by John Farrow
He felt staggered by joy. She was standing! She was upright!
Sandra was alive. Blood spun loose in his head.
Sivak’s car rocked with her sharp braking, and Cinq-Mars protected himself against the dash then bounded out before the vehicle came to a screeching halt. He banged his hip hard against the door and was off, running across the road with a pronounced limp. Not all the traffic had been stopped and on one side it was being funneled into a single lane. A delivery trucker gave him an annoyed honk and tapped the brakes as he dashed in front of his headlights. Sandra caught sight of him then. She was partially supported on her feet by a uniformed officer and twisted now in his careful grip and turned to lift herself into her husband’s embrace. The two wound together, holding fast, as if instantaneously melding into one being. Émile couldn’t breathe and Sandra hadn’t taken a free breath in hours, and didn’t think she could. When finally they separated a touch, so that they could look at each other, his tears instigated her own. Their joy mingled with a shock of nerves they had both suppressed, but which now boomeranged through their bones like a sonic thump.
Sandra’s first words were, “I need to sit,” and with that they both nearly collapsed. Dupree, with help from Flores, broke Cinq-Mars’s fall. Sivak grabbed Sandra at the last instant. They let them sag down awkwardly onto the pavement of the bridge where they held each other’s hands and kissed and cried and laughed and wiped away each other’s tears. Those who milled around, including Sivak, Dupree, and Flores, turned their backs on them and gave them have a private moment encircled by a forest of officers’ legs.
An ambulance was pulling up to take Sandra away.
“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
She nodded. She was all right. She couldn’t say those words though. As though she could not believe in their veracity.
Dupree turned back to them and knelt down. He wanted to get in a word before the paramedics took them away. “This is a precaution. We’ll get her checked out. We’ll ride with her, Émile.”
“My God. Oh my God, Émile,” Sandra repeated several times. Then she said, “I thought I’d never see you again. They told me I would and I wanted to believe them, but I didn’t think I could.”
He wanted to say that he knew that he would see her again, but before the words came out he recognized that the statement would be a lie and he swallowed it whole. He, too, had dealt with a nagging doubt that she’d survive this, and just that thought caused him to weep again. Happy now, but weeping again.
“Come on,” Dupree said, as the ambulance attendants rushed over with a gurney. He was guiding Émile to his feet so the men could do their job. They watched as Sandra was assisted into a proper sitting position on the gurney and then laid back. The gurney was cranked higher and as she rose from the pavement she managed a smile.
“We’re not riding with her,” Émile stated. He looked directly at Dupree by his side. “Only I am.” His voice cracked slightly.
“There’s such a thing as protocol, sir.” He stretched out his arm and eased Flores away from their conversation. The man took the hint.
Cinq-Mars looked away when Dupree turned to confront him. Émile wet his lips and swallowed. He needed water. But he had to win this argument first. “You don’t get to interrogate her before…” He stopped and looked down at the lovely face of his wife. “I’m talking to her first on my own.” He cupped her cheek in one hand.
“Émile,” Dupree objected.
“You’ll get plenty of time, Detective,” Cinq-Mars insisted. “But we’re taking this ride without you.”
Dupree never formally conceded, but said nothing further.
Having strapped her in, the paramedics lifted Sandra into the ambulance. Émile followed and found where he could sit. He did allow the paramedic to ask his questions and check her blood pressure, but as they moved off the bridge, picking their way through the gathering of cop cars, he hovered right over her and kissed her forehead. Sandra smiled, a timid, faint reflex, a ghost of a smile.
“I’m alive,” she attested, practically grinning now, briefly.
“You sure are,” he said.
“Are you okay?”
“Just between you and me,” he whispered, “I’m a wreck. I’ve probably had three heart attacks tonight and at least a pair of strokes. I should be lying where you are—you should be sitting vigil.” He roused a giggle out of her. “And I’m parched.” He suddenly barked out, “Don’t you guys have water?” All his pent-up rage came out in that surge. Sandra noticed. The man next to Émile passed him a bottle and Émile let Sandra sip before taking several gulps himself. Then he inhaled a few deep breaths. “But we can deal with my demise later. Tell me. Honestly. Were you harmed?”
She managed a light soft laugh. “Is this part of my interrogation, Officer?”
He brushed the hair from around her temples, not knowing what to say.
“Sandra, I—I have to speak to you before they do.”
“Oh you probably don’t, Émile. You just think that way. You can’t help it.” She was right all around.
“What did they want?”
Sandra nodded, as if this was the very question that she most wanted to ask and have answered.
“I think they wanted to convince me that they’re not the bad guys.”
He was looking into her eyes, and the surprise of her reply caused his brow to constrict, the furrows deepening. “So, the men who abducted my wife and killed the man hired to keep me safe are misunderstood innocent lads, is that it?”
“Don’t get sarcastic with me, Émile Cinq-Mars. I’m still in a shambles, you know. The point is, the men who nabbed me, stuffed me in the backseat of a van, blindfolded and gagged me—the gag came off when I promised to be still, and I kept my word—those men, they want you to know that they are not the bad guys. I know that it sounds crazy, but that’s my impression. I think that was the whole point of this.”
“They killed someone tonight.”
“Did they?”
Her pointed response indicated that she knew something. “What?” he asked.
Sandra took a breath, abruptly coughed and she accepted more water, then told him what she’d overheard. “I was in another room. They were trying to keep their voices down. I have to tell you, Émile, that gave me so much hope. If they were being quiet, careful not to let me overhear, that meant that they didn’t plan to kill me. Didn’t it? Otherwise, why would they care? I clung to that thought, Émile.”
Tears ensued, and they kissed again and Émile put his head on the pillow beside hers. He started to sense himself descend from a distance, as if this reality, her salvation, was now feeling entirely real to him.
Sandra wanted to keep going. “Anyway, I heard something. The word dead and the word him, so I assumed it was a man and I worried that it was you. That was my worst moment of all. But they said something, about the dirty side of the street in reference to him and something else, ditched from the force, so I no longer thought it was you. Before all that I heard someone say, ‘Oh shit.’ Like this was not something they wanted to have happen at all, but also, I don’t know, like it was a surprise to them. So no, I don’t think they killed anybody.”
“They kind of claimed they did.”
“I heard someone say, ‘Well, let’s use it then.’”
Émile nodded. “Okay,” he said.
“Émile, listen, they tried to convince me that I was kidnapped because it was necessary, not because they wanted to. They tried to get me to believe that I wasn’t in any danger. They said that you cannot be here, that you threw in with the wrong people, so you have to go home. They wanted me to convince you to go home. I told them, Émile, if they released me, we were going home. I’d see to it. You’d have no say in the matter. I convinced them, I guess. Here I am.”
Émile believed that he could look into those eyes until galaxies collided and the time would pass as if in a wink. Of course he was going home. Even if he didn’t believe in that course
of action—and he did anyway—he certainly wasn’t going to contradict her. Her willfulness might have convinced her abductors, but only if they wanted to be convinced and only if they never intended her harm. She’d be set free only if that was part of their plan from the start. This was a messed-up world he’d entered, some kind of madness, where strangers abducted the wife of a visiting former police officer in order to demonstrate their inherent goodness in the overall picture. Going or staying was not up for discussion. He wanted out.
She squeezed his fingers. “Émile, I know you. You want to run after these guys. But you have to let this one go. Take me home.”
He kissed her lips and she kissed him back.
“First flight,” he promised. The easiest vow he’d ever made.
Sandra closed her eyes and the ambulance released itself from the knot of traffic their scene had created and speeded up. The siren wailed, forlorn in the warm night air. Cinq-Mars also shut his eyelids, to conclude a prayer he had begun some time awhile ago and to express his everlasting thanks in rhythm to the siren’s outcry.
One thought stuck to him, refusing to let go. This is some kind of madness.
PART 3
EIGHTEEN
Sandra and Émile Cinq-Mars returned home to snows deeper than when they left. The farm appeared luminous under the fresh powder and a bright sun. With the shock of their misadventure lingering, they each stole private moments to appreciate the peacefulness of the countryside. Pristine in winter. Exquisitely unblemished.
The couple was invigorated by the landscape, yet that genuine connection could not realign their shaky sensibilities, which wavered and gyrated. Their inner lives felt storm-tossed. Latent grievances, nascent anger, perpetual confusion, and an inability to properly center themselves made the adjustment to being home again difficult, underscored by a compulsive need for privacy. Both Émile and Sandra wanted to be alone yet they frequently bumped together, to fix or share a meal, to cuddle, to accompany the other on a chore. As of ten, they flew apart, discovering themselves at opposite ends of the house, on different sides of the barn, indoors while the other was out, as if moments spent together satisfied them only temporarily before a centrifugal force pitched them away from whatever had compelled them to reconnect and flung them against some remote, invisible wall in both solitude and surprise, where they endured an abiding, restless disquiet.
Had they indulged an inclination to analyze their predicament, they might have detected the opposing forces at play. Émile was naturally inquisitive about what Sandra experienced, and he was boundlessly curious as to how the matter had played out. Yet his style of inquiry, and her expectations regarding the nature of his curiosity, bore sharp similarity to a police interrogation, and she could no more bear that nuance than he could modify his posture in a false, easygoing manner. He did not want to interrogate her, yet he needed and desired to ask questions. But attempt to do so provoked them to hurriedly forsake each other’s company.
Émile couldn’t help himself. Although off the case, he could not dispel his questions or vanquish a need to figure out the confounding aspects to everything that transpired. He failed to quell his instinctive passion to investigate, so in approaching his wife with good intentions, wanting to comfort and console, he discovered himself undermined by tangents of inquiry that beat him off that simple foray. He retreated then and sensed himself hurled away from the very center of their lives, dismissed for his prurient, professional intent.
Similarly, in the midst of her ordeal in New Orleans, Sandra had called upon her deepest reserves of resilience to maintain her bearings. In the aftermath, she felt her psyche submerge to the base of a well that she had since drunk dry. She wanted sympathy and tenderness and a chance to unload her fears and slough off her delayed responses, but to do so felt treacherous, as if she might discover herself void of any basic resolve. She might come undone. Sometimes she broached her need for company only to do a complete spin and flee the very comfort she sought.
Coming together, then, invariably wrenched them apart.
Neither knew what this meant for them, or for their marriage, in the longer term. Both instinctively understood that now was not the time for that discussion, although they could not dismiss the issue either. That, too, pushed them away from each other, often at the very moment when they most desired to be close.
Under the cloud of their mutual surveillance, watching, noticing, and backing away to ponder, Sandra made an executive decision to retain the farmhand hired to mind the horses in their absence. He had animals to care for on his own farm twenty minutes down the road, but in winter he also had significant free time so that he could tend to her horses as well. His two teenaged children were available after school to help out. She explained as vaguely as possible that she and her husband had returned early due to “a bit of a shock,” and would he mind dropping by mornings and afternoons—they’d still look after the animals in the evenings—for the foreseeable future? The helper, Noel Lambert, was fine with that, and both Sandra and Émile were happy with the reduced workload.
So they persevered, somewhat aimlessly, with ample time to sit alone and do nothing or very little. Except get on each other’s nerves.
Sandra barred any discussions that might pertain to their malaise from the bedroom. “I declare it a problem-free zone.” As a consequence of that edict, although it was never her plan, time spent in the bedroom passed in silence. Given their trouble communicating, a full week went by before Émile finally got the lowdown on her abduction. They met in the barn, on a warmish day, when Sandra was active at nothing more than patting a horse’s snout, and Émile was sussing out a place to hang from the rafters to ease his ailing back. They took each other by surprise and sat down on low stall stools. Rather than wait for a question, which might get them off to a bad start yet again and undermine the moment, Sandra waded in, prompted only by the silence between them and perhaps by a rising need.
A woman, she related, ostensibly a police officer with the NOPD, phoned their hotel room and asked for Émile. When Sandra explained that her husband was out for the evening, the female officer told her that the two men who had broken into their room that day after first trying to pilfer their wallets had been apprehended. Could she come down to the lobby and make a quick identification, to confirm that they nabbed the right pair? Sandra interrupted her husband’s censure and insisted that she did indeed protest, begging that the matter wait until her husband’s return or, better yet, until morning. The officer successfully mollified her, promised that it would take no more than a minute, one which might spare the police the embarrassment of keeping the wrong men in custody all through the night if they weren’t the guys. Sandra acquiesced. Cleverly, as it took careful choreography, one of her abductors, a stocky man, was already on the elevator when it stopped for her on the eleventh floor. The car stopped again at the sixth floor where a woman boarded and immediately slapped a chloroform pad to Sandra’s face. The man behind her bound her in bear hug. Sandra retained an impression of the elevator doors closing, although she wasn’t sure. After that, she remembered nothing before waking up in a bare, dark room. How they got her out of the hotel, sight unseen, remained a puzzle.
Discussions with her captors ensued.
They insisted that she relax. They wanted her to feel safe, to understand that she would not be harmed. They spoke well. They were articulate and calm. Their talk soon evolved into a negotiation. No one would hear her if she screamed, they told her, but if she promised not to, her gag would be removed. The gag terrified her. She feared she might vomit into her mouth then choke to death. She had to concentrate to keep her food down. Her head ached, her heart raced erratically, and she believed she was going to upchuck her dinner merely because she feared doing so. She agreed, violently nodding, and the gag was removed. Sandra coughed and spit up fluids and dutifully remained quiet.
She heard no evidence of other people within shouting range, so felt no particular temptation to scream.
The prospect of being gagged again thwarted any outburst.
Her wrists were lashed behind her back to a chair and one ankle to a heavy table leg. Strange, she said, that one leg was left free and it was her impression that they just didn’t bring enough rope. In any case, she could flex and twist about, but only with effort and without beneficial effect.
They had her. She was utterly under their control. So fierce was her fury, she was surprised when she was unable to burst the ropes apart and kick the chair and table into smithereens through sheer rampaging will.
Émile absorbed the narrative as it emerged, in bits and pieces, and held her hand. Then he wandered off to the edge of the barn, forced to flee by the return of his flagrant anger and by a desire to pummel her with questions. He knew he could readily cause an event the kidnappers successfully avoided and make her scream. So he walked it off, minded his tongue, and gave his tension a chance to expire.
To himself only, he mentally highlighted two aspects of her experience. First, her abductors knew about the pair of Latino pickpockets and knew that those gentlemen had attempted to strike against them not once, but twice. This fact was known to some people but was not common knowledge across New Orleans. That meant that her kidnappers had inside information at some level, either through contact with the pickpockets themselves or through contact with the police or hotel security. Second, they were clever and efficient in how they executed the abduction. A flawless operation. Anyone might think that they were experienced at such a gambit.