A King's ransom

22

Our car was a clunker. It wasn’t even from a rental agency. One of Alex’s friends loaned us a rusty Chevy Vega with eighty-nine thousand miles and worn-out shocks. It was part of her low-profile strategy. No fancy car, no wads of cash, no jewelry or wristwatch except my nineteen-dollar Swatch. And I could forget those nice restaurants I’d been reading about. At least we’d booked a reputable hotel.

“Hotel?” she said with a chuckle as we left the terminal. “I borrowed a flat from Pablo for a couple days.”

Pablo was the guy who’d loaned us the car that was now limping down the highway. “What about my reservations at the Bogota Royal?”

“You didn’t really think we were staying there, did you?”

“Uh. . yeah.”

“Just a diversion. If someone comes looking for us, we won’t be there.”

I thought she was joking, but she wasn’t smiling. “You’re thinking someone would be following us?”

“They grabbed your father. Obviously someone thinks your family has money.”

I suddenly felt vulnerable. I reached over and locked the passenger door.

She drove, and I rode in the glove compartment. That was what it seemed like, anyway. The passenger seat was stuck in the forwardmost position, so that my knees pressed up against the dash. The ride was bumpy, too many potholes for our little rust-bucket. We made decent time out of the Aeropuerto El Dorado, but traffic clogged as we headed east into the city. The drive from the airport was a foreigner’s first taste of lawlessness in Bogota. Horns blasting, red lights ignored, sudden maneuvers to avoid collisions-all performed to the endless symphony of vulgar gestures and the most violent insults ever hurled between motorists. Yesterday I’d been skeptical upon reading that each day three pedestrians were run over and killed by buses in Bogota, to say nothing of the casualties caused by some nine hundred thousand private automobiles. Now that I’d arrived, I was beginning to think they’d understated the carnage.

Sometime after 2:00 P.M. we finally reached downtown. The cool, thin air surprised me. Bogota was closer to the equator than Miami was, but the city was nestled high in a mountain basin against the jagged ranges of the Cordillera Oriental, about the same altitude as Aspen, Colorado. With over six million people, it was an aggressive metropolis. The mountains bordered the east, wealthy expansion had moved north, poorer housing and industry were to the south and west. The old city center was still vibrant, though some of the colonial buildings were in disrepair. At its best, the feeling was Madrid or New York, especially the old commercial center. There were impressive skyscrapers, wide boulevards, trendy shops, and well-dressed professionals walking with the ubiquitous cell phones. The air was thick with exhaust from plenty of clunkers and some nice cars, too, more than I’d expected. Of course there were beggars at the intersections. Sad, but street poverty was a fact of life in virtually every city in South America, not just Bogota. The atmosphere didn’t strike me as overwhelmingly friendly, but it wasn’t especially scary either. Then we turned the corner and saw the rubble.

Beside a bank was a huge pile of loose bricks, broken concrete, twisted metal. Cleanup crews were shoveling shattered glass and burned-out furnishings into wheelbarrows and dump trucks. The skeletons of three scorched cars were still on the sidewalk, one of them upside down. The work area was secured with rope and barricades. A handful of uniformed officers stood guard, but the investigation appeared to be over. They were just sweeping up the mess.

“Last week’s car bombing,” said Alex.

“Terrorists?”

“Claro.”

“Who?”

“Who knows? It’s at least the tenth one this year.”

I wanted to be open-minded and say something like “It could happen anywhere.” But a bombing every month? This wasn’t Madrid or New York. This was Bogota, and once I’d seen the first sign of terrorism, I seemed to become more critical of everything else, or perhaps just more observant. A beggar approached our car at the next intersection. He was just a kid, his face and hands dirty, his clothes practically rags. This time I didn’t just look past him. I looked right into his eyes, his face pressed against the passenger window. They were black, empty eyes. I noticed two other boys on the curb passing a big bottle of glue between them, sticking the nozzle up their nostrils. One looked right at me, but I honestly couldn’t say that he saw me. He had that same vacant expression. Foreigners heard so much about Colombia and its drugs, but no one seemed to talk about the eight-year-old kids on the streets blowing their brains out with industrial-strength fumes.

The traffic light changed, and we were on our way.

Our meeting with the kidnappers wasn’t until tomorrow evening. By arriving a full day early, we were sure not to miss it over a logistical problem like a flight delay or goats in the road. So far everything had gone without a hitch, which left us the rest of the day and a full day tomorrow with nothing to do. I thought I’d take the time to visit one of the organizations I’d been communicating with by Internet, Fundacion Pais Libre, a private foundation whose main mission was to raise public awareness of Colombia’s kidnapping epidemic and to push for reform. With their headquarters just blocks away, I felt rude not stopping by to thank them for the information they’d sent me.

“Skip it,” said Alex.

“Why?”

“Because any time I’m in Colombia to negotiate with kidnappers, my basic rule is to trust no one.”

“Not even the foundation?”

“No one.”

“I don’t have to tell them I came here to talk to the kidnappers.”

“What are they going to think? Your father was kidnapped by guerrillas, so you decided this would be a dandy spot for a vacation?”

“No. They’ll think I came all the way to Bogota because my family is pursuing every possible angle to make sure my father is released as quickly as possible. How can that hurt?”

“Look, I’m not putting down the foundation. They do a lot of great things. But keep in mind that they helped push for the passage of Colombia’s antikidnapping law in the early nineties. One of the things that law did was make it illegal for the families of kidnap victims to pay ransom.”

“You mean if we pay a ransom, we’re breaking the law?”

“Don’t worry. That part of the law was declared unconstitutional by the Colombian Supreme Court. The government still opposes the payment of ransom, but I’ve done everything we need to do to make sure the authorities look the other way.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you can’t begin to understand the scope of the kidnapping and ransom problem in this country, and I don’t want you making side trips to talk to people at the foundation or anywhere else. From now until the time we leave, I’d prefer that you stay within my line of sight.”

“Come on, Alex. I appreciate all you’re doing for me, and probably a little paranoia is understandable. But you’re starting to sound worse than me.”

She suddenly turned angry. “You want to see paranoid? I’ll show you.”

She steered down a side street and stepped on the gas. The tires squealed as the little car cornered up a winding road to the top of a steep hill. Minutes later we stopped at the side of the road, where the view of the valley was unobstructed for a good square mile. She stepped down from the car, and I followed her to the edge of the cliff. Below was a residential neighborhood, hundreds of middle- and upper-middle-class homes on the wealthy north side of Bogota.

“Look,” she said.

We had a bird’s-eye view of the rooftops. The houses were nice, but they were little fortresses. Security walls surrounded each home, some topped with razor wire. Dobermans roamed many of the properties. Dozens had guards posted along the walls or at the doors, like sentries, armed with automatic rifles.

“When I was a little girl, this neighborhood was like the one you grew up in. Kids could ride their bicycles. Mothers could stroll with their babies. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

I nodded slowly, taking it in.

“That green house on the corner,” she said, pointing. “FARC has their twenty-two-year-old son. The yellow house five doors down. They took a father of three. Shot him in the head six months later when he tried to escape, then came back and snatched his eight-year-old daughter while his widow was out making the funeral arrangements. That two-story house on the hill over there-”

“Okay, enough,” I said. Reading the Pais Libre statistics was one thing. Seeing where the victims actually lived was quite another.

“These aren’t drug dealers. They aren’t even super-rich people. They’re normal families who worked hard to have a decent home and a few nice things. Bankers, shop owners, lawyers like you. This is the way they have to live now.”

I noticed her voice tightening. Obviously this wasn’t easy for her to talk about.

“If you want to wander around Colombia against my advice, Nick, don’t do it while you’re my responsibility.”

I looked at her, then back at the fortified homes. “I’m sorry,” I said softly.

“Let’s go.”

We got back into the car, neither of us saying a word. What I’d seen had definitely made an impact. Certainly there was every reason to take precautions. As she’d said in the airport, “No se puede dar papaya.” But her refusal to stay at a hotel or drive a rental car seemed a bit overboard to me, not to mention her going so far as to make a phony hotel reservation purely as a diversion to would-be followers. And her fears of an organization like Fundacion Pais Libre seemed almost irrational.

The ignition whined, then screeched, and finally the car started. As Alex struggled to find first gear, I was starting to wonder. Maybe she was being extra careful for my benefit. She feared for the safety of the gringo.

Then again, maybe it was Alex herself who was hiding from someone.

I glanced back once more toward the houses in the valley, then tucked my knees against the glove box as she drove us back into the city.