Detour

TWELVE

Sometimes they were given newspapers.

They were allowed this small luxury by the powers-that-be. An infinitesimal luxury, since neither of them spoke Spanish. But things were coming back to Paul—dribs and drabs, words and phrases, sometimes entire sentences.

Anyway, it gave them something to do. Paul discovered you needed things to do to keep your mind off the unspoken question of the hour. What was going to happen to them?

The boy dropped off whichever newspapers their guards had discarded—mostly of the tabloid variety.

The back pages were filled with the local scores. After a while Paul understood that the front pages were too. It was as if Colombia were one big soccer match, both combatants going goal for goal, playing to the death. Guarding the left goal were their captors, FARC, and guarding the right one, the USDF, with the government ineffectually attempting to referee.

Kidnappings, bombings, and executions were how they kept score.

There was invariably a kidnapping story on the front page. A file picture of the snatched state senator, missing radio personality, or waylaid businessman. (The Breidbarts were conspicuously absent from the gallery of the gone.) There was generally an accompanying photo of the weeping wife, teary children, or somber family spokesperson.

The Spanish word for kidnapping was secuestro.

Bombings were only a little less frequent. For example: A ten-year-old boy named Orlando Ropero who liked soccer and ventello music was asked to deliver a bicycle by a teenager in the town of Fortul. He was given the equivalent of thirty-five cents as an inducement. When the bicycle and bicyclist, an excited and gratified Orlando, reached an intersection where two soldiers were stationed, he simply exploded. Remote control, said the papers.

Responsibility was placed at the doorstep directly to Paul’s left. FARC. He decided to keep this particular article to himself.

Then there were the obligatory retaliatory bombings from the right: the paramilitary units of the United Self-Defense Forces, self-defense apparently consisting of killing as many people as possible with no particular regard for innocence. The generalissimo of this august organization for law and order was currently residing in a U.S. prison for drug smuggling.

Paul had read about Manuel Riojas in the States, of course.

Who was he exactly? Drug kingpin, legitimate politician, USDF commander, songwriter. He was one of those, two of those, or possibly all four. Certainly a songwriter. He’d reputedly written a number one hit for the Colombian songbird Evi, which had gotten some play in the States. A love song titled “I Sing Only for You.” A title that took on ironic implications when she was discovered lying half dead on the floor of her penthouse apartment with her vocal cords surgically removed. Apparently, the lovers had experienced a falling-out. Evi had declined to press charges— I don’t remember, she’d scrawled on a pad when she was asked to explain who’d done that to her.

Murder and torture were said to be Riojas’ other vocations.

He was one of those people whose names were always followed by the word alleged. It was alleged, for example, that he had his own zoo on one of his many haciendas, used to allegedly feed his rivals to the tigers. That he allegedly enjoyed dropping people from a Blackhawk helicopter into a pool of writhing piranhas. That he offered human sacrifices in bloody and bizarre rites of Santeria—that was alleged too. He was clearly the stuff of tabloids; the tabloids took full and voracious advantage.

Paul and Joanna passed the newspapers back and forth till the ink stained their hands and their eyes grew blurry.

ONE NIGHT JOANNA WOKE PAUL AND ASKED HIM TO LOOK IN ON the baby.

It took Paul a moment to understand that she was deluded.

That they weren’t in the hotel room sleeping next to Joelle, but in a locked room with no air.

His face stung where the man had repeatedly smashed him with the rifle butt, a beating that had lasted at least five minutes and felt much longer. He’d lost at least one tooth; his lip was split open and still covered in dried blood. Afterward, they’d had to watch contritely from the center of the floor as two guards came in and hammered a new piece of wood back into place, muttering at them the whole time.

“Shhh,” Paul whispered to Joanna. “You’re sleeping.”

She opened her eyes.

“I thought I heard . . .” She began to cry. Soft, muffled sobs that seemed even more nakedly pitiable with no other sounds around to cloak them.

Paul put his arms around her. “Please, Joanna. We’ll get out of this. They’re not going to kill us—they had their chance when they caught us at the window. We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to get Joelle back. I promise.”

He wondered if promising Joanna anything was a good idea. But hope was the one commodity that hadn’t been taken away from them. Not yet.

Then she did a strange thing. She stopped crying and disentangled herself from his arms. She put a finger to his lips.

“Listen,” she whispered.

“What? I don’t hear anything,” he said. Only the sound of their breathing. Soft, regular, and strangely in sync.

“Listen,” she said again.

Then he heard it.

“It’s the TV,” he said.

“Maybe it’s real.”

“Probably not. No.”

“Listen, Paul. Listen. It’s her. ”

A baby crying.

Just like in Galina’s house, only different than Galina’s house.

“I know,” Joanna said. “I just know. ”

In Galina’s house the sound of a baby crying had frightened them.

Here it had exactly the opposite effect.

She wrapped herself around him in the dark. She put her head on his chest, and both of them lay there and listened to the sound as if it were a beautiful rhapsody. As if it were their song.

IN THE MORNING THE MAN CAME BACK.

This time he wasn’t alone.

Someone of evident importance was with him. Paul could tell from the way his attacker deferred to him. His role had changed; he was there to interpret now.

This became clear when the new man looked at Paul and Joanna and said something in Spanish.

“He asked you to sit down,” their original captor said.

Paul knew what the man had asked them to do. But he was still smarting from his previous beating. He thought it better to think things over before committing to even the simplest action. The man had asked them to sit, fine—maybe it was better to make sure he wanted them to sit. Joanna had remained stationary for another reason, he knew. Sheer willfulness, courage in the face of fire.

The man motioned them to the two plastic chairs. Once upon a time those chairs must’ve sat in the courtyard, that heavenly vista they’d fleetingly glimpsed before it disappeared again behind newly nailed oak. Dirt was ingrained in the white plastic, the kind that accumulates after too many winters spent outdoors.

They sat.

The man in charge spoke to them in soft, measured tones. He focused mostly on Paul, maintaining eye contact between puffs of a thick pungent cigar sending blue plumes of smoke drifting gently up to the ceiling. Paul recognized the brand: the box on Galina’s mantelpiece. He had a scraggly beard; his skin was pocked from childhood acne. He spoke entirely in Spanish, at a pace leisurely enough to allow his lieutenant—that’s how Paul thought of him now—to translate his words into English.

“This is what you are going to do for us,” the man said.

And they finally learned why they were there.