He then went to Isabella to see if she could get the deeds from me so that they had them in their own safety deposit box.

When she came to see me I explained the situation to her. Her husband wanted the deeds to pay for my death and the person doing the killing would end up as the owner of her shop and her business which she was working hard at bringing to the top ten percent of couture outlets in the city. She was incensed and wanted me to give her a gun so that she could go home and shoot him. I told her that I could arrange a little ‘accident’ which would look completely natural and keep her from going to jail and she was all for it.

Two weeks later she sent him to Europe on a buying trip and he, sadly, became a victim in a terrorist outrage. This was a surprise to me because I had organised something a little less public for the next day which I still had to pay for even though he did not show up at the place of his arranged demise. Isabella was amazed that I could organise an event that killed dozens just to remove her husband and was very careful towards me from that time on.

I did not let on that I had nothing to do with it and it did serve to bolster my standing within the gang that remained. Many of our employees were now ordinary people leading ordinary lives and working with us for a wage. Isabella had insured Eduardo heavily, considering his love of fast cars and ocean-going yachts so came out of it very well off, even more when I gave her the shop deeds as a present.

Marianne G © 2021