Detour

TWO

Their lawyer had booked them into a hotel with a French name, an American-style ambience, and an upscale Bogotá location. The area was called Calle 93, crammed with fashionable boutiques, high-rise hotels, and hip-looking restaurants with blue-tinted windows.

Their hotel was L’Esplanade, a name reeking of French chic, but its lobby coffee shop had Texas steerburgers and Philly fries on the menu.

Their tenth-floor suite had an unimpeded view of the surrounding green mountains. When Joanna pulled up the shades and made Paul look at them, he couldn’t help wondering if armed insurgents were looking back. He decided not to share those feelings with his wife.

They’d been dutifully warned about coming to Colombia, of course.

Their original lawyer had urged them to try somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

Korea, he’d suggested. Hungary. How do you feel about China? Colombia, he’d insisted, was too volatile. The sale of bulletproof glass was a national growth industry, he’d added.

But Korea or Hungary or China could take up to four years.

In Colombia it was two months. Max.

After waiting five long and agonizing years to become parents, four more years had seemed intolerable. Desperation arm-wrestled prudence and won hands down.

They were promptly steered to another lawyer, who specialized in Latin America.

His name was Miles Goldstein, and what he actually seemed to specialize in was enthusiasm. He was warmly effusive, seemingly indefatigable, and unabashedly committed. In this particular case, to bringing two dispossessed and suffering factions together. There were babies out there who needed homes; there were couples out there who needed babies. His mission was to make both parties happy. A handwoven sampler hung on the wall directly above his desk.

He who saves one child saves the world.

It was hard not to like a lawyer who subscribed to that kind of thinking.

Miles assured them that while Colombia wasn’t an oasis of peace, the capital city was pretty much no problem. The struggle between leftists and rightists had been going on for thirty years—it had become just another feature of the landscape. But that landscape was mostly north, mountainous, and far away from Bogotá. In fact, according to a recent survey in Destinations magazine, a photocopy of which Miles produced from his desk drawer and handed to them, Bogotá was safer than Switzerland.

You’ve really got to watch your back in Zurich, Miles said.

PABLO HAD BEEN TRUE TO HIS WORD.

He’d driven them up to the doorstep, then flew inside with their luggage, forgoing the proffered help from an obviously pissed-off bellboy. When Paul and Joanna followed Pablo into the loud Art Deco lobby, a fawning concierge with dyed-blond hair and a slight lisp was waiting to show them to their room.

Pablo promised to return in three hours to take them to the orphanage.

After he had left, Paul laid himself out on the generously sized bed and said, “I wish I could fall asleep, but I can’t.”

Two hours later he woke up and said, “What time is it?”

Joanna was over by the window reading the latest issue of Mother & Baby magazine. Paul couldn’t help remembering that she’d begun her subscription over four years ago.

“Sorry you couldn’t sleep, honey,” she said.

“I guess it caught up with me.”

“I guess.”

“Did you nap?”

“Uh-uh. Too jazzed.”

“What time is it?”

“One hour till Pablo comes back.”

“One hour. Well . . .”

Joanna put the magazine facedown and smiled at him. The cover was a startling close-up of a newborn’s eyes: baby blue. “It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Joanna said.

“ Surreal ’s a good word.”

“I mean, in one hour we’re going to meet her.”

“Yeah. Shouldn’t I be pacing or something?”

“Or something.”

“Well, I would pace. But there’s not enough room. Consider me mentally pacing.”

“Paul?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m so happy. I think.”

“Why just think ?”

“Because I’m so scared.”

It wasn’t like Joanna to be scared of anything—that was his department. It was enough to get him off the bed and over to her chair, where he shook off the pins and needles in his legs and leaned down to hug her. She put her head back on his shoulder and he smelled equal parts shampoo, Chanel No. 5, and, yes, the slightly acrid odor of fear.

“You’re going to be great,” Paul said. “Wonderful.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you’ve been babying me for ten years, and I don’t have any complaints. Because I say so.”

“Oh well, if you say so . . .”

She lifted her head and he kissed her full on the lips. Nice lips, he thought. Beautiful lips. She was one of those women who look good falling out of bed—maybe better, since makeup seemed to cover up her features rather than do anything to enhance them. Pale, lightly freckled skin, with powder-blue eyes—the kind they hand-paint on delicate porcelain dolls. Delicate, however, wouldn’t necessarily be one of the adjectives he’d use to describe Joanna. Strong, smart, focused, was more like it. On certain occasions he’d been known to refer to her as Xena, warrior princess —always affectionately, of course, and usually under his breath. She’d be thirty-seven in less than two weeks, but she still looked, well, twenty -seven. From time to time he wondered if she’d always look that way to him, if generally happy couples tend to see each other the way they were back when, till they suddenly wake up around sixty or so and wonder who that middle-aged person is sleeping next to them.

“What if I’m completely incompetent?” she said. “I don’t have a degree in this.”

“I’m told it comes naturally.”

“You evidently haven’t read Mother & Baby. ”

“That’s okay. You have,” he said.

“Fine. I’ll stop panicking.”

“Great. Next time I panic and you reassure.”

“Deal.”

“I’m going to take a shower. I feel like I’ve been on a plane for two days.”

“You have been on a plane for two days.”

“See, I knew there was a reason.”

PABLO CAME TWENTY MINUTES EARLY. APPARENTLY, THAT WHOLE mañana thing was an ethnic stereotype without merit.

He knocked on their door, then politely waited outside, even after Joanna had virtually begged him to come inside and sit down.

Paul, who was only half dressed, had to hastily scramble into the rest of his clothes. Black linen pants and a slightly rumpled white shirt he’d neglected to take out of his suitcase. He took quick stock of himself in the mirror and saw pretty much what he expected: a face stuck somewhere between boyishness and creeping middle age, someone who was clearly the sum of his parts, none of which would’ve stood out in a crowd. Well, clothes make the man. He topped off his outfit with his red-striped power tie. After all, he was preparing for the most important meeting of his life.

The Peugeot was softly idling in front of the hotel.

Paul noticed the hotel doorman whisper something in Pablo’s ear as he bent over to usher them into the backseat. A kind of rumba was playing on the radio.

“What did he say?” Paul asked Pablo after he had pulled away from the curb.

“He wished you Many Blessings. ”

“Oh. You told him where we’re going?”

“Yes.”

“Do you do this a lot, Pablo?” Joanna asked. “With many couples?”

Pablo nodded. “ Happy job, no?”

“Sure,” Joanna said. “I think so.”

They passed a convoy of soldiers hunched together in an open made-in-Detroit Jeep. Paul couldn’t help remembering the phalanx of armed sentries at the airport.

“Lots of soldiers around, huh?” Paul said.

“Soldiers? Sí .”

“How have things been?” Paul asked, a little hesitant to ask a question he might not like the answer to.

“Things?”

“The rebels? FARC?” It sounded like a curse, Paul thought. He imagined that to the vast majority of Colombians, it was. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The leftist guerrillas already holding much of the north, and most likely the group responsible for blowing the deputy mayor of Medellín to kingdom come.

Of course, there was always the chance the car bomb had been perpetrated by the right. FARC was embroiled in a long dirty war against the United Self-Defense Forces, or USDF, a rightist paramilitary organization of singular brutality.

On the way out of the airport, they’d passed a wall covered in red graffiti, which looked uncomfortably like fresh arterial spray, as if it had been written in blood.

Libre Manuel Riojas. Manuel Riojas was the reputed USDF commander, currently residing in an American prison for drug transgressions.

Pablo shook his head. “I don’t listen . . . No politics.”

“Yes. That’s probably wise.”

“Sí.”

“Still, it must be scary sometimes?”

“Scary.” Pablo derisively waved a hand. “I mind my business. Don’t read the papers. It’s all bad.”

Before departing, Paul had sent away for a video titled The Colombian Way of Life. After he’d watched the first five minutes, it was painfully obvious it had been created for schoolkids under the age of twelve. The video followed two teenagers, Mauricio and Paula, walking around sunny Bogotá, their intent being to show that there’s more to this modern South American city than coffee, cocaine, and guerrilla violence —or so stated the back blurb.

Pablo was driving them past a street of sprawling mansions. At least Paul assumed there were mansions back there somewhere—you couldn’t actually see them. An unbroken ten-foot-high stucco wall was in the way. Electronic gates periodically announced the demarcation of each new property, their names spelled out in tile mosaics embedded into the wall.

Casa de Flora.

Casa de Playa.

They passed a spotted dog with its ribs showing, urinating against the burnt-orange wall of the Casa de Fuego.

Something was unnerving about the scene. It took Paul a while to understand what it was.

Yes. The lack of people.

Except for several beggars, emaciated-looking women listlessly cradling babies in their laps, there was absolutely no one in view. Not in this neighborhood. They were all tucked out of sight, hidden behind a modern wall of Jericho.

La Calera, Pablo told them when Paul asked what the neighborhood was called.

Then, thankfully, their surroundings began to change.

Some scattered electronic and appliance stores, then small cafeterías advertising empanadas, patatas, and huevos, followed by a glut of news vendors, lotería shops, supermercados, various bustling places of commerce—the whole enchilada. A cacophony of smells wafted in through the half-cracked windows: bus exhaust, flowers, raw fish, newsprint—Paul was tempted to ask Joanna for a full rundown. They were clearly in the midst of the completely normal life of a capital city, just as Miles had promised. And Paul wondered if there was a kind of conscious denial at work here—if there had to be an ostrichlike mentality in a country where deputy mayors had their heads blown off on a regular basis. If Colombians were able to wall off pieces of their conscious mind from the ongoing war, much as they carefully walled off poverty from the upper classes in the La Calera district.

He stopped musing; there was a sign just ahead tucked into a small grove of trees.

Santa Regina Orfanato.

“Here,” Pablo whispered. He pulled into a hidden driveway and stopped the car. A locked gate; a black buzzer set in brass.

Pablo turned off the ignition, got out, and pushed the button. “Pablo,” he said, “Señor y Señora Breidbart.”

The gate swung open ten seconds later. Pablo got back in and methodically started up the car. He drove into an inner courtyard shaded by tall, spindly pines.

“Come on,” Señor Breidbart said when the car stopped again. “Let’s go meet our daughter.”