by James Siegel
Had Riojas been there in person?
Had he gotten another one of those calls in the middle of a dinner, coolly whispered in his wife’s ear that he had urgent business to attend to? Had he smiled, rolled up his sleeves, walked in on a bound and terrified Claudia, just like he had four years before? It’s impossible to say.
But Galina saw him there.
When she pictured it, as she did over and over and over again, dulled by alcohol, pumped full of whatever pills she’d managed to wheedle from yet another doctor, Riojas was always there. Wielding the knife. Spilling the acid. Choking the life out of her daughter.
He was always there.
WHEN GALINA FINISHED, JOANNA COULDN’T THINK OF ANYTHING TO say. She sat in stunned silence.
It wasn’t until Galina stood up to leave, till she whispered good-bye and turned to the door, that Joanna realized there was a missing piece of the story.
“Sofía?” Joanna said, hesitant to ask because she was afraid to hear Galina’s answer. “What happened to your granddaughter?”
Galina stopped just before the door. “Dead,” she said without turning around. “Like her mother.”
There were other questions—how had their deaths led Galina to FARC? But Joanna didn’t ask. If she thought about it hard enough, she could probably fill in the blanks herself.
After Galina left, Joanna lay on the floor and curled her body around her daughter, as if to protect her from fatal harm.
THIRTY-SEVEN
From the outside it looked like a taxi garage. Dial-a-Taxi, it said in big yellow block letters.
Apparently not.
For one thing there were no taxis inside.
There were no taxi drivers.
There were dark hallways that seemed to lead nowhere. There was a big room with faint oil stains on the floor. Maybe it had been a taxi garage once, but not now.
This was where the bird-watcher took him.
He’d been escorted down his apartment stairway with the bird-watcher’s hand on his arm, then bundled into a car with gray-tinted windows and driven outside the city by a faceless chauffeur. Queens, Paul thought—that vast unknown that Manhattanites traversed on their way to the East End, only stopping for gas or the occasional Mets game.
“You don’t watch birds,” Paul said to him sometime during the ride.
“No,” the man said. “I watch other things.”
IT TOOK PAUL A WHILE TO UNDERSTAND THAT HE WAS BEING interrogated.
They were asking questions and it seemed as if he was answering them. Yes, there were two of them. After a while he noticed that one of the men always stayed out of sight and directly behind him—the two of them switching off like beach-volleyball players rotating between net and serve. He wondered if this was a tactic meant to scare him. One of them hiding behind him, doing God knows what. If so, he felt like telling them they needn’t bother—he was scared enough already.
When they got to the garage, the bird-watcher had slipped on a blue vinyl jacket. No, slipped on was too casual a description. He cloaked himself in it, like a Masters champion displaying the green jacket.
This jacket had DEA prominently displayed in white letters, each half a foot tall. Paul imagined that was so there’d be no mistaking who was bursting through the front door of some walk-up in Spanish Harlem. Apparently, the bird-watcher hadn’t felt the need to announce his affiliation when he’d burst into Paul’s Upper West Side co-op.
“Know what this spells, Paul?” the bird-watcher asked him.
“Yes,” Paul said. “Drug Enforcement Agency.”
“Wrong.”
“D . . . E . . .”
“Wrong.”
“I thought DEA is—”
“Wrong. This jacket spells Paul is fucked.”
Yes, Paul thought, okay. “Do I get to call a—?”
“You know why it spells that, Paul?” the bird-watcher interrupted him. “Can you guess?”
“No. Yes.”
“No. Yes. Which is it?”
“Excuse me. Can I call a lawyer?”
“Sure you can call a lawyer. How about Miles Goldstein? He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?”
Paul didn’t answer. The bird-watcher had shed his glasses, and with them any suggestion he was involved in the gentle and scholarly pursuit of ornithology.
I watch other things.
“Paul, I asked you a question. Perhaps you’re not familiar with the dynamics of DEA interrogation. That’s okay. I’ll explain. We ask. You answer. It’s pretty simple. So what do you say—we clear on this?”
Paul nodded.
“Great. Terrific. So what did I ask you before? Hey, Tom, you remember what I asked Paul?” He was addressing the man lurking behind him. Paul turned to peek, but immediately felt the man’s arm on his shoulder forcefully turning him back.
“You asked him if Miles Goldstein was a lawyer,” Tom said.
“Yes,” Paul answered. “He’s a lawyer.”
“Wrong,” the bird-watcher said.
“He’s an adoption—”
“Wrong.”
“We went to him because—”
“Wrong. Miles Goldstein is not a lawyer.”
Paul shrugged, stuttered—he felt like the dumb and picked-on student unable to divine the right answer.
“Miles Goldstein was a lawyer. Was. His brains are splattered all over his home office. But you know that, Paul. Do we have to review the dynamics of DEA interrogation again?”
“No.”
“No? Okay, Miles Goldstein was a lawyer. What else was Miles Goldstein? Besides a cocksucking Jew bastard. You think Jews have infiltrated the corridors of power, Paul? Do you think they’ve co-opted our foreign policy? Hijacked the banks, corrupted our corporations, polluted our bloodline? You think that, Paul?”
“No.”
“No? It’s okay, Paul—we’re just shooting the shit. You can tell me—some of your best friends are Jews, yada yada yada . . . but come on, you mean to tell me you don’t curse the Yids every time you open the paper? You think Osama picked Jew York because he hates the Yankees?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, sure, you don’t know. But you can guess. You can have a sneaking suspicion. Come on, Paul: Jews—yea or nay?”
“Nay,” Paul said, surrendering to peer pressure. He wanted the bird-watcher to smile at him, pat him on the back, hail-fellow-well-met. He wanted to get out of this garage and save his wife.
The blow to the back of his neck drove his face straight into the table. He came up sputtering blood.
“Paul. Paul . . .” The bird-watcher slowly shook his head, but the image became increasingly blurred—Paul’s eyes were tearing up. “I’m surprised at you. Tom is a Jew. You offended him deeply. Why would you want to go and insult Tom like that?”
Paul tried to tell him he didn’t mean it, he was just trying to be liked. He was in too much pain to speak. Initial numbness had given way to a searing and excruciating agony. Thick drops of blood were leaking onto the table.
“Try to avoid offending us from here on, Paul. Just a word of advice, okay? One friend to another. Me, I’m the calm type, but Tom’s been up on more brutality charges than the LAPD. Now, where we? What else was Miles Goldstein?”
He got Paul a tissue, then waited patiently until Paul cleared enough blood from his throat to answer.
“I don’t know,” Paul whispered. “He was a kind of drug dealer, I think.”
“Ya think?” The bird-watcher smiled, but it wasn’t the kind of smile Paul had been seeking. No.
“Yeah, Miles Goldstein was a drug dealer. You’re right. Absolutely. Who did the dirty work for him? Who were his couriers?”
Me.
Paul said, “Really. I want to call my lawyer.”
“Really. You really, really want to?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“You haven’t . . . I’m supposed to get a call. You haven’t read me my rights.”
“Th
ere’s a reason for that, Paul.”
“What reason?”
“You don’t have any.”
“What?”
“See, we could read your rights to you, but you don’t have any rights. Where’ve you been? It’s Giuliani time.”
“I’m not a terrorist,” Paul said.
“No, Paul, you’re not a terrorist. You’re a mule. You’re a culero. You’re an up-the-ass FedEx package. We know what you are. But Goldstein was playing ball with those crafty little left-handers in Che Stadium. You know, FARC is a federally designated terrorist group. Yeah—they’re on the list—the one with Osama and Hezbollah. That’s why we supply Colombia with Special Ops nuts and really cool hardware. So if Goldstein was in business with terrorists and you were in business with Goldstein, well, that makes you . . . let me see, what does that make him, Tom?”
“That makes him subject to the newly drafted laws of national security. Or, as we like to say, rat-fucked by Ridge.”
“Yeah,” the bird-watcher said, “that’s about the size of it. No, Paul, you don’t get a call. You don’t get a lawyer. You don’t get three hots and a smoke. You don’t get out of here. Not unless we say so. And speaking of your fucked situation in life, I’d love to know how Miles and you walked into his office in Williamsburg and only you walked out.”
THEY PUT HIM IN A CELL, WHICH REALLY WASN’T ONE.
It didn’t have a toilet or a sink. Unlike the room in Colombia, it didn’t have a bed. It was just empty space surrounded by bare wall and what looked like a newly installed metal door.
If he wanted to lie down and sleep—and he did, desperately—he would have to lie directly on the concrete floor.
He tried, lay on his back and stared up at a single caged bulb, which didn’t appear to be shutting off anytime soon. It was enclosed in metal so he couldn’t reach up and break it, use it as a weapon, even against himself. No suicides on their watch.
Before throwing him in here they’d badgered him with questions—the majority of which he’d tried to answer. Mostly, he’d tried to explain what had happened. The kidnapping in Bogotá, the awful position in which he’d found himself, forced to choose between his wife and daughter and breaking six different federal drug statutes.
He couldn’t tell whether they believed him or whether they thought he was making it all up.
They asked him a lot of questions about Miles. Interrupted by an occasional change of pace: What school did Paul go to? What does an actuary make? Which company did Joanna work for?
Every time he mentioned his wife’s name, he felt a dull ache in the center of his chest. Everything he’d done, he’d done for them. Jo and Jo. He was no closer to freeing them. They were receding into the distance. It was as if he were pulling them up the side of a mountain, really putting his shoulder to it, only the rope kept slipping through his hands, dropping them further and further away.
AFTER A FEW HOURS IN HIS CELL THE BIRD-WATCHER CAME FOR him again.
Tom was missing in action.
“You know what really aggravates me, Paul?” the bird-watcher said. He was inhaling deeply on a Winston, holding in the smoke till the little vein in his forehead throbbed, then letting it out in a blue wispy stream.
“No,” Paul said.
“That was a rhetorical question, Paul. I appreciate you finally grasping the nuances of DEA interrogation, but I wasn’t actually seeking an answer. What really aggravates me, what sticks in my craw, is that I worked this asshole for a year and a half, and now he’s dead. A really bad case of coitus interruptus. I’ve got blue balls the size of grapefruits. Know what that feels like?”
Paul kept quiet this time.
“It doesn’t feel good, Paul. It hurts. All I’ve got to show for it is lots of free miles on American—and I’ve got to put those back into an agency pool. You believe it? All those boring trips to Bogotá watching Bruce Almighty and sitting next to shitbags like you, and I get a trip to San Juan next Christmas—if I’m lucky. And I don’t feel lucky. I mean, a year and a half and I end up with you? The last round-tripper on the Goldstein Express.”
Paul had been the last of many, the bird-watcher explained. It had taken him a long time to figure it out. He’d patiently followed the money trail. From Goldstein to Colombia and back. This close to wrapping it up, this close, and then . . .
“So what happened in his house, Paul? Monetary disagreement? Contractual dispute?”
“I told you,” Paul said. “He shot himself.”
“Maybe. Only I’m inclined not to believe you. You’ve got the bad luck to be the one left holding the bag. Sucks, doesn’t it? I need my pound of flesh, and you’re it. He shot himself? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I don’t give a shit.”
“I keep telling you, they kidnapped us. Miles set us up with a driver. And a nurse . . . Galina. She switched babies, and when we went to confront her . . .”
Paul stopped here. The whole thing sounded implausible, even to him. The bird-watcher seemed to be in no mood for any story providing Paul with even a shred of innocence. He was busy lighting another cigarette and staring off into space.
There was another reason Paul stopped speaking.
A few things were penknifed into the table. Some dirty epithets, a couple of crude drawings, and a heart cleft in two.
Paul was looking at the letter carved into the larger half of the jagged heart.
It was the letter R.
It reminded him of something.
The letters from Galina. And the granddaughter she was determined to protect at all costs.
Her father is looking for her. He won’t stop till he finds her. As you know, R has the power and means to do so.
R.
And Paul finally understood.
THIRTY-EIGHT
They called it a fault tree. The moribund boys in the loss adjuster department called it that.
When tragedy struck, something was lost, a building burned to the ground, a plane felled from the sky, a bridge collapsing into a river—you needed to apportion blame.
So you worked backward.
You created a fault tree.
You started with the twigs—all the little facts you knew, everything. Then you tried to ascertain which ones led back to the branches. To the trunk itself. If you were lucky, if you did your homework and took your time, you made it all the way back to the roots.
There was nothing much to do in his cell but clear wood, attempt to untangle the branches, and put it all back together.
That’s what he did.
He cut and pruned and sawed and snapped, and in the end he made a tree.
It began with a Colombian baby nurse.
She helped American couples flooding her country in search of instant families. A good woman really, someone who knew what it’s like to desperately want a family, because she had one once, a daughter, at least, who might’ve looked much like Joelle.
The Colombian nurse worked for an American lawyer. Maybe not all the time, a lot of the time. An adoption lawyer, sending couples who’d tried everything short of baby-snatching to a country whose first export was cocaine and second was coffee, but third was children. A country with almost as many unwanted kidnappings as unwanted kids.
This lawyer had rejected tax or corporate law and entered the ranks of legal aid, where general disillusionment had eventually led him into foreign adoptions. He put needy babies together with needy families, and he got to pat himself on the back and make a good living at the same time.
Just not good enough.
One day he picked up the phone and a tout whispered in his ear. He was off to the races. Or the hard court, the domed stadium, the baseball diamond, the hockey rink, whichever and wherever men in uniforms played games for the lure of the money, the pleasure of fans, and the deliriousness but mostly agony of the bettors.
With the lawyer it was agony.
He was a respectable man with a dirty habit. And a dangerously ballooning debt. He owed the wrong guys.
/> Back to the baby nurse in Bogotá.
Her daughter had a daughter with someone.
Let’s call him R.
Let’s imagine he was the wrong kind of person, the guy you wouldn’t want your daughter bringing home from a date. Someone dangerous and abusive. Even criminal.
Definitely criminal.
Once I thought my own daughter was safe from him. I was wrong.
Something happened to the nurse’s daughter.
She was killed, kidnapped, made to disappear, something, because suddenly, it was just the baby nurse and her granddaughter. The daughter was gone, yes, but the little girl—she survived.
Only there was a problem.
Her father is looking for her. He won’t stop till he finds her. As you know, R has the power and means to do so.
The nurse needed to act. Fast.
She needed to get her granddaughter away from R, and the only way to do that was to get her out of the country.
How?
By going to the one person who could help her. The one person who knew how to get kids out of the country because, after all, that’s what he did for a living. She appealed to the adoption lawyer for assistance. One more Colombian child he needed to help el norte.
Only this child was different. This child had a price on her head. Oddly enough, there was price dancing around the lawyer’s head too. All that money he owed to the wrong guys—the Russians with yellow teeth and CCCP tattoos on their arms.
Sure, he wrote, I’ll help. You came to the right guy. No problem.
Just one little stipulation.
Money.
Not the usual legal fees. No.
Enough to get him out of hock to the Muscovites and enable him to keep all those professional sports prognosticators in business. Lots and lots of money. And then he told her how to get it.
Here’s the deal, he told the baby nurse. Here’s how.
I send you couples looking to adopt, just like before. Every so often—not every time, not even every other time, just now and then—one of these couples will have the bad misfortune to be kidnapped. It’s endemic in your country, isn’t it? What can a lawyer do about that?
