We Have Taken Your Husband

by Angel Sanchez

  Schuyler had pulled the books off the shelf when she brought them to his attention. He handled them for a few minutes, then slid them back in among the other paperbacks and travel guides, Spanish grammar texts and dictionaries. The gouged out books are mementos of a horrible ordeal.

  Facing the bookshelf, Ariana’s mind goes blank, like standing in front of the refrigerator at a loss to remember why you opened the door. And then she remembers the unlicensed gun. She strides across the room only to discover that it is no longer among the grooming items on Schuyler’s bureau. With a sudden sense of urgency, she opens the nightstand along her side of the bed, the place where she had first kept it. No gun.

  She is preparing for a dogged search — the linen cabinet? the growing heap of dirty clothes in the hamper? When she remembers why she was standing before the bookshelf like an open refrigerator. It occurs to her to pull down the battered paperback of Thy Will Be Done. And sure enough, there it is, too big for the space that had been cut to hold the money, but not by much. The pages have been torn and furled to make room for the last inch or two of the barrel. Schuyler has never lacked a sense of irony. Ariana extracts the gun from the paperback and slips it into her jacket pocket.

  She leaves Schuyler to his notebooks and steps out into the late afternoon. Media have twigged on to the rumor (police tip?) that the gringo who escaped sequestration is, indeed, Schuyler Schermerhorn. A television reporter and her camera crew have staked out the block. At the sight of Ariana, they spring into action. The reporter asks asinine questions in broken English — any sound bite from the gringa will do for that evening’s broadcast. A few paces ahead of his associate, the cameraman walks backward filming Ariana as she comes down the street. The irregularity of the paving stones is treacherous. It amazes Ariana that he doesn’t stumble and fall.

  Her car is at the far end of the block. As she approaches it, two neighborhood gossips fall silent and stare at her from their usual perch in the doorway of Doña Angela’s tienda. Collecting themselves, they offer condolences and say they will bring food for her and Don Schuyler. The cameraman pivots to shoot them. Ariana thanks the women and steps into her car, shaking free of the TV people. She drives a desultory route through town and eventually reaches open countryside along the highway toward the coast. She pauses by the front gates of the finca Efraim led her to that moonlit night. The place looks to have been abandoned. No cop, real or fake, comes out to ask her what she’s up to. She drives through the dusk toward Uruapan. Fields give way to hillsides dense with pine; she turns back toward the lake. At a turnout on a lonely stretch of the highway, she pulls over. Margaret’s villa towers in the distance on its conical pustule. Cattle graze directly across the road. Ariana extracts the gun from her pocket and gazes at it contemplatively before tossing it into the lake. It sinks below a floating island of water hyacinth so thick she feared too late that the gun might remain visible above the dense, lake-choking vegetation.

  Back in town, she parks on a side street off the Plaza Grande, a block from the Iturbe. It is the time in the evening when the sky turns from pearl to a dark velvet and the artificial light in windows and on lampposts begins to burn holes in the fabric. She wonders what might happen if she walked in, roused the night clerk from his doze and asked for the key to room 228. Would he recognize her and hand it over, assuming from the vaguely familiar face that she and her man were booked into that room as usual? From across the Plaza she looks up again at the Iturbe’s façade. Light seeps from around the edges of a pulled blind.

  Epilogue

  Readers habituated to tidy endings that rebalance the scales of moral justice will be unhappy with this one.

  In the Hollywood ending we expect, Ariana Altobelli would suffer a heinous fate that her ill-gotten gains would be powerless to prevent. Or, in a story of the kidnapping more in tune with a cynical age, she would run off to some new Tahiti of her own imagining with another dark-eyed exotic of the type she has never been very good at resisting. She would leave the hapless Schuyler Schermerhorn to the ravages of advancing age, dwindling sexual prowess and the delusions that saw him through his youth and middle years. Alas, the man — Armando Quiróz or Enrique Sepulveda, call him what you will — would not be there to share with Ariana in the money and the moment he engineered.

  But insisting on either outcome would be to misjudge the nature of the bond between Schuyler and Ariana. It would also fail to account for the inertial power of so many years spent together, the inertia that begins to dim the allure of adventures that once beckoned like a siren’s song.

  The only real difference since the kidnapping is that Ariana remains more fully in charge of a nest egg Schuyler does not realize is still theirs, the one she stole. No, “stole” is too harsh — the one on which she took an advance ahead of one day settling her husband’s estate and dividing a portion of what’s left with his sons. Those curious about such things will want to know, and should not be surprised to learn, that Ariana promptly repaid Margaret Aldrich for her loan, then got the cash, the residual $250,000 back to a safe haven — an account in her name alone with one of the big New York investment banks — and that she did so with no more difficulty than when she took delivery of the funds in the first place. Of course, Mort Zimmerman knows no more about this deposit than does Schuyler.

  Ariana dares to dream that her generosity has secured Efraim’s loyalty. It has, but not without the need for renewal. Trouble, it seems, is never long at bay in the life of Efraim Ochoa, the unschooled, meagerly employed father of three, and eventually six. Two months pass when yet another misfortune befalls him at one of his other jobs (please don’t tell my mother; it will only make her anxious); time enough for gratitude over Ariana’s generosity to have curdled into a heightened sense that she is good for more. As months pass, Efraim and Ariana have done with pretense. Efraim begins accepting her “loans” without apology or thanks. The handouts have been routinized. He rarely misses his weekly visit for yard duty, though the raking and pruning are perfunctory and take almost no time at all. Before leaving he knows that in the garden shed, a place never visited by his mother or by Don Schuyler, he will find an envelope on a high shelf behind a tin of weed killer. It will contain a bit more cash than Ariana pays his mother in a month. He is no longer Ariana’s servant, though he poses as one. He is her vigilante, like the men at Margaret Adrich’s gate, on guard against any rival claims on her assets.

  In due course, like so many other one-time “expats,” Schuyler and Ariana will cut back on Mexico. Not, they insist, for fear of the cartels. “We’ve seen this movie a few times already,” they say to Jorge and Margaret when, over drinks at Lupita’s, they announce their decision. “Small towns are small towns, whether in Mexico or the States.” Dubbed movies and ranchero music begin to wear thin. Medical visits grow more frequent and complex. Nonetheless, they decide to keep the house on Madrigal.

  “We’re so glad about that; it means you’ll be back. Maybe you’ll settle here for good,” Margaret thinks to say. “Not that you’d have been able to get rid of it if you wanted to,” Jorge snarks. “I mean, in this market? With all the scare stories about cartels?” They still plan to come down for a month or two every year, which also makes the place tricky to rent. Instead, they will cast about for a house-sitter, someone who will look after the property in their absence and clear out when they want it for themselves. And who better for that assignment than Efraim? He knows the house and grounds, and now, even with a bunk bed in the living room, his family has outgrown the two-bedroom house near the embarcadero that he and Elena shared for years with his mother, now deceased.

  It is understood that in exchange for Efraim’s services as caretaker, Ariana will forward money enough — in fact, just a bit more than enough — for him to pay the taxes and utility bills. He is doing quite a bit better now. He has graduated from the produce trucks thronging the market at dawn, to a much more responsible — not to say lucrative — role collecting monthly fees that shopkee
pers pay as protection money for their stalls, their puestos. He is fair about it, people say, but fee collection is an art not a science. There is always room for negotiation, if the fee is not waived outright — or suddenly jacked up. There are those who consider Efraim Ochoa’s style in this art form to be, as Jorge once quipped, a bit expressionistic. Jorge, who remains better tuned in to Patzcuaro’s political underground than most, suggests that Efraim has graduated from the ranks of the street goats — the young sicario wannabes — to the more majestic levels of cartel hierarchy. An arrest with several other men in his late 20s will reek of an involvement in the market for amphetamine, not market produce. And Efraim’s murder a few years after that will be called a political assassination, not the carjacking gone awry that the papers reported.

  As he ages and becomes more forgetful, Schuyler will no longer think much about his reversal of fortune. As he anticipated, there is money enough; the bills somehow get paid as they always have been. When they face larger expenses, now it will be Ariana who somehow comes up with the extra cash, another loan from her 401K, she explains. Forgoing their annual “big trip” is no hardship for Schuyler. Stuffing himself into an aluminum tube and spending hours at 30,000 feet with a planeload of hacking, wheezing, gabbing fellow passengers will no longer be the prelude to adventures he needs to be part of. The indignity of airports and airplanes will become simply unendurable to him. Passing through time zones and checking in at overpriced hotels will do nothing for him.

  He admits it: He’s getting on in years, beginning to feel his age. In the view of old friends, he is also beginning to show it. A hazier mind makes him more averse than ever to reviewing his accounts or balancing his checkbook. Somehow, life goes on, more or less as it always has.

  He remains unaware of Ariana’s treachery, and she has long since forgiven herself for it. You know what, she says to herself: Maybe getting the cash out of New York really did secure Schuyler’s release. Because having that kind of money at hand strengthened my resolve. It gave me the courage to stand up to the sicarios. And who knows how crazy they might have gotten if I’d paid them what they were asking, Who knows how greedy, how violent in fighting among themselves! Maybe my holding on to the money saved Schuyler from being caught in the crossfire. And even after all that drama, who knows how long it would have been before Schuyler fell prey to some sexy Mexican gold-digger who really took him to the cleaners.

  After wearing out their welcome as guests of friends happy to put them up temporarily, Ariana and Schuyler will settle on a one-bedroom garden apartment in Weehawken, a modest building — something they can afford — with a rooftop deck (a picnic table, a grille, a few potted plants) that they share with tenants of the other eight apartments. The deck offers a glimpse of the Hudson and, beyond it, the whole sweep of Manhattan’s west side and the world they once assumed would always be theirs.

  The story of Schuyler’s kidnapping will have degenerated into the stuff of dinner-party chatter, a story unpacked from time to time for friends who haven’t heard it, a war story to compare with the excesses of Schuyler’s days as a campus radical or his memories of the grand estate up-Hudson.

  The Enrique angle — the fact that Ariana, without realizing it, was on rather intimate terms with the kidnap’s mastermind — is not part of the storytelling. It is one detail that has never surfaced, even years later. And what became of the ransom remains an even deeper secret, the one Ariana will carry to the grave, unless dementia loosens her tongue first. But then who would believe her, a dotty old woman claiming to have somehow embezzled $300,000 from a well-born husband, with help from a Mexican gangster, the best lover she ever had?

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