The Shattered Lens

by Jonathan Alpeyrie

  Then I dropped off the radar completely.

  So when my friend Aaron called him he was already braced for bad news.

  “Hello.”

  “Jean-Louis?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Aaron. I’m calling about Jonathan. He’s been captured.”

  “What?”

  “I’m in touch with his fixer. They think he’s a spy. I don’t know much more than that . . .”

  My father was stunned, frozen on the street, on the verge of collapsing. He described it as being hit by lightning. The traffic sailed past him and the world became strangely silent. As soon as he hung up the phone, the horns on Fifth Avenue were blaring again. All he could do for a few moments was stand on the sidewalk and look in several directions, wondering, What do I do now? Passersby must have thought he was lost. Then he got back on the phone, canceled his appointment, and walked back home.

  * * *

  AARON SCHUMM WAS my closest friend in New York. He initially started worrying after he’d sent a few WhatsApp messages and didn’t see the double check mark indicating his message had been received. But he just assumed I’d lost my phone.

  After a few more days, when I was supposed to be back in New York, Aaron tried to contact me via Facebook. But on my Facebook wall he saw a post from a mutual friend, a woman from Holland. “I’m in Paris. Where are you?” Below her query there was a reply from Alfarook, my fixer: “Jonathan has been kidnapped.”

  Aaron was in a taxi that morning going to the airport and he started messaging frantically from the backseat. Alfarook wrote that there had been four or five people in the car when it was ambushed. He said they kept me because they thought I was a spy.

  Aaron told Alfarook to immediately delete the Facebook post. After that he sent a quick message to our Dutch friend not to post anything else.

  * * *

  AFTER AARON CALLED, it occurred to my father as he was walking home that I’d given him the phone number of Robert Doueihy, the Lebanese Christian Maronite businessman whose family had long-standing political connections. Doueihy was my contact in Lebanon and I’d given my father his number in case something happened.

  But my father didn’t want to call him from the street, so he waited until he got home.

  “Hello, Mr. Doueihy?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m Jean-Louis Alpeyrie, the father of Jonathan, the photojournalist.”

  “Yes, yes, Jonathan. Has something happened?”

  “Well, it seems he’s been abducted. We’ve heard from his fixer that his car was ambushed.”

  “We’ll find out where he is,” Doueihy said. “But he should be fine.”

  Soon after, Doueihy called back and told my father that I was still in Yabroud as far as his people knew, but he’d try to get more information.

  My father immediately called my mother, who was living in Mexico. Even after their divorce they remained friends and communicated regularly.

  “Daniela,” he said straightaway, “Jonathan’s been kidnapped.” My mother never tolerated people beating around the bush when they had something important to say, so there was never any point in preparing her.

  “I sensed it. I told him not to go,” she said. “I had a premonition that something wrong would happen. He never listens.”

  After some initial venting, my mother shifted into her more characteristic pragmatic mode. The one trait of hers I always tried to emulate was her ability to survive in harsh conditions. She’d overcome a lot of hardships, and I liked to think that I’d inherited some of her fierce grit in the face of adversity. Instinctively, she felt that my social media presence should be wiped as clean as possible, so she called Aaron, who was very tech-savvy, to have him delete everything he could.

  Several days later, Doueihy called back and told my father that I was in the hands of the Free Syrian Army, in a Christian area, so I should be okay. In one of the subsequent emails Doueihy explained to my father that my captors thought I was a spy.

  I’m not sure how much Doueihy really knew at that point. I assume he got his information from the Doctor and his people.

  * * *

  FOR THE FIRST FOUR DAYS my father hardly slept and just stayed at home. His wife, Ann, my stepmother, was in Boston, where my sister Lauren had had some surgery. My father cloistered himself in his uptown apartment alone with Sam, a pet cat who was dying of cancer. Eating was more the act of injecting fuel into his system so he could keep moving. He prepared food for Sam, feeding him twice a day and making sure he had water and took his medication.

  But my father’s entire routine revolved around waiting for Doueihy to call him back, respond to an email, tell him something, anything that might release him from the paralysis of uncertainty.

  Sam could not walk well because of his cancer. But he seemed to take it stoically, so my father tried to absorb some of that stoicism. After a couple of days, the cat came to sleep on his bed, as if he understood something was amiss. During those first few days, when there was only the two of them, they communicated silently about their own pain. This was very unusual for my father, a thoroughly social animal who loves being with other people and has made a successful career out of finding the right people for the right position. The cat’s presence was no doubt a comfort to him, although minute by minute, as he watched Sam struggle through his last days, it must have been hard not to project that same fate onto me.

  * * *

  WHEN ANN CAME HOME after four days she could see my father was very optimistic about news from Doueihy’s emails—overly optimistic—and she tried to keep him on an even keel. When things took a turn for the worse, Ann kept a more cautiously optimistic tone.

  At that time my father was working at Heidrick & Struggles, an executive search firm. He’d go to the office, where he tried to carry on as if everything were normal. But some of his colleagues, especially his secretary, had already noticed a change.

  The H&S office was in Midtown, so he’d often go to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue to pray. As he liked to say, there are no atheists in foxholes, and he felt the need to pray for me to be released. As time went by, though, it occurred to him that many had died who were just as important to their families as I was, and the modality of his prayers shifted: “Help me stay strong and all in one piece to get my son out.”

  * * *

  SLOWLY TECHNOLOGY INVADED his private space. He slept one hour at a time, with his BlackBerry always close at hand to check if there were any messages from Doueihy. All his daily activities became consumed by events unfolding on the other side of the world, events shrouded by huge lacunas of information and muddied with the inevitable miscommunications and lies every war seems to breed like tumors. And as Sam’s tumors quietly metastasized, my father’s BlackBerry became the center of his life. It never left his hand and would rest on the night table while he slept. My father’s entire universe was held suspended by the gentle vibration indicating a call or an email.

  What kept going through his mind was: Why? Why did I let Jonathan go? How could I have let him pursue the road he had chosen years ago?

  One of my father’s many friends was the French philosopher and anthropologist René Girard, who had spent the latter part of his life teaching at Stanford University and had a significant impact on his view of the world. Girard had developed a number of ideas about the scapegoat. He theorized that all human societies began through acts of violence, and that we are defined primarily by our ability to control our violence: through religions, philosophies, ethics, and so on.

  In biblical times a goat would be sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it. My father tried hard not to extend that analogy to his only son, but at times he couldn’t help it. In a society morbidly obsessed with the visual image and other superficial trappings, it was easy to imagine—especially in his state of near-constant anxiety—that I had been called upon to go into the wilderness with m
y camera as a scapegoat.

  Such mental tangents would often get the best of him and start pulling him into a tailspin, so he simply went back to his BlackBerry for distraction.

  * * *

  FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, news about my whereabouts—or lack of any—kept my parents, sister, and the few friends who knew about my kidnapping on an emotional roller coaster. Initially the information kept changing. At first they were told I’d been taken because I was assumed to be a spy. In that case everything would get cleared up. Doueihy then told my father that I was in the “Christian mountains.” Over time, however, the tone of the emails changed. (Doueihy didn’t want to be called on the phone unless the circumstances were exceptional. My father called him anyway.) The communication became more negative: “He was somewhere else”; “He had not listened to good advice and had gone where he shouldn’t have”; “My people are looking for him.”

  Finally, after several weeks, Doueihy sent an email confirming their fears. I had indeed been kidnapped. It was clear that I was being held hostage. The only good news was that Doueihy said I’d been abducted by a “friendly” group of the Free Syrian Army in Yabroud.

  Occasionally my father wasn’t sure whether to trust Doueihy, but that only led to the harsh realization that he had no choice. His Lebanese contact was the only one with any concrete information.

  At one point Doueihy told him that they could get me out by means of a humanitarian convoy on its way to a destination just a few miles from where I was being held. From there I’d be brought to Lebanon. He never really explained the details of how that would happen, but my father wanted desperately to believe it was feasible.

  He waited all night, hoping to find out in the morning that I was free. But instead, he got word that it hadn’t worked out.

  * * *

  THE GOVERNMENT CONTACTS ADDED to the roller-coaster ride. At first it was the Americans. My father and Ann were both at home when a call came from the American embassy in Jordan. The caller claimed to be an FBI agent. Ann refused to say anything. She was suspicious for any number of reasons, but especially because she assumed that the FBI only handled domestic cases.

  “I don’t know who you are,” she said. “You say you’re FBI, I don’t know. If you give me your phone number I can check and then call you back.”

  Everything seemed legitimate, and they confirmed that yes, Jonathan had been kidnapped. Initially they didn’t provide much help, but then the FBI called and came to see my father. They sent an agent, a woman who came with another female colleague. The two of them debriefed him, asking him all sorts of questions: who knew what . . . who had contacted him . . . He told them what he knew, but he was basically in the dark about so many things. And the FBI didn’t propose any particular action.

  My father was surprised that the State Department wasn’t handling the case. As far as he could tell, the department didn’t even make any effort. It was all in the hands of the FBI, and he couldn’t understand why the FBI would be involved. It didn’t seem logical, not even to Ann, who was born and raised in the United States and whose father had been in the military.

  Then the French made contact. A woman called from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, known more commonly as the Quai d’Orsay. Her name was Mila Jubin, the same woman who spoke to me on the phone when I was in Beirut. She got Ann on the phone, who went through the same routine as with the FBI, calling back only when she was certain it was legitimate. At that moment my father had just come back home from taking a walk outside, so he called the number and wound up talking to Jubin.

  * * *

  AT MORE OR LESS the same time, he started to get all kinds of calls from people who had heard about my capture, like the head of Polaris Images, the agency I was working for. There was also a well-known British journalist who wanted to help, saying he had some contacts in the area. He put my father in touch with a man in Lebanon who would regularly cross the border into Syria to bring medical supplies to the people in the war zones. But this Lebanese man seemed like the kind of person who keeps telling you what he thinks you want to hear. My father mentioned the man to Jubin and she had one of the Arab-speakers on her team call the man up, pretending to be speaking on my father’s behalf. She got back to my father the same day and confirmed his intuition, “You can talk to him as much as you want, but bear in mind that he serves no purpose. He’ll tell you whatever he thinks will make you happy.”

  The only person who seemed to have any leverage in that wasp’s nest I’d fallen into was Doueihy. And Doueihy told my father not to talk too much. But he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure about Doueihy, either, so he asked Jubin. The Quai d’Orsay certainly knew Doueihy—everybody knew Robert Doueihy—and agreed that if any civilian could contact and convince the people holding me, it was him.

  My father also called the FBI regularly about his contacts. They acknowledged them, but nothing more—unlike the French, who were more adept at interacting with the Levantine mentality.

  * * *

  GRADUALLY, MY FATHER FELL into a routine: eating very little, going to the office two or three times a week (but doing nothing). Fortunately his secretary, Susan, was one of the few people who knew what was going on. She was practically telepathic and had guessed there was something horribly wrong, so he had to tell her.

  Ann played a key role in forcing him to do things. She kept him optimistic whenever she sensed the dark clouds approaching. Just when my father’s emotions were about to reach a critical mass that resulted in paralysis, she’d ease him back into a functional mode with dialogues that always followed the same pattern:

  “Jonathan’s not coming back,” he’d say. “They’re going to kill him. I can’t take it anymore.”

  “No, he’ll make it. He’s been through difficult situations before and has always come back. He knows how to handle situations like this and find his way with people, no matter how foreign they may be.”

  “I’m not sure. This time it’s different, much worse. He won’t come out alive.”

  “You’re wrong. And as usual you’re worrying yourself sick. Take a walk, do something.”

  “What difference will it make?”

  “Just remember, if the worst happens, you still have a wife, a daughter, family and friends who love you. If something were to happen to you, Lauren would be devastated for life.”

  “What about Jonathan?”

  “Jonathan will survive more easily there than you will by fretting at home. Remember, he’s someone who everyone likes. He naturally wins people over. It’s second nature for him. His captors will inevitably like him. They’ll grow attached to him. He’ll make himself useful. That’s how he is. And he’ll make it . . . Now go for a walk. It’ll do you good.”

  Ann’s assessment, in the end, turned out to be accurate. And if there was one redeeming aspect to my experience, it was a fuller realization of that “second nature” of mine, the ability to win people over without trying, especially people capable of violence.

  * * *

  AFTER FIVE OR SIX WEEKS my father’s world shifted again with news from Doueihy. They wanted money: $750,000. My father immediately offered to pay, but Doueihy refused out of hand. “That’s not how things work here. If you accept immediately, then they’ll pull back and ask for more,” he said. “Let me negotiate with them. We’ll start at two hundred thousand.”

  My father insisted he was ready to pay any sum, sell everything he owned and borrow money on top of that to pay my ransom—even stuff the cash inside a golden calf and lay it at the feet of the commander. But Doueihy was adamant; it would only make matters more difficult. “You don’t know how these people think.”

  As usual, my father deferred.

  * * *

  THE NEGOTIATIONS OVER MONEY dragged on for weeks. My father moved from hope to despair on a daily basis, often within the span of minutes. He felt paralyzed and needed to do something, take an action. So he decided to fly to Lebanon on his own and see what could be done. B
ut as soon as he floated the idea to Doueihy, the response was unequivocal: “No. You will be miserable and useless. Stuck in a hotel room. At best you’ll only bother us. At worst, someone will try to kidnap you, too.”

  The paralysis was aggravated by the need to maintain secrecy. At one point Aaron, with whom my father had been in contact at least once a week, suggested they use an acquaintance of Aaron’s who worked at a major television network to publicize my disappearance. Both my mother and father were totally against it. They’d been warned by Doueihy, the Quai d’Orsay, and the FBI that any kind of publicity would only disrupt the extremely delicate negotiations in progress. Another one who suggested going public was J. P. Pappis, the founder of Polaris Images. My mother practically ate him alive from her redoubt in Mexico.

  It was one of the few times that she dealt directly with one of the pieces involved in the puzzle. She’s a person who has always wandered through life on the margins. That’s where she’s most comfortable. She spoke every day to my father, but let him deal with Doueihy and the government because she knew she was incapable of being diplomatic. She was a tough woman, tempered by a difficult childhood and adolescence, and it instilled in her a take-no-prisoners approach to life. But that approach was a perfect counterbalance for my father. He called her almost every day and her reaction was always controlled, matter-of-fact. She absorbed everything he told her coldly, analytically. “This sounds right . . . That’s unrealistic . . . It’s not going to happen . . . This guy sounds crazy or dangerous . . . He’s lying to you . . .”