The Wonders

by Paddy O’Reilly

  Over their time together, Leon had gradually learned something of how the scar lines streaked through Kathryn like damaged nerve sheaths. He was better at avoiding the sensitive places, the words, the emotional bruises that made her flinch. He had grown used to her sharp edges, her funny lines—“Don’t try to fool me, Leon, I can see right through you.” She had always been determined to puncture the fast-inflating bubble of their self-importance. “We are the humans where you can see the seams. It’s like looking at those deepwater fish that are transparent and have odd protuberances from their heads.” When she’d said that, Kathryn had glanced slyly at Minh, then put on a fake posh accent. “Protuberances, there’s another one of those wonderful words. Like Christos’s wings. Do you think he’d appreciate that title—the Magnificent Christos and his Protuberances.” The three of them split into laughter.

  “I want to ask her to come with us myself,” Leon had said to Minh before the Wonders left for the South American tour. “She knows you want her to. If I ask, she’ll know we both do.” Kathryn’s whole life had been shot through with threads of pain and betrayal—perhaps their home could be her sanctuary.

  In the dressing room of the Brazilian auditorium, Kathryn swiveled on the parquetry floor, soles scraping with the resin Yuri had put on all their shoes to prevent slipping.

  “Well, they pay to see us, and we are celebrity-endorsed turds. So fuck you, Christos. Just shut up, will you?”

  As she disappeared into the bathroom to clean off her makeup, Christos and Yuri snapped shut their equipment cases and called the escort guards. Leon quickly changed into clean clothes and packed his costume into a pull-along suitcase.

  “Let’s go!” Christos shouted through the bathroom door at Kathryn. “Hurry up!”

  Leon was impatient to get moving too. Tonight they would fly home to Overington, where the final plans for the house he and Minh were having built in Australia would be waiting.

  Kathryn emerged from the bathroom with a shiny face, wearing her velvet traveling cape. She handed her bag to the security guard and wheeled around to face Christos.

  “Oh, you’re still here. Shouldn’t you be striding ahead in the vanguard of the art movement?”

  The group of six headed out of the dressing room and along the corridor. Christos and Yuri hurried alongside the guard at the head, Leon trundled his case along in the middle and Kathryn and the rear security guard walked behind. The head guard opened a door in the wall and they slipped into a service corridor, descended two flights of stairs and found themselves in a winding tunnel that ran below the shopping mall. At regular intervals they passed cleaning stations and other tunnels leading further into the bowels of the complex. Leon had his head down as he followed Christos and Yuri, pulling the case behind him and hearing the irregular rumble of the wheels as they rode the bumps of the concrete flooring. His signature tune was repeating relentlessly in his head, and he tried to oust it by humming snatches of pop tunes from his teen years. Anything to get rid of that melody. It was only after minutes of trying song after song that he realized he could no longer hear the clicking of Kathryn’s heels behind him.

  For a moment everything became supercharged. He smelled a whiff of cleaning fluid and another of cooked meat. He heard the distant clatter of a cleaning cart and voices from a corridor far away. He noticed how dimly lit the space was. A chilly draft curled around his ankles. He turned and saw only an empty tunnel behind him.

  “Kathryn?” he called.

  The concrete whispered with a sound like falling scree. Kathryn didn’t reply. He called her name again, and his voice rattled around the walls. They had turned a corner about three hundred feet before. Leon dropped the handle of his case and ran back. He turned the corner. Nothing. He pressed his hand to his chest. Running without warming up made him instantly breathless and panicky. He called Christos and Yuri.

  Further inside the tunnel, beyond another bend, they found the security guard slumped unconscious on the floor near a junction, a hypodermic sticking from his leg. Three more corridors led off from the junction.

  There was no sound apart from the clanking and rumbling of the workings of the complex. Leon found himself gasping for breath. Yuri was silent and wide-eyed, staring at the guard on the floor. Christos strode from entrance to entrance in each tunnel, calling Kathryn’s name. The remaining security guard had run off along one of the corridors where he thought he had heard a cry. No one else had heard it. She was gone.

  The message came later that night. It told Rhona to go home to the US, to wait for instructions, to tell no one. Kathryn had been taken.

  LEON PRESSED THE Play arrow again.

  The room had a low ceiling and scuffed cream paintwork. A metal-framed camp bed was pushed against the rear wall. A kitchen chair with turned legs and a brightly patterned orange-and-yellow flat cushion sat at the end of the bed. Under the bed was a green plastic bucket. A soiled pillow and rumpled sheet lay on top of the bed. Leon looked at that sheet and he felt terror that Kathryn would think of how to use it to escape from hell.

  The room was shadowy from the poor lighting.

  Kathryn sat on the bed, head bowed. She was draped in a length of dirty red brocade curtain material that might have been torn from a decaying mansion. A dull gleam at her ankle indicated a manacle attached to a chain that led to an eyebolt in the wall beside the camp bed.

  A voice spoke from behind the camera. “Tell them you are being treated well.” The voice was electronically transformed into menacing digital dictation.

  She didn’t respond. The camera operator zoomed the camera in spasms until her bowed head filled the frame.

  “Look at the camera.”

  She didn’t move. A black object appeared in the frame, pushed past her shoulder and prodded her neck. She convulsed. The brocade covering fell from her head and shoulders. She couldn’t have lost weight in such a short time, but her shoulders seemed bony and fragile under the wool.

  Kathryn looked up after she had been shocked with the electric prod. Her eyes were heavy lidded and bloodshot and focused on a point behind the camera.

  A male voice, accented, from another part of the room. “I thought you would have horns under that hat.”

  “You’re a fecking idiot.”

  The robotic voice from behind the camera told the other speaker to be quiet, then grunted. It grunted as if the owner of the voice was exasperated by this woman he had kidnapped and was holding captive. When Rhona heard that grunt as they watched the footage for the first time, Leon saw her face shift as if a magic cloth had been smoothed across her features. Her rage and fear and helplessness froze into an icy mask.

  On the screen, two men in loose gray cloth masks moved to stand either side of Kathryn. The scraping and shuffling of their boots on the concrete floor gave the scene an incongruous atmosphere of banality. One of them accidentally brushed Kathryn’s woolly shoulder with his hand and he recoiled, shaking his hand and wiping it against his trouser leg.

  Someone off camera passed the two hooded men, or boys they might have been from the way they moved, a pair of rubber gloves each. As they snapped the thin translucent gloves onto their hands, a puff of white talc rose from their wrists.

  Kathryn stared ahead. She was motionless except for her shuddering, which had been intensifying over the course of the footage and was now causing the metal feet of the camp bed to jitter against the concrete floor.

  The gloved hands took hold of her upper arms and lifted her to a standing position. Still she refused to look at the camera. The camera panned up and down her body. Her feet were bare and childlike. Leon rarely saw her in bare feet. She always wore those frivolous slippers or high heels.

  “She is not harmed,” the robotic voice said.

  This was the ninth time Leon had watched. Each time he saw a new detail. The eighth time he noticed a flicker of the light, not enough to be called a shadow. The almost imperceptible flicker hinted at more people moving around the room out of
the camera’s visual field. On this ninth viewing he became aware that the man on the right had a way of standing that made him look as if he had himself been beaten. A closure of the shoulders. A hollowing of the chest. The chin thrust toward the breastbone. He imagined that if he watched the film enough times, he would hear a noise, or see a blur of old writing on the wall, or recognize the pattern on a woven blanket. There would be a sign belonging to a small town or a foodstuff that identified a specific region. The reprieve that always happened on TV.

  When he finally went to bed, he lay dreaming about how this would happen, then pulling himself up, then drifting into reveries of detection and rescue. Each time he caught himself fantasizing about discovering a clue or working out a pattern that could reveal her location, he writhed in shame, twisting the sweaty sheets around his thrashing legs in the dark, waking Minh and apologizing and trying to lie still even though he wanted to shout and rip holes in the sheets. He lay rigid in the long dark of the night wishing he had turned around during the walk through the underground tunnels of that shopping center. Wishing he hadn’t been humming to himself, hadn’t been caught up, as always, in his solipsistic meanderings. Hadn’t he learned from Minh that the story of his life did not always revolve around him?

  Minh cried as she told him the next morning that she had dreamed Kathryn was nearby, and that Minh was following the high sharp note of Kathryn’s keening out from the tunnels of the center, through the streets and alleyways of a dark city.

  “I can’t stand it,” Minh said, sodden with tears. “I can’t stand thinking about what’s happening to her.”

  Christos called his family in Greece every few hours. His grandmother, in particular, had fallen for Kathryn’s charm. He told them Kathryn hadn’t been found yet, without giving any details. “I asked them to pray,” he said. “Pray harder. Pray every minute of the day.”

  Hap was in control of finding Kathryn and getting her home. He wouldn’t allow Rhona to call in the police or the FBI. “If it’s religious, if it’s ideology, if it’s some lunatics with an agenda, then the FBI is already useless because they didn’t see it coming. If it’s money, we’ll pay. That’s the right thing to do because it will be a clean transaction. Kidnapping’s an international business run by professional criminals. We need to adhere to the process. All we have to do is pay the money and she’ll be released. It happens all the time. But if someone has a point to make, if they’re going to use her in some campaign . . .” He looked at the floor.

  Rhona touched his arm, and he laid his square cheek on the top of her head.

  Minh turned to Leon. Hap and Rhona an item? They’d had no idea.

  LEON’S FIRST GUESS was the disability rights people, the ones who had been wheeling and limping and trudging around the boundary of the grounds for so long, appearing on random days, scrawling their accusations on the footpath in chalk or spray-painting them on the hedges so that the words appeared as speckled artworks that faded as the leaves died and fell to the ground.

  Hap said no. “What would a kidnap do except give them bad press? Think again. What else have you heard? Who are you afraid of?” He punched the room with his questions, and the air gave way. “Could it be the husband? He’s greedy and stupid. Lethal combination. Or a madman on a mission? You might have seen him in a crowd or from a car. Think. Anything unusual? Anyone?”

  Kyle, Leon realized, that’s who I used to be wary of. Kyle sat on the couch beside Rhona. He was pale and uncharacteristically mute. He looked old. As old as his age. And Leon began to wonder whether he had been harsh, whether he had taken a set against Kyle only because of his confidence and charm and all the other traits Leon lacked. Perhaps Kyle was simply a hopeless man, another of the many besotted men who loved beyond reason the uncanny bewitching human who was Kathryn.

  After Hap left to get his team together, they talked for hours, hysterical and babbling, trying to find solutions, posing ludicrous rescue scenarios. They subsided into silence, hollowed the building with despair. Started up again with the what-ifs. Hated themselves for it.

  Christos was nursing a brooding rage at Hap. Even though it wasn’t Hap’s men who had failed Kathryn but hired security from the complex, Christos still blamed him. He tried out different accusations: “Hap hired those men—it’s his fault.” “He didn’t hire enough men.” “He was doing nothing at home while Kathryn was being taken.” The others wouldn’t agree.

  Time jerked along in unpredictable increments as the residents of Overington wound down with tiredness and anguish. Leon, Minh, Christos, Yuri, even Kyle: they had become clockwork people whose mechanisms hadn’t been wound. Their movements were torpid, their speech semicoherent. By the next morning they could barely form words.

  Except for Rhona. Rhona blew a tornado through room after room, shouting on the phone to insurance agents, banks, Hap, her old friends. Even though there was no news, she still burst from hugging Christos to kissing Leon or Yuri or Minh, clasping hands, taking faces in her hands and speaking so close that her breath warmed them. “She will be all right,” she told Leon. “She will be all right. I know she will.”

  Hap was running teams searching all possible worlds. One team churned through computers and databases looking for anomalies in Kathryn’s online following, in the patterns of the lives of thousands of potential suspects who wrote about her, posted information or pictures, set up fan pages. Others were in the field, sniffing along the concrete of the underground passage where she was taken, grilling bystanders and security guards. One more group worked the electronic routes that the kidnappers’ messages had traveled. Hap’s day was spent walking around the garden talking into his headset, occasionally pulling a screen from his pocket to see what had been captured on video. Every now and then Hap and Rhona would collide on their pacing routes, and they would embrace wordlessly before moving on, back to work on their communication devices.

  “It’s those fucking Muslims.” Christos swam out of his apartment every now and then with a new theory. “Remember the letters? Remember the imam who put the death sentence on her? Said she was Satan’s ultimate weapon of enticement?”

  “I think the Christians have her. No offense, Christos. I mean the crazy ones.” Minh lay limp on a couch in the common room, a damp cloth over her forehead. “I don’t know why they haven’t arrested that nut who runs the TV station, the one in the South. He funds the abortion clinic bombers. He’s the one who called her the Princess of Darkness, got himself on all the talk shows with his ravings about the apocalypse.”

  Where was Christos’s god now? Some journalists had accused the Wonders of acting as if they were gods, strutting around the world stage, known by almost every person on the planet, celebrities of a higher order than had ever been seen. Do these false gods believe they are immortal? one Christian broadsheet demanded on the front page when the Wonders first went global. We shall soon see.

  Later that night Leon sat in the rickety pavilion in the old monkey enclosure where Rosa had originally been housed. He sipped his whiskey and stared at the shadowy palm trees clacking their fronds together in the breeze. Minh was inside sleeping. When Hap passed by, Leon caught his attention by waving the whiskey bottle and miming taking a swig. Hap refused the offer with a shake of his head. His headset blinked blue, and he tapped it and moved off, his voice sniping under the whisper of wind.

  THE RANSOM DEMAND came at eight the next morning through Kathryn’s fan site. The money was to be delivered to a designated spot in the highlands of Colombia in twenty-four hours’ time.

  An hour later Rhona called the house together for an update. “It’s ready. The insurance company had already prepared cash in case it was going to be ransom.”

  Minh laid her head on Leon’s shoulder. “She’s coming home.”

  Hap was in his usual stance next to Rhona. He had become her suit of protective armor. She was tiny beside him. “This is good news. Great news. If it’s simple K and R, Kathryn will be home safe in no time.”


  “Kidnap and ransom,” Rhona said slowly, as if the words were exotic foods she was tasting for the first time. “It sounds like a TV show. Not real. None of this seems real.”

  “So now we should call the police?” Christos had been arguing for the police all along.

  “Now would be the worst time. They want to catch the kidnappers. We want Kathryn back. Two different and opposing objectives.” Hap muscled across the room to Christos, who was glowering in the corner. “Don’t try to be a hero and call the police. You’ll cause chaos and Kathryn will die. Is that clear?”

  “But they can find out where she is!” He wore a T-shirt and jeans but when Christos stood at his full height, Leon half believed he could see the shadow of wrathful angel wings arched above him.

  “Sure, and shoot everything that moves while they try to rescue her. Don’t make me lock you up till it’s over, Christos. My objective is to keep Kathryn alive. If you threaten that in any way, I’ll shut you down until she’s safe. We’ve hired a professional K and R negotiator. They’ve done this in Colombia plenty of times. This is the first take of an international celebrity by one of the gangs but it’s the same deal. We pay, they release her. Now butt out and pray some more.”

  Hap asked what the proof-of-life question should be. What piece of information did anyone know about Kathryn that only she could answer?

  “Can’t we just give them the money?” Rhona said. “They can have it now, whenever, however much they want.”

  Hap said no. “We have to demand proof of life or they’ll think we’re up to something, some trick to avoid paying. We have to follow the procedure. They’re professionals who expect us to play this a certain way. Now, please, try to think of questions only Kathryn could answer. We have a live video link in half an hour.”

  Minh suggested the question. “What was your nickname for your brother when you were little?”