We Have Taken Your Husband

by Angel Sanchez

  “No, Miss Ariana. The onus is on you. You failed to convince them. Perhaps you need my help. I could send a finger or — what was it they took from J. Paul Getty’s grandson? His ear? A quick DNA test would leave them with no doubt about the urgency of the situation. I would send them the whole thing — his corpse — but then I would have no more leverage. Sending the still living body piecemeal is the better strategy. It is unfortunate that this approach will also augment and prolong your husband’s suffering. His death will not have been in vain. It will be useful as a message to others of your countrymen living among us in Mexico. When the Caballeros come calling, pay up.”

  Ariana begins to plead, and she had vowed not to. “There is something you don’t understand,” she begins. “This is an American family. A family in decline. A family with just enough money to worry about not having enough. A poor family might be more generous, a family already accustomed to having nothing.”

  Ariana has been hanging tough, but now her nerve fails her: “Don Rogelio. You have to understand. The only way you can possibly get more money is to release Schuyler and let him fulfill any obligation to you over time. You could hold a note. Take the house as collateral.”

  The words are not out of her mouth before Ariana realizes Rogelio will find the very suggestion absurd. Even if she and Schuyler are foolish enough to stay on in Mexico, repayment will take time, and time will only deepen Rogelio’s embarrassment, his disgrace in the eyes of whatever team of accomplices he has pulled together for this botched escapade. Disgrace in the eyes of the ones who opposed him all along. A gringo? You’re kidnapping a gringo with money and connections in New York? And he turns out not to have money? You are a fool, Rogelio.

  day twenty-eight

  Ariana Altobelli was known and admired as a woman able to keep her cool. It was a trait that saw her through explosive news cycles and workplace crises in the tumultuous broadcasting industry. Just as it serves her well in her equally tumultuous love life.

  Balance is the key, in both arenas: the ability to keep from getting rattled by sudden change, while simultaneously seeing the far horizons of what changing circumstances might make possible.

  To be suddenly in secret possession of an extra $300,000 in cash is not automatically a life-changing event, but it definitely fires up Ariana’s imagination and, with it, her sense of personal empowerment. And so, as she approaches the Iturbe — a summons from Enrique, at last! — she is alive to possibility.

  Without quite planning things this way, she has become, overnight, a woman of means. Modest means, perhaps, but if you combine what she has saved over the years with the ransom she declined to hand over to the extortionists, she has enough to make for carefree living, and for quite some time to come. She inventories her other assets: She is a good-looking woman who can bask in the afterglow of a productive career, a woman with good years still ahead of her. And, yes, she is a woman in love. Admit it, she says to herself, and her sharply improved financial standing somehow makes that admission possible. Enrique isn’t just a philosophical statement in a continuing dialogue with Schuyler. You’re crazy about him, she admits to herself — his mind, his accent, his body, what he does to your body. And anyway, since when is your sense of adventure confined to a hotel room? Who says your lifelong meditation on freedom and sexual autonomy is limited to serial adulteries and a periodic return to the security of a marriage grown stale?

  Her outlook on life has been buoyed. She toys with the implications. Is she ready to leave Schuyler — assuming she ever sees him again? She knows better than to think that Enrique would abandon his wife and their brood of children. But this is Mexico, not the Bible Belt. A lover — she dislikes the word “mistress” — could gain official standing in a man’s life without obliging him to break his marital vows and obligations.

  And so Ariana has a special radiance as Enrique answers her knock on the hotel room door. She is more assertive than usual during their love-making and his hungry delight in a more complete and liberated sexual repertoire shows her how foolish she was to assume for as long as she did that he needed his women to be submissive. Finally, exhausted and at peace, they talk as openly as they made love. It takes her a few false starts, but Ariana finds her way into a conversation about deepening commitments, a change in their relationship. “I missed you, Enrique. I don’t want to miss you like that. I want more of you. Maybe I want all of you.”

  Because it is inconceivable to Enrique that he would give up his family for this gringa, he assumes she is talking about money: “I give you what I can, Ariana. The comforts of this hotel; our meals on the edge of town.”

  “No, you don’t understand. it’s not about money. I have money. We can use it to build a better life. You are away more than you are in your home. We need a home of our own. I want to be with you on the road. I want to be with you every moment that you are not with your wife. I will leave my husband even if you don’t leave your wife.”

  “You would leave your husband? Your rich husband? How would you support yourself?”

  Right then, the yearning to share her secret, to tell Enrique about the kidnapping and all it has entailed nearly overwhelms her. God, it would be wonderful to lay it all out, disburden herself of her secret, seek this knowing man’s counsel — the ransom demands, her draining of Schuyler’s portfolio, her decision not to part with the ransom, perhaps better described as her inability to complete the deal and hand it over. But instead of saying all this, she equivocates and insinuates, leaving it to Enrique to connect the dots, clueless that he already knows a great deal more about her situation and Schuyler’s than she can imagine. Equally unaware that this rendezvous at the Iturbe is their last.

  day thirty

  The caller is a DEA man, but not Forrester. He gives his name as Schwarzenbach. His accent is American — from the Boston area, Ariana guesses. He says Forrester asked him to call. They want her to know they “went in” overnight. They had got wind that the kidnappers were in disarray, some internal schism. One faction has spirited Schuyler off somewhere, presumably to another hideout. The raid of the old camp was precise — “surgical” is the word Schwarzenbach uses, as though they have removed a malignancy. “We’re only sorry we didn’t “get it all,” he says. “To be on the safe side, we’re putting agents in separate cars up the street from your house.”

  Ariana switches on the kitchen radio and makes coffee. A little after midnight a freight train jumped the tracks between Uruapan and the port at Lazaro Cardenas; tank cars rolled over and burst into flame. Teachers are tying up highways across the republic, part of a continuing protest against federal plans to reform the school system, a cesspool of waste, vested interests and corruption in which it is possible to buy and sell teaching jobs or pass them on to illiterate family members. Mexico has defeated Honduras in soccer — has routed the Hondurans, to be more precise. Final score: 6-2.

  And then, yes, there it is. In the hours after midnight, federal agents raided a cartel stronghold “not far from Morelia” — which could mean anywhere in the state of Michoacan. A shootout erupted along the carretera, the highway southwest of Lake Patzcuaro. A man suspected of drug trafficking is dead as is an American described delicately as a liaison to the Mexican federal police. The shocker: police believe another American was being held hostage by the fugitive cartel. It is unclear whether the man was seized as the cartel took flight or had been in captivity before the raid occurred.

  An earlier report that the dead narco is La Tuta, head of the Templario cartel, has been retracted. The dead man’s name is not reported. A confederate, identified as Armando Quiróz, is known to have been present during the gunfight but managed to escape.

  Armando Quiróz. Ariana says the name a couple of times, so bland, so common, wondering if he could be the phantasm she has been imagining in her visions of Schuyler’s capture and captivity, the voice, perhaps, that she heard on the phone.

  With the cartel in chaos — at least this one small factio
n of it — she has no compunction about calling Forrester, and does so immediately. She asks him if they have any leads on where Schuyler might have been taken. They do not, but they are in active pursuit. Implying that she has already met the ransom demand, she asks if any money was recovered in the raid. He tells her that if money has been found, word of it has yet to reach his office. “Even the full amount — you paid, what? three-hundred thousand? — it’s chump change; it’s an insignificant sum in an underground economy where extorted millions change hands every day.” He promises to keep her posted if he learns anything interesting.

  The news, embellished and soon adorned with a filigree of misinformation, seeps in around the edges of Patzcuaro’s expat colony and then washes across it in waves of gossip. Reference in news reports to the American hostage is intensely provocative. Speculation swirls around the tables out front of la Surtidora and across the plazas. Who is missing? Someone mentions Schuy Schermerhorn. He missed the October cocktail party. Has anyone seen him? But the excitement is allayed by Ginny Euler and her recollection that he went up to Connecticut to deal with an ailing in-law, the husband of one of his sisters, or something like that. Other names are mentioned.

  day thirty-one

  The call comes in mid-afternoon. Unexpectedly, the voice on the other end of the line is that of a woman.

  She speaks almost robotically in Spanish. Ariana tries to fathom what she’s saying, as though her life depends on it, not just Schuyler’s. The caller says the cartel has agreed to accept her offer: the $40,000. She is told to be on the wrought-iron bench facing the statue of Gertrudis Bocanegra that dominates a corner of the mercado.

  The phone goes dead.

  The caller has not said what time the meeting is meant to occur. She did not need to. She knows that no matter what time is specified, a kidnap victim’s contact will go immediately to the designated rendezvous, plant herself there and wait — the whole day, if that’s what it takes. Ariana is no exception.

  It is one of those days when a walk through the historic district shrinks Patzcuaro to the size of a small town: A friend says her name as Ariana passes a café along the Plaza Grande. Ariana blows by with a hasty apology. Late for a meeting, she says. How about a drink at Lupita’s around five? And when Ariana reaches the statue, two blocks away, there, slouched on one of the benches confronting Bocanegra, heroine of the first Revolucion, is Efraim Ochoa, in full lay-about mode. This is more worrisome, more of a nuisance. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have someone you know within hailing distance, Ariana thinks to herself. She nods to Efraim and circles the statue, trying to determine which of four people might be her contact. She recognizes none of them and settles down on the one unoccupied bench to wait. Now, to her dismay, Efraim has decided to be sociable. He steps over to where she is sitting, drops down beside her and lights a cigarette. She has never known him to smoke. He looks over and catches her eye, quickly looks away, then mutters something under his breath. Tiene que darme el dinero. Is he is telling her to hand over the money, the forty thousand?

  Her mind reels. She is stunned. Not that Efraim would see fit to rob her. The envelope in her jacket pocket holds more money than he is likely to make in a decade. What’s startling is that he knows she’s got it. How did he know to strike? He looks her full in the face and his gaze has steadied. “I am sorry that I must do this,” he says in English. “I am doing this for you. Is for Don Schuyler.” Tiene que dejarlo. (You must hand it over.) “Soon you will understand.”

  Ariana stands bolt upright. She makes her eyes as hard and cold and scornful as she can. She stares at Efraim until he loses his nerve and looks away.

  She considers making a break for it, takes four steps, stops in her tracks. Running is an overwhelming temptation, but it is not an option, only a postponement of the reckoning that lies ahead. She settles back down on the bench. If you are screwing me, Efraim I will do everything I can to ruin your life, and God will do much more. You understand that, I hope. Efraim holds out his hand silently, like the beggar woman in her photographs, and she produces the envelope from her jacket pocket. He slits one end of it, peers inside and fans the bills to be sure they are G-notes in roughly sufficient quantity. As he rises from the bench he hands her a slip of paper with directions jotted down by someone more literate than he is:

  Carretera hacia Morelia. 2 kms mas 100 metros después el Pemex. Derecha, calle empedrado. 3kms. Granero al lado de la milpa.

  So Efraim has managed to make contact with the cartel? Or is he, in fact, its agent — now a sicario himself? Perhaps Señor Schermerhorn and his wife have financed his vocational education after all. She glances again at the slip of paper. She dares to hope that it tells her where she will find Schuyler. She can not assume he will be alive. If he is alive, she can not assume he will be unharmed. Efraim accepted her payment without specifying the size of the next installment or whether there will be any further payments. Maybe they are tiring of this game. Maybe they are as tired of it as she is, whoever they are.

  There are three Pemex gas stations along the 60-kilometer drive to Morelia. Ariana punches in the odometer as she passes the first of them and tries crazily to do the conversion from kilometers to miles in her head. A kilometer is about two-thirds of a mile. (It would have taken 30 seconds to do this on the computer before she left, but she was in too much of a hurry, too frenzied.) Two thirds of a tenth of a kilometer would be a fifteenth of a mile (a tenth of a mile, plus half of a tenth.) Her mind explodes with a computation she can not complete without pencil and paper. She pulls into a turnout, a place where the Morelia-bound buses pick up campesinos, the country people who have made it to the highway from towns up in the hills. She digs a pen out of the clutter on the console and does the conversion to miles, then adds the sum to the reading on her odometer. She pulls back onto the highway pavement, spitting gravel. At the designated distance from the first Pemex there is no turn at all. She skirts a wall of rock sheathed in riprap to keep boulders from falling into the road.

  The same distance from the second Pemex is, as promised, a dirt road to the right and up a sharp incline. She punches the odometer again. Three point five kilometers up the road (2.4 miles), she reaches a milpa (cornfield) on the left and almost misses the shed — corn crib? coop? sty? — obscured by the tall stalks left behind from the corn harvest and not yet taken for silage. She pulls over and kills the motor. The insect drone rises and falls in surges. A dog yaps in the distance. The cooling motor ticks intermittently. Otherwise, silence. She doesn’t know what she should expect: a car barreling down the road in a cloud of dust that will slow just enough for someone to shove Schuyler out the door? Will he be bruised and bloodied. Will the ejected passenger be a corpse, hogtied, stripped of clothing? Has she been stood up by Efraim? Will anything come this way at all?

  Half a minute passes before she picks up on thumping sounds from inside the shed, a boot kicking wooden planks. She steps out of the car and instinctively — stupidly — tries to close the door without making a sound, as though braking to a stop and turning off the motor did not loudly announce her arrival. The latch clicks as she gently releases it. She pushes through the corn stalks and comes around to the side facing the cornfield. An iguana scuttles up the wall. The shed has a doorless opening big enough for burros and small carts, if not for a tractor.

  And there he is.

  Schuyler is gagged but loosely bound, as though his captors were only going through the motions as they prepared to release him on a back road and flee for their lives. His ankles are tied. So are his wrists, which are pinned behind his back. He sits on a low plank propped up on two concrete blocks. With his legs outstretched he can just reach the planks that wall off an empty stall. The thumping sound was his boots against the wood. He stops when he sees Ariana, and in an instant she is at his side, working loose the knots that hold his wrists and ankles.

  The dusty planks, the stall, the thumping sound will remain vivid in her mind for a long
time. So, too, the empty Coke bottle someone left standing on a wall joist, the discarded condoms in the dirt. On the far wall, in faded fluorescent spray paint, an unnamed admirer has declared his love for Luciana. The way these minute details have stuck in her memory suggests she is in a state of high alert. Close attention to these meaningless details also lengthens the few seconds between her first glimpse of Schuyler and her rush to reclaim him and her marriage. He says nothing as she strips the bandana from around his head and pulls the wad of cloth from his mouth. With his hands free, they put their arms around each other.

  “Oh, my god. Oh, my god, Schuyler.”

  He splutters something.

  “Oh, my god, Schuyler.”

  They give up on words as she leads Schuyler out to the car. There is too much to say. The silence is broken only haltingly during the drive back. “Should we stop? When did you last eat, Schuyler?” He mutters, shakes his head, and she drives on. He can provide only bits and snatches of the past day, much of it spent in the back of a pickup truck, hogtied, blindfolded and hidden under a tarp. From the quarrels that erupted among the two men guarding him, he came to understand that there had been a raid at one of the cartel redoubts. As they fled in the truck, shots rang out and a woman screamed. The guards have been promised a cut of the ransom money. One of them expects a lot: fifteen thousand apiece. “The ransom was three hundred thousand. I heard Quiróz say that. We get fifteen thousand. ‘Just get rid of this pendejo,’ That’s what they said. ‘Don’t kill him. We don’t want the trouble that comes with that.’” The other man is a cynic. “Fifteen thousand — bullshit. Pesos or dollars? We’ll be lucky to see fifteen hundred.”