From Cape Town with Love

by Blair Underwood

  “I don’t know. Maybe you did everything you could. How did you hear about Children First? Why did you suspect Nandi was yours?”

  Paki looked up at me with hangdog eyes. Unblinking. “Imagine you are me: You walk past a man reading a newspaper and you see a child who looks exactly like your sister, on the arm of an American movie star—exactly! Haw! And Children First is well known in the township. The age and coloration were right, and I stepped forward, demanded a blood test. Sofia’s people paid for the DNA test, and for that I thank them. I could not stay quiet. I had to claim her. I wanted her to remember she had come from somewhere.” His voice quivered with emotion. “Do you understand this . . . brother?”

  I nodded. I also understood that anyone would be tempted to get a piece of Sofia Maitlin and the life she could offer Nandi.

  “I get no stipend!” he said, objecting to my unspoken thoughts. “She pays me nothing. She only helped me get a work visa and find a place to live, and enough to move. That is all. Aside from these things, all I asked was to see my daughter from time to time. On her birthday. At Christmas! Does it make me a criminal to ask for these things?”

  “No one said you’re a criminal, man.”

  “No one has to say it,” Paki said, and switched the channel again. The Golden Girls was on, its laughter frozen in time. Paki seemed to forget I was there, sinking into the soft pastels with glazed eyes. “So much to watch!” he said. “Hundreds of channels. Everything here is choice after choice. There is so much! How do you make the right choice?”

  Paki had nothing left to teach me, and his choices were his own.

  MONDAY

  7:10 A.M.

  I hadn’t slept when my cell phone rang the next morning. Barely past dawn.

  It was Len Shemin, my agent. I was walking the grounds outside, relieving the night shift’s patrol. I was tired of my thoughts, so I picked up the call.

  “Hey, man, I can’t make the shoot today,” I told Len.

  “Really?” Len said. “Nice afterthought, Ten. Think you could have waited any later to let me know you’re blowing off your career’s biggest shoot? The one you hired a lawyer to fight for? It’s still ninety minutes before your set call. Sure you’re cutting it close enough?”

  “Look, I can’t go into it, but—”

  “Never mind,” Len said, chuckling. “I’m just giving you shit. I got an email from Rachel Wentz. I don’t know what kind of voodoo you’re practicing over there, but the whole shoot’s been pushed back because Sofia Maitlin’s production company wants to invest in the project—if he can spare you for a couple of days. Apparently, that’s just fine with Spike. He emailed me, too. Sofia Maitlin. Whoa. I just called to say to remember us little guys, okay?”

  “Ain’t even like that.” Len is a genuine friend, so I wished I could tell him more. I wished the real picture was half as rosy as the one Rachel Wentz had painted for him.

  “You okay, Ten? You sound like shit.”

  “To quote Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction, I’m pretty fucking far from okay. But I’ll live.”

  Len laughed. “What’s this I’m hearing about a kid going AWOL from the party? Someone must have been shitting bricks.”

  “And Angelina Jolie gave birth to a two-headed calf. Bullshit tabloid rumor,” I said. “Gotta go, Len. Thanks.”

  I didn’t give him the chance to ask any more questions. I can weave lies with the best of them, but I never enjoy lying to friends. I was deep in the bosom of celebrity life, but I wasn’t in Hollywood by far. I didn’t need an agent that day.

  Sometimes, life becomes instantly clarified.

  Mine was all about Nandi.

  There was a call at noon. Four of us crowded Maitlin’s phone, straining to hear Nandi’s small voice. Nandi didn’t sound happy, whining about how she didn’t have any apple juice, so we were left with an image of deprivation before the kidnappers took the phone. When we heard Nandi’s cries, Maitlin hugged her stomach, as if she had been speared. Maitlin’s ghostly face reminded me of the painting The Scream by Edvard Munch.

  “Don’t hurt her!” Maitlin begged her telephone.

  “We’ll call with the drop-off location at ten,” a man’s mechanized voice said. “Bring five million dollars. No invisible ink. No booby traps. Unmarked bills. If you are late, if you fuck with us, if I see any police . . . I’ll slit her throat myself.” Click.

  “Sons of BITCHES!” Alec roared, red faced, the most emotion he’d shown since Nandi’s disappearance. I’d almost wondered if the man’s stoicism was suspicious, but what was the point of kidnapping his own child? His son, Nikolos, convinced him in Greek to take a walk outside Nandi’s room. Maitlin and her husband drifted to separate islands to suffer.

  Maitlin never left her daughter’s room. If she had slept, it was on Nandi’s miniature bed. Maitlin’s eyes were hollowed out, dark pockets. By Monday afternoon, she wasn’t speaking to anyone, saving her energy for her phone calls.

  The next call came at ten exactly, after an eternity. The room was crowded, all of us standing by for the endgame. News that would bring Nandi home to her bed.

  The call lasted twenty seconds at most. Nandi was crying in the background.

  I couldn’t hear the caller that time, so I read Maitlin’s scribbles: 11 P.M. Citrus College. Glendora. Football stadium. 50-yard line. Barranca entrance. Maitlin was so nervous as she wrote, I could barely make out the last words. As I read, my heart knocked against my ribs.

  “Yes,” she kept saying, obedient. “Yes. Just don’t hurt her. That’s what you promised.”

  Beverly Hills is an hour from Glendora on a good day. Roman and I had mapped tentative routes to predictable sections of Los Angeles—the port, downtown, the beaches—but Glendora was a surprise. Forty miles east of us! And late was not an option. If the drop-off went badly, it couldn’t be because we got stuck in traffic.

  Maitlin’s sob caught between my ears, a wounded, mournful surrender I would hear the whole drive to Glendora. I wanted to promise her that Roman and I would bring her daughter home, but there was no time for false assurances.

  “Go, go, GO!” Rachel Wentz cheered behind us. We were racing down the stairs.

  All we could do for Nandi was run.

  THIRTEEN

  10:15 P.M.

  Five million dollars sat in the rear of Roman’s black Mercedes SUV, in two large duffel bags stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. Each bag weighed at least fifty pounds. Roman and I had retrieved the pile of currency from Maitlin’s bank that day amid curious gazes from bank employees but no embarrassing questions.

  I hated what we were doing, but I liked my new partner. The disagreement about whether or not to call the police simmered between us, and sometimes he seemed too emotional, but Roman’s mind stayed quick. It’s good when somebody’s got your back, I thought.

  Then, he turned on DMX.

  Don’t get me wrong: I like rap fine. Sometimes it’s just the right sound at the right time. But when I was driving with a carload of cash to retrieve a two-year-old child, the last thing I wanted to hear booming from the speakers was shit about losing our minds or acting a fool. Men have been psyching themselves up for battle with music since drums were invented. Roman cranked the angry bass, smacking his hands against the wheel in rhythm.

  He reached under his seat and handed me a gun case. A SIG Sauer P226. A hyperfunctional weapon beloved of SEALs and Recon Marines. Never fired one, but it had killed more men than the flu.

  “Ever zap anybody?” Roman said. The speedometer was creeping past ninety.

  I remembered the life flickering out of a man’s eyes in the Florida swamp—but I would have saved his life if I could have. His bad heart killed him, not me. “No,” I said. “You?”

  “Not sure of the exact count,” Roman said. “Iraq. Some memories I don’t want stuck in my head. Everybody thinks it’s the men you kill who haunt you. That’s not true.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s the men you c
ouldn’t save,” he said. “Boys and men who trusted me, and died.”

  I was glad I’d never been to war. Back when my father’s doctors thought he was dying, one of Dad’s oldest friends told me Dad was never the same after his tour in Vietnam in sixty-seven. I’d never met the playful, laid-back dude his friend remembered.

  “Sounds rough.”

  Roman hunched over the wheel. “Shit was a long time ago.”

  I checked the magazine, counting the rounds I might need to save my life. Both magazines were full, but the black metal lip on the second looked a little off to me. I decided not to trust it. I fed the first back into the SIG Sauer. I held the gun in my lap, caressing it, my finger beside the trigger. Roman drove like a fiend, skating past changing yellow lights to get us to Interstate 10.

  “In a perfect world?” Roman said. “Once Nandi’s clear, we smoke ’em all.”

  This man is going to get us all killed. “Not what I signed up for.”

  “And this isn’t a perfect world,” Roman said. “So we eat it and bring Nandi home.”

  “We’ve got their five million,” I said. “If they play fair, we’ll get her.”

  “We’ll get her no matter what,” Roman said. He zagged across solid lines, trying to maneuver around the bank of brake lights that had suddenly appeared ahead. It was ten fifteen and we were nowhere close. We hadn’t even hit the 60 yet, and Glendora was a long way northeast.

  Roman nodded toward an index card on the dashboard. “Grab that. That’s my number.” The index card had a phone number with an 818 area code, and three names: Wendy. Bryan. Caitlin. He didn’t have to tell me what the number was for. “Write yours down on the other side. Wife, girlfriend, your kid. It’s better when they hear it from someone who was there.”

  Roman, obviously, had made this call before.

  I wrote Captain Hardwick—it would annoy Dad if a stranger called him by his Christian name, no matter what the news. I was fine until I started writing Chela’s name, when I realized what I was doing: I was volunteering to possibly walk away, just when I’d promised to take care of her. I didn’t let myself think about April often, but her words from Cape Town came back to me: I can’t sit around worrying about whether you’re going to get killed, or if you’ll have to kill somebody. I can’t live that way—or raise our kids that way.

  April had been telling the truth on me, and I hadn’t wanted to hear. What was I doing speeding on the Santa Monica Freeway with five million dollars in cash and a gun in my lap? Riding the chaos, just like April had said. And I was taking my family along for the ride.

  I wrote Chela Hardwick on the index card, hoping it would matter to her if the call came. I wanted to write more, but it felt like a jinx to plan on dying.

  Roman’s GPS showed traffic patterns; most of our route was clear, colored green, but we were close to a patch in yellow that meant a slowdown. No alternate route made sense. Our arrival estimate was 10:58, but we would add minutes in traffic. We might already be late.

  The drumbeat in my chest wasn’t from DMX. A wary voice whispered, If you remember how to pray, this might be a good time to start. Was the voice mine? My father’s?

  I watched the small wood-carved crucifix swing back and forth from Roman’s rearview mirror. I wished it looked more like a comfort, less like an omen.

  The campus of Citrus College was dark and deserted by the time we screeched to Barranca at exactly 10:59. The music was off.

  We drove past the light on Route 66 heading north on Barranca, and the last lights were from a strip mall and a 7-Eleven. Ahead, there was a well-kept residential neighborhood and mountains shrouded in darkness. The navigator said we should have been sitting right on top of the football stadium, but I couldn’t see it.

  “Where the fuck . . . ?” Roman said, straining to see through his windshield.

  When the clock showed 11:00, we were still on Barranca, lost. Maitlin’s phone might already be ringing with bad news.

  The colors black and white appeared in my side-view mirror, and I froze. A Glendora police cruiser approached from behind us, sirens off. The cruiser slowed and the driver glanced our way, trying to see through Roman’s tinted windows. The massive luxury SUV looked out of place on an empty street so late.

  “We better—,” I began. Get the hell out of here, I was about to say. If we showed up with a police escort, Nandi might not survive the night.

  Roman drove slowly, ten miles below the forty-mile-per-hour speed limit. Still, the police cruiser lingered. I braced for the flashing red light, scanning the dark streets for a cover story. There was a trailer park on my side of the street. Good.

  “Shit,” Roman said. He was already wild eyed.

  “Stay cool. We’re looking for a friend’s house on Barranca.” I kept my body language neutral, looking toward Roman instead of the police. He was dripping in sweat, glistening in the glow from the navigator.

  My heart flipped. Roman was freaking out. This could go all wrong, I realized. Maybe it already had.

  The police cruiser drove ahead at last, turning east at the next light, on Foothill.

  “That did not just fucking happen,” Roman muttered.

  The clock said 11:01.

  “There’s the parking lot,” I said. On the driver’s side, a huge parking lot sat empty. I still didn’t see a football stadium, but the parking lot was big. An unlighted sign in white sat atop what looked like a grassy hill over the parking lot: CITRUS COLLEGE—THE FIGHTING OWLS. High above stood towering poles from dark stadium lights that were nearly invisible in the night. The stadium was behind the hill, camouflaged to blend into the neighborhood! A maze of gates penned it in. But the gate to the parking lot was wide open.

  The empty parking lot stretched everywhere, a long drive snaking the length of the stadium before it turned the corner and led to a more traditional ticket booth and entrance. The parking lot abutted the strip mall we’d passed earlier, and college buildings were nearby, but the concrete was an ocean of isolation. Not a single other car.

  We parked at the edge of the stadium’s deserted ticket island and admission gates. The only lights were from Roman’s headlights. The clock said 11:02.

  Roman opened his car door, but left the car idling. Lights on.

  “Hello?” he called out. “We’re here for Nandi! We’ve got your money!”

  No answer. They might be playing us, of course. A test. Maitlin might get a new location when we passed.

  “They want us on the fifty-yard line,” I said. “We better hustle.”

  We used the strategy from actors’ base camp during a shoot, hiding the car keys on top of the tire on the driver’s side—easy to find, but the last place anyone else would look. Roman opened the back of the SUV, and we heaved two and a half million dollars apiece across our shoulders in duffel bags, securing them with one arm. Those bags were heavy, like carrying fifty-five pounds of potatoes on your back. My P226 was in my jeans, hidden beneath my T-shirt. Roman tossed me a device that looked like miniature binoculars with an adjustable headband and chin strap, and I caught it with my free hand.

  “Night vision,” Roman said. “Better than a flashlight. Dark as shit out here.”

  “Thanks, man,” I said. I fitted on the goggles, and hidden objects leaped into my green-tinged vision. Another maze of fences lay ahead. I scanned the parking lot again; I saw rows of painted lines, suddenly bright, but not a single car. Nothing moved. I took the goggles off and wore them around my neck. Too disorienting until I needed them. I would trust my own eyes.

  We ran as fast as we could with the weight of the money, only at a jog. The gate to the stadium’s main entrance was wide open, too.

  We turned a corner past the gates, and the football stadium unfolded like a massive crater, ringed by a competition running track with marked lanes. Without my goggles on, all I could see were the shadowy rows of aluminum seats, rising like the Red Sea on either side of us, and the words CITRUS COLLEGE spelled out with white flowers hig
h above the goalpost.

  Fingers toggling his goggles, Roman swept the field with his eyes. “Nobody,” he muttered. “They better not think we’re just gonna drop off the money and go. Kiss my ass.”

  “Hello!” I called out to the vast, dark space. “We’re here for Nandi!”

  Nothing. I checked my watch: 11:04.

  “I don’t like it,” I said quietly. “We’re wide open for a sniper. Pow, we’re dead. Money disappears. No Nandi.” I hoped they were professionals, and that this was just another day at the office. Amateurs might think it was worth it to shoot us. Just in case.

  Roman hiked his bag up higher on his shoulder. “Let ’em try it.”

  We ran side by side, our shoes sinking into springy artificial turf as we made our way toward the fifty-yard line. Every yard was an effort; my thighs felt tight. The wads of bills shifted inside my duffel bag, making it squirm like something alive. Please let Nandi be here, I thought, even while the darkness and silence said otherwise.

  Both of us were breathing hard when we flung our bags off on the fifty-yard line and tried to realign our joints. My left shoulder would be bitching at me for a long while.

  Five minutes late, but we’d finally made it.

  This time, both of us used our goggles to scan the stadium. I finally saw movement on the home side, near the announcer’s booth. A flash of light, and then the world went dark. My goggles had shut off.

  “Fuck!” I said. Or maybe Roman said it. Simultaneously, we took off our goggles.

  Someone had turned on a spotlight, triggering the goggles’ auto shut-off. The light was too weak to fully illuminate us, but it was more than bright enough to hide whoever was standing behind it. The light was on the home side, about ten rows high.

  “Empty your guns and throw them down,” a man’s voice said. He sounded like a megaphone, with a posh English accent, and he was nowhere near the light.