“What do you mean?’
“I mean we do not negotiate with criminals.”
“But what about my mother?”
He sighed. “We will get her back, don’t you worry. It may take time and perhaps even a certain degree of pain”—here he reached down beneath the desk and with some effort set a two-quart pickle jar on the table before him—“but have no fear.”
Aquiles stole a look at his brother. Néstor had jammed his forefinger into his mouth and was biting down as if to snap it in two, a habit he’d developed in childhood and had been unable to break. These were not pickles floating in the clear astringent liquid.
“Yes,” the Chief said, “this is the next step. It is called proof of life.”
It took a moment for the horror to settle in.
“But these fingers—there are four of them here, plus two small toes, one great toe and a left ear—represent cases we have resolved. Happily resolved. What I’m telling you is be prepared. First you will receive the proof of life, then the demand for money.” He paused. And then his fist came down, hard, on the desktop. “But you will not pay them, no matter what.”
“I will,” Aquiles insisted. “I’ll pay them anything.”
“You won’t. You can’t. Because if you do, then every ballplayer’s family will be at risk, don’t you understand that? And, I hate to say this, but you’ve brought it on yourself. I mean, please—driving a vermilion Hummer through the streets of this town? Parading around with your gold necklaces and these disgraceful women, these putas with their great inflated tits and swollen behinds? Did you really have to go and paint your compound the color of a ripe tangerine?”
Aquiles felt the anger coming up in him, but as soon as he detected it, it was gone: the man was right. He should have left his mother where she was, left her to the respectability of poverty, should have changed his name and come home in rags wearing a beard and a false nose. He should never in his life have picked up a baseball.
“All right,” the Chief was saying, and he stood to conclude the meeting. “They call you, you call me.”
Both brothers rose awkwardly, the empty plate staring up at Aquiles like the blanched unblinking eye of accusation, the jar of horrors grinning beside it. The bodyguard poked his head in the door.
“Oh, but wait, wait, I almost forgot.” The Chief snapped his fingers once again and an assistant strode through the rear door with a cellophane package of crisp white baseballs in one hand and a Magic Marker in the other. “If you wouldn’t mind,” the Chief said. “For my son Aldo, with Best Wishes.”
She was wedged between two of the boys in the cramped backseat of the car, the heat oppressive, the stink of confinement unbearable. El Ojo sat up front beside the other boy, who drove with an utter disregard for life. At first she tried to shout out the window at pedestrians, shrieking till she thought the glass of the windshield would shatter, but the boy to her right—pinch-faced, with two rotted teeth like fangs and a pair of lifeless black eyes—slapped her and she slapped him right back, the guttersnipe, the little hoodlum, and who did he think he was? How dare he? Beyond that she remembered nothing, because the boy punched her then, punched her with all the coiled fury of his pipestem arm and balled fist and the car jolted on its springs and the tires screamed and she passed into unconsciousness.
When she came back to the world she was in a skiff on a river she’d never seen before, its waters thick as paste, all the birds and insects in the universe screaming in unison. Her wrists had been tied behind her and her ankles bound with a loop of frayed plastic cord. The ache in her jaw stole up on her, her tongue probing the teeth there and tasting her own blood, and that made her angry, furious, and she focused all her rage on the boy who’d hit her—there he was, sitting athwart the seat in the bow, crushed beneath the weight of his sloped shoulders and the insolent wedge of the back of his head. She wanted to cry out and accuse him, but she caught herself, because what if the boat tipped, what then? She was helpless. No one, not even the Olympic butterfly champion, could swim with all four limbs bound. So she lay there on the rocking floor of the boat, soaked through with the bilge, the sun lashing her as she breathed the fumes of the engine and stared up into a seared fragment of the sky, waiting her chance.
Finally, and it seemed as if they’d been on that river for days, though that was an impossibility, the engine choked on its own fumes and they cut across the current to the far bank. El Ojo—she saw now that he had been the one at the tiller—sprang out and seized a rope trailing from the branch of a jutting tree, and then the boy, the one who’d assaulted her, reached back to cut the cord at her ankles with a flick of his knife and he too was in the murky water, hauling the skiff ashore. She endured the thumps and bumps and the helpless feeling they gave her and then, when he thrust a hand under her arm to lead her up onto the bank, the best she could do was mutter, “You stink. All of you. Don’t you have any pride? Can’t you even wash yourselves? Do you wear your clothes till they rot, is that it?” And then, when that got no response: “What about your mothers—what would they think?”
They were on the bank now, El Ojo and the others taking pains to secrete the boat in the undergrowth, where they piled sticks and river-run debris atop it. The boy who had hold of her just gave her his cold vampire’s smile, the two stubs of his teeth stabbing at his lower lip. “We don’t got no mothers,” he said softly. “We’re guerrillas.”
“Hoodlums, you mean,” she snapped back at him. “Criminals, narcotraficantes, kidnappers, cowards.”
It came so quickly she had no time to react, the arm snaking out, the wrist uncoiling to bring the flat of his hand across her face, right where it had begun to bruise. And then, for good measure, he slapped her again.
“Hey, Eduardo, shithead,” El Ojo rasped, “get your ass over here and give us a hand. What do you think this is, a nightclub?”
The others laughed. Her face stung and already the flies and mosquitoes were probing at the place where it had swelled along the line of her jaw. She dropped her chin to her shoulder for protection, but she didn’t say anything. To this point she’d been too indignant to be scared, but now, with the light fading into the trees and the mud sucking at her shoes and the ugly nameless things of the jungle creeping from their holes and dens to lay siege to the night, she began to feel the dread spread its wings inside her. This was about Aquiles. About her son, the major leaguer, the pride of her life. They wanted him, wanted his money he’d worked so hard to acquire since he was a barefoot boy molding a glove out of old milk cartons and firing rocks at a target nailed to a tree, the money he’d earned by his sweat and talent—and the fame, the glory, the pride that came with it. They had no pride themselves, no human decency, but they would do anything to corrupt it—she’d heard the stories of the abductions, the mutilations, the families who’d paid ransom for their daughters, sons, parents, grandparents, even the family dog, only to pay again and again until hope gave way to despair.
But then, even as they took hold of her and began to march her through the jungle, she saw her son’s face rise before her, his portrait just as it appeared on his Topps card, one leg lifted in the windup and that little half-smile he gave when he was embarrassed because the photographer was there and the photographer had posed him. He’ll come for me, she said to herself. I know he will.
For Aquiles, the next three weeks were purgatorial. Each day he awoke sweating in the silence of dawn and performed his stretching exercises on the Turkish carpet until the maid brought him his orange juice and the protein drink into which he mixed the contents of three raw eggs, two ounces of wheatgrass and a tablespoon of brewer’s yeast. Then he sat dazed in front of the high-definition plasma TV he’d bought his mother for her forty-fifth birthday, surrounded by his children (withdrawn from school for their own protection), and the unforgivably homely but capable girl from the provinces, Suspira Salvatoros, who’d been brought in to see after their welfare in the absence of his mother. In the corner, mutte
ring darkly, sat his abuela, the electric ghost of his mother’s features flitting across her face as she rattled her rosary and picked at the wart under her right eye till a thin line of serum ran down her cheek. The TV gave him nothing, not joy or even release, each show more stupefyingly banal than the last—how could people go about the business of winning prizes, putting on costumes and spouting dialogue, singing, dancing, stirring soft-shell crabs and cilantro in a fry pan for christ’s sake, when his mother, Marita Villalba, was in the hands of criminals who refused even to communicate let alone negotiate? Even baseball, even the playoffs, came to mean nothing to him.
And then, one bleak changeless morning, the sun like a firebrick tossed in the window and all Caracas up in arms over the abduction—Free Marita was scrawled in white soap on the windows of half the cars in town—he was cracking the eggs over his protein drink when Suspira Salvatoros knocked at the door. “Don Aquiles,” she murmured, sidling into the room in her shy fumbling way, her eyes downcast, “something has come for you. A missive.” In her hand—bitten fingernails, a swell of fat—there was a single dirty white envelope, too thick for a letter and stained with a smear of something he couldn’t name. He felt as if his chest had been torn open, as if his still-beating heart had been snatched out of him and flung down on the carpet with the letter that dropped from his ineffectual fingers. Suspira Salvatoros began to cry. And gradually, painfully, as if he were bending for the rosin bag in a nightmare defeat in which he could get no one out and the fans were jeering and the manager frozen in the dugout, he bent for the envelope and clutched it to him, hating the feel of it, the weight of it, the guilt and horror and accusation it carried.
Inside was a human finger, the little finger of the left hand, two inches of bone, cartilage and flesh gone the color of old meat, and at the tip of it, a manicured nail, painted red. For a long while he stood there, weakkneed, the finger cold in the palm of his hand, and then he reverently folded it back into the envelope, secreted it in the inside pocket of his shirt, closest to his heart, and flung himself out the door. In the next moment he sprang into the car—the Hummer, and so what if it was the color of poppies and arterial blood, so much the worse for them, the desecrators, the criminals, the punks, and he was going to track them down if it was the last thing he did. Within minutes he’d reached the police headquarters and pounded up the five flights of stairs, the ashen-faced bodyguard plodding along behind him. Without a word for anyone he burst into the Chief ’s office and laid the envelope on the desk before him.
The Chief had been arrested in the act of biting into a sweet cake while simultaneously blowing the steam off a cup of coffee, the morning newspaper propped up in front of him. He gave Aquiles a knowing look, set down the cake and extracted the finger from the envelope.
“I’ll pay,” Aquiles said. “Just let me pay. Please, God. She’s all I care about.”
The Chief held the finger out before him, studying it as if it were the most pedestrian thing in the world, a new sort of pen he’d been presented by the Boys’ Auxiliary, a stick of that dried-out bread the Italians serve with their antipasto. “You will not pay them,” he said without glancing up.
“I will.” Aquiles couldn’t help raising his voice. “The minute they call, I swear I’ll give them anything, I don’t care—”
Now the Chief raised his eyes. “Your presumption is that this is your mother’s finger?”
Aquiles just stared at him.
“She uses this shade of nail polish?”
“Yes, I—I assume . . .”
“Amateurs,” the Chief spat. “We’re onto them. We’ll have them, believe me. And you—assume nothing.”
The office seemed to quaver then, as if the walls were closing in. Aquiles had begun to take deep breaths as he did on the mound when the situation was perilous, runner on first, no outs, a one-run ballgame. “My mother’s in pain,” he said.
“Your mother is not in pain. Not physical pain, at any rate.” The Chief had set the severed finger down on the napkin that cradled the sweet bun and brought the mug to his lips. He took a sip of the coffee and then set the mug down too. “This is not your mother’s finger,” he said finally. “This is not, in fact, even the finger of a female. Look at it. Look closely. This,” he pronounced, again lifting the mug to his lips, “is the finger of a man, a young man, maybe even a boy playing revolutionary. They like that, the boys. Dressing up, hiding out in the jungle. Calling themselves”—and here he let out his bitter laugh—“guerrillas.”
She was a week in the jungle, huddled over a filthy stewpot thick with chunks of carpincho, some with the hide still on it, her digestion in turmoil, the insects burrowing into her, her dress—the shift she’d been wearing when they came for her—so foul it was like a layer of grease applied to her body. Then they took her farther into the jungle, to a crude airstrip—the kind the narcotraficantes employ in their evil trade—and she was forced into a Cessna airplane with El Ojo, the boy with the pitiless eyes and an older man, the pilot, and they sailed high over the broken spine of the countryside and up into the mountains. At first she was afraid they were taking her across the border to Colombia to trade her to the FARC rebels there, but she could see by the sun that they were heading southeast, and that was small comfort because every minute they were in the air she was that many more miles from her home and rescue. Their destination—it appeared as a cluster of frame cottages with thatched roofs and the splotched yawning mouth of a dried-up swimming pool—gave up nothing, not a road or even a path, to connect it with the outside world.
The landing was rough, very rough, the little plane lurching and pitching like one of those infernal rides at the fair, and when she climbed down out of the cockpit she had to bend at the waist and release the contents of her stomach in the grass no one had thought to cut. The boy, her tormentor, the one they called Eduardo, gave her a shove from behind so that she fell to her knees in her own mess, so hurt and confused and angry she had to fight to keep from crying in front of him. And then there were other boys there, a host of them, teenagers in dirty camouflage fatigues with the machine rifles slung over their shoulders, their faces blooming as they greeted Eduardo and El Ojo and then narrowing in suspicion as they regarded her. No one said a word to her. They unloaded the plane—beer, rum, cigarettes, pornographic magazines, sacks of rice and three cartons of noodles in a cup—and then ambled over to a crude table set up in the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing, talking and joking all the while. She heard the hiss of the first beer and then a chorus of hisses as one after another they popped the aluminum tabs and pressed the cans to their lips, and she stood and gazed up at the barren sky and then let her eyes drop to the palisade of the jungle that went on unbroken as far as she could see.
Within a week, they’d accepted her. There was always one assigned to guard her, though for the life of her she couldn’t imagine why—unless she could sprout wings like a turpial and soar out over the trees she was a prisoner here just as surely as if she’d been locked away in a cell—but aside from that, they gave her free rein. Once she’d recovered from the shock of that inhuman flight, she began to poke through the dilapidated buildings, just to do something, just to keep occupied, and the first thing she found was a tin washtub. It was nothing to collect fragments of wood at the edge of the clearing and to build a fire-ring of loose stone. She heated water in the tub, shaved a bar of soap she found in the latrine, wrapped herself in the blanket they gave her and washed first her hair, then her dress. The boys were drunk on the yeasty warm beer, sporadically shooting at something in the woods until El Ojo rose in a rage from his nap and cursed them, but soon they gathered round and solemnly stripped down to their underwear and handed her their filth-stiffened garments, murmuring, “Please, señora” and “Would you mind?” and “Me too, me too.” All except Eduardo, that is. He just sneered and lived in his dirt.
Ultimately, she knew these boys better than they knew themselves, boys playing soldier in the morn
ings, beisbol and fútbol in the afternoons, gathering to drink and boast and lie as the sun fell into the trees. They were the spawn of prostitutes and addicts, uneducated, unwanted, un-loved, raised by grandmothers, raised by no one. They knew nothing but cruelty. Their teeth were bad. They’d be dead by thirty. As the days accumulated she began to gather herbs at the edge of the jungle and sort through the store of cans and rice and dried meat and beans, sweetening the clearing on the hilltop with the ambrosial smell of her cooking. She found a garden hose and ran it from the creek that gave them their water to the lip of the empty swimming pool and soon the boys were cannon-balling into the water, their shrieks of joy echoing through the trees even as the cool clear water cleansed and firmed their flesh and took the rankness out of their hair. Even El Ojo began to come round to hold out his tin plate or have his shirt washed and before long he took to sitting in the shade beside her just to pass the time of day. “These kids,” he would say, and shake his head in a slow portentous way, and she could only cluck her tongue in agreement. “You’re a good mother,” he told her one night in his cat’s tongue of a voice, “and I’m sorry we had to take you.” He paused to lick the ends of the cigarette he’d rolled and then he passed it to her. “But this is life.”
And then one morning as she was pressing out the corn cakes to bake on a tin sheet over the fire for the arepas she planned to serve for breakfast and dinner too, there was a stir among the boys—a knot of them gathered round the table and El Ojo there, brandishing a pair of metal shears. “You,” he was saying, pointing the shears at Eduardo, “you’re the tough guy. Make the sacrifice.”
She was thirty feet from them, crouched over a stump, both hands thick with corn meal. Eduardo fastened his eyes on her. “She’s the hostage,” he spat. “Not me.”
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