We Have Taken Your Husband

by Angel Sanchez

  “I have a question, Schuyler. The question is why. Why are you telling me this shit, your stupid fantasies of cultural transmigration and escape?

  “I’ve always been honest with you, Ariana.”

  “Honest, Schuyler? I don’t need a paean to honesty. I’m not asking about you and your Mexican mistress, your latina lover. I want to know why you’re telling me about her and your outlaw fantasies. I want to know about the lie you’ve been living all these years. All these decades. The decades when I thought we were in this together. Our shared commitment to escaping the fatuous constraints of bourgeois marriage, escaping New York, escaping the States and then, once we got here, breaking out of the gossipy little expat scene and siding with the Mexicans. All of that was a lie, I now realize. We weren’t co-conspirators in a fight against those constraints. Remember when we laughed and called ourselves Freedom Fighters? Meanwhile, all those years you were dreaming of another kind of escape. You were looking for the ultimate escape, the one that would free you from any constraints at all, the big constraint being me, your marriage.”

  She goes for broke, in her effort to turn the tables on Schuyler, make her guilt his:

  “Am I crazy to think that maybe an apology is in order, Schuyler. An abject apology. Like maybe you should be groveling on the floor, weeping, gnashing your teeth, begging for forgiveness for your thing with Fatima and for completely fucking up what we had going for us: an interesting life, a comfortable retirement? What is this, something out of Love Story? ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry?’ Wasn’t that the Ali MacGraw line?”

  Schuyler says nothing. He stares at her blankly, forthrightly. He looks at her more blankly than she could have regarded herself in the mirror of a locked bathroom. His eyes are moist, but that seems less like tears welling up than a self-conscious effort not to blink his eyes at all. And when he finally breaks the silence his voice is as drained of life as his eyes.

  “Are you done, Ariana? Have you had your big moment? Can we cut to the soap commercial?”

  And now he gets to what he really needs to say:

  “You don’t get it, do you, Ariana. You have no clue how completely I have loved you. All of this was for you, Ariana, to keep you coming back for more.

  She cannot let that go unanswered: “Stop, Schuyler. Stop now. Stop right there. Do you have any sense of how trivial all that has begun to sound? How trivial you are, we are? Your dreams, your goals, your definition of freedom, the completely stupid politics you have built around your penis, your endless need to find fresh women to fuck in order to keep it hard enough to fuck anyone at all?”

  “It worked for me, Ariana. It worked for us.”

  “Well, maybe not any more. And your hangups about money, your money. Your inherited money and the bankers practiced in the art of making even small-time clients feel significant, indulging them with the occasional office visit, your too frequent mention of the grand country estate your family lost half a generation ago to people with real money?”

  As Ariana berates him, Schuyler has risen from the bed and is pacing the room. Now he stands by his clothes bureau, staring at his wife, no doubt silently picking over the words he will fire back against the diatribe she has just unloaded. Ariana tries to suppress her own thoughts, but they rage on. She thinks to herself: Is it possible to love someone and know that they wish you were dead? She doesn’t know the answer to that question, but she knows the answer to this one: Is it possible to love someone and wish they were dead? Or maybe this is the less philosophical rendition of the same question: Is it possible to love someone so much that you wish they were dead?

  A minute passes, maybe more, before she realizes that Schuyler is no longer fidgeting with the things on top of his bureau: the hair brush, the tweezers, the nail file. He is holding the revolver, the one Ariana bought in Mexico City and has never carried, let alone used. He must have found it in the bedside table and made it his own. It must have been right there among the silver utensils, the brush, the cufflinks box, camouflaged among them, silver against silver.

  “Where did you get this thing, anyway?” he asks, swinging toward her, pointing it at her. “What were you planning to do with it?”

  Ariana thinks to herself: “Does he fail to understand that I had every reason to be as scared as he was?” But she does not dignify Schuyler’s question with any answer at all.

  “You realize how easy it would be for me to end this charade, Ariana? This charade you call a marriage. I pull the trigger. I call the police. I feign hysterical grief when they arrive. The newspapers take it from there: “Gringo’s wife kills herself in aftermath of bizarre kidnapping.”

  “But what good would it do you, Schuyler? They’ve got the money that was so important to you. You’ve sold your freedom once again, this time for nothing.”

  “Have I, Ariana? Have I?”

  He smiles at her bitterly.

  Ariana repairs to the living room couch. She sleeps fitfully, dozing for an hour, a half hour. She stares into the snug, brightly lit world of a cellphone solitaire game. She dozes again and wakes up from a dream screaming silently, a dream she recalls in vivid detail:

  A knock on the dreamed door. I open it to see Forrester on the stoop and at his side, Efraim. Sooner or later it was bound to be Efraim at Forrester’s side.

  In the kitchen I offer tequila and shot glasses, but they don’t partake. I do. Small talk quickly subsides and Forrester gets down to business.

  I assume he is checking in before he checks out, a courtesy call, a victory lap. He wants to stake his claim to success; he will take a bow for having secured Schuyler’s release. He will express appreciation for Señor Ochoa’s services as a go-between: “A fine young man, You owe him, Ms. Altobelli.”

  He will express regret that the money has not turned up. (And I will wonder if he secretly knows that the ransom was never paid.) But no. This is not a courtesy call. The dreamed Forrester has a different agenda.

  “You slipped up, Ms. Altobelli. You made a mistake. It was a small one, but it was your undoing.”

  I look at the man like he is out of his mind. At least I try to look like that: a woman reacting as though she thinks someone is talking crazy. I don’t know why. I don’t know who I think I’m playing to. Efraim isn’t much of an audience. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He pokes at his pants as though to loosen his balls from the leg they’re stuck to. He lights a cigarette. I ask him not to smoke in my house. He walks to the unopened window, gazes out of it and continues to smoke.

  “Your mistake, Ms. Altobelli was to think for even a minute that we could be played like that, that we were stupid. You get a call like the one you made — some gringa who has disappeared her husband and wants to make it look like the cartel’s dirty work — the first thing I’m going to do is call around to our people in the cartel, our plants, our snitches. Your scheme was more elaborate. You went out of your way to tell Efraim — Señor Ochoa — about your late-night strolls, yours, Mr. Schermerhorn’s, how easy it would be to pluck him off the streets. We’re not going to fall for that in a million years and, of course, neither will the cartel. Not that we can ignore a reported disappearance. It’s an easy opportunity to collect some chits. Or do you really think the ‘war on drugs’ is a simple faceoff: good guys vs. bad guys. Americans in white hats versus dope-trafficking Mexican scum? If it were that simple don’t you think we’d have wiped them out long since?

  “Forrester, let me ask you something: Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Am I telling you anything you don’t know, Ms. Altobelli? You’re not a moron. TV may be the idiot box, but it takes brains to grin and blather into a microphone on cue. But you tell me: What can you do with what I’m telling you? Call for camera crew? Run down to the federal station house and start shooting your mouth off to the Mexicans? Call Vanity Fair? Who would believe you? Because I’ll tell you something else, Ms. Altobelli. If you tried to source your story by saying you heard
it from me, from a DEA agent, anyone in their right mind would know I talked freely like this only with full confidence that the cartel already had decided you were going to be eliminated. And in fact, ma’am, that’s exactly what’s about to happen. Hasta luego, Ms. Altobelli. It’s been real.”

  The word “real” hangs in the air for the seconds that remain to me, the interval in which I realize that while Forrester ranted, Efraim moved silently across the room and now stands directly behind me. He pulls a knife from the sheath on his belt, grabs me by the hair and draws the blade across my neck. The sawing motion will be of brief duration. I will not scream. The blade is razor sharp.

  I scream, but the scream is only dreamed. My windpipe has been severed along with the jugular.

  Ariana rears up off the couch and, not quite awake, somehow impels herself to the bathroom and into the shower. She stands there in the chilly water until she is shivering and completely awake. Then she turns it up as hot as she can stand. In ten minutes she is dressed and gone. The door clicks shut behind her. She jiggles the handle to be sure it’s locked. She stops in the plaza for coffee and to wait for the early papers.

  Even Excelsior, the finance-oriented federal daily, still has the story in the upper left corner of page three. The Morelia papers, previously hog wild over the raid, now relegate it to the bottom half of the front page. The story is more in the nature of a recap: that an unnamed American was being held hostage when federal agents closed in on a hideout associated with one faction of the Templario cartel, killing at least two sicarios including a woman thought to be involved romantically with the leader, Armando Quiróz; that the American was able to break free of captivity and regain his freedom; that police recovered a substantial portion of the ransom money — but not all $300,000.

  Ariana reads right over that sentence and is a paragraph farther into the article when her mind explodes, and she turns back to it: “… a substantial portion of the ransom money” …?

  Journalism is practiced differently in Mexico. Ariana knows that. Politicians and other sources pay reporters for spinning a story their way. And police expect some financial consideration for providing the press with any information at all. Unless, that is, it’s something the police want to put out there, some lie or fact or misstatement that furthers their purposes, perhaps by pitting one syndicate or government faction against another.

  Which may be what’s going on here. The insinuation that someone made off with the ransom money — maybe Schermerhorn himself — is sure to provoke the parties who think the ransom was never paid at all. And for the DEA, the bloodbath that follows will be both interesting and useful — rich in insights into the power structure of the cartels and, as the body count rises, there will be that many fewer sicarios to keep track of.

  Did the money even exist? Or had the DEA simply mistaken one cache of bills — the forty-thousand she handed Efraim — for another. Perhaps it was an invention fed to media by rival narcos interested in deepening the Caballeros’ distrust of the police and of each other. Caballero loyalists would work back channels and demand that the money be returned to them, only to be told that someone had lied to the media and that it was still missing, gone, pffft, dandelion fluff in late June.

  Ariana is of course as delighted as she is perplexed by the press report, the way it so nicely corroborates the act of financial deceit now at the center of her marriage. It dawns on her that there may soon be a retraction of the statement she knows to be bogus. Or if not a retraction, then a further clarification: that the money was assumed to be ransom but wasn’t; that, indeed, there are sources within the cartel who contend a ransom was never paid.

  Ariana walks over to the Plaza Grande and, while steering a course that keeps clear of anyone who might overhear her, calls the embassy on her cell phone. Forrester is in and takes the call.

  “This is about the money, Ariana?” Suddenly they’re on a first-name basis. “How badly do you need it?” This is not the tack she had expected him to take, nor the tone. She equivocates, not certain where he is going with this. “It’s evidence, or so they will argue. You’ll need a lawyer if you want it back anytime soon — assuming it even exists.”

  “Oh, it exists, Mr. Forrester. That I can assure you. And, yes, we want it back. We need it.”

  “I make you no promises, Ms. Altobelli. We’ll do what we can. The federal establishment is pretty quick to expropriate the profits of criminal enterprise — just like in the States. But we can formalize your claim. Just don’t hold your breath. These things can take years.”

  Ariana reaches the house in a state of delicious exhaustion. Is this really happening? Is there a chance that she will actually come out of this with double the money she siphoned from Schermerhorn holdings and then nearly gave to his kidnappers? The door is open and there is a scrub-bucket on the stoop. Ah, yes: a Gabriela day. The cleaning woman is red-eyed from night duty with her grandchildren. But she can report that the little girl who took sick is on the mend. Now it becomes clear that her anxiety has found a new focus. She says she is scared for Ariana and Don Schuyler, as scared as she is happy that the kidnapping is over. Ariana speaks with her briefly, then goes upstairs. The bed has been stripped of sheets and blankets. She collapses on it, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. She savors the feeling of relief at having Schuyler back; she tries to disentangle it from aching for Enrique.

  She finally drifts off, if not to sleep then into a meditative trance from which she is roused by the sound of something — someone — in the adjacent dressing room. She steps into the corridor. Efraim is just disappearing down the back stairs, broom in hand. She hadn’t seen him in the courtyard as she came in. She assumed Gabriela was working alone. In any case, he has no business up here.

  She calls out to him: “Efraim, come here a minute.”

  He freezes on the stair. Caught. He turns slowly and comes back up onto the landing.

  “Were you looking for something, Efraim?”

  He catches her eye, and looks away.

  In that instant she sees his contempt for a woman who would, if not deliberately betray her husband, a decent man, after all, fall so short of her obligation to honor him with her loyalty even in the face of his philandering. And she also sees the steeliness of Efraim’s resolve — desperation might be the better word — to somehow turn the situation to his advantage. In prospect, he had tasted the power and impudence that would come with status as a “made man,” a sicario, only to see the outlaw band that had begun his initiation collapse in a hail of bullets and blood.

  She was about to shoo him back downstairs, pull rank, intimidate him with a bit of a scolding. Nothing serious; it would reiterate the power balance that must prevail between a servant and his master — however much a well-meaning expat tries to veil that reality behind friendship or charity. But she bites her tongue. The world has changed suddenly and in ways that sap her self-confidence. Efraim after all is one of a very few survivors of this whole intrigue who might know — or at least sense — that the ransom was never paid. Not all of it anyway — not much at all.

  And what about the money she had handed over to him in the Plaza Chica, the forty-thousand? Had it bought Schuyler’s release? In the excitement and confusion of their first hours back together, she hadn’t thought much about it. She just assumed Efraim had passed the cash on to the upper echelons of the cartel leadership, the people he wanted to impress, the people controlling Schuyler’s fate. But had he? Was the raid and the chaos that ensued an opportunity he seized to put a sum of money in his pocket greater than he had ever seen before or probably ever would again? Either way, there would be no getting it back. Blood from a stone.

  The bastard! Ariana thinks to herself.

  Without knowing where this is going, she aborts the tirade she was about to unleash on Efraim for snooping around in her house, probably in search of more where the forty-thousand came from — whoever’s pocket it wound up n. Instead, she surprises them both:

 
; “I want to thank you, Efraim.”

  Those are the first words out of her mouth.

  “I want to thank you for helping me find Don Schuyler, however you did it. I don’t know how you did it. I don’t want to know how you did it. No one should ever know.”

  Then she thinks to say this: “I promised you a reward.”

  As per their agreement when she first enlisted him to help her, she owes Efraim a thousand pesos: eighty dollars or so. She scrounges in her purse and brings forth not a thousand pesos, but one of the bills from the stash Zimmerman sent down: a thousand dollars.

  She looks him in the eye as she proffers the bill. “I want you to know how grateful I am for your help,” she says, smiling nervously. “For your help and for your silence,” she adds. “La boca cerrada.”

  He mumbles thanks but seems to be refusing her extravagant gift. He holds the bill out to her. Tainted money? Is that the problem?

  No puedo cambiarlo.

  Of course. She should have known. It’s a bill bigger than he could ever hope to cash in a small town like Patzcuaro without cutting a cartel financier in on a significant chunk of it.

  “I will change it to smaller bills and you will have it as soon as I get back from the plaza,” she promises, and this is a vow she has no intention of breaking.

  day forty-one

  A glance out the study window reveals that Schuyler has ensconced himself in the garden below. His coffee cup sits on one of the morning papers as he bends over his notebook, adding to the jottings that will never cohere into anything publishable. Ariana turns toward the bookshelf. She takes in the familiar array of titles, most of them old chestnuts she has not opened since she read them years ago and deemed them worth keeping. She notices the spines of the gouged-out books in which the courier delivered the cash from New York. Emptied of their riches, they are still souvenirs. Also morsels of evidence in support of her story: a small fortune secured from Schermerhorn family bankers and paid out as ransom.