Detour

by James Siegel

  Kidnappings, bombings, and executions were how they kept score.

  There was invariably a kidnapping story on the front page. A file picture of the snatched state senator, missing radio personality, or waylaid businessman. (The Breidbarts were conspicuously absent from the gallery of the gone.) There was generally an accompanying photo of the weeping wife, teary children, or somber family spokesperson.

  The Spanish word for kidnapping was secuestro.

  Bombings were only a little less frequent. For example: A ten-year-old boy named Orlando Ropero who liked soccer and ventello music was asked to deliver a bicycle by a teenager in the town of Fortul. He was given the equivalent of thirty-five cents as an inducement. When the bicycle and bicyclist, an excited and gratified Orlando, reached an intersection where two soldiers were stationed, he simply exploded. Remote control, said the papers.

  Responsibility was placed at the doorstep directly to Paul’s left. FARC. He decided to keep this particular article to himself.

  Then there were the obligatory retaliatory bombings from the right: the paramilitary units of the United Self-Defense Forces, self-defense apparently consisting of killing as many people as possible with no particular regard for innocence. The generalissimo of this august organization for law and order was currently residing in a U.S. prison for drug smuggling.

  Paul had read about Manuel Riojas in the States, of course.

  Who was he exactly? Drug kingpin, legitimate politician, USDF commander, songwriter. He was one of those, two of those, or possibly all four. Certainly a songwriter. He’d reputedly written a number one hit for the Colombian songbird Evi, which had gotten some play in the States. A love song titled “I Sing Only for You.” A title that took on ironic implications when she was discovered lying half dead on the floor of her penthouse apartment with her vocal cords surgically removed. Apparently, the lovers had experienced a falling-out. Evi had declined to press charges— I don’t remember, she’d scrawled on a pad when she was asked to explain who’d done that to her.

  Murder and torture were said to be Riojas’ other vocations.

  He was one of those people whose names were always followed by the word alleged. It was alleged, for example, that he had his own zoo on one of his many haciendas, used to allegedly feed his rivals to the tigers. That he allegedly enjoyed dropping people from a Blackhawk helicopter into a pool of writhing piranhas. That he offered human sacrifices in bloody and bizarre rites of Santeria—that was alleged too. He was clearly the stuff of tabloids; the tabloids took full and voracious advantage.

  Paul and Joanna passed the newspapers back and forth till the ink stained their hands and their eyes grew blurry.

  ONE NIGHT JOANNA WOKE PAUL AND ASKED HIM TO LOOK IN ON the baby.

  It took Paul a moment to understand that she was deluded.

  That they weren’t in the hotel room sleeping next to Joelle, but in a locked room with no air.

  His face stung where the man had repeatedly smashed him with the rifle butt, a beating that had lasted at least five minutes and felt much longer. He’d lost at least one tooth; his lip was split open and still covered in dried blood. Afterward, they’d had to watch contritely from the center of the floor as two guards came in and hammered a new piece of wood back into place, muttering at them the whole time.

  “Shhh,” Paul whispered to Joanna. “You’re sleeping.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “I thought I heard . . .” She began to cry. Soft, muffled sobs that seemed even more nakedly pitiable with no other sounds around to cloak them.

  Paul put his arms around her. “Please, Joanna. We’ll get out of this. They’re not going to kill us—they had their chance when they caught us at the window. We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to get Joelle back. I promise.”

  He wondered if promising Joanna anything was a good idea. But hope was the one commodity that hadn’t been taken away from them. Not yet.

  Then she did a strange thing. She stopped crying and disentangled herself from his arms. She put a finger to his lips.

  “Listen,” she whispered.

  “What? I don’t hear anything,” he said. Only the sound of their breathing. Soft, regular, and strangely in sync.

  “Listen,” she said again.

  Then he heard it.

  “It’s the TV,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s real.”

  “Probably not. No.”

  “Listen, Paul. Listen. It’s her. ”

  A baby crying.

  Just like in Galina’s house, only different than Galina’s house.

  “I know,” Joanna said. “I just know. ”

  In Galina’s house the sound of a baby crying had frightened them.

  Here it had exactly the opposite effect.

  She wrapped herself around him in the dark. She put her head on his chest, and both of them lay there and listened to the sound as if it were a beautiful rhapsody. As if it were their song.

  IN THE MORNING THE MAN CAME BACK.

  This time he wasn’t alone.

  Someone of evident importance was with him. Paul could tell from the way his attacker deferred to him. His role had changed; he was there to interpret now.

  This became clear when the new man looked at Paul and Joanna and said something in Spanish.

  “He asked you to sit down,” their original captor said.

  Paul knew what the man had asked them to do. But he was still smarting from his previous beating. He thought it better to think things over before committing to even the simplest action. The man had asked them to sit, fine—maybe it was better to make sure he wanted them to sit. Joanna had remained stationary for another reason, he knew. Sheer willfulness, courage in the face of fire.

  The man motioned them to the two plastic chairs. Once upon a time those chairs must’ve sat in the courtyard, that heavenly vista they’d fleetingly glimpsed before it disappeared again behind newly nailed oak. Dirt was ingrained in the white plastic, the kind that accumulates after too many winters spent outdoors.

  They sat.

  The man in charge spoke to them in soft, measured tones. He focused mostly on Paul, maintaining eye contact between puffs of a thick pungent cigar sending blue plumes of smoke drifting gently up to the ceiling. Paul recognized the brand: the box on Galina’s mantelpiece. He had a scraggly beard; his skin was pocked from childhood acne. He spoke entirely in Spanish, at a pace leisurely enough to allow his lieutenant—that’s how Paul thought of him now—to translate his words into English.

  “This is what you are going to do for us,” the man said.

  And they finally learned why they were there.

  THIRTEEN

  There were three boxes of condoms on the table.

  A French brand. Cheval, the boxes said, over the picture of a white stallion with fiery eyes and windswept mane.

  An Indian woman wearing incongruous-looking bifocals was bent over the table, carefully stretching out the condoms one at a time. She was wearing black latex gloves and no top. Just a gray sports bra with a black Nike swoosh on it.

  At the other end of the table, another woman wearing black latex gloves and sports bra was methodically chopping up blocks of white powder with a gleaming surgical scalpel. The lieutenant was leaning against the door, eyes fixed on the half-naked women like a man in love.

  Paul was sitting against the wall, waiting.

  They’d made him give himself two enemas spaced an hour apart. As he waited for the second one to take effect, he stared at the thirty-two bulging condoms already gathered in the middle of the table and tried not to feel sick.

  He was reminded of one of those inane reality shows that had so recently swept the country. Fear Factor —wasn’t that the one? Raw pig brains, bloody offal, cow intestines, laid out on a table before three or four greedy contestants. Go ahead —the smarmy host intoned every week— whoever gets the most down wins.

  And didn’t they dive in with unabashed gusto? Didn’t they chow
down to the last morsel, their eyes firmly on the prize? It helped Paul to think of them. They were his newfound role models. If they could do it, so could he.

  After all, he wasn’t striving for mere money here. The grand prize on this show was two lives.

  His wife’s and his daughter’s.

  Thirty-two condoms became thirty-three. The woman at the end of the table had just added to the pile.

  He felt the familiar rumblings in his gut. He asked Arias—that was the lieutenant’s name—if he could go to the bathroom.

  Arias nodded and beckoned him forward. The women kept working without interruption, assembly line workers who hadn’t yet heard the lunch whistle.

  Arias opened the door and pushed him out. There was a bathroom just down the hall. Arias watched him as he went in and swung the door shut behind him.

  The door didn’t make it to the closed position.

  Of course not. Arias’ booted foot stopped it, just as it had stopped it the first time Paul ran to the bathroom.

  The door swung back the other way as Paul sat down on the dirt-streaked toilet seat and tried not to notice Arias watching him. That was kind of hard. He closed his eyes and thought of his bathroom back home, where a dog-eared copy of The Sporting News Baseball Stats sat just to the right of the toilet. Not because he particularly liked baseball—he didn’t. He liked stats. He visualized page 77—Derek Jeter. Batting average, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases. Numbers always told a story, didn’t they? It comforted him to think of numbers now. Numbers imposed order on the universe—you could lean on them, take comfort in them. They always added up.

  For the second time in an hour, it felt as if every bit of his insides had come out of him. Then, with Arias still watching, he stood up and cleaned himself.

  Back to the table. Where three more condoms had been added to the pile.

  “Sí,” Arias said, staring at Paul and stopping the women in midmotion. “Start swallowing.”

  THIS IS WHAT THE FARC COMMANDER HAD TOLD THEM.

  “We are a revolutionary army. We are involved in a long struggle against oppression. We are in need of financing this struggle, so we must do whatever we can.”

  Whatever we can turned out to be exporting pure Colombian cocaine to the eastern seaboard of the United States.

  That’s how he began, as if he were seeking some kind of approval from them. Explaining the distasteful nature of the drug trade as a kind of necessary evil. A means to an end.

  When he paused, Paul nodded, even nervously smiled, bestowing a kind of absolution on him. Perhaps that’s all he wanted, Paul thought, someone to take the message back to the world.

  Yes, we smuggle drugs, but only to further the cause.

  Of course, that was stupid. They weren’t going to kidnap them to relay their apologies. Of course, Paul hoped otherwise. Up to the minute the man told Paul he’d be swallowing thirty-six condoms stuffed with two million dollars’ worth of cocaine and bringing it to a house in Jersey City.

  He would do that if he wanted to see his wife and new daughter alive again.

  Then and only then did Paul understand the full enormity of their predicament.

  Yet there were still things Paul didn’t understand.

  The man asked him who knew they were here in Colombia—not everyone, just the people who kept tabs on them, who’d be expecting them to return on a certain date. Paul told him. Starting with his boss—Ron Samuels, head actuary of the firm he’d called home for the past eleven years. His in-laws, of course, Matt and Barbara, who resided in Minnesota and were due to fly in bearing gifts for their first grandchild. Finally, John and Lisa, their next-door neighbors and best friends.

  Paul was ordered to write them letters, pretty much the same letter, three times.

  Things are taking a little longer than expected down here and it will be a few more weeks before we can return with our adopted daughter —that was the general theme. They made him add a part about there being no need to call, since they’d be running from place to place with little time to chat.

  Paul thought, they don’t want anyone to know. Not yet.

  They’d forgotten something, hadn’t they?

  “Pablo checked you out of L’Esplanade,” Arias said. “The reservation clerk thinks you changed hotels. That’s all.”

  So they hadn’t.

  No one would know they were missing.

  Not for weeks.

  They gave him three sheets of paper and a blue ballpoint pen that someone had virtually chewed the end off of. Paul wrote the letters with Arias hovering over his shoulder, evidently looking for any hidden messages, disguised cries for help.

  When Paul finished, Arias read them out loud.

  Later that afternoon, as Paul and Joanna sat on the mattress with their backs against the wall, Paul said, “I think I know why they switched her.”

  “What?”

  He’d been thinking this through; he thought he understood now. “Why they switched babies. Why they didn’t just wait and take all three of us together.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Remember when Galina came back with the thermometer? You said we hadn’t been paranoid, that we were in a foreign country. Paranoia is a foreign country, Joanna.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Galina took Joelle that day so we would come back and find her gone. So we’d call the police. There was no note—remember, she went into the bathroom and found it.”

  “Why would they want us to call the police?”

  “Because they wanted the police standing there when Galina walked back in.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Sure it does. You’re in the country of paranoia now, remember? Think like a citizen. They wanted us to cry wolf. They wanted to make us look crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because crazy people have no credibility. Crazy foreigners have even less.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “First we called the police and insisted our baby was kidnapped. Only she wasn’t kidnapped. Then we noticed we had the wrong daughter—so she was. Only, if we called the police a second time, we would have looked more deranged than before. They wanted us to know they’d taken her.”

  Joanna seemed to contemplate this notion. “Okay. What if we hadn’t noticed? I did—you didn’t.”

  Paul shrugged. “If we’d never noticed, they would’ve called and told us. We’ve got your baby—come and get her or else. Either way, we couldn’t have gone to the police without looking like lunatics. Maybe it was a kind of insurance policy: if one of us got away, if they botched the kidnapping, if I’d refused to drink that coffee and never passed out. Who knows? Maybe they were always going to make that call. We were early, he said, remember? Galina was yelling at Pablo about something—maybe it was that, bringing us there before she was ready.”

  “Okay,” Joanna said. “Why us?”

  “Why not us? They must pick people they feel no one will bother at customs. The last time I looked, I didn’t look like a drug smuggler.”

  Joanna said, “You’re not a drug smuggler.”

  “Not yet.”

  She turned to look at him as if to gauge his expression for degree of seriousness. “You’re going to do it?” she asked. It sounded more like a statement.

  Paul looked back at his wife. Her face had changed, he thought. Four days of mostly not eating or sleeping had sharpened her cheekbones and dug craters under her eyes. Yet even now when she was hollow-eyed and terrified, he saw something etched there on her face, as if the last few days had removed everything extraneous and left the only thing that really mattered. He’d like to think it was love .

  “Yes,” he said.

  “They’ll arrest you. You can spend twenty years in jail for smuggling drugs. You’re not a criminal—they’ll see right through you.”

  Yes, he thought, everything she was saying was true.

  “What other options do I have?”

&nbs
p; Joanna had no answer. Or maybe she did. She leaned her head against his chest, somewhere in the vicinity of his heart.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  “What if they’re lying? What if they’re lying about letting us go?”

  Paul had been waiting for that question, of course. He gave the only answer he could.

  “What if they’re not?”

  FOURTEEN

  He would have eighteen hours.

  Three-quarters of one day. One thousand eighty minutes.

  That’s it.

  In those eighteen hours, he would have to swallow thirty-six condoms filled with two million dollars’ worth of pure, undiluted cocaine, take a plane to Kennedy Airport, and get to a house in Jersey City, where he’d be expected to deposit them onto a dirty Newark Star-Ledger .

  If he made it to the house one minute after the eighteen hours allotted him, Joanna and Joelle would be killed.

  If he made it to the house and only thirty- five condoms came out of him, Joanna and Joelle would be killed.

  If he didn’t get the condoms out in time and one of them dissolved inside his stomach, he’d be killed.

  His heart would go into cardiac arrest, his body into toxic shock.

  He’d begin salivating from the mouth and shaking uncontrollably. He’d be dead before anyone knew what was wrong with him.

  This was carefully and painstakingly laid out for him by Arias. To get his attention, to have him maintain focus.

  A kind of pep talk.

  Of course, if he made it to the house in eighteen hours with all thirty-six condoms still inside him, a call would be placed to Arias.

  Joanna and Joelle would be set free to join Paul in New York.

  They had Arias’ word on it, as a FARC revolutionary in good standing.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THEY HAD BROUGHT HIM TO THE CUTTING house where mestiza women in sports bras worked tirelessly on Colombia’s number one export, they heard someone singing that plaintive lullaby just outside the door.