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.
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.