Detour

ONE

Buenas tardes.

When they got to Bogotá, the first thing Paul and Joanna saw was a man with no head.

A picture of the man in question, apparently once the deputy mayor of Medellín, was plastered across various table-sized posters stuck to the walls in El Dorado Airport, all of them advertising different Bogotá newspapers. The man was carelessly sprawled in the middle of the street, as if he were just taking a much-needed rest. Except his shirt was stained with dried blood, and he was clearly missing something important. It had been blown off by a car bomb, which had been set by either the leftist FARC or the rightest USDF—depending on which theory you chose to believe.

Paul thought it was a hell of a welcome. But all in all, he still felt like saying thanks .

Glad to be here.

That’s because flight 31 from JFK to Colombia had lasted eighteen hours, which was eleven hours longer than it was supposed to. There’d been a five-hour delay in Kennedy and an unscheduled stop in Washington, D.C., to pick up baggage belonging to a Colombian diplomat who’d remained nameless.

They’d sat on a broiling Washington tarmac for hours—with no Bloody Marys or gin and tonics to cut the boredom or beat the heat. Serving alcohol during ground delays was apparently an FAA no-no. That was probably a good idea. The general disposition on board had grown angry and mutinous—with the possible exception of Joanna and the passenger to Paul’s right, who calmly stared straight ahead into the seat back in front of him.

He was an amateur ornithologist, he volunteered.

He was used to waiting. He was off to the jungles of northern Colombia to hunt for the yellow-breasted toucan.

Paul kept looking at his wristwatch and wondering why it wasn’t moving.

Joanna, mostly a bastion of calm, had reminded him that they’d waited five years. Ten hours, more or less, wouldn’t kill them.

She was right, of course.

The New York delay, the eight-hour Washington layover, the increasingly fetid cabin, wouldn’t kill him. He knew what would kill people and what wouldn’t. After all, he was an actuary for a major insurance company, whose logo—a pair of paternal cradling hands—appeared regularly on sickly-sweet commercials twenty times a day. He could spin the risk ratios on all sorts of everyday activities, recite the percentages of accident and death chapter and verse.

He knew that the odds of dying in a plane, for example, were exactly 1 in 354,319—even with the recent small bump due to men whose first name was Al and last name was Qaeda . A delay in takeoff would be in actuary-speak: statistically insignificant.

Plane delays couldn’t kill you.

Car bombs could.

Speaking of which.

The sight of the headless man admittedly threw them just a little. As they walked from the gate in the general direction of baggage claim, Joanna noticed the first gruesome poster and immediately turned away, while Paul felt the first vague prickling of fear.

Worming their way through customs under the sullen eyes of soldiers with shouldered AK-47s didn’t exactly help. When they finally made it through baggage, they were approached by a stooped white-haired man holding a crude hand-lettered sign over his head.

Breidbard, Paul, it said. Their last name was misspelled.

“I guess I’m considered luggage,” Joanna whispered to him.

The old man introduced himself as Pablo and timidly shook Paul’s hand. He picked up all three of their suitcases in one swift motion. When Paul tried to wrest at least one bag back from this man who, after all, had to be thirty years older than he was, Pablo politely refused.

“Is fine,” he said, smiling. “Please follow . . .”

Pablo had been hired through the local Santa Regina Orphanage. He would be their man in Bogotá, he explained. He’d drive for them, shop for them, and help guide them through the entire process. He’d accompany them everywhere, he told them.

It was reassuring to hear.

Pablo led them through the unruly and suffocating crowd. All airports were experiments in barely managed chaos, but El Dorado was worse. The crowd seemed like soccer fans who’d lost—loud, milling, and dangerous. Paul, who’d done a little boning up on his Spanish, forgot the word for excuse me and had to resort to a primitive form of sign language in an effort to get people to move out of the way. Most simply ignored him, or looked at him as if he were touched in the head. He eventually relied on out-and-out shoving to navigate their way out.

Getting through the crowd was just one of their problems.

The other was keeping up with Speedy Gonzalez, a.k.a. Pablo.

He seemed remarkably spry for a man who had to be pushing seventy. Even while carrying three bulging suitcases.

“Think he’s chewing coca or something?” Joanna asked. Joanna ran three mornings a week and could do a good hour and a half on the StairMaster, but even she was having trouble keeping pace.

“Pablo!” Paul had to shout his name once, twice, three times, before Pablo finally turned around and noticed that the two people whom he was supposed to stick to like glue were out of breath and falling dangerously behind.

“Sorry,” he said almost sheepishly. “I’m used to . . . how you say . . . giddyap .” He smiled.

“That’s okay,” Paul said. “We just don’t want to lose you.”

They’d made it through the sliding front doors and were on the outskirts of a vast parking lot directly adjacent to the terminal. A sea of cars, dotted with small eddies of slowly strolling passengers, seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions.

“What’s that odor?” Joanna asked.

Paul sniffed the air; motor oil and diesel fuel, he was about to say. But Joanna possessed an uncannily accurate sense of smell, more an olfactory intuition, so he kept quiet.

“Ahh . . . ,” Pablo said. “Wait.” He gently placed the suitcases on the cracked pavement, then walked a good twenty feet to what appeared, at least at this distance, to be some kind of ticket booth.

It wasn’t. He returned holding two tightly wrapped packages trailing tiny plumes of steam.

“Empanadas,” he said, handing them to Paul and Joanna. “Pollo.”

“Chicken,” Paul whispered in Joanna’s ear.

“Thanks,” Joanna whispered back, “I’ve eaten at Taco Bell too.” Then she asked Pablo, “How much do we owe you?”

Pablo shook his head. “Nada.”

“Thank you, Pablo—that’s very generous of you.” Joanna took a bite of her empanada, then was forced to lick a dollop of red sauce which had trickled down past her lower lip. “Mmmmm—it’s really good.”

Pablo grinned. Paul thought that his face looked tender and tough at the same time—or, at the least, weathered.

“Wait here, I go for the car,” Pablo said out of deference to their obviously inferior constitutions.

“He’s sweet, isn’t he?” Joanna said after Pablo had disappeared into a row of Volkswagens, Renaults, and Mini Coopers.

“Yes, maybe we should adopt him, ” Paul answered. He took her free hand and squeezed—it was sticky with perspiration. “Excited?”

She nodded. “Oh yeah.”

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“Six hundred and eleven.”

“That’s all, huh?”

Two minutes later Pablo reappeared behind the wheel of a vintage blue Peugeot.