THIRTEEN
There were three boxes of condoms on the table.
A French brand. Cheval, the boxes said, over the picture of a white stallion with fiery eyes and windswept mane.
An Indian woman wearing incongruous-looking bifocals was bent over the table, carefully stretching out the condoms one at a time. She was wearing black latex gloves and no top. Just a gray sports bra with a black Nike swoosh on it.
At the other end of the table, another woman wearing black latex gloves and sports bra was methodically chopping up blocks of white powder with a gleaming surgical scalpel. The lieutenant was leaning against the door, eyes fixed on the half-naked women like a man in love.
Paul was sitting against the wall, waiting.
They’d made him give himself two enemas spaced an hour apart. As he waited for the second one to take effect, he stared at the thirty-two bulging condoms already gathered in the middle of the table and tried not to feel sick.
He was reminded of one of those inane reality shows that had so recently swept the country. Fear Factor —wasn’t that the one? Raw pig brains, bloody offal, cow intestines, laid out on a table before three or four greedy contestants. Go ahead —the smarmy host intoned every week— whoever gets the most down wins.
And didn’t they dive in with unabashed gusto? Didn’t they chow down to the last morsel, their eyes firmly on the prize? It helped Paul to think of them. They were his newfound role models. If they could do it, so could he.
After all, he wasn’t striving for mere money here. The grand prize on this show was two lives.
His wife’s and his daughter’s.
Thirty-two condoms became thirty-three. The woman at the end of the table had just added to the pile.
He felt the familiar rumblings in his gut. He asked Arias—that was the lieutenant’s name—if he could go to the bathroom.
Arias nodded and beckoned him forward. The women kept working without interruption, assembly line workers who hadn’t yet heard the lunch whistle.
Arias opened the door and pushed him out. There was a bathroom just down the hall. Arias watched him as he went in and swung the door shut behind him.
The door didn’t make it to the closed position.
Of course not. Arias’ booted foot stopped it, just as it had stopped it the first time Paul ran to the bathroom.
The door swung back the other way as Paul sat down on the dirt-streaked toilet seat and tried not to notice Arias watching him. That was kind of hard. He closed his eyes and thought of his bathroom back home, where a dog-eared copy of The Sporting News Baseball Stats sat just to the right of the toilet. Not because he particularly liked baseball—he didn’t. He liked stats. He visualized page 77—Derek Jeter. Batting average, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases. Numbers always told a story, didn’t they? It comforted him to think of numbers now. Numbers imposed order on the universe—you could lean on them, take comfort in them. They always added up.
For the second time in an hour, it felt as if every bit of his insides had come out of him. Then, with Arias still watching, he stood up and cleaned himself.
Back to the table. Where three more condoms had been added to the pile.
“Sí,” Arias said, staring at Paul and stopping the women in midmotion. “Start swallowing.”
THIS IS WHAT THE FARC COMMANDER HAD TOLD THEM.
“We are a revolutionary army. We are involved in a long struggle against oppression. We are in need of financing this struggle, so we must do whatever we can.”
Whatever we can turned out to be exporting pure Colombian cocaine to the eastern seaboard of the United States.
That’s how he began, as if he were seeking some kind of approval from them. Explaining the distasteful nature of the drug trade as a kind of necessary evil. A means to an end.
When he paused, Paul nodded, even nervously smiled, bestowing a kind of absolution on him. Perhaps that’s all he wanted, Paul thought, someone to take the message back to the world.
Yes, we smuggle drugs, but only to further the cause.
Of course, that was stupid. They weren’t going to kidnap them to relay their apologies. Of course, Paul hoped otherwise. Up to the minute the man told Paul he’d be swallowing thirty-six condoms stuffed with two million dollars’ worth of cocaine and bringing it to a house in Jersey City.
He would do that if he wanted to see his wife and new daughter alive again.
Then and only then did Paul understand the full enormity of their predicament.
Yet there were still things Paul didn’t understand.
The man asked him who knew they were here in Colombia—not everyone, just the people who kept tabs on them, who’d be expecting them to return on a certain date. Paul told him. Starting with his boss—Ron Samuels, head actuary of the firm he’d called home for the past eleven years. His in-laws, of course, Matt and Barbara, who resided in Minnesota and were due to fly in bearing gifts for their first grandchild. Finally, John and Lisa, their next-door neighbors and best friends.
Paul was ordered to write them letters, pretty much the same letter, three times.
Things are taking a little longer than expected down here and it will be a few more weeks before we can return with our adopted daughter —that was the general theme. They made him add a part about there being no need to call, since they’d be running from place to place with little time to chat.
Paul thought, they don’t want anyone to know. Not yet.
They’d forgotten something, hadn’t they?
“Pablo checked you out of L’Esplanade,” Arias said. “The reservation clerk thinks you changed hotels. That’s all.”
So they hadn’t.
No one would know they were missing.
Not for weeks.
They gave him three sheets of paper and a blue ballpoint pen that someone had virtually chewed the end off of. Paul wrote the letters with Arias hovering over his shoulder, evidently looking for any hidden messages, disguised cries for help.
When Paul finished, Arias read them out loud.
Later that afternoon, as Paul and Joanna sat on the mattress with their backs against the wall, Paul said, “I think I know why they switched her.”
“What?”
He’d been thinking this through; he thought he understood now. “Why they switched babies. Why they didn’t just wait and take all three of us together.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Remember when Galina came back with the thermometer? You said we hadn’t been paranoid, that we were in a foreign country. Paranoia is a foreign country, Joanna.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Galina took Joelle that day so we would come back and find her gone. So we’d call the police. There was no note—remember, she went into the bathroom and found it.”
“Why would they want us to call the police?”
“Because they wanted the police standing there when Galina walked back in.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sure it does. You’re in the country of paranoia now, remember? Think like a citizen. They wanted us to cry wolf. They wanted to make us look crazy.”
“Why?”
“Because crazy people have no credibility. Crazy foreigners have even less.”
“I still don’t—”
“First we called the police and insisted our baby was kidnapped. Only she wasn’t kidnapped. Then we noticed we had the wrong daughter—so she was. Only, if we called the police a second time, we would have looked more deranged than before. They wanted us to know they’d taken her.”
Joanna seemed to contemplate this notion. “Okay. What if we hadn’t noticed? I did—you didn’t.”
Paul shrugged. “If we’d never noticed, they would’ve called and told us. We’ve got your baby—come and get her or else. Either way, we couldn’t have gone to the police without looking like lunatics. Maybe it was a kind of insurance policy: if one of us got away, if they botched the kidnapping, if I’d refused to drink that coffee and never passed out. Who knows? Maybe they were always going to make that call. We were early, he said, remember? Galina was yelling at Pablo about something—maybe it was that, bringing us there before she was ready.”
“Okay,” Joanna said. “Why us?”
“Why not us? They must pick people they feel no one will bother at customs. The last time I looked, I didn’t look like a drug smuggler.”
Joanna said, “You’re not a drug smuggler.”
“Not yet.”
She turned to look at him as if to gauge his expression for degree of seriousness. “You’re going to do it?” she asked. It sounded more like a statement.
Paul looked back at his wife. Her face had changed, he thought. Four days of mostly not eating or sleeping had sharpened her cheekbones and dug craters under her eyes. Yet even now when she was hollow-eyed and terrified, he saw something etched there on her face, as if the last few days had removed everything extraneous and left the only thing that really mattered. He’d like to think it was love .
“Yes,” he said.
“They’ll arrest you. You can spend twenty years in jail for smuggling drugs. You’re not a criminal—they’ll see right through you.”
Yes, he thought, everything she was saying was true.
“What other options do I have?”
Joanna had no answer. Or maybe she did. She leaned her head against his chest, somewhere in the vicinity of his heart.
Thump, thump, thump.
“What if they’re lying? What if they’re lying about letting us go?”
Paul had been waiting for that question, of course. He gave the only answer he could.
“What if they’re not?”