Detour

TWENTY-ONE

Miles answered on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Miles?”

“Yes?”

“This is Paul. Paul Breidbart.”

Paul was back at the diner. He’d tried the number in Colombia again. Six times. No answer. He could think of just one other person to call.

“Paul?” It seemed to take his lawyer a long time to flip through the Rolodex in his mind and actually place him. “Well, how the hell are you? Are you and, uh . . . Joanna back?”

Paul wondered if he’d needed a real Rolodex to come up with his wife’s name. He guessed, probably.

“No. Yes. I am.”

“You are? She’s not?”

“I’m in trouble, Miles.”

“What’s the problem? Everything okay with the baby?”

“Can I come see you?”

“Of course. Call the office tomorrow and make an appointment with—”

“I need to see you now,” Paul cut him off.

“Now? I was just on my way home.”

“It’s an emergency.”

“This can’t wait till regular office hours?”

“No. It can’t wait for regular office hours.”

“Well . . . okay,” Miles said after a moment’s hesitation. “It is an emergency, right, Paul?”

“Yeah. It’s an emergency.”

“You’ll have to meet me at my house. You got a pen handy?”

“I’ll remember.”

He gave him a street address in Brooklyn.

PAUL USED A LOCAL CAR SERVICE WHOSE NUMBER WAS POSTED ON A crowded bulletin board in the diner’s stinking vestibule.

Jersey Joe’s Limos.

Stuck between Stanley Franks Psychotherapy and Wendy Whoppers Body Work—In Call and Out Call.

Paul could’ve used a session with both.

He needed a limo more.

Although Jersey Joe’s Limos apparently didn’t have limousines. Ten minutes after he’d called, a forest-green Sable pulled up to the diner and honked its horn twice.

The grossly overweight driver offered to put Paul’s bag in his trunk. Paul gripped the handle straps tighter and declined.

He wondered how much time he had. Had he been afforded an extension of sorts? When Arias called that house in Jersey City, no one would answer. There’d be no ring because there’d be no phone. Maybe they’d know something was wrong—they’d take that into consideration. They’d restrain themselves.

They were coming off the ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge, and some very strange-looking people were coming into view. At least strangely dressed. It was summer, but the men wore enormous fur hats and long black jackets. The women wore even more.

He hadn’t connected the address Miles had given him to Williamsburg, bastion of Orthodox Judaism. Clearly, that’s where they were.

At every traffic light, sweating, bearded faces stared at him through the windows.

Miles’ home was a handsome brownstone neatly festooned with pots of scarlet geraniums.

Paul paid the driver, then lugged his black bag out of the car, like your friendly neighborhood drug dealer.

He walked up the brownstone steps and rang the buzzer.

The door was opened by a stout, smiling woman who would’ve been pleasant-looking if it weren’t for the thick black wig that sat on her head like a helmet.

“Mr. Breidbart?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Goldstein and led him into a wood-paneled study.

“He’ll just be a minute,” she said. “Please sit down.”

Paul chose one of the leather chairs facing a desk buried in an avalanche of paper.

After Mrs. Goldstein had left, he wondered about the wig.

Cancer?

A sudden image of his mother came back to him, meticulously placing someone else’s hair onto her head before the dresser mirror.

Paul gazed at the crowded bookshelves that lined two sides of the den, where books and pictures fought for space. Most of the photographs were of Miles. Shaking hands, posing with various Latin American kids. There was a picture of Miles and María Consuelo standing together in front of the Santa Regina Orphanage. There were several framed citations haphazardly mounted on the wall. Latin American Parents Association Man of the Year. Sitting just below an honorary degree from a law school and a certificate of service from a local hospital.

When a man entered the room and turned around to shut the door, Paul almost asked him when the man in the pictures would be coming down.

But it was the man in the pictures.

In disguise.

Miles was wearing a black felt yarmulke. He was in the process of detaching a small black object resembling a box from his naked forearm, unwrapping a tangle of crisscrossing leather straps. He was wearing a jet-black jacket that fell all the way down to his knees, looking very much like someone who’d wandered out of a Matrix movie.

“They’re called tefillin,” Miles said after he’d shaken Paul’s hand and sat down behind his desk. He’d added the strange black box with trailing straps to the rest of the clutter on his desk, where it lay like some exotic sea creature, an inky octopus maybe, now dead. “They’re kind of indispensable to morning prayer.”

“It’s afternoon.”

“Yeah. I’m playing catch-up.”

“You’re an Orthodox Jew?” Paul asked.

“Hey—you’re good.” Miles smiled when he said it.

“You didn’t dress like this at the office. I didn’t know.”

“Of course not, why would you?” Miles said. “Anyway, I’m modern Orthodox. And I’m kind of unorthodox about my orthodoxy. Wearing nonsectarian attire is a necessary accommodation I make for my career—it might frighten off the clients. Wearing a yarmulke at home is a necessary accommodation I make for my religion—if I didn’t, God might get angry. Got it?”

Yes, Paul got it.

He was eager to get off the subject of Judaism and onto the subject of his kidnapped wife and daughter.

“So,” Miles said, “you’re here. Welcome back. What’s the problem?”

“The problem?” Paul repeated it, maybe because it was such a hopeful word—problems could be faced and surmounted, couldn’t they?

“Bogotá,” Paul said flatly. “It wasn’t safer than Zurich.”

“What?”

“I’m in trouble,” Paul said. “Help me.”

PAUL WAS SIPPING A CUP OF GREEN HERBAL TEA GENEROUSLY provided by Mrs. Goldstein.

Good for the nerves, Miles said.

Miles’ nerves were evidently okay—he’d declined a proffered cup and was instead sitting at the desk with his hands clasped against his forehead.

He’d pretty much reacted the way a concerned lawyer should at the news that his clients had been kidnapped, with one of them still in Colombia and the other forced to smuggle drugs past U.S. Customs. Maybe more so. His face had dropped, become a puddle of concern, anger, and empathy.

He’d come out from behind the desk and clasped Paul around the shoulders.

“My God, Paul. I’m so sorry.”

Paul allowed himself to be comforted, to soak it in like a parched sponge. Up till now, the only person who’d felt sorry for him was him. Miles wanted details.

“Tell me what happened—exactly what happened.”

He told Miles about the afternoon they came back to the hotel and discovered their baby gone. About the next day, when Joanna had matter-of-factly stated that she was certain that the baby sleeping next to them wasn’t Joelle. About the trip to Galina’s, the cries coming from the back of the house, followed by Pablo’s sudden brutality.

The boarded-up room. Arias. The man with the cigar. The burned-out house. Paul continued right up to the moment the taxi stranded him in Jersey City.

Miles listened intently, made a few notes on a yellow legal pad that magically appeared from the clutter on his desk.

“Pablo?” Miles asked him. “This man was your driver?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-huh. And he was contracted through Santa Regina?”

“Yes. Why? Do you think Santa Regina had anything to do with this?”

“Not a chance. I’ve known María Consuelo for years. The woman’s a saint.”

Paul peeked at his watch. “They said eighteen hours. That’s two hours from now.”

“Okay. Let’s think about this logically.”

Paul was going to say that was easier said than done. That it wasn’t Miles’ wife and child in the line of fire. That time was running out. He remained quiet.

“Look, I know it looks pretty bleak, but we’ve still got something they want,” Miles said. He peered at the black bag on Paul’s lap. “In there, huh?”

Paul nodded.

“Maybe we should lock that up in my safe. I have kids running around.”

“Okay.”

Miles walked around to Paul’s side of the desk. He unzipped the bag and looked inside.

He whistled. “I’m no expert on narcotics, but that looks like a lot of stuff.”

“Two million dollars.”

“I’d say that constitutes a lot.”

Miles zipped the bag closed, then tentatively picked it up, holding it at arm’s length the way dog walkers carry their pets’ droppings to the trash can. He opened a liquor cabinet that wasn’t; there was a stainless-steel safe inside.

After he’d locked the bag in, he settled back behind the desk. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did you manage to swallow all that?”

Paul was going to say that it’s amazing how much you can swallow when your wife’s life depends on it. You can swallow thirty-six condoms and your own fear and disgust.

“I don’t know. I had to.”

“Yeah, guess you did,” Miles said. “Okay, where were we?”

“The drugs. The something they want.”

“Right, the drugs. They’re not going to do anything to your wife until they know where it is. Doesn’t that make sense?”

Paul nodded.

“Of course it does,” Miles continued. “That’s two million dollars. Besides, I believe FARC’s been known to hold hostages a long time. Years, even.”

Miles offered that particular fact as a palliative. It had the opposite effect; it made Paul sick to his stomach.

Years.

Miles noticed. “Look, I was just making a point. They may have told you eighteen hours. I don’t think they meant it.”

“How do you know?”

“Call it an educated guess.”

Okay, Miles was saying, you have more time. It’s like those threatening past-due bills you get in the mail—they’re just trying to scare you.

But Paul did feel sick to his stomach—in addition to feeling sweaty, filthy, and physically exhausted. He closed his eyes, rubbed his throbbing forehead with a hand that still smelled of gas station soap.

“You okay?” Miles said with evident concern. “I mean relatively? Look, I need you to stay with me. We’ll work this out, we’ll find a way—but I need you, okay?” He looked down at his scribbled-on pad. “Let’s review our options.”

Paul wasn’t aware that they had any.

“One—we go to the authorities.” Miles seemed to contemplate this notion for a moment; he shook his head. “Uh-uh. Your first instincts were probably dead-on. I mean, which authorities exactly would we go to? The NYPD? The State Department? The Colombian government? They haven’t been able to free their own people. Never mind a foreigner. Plus, if FARC finds out we’ve got people looking for Joanna and the baby, she becomes a liability to them. Then they might do something to her. And there’s something else. You did smuggle drugs into the United States—a lot of drugs. Under duress, sure, the worst kind of pressure, but we’re still talking narcotics trafficking, a federal offense. Okay, we don’t go to the authorities. Agreed?”

Paul said, “Yes.” He was enormously heartened by Miles’ use of the we word. It made him feel a little less alone in the universe.

Miles held up a second finger. “Two. We could do nothing. We could sit and wait for them to contact you.” He shook his head again. “Not so smart. How do we even know they know how to get in touch with you? Odds are, they don’t and who says your wife told them? Okay, scrap that. We can’t sit on our hands. Now . . .” He held up a third finger, leaned slightly forward. “Three. We can contact them ourselves. We can tell them we’ve still got their drugs. All we’re looking for is someone to give it to. We give you the drugs, you let Joanna and the baby go. No Joanna and baby—no drugs. Drugs equal money, lots of money. They’ll want the money.”

Okay, Paul thought, it sounded like an actual plan.

Perfectly logical, simple, even hopeful. Except . . .

“How are you going to contact them? They’re not answering that number. I’ve tried.”

“The driver,” Miles said, snapping his finger. “Pablo. I’ll call Santa Regina. María must have his number somewhere.” Miles opened his desk drawer and pulled out a small phone book. “Let’s see . . .” He scanned down one page, then flipped to the next. “Consuelo . . . Consuelo . . . here we are.”

He picked up his phone, punched in a number.

Some people chat on the telephone as if the person they’re speaking to is right next to them in the room. Miles was like that. When he said hello to María, he grinned, smiled, shook his head, as if she were sitting there right in front of him.

Fine, Miles said, and you?

Yes, growing up. And how are yours?

That’s wonderful—I’d love to see a picture . . .

They continued in this vein for a minute or two, small pleasantries, polite inquiries, general catching up.

“María,” Miles said, “I wonder if you could give me the number of a taxi driver—Pablo. I’m not sure what his last name is . . . Yes, that’s right. I’m thinking of using him for another couple . . . Really? Oh great.”

Miles gave Paul the thumbs-up. He waited, flipping a pencil back and forth between two fingers.

“Ahhh . . .” He scribbled something down. “Thank you, María . . . Of course. Talk to you soon.” He hung up the phone.

“Okay.” He looked up at Paul. “We have the number. Now . . .” He looked down at the pad and dialed again.

This time there were no hellos, no pleasantries exchanged, no small talk. That was because there was no talk at all. Miles waited, flipped the pencil, looked at his watch, stared around the room. Then he shrugged his shoulders, hung up the phone, and tried again.

Same result.

“Okay,” Miles said, “no one’s home.” He put the phone down. “I’ll try again later.”

Paul nodded. The question was, how much of later did they have?

“Look,” Miles said, “I’ve been thinking about this. You probably shouldn’t go home. Not yet. They didn’t want anyone knowing you’re back, correct?”

“Yes.” He’d been lifted up, borne along by Miles’ optimism, but now that they’d failed to connect with anyone, he felt his spirits plummeting.

“Let’s keep it that way, shall we? At least for the time being. You can stay here. Until we get through to them. That all right with you?”

Paul nodded again, willing to be reduced to childlike obedience. If Miles were recommending he stay here, he’d stay. Yes, sir. He was drained, dog-tired, in dire need of a pillow.

Miles made some explanation to his wife—Paul heard him whispering in the next room. Then he led Paul upstairs, past his children’s room, where two boys with remote controls in their hands looked up from their Nintendo.

There was a small guest room at the end of the hall.

Miles clicked on the light.

“Make yourself comfortable. If you want to take a shower, the bathroom’s down the hall. There’s pillows in the closet.”

Paul said, “Thanks.” He did need to take a shower, remembering what had transpired in the middle of the Triborough Bridge. But he didn’t have the energy.

Miles turned to leave, took a few steps, then turned back. “I’ll keep trying the number. If we don’t get him today, we’ll get him tomorrow. We’re going to save them, okay? Joanna and the baby, both of them. We’ll do everything we can.”

It was as good a good-night prayer as Paul could hope for.

He took off his shoes and socks and lay down on the bed without bothering to get a pillow.

PAUL WOKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. HIS WATCH SAID 3:14.

There was that moment when he wasn’t aware where he was, or even what had happened to him. When it was still possible Joanna lay next to him in bed and in the next room lay Joelle, softly sucking on her pacifier.

Then reality intruded. He knew where he was. He knew why. Understood that eighteen hours had come and gone and his wife either was or wasn’t alive. He shut his eyes and dug his head into the mattress in an effort to get back to sleep.

He couldn’t.

He felt suddenly wide-awake, infused with the energy of the seriously panicked. He turned one way, then another. He got a pillow from the closet; lay back and closed his eyes again. No dice. His mind couldn’t stop racing.

Hello, Arias, nice to see you. How’ve you been?

Buenas noches, Pablo.

Galina, good to see you again.

He pictured Joanna too, locked up in that room. His wife, his warrior princess.

After an hour he gave up.

It was dead quiet, the time of the night when it seemed he might be the only one on earth.

Don’t be silly. The darkness can’t hurt you, his father used to say to him as he lay shivering under the covers.

Hard to believe that was true. After all, Paul had been assured that other things wouldn’t hurt him, only to find out differently. Cancer, for instance, which he’d been told was nothing much, even though it had already reduced his mom to the human skeleton he’d discovered lying on her bed, before it killed her just three days past his eleventh birthday. His father was distant, and not home much. His mom was the nurturer in the family. He’d resorted to serious and constant prayer on her behalf. When she succumbed anyway, when the family priest fastened onto his hand as his mom—not his mom, her body—was brought down the stairs draped in a white sheet, he’d secretly renounced his belief in a higher deity. He’d embraced the cool logic of numbers. He’d carefully constructed a universe of structure and compliance. Where probabilities and ratios were your friends. Where you could statistically calibrate the odds of bad things happening to you, then take comfort in them.

It wasn’t by chance that he’d gravitated to a career whose sole purpose was controlling risk.

In actuary-speak: reducing the likelihood of undesirable events.

His risk management skills seemed to be lacking these days.

He rolled out of bed and stood on his bare feet. The wooden floor felt cool and ancient. There was no television in the room, no radio.

He needed a diversion, something to keep his mind off things. Something to read.

He tiptoed down the staircase, but it still protested with creaks and groans. Having no idea where the hall lights were, he had to feel his way along from banister to wall.

He finally made it into Miles’ office, where after some fumbling around he discovered the light switch just inside the door.

Click.

He shuffled over to the bookshelves. Okay, light reading was in order here. He seemed to be out of luck. The shelves contained the kind of books you might expect in the office of a lawyer. Law books, a veritable glut of them: thick, leather-bound, and singularly uninviting. There were a few other books there but nothing that looked particularly enticing. A Jewish Bible with a cracked, peeling binding. The Kabbalah—whatever that was. A biography of David Ben-Gurion. A wafer-thin volume titled The Story of Ruth.

It won by default.

He could use a good story. The story of anything. But when he pulled it out, not without some difficulty since it was wedged between New York Estate Statutes and Principles of Trial Law, a stack of papers fell out.

Paul reached down to scoop them up.

Letters, old ones by the look of them. Sickly yellow to off-white.

Dear Dad, Daddy, Pop, Father, the first letter began.

One of the video-game players from upstairs. Writing from summer camp maybe?

He felt like a voyeur, an intruder into the Goldstein family history. It made him think of his own family—or lack of one.

He felt a sudden and overwhelming sadness, mixed in with something he clearly recognized as jealousy. Miles was lucky. He had a wife who wasn’t sitting in Colombia under armed guard. Two children who dutifully wrote him from camp, delighting in using every existing term for father.

Paul would’ve been happy with one.

Dear Dad, Daddy, Pop, Father: Remember when you took me to the zoo and you left me there?

Miles had taken his boys to camp and one of them was registering his unhappiness. Reminding his dad of another time he’d been taken somewhere and left behind. Momentarily separated in the crowd of monkey watchers while Miles went off to purchase some cotton candy. Paul was creating his own version of the Goldstein family history—what familyless people do to pass the time.

He might’ve continued in this inventive mode if it weren’t for a sudden sharp sound at the door. One of Miles’ boys, standing there in blue pajamas rubbing his half-open eyes against the glare. He looked about fourteen, Paul thought—that gangly, awkward age between childhood and teen. The boy’s legs were too long for his body; the faintest fuzz covered his upper lip like a lipstick stain.

“I heard someone on the stairs,” the boy said.

If Paul had felt voyeuristic before, he now felt embarrassed. Caught red-handed reading personal letters between son and father. As if it were perfectly okay, as if he had the right to.

“I pulled the book out, and they fell out,” Paul said lamely.

The boy shrugged.

Paul slipped them back into the book, wedged it back onto the shelf.

“Well,” Paul said, “back to sleep.”

The boy nodded and turned as Paul shut the light and followed him out. They trudged up the stairs together.

“Did you go to summer camp?” Paul asked him.

“Huh?” The boy was still half asleep.

“Summer camp? When you were younger?” Paul said.

“Uh-huh,” the boy answered sleepily. “Camp Beth-Shemel in the Catskills. It sucked.”

“Yeah,” Paul said, “I didn’t like sleepaway camp either.” Paul had been sent to camp the summer his mom died.

At the top of the stairs Paul said good night and went back to his room, where it took another two hours before he actually fell asleep.

BY THE TIME PAUL WOKE, IT WAS MIDMORNING AND MILES WAS GONE.

“He left for work hours ago,” Mrs. Goldstein told him. “He said to please make yourself comfortable. So please”—she smiled shyly—“make yourself comfortable. He’ll call you later.”

He’d found Mrs. Goldstein in the kitchen after he’d put his shoes and socks on and ventured downstairs. One of Miles’ boys was at the table reading a comic book—Spider-Man Wreaks Vengeance. This was Miles’ other son—he looked about two years younger than his brother.

“Hello, I’m Paul,” he said to the boy.

The boy mumbled hi without looking up.

Mrs. Goldstein sighed. “Tell him your name. When someone introduces themselves, you introduce yourself back.”

The boy looked up and rolled his eyes. “David,” he said, then immediately dived back into the adventures of a boy who introduced himself by entrapping and hanging you upside down in his sticky web.

Mrs. Goldstein was still wearing her wig, but this time Paul noticed a tuft of her own hair peeking out of one side. It seemed thick and dark, and Paul suddenly understood it wasn’t cancer, but religion, that dictated she cover her head.

“Would you like some coffee, Mr. Breidbart?”

“Paul. Please.”

“Please you want some coffee, or please call you Paul?”

“Please to both.”

“All right. But you have to call me Rachel.” She pronounced it with a guttural ch, like Germans do.

“Yes, Rachel. Thank you.”

“Sit down. He doesn’t bite.”

Paul sat down next to the boy, who didn’t seem particularly surprised to have a strange guest sitting at the breakfast table with him.

The humidity seemed to be gone today. Butter-yellow sunlight was streaming in between the geraniums in the window box. If his wife and daughter were back home, the three of them would’ve strolled into Central Park today and spread out a picnic blanket in Sheep Meadow. They would’ve luxuriated in the newfound aura of family.

Later, after Paul had taken a shower, after he had dressed in one of Miles’ crisply ironed shirts generously provided by his wife, after he had read two newspapers—one of them Jewish, which he dutifully leafed through without understanding one word—after he had basically done anything to keep from jumping out of his skin, Miles called.

“Okay,” he said. “Brace yourself. I got through.”

“What?”

“I called a few more times last night—nothing. Ten times this morning—still nothing. I finally got him this afternoon. Our friend Pablo.”

“And?” Paul felt the vague stirring of hope.

“He was suspicious, of course. To put it mildly. First he denied even knowing you. Even when I told him who I was, that I know everything that happened there. After a while he said okay, he might know you a little, but he had no idea what I was talking about. He drove you places, that’s it. I told him to relax—no one’s going to the police. His memory seemed to come back then. I told him about the house being burned down. I assured him we’ve still got the drugs. I think it’s going to be okay. He’s going to get back to me. He’s going to tell us how to deliver the bag. The where and when.”

“And Joanna? And my daughter . . . Are they . . . ?”

“They’re fine.”

Paul felt the large knot that had lodged somewhere in the pit of his stomach slowly begin to unwind. At least, a little.

“I asked Pablo if he was absolutely sure about that,” Miles continued. “I laid it out for him so there’d be no mistaking. No Joanna and Joelle—no drugs. I think he got it. It’s like litigation. You have to make them think you’ve got the upper hand, even if you don’t. Who knows? Maybe we do. We’ve got their drugs, right?”

“Okay.”

“Okay? What about that’s great, Miles? That’s terrific? I’m positively overjoyed at the news?”

“I’m positively overjoyed at the news.”

“You don’t sound overjoyed at the news.”

“I’m worried.”

“Okay, you’re worried. Of course you’re worried. Who wouldn’t be in your shoes? Have some faith, I’ll lend you mine if you like—no charge. I told you. We’re going to get this done. He’s going to call back, we’re going to deliver the coke and get out of Dodge.”

“It’s something else.”

“What something else?”

“What if we give them the drugs?”

“Okay?”

“But they still don’t release them?”

It was the obvious question, of course. The same question Joanna had asked him back in that room. The one he’d been avoiding looking at too closely or too often. Something that was easy enough to do when he was dodging U.S. Customs inspectors and drug-dealing kids.

Not now. Not when he was finally about to get two million dollars’ worth of drugs into the right hands.

Miles shrugged. “I don’t know how to answer that. I think trusting them’s the price of admission. Sorry, that’s pretty much the way it is.”