Drink the Sky

by Lesley Krueger

  Todd couldn’t look at her, but he mouthed, “No.” Then he drew himself up and grabbed her suitcases before walking outside. Trailing behind him, Holly knew she’d been absurd, telling herself that she could fly when she was really falling, falling down to the blood-spattered ground. Just look what she did to the ones who had to catch her.

  25

  Todd didn’t know what was taking them so long. Back in the living room, he avoided the eyes of his silent wife while thinking obsessively about the other kidnapping she’d described. The boy who had been taken from the bottom of their street had been held for eleven days. Eleven days! The full horror hadn’t registered until now. In just two days, Todd felt he’d aged ten years. It was cool for high summer, but he still felt as if he were suffocating. The kidnappers were letting them hang, spacing their calls out meanly, and then only telling them to wait for further instructions. Were they hoping Todd would get in touch with some of his friends and advise them to disappear? Were his friends being watched? Which friends? Him? Them? Here?

  He couldn’t have contacted Ignacio anyway. Ignacio had left for a trip deep into his parish even before Todd had flown out of the Amazon. With Ignacio gone, Todd had no way of reaching Celso without letting everyone in the Indian agency know he was looking for him. Celso would be picked up after the first phone call, and killed as soon as they’d extracted the old man’s name. After that, of course, it would have been easy to get the old man to say publicly and often that the document had been forged. Failure was addictive. Why should he rise to the occasion now?

  If there was an old man. If Celso hadn’t made him up. In his worst moments, Todd even suspected Celso of being involved in the kidnapping. It was utterly illogical to think so, except that Celso seemed to like playing both sides of the street. A double, triple agent. And it was strange the kidnappers used an obvious middleman on the telephone, as if they expected Todd to recognize the voice of whoever was in charge. Who was in charge, with Doutor Eduardo in Paris? Seu José? Tânia said Seu José did the dirty work, not the thinking. Not Mankiewicz; he was clean. Powell? Todd shivered at the thought of Powell near his sons. A nasty man, but Todd didn’t think he was dirty in quite this way. And as for brains, Eric had scrambled his years before. Celso seemed as good a bet as any.

  Or was Todd building up suspicions around Celso as a way to let go of him emotionally? Preparing to sacrifice Celso for the boys? A nervous stutter. Acne medicine. An unattractive man, grating as fingernails, easy to discard.

  He couldn’t give them Celso, but he had to get his boys. How could he do that? Without even knowing who he was dealing with, he had little hope of playing a winning hand.

  Not that he could use those terms with Holly.

  “It’s my fault,” he’d told her, on the way back from the airport.

  “Mine, too,” Holly answered. “Give me some credit here, Todd.” She smiled wanly, then fell into sobs.

  Todd knew he should reach for her, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the airport. Larkin. He knew his name perfectly well. He was chewing on it. Felt like spitting it, spitting it out.

  “All my fault,” he mumbled, his mouth so full.

  “You never listen,” she sobbed, half laughing, half hysterical. “You never listen, and I never manage to say what I mean. Yes, it’s your fucking fault. And mine. We’re their parents. How could we have let this happen?”

  “I hate myself,” Todd told her. “Just loathe myself.”

  “That isn’t useful, Todd,” she said, trying to regain control. “Tell me what happened. Everything. Right from the start.” When he hesitated, she added, “Wouldn’t it be a relief?”

  It wasn’t. Nothing would be, not until she’d told him her half; given him at least a taste of an apology. Yet when Todd finished sketching in his story, she only looked out the window, crying, and he stayed stubbornly silent until they got home. It was Tânia who embraced his wife. An improvement over Larkin, he thought bitterly. Over Holly’s shoulder, Tânia said there had been no more calls, leaving Todd to start pacing. He didn’t know what else to do. What were they trying to do to him? Exhaust him until he couldn’t think straight?

  The next morning, Todd was afraid they’d succeeded. He’d spent the night in his armchair. Now he stank, his beard was bristling, and the little he’d eaten had left him with a rumbling case of indigestion. Holly look equally wilted, slumped in the chair across from him. Only Tânia was efficient, grim, determined, and far more energetic than either of them, having slept and showered. She’d staffed the kitchen with a girl from her apartment and filled the garden with dubious-looking men whose vests bulged under the shoulder. As the Austens waited, she worked her cell phone, talking to Cida’s oldest brother Wanderley, who was looking around in unspecified ways. Wanderley worked in newspaper distribution, meaning he knew something about information; where to get it, how it spread.

  “Are we talking in euphemisms here?” Todd had asked. “Newspaper distribution?”

  “Perhaps in metaphor,” Tânia said, pursing her lips. “Better not to ask.”

  She radiated such resolve. Todd half suspected she was enjoying this, finally challenging her uncle, although he’d caught her at odd moment looking deep inside herself, bleak, austere, folded into sadness. Cida had lost the baby. Two months premature, tiny and traumatized. Tânia had said last night that Cida was recovering, and would soon be discharged from the hospital into her mother’s care. Now she took another call, her energy visibly receding, and hung up telling them Cida was at home.

  “There will be a little funeral,” she added, so Holly wailed helplessly, an awful dying sound that made Todd ball his fists together tightly. Yet when she finally stopped, Holly’s face was so different she might have been her own sister.

  “I didn’t ask last night,” she said, drying her eyes. “Was it a boy or a girl?”

  “A boy,” Tânia answered quietly.

  “So self-centred,” Holly said. “I’ve got to stop that. We’ve got to talk about what’s really happening here. I’m sorry, Tânia, but I have to ask. Is this all tied together somehow? Antônio, the boys?”

  “No,” Tânia said, shaking herself out of her reverie. “No, it’s not connected, dear, except that my uncle’s annoyance with me is probably making him a little more difficult with you. Which means I do owe you something, even leaving aside the babies. But I wonder — did you ever give Todd my message, that my uncle dislikes giving up control.”

  “I said to be careful.”

  “Which you weren’t,” Tânia said, turning to Todd. She shrugged. “I also told Holly some family history. I told her how my uncle became my guardian after my parents died, and took control of the estate. I know now that miracles occurred when he did. Large properties began to move around. From my name, you see, to his. However, I knew nothing about it at the time. I was very young, and soon afterwards, very badly married. My first husband later became a good friend, but when we were young, I’m afraid, we neither of us knew how to act toward the other. Poor Felipe. He’s dead now. My Argentine friend Osvaldo was his partner for many years. Holly, you must have told Todd about Osvaldo.”

  Holly nodded, holding Tânia’s eyes.

  “I ran off,” she admitted. “That’s how I got out of it. I met an American and ran off to New York, which was convenient in many ways. Un mariage de convenance. Eventually giving three lovely daughters, so how can I complain? But it was seventeen years before I felt strong enough to divorce him and come back to Brazil. Another brief marriage; we all make mistakes. But I was finally on my own, and decided it was time to take a role in managing my affairs. I’d left it to others until then. My uncle always made a point to have the accountants go over it with me, but I never paid much attention. I was an artist. Why should I care? Not as long as he was giving me what I needed to live on, which he did.

  “My uncle likes to spend money too, y
ou see, on his possessions, although he makes a fetish of living simply himself. Cold baths, peasant meals. The best stable in Brazil, however, and a museum of colonial art on the walls.

  “And then there was Antônio. The poor boy, you know, he was destined to be the chief executive officer of a large hospital. He would be a surgeon for a few years, and then begin to take a interest in the hospital procedures, become head of his department and so on, until he ran it all. You see how I’ve constructed an entire life for him in my imagination. I’ve even given him a young wife, later on, and several charming children. I met Antônio when I was already learning about business; paying attention during my silly little meetings with accountants. My second husband had kept files of everything they sent me in New York, seventeen years worth of documentation. The forensic accountants have it now. It isn’t important, except to say that Antônio volunteered to help. He could get into the Brazilian land registry; also trace the publicly-traded companies. I wish you could have seen him, working through those dusty old records. He was remarkably patient, but in the manner of a gambler picking up his cards. You know, the poker face, while slowly putting together a royal flush. Hardly anybody knew that Antônio was a gambler. I mean, he was literally a gambler. His family had no money to speak of. This is what financed his medical education, not to mention that bloody motorcycle. When they killed him, I had no idea if it was some petty debts to a bicheiro or a warning to me.”

  “So you really thought it was a warning?” Holly asked.

  “Yeah, sure, I had a pretty good idea. Then Todd told me you saw my son in the Amazon and I knew it was. He’d picked up something about what I was doing and decided that Antônio was manipulating me, trying to cut him out of his inheritance. He loathed Antônio, and if he got together with my uncle, the mixture of suspicions was probably too volatile. Weak, weak. I lived in New York, but I insisted on educating Eric in Brazil, and in retrospect I realize there was a fissure created in his personality. Into which both he and Antônio fell.”

  “But Tânia, do you have proof your uncle defrauded you?” Holly asked.

  “Yeah, sure. But you don’t need to be concerned with that. It’s not connected, except maybe in making him more suspicious and difficult. He isn’t sure what’s going on, but he’s worried, and he’s probably afraid I’ll impoverish him. Maybe that’s why he’s so eager to develop this mine in the Amazon.”

  Todd felt surrounded. How could you feel surrounded by only two women?“I won’t impoverish him, it’s all relative,” Tânia said. She puckered her lips. “All relatives,” she amended. “He’s right, you know. It really is about legitimacy. Succession.

  “But why don’t they call about the babies?” she asked.

  “It’s a stupid way of doing things. We ought to make a straight trade, him for the kids. He brings along the documents, his wife takes the boys, and he does it right now. No more delays. Get it back the way it was supposed to be.”

  “I keep telling you, it’s the psychology,” Powell said. “This hasn’t penetrated yet? We got trained in hostage-taking situations. The airlines brought in experts. You’re taught to use psychology, you wear them down. Let them start second-guessing themselves. Get confused, suggestible. They defeat themselves in the long run.”

  “I don’t like the long run,” said Seu José. “I like to make it quick.”

  “And this way no one gets hurt. Okay? We get the information and nobody gets hurt. Are those children getting properly fed? Have you given them what they asked for?”

  “I sent one of the boys out,” said leather-jacketed gunman, whose name was Gilson.

  “Well, where is he?”

  “He can’t find the right kind of bloody cereal around here. They want Choco-Krispis, and nobody here has it. I had to tell him to get on the bus.”

  “Choco-Krispis?” said Powell. “What kind of parents let their kids eat crap like that? What about their teeth?”

  “You said to get them what they wanted.”

  “Go ask them if their parents let them eat it.”

  Exchanging a glance with Seu José, Gilson went upstairs, and found the boys hunched together at the far side of the cot, where the rough walls met in a rougher corner. They had not touched the toys bought for them, which still lay around the cot in their wrappers. Gilson had a boy and a girl himself. He thought this was a bad business.

  “Hey,” he said. “Does your mother let you eat Choco-Krispis?”

  The older answered politely, “We’re not allowed to have it in the house, but we can eat it in restaurants on vacation.”

  “You going to brush your teeth after?”

  “Please don’t hurt us,” the kid said.

  Aside from asking for the cereal, the younger boy hadn’t spoken a word.

  “Here. Take the rabbit,” Gilson told him, holding out a stuffed toy. To his surprise, the kid grabbed it. Maybe he was afraid not to.

  Gilson didn’t like this business at all. Lingering outside the doorway, he heard the redhead say in a demented voice, “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.”

  “We’re going to have to brush our teeth,” the older one instructed. “When they tell us to, you do a really good job.”

  “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.”

  They were speaking Portuguese, sounding uncomfortably like Gilson’s kids.

  “We’re going to do everything they ask us to.”

  Gilson thought, sounding the way parents wished their kids sounded.

  “Rabbit-rabbit, rabbit-rabbit.”

  “Then Daddy will come get us. Daddy will take care of us. We just have to behave and then we’ll be all right.”

  Gilson turned and went back downstairs.

  “Not at home, but when they’re on vacation,” he told Powell.

  “So where’s the consistency in that? If they’re bad for you, they’re bad for you.”

  Powell got up from his chair, slapping his thigh as he walked around the kitchen. It was obvious to Powell that the Austens were terrible parents. They alternately over-indulged the boys and ignored them, filling them with chocolate and then abandoning the lonely little snickers to play with strangers on vacation. You couldn’t do that. What was the mother thinking? That the world was a benign and predictable place where you could forget about your kids while you worked on your tan?

  The boys were lucky they’d met Powell, who would take far better care of them than their feckless, self-involved parents. He’d been looking for something like this for a while, and wasn’t planning to let go of it. First he’d extract the necessary information from the father and get him to deliver the document. Then he’d simply keep the chickadees, take off with them somewhere. As long as he got what he wanted, the big man wouldn’t be overly concerned with the details.

  Of course, Powell still had to work out a few details of his own. But he knew he could pull this off, one step at a time.

  He checked his watch. The hands had worked around to eight p.m.

  “Get them on the phone,” he said.

  26

  “Yes,” Todd answered.

  “I want to talk to your wife.”

  “What?”

  “I want to talk to your wife,” the voice repeated.

  “Your business is with me, not with her.”

  But Tânia signalled Todd from the other extension, and he handed the phone to Holly.

  “I’m here,” she said. “I don’t know what you could possibly want with me, but I want to talk to my children.”

  “They’re all right. I was just talking to them.”

  “But I want to talk to them. You sound like you’re on a cell phone. I can’t see that there’s a problem. Can’t you just take the phone to them?”

  “You’ll get them all upset. And then I’ll have to calm them down.”

  Holly paused.

  “They’re okay,
” the voice said. “The younger one has a stuffed rabbit. They want Choco-Krispis. They say you don’t have it at home, but they’re allowed on vacation.”Again Holly couldn’t think what to say.

  “You want your children back, don’t you?” the voice insisted.

  “You asked them what kind of cereal they’re allowed to have?”

  The guy snorted, but in amusement. Contempt?

  “You must have children,” she said. “You must have children yourself.”

  “Don’t push it.”

  Holly drew a breath. “I want my babies back,” she said.

  “So you’re going to ask your husband who gave him the document.”

  Holly asked cautiously, “And what am I going to do after he refuses? If he says he’ll only tell you personally? After we have the boys.”

  “Ask him who gave him the document. Right now.”

  Holly turned to Todd, pillowing the receiver in her chest.

  “Who gave you the document?” she asked. “They insist on knowing, and I have no idea here. No ideas. Tell me how this ends, Todd. Who pays?”

  In agony, he snatched the receiver. “The guy’s dead,” he cried.

  “We thought you were going to say that,” the voice replied. “We’re going to send you something.”

  He hung up.

  “My God,” Todd said helplessly, as Tânia sucked her cheeks. He pictured something grisly. But then he heard the fax downstairs in his office distantly ring and answer. Exchanging a confused glance with Holly, he ran down the stairs in time to see the grainy top of a full-page photograph start to emerge from the machine. But there was something wrong with the transmission. Not only was it too dark, the centre of the picture was lost in waving, extended lines. There was absolutely no telling what it was.

  The telephone rang a moment later, and again Todd snatched it.