by James Siegel
Paul would’ve been happy with one.
Dear Dad, Daddy, Pop, Father: Remember when you took me to the zoo and you left me there?
Miles had taken his boys to camp and one of them was registering his unhappiness. Reminding his dad of another time he’d been taken somewhere and left behind. Momentarily separated in the crowd of monkey watchers while Miles went off to purchase some cotton candy. Paul was creating his own version of the Goldstein family history—what familyless people do to pass the time.
He might’ve continued in this inventive mode if it weren’t for a sudden sharp sound at the door. One of Miles’ boys, standing there in blue pajamas rubbing his half-open eyes against the glare. He looked about fourteen, Paul thought—that gangly, awkward age between childhood and teen. The boy’s legs were too long for his body; the faintest fuzz covered his upper lip like a lipstick stain.
“I heard someone on the stairs,” the boy said.
If Paul had felt voyeuristic before, he now felt embarrassed. Caught red-handed reading personal letters between son and father. As if it were perfectly okay, as if he had the right to.
“I pulled the book out, and they fell out,” Paul said lamely.
The boy shrugged.
Paul slipped them back into the book, wedged it back onto the shelf.
“Well,” Paul said, “back to sleep.”
The boy nodded and turned as Paul shut the light and followed him out. They trudged up the stairs together.
“Did you go to summer camp?” Paul asked him.
“Huh?” The boy was still half asleep.
“Summer camp? When you were younger?” Paul said.
“Uh-huh,” the boy answered sleepily. “Camp Beth-Shemel in the Catskills. It sucked.”
“Yeah,” Paul said, “I didn’t like sleepaway camp either.” Paul had been sent to camp the summer his mom died.
At the top of the stairs Paul said good night and went back to his room, where it took another two hours before he actually fell asleep.
BY THE TIME PAUL WOKE, IT WAS MIDMORNING AND MILES WAS GONE.
“He left for work hours ago,” Mrs. Goldstein told him. “He said to please make yourself comfortable. So please”—she smiled shyly—“make yourself comfortable. He’ll call you later.”
He’d found Mrs. Goldstein in the kitchen after he’d put his shoes and socks on and ventured downstairs. One of Miles’ boys was at the table reading a comic book—Spider-Man Wreaks Vengeance. This was Miles’ other son—he looked about two years younger than his brother.
“Hello, I’m Paul,” he said to the boy.
The boy mumbled hi without looking up.
Mrs. Goldstein sighed. “Tell him your name. When someone introduces themselves, you introduce yourself back.”
The boy looked up and rolled his eyes. “David,” he said, then immediately dived back into the adventures of a boy who introduced himself by entrapping and hanging you upside down in his sticky web.
Mrs. Goldstein was still wearing her wig, but this time Paul noticed a tuft of her own hair peeking out of one side. It seemed thick and dark, and Paul suddenly understood it wasn’t cancer, but religion, that dictated she cover her head.
“Would you like some coffee, Mr. Breidbart?”
“Paul. Please.”
“Please you want some coffee, or please call you Paul?”
“Please to both.”
“All right. But you have to call me Rachel.” She pronounced it with a guttural ch, like Germans do.
“Yes, Rachel. Thank you.”
“Sit down. He doesn’t bite.”
Paul sat down next to the boy, who didn’t seem particularly surprised to have a strange guest sitting at the breakfast table with him.
The humidity seemed to be gone today. Butter-yellow sunlight was streaming in between the geraniums in the window box. If his wife and daughter were back home, the three of them would’ve strolled into Central Park today and spread out a picnic blanket in Sheep Meadow. They would’ve luxuriated in the newfound aura of family.
Later, after Paul had taken a shower, after he had dressed in one of Miles’ crisply ironed shirts generously provided by his wife, after he had read two newspapers—one of them Jewish, which he dutifully leafed through without understanding one word—after he had basically done anything to keep from jumping out of his skin, Miles called.
“Okay,” he said. “Brace yourself. I got through.”
“What?”
“I called a few more times last night—nothing. Ten times this morning—still nothing. I finally got him this afternoon. Our friend Pablo.”
“And?” Paul felt the vague stirring of hope.
“He was suspicious, of course. To put it mildly. First he denied even knowing you. Even when I told him who I was, that I know everything that happened there. After a while he said okay, he might know you a little, but he had no idea what I was talking about. He drove you places, that’s it. I told him to relax—no one’s going to the police. His memory seemed to come back then. I told him about the house being burned down. I assured him we’ve still got the drugs. I think it’s going to be okay. He’s going to get back to me. He’s going to tell us how to deliver the bag. The where and when.”
“And Joanna? And my daughter . . . Are they . . . ?”
“They’re fine.”
Paul felt the large knot that had lodged somewhere in the pit of his stomach slowly begin to unwind. At least, a little.
“I asked Pablo if he was absolutely sure about that,” Miles continued. “I laid it out for him so there’d be no mistaking. No Joanna and Joelle—no drugs. I think he got it. It’s like litigation. You have to make them think you’ve got the upper hand, even if you don’t. Who knows? Maybe we do. We’ve got their drugs, right?”
“Okay.”
“Okay? What about that’s great, Miles? That’s terrific? I’m positively overjoyed at the news?”
“I’m positively overjoyed at the news.”
“You don’t sound overjoyed at the news.”
“I’m worried.”
“Okay, you’re worried. Of course you’re worried. Who wouldn’t be in your shoes? Have some faith, I’ll lend you mine if you like—no charge. I told you. We’re going to get this done. He’s going to call back, we’re going to deliver the coke and get out of Dodge.”
“It’s something else.”
“What something else?”
“What if we give them the drugs?”
“Okay?”
“But they still don’t release them?”
It was the obvious question, of course. The same question Joanna had asked him back in that room. The one he’d been avoiding looking at too closely or too often. Something that was easy enough to do when he was dodging U.S. Customs inspectors and drug-dealing kids.
Not now. Not when he was finally about to get two million dollars’ worth of drugs into the right hands.
Miles shrugged. “I don’t know how to answer that. I think trusting them’s the price of admission. Sorry, that’s pretty much the way it is.”
TWENTY-TWO
They took her somewhere else without warning.
The middle of the night? The middle of the day? She didn’t know. Only that she’d fallen into one of those bottomless slumbers and was happily in the middle of a sweet dream. The sweetest. She was home with Paul on what seemed like a lazy summer afternoon. A Sunday maybe, where they’d stumble out of bed around ten or so to secure a Sunday Times and two iced Starbucks.
The dream had that Sunday feel.
Then the door slammed open—she perceived it as a thunderclap outside their 84th Street apartment. Rainstorm to follow.
What actually followed was someone pulling her up off the mattress and directly out of her dream. Accompanied by the acrid odor of nervous, sweaty men. And the sound of harsh orders delivered in a quasi English they must’ve picked up from kung fu videos.
“Chop-chop,” one of the men—boys really—said to her. �
��Vamos.”
Then the ski mask came down over her head, only backward, so that the eye holes were somewhere behind her, and all she could see was blackness.
She wondered if this was it. The end. The first steps on her way to a shallow grave in the middle of nowhere in particular. A candidate for one of those gruesome pictures in the newspapers. She tasted her own fear—a sour tang on the back of her tongue.
She’d been thinking a lot of her own death lately. Ever since Galina had summarily informed her of Paul’s failure to come through. It had the power and solemnity of a death sentence being read by a hanging judge.
Not that.
Not only that. It was the demeanor of her guards. The boy who brought Joanna her daily breakfast no longer acted like a room service waiter hoping for a tip. There was no smiling good morning. Someone had gotten the message to him: She was no longer a cash cow, but a sacrificial lamb.
The other guards too. Gruff, sour, pissed off. They spoke to her with barely restrained anger and thinly disguised contempt.
She could smell the menace in the air.
Now this. She was being pulled out the door, along a hallway, then suddenly down some steps—one, two, three—she stumbled and nearly fell. They’d tied her hands together with rope—the harsh fibers dug into her wrists.
“I can’t see,” she said. She hated the panic in her voice—the helpless-victimness of it.
She was a veteran of H.R. departments. She was used to victims parading before her desk, please-don’t-hurt-me kind of girls—they were almost always girls, sobbingly relating one abuse or another. She would nod, smile, and comfort, but there was always a small part of her that wanted to say why didn’t you stand up for yourself? Why?
Now she was like them, reduced to naked pleading. Her wrists were already burning and she was still inside the house. She could smell the odor of burned grease, butter, pineapple. They had to be walking through the kitchen. Not walking—stumbling, tripping, flailing.
No one had answered her. Or maybe they had. When she said I can’t see, whoever was pulling her forward had tugged sharply on the rope. She banged her shoulder into the wall.
This was their answer. Shut up.
She knew she was outside from the sudden sharp smell of pine, the sweet scent of hibiscus, and the familiar if nauseating smell of gasoline. The air felt different—that too. It had the texture of night, already swollen with morning dew. It felt painfully sweet to be outside again. To breathe the cool air and feel a soft breeze against her throat. Only she was being taken away—from what she knew to what she didn’t.
From Joelle.
A car door opened.
But it wasn’t a door. She was pitched forward into a trunk. No gentle hands to break her fall. Her cheek met the car trunk floor flush. She cried out from the sudden pain in her jaw.
“Silencio,” one of them said.
The car trunk shut. Panic bound her tighter than the rope around her wrists. There was only so much air in a car trunk. She would run out of it sooner rather than later. It didn’t help that she was breathing too rapidly, her chest heaving, as if she’d just come back from a good morning run.
Slow down, she told herself. Stop it.
The car started with a loud rumble—she heard two car doors open and close. Then she was moving. Gently at first, like a boat drifting away from a dock. The car turned right, then left in a slow circle, before quickly picking up speed.
They seemed to be going more or less straight.
A highway?
To where? From where?
At least she wouldn’t be dead of suffocation when they arrived; as soon as the car accelerated, streams of chilled air rushed in against her face. They’d removed something from the underside of the trunk so she’d be able to breathe.
This heartened her a little. If they were concerned enough to keep her alive for the trip, maybe they wouldn’t kill her when they got there. Maybe.
Stay strong.
They traveled for at least an hour, possibly two. The worst part was her cramped position—her bound arms pinned underneath her body. They quickly went numb. Her shoulders were a different story—every time they hit a bump, a stabbing pain shot from her shoulders down the middle of her chest. The car needed new shocks almost as much as the highway needed new paving. A few times it felt as if they were falling into a hole.
The men had turned on the car radio. It sounded like some kind of ball game—a soccer match maybe.
Whatever it was, it had engaged the men’s attention. They were laughing, muttering, cursing. There were three of them, she thought—three distinct voices.
As long as she was surrounded by blackness, she could imagine somebody else was there with her.
Joelle.
She’d thought about having a child for five years, was consumed with it, yet when it finally happened, when she’d finally walked into the Santa Regina Orphanage and was handed this extraordinary little girl, she’d been humbled by the power of baby love. Umbilical cords were severed. This connection, she was certain, was for life.
I’ll bring her back, Galina had promised.
What was a kidnapper’s promise worth? Especially now that Joanna was being driven somewhere else? She felt tears running down her cheeks, only to be blotted up by the ski mask. The wool tasted like dust.
Stop it.
After a while she must’ve drifted off.
She was suddenly aware that the car had stopped moving. No rushing air. No stomach-turning bumps in the road. The car radio was off.
She heard a rooster crowing loud and clear.
The car trunk opened. A gray light filtered in through the wool fibers. She was pulled out by her legs. Her chin banged against the lip of the trunk. She could smell her own blood.
She was stood up. The man who did so took the opportunity to run his hands up over her breasts. Bueno, he said in a singsong way, and laughed.
A sudden chill gripped her. Of all the various ends she’d contemplated, of all the numerous indignities and violations she’d envisioned in her darker moments, she hadn’t thought about this one.
But why not?
The man stopped pawing her, began leading her somewhere. She could make out vague shapes through the wool. She was being taken into a house.
In through a door—a big step up which no one warned her about, causing her to trip and smack her knee against solid stone. She was yanked back up onto her feet again and pulled down what must’ve been a hallway. She could barely sense two walls on either side of her.
It smelled of farm, she thought.
Sheep, cows, chickens. Unvarnished wood beams. Baking bread.
Suddenly, they stopped and the ski mask was pulled off her head.
She was in a small room—not unlike the room she’d just left. The windows were boarded up just like that one. There was a dirty mattress on the floor—an identical twin to the one she’d just spent eight nights sleeping on. But there was a major difference.
People.
Two of them. Other women.
When the guards left, they came up and touched her as if they weren’t quite sure she was real.
“Hola,” one of them said—a woman of about forty or forty-five.
“I’m American,” Joanna said. “Do you speak English?”
“Not really. But then, neither do you,” said the other woman. And she smiled.
THEIR NAMES WERE MARUJA AND BEATRIZ.
Maruja was a journalist—or had been one, till she’d been pulled out of her car just across the busy Plaza de Bolívar. Beatriz was a government official who’d recommended stronger action against the guerrillas. She’d paid for this by being stolen off the street in broad daylight and having to witness her bodyguard being shot dead before her eyes.
A morose-looking man the guards called el doctor appeared to be in charge. He appeared just minutes after Joanna was placed in the room. He told them they weren’t allowed to speak to each other. No talking. He wagged his finge
r at them, like an exasperated mother superior at a convent school for girls.
The other guards were more lenient, Maruja said. Or at least more distracted. At night they mostly listened to soccer matches and soap operas on a small TV in the hall and didn’t pay much attention to them.
Joanna had lost Paul, then Joelle. Now she was surrounded by people going through the same thing she was. They had husbands and children and parents. They understood.
The three of them whispered and signed. Maruja and Beatriz related their respective stories. They passed pictures of their children and spouses. Of their houses too, one in the fashionable La Calera section of Bogotá, the other nestled in the hills above the city.
When they asked Joanna if she had children, she told them yes. One. No picture, though, just the one she kept in her head. She told them what had happened to her and Paul. Maruja and Beatriz sighed, shook their heads in empathy.
The three of them slept on the one mattress, head to feet to head. Maruja, an unreformed smoker back in the real world, snored; Beatriz elbowed her in the ribs to make her stop. Apparently, sisterly affection only went so far.
They had to be in the mountains, Joanna thought. It grew icy cold that night—they breathed vapor and huddled against each other’s bodies for warmth. In the morning Joanna saw tiny droplets of frost on the wooden slats covering the windows.
By the second day it felt a little like an endless pajama party. They braided each other’s hair. One of the guards had procured Maruja a bottle of cheap nail polish—Purple Passion. They took turns doing each other’s nails, pedicures too.
The man who’d felt Joanna’s breasts kept his distance. Joanna’s fear of rape faded, pushed aside by other fears. Death, of course. And another gnawing fear which was a kind of death too: Would she ever get out of there?
Maruja and Beatriz had the gray pallor of the confined and dying. Joanna wondered how long it would be before her own skin turned the same shade.
Occasionally, the guards let them watch TV with them, Beatriz confided. Maruja and Beatriz looked forward to the news shows. Sometimes their husbands would be on, offering messages of hope.