We Have Taken Your Husband

by Angel Sanchez

  Schuyler is free. More to the point, Schuyler is alive. Ariana finds herself trying to imagine how she would have reacted to other possibilities, his death, for example, or his disfigurement. Ranting and hysteria? A grim resolution to find and kill his murderers, even at the risk of her own life? Grief over his death mixed with relief that the crisis has ended?

  “Where do we begin, Schuyler?”

  “How did this happen?” he asks again.

  She picks up the slip of paper with the directions Efraim had given her and hands it to him.

  “No, I mean … tell me the whole thing. I assume there was ransom? How did that go?”

  “Yes, your guards got that right: three-hundred thousand.”

  She repeats the number, the number that Schuyler had overheard the guards using. (And how very fortunate that was, that specificity on their part!) Repeating it smoothly, as she just did — and, of course, Mort Zimmerman will repeat it once again — inserts the figure permanently into the oral record of all they have been through.

  Ariana begins piecing together the events of the past month as well as she can: The call on the highway from Zihuatenejo. Being taken at gunpoint to a shoe store on Calle Mujica. The trips to Mexico City, to New York, the couriered cash, the contact with the DEA — in the basilica, of all places; the pointless late-night visit to the finca outside of town. “Were you there, Schuyler? Were we close? Is that where they took you?”

  “I have no idea where they took me. I was blindfolded, gagged and pushed against the floor of the car by the bastards holding me there with their feet. But, yes. It was some kind of farm, maybe twenty minutes out of town.”

  She does not mention the photograph that showed her in extremis in the arms of a lover. She assumes Schuyler saw it, that they rubbed his nose in it. Let him bring it up in his own good time.

  They have driven maybe six miles back toward Patzcuaro when Ariana senses that the conversation has become a monologue on her part. She looks over at Schuyler. His shoulders tremble. His whimpering is barely audible. She has never seen him cry. Not once in the twenty years they have been together. She pulls over and stops the car. She puts an arm around him and pulls him toward her, a gesture encumbered by the gear shift and console that separates the front seats. He puts up with it patiently, unresponsively, then shrugs off her arm. “Let’s get back,” he says. “I’m okay.”

  But he isn’t. He is unstrung — from the ordeal now ended? Or is it the shock of returning to the world from which he was snatched away? Both? Ariana is not sure.

  When they reach the house, exhaustion has made Schuyler amorous. He is in a mood to make love to his wife for the first time in a month. His doubts about her, his fears — all of that is shelved at least temporarily by his simple animal need. He leads her to their bedroom. They are not fully undressed when she is all but overwhelmed by the stink of him. Oh, my god, Schuy, how long has it been since you saw soap and hot water. They laugh and enter the shower together. The sex is hasty and, for Schuyler, deeply draining. He has barely dried himself off when he flops on the bed and sinks into a state of blessed unconsciousness.

  day thirty-two

  Ariana sleeps fitfully at his side for a while and is up to see the sun rise. Coffee. A few minutes to check her email and read news headlines. She is in the Plaza at six a.m. as the bales of out-of-town newspapers thump down on the curb near the kiosks that will sell them. The cover of La Jornada lands face up. Front and center is the most startling photograph she has ever seen.

  Her mother used to clean the oven by setting a bowl of ammonia on one of the racks and turning the temperature high: 350 degrees. One time — she was a sprite of seven or eight — Ariana opened the door to see what was baking, caught a lungful of the ammonia vapors, and fell back onto the floor, unable to breathe.

  The memory has flashed to mind because it is the only experience in Ariana’s life comparable to the impact of the cover shot on La Jornada that morning. Yesterday’s news had reported the DEA raid and the death of “varios asociados de la cartel Templario.” The second-day story names names — Armando Quiróz and two others. Somehow the editors got hold of mugshots to go with them, probably from DEA surveillance cameras. Except that the portrait of Quiróz is not some generic sicario staring out at the world from which he has been removed. The man in the picture is Enrique: the moustache, the scar high on the left cheek, the black, black eyes, the same eyes that had roamed her naked body in musty hotel rooms, a hands-off foreplay ritual that, within minutes, rendered Enrique as impatient as an adolescent.

  Somehow, stunned speechless and trembling, she manages to find ten pesos. She buys the paper and makes it down the block to an empty table out front of the Gran. She orders a coffee and then, opening the paper, looks around furtively to see if anyone notices that the American woman is thunderstruck by the day’s thoroughly ordinary news from the frontlines of the war on drugs, that yet another sicario has been taken out. Of course, no one pays her any mind at all. Ariana reads into the story, learning nothing that wasn’t reported the day before: that Quiróz — as they persist in calling him — was a resident of Morelia, the father of five and the associate in the Templario organization principally in charge of their drug trafficking: Michoacan’s local harvest of pot and opium and the product of meth labs secreted in mountain towns and desert hideouts all the way to El Paso, to Enseñada, to Nuevo Laredo.

  She closes the paper and rises from the table, leaving a fifty-peso note for a fifteen-peso cup of coffee that she couldn’t finish. In a daze, she walks the two blocks to the Plaza Grande, grateful not to run into anyone she knows. Her heart races and slows and races again. She would not have been able to answer if someone spoke to her. She crosses the plaza and goes up the stone staircase to their house

  Schuyler is in the kitchen. He has his own copy of La Jornada from the corner store up the street. He picks it up and slaps it down on the table, alongside a butter plate with a half-eaten slice of toast. He has the radio going, waiting for more news. “Did you see this?” He is clearly ecstatic. His jailer, that bullying tormenter, has been captured and killed. And who could blame Schermerhorn for relishing the moment? “I have never been a proponent of the death penalty, least of all a summary execution without benefit of trial,” he says, ballasting his delight with irony. “But this asshole’s death? No, I have no problem with it, none at all.”

  Exultant as he is, Schuyler does not notice Ariana’s silence. She leaves the kitchen and is crossing the courtyard. “Ariana?” Schuyler wants to share the moment, she supposes. She manages to say that she has some work to do and will be at her desk.

  day thirty-three

  Sex was the easy part. Money was a challenge. They had put off talking about it — their changed circumstances — because they had always put off talk about money. Money was awkward, a topic for another day. Finally, unavoidably, that day had come.

  “Is there anything we can do, Schuyler? Insurance? Anything?”

  For forty-eight hours they have been trying to look through the window that divides their two worlds. Schuyler wonders if Ariana is seeing more in the glass than her own reflection. As they rediscover old habits and ways of being with each other, there is still much that remains unsaid about their time apart.

  “Yes, I guess we have to figure this out, don’t we,” Schuyler says. “What it’s going to be like, getting old without as much money as we were counting on — or I was counting on.” He takes a sip of the coffee, walks to the window, turns and faces his wife. “Tell me about the negotiations, Ariana. Tell me how this went down.”

  Ariana looks over at her husband. She tenses, conscious at some level that this is a test.

  Quiróz would have made Schuyler privy to some of the twists and turns in the cartel’s contact with Ariana; he’d be ignorant of other details. He will lay what he knows over her version of events to see if the narratives match up. His time in captivity was not a month blindfolded in a darkened room with food shoved thr
ough a transom. From what Ariana can tell, his captors kept him aware of their progress, at least the rough outline of it: the ransom demand, her feints and stalling and, as she tells it, her eventual capitulation: payment of a $300,000 ransom. They would have prodded him for information about her. Cooperating would have been a way for him to end his captivity; for them it would have been a way to maximize the payout. For different reasons, they would have had common cause, Schuyler and his captors. And if she hung tough, they would have wanted Schuyler to know that, too — to demoralize him and put him only more completely in their thrall.

  “Why did it take so long?”

  “I’ll be candid with you, Schuyler. I had two goals. The priority was getting you out of there alive. The other was trying to keep them from putting a straw into what we have and sucking hard.”

  “Which they managed to do anyway,” he interjects.

  “I needed them to take me seriously,” she continues. “In that respect, time was on my side. I know — I knew full well — it wasn’t on yours. And of course by playing them as long as possible, there was the chance that Forrester and the boys from DEA would actually make something happen. Find you and free you — no ransom at all.”

  “Which they didn’t.”

  Ariana falls silent without breaking eye contact, waiting for him to go on, waiting to see how far he will go with his recriminations. Above all wanting to see if he knows about her last-minute maneuver, the one that reduced her actual payout to a fraction of the original demand.

  “I was being held for ransom, Ariana. My life hung in the balance while you were fucking some goombah with a camera in the ceiling over his bed. While you are fucking that guy, I am suffering, scared shitless, really close to just being offed and left by the road. Roadkill.

  “That’s not fair, Schuyler.”

  No, it’s not, but that’s what happened. I was being tormented; you were getting laid. Who was that guy, anyway?”

  Ariana had to do everything in her power just then to keep from telling her husband exactly who her lover was. The moment would have been delicious, a thunderclap to end an increasingly ugly conversation, a bolt of lightning that would illuminate a hidden landscape. “You really want to know who he was, Schuyler? As best I can tell, he was the man who arranged your kidnapping and captivity, Enrique Sepulveda. I believe you knew him as Armando Quiróz.” Perhaps she would have left Schuyler spluttering in angry disbelief. Perhaps she wouldn’t have bothered to provide the mitigating detail, that she had no idea her lover was a cartel jefe until she read reports of his elimination and saw his picture in the paper.

  But all of that remains unsaid, and Schuyler falls into an extended silence of his own. Ariana is wondering if the conversation is finished when he says this: “There’s something you need to know, Ariana. Well, you don’t need to know it, but I’m going to tell you anyway. It took me a while to make the connection, but I had met Quiróz before the kidnapping. I met him at the home of a woman I know. One of the women at the rehab clinic. They were friends; I think they had been lovers at some point. This is a small town. The drug counselor, Fatima Ornelas, said more than she should have: aging gringo; money to burn. And Quiróz cooked up the whole crazy scheme. He told her if the extortion went smoothly and the ransom was big, he would share some of it with her. She was horrified. She said she never thought things would go this far. Never dreamed it. I believe her. He had a bug up his ass. There was no talking him out of this crazy plan.

  “They let her visit me while I being held hostage. They were using her to try to get information out of me; I knew that — information they could use to play you. OK, I was a fool to have got involved with that woman — fate took revenge on me for betraying you. But Fatima sided with me, Ariana. She really did, and just then I really needed her.

  “You develop a dependency on someone like that, the one person in that whole world who seems to have an interest in keeping you alive. Yes, that’s the word: ‘dependency’. You become dependent. Like a junkie. You start to moan when your fix is withdrawn.”

  “Well, your fix has been withdrawn, Schuyler. I assume she has beat it far from Patzcuaro, the scene of the crime. I assume she’s got a great big target on her back. The cartel hates her; the DEA wants her. No fix for you, Schuyler. You’re going cold turkey. Are you going to start moaning?

  “Fuck you, Ariana. No, she didn’t beat a retreat from Patzcuaro. She got killed in the raid. You didn’t see that in La Jornada. The Mexicans — Mexican media — have a sense of decency about such things, to spare her family the shame.

  I think she’s the main reason I’m alive. Not because of the ransom. I got to be more trouble than I was worth. Some of the men — Quiróz, one of his rivals for leadership in the cartel — fell out over what to do with me: one man against another, one faction against another. Whether to kill me or let me go. Someone — I assume it was Fatima — convinced the whole lot of them that they didn’t need my blood on their hands, and in the chaos after the raid, I was cut loose. I saw Fatima’s bullet-riddled corpse as I broke out of there. You know the rest.”

  “All but one detail: what did your lovely girlfriend plan to do with the ransom? No. Let me put it this way: What did she and Quiróz do with the money I scraped together?

  With my money, you mean? The three-hundred thousand?”

  Ariana corrects him: “Our money, Schuyler. Where is it now?”

  The other shoe has dropped. Clever of her: By arguing over which pronoun belongs with the word money, Ariana has reasserted the amount of the ransom she wants Schuyler to think she paid.

  They back off. They move on. Late that night, talked out, they communicate in the only way left to them. They make love convulsively, angrily, then lie in each other’s arms spent, at peace, alone with their distrust.

  “Oh, Jesus, Ariana. It’s good to be back.”

  And in moments like this, no doubt it still is, for both of them.

  day thirty-four

  Over breakfast the next morning, Ariana breaks a silence:

  “Have you heard from Mort?”

  “Zimmerman? I emailed him, so he knows I’m back among the living.”

  Ariana said she expected Zimmerman to have called, or that he would at any moment, to convey congratulations, condolences — all of that, and then they’d get around to the serious part: the money. Was there anything that could be done? Had it been recovered? Were they in touch with the embassy? The American agents?

  “Mort was great, Schuy. He bent the rules, he pulled the money from accounts without involving your sisters.

  And at precisely this moment, it would have been as natural as can be for Ariana to put a twinkle in her eye and say: “And our first order of priority will be getting all this cash back to a safe place!”

  Schuyler would stammer, not quite certain whether he had misunderstood her or was hearing something he was already supposed to know: “You have the cash?”

  “All of it except the forty-thousand I handed over to find out where they’d stashed you. I kind of thought you’d like to hear that. Two-hundred sixty thousand remains. Assuming these goons don’t break in on us and make off with it.”

  In an instant Schuyler would be pulling her up from her chair and folding her into his arms.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’ve been trying to. I was afraid you wouldn’t understand, that you’d be furious with me, for having taken out so much in the first place, and then for having risked so much by not handing it over.”

  But that’s not what got said. Because suddenly it was too late to redo the whole conversation and say what would and should have been said days ago, right from the start: that for all the travail and drama, the money was still theirs. Yes, Ariana could say, I may have been rash or stupid but, when all is said and done, I outmaneuvered the sicarios and got my husband back anyway, fortune intact. Almost.

  Now it seemed easier for her to say how terrified she had been, driving through the stree
ts of Patzcuaro late at night to deliver $300,000 to god knows who, all the while wondering if she’d be simply shot and killed once the cash was handed over, or whether it would do any good in securing Schuyler’s release.

  “We should call Forrester,” she thinks to say. “The money might have turned up in the raid. It must have.”

  And so they place a call, then and there. Ariana does the talking but the call is on speaker so Schuyler can hear. Of course the agent doesn’t have the money. More surprising to both Ariana and Schuyler, he doesn’t seem to have much interest in it. Small potatoes.

  “I can try to find out if the Mexicans have it, Ariana. But let me be blunt: You might be smart to go back to the States for a while. Get out of Mexico. Maybe for good. You got your husband back. Settle for that.”

  She says nothing and Forrester goes on anyway:

  “The Quiróz faction hates you. By their lights you killed him. You blabbed to the police, the DEA. The rogue faction that did the extortion now knows — if they ever doubted it — that you’ve got money. Access to it, anyway. You delivered $300,000. Maybe you’re good for more. Word to the wise: Let this whole mess simmer down.”

  Ariana hangs up. Mission accomplished. Her storyline about paying a six-figure ransom has been confirmed unwittingly by a DEA agent. As she puts down the phone, she finds herself wondering if, five years from now, she’ll come across a squib in the bowels of the New York Times, announcing that another Mexican drug lord has been taken out and that a DEA agent — Forrester, by name — had been acting in effect as the drug lord’s courier, using his badge to ward off close inspection of “soup” cans packed with heroin moving up the spine of Mexico and across the Rio Grande to El Dorado, the American market, the most lucrative on earth.