Detour

by James Siegel

  The taxi driver turned into an area festooned with Arabic signs. They passed a yellow mosque complete with gleaming minaret, an open-air market dripping with exotic-looking fruits and vegetables. They crawled past several women covered head-to-toe in black burkas, drifting down the street like shadows.

  My name is Paul Breidbart. I have something you’ve been waiting for.

  He pictured Joanna’s face as she got off the plane. Still hollow-eyed and fatigued, but flush with gratitude and relief. She would have Joelle pressed to her chest. They would go home, where their best friends, John and Lisa, would’ve tied bright pink balloons to the doorknob of their apartment.

  My name is Paul Breidbart. I’ve got something for you.

  The taxi stopped. The driver was craning his neck, peering out the side window.

  “Are we here?” Paul asked.

  “Thirteen forty-six Ganet Street?” the driver said.

  “Yes. Is this it?”

  “This is Ganet Street,” he said.

  “Good,” Paul said. They were in the middle of a block. A grocery, a drugstore, and two check-cashing places were situated on one side of the street. The other side looked residential, which must’ve been the side he was looking for.

  Only something was wrong. The taxi driver was shaking his head and sighing.

  “Thirteen forty-six?” he asked again.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not there,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look,” the taxi driver said. “It’s missing.”

  NINETEEN

  Morning.

  Joanna could smell fried plantain and smoke. And the familiar musky odor of her baby. Her soft head was tucked under Joanna’s chin as she guzzled the pale yellow formula provided by Galina.

  Paul had left hours ago. Or was it days?

  She’d tried to be brave about it. She’d tried to stay strong for Paul—he’d need it. When he left, when he actually departed from the room, it was as if hope had left with him.

  This is what it feels like to be utterly alone, she thought.

  And yet there was Joelle. So she wasn’t.

  Galina had come back soon after Paul left, and Joanna had latched onto her baby like she used to clutch her pocketbook in the face of a possible 84th Street mugger.

  You will not take this from me.

  And Galina hadn’t.

  “Would you like to feed her with me?” Galina asked.

  “Yes.”

  So they had. Side by side, like the young moms with their foreign nannies who congregated on the Central Park benches every morning. Only no swings, seesaws, or slides.

  There was another difference, of course. This nanny had kidnapped them.

  Joanna didn’t bother mentioning that particular fact. She was trying to hold on to the moment. Don’t upset the applecart, her mother used to say to her when she’d complain about something or other. Meaning be happy for what you have. Why? Because it can always get worse.

  If you let me hold her and feed her and be with her, I’ll say nothing about what you did to us.

  This, admittedly, went against every fiber of Joanna’s character. She was used to speaking her mind. But she couldn’t take the risk of Joelle being snatched from her a second time.

  Galina asked Joanna how she’d slept. She commented on how good an eater Joelle was. She demonstrated the proper way to burp her. Talking to Joanna as if they were still back in the Bogotá hotel room.

  And Joanna nodded, answered back, even conversed.

  “Where were you born, Galina?” Joanna asked after Joelle had been fed and gently rocked into a semblance of sleep.

  “Frontino,” Galina answered. “In Antioquia. North,” she added, realizing that Joanna wouldn’t know one Colombian province from another. “On an orchard farm. A long time ago.”

  Joanna nodded. “What was it like?”

  Galina shrugged. “We were poor. Campesinos. I was sent to school by the fathers.”

  At the mention of religion Joanna recalled the black jacket and white collar you could glimpse through the confessional partition. The smell of mothballs, incense, and baby powder.

  Joanna was intent on keeping the conversation going. Joelle was asleep, and any minute Galina might stand up and say hand her over. Besides, it was undeniably pleasant speaking with another human being.

  There was another reason. Talking kept her from thinking.

  Eighteen hours, they’d told Paul.

  Galina reached over and gently and playfully caressed the spiky hair on Joelle’s head.

  It would be hard not to like a woman like this, Joanna thought. There must be two Galinas; this one you’d willingly hand your baby to.

  “When did you come to Bogotá?”

  “During the riots,” Galina said. “When Gaitán was killed.” She explained to Joanna, described what Colombia was like in the 1940s. Jorge Gaitán was a man of the people—not lily-white the way the rest of the politicians were. Half Indian. The hope of campesinos like her father. Only he was gunned down by a madman. The country went crazy, dissolved into La Violencia that had never really ended.

  Joanna listened, nodded, asked questions. She supposed she was not only interested in keeping the conversation flowing but interested in what Galina was saying. Maybe it would give her a clue.

  You don’t understand, Galina had said to Paul when he’d asked her how she could kidnap them. It’s not your country.

  Okay, Joanna thought, help me understand.

  She reached for parallels from Hollywood. Colombia was like West Side Story—a movie she’d cried at as an eleven-year-old when she saw it on TV; the Jets versus the Sharks, with the bumbling and ineffectual Officer Krupke in the middle. Here it was leftists against rightists, with the government stuck in between.

  Only there was no coming together in the end over death.

  Just death.

  She held Joelle even tighter within a soft rocking rhythm.

  My baby, my own . . .

  That song from Dumbo just flitting into her brain. Dumbo could fly away just using his enormous ears.

  If an elephant could fly . . .

  She tried to picture Paul on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic. Or was he there already? How much time had passed since Paul departed?

  She turned to Galina to ask her this question, but Galina was staring down at Joelle, seemingly lost in thought. Or was it memory?

  “I had a daughter,” Galina said.

  Joanna was about to ask what her name was, what she looked like, where she was. There’d been the undeniable use of past tense.

  “What happened to her?” Joanna asked.

  Galina stood up. She reached for Joelle.

  When Joanna didn’t hand her over, Galina said, “I’ll bring her back.”

  Joanna had no choice; she handed her daughter to the woman who’d stolen her.

  AFTER JOANNA HAD WOKEN THE NEXT MORNING, SHE PRESSED HER ear up against the rough slats that covered one of the windows. She was trying to expand her universe by feet, even inches.

  She heard construction sounds—scattered hammering and a muffled rhythmic pounding. She pictured a pile driver, a steam shovel. Two dogs were barking. An airplane passed overhead. Someone bounced a basketball.

  Then Galina stepped into the room. There was no baby with her. This time she was bearing something else.

  News.

  “Your husband,” she said in a flat, emotionless voice. “He didn’t deliver the coca.”

  TWENTY

  There was a charred, blackened, and still-smoldering hole approximately a third of the way up the left side of Ganet Street.

  Paul finally figured out that this used to be 1346.

  “It burned down,” a resident in a white skullcap explained to them.

  “When?” Paul asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  Paul felt something in his stoma
ch—pretty much the opposite of what he’d felt before. The torturous sense of fullness had been replaced by an equally torturous sense of nothingness.

  Call it a black hole, sucking in every particle of hope.

  “The people who lived there?” Paul asked. “Do you know where they are?”

  The man shrugged.

  It turned out that no one really knew where they were. No one really knew who they were either.

  “Freakin’ Ricans,” said a white man holding a beer can half submerged in a brown paper bag.

  “Foreign people,” said another man, who appeared to be from Eastern Europe and spoke only a halting English.

  The foreign people had kept to themselves. They’d been there only six months or so. They didn’t mix much. There were two or three of them, depending on whom you asked. Men.

  “No one died, though? In the fire?”

  Apparently not. The firemen, at least, hadn’t discovered any bodies.

  By this time the taxi driver was growing impatient. He’d made his double fare, and he was anxious to get back.

  “Keep the meter running,” Paul said.

  “You okay?” the taxi driver asked him. He must’ve noticed Paul’s ghostly reflection in the rearview mirror.

  They crawled up Ganet Street and found a diner. Through the window Paul could see an empty phone booth in the back. He had left his cell phone at home.

  They’d given him a number. Just in case.

  He’d explain. I have your drugs here, all thirty-six condoms. I just need someone to give it to.

  Paul told the driver to wait.

  “Sure. Give me the money you owe me.”

  Paul pulled $165 out of his wallet and handed it through the partition. The guerrillas had returned his cash and traveler’s checks largely untouched.

  Do you think we’re bandidos?

  No. Just kidnappers and murderers.

  When Paul entered the diner, he heard the unmistakable sound of peeling tires. When he spun around, all he could see was a thin cloud of blue exhaust where the taxi should’ve been.

  He used his phone card. After a minute listening to the series of dull clicks, the phone rang, but no one answered. One ring, two rings, three rings, four. Paul let it ring for approximately five minutes. They were like dog minutes—each minute the emotional equivalent of a week.

  He hung up and tried again.

  Still no answer.

  He felt feverish.

  He walked back to 1346. He searched each passing face for signs of recognition, but they moved past like speeding drivers.

  He planted himself in front of the burned-out house, where thin, needlelike cinders were still suspended in the thick, humid air.

  They must’ve been expecting him, he thought. Someone would come back for the drugs.

  He stood there for a kind of eternity. People walked back and forth, in front of him, behind him. No one stopped to speak with him. No one asked him what was in the overnight bag.

  Then someone did come up to him.

  A kid, even though he didn’t look much like a kid.

  When he ambled across the street and sort of shuffled over to Paul, he thought that maybe this kid had been standing across the street for a long time. He looked familiar.

  “Pssst,” the kid said.

  “Yes?” Paul asked. He felt a first glimmer of hope.

  “I know why you’re here, chief.” He looked to be the right nationality—Latino anyway.

  “You do?”

  “Sure, Holmes.” The kid looked left, looked right, then motioned to Paul to follow him. “Just waiting for the all-clear.”

  “I saw the building had burned down. I didn’t know what to do,” Paul whispered, half a step behind him. The kid had turned the corner and was headed down a side street guarded by row houses all painted various uninspiring shades of brown.

  “Uh-huh,” the kid said.

  “I thought I’d wait till you found me.”

  “Good thinking, chief.”

  Halfway down the block, the kid turned toward an alley between two houses. They ended up in a backyard paved with cracked and spray-painted cement. Two empty windows with no shades stared at them from the back of the house.

  “Let’s see what you got in the bag for me,” the kid said.

  They’d found him. He was going to make it, after all.

  It took just two seconds after Paul had opened the bag to realize he was dead wrong.

  It was the kid’s expression. He’d looked in the bag and seemed, well . . . disappointed.

  “What the fuck is this?” he said.

  “This is . . . ,” Paul started to explain, then stopped.

  “Money, Holmes,” the kid said. “You scorin’ or not?”

  Not. It made perfect sense that the street where some Colombian drug dealers had been waiting for their cocaine might be a street where other drug dealers waited to sell it. He’d stumbled across one of them.

  “No,” Paul said. He started to zip up his bag.

  The zipper didn’t make it to the closed position; the kid grabbed his arm.

  “Wait a minute, Holmes.”

  It was like showing meat to a dog.

  The kid had recovered from the disappointment. He was starting to realize what it was that he had seen.

  “Where’s the fire?”

  “I’ve got to go. I thought you were someone else, okay?”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Look, it’s not mine. I need to give this to someone.” Paul was tugging at the bag, but it wasn’t budging.

  “I’m someone, chief.”

  “Look, this belongs to some dangerous people, understand? They’re going to be mad if they don’t get this.”

  There was someone else who was dangerous here. The kid had lost the easy demeanor of a salesman. His eyes had gone stone-cold; he’d tightened his grip on the bag.

  “Tell you what,” the kid said. “Let go.”

  “No,” Paul said, surprising even himself. The old Paul would have spun the numbers, calculated the risks. He would’ve let go of the bag.

  Not today.

  If he lost the bag, it was over.

  The kid reached into his pocket for something. Paul saw the dull gleam of metal.

  “Look, boss, you want to let go of the bag, okay? You don’t want me to hurt you any, right?”

  “I can’t let you have it,” Paul said.

  “You ain’t letting me have it. I’m taking it from you.”

  Paul didn’t let go.

  He hardly saw the kid’s hand move. It didn’t seem possible a hand could launch itself into Paul’s left cheekbone and make it back to the side of his body all in the blink of a swollen eye. Paul felt as if he’d been hit by a high inside fastball—something that had happened twice in Little League, leaving a slight crack still detectable in X-rays of his orbital lobe.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t go down. He tottered, teetered, wobbled. Then he did something even more surprising.

  He swung back.

  The kid had loosened his grip—maybe it was hard to wallop someone with one hand and hold something with the other. Paul wrenched the bag clear away from him, then swung it forward in the general direction of the kid’s head.

  SMACK.

  The kid went down. Hard. Hard enough to bang the side of his face on the cracked cement and look up at Paul with a hint of incredulity, if not outright fear.

  Paul stared back.

  Maybe it was Paul’s expression—he had his game face on. A face that said come on, just try it again. Just try. Or maybe, and more likely, it was the police cruiser that slowly drifted into view between the two houses.

  Whatever it was, the kid got up and ran.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Miles answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Miles?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Paul. Paul Breidbart.”

  Paul was back at the diner. He’d tried t
he number in Colombia again. Six times. No answer. He could think of just one other person to call.

  “Paul?” It seemed to take his lawyer a long time to flip through the Rolodex in his mind and actually place him. “Well, how the hell are you? Are you and, uh . . . Joanna back?”

  Paul wondered if he’d needed a real Rolodex to come up with his wife’s name. He guessed, probably.

  “No. Yes. I am.”

  “You are? She’s not?”

  “I’m in trouble, Miles.”

  “What’s the problem? Everything okay with the baby?”

  “Can I come see you?”

  “Of course. Call the office tomorrow and make an appointment with—”

  “I need to see you now,” Paul cut him off.

  “Now? I was just on my way home.”

  “It’s an emergency.”

  “This can’t wait till regular office hours?”

  “No. It can’t wait for regular office hours.”

  “Well . . . okay,” Miles said after a moment’s hesitation. “It is an emergency, right, Paul?”

  “Yeah. It’s an emergency.”

  “You’ll have to meet me at my house. You got a pen handy?”

  “I’ll remember.”

  He gave him a street address in Brooklyn.

  PAUL USED A LOCAL CAR SERVICE WHOSE NUMBER WAS POSTED ON A crowded bulletin board in the diner’s stinking vestibule.

  Jersey Joe’s Limos.

  Stuck between Stanley Franks Psychotherapy and Wendy Whoppers Body Work—In Call and Out Call.

  Paul could’ve used a session with both.

  He needed a limo more.

  Although Jersey Joe’s Limos apparently didn’t have limousines. Ten minutes after he’d called, a forest-green Sable pulled up to the diner and honked its horn twice.

  The grossly overweight driver offered to put Paul’s bag in his trunk. Paul gripped the handle straps tighter and declined.

  He wondered how much time he had. Had he been afforded an extension of sorts? When Arias called that house in Jersey City, no one would answer. There’d be no ring because there’d be no phone. Maybe they’d know something was wrong—they’d take that into consideration. They’d restrain themselves.

  They were coming off the ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge, and some very strange-looking people were coming into view. At least strangely dressed. It was summer, but the men wore enormous fur hats and long black jackets. The women wore even more.