Ransom

by Jay McInerney

  Ransom nodded. He thought it was a funny kind of devotion that traded in smack and balked at booze, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I hope your wife will be well soon,” the Pathan said. “A good woman is a pearl of great price.”

  They’d met the Pathan two weeks earlier, the day after they arrived in Landi Kotal. Ian was planning to leave for Kabul later that afternoon. The three of them spent the morning in the bazaar. This was Annette’s first time in Landi Kotal and she wanted to look at everything. The close-packed stalls displayed bolts of Scottish tweed, Swiss watches, Indian ivories, sundries with the initials of French and Italian designers, Levi’s, Japanese cameras and radios, Buddhas in bronze and clay, vintage British cavalry swords and U.S. Army-issue Colt 45s. They found a handtowel embroidered with the legend Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island, Michigan laid out beside a stack of Tibetan prayer rugs, and in the next stall a Peugeot ten-speed bicycle. Smuggling was the main industry of the region. Some of the contraband was what it appeared to be, but the smart buyer began with the assumption that the Western goods were Asian counterfeits, the handcrafts and antiques mass-produced. You never took the first price quoted.

  At one of the stalls, Ian and Ransom examined some pale, crumbly hash. Ian shook his head. Water-pressed, he said, the dregs of the last season’s pressing. He was confirmed in his decision to cross the border and get the pick of the crop in the mountain villages outside of Kabul.

  A small boy with a large knife sheathed in his belt stepped into their path waving his arms. “I got stone, man,” he announced. “I got stone. Very hot stuff. Brand new. Crazy tunes.” He reached into a pocket and drew out a cassette which he pressed into Ransom’s hand. The blocky, Roman letters on the inner lining read, “Excite on Main St. by Rolling Stone.” The boy wiggled his shoulders and hips vigorously. He took Annette’s arm and coaxed them over to his rock-and-roll emporium, a stall with boxes of bootleg cassettes and several Japanese cassette players. A Fender Stratocaster was mounted in a gun rack at the back of the stall.

  Annette wanted to buy a cassette player. Ian told her that if it wasn’t confiscated at the border when they went back to India they’d end up paying more duty than it was worth. Ransom reminded her that their money was tight. Annette slammed down a tape she’d been looking at. “Always you and Ian gang up on me,” she said, stalking off into the bazaar. Ian went after her while Ransom bargained for the cassette player. Annette had been clean for three weeks and Ransom wanted to keep her happy.

  Finding Ian and Annette was easy because they’d gathered a crowd. Annette’s red chamois shirt was on the ground and she was trying to tug her T-shirt up over her head. Ian was trying to restrain her. Men and boys in turbans were closing around them.

  Earlier in the morning they had counseled Annette on keeping herself covered no matter how warm it was. Annette didn’t like being told what to do. And she didn’t like clothes. In Goa they’d spent the days nude on the beach. But Goa was not Moslem.

  Ransom pushed through the onlookers. Ian had her arms pinned. Annette had a mouthful of her own sleeve and was trying to rip the fabric with her teeth. When Ransom grabbed her shoulder she kicked him in the shin.

  “Bastards! Beat up on me!”

  They each took an arm and pushed her through the crowd. Annette was laughing now.

  “Fook these dirty people,” Annette said. “They have never seen teets before?” Ransom was hoping that no one could make out the English behind Annette’s French accent. The eyes of the crowd were already hostile.

  The crowd followed them. Annette tried to wrench herself away from Ransom. He dropped the new cassette player, which had been pinned under his arm. The turbans hissed and muttered behind them. Ransom looked back and saw a man pick up a stone from the side of the road. Some of the men carried rifles. A young man darted forward from the crowd and grabbed at the neck of Annette’s shirt. Ransom turned and kicked him in the knee, provoking angry shouts from the mob.

  “Don’t look back,” Ian said.

  Annette was no longer resisting. Her face was pale.

  In front of them a man emerged from one of the stalls. Ransom raised his fist.

  “Please follow me,” the man said. “This way.” He took them through a narrow passage between two stalls. “Here,” he said, holding back the flap of the tent.

  “They will not come here,” the man said, closing the flaps. He lit an oil lamp and beckoned them to sit.

  The first thing Ransom noticed about the man was that his eyes were blue. The sharply hooked nose seemed to be placed a little too high on his face. He wore a pale-blue turban and had a long, wispy beard, which he stroked with his left hand. Ransom saw that the ring finger on his right hand was missing, nubbed below the first joint.

  “An accident,” the man said, catching Ransom’s eyes on his finger. He introduced himself. Ransom missed the name. He said he was of the Afridi tribe of Pathans and that it was the code of his people to offer shelter and protection to strangers.

  Ransom was stroking Annette’s hand, watching her.

  “She is your woman?” the man asked Ransom.

  Ransom didn’t say anything.

  Annette said, “I am nobody’s woman. Nobody cares about me.” She was pale and her hands trembled.

  “She is very beautiful,” the Pathan said.

  Ransom put his arm around Annette and began to knead the muscles in her neck. He stopped suddenly when he saw the way the Pathan was looking at Annette. It was a look he had seen in the faces of the crowd in the bazaar.

  Ian said, “I think we should be pushing on.”

  They thanked the man. He assured them that he was always at their service. He was a merchant, a broker of commodities, and if they should require anything, anything at all, during their stay in Landi Kotal . . .

  To Ransom he offered the advice that you did not display a jewel in the bazaar unless you intended to sell it. Then he looked again at Annette.

  Ransom and Annette saw Ian off a few hours later. The taxi stand at the edge of the bazaar had a fleet of pre-’60 Chevies. When a sufficient number of passengers had presented themselves, the cabs rattled off over the Khyber Pass. A taxi was nearly ready to leave when they arrived. The driver had seven fares in the cab itself and intended to put four more in the trunk. Four of the passengers were Caucasian. A woman with matted blond hair and dirt in the creases of her face was leaning out the back window of the cab moaning. The man beside her was holding her hair back behind her neck. While Ian dickered with the driver, she vomited. “That’s the way,” the man said, “that’s the way.” Inside the cab someone with a heavy southern accent was telling a story about a guy from Ohio who had his balls cut off at the border when the guards found a ball of hash taped underneath his scrotum. A Pathan with an automatic rifle on his shoulder was securing a canvas bag to the pile of luggage on the roof.

  “Well, that’s it,” Ian said, after he’d paid the driver. “I’ve got a seat on the observation deck,” he said, indicating the trunk. He turned to Annette and opened his arms. “How about a kiss for the soldier going off to the wars?”

  Annette allowed herself to be embraced, then kissed him on the cheek.

  Ian hugged Ransom and said, “You take care of her. That’s your job.”

  Ransom nodded and tried to smile. He was suddenly very nervous. He felt there was something they were forgetting. They’d been planning this for weeks, but now that the time had come he didn’t like the idea of splitting up. The blond girl leaning out of the cab heaved again, and Ranson felt his own stomach shrink in on itself. “You’ll be back in a few days?”

  “A few days, maybe a week. Just as soon as I can.”

  Ian had done this before. He liked to buy direct from the tribes in Afghanistan because it was cheaper and the hash was better than anything that came into Landi Kotal. He had a third of the money in his boot heel. Ransom, who had never done anything like this in his life, was holding the rest. Ian would catch a bus from the
border to Kabul, hire a guide into the hills, arrange the buy and make a down payment. He would come back through customs clean, and they would wait for the Afghanis, who did not believe in borders, to bring the stuff over the mountains. That was the plan.

  The taxi driver told Ian they were ready to go. Ian climbed into the trunk of the cab and settled himself among three old men in pink turbans. A cloud of smoke engulfed the rear of the car as the driver gunned the engine. When he popped the clutch the car lurched violently and died.

  More than an hour later, the driver still hadn’t managed to get the car running. Ransom and Annette had waited with Ian as the sun dropped through the cloudless sky toward the jagged ridge of mountains to the west. Ransom could feel the dry rasp of high-altitude sunlight on his face even as he was slapping his arms and chest for warmth. Annette said she was freezing to death. Ian said they shouldn’t bother to wait.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Ransom said. “Why don’t you stick around another day, get a fresh start tomorrow?” To him the signs did not seem auspicious—the near-riot in the bazaar, the sick blond girl, the taxi breaking down. He was not eager to see Ian go.

  “I’d hate to lose a day,” said Ian, whose augury did not recognize ill omens. He acted as if he believed that he had been born under a fortunate sign, and that his luck would hold.

  Ian went to talk to the driver, who had just climbed in behind the wheel of the cab. The engine turned over and sputtered back to life. Ian jumped into the trunk of the taxi. He waved as the car pulled forward. Ransom put one arm around Annette and waved with the other as the taxi disappeared into the dust.

  * * *

  Annette and Ransom were staying in a fortified house on the hillside just off the main road. Surrounded by high walls for protection against bandits, it looked like a two-storey pillbox. Ian had arranged for them to stay there; the family, he said, was on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The heavy wooden door on the ground floor opened into a dark space rank with the smell of animals, the quarters of the family sheep. A stairway led to the second level, where the small, vertical windows, suitable for returning rifle fire, admitted little light. There was no escaping the residual odor of the animals. “Le château des pourceaux,” Annette said, holding her nose, when they first surveyed the place.

  Things had gone sour after the incident in the bazaar. Annette had seen all she cared to see of Landi Kotal and wanted to move on. She began to talk about Katmandu, where she and Ransom had first met. Ransom didn’t want to be reminded of Katmandu. They had spent a month together there, Ransom having just arrived in Asia, looking for freedom in the homeland of fatalism, looking for he didn’t know what—but something more vital than the pallid choice of career. He had never met anyone like Annette, unless it was Ian, so profligate with her energy, staying up all night talking, racing from city to city, friend to friend—the kind of person who seemed too expansive to gather all of her affection into a package and present it to one other human being. Ransom instinctively admired this abundance; and the more he admired it, the more important it became for him to have it all to himself. He had never wanted anyone so much, and his wanting made him awkward and jealous. Annette had gone off one night with an Italian, and Ransom hadn’t seen her again until she showed up one day in Goa, three months later, hundreds of miles from where she had ditched him.

  Fed up with Landi Kotal, with more reason than she usually had for wanting to move on to a new place, Annette spoke wistfully now of their month in Katmandu, of the pastel-colored temples and the tall, crooked houses with hex eyes painted on the lintels.

  “And the monkeys,” Ransom said absently. “Don’t forget the monkeys.” The two of them were lying on a single pallet inside the fortress house. Ian had been gone three days.

  “I hate the monkeys,” she said. “Nasty, ugly things. I hate them.”

  “Sorry,” Ransom said. There was no telling when some little thing would set her off. He didn’t remember any special antipathy toward monkeys. He turned onto his side and looked at her. Her face was rigid. He stroked her shoulder; she pushed his hand away.

  “It smells like pig in here.”

  “Sheep. It’s sheep.”

  “Pig. Pig pig pig. Big-time, big-deal businessmen. They make a big deal and they stay in a pig house. Pig time. Pig deal. Pig guys.”

  “Annette.”

  “Pig!”

  Ransom leaned over and kissed her neck. “Once we finish this we’ll have lots of money. Then we can go anywhere.”

  “We go now.”

  “We have to wait for Ian.”

  “Ian. Always Ian. Ian Ian Ian Ian—”

  Ransom clapped a hand over her mouth and she bit him.

  She resumed the chant, her voice rising until she lashed out at Ransom with her arms and legs. When Ransom tried to cram the blanket into her mouth, she kneed him.

  He got a handful of her hair and rolled her off the pallet. He thumped her head, hard, against the wooden floor. She stopped struggling and began to cry.

  After a while she said, “Do you love me?”

  Ransom said that he did.

  “Do you love me more than Ian?”

  “Do I sleep with Ian?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  He wondered if she really believed this, then decided that it was shorthand for her jealousy of Ransom’s friendship with Ian. They had known each other in college, not close friends, Ian being two classes ahead of him, but Ransom had admired Ian’s reckless vitality, feeling himself to be far more cautious than he wished to be. While most of his classmates prepared for gainful employ, Ian seemed to be training for adventure. Ian took his junior year off to travel Asia, and though Ransom never told him so, it was his example and the articles he sent back to the college paper that inspired Ransom to do the same thing. They had run into each other, a year after Ransom graduated, at a pie shop on Pig Alley in Katmandu, and after Annette ditched Ransom they had started to hang out together, eventually travelling south through India to Goa, where they rented a beach hut for the winter. Annette had reappeared—everybody showed up for Christmas in Goa. In Annette’s version of Katmandu, Ransom had cruelly abandoned her, and when she moved in with them she made him promise he would never run out on her again. For a few weeks everything was fine. Ian liked Annette and Annette liked Ian, to the point that Ransom felt almost like the third party, their dispositions curiously complementary: Ian believing in the power of his own will to shape the world to his needs, and in the inherent value of his own desires; Annette profoundly fatalistic, what Ransom later saw as a junkie mentality, acting as if nothing she did mattered, and therefore she might as well do anything she pleased. They shared a belief in the primacy of their inclinations. At first, Ransom considered them kindred spirits, but then Annette had turned petulant and jealous of Ian, quizzing Ransom with hypothetical situations in which he had to choose between the two of them.

  Now Ian was somewhere on the other side of the Hindu Kush trying to score some dope, and Ransom said to Annette, “lan’s not my type.”

  “What is your type?” she demanded.

  “French, female, blond and manic.”

  “What’s manic? C’est manie?”

  “Sexy. It means very sexy.”

  The next day Annette stayed in bed complaining of cramps. Ransom went to Peshawar to check on bus schedules. When he got back Annette was high. He could see it in the way she greeted him, giddy and languorous, and in the slight drop in register in her voice. She’d had a habit for two months in Goa, and he knew the signs.

  “Where did you get the stuff?”

  “Come hold me,” she said.

  “Where did you get it?” Even as he asked, he didn’t know why he bothered. The point was, she had it. But he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Only a little bit,” she said. “To make the sickness go away.” This was her way, calling the disease the cure.

  She nodded off before sundown. He stayed with her through the next morni
ng. By noon she was sweating and trembling. He held out until three, when he could no longer stand to watch her. She told him she’d bought the stuff from the Pathan who’d helped them that day. Ransom went to find him, and returned an hour later with her fix. There would be time to straighten her out when this business was all over.

  Ransom went outside the moment she started to tie off. He bought it, but he would not watch her put the needle in her arm. He looked out over the barren gray peaks. The afternoon sun cast crisp, angular shadows. There was no vegetation in sight. To the west, the road threaded its way between the jaws of the pass. Three eastbound vehicles crawled like beetles toward the bright mosaic of the town. Possibly Ian was in one of them. Ransom wanted to think so. But he felt that a landscape like this didn’t have anything very encouraging to say about the fate of individuals.

  16

  “Your Cheating Heart” was on the jukebox and Miles Ryder sang along, sitting on the bar displaying his new boots, when Ransom came in.

  “This weather is getting me down,” Miles said.

  “It’s bound to get worse.”

  “I don’t think I can take another rainy season.” Miles raised his leg, hooked his ankle over his knee, and brushed repeatedly at his boot heel, although it was clean. “The baby isn’t born yet and the house already feels crowded. Akiko never complains, but just looking at her makes me uncomfortable.” He let go of his foot; the boot banged loudly against the bar. “You coming from practice?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I could understand if you were going to use it. On DeVito-san, say.” He jumped down from the bar to answer the phone. Ransom ordered a cup of tea. When Miles came back, Ransom asked him if he was faithfully adhering to the terms of their skiing wager.

  “Didn’t you see the sign over the door: Ladies not welcome? I catch one whiff of gardenia cologne and I run in the other direction. Why are you looking at me like that? Whatever happened to trust?”

  “Good question. You haven’t seen Marilyn?”

  Miles shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe it’s my breath.” He took off his hat and stroked the feather in the band, then looked toward the door. “Here comes our favorite satori hound,” he said.