by James Siegel
Joanna, who’d been trying to grab some sleep on the ripped and dirty mattress, immediately woke and lurched to a standing position. The lullaby continued, seeped through the door like the irresistible aroma of a longed-for food.
The door opened.
Joanna put her knuckles to her mouth in an effort to stifle a sob, but she was only half successful.
“Please,” she said. “Please.”
Galina. Standing there with Joelle nestled against her chest.
“Please . . . Galina . . .”
Galina entered the room as someone locked the door behind her.
She met Joanna in the middle of the room, gently placing Joelle into her already reaching arms. Paul believed that gentleness like that couldn’t be faked. That Galina was someone who loved children even as she kidnapped their parents, a dichotomy he found hard to reconcile.
There was no such dichotomy with Joanna. She folded her daughter against her chest and silently wept.
Paul stood next to her with his arm around her shoulders, the circle made whole once again. He couldn’t help looking outside the circle. At Galina. He wanted her to look back —he thought that might be hard for her to do. He was wrong.
She met his gaze with perfect equanimity.
She even smiled, as if she’d just taken Joelle for another walk around the block and was ready to resume her duties as übernurse.
“See,” Joanna said to Paul. She’d rolled up the left leg of Joelle’s blue stretchie and was pointing at an amber beauty mark just below the knee. Right where she’d said it was.
“Joelle,” she whispered, and kissed her daughter’s face. “Can she stay with us tonight?” she asked Galina. “Please?”
Galina nodded.
“Thank you,” Joanna said.
And Paul thought how quickly captives become so grateful for any kindness from their captors. Please and thank you to the people who’ve snatched you from the world and locked you away in an airless room.
Galina reached into the pocket of her loose black shift. She brought out a baby bottle already filled with thick yellowish formula, and two diapers.
Paul took the bottle from her; he couldn’t help remembering that the last time he’d accepted liquid refreshments from her, they’d been laced with escopolamina .
Galina turned to leave.
Paul wouldn’t let her go without some acknowledgment of what she’d done to them. Some declaration of responsibility, even if it was defiant or angry or unpleasant.
“How many people have you done this to, Galina?” he said.
Galina turned back. “It isn’t your country,” she said slowly. “You don’t understand.”
Before Paul could answer her, before he could tell her that understanding and kidnapping didn’t belong in the same universe, much less the same sentence, she turned around and knocked twice on the door.
The boy opened it and let her out.
JOANNA UNDRESSED JOELLE.
She looked over every inch of her body for any bruises, scratches, or suspicious discolorations. Any evidence at all that they’d hurt her daughter. Apparently not. Paul could sense the joy Joanna was experiencing just to be touching Joelle again, feeling her heartbeat, stroking her hair.
“It’s going to fall out, you know,” Joanna said softly.
“What?”
“Her hair. It comes in like this when they’re born, then they lose it.” Joelle’s hair was ink black and soft as angora.
“When does it grow back?” Paul asked, even as he wondered if they would be around to see that. He sensed that Joanna might be asking herself the same thing.
“Six months, I think,” she answered. “Around that.”
There was something surreal about their conversation. As if they were having it back home in their apartment, two new parents just like any other new parents, wondering aloud at the miracle that’s their daughter. As if the future stretched limitlessly ahead of them—preschool and kindergarten and grade school. Graduations, confirmations, and birthday celebrations. Girlfriends and boyfriends. Diaries and dance lessons.
Paul understood. They’d have this one night before he left. They’d treat it as normally as possible.
PAUL AND JOANNA SENSED THAT IT WAS MORNING WITHOUT actually knowing it. Their watches had been taken, the windows were boarded up tight. But their bodies had grown attuned to the different times of day, like blind people whose other senses compensate for lost sight. The morning felt different than the night.
This morning felt different than other mornings.
In a little while Paul would be leaving Joanna behind. He’d be leaving the country and leaving her here .
She’d fallen asleep with Joelle in her arms, and sometime later he’d fallen asleep with Joanna in his. When he opened his eyes, it took him several minutes to realize that Joanna was also awake—he could tell by her breathing, neither one evidently ready to face the other.
Not yet.
Then Joanna said, “Good morning.”
“Back to you.”
His arms were numb from holding her all night, but he didn’t dare move them. It might be the last time for a while. It might be the last time, period.
“At least they brought us Joelle,” she whispered. “Maybe they’re not so bad. They didn’t have to do that.”
“They weren’t being kind, Joanna,” he whispered back.
“No? Then why’d they do it?”
“To remind me, I think.”
“Of what?”
“What’s at stake. What I’ll lose if I don’t get the drugs there—if I fuck up. I think they wanted to make her real again for me. That’s all.”
Joanna pressed her back against him, as if trying to burrow right up inside of him.
“Paul,” she said slowly, “if you get there and decide to tell someone, do it. I’ll understand. Maybe they can be negotiated with. Maybe you can give them something in return.”
“Remember the pictures we saw on the airport wall—the deputy mayor of Medellín? They found his head two blocks from the car bomb. I think that’s pretty much how they negotiate. I’m going to deliver the drugs and then they’re going to make that call and they’re going to let you go. You and Joelle.”
They lay there silently for a while.
Then she said:
“Sometimes I think we’ve been pretty unlucky. Sometimes I think just the opposite. We couldn’t have a baby—that was tough, the toughest thing I’ve ever gone through. Before this. I mean who has to go through this ? We’re a newspaper story now, aren’t we? But then, I’ve loved you. All this time I have. And I think you’ve loved me too—despite everything, I do. And that’s lucky, isn’t it? So who knows.”
It was her good-bye to him.
Just in case.
He was trying to think of his good-bye. He was trying to string together the right words to convey the ravenous ache that was gnawing at his insides. He was trying to articulate hope. He was trying to compose himself; to say good-bye without breaking down. There was a shuffle outside the door.
Then it swung open and Arias was there.
FIFTEEN
Retardo.
One of the eight million Spanish words he still didn’t know. Sometimes Spanish words sounded like English words. The trick was to consider their context.
The context here was the huge black departure board in El Dorado Airport. And the words and symbols that preceded it.
Flt#345 a JFK. Nueva York.
That gave him some useful and solid clues.
Only Paul was attempting to ignore those clues. He was being willfully ignorant, a detective on the take who has no intention of putting two and two together.
He’d swallowed the thirty-six condoms two hours ago in a house outside Bogotá.
He’d been driven to the airport by Pablo, the very man who’d greeted him here just over a week ago.
He’d made it through security and customs.
The flight was retardo .
There was another clue here—one that was practically impossible to ignore. His gate companions. They were groaning, muttering, shaking their heads at each other with that same-old, same-old look of resignation.
Paul got up from his chair. He walked over to the check-in desk. He could feel the condoms sitting inside him with every step. It felt as if he’d swallowed a basketball. A lethal jump shot from Kobe, ready to drop through the net and kill off a possible rally in its tracks.
“Excuse me,” Paul said to the winsome-looking Colombian woman behind the airline counter.
“Yes, sir?” she said. She had that look —the one you saw at return counters on the day after Christmas. Defensive fortifications being readied for the coming onslaught.
“Is everything okay with the flight?”
He knew that everything wasn’t okay with the flight, of course.
If everything was okay with the flight, the word retardo wouldn’t be up there on the departure board. His fellow travelers wouldn’t be uttering collective groans of frustration. But until the woman confirmed this, he’d stay dumb. He’d stick to the timetable in his head—the one that had him arriving in JFK approximately four and a half hours from now, and arriving at that house in Jersey City two hours later.
“The flight’s delayed, sir.”
Suddenly, the only thing that felt heavier than his stomach was his heart. It sank like a stone.
There was still one more question to ask.
“How long ?”
“We don’t know. We’ll make an announcement when we know more, sir.”
Paul felt like making an announcement himself. I’m carrying thirty-six condoms filled with cocaine inside my stomach, and if I don’t get them out of me soon, they’ll dissolve and kill me.
Then Arias will kill my wife and daughter.
A Colombian policeman was standing between gates. He was smoking and watching the legs and asses of every passing female—an equal opportunity leerer.
If you decide to tell someone, do it, Joanna had said. I’ll understand .
What an easy thing to do. To talk. To tell.
He would unburden himself to the policeman, who’d stop scoping out the passing women and bring Paul to the nearest hospital, where they’d flush the drugs from his stomach. They’d take a report from him, including a full description of the kidnappers. They’d arrest Pablo and Galina.
How easy was that?
Only this was a Latin American country with an inflationary economy. Where everything was nominally expensive, but in actuality, cheap. Life, for instance. Life was cheap here. Joanna’s was dirt cheap. If he opened his mouth, he was pretty sure he’d be closing hers forever.
The policeman threw the glowing butt of his cigarette onto the floor, where he ground it out with an impressive black boot.
And then walked away.
Paul sat.
Every fifteen minutes or so he got up and approached the check-in desk, where the Colombian woman he’d already talked to scattered for cover. She always seemed to find something to do, check the flight manifest or align the tickets into a neat little pile. He was getting on her nerves, an annoying suitor who refused to take no for an answer.
“We don’t know anything yet,” she answered the second time he inquired when the plane would leave. He noticed she’d pretty much dropped the sir .
“I have to get to New York for an important meeting. I can’t be late. Do you understand?”
Yes, she understood. But she didn’t know anything, so if he would please take a seat again and wait for an announcement?
Fifteen minutes after waiting for an announcement that didn’t come, he was back again. Then fifteen minutes after that.
“Look,” she said, “I’ve already told you. We don’t have a report yet.”
“Well, is the plane here? You can tell me if the plane’s here, can’t you?”
“If you’ll just have a seat, I’ll make an announcement when they tell us something.”
He didn’t want a seat. He wanted answers. “Who’s they ?”
“Excuse me?”
“Who’s this mysterious they ? The they that’s going to tell you something?”
“Please sit down.”
“I’m just asking you a question. I’m trying to find out how long I’m going to be sitting here. I’d like a clue, a guess, something . Is that too much to ask?”
Paul realized that his voice was louder than normal. He sensed this because several tired passengers in the waiting room had looked up from their crossword puzzles and newspapers and magazines to stare at him. They looked half alarmed and half supportive. Maybe because he was only doing what they themselves wished they were—venting a growing anger—even if he was doing it in a way that offended decorum. They’d keep their distance and silently root him on. He remembered another passenger who’d once upon a time harangued a different airline employee for information. Long ago and far away.
The woman behind this counter— Rosa, her name tag said—offered no such support.
“I told you. When they tell me something, I’ll make an announcement. Now, I have to ask you to—”
“Fine, I’ll sit down. If you tell me who they are.”
She decided to simply ignore him. She went back to her busywork as if he’d already turned around and gone back to his seat.
Paul felt something rise up his esophagus. For just a moment, he thought that a condom must have burst inside his gut, that in one moment he’d be down on the floor, drowning in his own vomit. But it wasn’t cocaine. It was rage —all the poison he’d built up over the last five days of captivity. Rage at Galina and Pablo and Arias and the man with the cigar—it all focused on this woman who was refusing to tell him if he’d get out of Colombia in time to save his wife and daughter.
“I asked you a fucking question,” Paul said. Or shouted. “I’d like a fucking answer.”
Everyone pretty much lost the supportive look. Their faces registered pure alarm. Rosa’s included. She stepped back, as if he’d physically assaulted her.
“There is no reason to use that language,” she said sharply. “You’re being abusive, and I’ll call the authorities if you don’t . . .” Paul lost track of what she was saying. Mostly because he could see several people in blue uniforms hurrying to the scene of the commotion. He wasn’t sure if they were airline employees or a Colombian SWAT team.
If the police arrest me, I won’t make the flight. This is what immediately went through his brain. The flight might be delayed and it might be taking off God knows when, but if they arrest me, I won’t be on it.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “Forgive me. I’m just under pressure because of this meeting. I’m sorry. Really.”
The blue uniforms were airline people. Three men and one woman who’d surrounded the counter in an impressive display of support. Airline people tended to stick together these days, now that they were operating on the front lines.
“Is there a problem here?” one of the men addressed Rosa.
She hesitated, then shook her head. “No, it’s all right,” she said. “Mr. Breidbart’s going back to his seat.”
Mr. Breidbart went back to his seat.
The plane was already one hour late.
He had seventeen hours left.
SIXTEEN
They were showing a comedy with Reese Witherspoon. Paul knew it was a comedy because several passengers were laughing.
He was watching the movie too. He had no idea what it was about.
Something was wrong with his stomach—other than the obvious. When he touched it, it felt tight as a bongo drum. He could play “Wipe Out” on it. He was increasingly nauseous.
I will not throw up, he told himself.
If he threw up the condoms, he’d have to swallow them again; it had been hard enough to get them down the first time. Each swallow had triggered a reflexive urge to
vomit. How had he managed it exactly? By using various and only half-successful stratagems.
First he’d pictured Joanna and Joelle sitting in that room—focused on the end benefit. That worked only for a while. So he’d changed tack, imagined each condom as a kind of local delicacy—a strange-tasting delicacy, even a repulsive one, but one that as a politically correct visitor he felt honor-bound to try.
When that didn’t work either, when he gagged and almost brought everything back up, he’d thought of them as individual doses of medicine. Something prescribed to save his life—his life and theirs.
Somehow he’d managed to get all thirty-six down.
The hard part was keeping them there.
The plane had taken off two hours behind schedule. In order to avoid an unexpected turbulence over the Caribbean, the pilot had climbed to thirty thousand feet. This would add time to the flight, the pilot explained, but better late than bumpy, he added in that neutral midwestern twang every pilot in the world seemed to speak with. He was amending the flight path with their comfort in mind.
Paul’s comfort was in negative integers.
Negative numbers had always fascinated him. They were the dark side of the moon, the antimatter of the numerical universe that he called home. He was traveling through this universe now.
“Are you all right?” the man next to him asked. Evidently, he wasn’t watching the Reese Witherspoon movie. He was watching Paul. Paul looked weird.
“Just a little nauseous,” Paul answered.
The man seemed to pull back. Somehow he’d increased the physical distance between them without actually moving. Paul understood—nausea was the last word you wanted to hear during a long flight. Next to bomb, of course.
One of his industry’s standard jokes: Did you hear about the actuary who brought a fake bomb onto a plane? He wanted to decrease the chances there’d be another bomb on the plane.
Ha, ha.
“You want me to call the flight attendant?” the man asked warily.
