And once pleasantries are aside, and I explain the nature of my latest assignment and my concerns, I double-check—only in passing, making the assumption—that he is already carrying some kind of kidnapping insurance.
He pauses a long beat, looking at me. Examining me. “I have no kidnapping insurance.”
The risk professional? The consummate arbitrageur of risk and return? My puzzled expression asks: Why not?
He smiles grimly—his shifted lips a parallelogram of irony—and mutters gruffly: “Too expensive. Can’t afford it.”
Meaning what?
“Me, my wife, my kids, we’re uninsurable,” he says. He looks out, explains in simple terms to the neophyte. “To take the risk of covering me, anticipating what kidnappers would ask, an insurance company would want… well…” and here, I can tell, he is careful to avoid the specifics, “… it would come to a sum that you, that I, that anyone, would find incomprehensible. So it’s just not worth it.” He smiles at the irony. “We’ve got too much money to be insurable.”
I’m silent. I’ve never imagined such a problem.
He explains a little more. How it’s actually worse than that. More complicated. The insurance companies can’t tell what he’s worth. “So they can’t assign a value or formula to me. And they won’t work without their formulas.
“But here’s the thing. My business life has been built on risk. Assessing it, quantifying it, minimizing it. Being proactive and anticipatory about it. Acting on risk. This is just another case of risk. That’s how I’m looking at it.”
Proactive and anticipatory. Acting on risk. Calculating life down to the financial, to its plus and minus columns. That’s how he’s gotten where he is.
He turns serious, dutiful. “I’ve started interviewing guards,” he says. “Seen some impressive candidates. It’s not a terrible arrangement, for them or me. These guys will be your fourth for golf or tennis. They’ll drive your ski-boat. Even make a decent meal or two on the chef’s night off. Ex-military, most of them. Physically fit, mentally sharp. Of course, you’ve got to watch your womenfolk.” He smiles wolfishly.
So he is protecting himself and his family, at least. But we both still know that he is sitting across from his greatest liability. A condition that long precedes my accepting the kidnapping assignment. For the wealthy, poor relations are always a burden. Their ruined evenings and sleepless nights. For everyone like my brother, it will always be someone like me—someone entrenched in the messy daily world he tries to absent himself from—who will define and demonstrate where familial responsibility begins and ends.
AND NOW, OF course, it has come to pass. And if the kidnappers know what they are doing, they have begun with my wife, given her an impossible sum for us to cobble together, but one that he can handle—not without a wince or two—so that it is she who must approach him. With her anxiety, with her tears, with my two- and four-year-old daughters in tow, she’ll presumably make a far more effective salesman on his threshold than some cold South American voice on the phone.
I see my wife there in that same lonely leather seat opposite his massive Louis XIV desk, or standing by his plane amid the wind and engine noise on an agreed-upon tarmac, making the case to him, wondering why she even should have to, resenting his somber nod, knowing he has already decided what to do, or what not to. Already, perhaps, without her knowledge, through his network of contacts, engineering my release.
AND NOW LET me pull you into the dark with me again. A far different quality of dark than the one that surrounds me now.
Wait with me… pulse pounding… in the dark of a storage closet of an insurance company that happens to sit two floors above the trading floor of a brokerage firm—a brokerage firm where my research, my interviews, my tips, my instincts, have all led me.
A dark alive with anticipation, with a sense of mission and purpose.
A dark that I controlled, that I had chosen and arranged. By flowing in with dozens of glum wordless workers, who assumed I was simply reassigned from another building, as a number of the other workers actually seemed to be, so all my carefully practiced excuses were never needed—in fact, I never had to say a word. This silent, invisible army of the underclass, the army of night, in which a new soldier with his ID and brown uniform isn’t even noticed, much less questioned. (ID and brown uniform copied from photos on the Internet site of the maintenance company that had the building’s cleaning contract.) I earned only a wan welcoming smile or two from squat matronly Filipinos and Malaysians with no English.
Pushing my cart of supplies around the halls of the insurance company—restocking bathrooms, dumping office trash cans, replenishing my cart from the various supply closets, learning the floor’s layout as I go. Toward the end of the shift, slipping silently into the storage closet I scouted earlier, arranging the packs of paper towels and rags and smocks just so, to settle into the black silence….
Post-9/11 New York fire laws require that during office hours, stairwells between floors (and between companies) in high-rise buildings must be open and accessible.
So that when the brokerage firm’s trading day is in full swing the next morning, a new mailroom attendant (in the required uniform of pressed black slacks and white button-down shirt) is working the day shift, already out on his morning rounds….
Hushed carpeted lobby, expensively coiffed receptionists, paneled walnut and mahogany walls, a serene corporate preserve high above the street, far above the fray, operating as if unshaken, untouched, by the utter turmoil of the markets it serves, as if all is well, nothing is changed, like a man in top hat and tails strolling through the rubble of a bombing—and moments later, my dowdy mail cart and I are bursting through the regal matching mahogany doors as if through swinging saloon gates, onto the trading floor—vast cacophonous sheer space filled with computer monitors and white-shirted loose-tied bodies—leaning forward, slouching back, striding confidently, rocking nervously, a dense Bosch tableau of headsets and torsos and screens. A futuristic locked-away warehouse of men and their blinking machines, and you couldn’t ascertain which were beholden to which, which the masters, which the servants.
And as I stroll, head bowed—docile and dull—down the central corridor of this cacophony—traders murmuring, shouting, declamation, tintinnabulation—I have the sense of all commerce passing through these electronic portals, all the pounds and bushels and barrels and crates of oranges, coffee, lemons, rubber, salt, rapeseed oil, bioengineered corn and soybeans—all digitally routed through, paying homage and tithe to, this electronic crucible. The economy is in collapse, but this gear of it spins ceaselessly on an unstoppable flywheel—the continually floating, continuously adjusting assignment of value to products, of money to goods, of dollars to donuts.
I pass the desks at the end—quieter here, something more measured and mundane traded here—and push my mail cart—by instinct, by intuition—through a further, interior-most set of double doors, to another trading area—same monitors, same white-shirted young traders—but the room is much smaller, a narthex off the nave, and when I enter, a few traders turn, and look at me, and frown suspiciously.
I step closer to the monitors—an aborigine drawn to the blink and gleam.
On the monitors there are first and last names, with a five- or six-digit number next to each name….
I become light-headed, breathing deeply to steady myself. Comprehending fully, bluntly, irrevocably, what I am seeing. The blinking numbers, the tiny digits, as fragile and as clear as a life. A life, assigned a value. I watch, dumbstruck.
Listen to the smooth explanatory pitch I was subjected to over the next few days, as various silver-tongued spokesmen tried to justify, to dissuade me from my article, to educate me. “It’s clean. Antiseptic. A marketplace solution. Matching buyers and sellers. It’s a redistribution of wealth. We broker it. We’re middlemen. The South Americans know they’ll get their money—they don’t want to be in the business of killing, they prefer the business of
not killing. We assist them in assigning a value—in determining that fine trading point between what they can get and what they can’t, what the maximum reasonable payout is, above which they likely won’t get a thing. And on the other side of the ledger, the victims’ families, they know we’re the experts. They know we have the experience in what the kidnappers will take, what they’ll accept. So they turn here. They know we’ll stake them, work out a payment plan they can afford.
“And as middlemen, as providers of the stable marketplace and the necessary and reliable software and experience and expertise, we take our cut. And for that cut, there’s almost no killing….
“It’s contained. Systematic. Gives the kidnappers an organized clearinghouse. Keeps them calm. Keeps people alive.”
Bring kidnapping to America, and we will Americanize it. Streamline it, polish it up, PowerPoint it.
Pork bellies, soybeans, coffee, lives, freedom.
Trading freedom.
Freedom—America’s signal promise—converted now to supply and demand.
What’s a life worth? On the one hand, of course, that can’t be determined. We’re not in a position to judge. It’s the exclusive, murky province of philosophers and of God.
On the other hand, we determine the worth of lives all the time. Every salary review. Every war reparations board. Every carat of every engagement ring. Three thousand perish, and we appoint a special master to examine and assess each claim, to distribute based on future income potential, current earnings, current responsibilities, current and future suffering. A life’s worth can’t be determined, and yet we do it every day.
And I was therefore sure, looking at those monitors, that somewhere, in data, on disc, there was a system. A score. Like a credit rating, which every financially functional American adult has assigned to them, so why not something similar? Your worth rating. What will it take, what will it cost, to get one/you/him/her back? A shorthand, a set of metrics, within which the traders negotiate, they parry, they get to yes.
And it occurred to me that such a rating wasn’t measuring something so vague as “a life’s worth.” It was measuring something far more specific. Something unaccustomed to measurement.
It was measuring love.
How much did a spouse love a spouse? How much did a family love a child? How much exactly? Because that’s what determined the price. The price to get them back. And those prices in aggregate in turn helped determine a proprietary algorithm, and the question was how you stacked up, rated, on the algorithm. Did your family want you back more than the mean? Or less than the mean? Did you want your child back more? Or less?
One’s freedom—all it required was enough love.
Those monitors: an enormous blinking Love-O-Meter.
Love, quantified.
Love, American style.
WHEN I CURL into sleep in this blackness—for a few minutes or a few hours, I can’t really tell—I pull up my knees, pull my collar up over my face, to make some recognition, at least, some gesture of order, of a differentiated state, to aid my descent into slumber. And I have another tradition that carries over from curling into sleep in my own bed in my own home. I think of my daughters. I minutely construct their faces, their big swimming wide curious eyes, their smooth soft cheeks. I picture them folding into sleep themselves—blissful, unconscious, as natural as breathing, and their example leads me, instructs me, inspires me.
My brother’s two daughters are only a few years older than my own. They are surrounded by adults—day nanny, night nanny, ubiquitous chef Armando, maids and handymen and gardeners. The girls have gotten the sense that they’re on more than equal footing with the adults. That they are, in some way, in charge. They have picked it up, presumably; felt it in the air. The predictable result? An insolence, an arrogance, a bossy willfulness. First-class brats—literally.
Yet he dotes on his girls, my brother does, lights up when they float silently into the study or kitchen in the morning, often not yet dressed, in their silk catalog pajamas. He watches them fascinated, admiring. And I understand. They move in a rarefied realm, a magical sphere, and when you are with them, you move within it a little yourself. That’s how it is for dads and daughters. A helpless addiction to their aura. No different from my own.
His daughters are lightweight. Trusting of adults. Easily transportable. Perfect kidnap candidates. But they weren’t taken. Instead, it was me.
AS I THOUGHT about the numbers on those screens—later looking closely at the photos of them I snapped with my unobtrusive little palm camera—I could see that each blinking number, each “price,” included a fraction. Which confirmed that the traders were earning a percentage. We take our cut, as I’d been told. But it wasn’t a simple fraction. It didn’t take a genius to see it was a fraction of a fraction. Which presumably meant that some other party was taking a cut, too—an unchanging, consistent cut, given the math. My brother’s words in passing returned to me: They won’t work without their formulas.
Insurance companies, I thought. After nearly choking themselves in a feast of their own toxic CDOs and credit default swaps and other exotica, going back to their roots. Their core competency. Insuring lives. Because everyone was upping their life insurance, buying more, lining up for it. To say nothing of kidnapping insurance, which had always existed for executives on South American business trips, but now there’s suddenly a broad new need for a host of new kidnap financial products. And are the insurance companies just the dumb-luck beneficiaries of this chaotic new world, or do they have a hand—a substantial, steady hand—in creating it? The percentage of a percentage revealed on those screens in that dark, quiet, interior trading room would seem to be giving me my answer.
And to maintain the value of the policies? To keep customers paying their premiums? To motivate a steady stream of new buyers? It was obvious to me that the marketplace would require the occasional killing. The killing must go on to some degree, to hold insurance rates steady; to stabilize income and guarantee return.
The insurance companies: using death and chaos as a hedge.
Death and chaos. Always a smart hedge.
You can generally count on them.
The insurance company where I crouched waiting in the dark—it wasn’t just fire doors and stairwells that connected it to the trading floor of the brokerage below it. It was an idea—the same cynical, practical, highly profitable idea. I had passed between the two companies as easily, as permeably, as fluidly, as the cynical idea itself.
OF COURSE, THERE need not be the traditional envelopes of cash anymore. The transactions could all be paperless—wire transfers, bank account to bank account, made and confirmed on the Internet from a laptop anywhere. With neutral, third-party “holding” accounts for the cash in transit, while the deals, the drop-offs, the physical transfer and reclamation details, are finalized. That’s how it would work. If the marketplace I discovered did not need to keep itself secret.
So to camouflage the existence of such an organized marketplace, there are still the smudged, crumpled envelopes of cash. To make the kidnapping continue to look primitive, dangerous, uncontrollable, criminal.
I’m pulling one of those envelopes out of my pocket now.
A white stationery envelope like any other.
A discarded envelope. Its contents already removed. Precisely the kind of envelope that could have held cash. But it was not stretched or creased or crumpled that way. It looked fairly pristine, as if it had held, if anything, only a note, and it seemed somewhat out of place, of course, there beneath me on the dirty car floor behind the front seats, where I had just been shoved forcefully, facedown, out of sight.
An envelope I scooped up and stuffed into my pocket in the brief few seconds before—hovering above me, working silently—they tied and adjusted my blindfold, bound my hands with duct tape, and delivered the little pinch in my arm that would put me out.
An envelope I scooped up because I recognized in an instant—from childhood, from
my past, in a millisecond ignition from my unconscious—my brother’s handwriting on it. Which I still might not have recognized, but for what was written in it. In his distinctive arrogantly looping lettering, precisely the words I had seen written before, on cards with gifts, on previous envelopes, so many times over the years: my own name and address. But here, the address underlined repeatedly, for emphasis—and next to it, some further instruction I had no time to decipher.
I have the envelope out now. I am turning it in my hands in the dark. I have been taking it out of my pocket, turning it around in my hands, putting it back, since I got here. I can’t see it, of course. I can’t check or confirm here in the dark what my instincts told me in an instant, can’t get another look at that handwriting. But I have had nothing but time to think through, to imagine, what would be written on the note inside it.
On the back of the envelope, I can feel an embossed return address. I have run my fingernail along its ridges slowly, incessantly in the dark, trying to carefully count the letters in the embossed name, to see, to feel, whether they correspond to my brother’s. Trying the same thing with the next line, the street name and number.
This is my brother. This is where he lives. Go ahead. Take him. I offer him up to show you that you can’t threaten me. That you don’t frighten me. To show you that I am bigger than the emotions that you rely on, better than the game you play. I am in control—not you. As proof, I give you my only brother. To show you that my money, my holdings, my assets, will always come first, and that I will make any sacrifice necessary to protect them. A sacrifice all but biblical. My own brother. To show you by example that I will pay for no one. Are you contemplating grabbing any of my family? I am showing you the outcome before you even try.
Proactive. Anticipatory. A contrarian play.
True to his profession, a hedge. A hedge against calamity.
There are multiple possible versions, of course. I mull them obsessively here in the dark. Maybe something like this: Someone I know, someone I’m close to, is about to blow the story wide open. Expose the insurance companies, the collusion, the vibrant market behind closed doors. But I know how you can gain six, eight months. Six, eight months more profit. Kidnap him. Take him. You won’t hear from him, you’ll buy yourselves, the industry, months more profitability. Millions more in policies and assets. Yes, he’s my brother. Which shows you where my loyalties lie, doesn’t it? And what would I like in exchange? To avoid the same fate. Make sure we’re left alone—me, my wife, my girls.
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Mystery Box Page 29