A King's ransom

39

Matthew had expected some form of punishment. But not this.

After the death of Nisho’s husband, it had been straight to solitary confinement for Matthew. Not in a thatched hut or wooden shack, like the one in the FARC camp where he’d met Emilio. This was five days in a hole in the ground. It was deep enough for him to sit upright but not stand. He could lie on his side in the fetal position, but there was no room to stretch out to his full length. The roof overhead was at ground level, made of chopped branches, wide jungle leaves, and thick mosses. It kept out the daylight but not the steady mountain rainfall. In a matter of hours the sides and bottom of his pit were nothing but slimy mud. Last night it had rained hard, and today the chilly water was up to his ankles, as the ground was too saturated for it to drain away.

Matthew still couldn’t erase the sight of that man sprawled on the rocks beside the river. Joaquin had left him there, of course, no proper burial. All the way back from the tragic sight, Matthew had protested his innocence. Nisho, the new widow, hadn’t seen anything, so she couldn’t say whether Matthew or Jan was lying. Joaquin didn’t have time to sort out the truth. Immediately upon their return to camp, Joaquin ordered his men to start digging. Matthew was thrown in one hole, and Jan went in another one twenty yards away. Better to punish the innocent than to risk letting a guilty man go free. Justice according to Joaquin.

Matthew tried to think of Cathy, his family-anything to take his mind away from this place. He recounted fishing trips he’d taken, bonefish in the Bahamas, peacock bass in Venezuela. That only brought to mind the ancient fisherman’s motto-“Allah does not subtract from the allotted time of man the hours spent fishing.” He wondered about the hours spent kidnapped, knee-deep in mud in a dark hole in the earth.

He suddenly cringed. There it was again, that sharp pain in his belly. It had first come upon him two days ago after lunch, a violent episode. Ironically, he’d thought the guards had acted out of kindness in allowing him to eat in daylight with the roof pulled back. Turned out they merely wanted to watch the show. Within ten minutes of finishing his cornmeal, he was doubled over in pain. The vomiting and diarrhea were utterly uncontrollable. He couldn’t even climb out of his hole, and the guards wouldn’t lift him out. They only laughed, and he knew that they’d slipped him something to make him so sick.

It was back again, the same stabbing sensation in his lower abdomen.

“Son of a bitch!” he shouted as the pain ripped through his body. He fell on his side in the darkness, mired in filthy water. His body twisted and erupted in the same violent motions, but after two days of this, there was nothing left to expel. His stomach had kept nothing down for at least thirty-six hours. The guards refused to give him more than a few sips of water, insisting that it would only make the diarrhea worse. That wasn’t additional punishment. These morons just couldn’t comprehend the concept of dehydration.

His body shivered. The water in the bottom of the hole was very cold, but he was too sick to sit up. A thought crossed his mind, a sure way out. If he could just force himself to roll over, he’d be facedown in the thick mud. The water was more than deep enough to drown in. The question was, Could he hold himself down? The survival instinct was strong, but perhaps his body was too weak for his mind to engage it.

With both fists clenched, he pounded the mud in anger. He was furious with the guards, naturally, and with himself for even having considered the coward’s way out. Mostly he was angry in ways that even he didn’t fully understand. The nausea, the weakness, the darkness in the hole-it was all ganging up on him, pushing him to the brink of hallucination.

His shivering stopped. The pain remained in his belly, but it was on some other level, a more conscious level, a level at which he was no longer operating. In the darkness he could suddenly see himself as a boy in the Florida Keys, back in the old Red Cross house in which he’d grown up. .

“Leave her alone!”

He was five years old and shouting at his father. His terrified sister was standing right behind him, two years older than Matthew but dressed in a diaper. She’d wet the bed the night before, and their father’s solution was to send her off to the school bus dressed in nothing but a diaper, so that all the other kids could see what a baby she was. That would break the habit.

“Stay out of this, boy!” His father was drunk, as usual. Six o’clock in the morning, and he’d been out all night.

“Run, Stacy!”

His father pulled off his belt, slapped the leather strap on the couch. “Don’t move, you little bastards!”

Matthew charged straight at him, a fifty-pound bull of a boy plowing into a two-hundred-pound drunk. He knocked his old man flat, shattering a lamp in the tumble.

“Run!” shouted Matthew.

His father was cursing and swinging wildly, trying to get off his back.

“Run, Stacy! Run!” Matthew turned to escape, but just as he did, a huge hand grasped his ankle. “Let me go! Let me go!”

“?Silencio!”

Matthew was suddenly shaken from his memories. The voice in Spanish had come from somewhere above his dark, covered hole, a place beyond the misery of his childhood. He’d been unaware of his own shouting, though it had obviously been loud enough for the guards to hear.

The leaves rattled overhead. Someone was opening the roof. Matthew prepared himself for the sudden burst of light, but even on a cloudy day the brightness was too much for eyes that lived in darkness. He couldn’t look up.

“Lunch,” the man said.

The familiar voice surprised him. It wasn’t a guard, he knew, since none but Joaquin spoke English. Slowly he looked up toward the hole in the roof, and his eyes began to focus. “Emilio?” he said.

“Yeah,” he said, then made a face. “Man, it stinks in here.”

Matthew was still woozy. “What-what are you doing here?”

“Bringing you lunch.”

“Are you crazy? They’ll shoot you.”

“No. I’m a trusty now.”

“Huh?”

He handed down a tin plate with two cold sausages. Just the sight of processed meat had Matthew on the verge of relapse.

“Joaquin trusts me now, so he gives me little tasks.”

His head was pounding, his belly racked with cramps. It was all so confusing. “Why?”

“He just does.”

Matthew slowly rose to his knees, looked Emilio in the eye as best he could from his hole. His thoughts were jumbled from fever, but he struggled to string the truth together. “You ratted on Jan, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“Jan and I talked, just before Nisho’s husband was killed. He accused you of telling Joaquin that he was planning an escape. I told him he was crazy. But it wasn’t paranoia, was it? You told.”

Emilio checked over his shoulder, as if to see whether any of the guards were close enough to overhear. “Of course I told,” he said softly.

“I can’t believe you did that.”

“I had to. That Swede is trouble. That first day we left the FARC camp, Joaquin warned us what would happen if you tried to escape. If you failed, Joaquin would kill me, the daddy. If you succeeded, he’d kill Rosa, the mommy.”

“He made those rules to keep me from escaping.”

“Not just you. He had the same rules for Jan. And then the idiot came to me, asking me to escape with him. He expected me to leave Rosa behind for Joaquin to execute. Wouldn’t you have snitched?”

Matthew tried to focus, but in his weakened, sick condition, things were starting to spin. Murders, false accusers, snitches. This was Pitcairn Island.

“If Joaquin trusts you,” said Matthew, “then get me out of here. You know I didn’t kill Nisho’s husband.”

“Just because Joaquin lets me bring you lunch doesn’t mean I can sit down and negotiate with him.”

“Try,” he said, his voice breaking. “Somebody has to get me out of this hole. I’m going crazy in here.”

“Hang in there, okay? I don’t think you’ll be in much longer. He let Jan out yesterday.”

“Him?” Matthew said, nearly losing it. “Why him? Why am I getting the worse punishment?”

“Maybe Joaquin thinks your spirit is stronger. He wants to break it.”

A wave of nausea hit him, chipping away at his will to endure. “If he’s going to kill me, tell him to just do it. Please, I don’t want to go through this hell and end up dead anyway.”

“You can’t give up, Matthew. I don’t think he’ll kill you, even if he thinks you killed Nisho’s husband.”

“How do you know?”

“The guards tell me that the Japanese guy wasn’t such a big loss, at least from Joaquin’s point of view. He thinks Nisho’s family will pay as much for her release as they would have paid for both of them. It’s not like buying two cars with a price tag for each of them. These kidnappers just come up with a big number that they think the family can pay. Joaquin’s not going to lower his price just because it’s only Nisho’s life on the line and not Nisho and her husband.”

“So I guess he’s glad her husband is gone.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘glad.’ ”

“I would. Have you seen the way he looks at Nisho? He’s more than happy to have her husband out of the way.”

“I haven’t really noticed.”

“Then take notice. I don’t care if you are a trusty, Emilio. I know you’re a decent man. If somebody doesn’t stand up to these guards, they’re going to have their way with Nisho, then Rosa, then Nisho again, and again, and again. I can’t do anything from in here, so it’s up to you. Don’t let it happen, you hear me?”

Their eyes locked. Matthew was stone-faced, unflinching.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Emilio pulled away. Matthew just watched as the leaves and fronds returned to their place on the roof overhead, and his hole returned to darkness.