“Well, this is a kick in the pants. No sooner have I made a noble speech than I get the snap quiz: Does the girl really have serious guts or is she a bullshitter? It doesn’t usually work that way; usually you get to keep your wonderful illusions for a while.”
“It’s Mexico,” said Marder. “It doesn’t work that way here.” He pulled out his wallet and handed a wad of currency to his daughter. “Here’s all the money I have. I don’t know what good it’ll do, but…”
She took it, a thick wad of violet five-hundred peso notes. “It’s okay, Dad. It’ll be fine,” she told him, although she didn’t think it would be fine at all, but rather to make him feel better, so that her panic did not add to his. She’d always thought her father was the acme of cool, but with his crack-up at the tomb and now, this pale and sweating, this trembling figure before her, she felt the axis of her life starting to go eccentric.
“It’s okay,” she repeated. “I have a gun.”
“Oh, no, you don’t want a gun! Give it to me!”
He looked around frantically to see if they were being observed, and they were—more than observed. There were two men coming toward the truck, and Marder had to stand by helplessly while they took his daughter and Lourdes away. He heard Lourdes ask, “What’s going on? Are these guys taking us to the airport?” before the sound of revving engines from all the Templo vehicles drowned out any response that might have been made.
* * *
In the VW, both priest and reporter demanded explanations too.
“Drive,” said Marder. “Drive fast.”
So they flew down the sierra, the priest’s foot to the floorboards over long stretches, scattering chickens in the tiny settlements, and Marder told them the situation. Pepa was leaning forward in the backseat, clutching Marder’s seat, her face close to his so she could hear above the sound of the poorly muffled engine and the wind.
“But you’re going to give him his stuff, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think I will,” said Marder. “Skelly told me once that any group with those weapons could just grab Casa Feliz and toss everyone out, which is why he arranged for us to take them. As long as we hold them, we hold the land. And, of course, there’s no guarantee that Gomez will return the hostages even if he has the weapons. We’re not going to take him to court. And he’d be worried that a couple of guys who’ve shown the ability to import heavy weapons and heroin into Michoacán would go over to La Familia or even one of the other cartels. He’d shoot us both out of hand and probably kill anyone he thought might be a popular leader in the colonia.”
“But your daughter,” she said, “she’s your daughter. You’re risking her life for a house and for people you don’t even know?”
“I’m terrified,” he said, turning toward her, and she could see it in his face, pale beneath its tan, white around the lips, the pain in his eyes. “But the point of this whole thing is not to surrender to the terror. I’m not going to act like a typical kidnap victim’s parent, giving up everything to buy back the child, frantic, totally controlled by the kidnappers. I’m not doing that, even though I feel that way. I get you don’t understand this, but I’ve learned to accept whatever God sends. If it’s a disaster, I’ll mourn the loss. If not, I’ll rejoice. It’s not in my hands. I didn’t ask for this fate, but it’s the one I’ve been given, and so I intend to hold the land and protect the people in my care as long as I have life and let come whatever. I had a thought also, speaking about fate, back at the cemetery; the thought was that years ago I stole a girl out of Mexico and now Mexico wanted one in return. It’s an absurd thought if you think life is just one thing after another, with no meaning, but not if you think there’s a deep plan going on in every life. Which I do.”
Pepa had nothing to say to this, and they drove on, not speaking, wrapped in the roar of the engine and the scream of the tires on the mountain curves.
* * *
Statch and Lourdes were shut up in the back of a windowless truck furnished with a pile of blankets, padded shipping mats, a bucket, and a two-liter plastic container of water. A faint gleam of light penetrated the interior from small holes in the roof. The truck jounced into motion and Lourdes said, “We’re going to the airport, right?”
“Actually, no. The Templos are kidnapping us.”
A small frown marred the matte perfection of the girl’s brow. “You’re joking.”
“I wish I were. The thing of it is, El Gordo wants something from my father and Skelly, and they’re holding us until they get it.”
“Well, they’ll give it and then I’ll be able to go to Defe. How long will it take, do you think?”
“I don’t know, Lourdes. It could be a while, because I don’t think Skelly wants to give up the stuff.”
“It’s drugs, right? I knew Skelly was a narcotraficante. He said no, but I could tell. But, you know, he’ll give it because he loves me, even if they kill him.”
“Well, perhaps—”
“No question,” said the girl. “And Don Ricardo, your father, will pay for you too. It’s a common thing; everyone understands how it goes, although usually they take the boys. People will pay more for a boy, they say.”
She stretched luxuriously and tossed the shipping mats and blankets into a simple pallet. “I’m going to take a nap,” said Lourdes, arranging herself on the floor. “I was up all night—who would think that an old man like that would want to do it all night long? It’s the Viagra or something, I don’t know.” She looked up at Statch. “So, do you have a boyfriend?” “Boyfren,” not novio; Lourdes was a modern girl.
“Not at the moment.”
“What, you don’t like it with boys?”
“I like it fine,” said Statch. “I just have a lot of other stuff to do, and a boyfriend takes up time and energy.”
“Yes, that’s what Pepa says too. She says don’t let the boyfriends mess up your career. Pick someone who can help you out and stick with him until you can stand on your own. That’s good advice, don’t you think?”
Statch thought briefly of Dr. Schuemacher and the lab at MIT. “Yes, good advice,” she agreed, and thought, Would I trade places with this kid? Quite apart from the dazzling looks, could I ever achieve that unthinking physical being, without all the thoughts and plans, the continual self-appraisal, the measuring of every action? She hadn’t been anything like Lourdes since the age of six, and now here she was, all plans and control having been taken from her. And, to her surprise, she was riding on top of the whole thing; being kidnapped was apparently a natural extension of having kidnapped herself from the life she’d thought she wanted. Again she decided that, whatever happened, she would not have changed the path that had led to this strange and more intense life.
The truck drove on, and from the angle of the bed Statch could tell that they were climbing. They’d taken her bag but hadn’t searched her, nor had they taken her watch, so she knew, when the truck slowed, made some intricate turns, and then reversed and stopped, that they had been traveling for about two and a half hours; somewhere in the tierra caliente, then, up in the hill country.
The doors swung open and a man called for them to come out. It was dark and warm, and the air smelled of dust and, faintly, of horses. They were in a stable. Two men led them across a concrete floor to a side door, across an alley, and into another building. Lourdes wanted to know where her bags were—she had all her stuff for Mexico City in those bags, her clothes, her makeup—but the men didn’t answer her. They moved through a large kitchen smelling of lye and frying grease and down a hallway. A ranch house, thought Statch, and wondered if it was the same one in which her father and Skelly had been confined. The men put her in a room by herself. It had a hasp and padlock on the door, and she heard it being fastened. Throughout this brief walk she’d heard the sounds of roaring engines and of a crowd of people, and she assumed that there was someone in the house watching television, perhaps an auto race. For some reason this made her feel better. No one had yet sa
id a word to her.
The room contained a pipe bed with a bare mattress, a covered bucket, and a washstand with a white enamel basin. The single window was barred with a wooden shutter, which, on inspection, proved to be wired shut. But one of the slats was cracked, and by prying at it with her pen, Statch was able to snap it in two, so that she could peek through and see what was going on outside. Like many such mountain ranchos, this one was built around a walled courtyard, and Statch’s window provided an oblique view of that area. The sounds she had heard were not from a television broadcast at all, she now found. The courtyard was full of vehicles, pickups and SUVs and sedans, revving engines, moving around, arranging themselves into columns, and around them were scores, perhaps hundreds, of men, all wearing black baseball hats and dark shirts, many of them carrying assault weapons. It looked, and Statch thought it probably was, an army about to go to war.
At the extreme corner of her field of view was a big ten-wheeled truck, curiously modified. Steel plates had been welded to its side—overlapping plates, like the scales of a pangolin—and a kind of cupola had been built on the top of the cargo hold, protected with sandbags held in place by cyclone fencing, leaving dark slits that could only be meant for gun ports. The front of this vehicle bore a steel plate that covered the windshield and the hood, with a narrow opening cut into it to allow the driver to see. The bumper had been extended by another thick steel plate, and an I-beam was welded to that, to make a heavy ram. Above this shelf, sandbags had been piled, secured by more cyclone fencing. The sides of the cab had been similarly armored and there was a hinged hatch where the window had been, to give access to the cab’s interior. As an engineer, Statch could not help admiring the design—it was the first narco-tank she’d seen in real life—although her heart quailed at the thought of its obvious target. The thing would go through the gate of Casa Feliz like a bullet through a Barbie doll, and the front wall of the house wouldn’t slow it down much either. In one charge, it would deposit fifty armed men in her father’s command post.
As she watched, engines roared, the men mounted their vehicles, and the convoy rolled out of the yard, leaving behind a cloud of yellow dust that hung in the air for a long time. Panic touched her with little electric jabs in the belly; chill sweat bloomed on her face. She had to escape from here. She had to find a phone and get through to her father and warn him, and she had to call Major Naca and get the army involved. They’d taken her bag, so the cell phone and the money were gone, but she still had a number of interesting things in her pockets. And, of course, the pistol, pressing against her spine. Maybe she should have handed it over to her father, but there hadn’t been time. She had never shot anyone, and although she was an excellent target shot, both her father and Skelly had impressed upon her the difference between target shooting and shooting people. She recalled Skelly’s advice about pointing guns: never point a gun at someone you don’t intend to shoot, and if you do point it, shoot them. It’s not like the movies, where the two guys have a conversation at gunpoint. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself shooting a man and also saw herself freezing and having the man take the gun away from her. She moved her thinking away from that dire topic and looked at the stuff she’d taken from her pockets: a small leatherbound notebook, a black Rotring rollerball pen, a tiny flashlight attached to the keys to her motorcycle, a thumb drive, twenty-seven pesos in coins, a red Bic lighter, and a miniature Swiss Army knife containing a tiny scissors, a nail file/screwdriver, a toothpick, and a thirty-two-millimeter blade.
The question of escape: in the movies, the hero always tries to escape, but Statch was not sure if this was the correct solution. Getting out of the room would be trivial. A quick inspection told her she could unscrew the bed frame and that the steel levers provided by its parts would be more than sufficient to break out the shutters. But what then? She had no idea if there was a guard looking out into the courtyard. She could shoot the guard (could she, really?) and then skip lightly over the wall and use her transparent airplane to fly a couple of hundred kilometers to Apatzingán, where Major Naca would immediately put his forces at her disposal, assuming he was not someplace else by now.
No, it was too stupid to move without more data, and, besides, she had some responsibility for the idiot child, Lourdes. She couldn’t leave without learning where she was and what they planned to do with her. On the other hand, there was the night. Depending on what she learned during the next few hours, she might try to slip away in the darkness. She could hot-wire a car—an older model, without all the security crap in it—disable any other vehicles, and drive away. Interesting fantasy, anyway—did anyone actually ever escape from kidnappers? She didn’t know, and although it was now unfashionable, Statch never liked committing to anything in the absence of evidence.
So she waited. In all this consideration, it never occurred to her that she might be in danger of death. Her whole life was a record of success and obstacles conquered, and so she thought she had an advantage over anyone who might wish to harm her and was able to scotch most negative thoughts. And as one who despised the wasted minute, she now lay down on the bed, propped her back against the wall, and picked up her notebook and pen. Turning to a fresh page, she began to design a twenty-first century leapfrog energy and manufacturing economy for Colonia Feliz.
* * *
They heard honking behind them. Father Santana checked his mirrors and then pulled to the side of the road to allow a convoy of pickup trucks to pass. Each one carried a posse of hard-faced young men, standing and swaying, the barrels of their assault rifles making a picket around their close-cropped skulls.
“I wonder what that’s about,” said the reporter.
“The clans are gathering, it seems,” said Marder.
“Let me check the Net.” Pepa twiddled her smartphone for a few minutes and then exclaimed, “Jesus Maria!”
“What?” The two men in unison.
“The Templos bombed one of Cuello’s boats in the marina at Playa Diamante and machine-gunned one of their cantinas.”
“Did they get the jefe?” Marder asked.
“It’s not being reported. I rather doubt it; he’s careful and he has a lot of boats, both in the Playa and in Cárdenas, and any number of properties he controls. In any case, it looks like the war is heating up, and it’s apparently going to happen here, on the coast.”
This idea was confirmed when two more such convoys, with dozens of vehicles and hundreds of men, passed before they hit the coastal road. As they made their northward turn, Marder said, “Look, I’d appreciate it if you kept quiet about Carmel and Lourdes for a while. I want to tell Skelly about it myself.”
* * *
In the event, Skelly got only a partial truth. Marder found him in the command center, formerly the living room of the mansion, now packed with the adult population of the island, and many of the children. Skelly stood soldier-straight in front of a whitewashed half sheet of plywood, upon which had been drawn a large-scale map of Isla de los Pájaros. Marder waited by the door at the back and watched; Skelly saw him but did not acknowledge his presence.
Skelly was, of course, an excellent military briefer, and Marder could see he was getting his points across despite his halting Spanish. He even had a sheet of clear plastic that he dropped over his map and drew on with china markers to show the locations of his troops. The tactical situation was not complex. The island was a hog-backed, egg-shaped territory oriented north–south, connected to the mainland slightly below its equator by the causeway, a distance of perhaps one hundred meters. There were a hundred or so meters of beach on the seaward side, with the remainder of the northern coast occupied by cliffs plunging directly into the sea. The house, now the final redoubt, was located on the peak of the ridge in the center of the southern hemisphere, directly in line with the causeway.
Skelly’s shining pointer—a recycled car aerial—flitted over the chart, indicating the only possible routes of attack: the causeway itself, the beach, and the sout
h side of the island, where the former owner had constructed a tiny marina, with a semicircular basin and two wooden docks. The defending forces owned three DShK heavy machine guns and six PKM light machine guns, all ex–Soviet Army, and, from the same source, seventy-two AK-47 rifles. Skelly had eighty-four men at his disposal, including the three Hmong—los chinos, as the people called them—who now sat together in one corner of the room, squatting against the walls and whispering together in their chirring tongue. Los chinos would each command one of the DShKs—huge 12.7-mm machine guns on wheeled carriages—and these would constitute the heart of the three strong points on which the defense was based and which were directed against the three supposed routes of attack.
Flick flick flick went the pointer. The other men had been arranged in four platoons. Three would support the strong points: Alpha on the roof terrace and house approaches, commanding the causeway; Bravo to the south, above the marina; and Charlie, deployed below the terraces of the house and directed at the beach. Delta would be based in the house proper and be used as a reserve or the core of a last-ditch defense.
A simple plan, Marder thought, but they could have only simple plans with the kind of half-trained soldiers they had. He looked at their faces as Skelly concluded his talk. “Any questions?” Skelly asked. There were none. The peasants and artisans of the Colonia Feliz defense force clutched their unfamiliar rifles and moved uneasily within their webgear, and most of them wore on their mild brown faces the look of boys standing along the wall at their first dance. Some of the younger ones, of course, had tied on red headbands and looked fierce, and now Marder found that almost everyone was looking at him. After a moment’s hesitation, he went to the front of the room.
Marder had not given many speeches in his life, and certainly none like this, but he relied on the generic type of such speeches, many of which had been given to people such as these in the history of their unhappy land. He told them that they were about to make history, that they fought against wicked people who were trying to steal their land and destroy everything they had worked for and steal the future of their children. He said that he had come here as a stranger but that his late wife was from around here and that he had resolved to build a monument to her memory by doing something she would have done, had she been able. He told them that his wife’s parents had been murdered, as so many others had been, by the evil ones, the same ones who would shortly come here with their weapons, thinking that they could simply take anything they wanted by violence. He said he swore to them on his wife’s memory and by the Blessed Virgin that he would never give in, that he would resist to his last drop of blood. He said that if anyone wanted to leave, they could go now, without shame, but once the battle started he expected everyone to give what he himself would be happy to give, his life for peace and justice and a better future for them and their children. Long live the Colonia Feliz!
The Return: A Novel Page 37
