Efraim does the honors: “La gringa no puede hablar español. Esta buscando la carretera hacia Cherán.”
This was artful. Efraim has said they are looking for the road to Cheran, a small village in the area.
Straight ahead, three kilometers, the officer says — telling Efraim nothing he doesn’t know.
The cruiser follows them a ways, then pulls over. If the cop is in fact a cartel guard, as Ariana suspects, he is suspicious of anyone stopping near the finca at this time of night. In the rearview mirror she can see him back and fill and reverse direction. At Cherán, they also turn around and double back.
“You are not a stranger at the finca, Efraim. Am I right? Don’t lie to me.”
“It is very dangerous there,” Efraim says, ducking the question.
They are nearing the finca when Efraim says, “Cut the lights.”
By a sliver of moonlight, he directs Ariana to a dirt road that cuts up the flank of the hill about a quarter-mile shy of the farm’s rear fences. They follow the dirt road until it is parallel with the outbuildings behind the walled compound. The car’s interior dome light has long since lost its covering. Without Ariana saying anything, Efraim unscrews the bare bulb and drops it in the dashboard ashtray. They push open the doors as quietly as they can. With the dome light extinguished, the darkness is unbroken as they step out of the car.
The two of them case the wall looking for a gap, but it is not long before Ariana loses her nerve and aborts what has come to seem like foolish heroics. She signals to Efraim and they turn back to the car. The moon is too bright, she says. We should come back another night. Efraim says nothing. Ariana debates somehow communicating what she has learned to Agent Forrester, then decides against it. The chaos of a raid would be as perilous for Schuyler as for any of the people holding him captive.
day twenty-four
Maybe two nights later, Ariana has a dream. It’s one of those Sisyphean dreams, driven by indigestion or a full bladder, in which a task is confronted repeatedly and ineffectually. The rampart that circles Margaret Aldrich’s Villa Mujica is topped with coils of concertina wire and vandalized here and there with swirls of graffiti. The graffiti seethes with the odium that courses among rival gangs. Graffiti is relatively new to Patzcuaro. The Mexicans will tell you it comes back with the young men — cholos — who slip across the border, work for a year in Los Angeles and return with wages enough to fix a wife’s teeth or buy a wrecked pickup. Along with the graffiti and dollars, additional souvenirs of a season in El Norte include pants belted roughly at the altitude of their anuses.
Ariana’s dream seems to conflate the walls around the cartel’s not-very-hidden hideout with the concrete block wall around Margaret’s estate. Ariana does not make that association immediately. In her dream she picks her way around the wall, searching for a toehold, some deficiency in the villa’s rampart. She finds one in the uprights that frame a metal gate. Margaret had once mentioned a canoe that she sometimes paddles out into the lake. This must be where she puts in. The gate is topped with concertina wire, but its furls are interrupted by the stone gate posts. The stones of the gateposts bulge here and there, providing better toeholds than the mortared crevices between the concrete blocks.
Gloves. Garden gloves? The dreamer’s hands are gloved and her fingertips just reach the top of a post, the one on the left side of the gate. She grabs hold, legs flailing, and somehow drags herself up the rest of the way. Her pulse is racing and her arms tremble weakly after what, not so many years ago, would have been a routine workout on a health spa’s climbing wall. She hovers in place for a moment at the top of the gatepost, a human gargoyle. When her breathing steadies, she eases through the gap in the concertina wire, one leg at a time. The razor wire catches one small crease in the fabric of her slacks, a few inches below the left knee, but her flesh is not slit. Fortune favors the fool.
She leaps to the ground and, rising too fast from a crouch, waits for the blood to find its way back into her brain. It is then, out the corner of an eye, that she sees a dark, bone-thin dog glide across the upper reaches of the sloping lawn, like the shadow of a hawk a thousand feet high in the noontime sky. She should have counted on guard dogs. Also unexpected: the rush of anger as the dog attacks. She kicks and twists in a useless effort to elude the animal’s snapping fangs. Then, drawing on some energy more primitive than dread, she becomes one with the moment. She grabs the Doberman’s muzzle, the nosecone of this four-legged torpedo. One glove encases the animal’s snout and upper jaw, the other the lower jaw. Pivoting sideways, she harnesses the animal’s momentum and brings its spine hard against the stone gatepost. Incredulous that she has found the strength, she hears a cracking sound, like a bit of fireplace kindling snapped against an upraised knee. Instantly the dog goes limp. She drops the sack of fur and fangs and watches a final convulsion course the length of the Doberman’s severed spine. But of course where there is one dog, there will be another, the one now tearing towards her from farther up the hill.
Ariana’s dream of a nocturnal encounter with attack dogs will recur in brief sequels for two more nights. In one version she somehow eludes the dogs and darts within range of a two-story window in the Villa Mujica. And there, eerily engaged with Margaret — refreshments, laughter faintly audible — is the crime boss who had treated the archbishop to dinner at Rancho de la Mesa: La Tuta.
Ariana has been had, she fears. What a fool she was to confide in Aldrich.
“Margaret,” she says, a soliloquy addressed to no one but her dreaming self. “I need an explanation.”
“For what,” Margaret replies, as though she can easily hear the question through a closed window.
Ariana doesn’t know where to begin.
day twenty-five
The third and final llamada comes in mid-afternoon exactly six days after the second. A change of tactics. Evidently the extortionists have decided against any further pussyfooting around. Instead of waiting for Ariana to tip her hand, they simply call her cell and announce their price: three hundred thousand.
That would be dollars, not pesos.
She is staggered, of course, but tries to keep her wits about her. She thinks to say this: “What guarantee do I have that you’ll release my husband.”
“You have no guarantee.”
“How do I know you even have him.”
“He suggested that we convey a message: He said you’d remember the dark-eyed boy making music with crystal goblets.”
“So he remembered my story. So what. How do I know he’s still alive?”
And then — incredibly, eerily — Schuyler’s voice comes over the phone.
“This is for real, Ariana. You need to do what they say, if you ever want to see me again, alive.”
His voice is thin, guarded, as though, from lack of use, his larynx has become wizened, a dried prune.
“I love you, Ariana.”
A day later, another message is conveyed by phone. Or rather, the message that there will be a message is conveyed by phone. The man says only that instructions will arrive and had best be followed.
The letter arrives that afternoon in an envelope with no postage stamp. It is mixed in among pieces of mail properly stamped. The mail carrier knows better than to ask questions when a honcho tosses an unstamped letter into his sack and tells him to carry it up the block. An address and a time are written on a plain piece of paper, along with the amount already named: $300,000. The number takes the place of a signature. A signature would mean nothing to Ariana anyway. The number authenticates the communication as if it were code.
Ariana interprets the cryptogram as follows: She is to show up with the ransom at the specified address at the specified time. They will count the bills to be sure she is in full compliance. She will leave with her husband — if she chooses to.
But she is suspicious. Money aside, this seems too simple a resolution of such a complex and protracted ordeal. But then these incidents have to end one way or another. S
o maybe it really will be as simple as that.
She does not tell Forrester, much as she would like an armed escort, someone who at least tags along at a discreet distance. And she does not tell Jorge or Margaret, let alone Efraim.
As arranged, she places a call to Mort in New York. She uses a friend’s cell phone. Hers has been lost, she tells her friend. Twelve hours later a bonded courier, easily mistaken for a delivery boy, turns up at the door. He carries the additional $200,000 cash in a duffel bag disguised as a piece of luggage that might have been misplaced by an airline. It contains toiletries, three Brooks Brothers shirts, a folder of estate-planning documents (mostly boilerplate) and a handful of trashy paperbacks with rubber bands around them. One of them — Mort does not lack a sense of irony — is a battered copy of Thy Will Be Done. All four books have been partially hollowed out with an Exacto knife. The cavity in each book is precisely the size of a packet containing 50 thousand-dollar bills, a denomination Ariana doubts she has ever laid eyes on.
Among the papers in the folder is a note scribbled in Mort’s hand, a simple tabulation showing that an account that had been worth more than half a million in mid-October is now worth less than half that.
There will be nothing comfortable about their old age, Ariana thinks to herself, though with this transaction there is some reason to hope that Schuyler will actually make it to old age.
The address is a building like a thousand others in Patzcuaro, a one-story structure of adobe, painted deep red from the sidewalk up to the bottom of the window sills, white above that. Stained wooden shutters, stained eaves poking out from under their burden of red clay roofing tiles. The building fronts are fused in a continuous, block-long façade, like row housing. But households are differentiated, one from the next, by small variations in the roofline and doorways.
As she approaches the address she has been given, Ariana forces herself to imagine what she might expect in the moments ahead — every detail she can think up, the mundane, the idiosyncratic. It’s a mental calisthenic from her TV days. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Do you knock on a kidnapper’s door? She imagines it swinging open even before she touches her knuckles to the wood. A man with a gun would step out of the shadows as the door closes and escort her through a courtyard. She imagines the courtyard lined with tin cans repurposed as flower pots, a Mexican courtyard cliché. They contain pepper plants and small cactuses, jade plants and geraniums. Two men glare up at her from a worn out kitchen table, chrome legs, a chipped formica top. Would they be the same men who were in the office over the shoe store? She envisions all this as though she is living the moment, but now the mental fast-forward stops abruptly. She can’t do it. The detail she can not summon to mind is the moment in which she hands over the satchel of three hundred thousand-dollar bills, watches helplessly as the men count their windfall, endures their scorn or — just as likely — the gleeful and gallant courtesies with which they relieve her of her money and with it, any prospect of an easy old age.
“Where is he?”
The men would ignore her plea. One of them would pull the wrapped packets of thousand-dollar bills from the satchel, fan the ends of them, hand them to his associate for a more careful accounting.
He would look up at Ariana as though her question had just registered: “You are a woman of great faith but limited intelligence, Señora Schermerhorn. That is your name, is it not?” She doesn’t bother to correct him. “Or are you just very naïve? You will get your husband back, your meal ticket. A deal is a deal. But no one said anything about it happening right now. I will assume that you have had the good sense to bring the full ransom. But no one ever said whether that was earnest money or payment in full. Let me end the suspense: You will need to come through with a bit more. There has been the expense of feeding and guarding the gringo. You will need to demonstrate with more than words that you hold our organization in high esteem. I don’t know exactly what the full assessment will be, that is for the leadership to decide. But I imagine another twenty thousand will be persuasive, particularly if you are able to produce it immediately.
Twenty thousand is, of course, exactly the amount, in dollars, that Margaret Aldrich had advanced her. Livid with rage, Ariana would rise to her feet. Instantly two goons would step out of a back room, place their slab-like hands on her shoulders and press her back down into the chair. The extortionist would continue: “Cuidado, Señora Schermerhorn. You do not like to feel squeezed, especially financially. You do not like to be played for the fool. Neither do we. Perhaps you’d rather think of the second payment as a tax. Or consider it a propina, a tip for services rendered, such as keeping your husband alive. In the face of humiliation, does that make it easier for you to maintain your accustomed air of superiority?”
“Please, I am broke,” she says quietly. “You have taken everything.”
The man leers at her and chuckles.
She continues: “I have drained dollars from every account I can put my hands on.”
The leerer is quicker than she is: “No more dollars? Then we will have to accept pesos. Your car is worth something. Granted your house would be a hard sell in the current market.”
The other one chimes in now: “We will expect you in two days, Señora Schermerhorn. Feel free to tell your friends at the embassy about this conversation and where it took place. You can be certain that ten minutes from now they will find no trace of our brief stopover here. You were wise to come alone. If indeed you came alone. It remains unnecessary to kill your husband. You will receive further instructions. Of course you will need to act on them without help from the embassy, or anyone else. Show her out, Ruben.”
All that is a figment of Ariana’s fervid imagination as the cab draws up in front of the address she gave the driver. “Don’t stop.” For a split second Ariana isn’t sure who said the words. “I forgot something,” she tells the taxista. “Take me back to Madrigal, the place where you picked me up.”
And so, without pausing, the driver continues past the nondescript door bearing the number Ariana gave him.
She is not entirely sure what just happened: Cold feet? Defiance? A strategic ploy? Perhaps they will round the corner and the block, maybe even drive for several blocks before she pulls herself together and tells the driver to go back to the place where she has been ordered to appear, the place they just drove past.
But no. Back at the house on Madrigal, her pulse races at a level not explained by the physical exertions of stepping out of the cab, paying the driver, mounting the familiar three-step stoop.
She pushes the door shut and leans against it for a moment, calming herself. In the study upstairs, she drops the satchel of money and falls into her favorite seat, the one made of pigskin stretched over cedar slats. She tips back and rolls it on the rounded base until she can see the plazas and the trees looming over them.
“Oh, my god.” She says the words aloud, marveling at how close she had come to forfeiting so much of their nest egg.
As that huge surge of relief passes over her, she thinks again of Schuyler as a Hudson Valley kid, Schuyler hopping crazily from one side of the tracks to the other as a freight train bears down on him and his friend. That, and the “cosmic sigh of relief” that comes when the train divides him from his buddy and they flip each other off through the steel wheels rushing past.
Now she remembers the satchel on the floor beside her chair. She pulls it up onto her lap and unclicks the hasps. And there it is: three-hundred thousand in crisp thousand-dollar bills. She tries to imagine where to stash a wad like that, where to hide it. The satchel suddenly weighs on her lap and she rises. Mort’s hollowed out books are on the coffee table where she tossed them after dislodging the money. She packs the bills back into the gouged–out cavities, slides the books randomly in among others — dictionaries, crime thrillers, Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities (three volumes) on the shelves above Schuyler’s desk.
Schuyler will be utterly thrilled that their fortune is intact, s
he says to herself — assuming he lives to learn of it.
day twenty-six
Dread of her next encounter with Rogelio gives way again to impatience. For Christ’s sake get on with it! Ariana says the words under her breath as she walks across the Plaza Grande and on to her habitual table on the sidewalk out front of the Gran. She does not have to wait long. Rogelio did not intercept her that first morning after her failure to show up with the ransom, but the next day he is across the street from the Gran even before she takes a seat.
Upon spotting her, he crosses the Plaza Bocanegra and, without breaking stride, wades into the stream of taxis and microbuses flowing by. And this time he does not take a seat at a nearby table and angle his utterances obliquely. He makes a beeline for her table and, without comment, takes the seat directly across from her.
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t raise the money, not all of it. I was afraid to bring less than the full amount.”
A good instinct, Señora Altobelli. I hate to be disappointed. I really hate it. How much do you have?”
There is no pretending that Ariana is not nerve-wracked. But it calms her to realize that Rogelio is also on edge.
He repeats himself: “How much do you have?”
“I was able to raise the forty-thousand. In dollars. Forty-thousand dollars.”
He says nothing. She tries to read his gaze, dreaming that he is mulling a counteroffer. He is not.
“You’re playing with me,” he says shortly, blinking the cobra eyes that had been fixed on her and looking away.
“I tried. I went all the way to New York and begged and wheedled. But you need to understand something. Two things, actually. My husband’s family is no longer rich. And the money they still have is in a joint trust. His sisters have to consent to its release, and they would never be quick to do that. One of them hates him — hates the whole family, not Schuyler in particular.
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 16