by Wendy Dale
“Charles is a con man. The last woman he tried to swindle, he gave her a story about a bank transfer coming from Kuwait.”
I hung my head.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Later that night, having recovered my suitcase and my cash in return for a strenuous day of testifying, I lay depressed and confused in the hotel room that Luís and his partner, Walter, had found me for the night. Too much had happened too fast and I hadn’t had time to make sense of it all.
Staring up at the ceiling in a glum mood, I was startled to hear a knock at my door. I hesitated to answer it: I’d had enough excitement for one day and wasn’t up for company. Of course, there was always the remote chance that this was opportunity visiting me, but then the knock came twice, eliminating this as a possibility.
“Wendy?” a voice called. “Wendy, open up.”
Who possibly knew I was here?
“Wendy, don’t be afraid. It’s Luís.”
Great. Now the Costa Rican FBI was knocking on my door. I climbed out of bed and opened the door to find myself face to face with the five men who not three hours earlier had grabbed Michel and tossed him into their truck. What did they need? More testimony? My passport number?
“We’re going out for drinks and dancing and thought you might want to come along.”
This was too confusing. First, the man I cared about turned out to be my enemy. Now the people who took the man I cared about wanted to be my friends. I was going to have to start making these people wear color-coded name tags to tell them apart.
An hour later, seated at the bar of a cheesy seventies-style dance club, I found myself surrounded by rum and Cokes, federal officials, and the reflecting lights of a disco ball. I was still depressed, but at least now I was semi-intoxicated, accompanied by others, and well illuminated.
Luís did his best to cheer me up, moving from lighthearted topics like Top 40 Bee Gees tunes to the best cocktails in Costa Rica, but even his jovial attempt at conversation was unsuccessful at pulling me out of my black mood.
I fell into a distracted silence, and as if reading my thoughts Luís leaned over and whispered to me, “Just remember, we are the good guys.”
I wanted to believe he was good. He was warm and gentle— but, then again, that was how Michel had seemed. How could I possibly have been so wrong?
Good guys, bad guys. Was life as black and white as that?
In the stories I grew up with as a child, it wasn’t too difficult to tell the protagonists from the people who were antagonizing them. The antagonists were the ones wearing black clothes and big pointy hats who wandered about trying to interest young maidens in large, shiny poisonous apples. Run across someone with green skin, crooked fingers, moles, and a raspy voice, and it was a pretty strong indication that you didn’t want to give them your name for a twenty-five-thousand-dollar international money transfer.
But Michel had none of these traits. He had been funny and sweet and had taken me to the doctor when I was sick. How could he have betrayed me? This was the first question I planned on asking him. The previous night, I’d done a little bit of cautious detective work of my own and after some innocuous-seeming but intentional questioning at the disco, I’d gotten Michel’s current whereabouts out of Luís. Impelled by a surge of angry determination, I’d fearlessly marched through Limón in the morning, where I became the one frightening people on the streets. I had demanded directions of anyone I encountered without as much as an explanation, a kind word, an introductory greeting, or a smile.
Now I was on a rickety bus wandering through territory I didn’t recognize, wondering if I would even be allowed in to see him. But I had come this far and I wasn’t going to back out now.
“This is it,” the driver shouted to me.
I stood up and walked to the front of the bus.
“Good luck,” he said as I stepped onto the street.
The doors shut behind me as I took stock of my location—the green countryside, the pastures with grazing horses—had the driver made a mistake? I turned around to ask him, but the bus was already in motion. It sped away, leaving me alone at the side of a remote two-lane highway.
There were only four buildings within my sight: two farmhouses, a small restaurant with two kids playing in front, and a lime-colored building surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. Was this the prison?
I walked across the street. As I neared the building, two men came into view, obviously guards. This had to be the place. Now, how was I going to convince them to let me see Michel?
“I’m here to see my boyfriend. He was brought here yesterday,” I informed the closest of the two uniformed men sitting in the guardhouse.
“Visiting days are Thursdays and Sundays. Come back then.”
“I have to leave the country tomorrow,” I fibbed. “I’m flying back to the States. Please, isn’t there anything you can do?”
The older guard in the rear approached the window and addressed his partner. “It’s okay. They just brought him in. He’s entitled to one special visit. They’ll let her in to see him.”
With a nonchalant shrug, the guard pulled open the gate, and for the first time in my life, I stepped onto the grounds of a prison.
One of the most intoxicating aspects of travel is that it gives you the ability to wander through a foreign environment without feeling like you’re actually part of it. There is a dreamlike quality to moving through an unfamiliar place, a sense of false protection—the way that journalists and photographers can often believe they are somehow outside of the story—as if bombs and gunfire somehow respected a reporter’s observer status, understanding that writers are merely there as witnesses.
This was how I felt walking up to the door to the main office of the prison: It was not real. Real things only happened in New York and Los Angeles (and once in a great while in Miami). This was Costa Rica, an otherworldly state that I would soon wake up from. Here it was acceptable for me to visit a jail cell (something I would never have considered in my own country). In fact, it was necessary. I had never met anyone who had been arrested before and I needed to understand. For the moment anyway, irresponsibility had taken a backseat to my quest for answers.
A female guard who had patted me down minutes earlier accompanied me to the administrative office and asked me to take a seat on a bench. I sat down in what could have been any Costa Rican business office. There was a large counter staffed by two employees, conference rooms off to the sides, and people walking around with files.
“Charles will be with you in a moment,” the woman behind the counter said.
I smiled back at her and waited. What would Michel—what would Charles—what would whatever-the-hell-his-name-was have to say to me?
I watched a fly zip across the room, its buzz suddenly audible to me in Dolby 3-D stereo. An imaginary music score began playing in my head. I was simply the character in a movie. None of this was really happening.
Looking up, I saw Michel only steps away from me, which only heightened the strangeness of the situation. This was the same man I had spent the past week sleeping next to and here he was in a prison.
He sat down calmly at my side and waited for me to react. There were so many things I needed to know, so many things his betrayal had made me question.
“I just came to ask you why.”
Even though I had asked, I was still determined not to believe a word Michel told me. He was a liar and a thief. I wasn’t interested in what he had to say. I had come to visit him to allay a nagging worry I’d had since his arrest—I had always been such a good judge of character, able to size up a person within minutes of meeting them. I needed to figure out how I had been so wrong about Michel.
Michel was speaking to me, laying out his confession, but I wasn’t really interested. In my mind, I was a little girl with her hands over her ears singing to shut out the sound of his voice. There was no reason to trust him now. There he was droning on about innocence and regret, w
ords I had no reason to believe, except that they weren’t the words he was using at all. I suddenly heard what he was saying. It was a huge confession, a horrible one. He was giving me the names and dates of all the crimes he had committed. I was stunned. I was the plaintiff, he was the defendant, and he had suddenly provided me with all the evidence I needed to destroy him.
There was a stint as a mercenary, a guerrilla, involvement with even less reputable groups. He had fled his home country after his brother was assassinated for treason. From there, he had wandered the world, surviving as best he could. The money I had given him was to go toward leaving Costa Rica to go anywhere but Trinidad and Tobago—that passport was fake. There were additional details, some of which I do not remember, some of which I choose not to write. But by the time the guard came to take him away a half hour later, I was torn by conflicting urges: the gut instinct to flee from the dangerous man in front of me and the journalist’s desire to stay, to remain part of what had turned out the be the most interesting story of my life so far.
I was sitting right next to a man who had done things I couldn’t begin to imagine. It was like coming face to face with the Godfather. Did you run in fear or did you stick around to hear his stories? What I really wanted was to start over with the truth, to spend days getting to know him again in an attempt to understand. I wanted to comprehend this man who had been willing to lay down his life for a political cause. I wanted to know what had drawn me to him and, stranger still, why that attraction still remained. Did I see the good inside of a bad man or had he been a good man all along, one blurred by false truths?
The world was such a complex place. Memorizing the dates and names of world events was easy, but understanding the meaning behind these conflicts, what compelled people to lay down their lives for a cause was something I would never fully comprehend. Had I been born in a warring Middle Eastern country, had I watched my family members get killed by an oppressive government, would I have made the same choices as Michel?
I watched the guard lead Michel away, wondering who he really was, this man with the boyish charm and the complicated life. I would never really know.
“You are the most dangerous person I have ever met,” were the last words he said to me. It had been his idea of a compliment, his joking way of explaining his need to confide in me. He claimed I had been enough to shake his worldview.
But he was wrong. I hadn’t been trying to change his mind. I had just wanted to figure him out. I had learned long ago that it was impossible to draw that moral line for anyone else. And anyone who foolishly believed they could invariably got themselves mixed up in a violent armed conflict. Lebanon versus Israel, Cuba versus the United States—had any of these attempts made progress? Was it really possible to alter anyone else’s view?
Bill, George, Fidel, Ehud, Benjamin, Ariel, and Yasser—they were the dangerous ones. I was simply trying to understand. I was just trying to make sense of a war-torn world.
Chapter Five
Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals
Before visiting Costa Rica, I’d only ever met one person who had ever been there, but now it seemed that everyone I ran into had spent significant amounts of time in the country. Wherever I went in Los Angeles, somebody had a story to tell. A guy I bumped into at a bar wanted to talk about Guanacaste. A friend had photos of the Caribbean coast tacked up on her office wall. The checker at the grocery store turned out to be from Limón. It was like the experience of looking up a new word in the dictionary—you go twenty-five years without ever needing to use a term like salubrious, but the minute you learn what it means, all of a sudden the word pops up everywhere.
I had only been back in Los Angeles for a month, but while salubriously tossing items in my cart at the health food store, I began to think over all the things I had heard about Costa Rica since my return. My own experiences were nothing like the stories I had recently been told, which got me thinking—was it possible I had visited an entirely different country? Maybe Costa Rica was like Vietnam and Korea—maybe it was a nation divided; perhaps there was a communist part and a regular part and I had gone to the wrong half by mistake. How else was I supposed to reconcile my bizarre, prison-related experience with the stories I kept hearing of aqua-colored beaches and picturesque cloud forests?
At least I knew who could give me the answer. Since returning to Los Angeles, I had kept in touch with Jessica through a series of faxes and overseas phone calls. We had become friends during my last three days in Costa Rica. After Michel’s arrest, she had raced over to my hotel in San José to see if I was okay—an article about Michel had come out in the paper and she had recognized my name. After hearing my side of the story, she quickly shifted her alliance from him to me, figuring I would make a better friend anyway: I was unlikely to swipe her money and, besides, it would be a lot easier getting together for coffee with someone who wasn’t in prison.
As I waited until there was space available on the bus to Tegucigalpa, she had helped me pass the time. She had made me temporarily forget all that I had just been through, and hanging out with her had been surprisingly fun. She was seven years younger than me and at first I thought the age difference would mean we had nothing in common. After all, I had been on my own for the past nine years whereas she still lived with her parents. However, it was this very fact that ended up appealing to me. She reminded me what it was like to be nineteen—or what it would have been like had I not been somber and hardworking, weighed down with the anxiety of putting myself through college. Spending time with her was like getting back the teenage years I had missed. The act of smoking a cigarette or drinking half a beer was still a major event for her; to me these actions had ceased to be any big deal, but she made them fun again. Together we reveled in the depravity of it all. Just walking down the street, we’d crack each other up. A simple walk to buy ice cream was an event that would inevitably turn into an infectious gigglefest.
Although my life in Los Angeles had greatly improved over the past year, it still paled in comparison to my last few days with Jessica. I wanted to laugh like that again. I wanted to act silly. I wanted people to roll their eyes at me as I giggled too loudly in the street. Maybe I had missed out on all the fun things there were to do in Costa Rica. Maybe I should give the country one more chance.
While waiting for my bags at the San José airport, I thought to myself that this trip to Costa Rica really was going to be different. It was going to be a real vacation, just as Jessica had promised. I was going to visit nature preserves, museums, and exotic restaurants. I was going to sip tropical drinks out of ripe coconuts. I was going to throw caution to the wind and get myself a tan. And no way in hell would there be any need for me to visit the local jail.
“What are we doing tomorrow?” I asked Jessica once I had arrived at my hotel in San José and was able to use the phone.
“Actually,Wendy, I hope you don’t mind, we’re going to visit the local jail.”
This was not a good sign.
“Jessica, I’d love to, but I have to go to a beach or a mountain. I have to get a tan.”
“Wendy, remember when you said how lucky I was to have a boyfriend who wasn’t in prison?”
“Yeah.”
“Well I’m not so lucky anymore.”
The irony of this situation was not lost on me. The last time I’d been in Costa Rica, we had turned Michel’s incarceration into a joke. Every time Jessica uttered the slightest complaint about her aching feet or her growling stomach, I’d turn to her and jokingly remind her that things could always be worse: She could be in my shoes. “At least your boyfriend isn’t in prison” had become my ongoing refrain.
How was I supposed to console her now? “Well, at least you know he’s not sleeping with other women” didn’t come out as encouraging as I had hoped. But more important, what was going on in this country? Given the number of men I had met in Costa Rica and the percentage of those men that had wound up in prison, I was beginning t
o suspect that getting arrested was something that went on all the time.
My phone conversation with Jessica ended before I got any real information. Her father walked into the room she was calling from, and since he was blissfully unaware of the recent events in his daughter’s life, Jessica was unable to give me any details of the situation, leaving me with a lot of unanswered questions. Lying in bed in my hotel room (I’d gone back to Hotel Venecia, not because it was especially nice, but it was cheap and familiar—it was a wonderfully worldly sensation to arrive in a foreign country and get recognized by the hotel staff), I thought over what I knew about my new friend. As far as getting involved with criminals went, she didn’t seem the type. She made the sign of the cross every time we walked past a Catholic church, ran her own business at age nineteen, and refused to sleep with Olman until they got married (which at the rate things were going looked like it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon). The only thing in her life resembling corruption was her one-cigarette-a-day habit, which she indulged in with the same guilty glee as if her menthol Virginia Slims had been laced with crack.
I chalked up the strange turn of events to being in a foreign country with a penal tradition different from the one found in the United States. Unlike in my own country where wealthy and powerful criminals actually had to have a trial before being declared innocent and freed from prison, here they often did away with the inconveniences of scheduling hearings. Bribes were standard practice throughout Costa Rica and it was common knowledge that a checkbook was the most important legal document anyone could carry.
This sort of simplified the whole judicial process and made life a lot easier on wealthy, law-disregarding citizens, but if you were foolish enough to have been born poor and got on the wrong side of the police, your chances of seeing the outside world again were about as good as those of Siberian tigers hoping to get paroled from the San Diego Zoo.