Schermerhorn hears a bit of a ruckus among the men — cartel sicarios, he guesses. They congregate by the gate that leads to where he’s being held. They come and they go in the course of an afternoon, and he has lost interest in peeking out at them through cracks in the troje wall every time they get noisy. Now he hears a voice of authority, one that’s new to him. He can only guess at some of what’s being said, but from the tone of the man’s voice, Schermerhorn knows he is scolding the guard and his amigos:
“You have nothing better to do than stand around here? The mercado needs no attention? The police have agreed to stop harassing our friends? The bootleg CDs and DVDs are selling without your help? Then you must not be needed any longer. Is that it?”
Armando Quiróz, as Schermerhorn will learn to call him, is an irritable man, and the sight of these idlers infuriates him. He scatters them like dogs. The men move off, trying as they saunter away to keep from breaking into open flight.
Quiróz nods to the sicario who remains, the guard on duty, and pushes the gate open. The guard closes it behind him. Quiróz strides the ten yards or so that separate the troje from the gate and guard post.
He pulls back a horizontal metal bar and throws the door open. Schermerhorn cringes, mentally if not physically, from the looming figure silhouetted in the doorway. The man’s face is a void against the sun-splashed backdrop. But now, as the man steps further into the room, the shadowy light sketches in the missing features: the trim black mustache, the row of large, perfectly aligned and very white teeth, a large mole above the left eyebrow. Schermerhorn finds himself looking the man in the face, not boldly or defiantly but out of sharpened curiosity. Has he seen this man before? Probably in the car when he was seized and carried off, he decides. Schermerhorn is seated on a cot, the cabin’s sole furnishing besides an urn of water, a bowl for bodily wastes and, by the door, the tray with a dirty dish or two that will be removed when a guard brings around Schermerhorn’s second daily meal: another scoop of beans, a tortilla. A bare light bulb hangs unlit from the roof beam on a six- or seven-foot cord. Quiróz kicks the door shut behind him. Schermerhorn assumes that the guard stands just to the side, out of his sight, but available with sudden assistance if needed. What light there is slips through gaps between planks in the windowless walls.
Quiróz regards Schermerhorn evenly, studying him for signs of fear or an impulse to attack. The prisoner, the abductee — el levantado — again ducks the captor’s glare. He does not see the smile — almost a benevolent smile — that comes over Quiróz’s face.
Where has he seen this man before? Schermerhorn wracks his brain. He spins the mental Rolodex, containing the names of people he knows or has at least met. The ink has faded on some of the cards, some were entered in haste. Some indelibly.
If he has ever met the man, he can not now place him. More likely, he thinks to himself, the faint sense of déjà vu is nothing more than the tribal bias that makes “all natives look alike” to an outlander, the spectrum of social response that begins with love for one’s own kind and ends in racism and genocide.
“How do we get you out of here, señor?
Schermerhorn looks up. It is excruciatingly uncertain to him whether Quiróz’s question is meant as a threat or an offer of sympathy and assistance. “Oh, of course,” he thinks to himself: “the good cop/bad cop routine.” The good cop has superseded the assholes — pendejos — who plucked him off the street, wedged him into the back of a car and pressed his face to the floorboards with their feet as the car sped off into the countryside.
Quiróz settles onto the cot beside his prisoner and repeats the question: “How do we get you out of here.”
“What do you mean? No comprende,” Schermerhorn says dully. He catches himself twisting his fingers together and forces himself to stop. He wants to appear calm.
Quiróz persists in English:
“I mean, we need to get your wife to buy your release.”
“Have you contacted her?”
“Yes and no. I needed to talk to you first. I have no idea what your life is worth to her.”
As he says this, he grasps the back of Schermerhorn’s neck, a brotherly gesture, except that he squeezes too hard.
“I won’t hurt you unless you make me,” Quiróz says, releasing his grip on Schermerhorn’s neck. “The others may not be as gentle. They’re more the sporting kind.”
Schermerhorn’s good-cop theory is collapsing.
“Let me help you understand our dilemma — and yours,” Quiróz continues. “You get out of here, maybe dead, maybe alive, when we determine that you mean so much to your wife that she has nothing left to give. Meanwhile, you belong to me. Any trouble …”
Quiróz has produced a revolver from his jacket pocket and jabs the barrel into Schermerhorn’s groin. “Any trouble and you will no longer be of much use to your wife. Indeed, she has already adjusted for that possibility.” Quiróz pulls a grainy photograph out of his shirt pocket, an image grabbed from a surveillance video. It shows the rear of a naked man ravishing a woman. The woman gazes up over the scallop shell of the man’s broad back, her eyes lost in a haze of pleasure and pain. The camera angle conceals the man’s face. The woman is, of course, Ariana, in the arms of … a lover? A rapist? Has she, too, been seized? Whatever the circumstances, there was a camera in the bedroom.
Blinded by rage, Schermerhorn lunges toward Quiróz, a much younger man, a much stronger man. Quiróz jerks him back onto the cot and drives an elbow deep into his gut. Schermerhorn doubles over, straining to take his next breath. .
Now Quiróz is all business: “We need to know how much you have, Señor Schermerhorn. I need your advice on how these assets are best made available to us. You will need to convince your wife that compliance is her only option. She has other men. I doubt you needed the picture to know that. You may no longer be able to count on her devotion to you or your marriage. There is devotion but there is also pity, and while a woman’s love can not be forced, there are ways to inspire her pity. We can help you with that, if need be. I am easily frustrated, but I am a soft-hearted man. I would rather not send her your ear or your finger, the one with the wedding ring on it.”
Quiróz kisses Schermerhorn on the lips, mockingly. “I am Judas,” he says, rising from the cot.” Let’s make your stay in Gethsemane as brief and pleasant as possible.”
He leaves the troje. Schermerhorn listens for the thwack of the metal bar falling across the closed door and is perplexed not to hear it — almost disappointed. Its absence denies him the sense of temporary respite that comes with knowing he will be alone for a while, maybe the rest of the afternoon.
day twelve
It is a beautiful afternoon by Patzcuaro standards, or any standard at all. The downpour came in the morning, a late installment as the rainy season winds down, and the thin air stayed cool — cool enough to make you forget that you are closer to the sun than in any skin-blistered American city, closer than Miami, even Honolulu.
Hidden behind dark glasses, Ariana buries herself in her newspaper, but she can not focus on the article she is reading. Instead, here at the Gran, she monitors a conversation among gringo tourists evidently fresh back from Colombia, a name they pronounce with overweening attention to the vowels — Coal-om-bya. You hear that among gringos — less a stab at properly accented Spanish, Ariana supposes, than a way of signaling that they know better than to call the place Columbia, like the university in New York. (This linguistic precision does not yet extend to calling Mexico “Mehico” — but perhaps, someday soon, it will.) One of the women lapses into a two-minute homage to the FARC guerrillas. The cocaine harvest that guerrillas expropriate from the campesinos is — in her view and it’s a fashionable one — somehow, more than simple theft. It is, she opines, a calculated and principled renunciation of the imperial currency, the dollar, and of the Latin currencies in thrall to it. In Coal-om-bya, using cocaine as a currency is a revolutionary act, the woman argues. Ariana wonders if expropri
ation of the woman’s personal assets, her Park Slope condo, for example, or her silverware, would seem as revolutionary in Park Slope as in the Altiplano.
Even before her days on air, Ariana was exasperated by mannered speech — a scourge of the broadcast industry. But her attention to the Coal-om-byan travelers is only a dodge. She’s avoiding the issue that should be at the center of her thoughts ahead of a meeting — one she hopes for but also dreads — with Rogelio.
She continues the meditation that has bedeviled her for a week. Will she have to come up with a million pesos to secure Schuyler’s release? A million dollars? A few thousand?
During their meeting at the embassy, she had asked Agent Forrester for his view only to realize at once that the question made him too uncomfortable to answer. “You’re going to need to do your best,” he said. “I’ve heard of ransom demands that ranged from pocket change well into seven figures.” These were the words of a bureaucrat trying to cover his ass, Ariana realized. If he put out a number and something went wrong … ? He’d have to take responsibility and that’s something a government functionary knows to avoid at all cost.
She remembered a younger friend’s experience, a man still raising two daughters. He got the call — la llamada — one afternoon out of the blue. The caller threatened to grab one of the daughters. He knew her route home from school; indeed, the caller was able to describe where she was at that very moment, what intersection, how she was dressed. “I can see her as we speak, señor. She is rounding the corner by the Pemex station.” Perhaps the caller was speaking into a throw-away cell phone from a parked car. “Do you want to live in fear, knowing that I could snatch her at any time?” Then he got to the point. He wanted thirty-thousand pesos — less than 25 hundred dollars, at the then-current exchange rate. A courier would come by in an hour. The girl’s father was on the phone with friends, trying to round up the cash, when his daughter walked in the door,. Her father had been preparing to capitulate to a punk, a low-life making a low-ball ransom demand. The caller had been merely fishing for a payout, without doing anything more than picking up the phone. And he nearly got it.
But it left Ariana thinking. Perhaps thirty-thousand is the going rate. Would fifty-thousand pesos be an offer they couldn’t refuse, a premium big enough to signal respect for the extortionists now working her over? Or would it be an insult? Of course they would counter. But where did they expect the bargaining to wind up? Had they done their homework? Had they rifled the garbage on Madrigal for account statements? Had they googled Schermerhorn family history and come to the (false) conclusion that old money meant lots of it? Had they stumbled upon press accounts of Ariana Altobelli’s settlement with CBS in a gender-discrimination case, failing to appreciate that the three million was split with fifteen plaintiffs and that the lawyers creamed off a third of it?
In the middle of these ruminations, a light bulb goes off in Ariana’s head. She will
bring a portion of the money to Rogelio, in cash, at their very next encounter — say, ten thousand pesos, earnest money. It would be proof of her sincerity, her willingness to play ball. It would be a way of feeling him out. It also would be a reminder to Rogelio that laying hands on cash is not a simple matter of writing a check. Though she and Schuyler have been spending the better part of the year in Mexico these days, they do so on tourist visas. That means passing back into the States every six months and then renewing their visas upon return to Mexico — sometimes the very next day. This is easy enough to do, but it means that, for lack of immigrant status — the “temporal,” for example, as an intermediate step on the way to becoming “residentes permanentes” — they are not permitted to open a Mexican bank account. Instead, they use credit cards whenever possible, drawn on U.S. accounts. For pocket change, Ariana takes pesos from an ATM that accepts her Visa card. Maximum withdrawal: the peso equivalent of about three hundred dollars, plus a fee for the transaction. A ransom of, say, a hundred thousand dollars? It would take forever to pay in those increments — nearly a year.
Ten thousand pesos took her two days: two withdrawals. She has the money on her. Who knows: maybe having ten-thousand pesos in hand will so enrapture Rogelio and his dipshit posse that they’ll fold and release Schuyler forthwith. (Dream on, she scolds herself.)
Another ploy occurs to her. She’ll say something flirtatious: “What makes you think I am all that eager to be reunited with my husband?” She had tried to imagine herself saying those words, a sexy gringa playing wink-wink with an aging sicario. She rehearsed, saying the words aloud in the empty street between the Plaza and Lerin. She tried to muster a knowing chuckle. It made her cringe. Of course bonding around the (false) confession that her marriage has gone stale could backfire. No matter how many people he had killed or extorted, Rogelio could turn out to be a sanctimonious son of a bitch, a staunch Catholic and deeply conservative when it comes to the sacredness of marriage. Sanctimoniousness doesn’t rule out boozy nights for sicarios and the corrupt politicians they run with. From what Enrique has told her, sanctimoniousness leaves sicarios with plenty of room for philandering with young women not their wives, philandering and the occasional love child. Induction into this frat-boy culture — the late nights, the marriages betrayed — doubles, she assumes, as a way for cartel members to keep an eye on each other. Each transgression provides leverage over a potentially errant peer, Enrique explained, in confirming her theory. But however ugly for their wives and children left at home, it is not, she surmises, the same thing as abandoning them altogether. She imagines Rogelio cold-shouldering her attempt at irreverent humor: “If you don’t like your husband, that is your problem.” That might be his comeback. It might revolt him that a woman would presume to talk buddy-buddy with him. He could be a Catholic through and through, Ariana reminds herself, even if he has to wash the blood off his hands before accepting the host at mass.
The tourists fresh back from Coalhombya have moved on when Rogelio slips into the chair on the other side of Ariana’s table. Over a quick cup of espresso, he suggests that they stroll about in order to assure themselves the unaudited conversation required for a delicate negotiation. Within a block he abandons delicacy:
“How much?”
“I have ten thousand in cash. Here, I want you to take it.” She holds out an envelope. “I am begging an equal amount from family back in the States.”
“Twenty-thousand total. I assume you mean dollars, not pesos. The Caballeros will take the payment of your impuesto” — he is speaking of the ransom as a “tax” — “in either currency. They are not choosy. Twenty-thousand pesos is …” He whips out a pocket calculator and punches in the numbers: “... about seventeen hundred dollars.” (The peso has recently stabilized between precipitous declines.) Your husband is worth more than that. Surely he is worth much more than that to you. Just as you would surely be worth more than that to your lusty friend. He withdraws a photo from his shirt pocket and holds it out for her inspection: a couple in flagrante, the enraptured woman visible over the broad shoulder of the unidentifiable male. It takes her a moment to realize that she confronts this woman every time she glances in her makeup mirror. The man must be Enrique. Her stomach rolls. Her knees feel weak as they do when she is standing on a high ledge or a balcony with a low railing. Rogelio is reinforcing a ransom demand with sexual blackmail. “Think a little further about this, Señora.” Rogelio veers away from Ariana and disappears in the direction of the mercado, leaving the photo behind, a keepsake. And he has not even bothered to take her envelope with the cash. So their hotel room was bugged. She stuffs the photo and the envelope into her purse as she makes off after him. She is desperate not to be left in the lurch any longer, but she quickly loses him in the crowd.
An hour later, she is back on Madrigal when the phone rings. She freezes in place, thaws, freezes again, picks up the phone. Schuyler? The cartel?
“Ariana, darling.”
It’s Margaret Aldrich.
“You had said something a
bout wanting to talk. Well, this is short notice, but I’ve never been one to stand on formality. Why don’t you come by this evening?”
Ariana manages an afternoon nap and wakes up less on edge, a little before six.
Margaret is rich, as Patzcuaro expats go, but at any distance from her house, she cannot be called showy. Like others of her tribe — New England WASPs — she is repelled by conspicuous consumption, by fashion, by competitive trendiness of any kind. She might have said she was repelled by money itself, except that it takes more than a little to keep up a house like hers — more a fiefdom than a house. Even Patzcuaro’s most ambitious social climbers can not compete with it, there being nothing remotely comparable on the market or ever likely to be, this side of her death.
Margaret’s abode stands on the crest of what must once have been a minor volcano and then, for millennia, an island. That was before the lake — el Lago de Patzcuaro — for reasons understood by Indians, if mysterious to science, began receding from its former shores, reconnecting the island to the mainland. With the main house at the pinnacle, the lower slopes of the volcanic pustule are cluttered with outbuildings and staff quarters like a small village in thrall to a Spanish grandee’s castillo in a painting by El Greco. The grandee, in this case, was Generalissimo Francisco Mujica, a comrade in arms of Pancho Villa during the second Mexican Revolution, the one that erupted in 1910 and was not entirely spent 20 years later when Mujica’s friend and ally, Lazaro Cardenas, became president. Margaret bought the place from the Mujica estate following the death of Carolina, the much younger woman, a secretary, who had become the Generalissimo’s second wife and outlasted him by some 50 years.
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 8
