This morning they were sitting in the center of the room fully clothed, passing the time constructing lists of their favorite cities. Beatriz had picked Rome, Rio, and Las Vegas. Maruja, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, and Acapulco. It was Joanna’s turn. All she could come up with was New York. The city she lived in, the one she was aching to return to.
The door opened and Galina walked in.
It was a measure of Joanna’s desperation that the sight of her kidnapper gave her a rush of—what? Pleasure? Relief? Simple familiarity?
Maybe it was because Galina appeared different than the last time Joanna had seen her, when she’d solemnly informed her about Paul’s failure to come through. She seemed more like the other Galina now—the one you wouldn’t mind hanging out with on a sunny bench in the park.
She motioned for Joanna to come closer—she had something to tell her.
“We’ve heard from your husband,” she whispered, and squeezed Joanna’s hand. “It’s going to be all right.”
And Joanna’s heart, spirit—whatever that thing is that allows people to occasionally walk on air—surged. Not just because of the news. No.
Galina hadn’t come to the mountains alone. One of the guards—a shy boy who looked all of thirteen—entered behind her.
He was holding Joelle.
TWENTY-THREE
They’d traveled over the Williamsburg Bridge, then through the Lincoln Tunnel, headed to a place somewhere outside Jersey City. It was five o’clock. They were on a mostly empty road flanked by fields of swaying cattails. High as an elephant’s eye. The lyrics were from Joanna’s favorite musical, Oklahoma! They’d attended the revival on their last anniversary, Paul told Miles.
The word last stuck in his throat.
It was three days and eighteen hours since he’d left his wife and child.
The swamp was throbbing with the steady hum of insects. Still, you could hear the Major League scores clear enough. Miles was listening with rapt attention.
“Baseball,” Miles said, “is the hardest sport to handicap. Brutal.”
“You mean bet on?”
“Yeah, bet on. You’ve got to give runs, two, three, depending on the pitcher. The worst team in the world wins sixty times a year. Go figure. It’s a sucker’s bet.”
“You bet on sports?”
“Well, sure. Penny-ante. You know, twenty, thirty dollars—just to keep things interesting. It’s my little rebellion against prescribed living. Orthodoxy has little rules for everything. It can drive you nuts.”
Paul guessed that going to work without his yarmulke was another one of Miles’ little rebellions against prescribed living. “Did you ever think about not being Orthodox?”
“Sure. But then what would I be? It’s sort of like asking a black person if he ever thought about not being black. You can think about it all you like, but it’s kind of who you are.”
“So? Are there rules about betting on baseball games?”
“Yeah—you have to stay away from the Padres.” Miles turned up the radio for the National League scores.
Paul felt like mentioning that he and his coworkers had spent more lunch hours than he cared to remember establishing risk ratios for specific pitches thrown to specific batters in specific parks. A bunch of regular Bill Jameses. He could’ve told Miles, for example, that throwing a down-and-in fastball to Barry Bonds in 3-Com Park had a risk-to-reward ratio of three to one. Every two times you got Barry, he’d launch one into the stratosphere.
He didn’t, though.
Paul understood Miles was talking about sports so they wouldn’t have to talk about something else. What they were doing. Meeting drug dealers in a swamp outside Jersey City. If they talked about it, they would be forced to acknowledge that they were hopelessly out of their element.
“Thank you,” Paul said.
“For what?”
“For doing this with me, I guess.”
Miles remained silent for a minute. “I sent you to Bogotá. I told you you’d be safe. That makes me kind of responsible, doesn’t it?”
“Great. Can I hire you to sue yourself?”
“Sorry. I don’t do suits.”
“How long have you been a lawyer?” Paul asked after turning up the AC.
“How long?” Miles repeated, as if he’d never been asked that particular question before. “Too long. Not long enough. Depends on the day.”
“Why did you want to be a lawyer?”
“I didn’t. I wanted to be Sandy Koufax. God didn’t cooperate. My fastball was more like a change. If you can’t be Sandy, you get to be a doctor or lawyer. Indian chief wasn’t available—it should be, we’re a tribe, aren’t we? I went for lawyer. Maybe not the kind of lawyer they expected.”
“They?”
“You know, all the wise men of the tribe. Everyone goes real estate, tax, or corporate. I went legal aid. Juvenile division.”
“What was that like?”
“Crazy. I had a caseload of about a hundred fifty. I’d get about ten minutes with each kid and a quick glance at their file before saying hi to the judge. That was it. And it’s not like I could do any pleading-out there.”
“Why not?”
“You couldn’t threaten the prosecutors with a long jury trial because there are no juries in juvenile, and kids don’t really have any information worth trading. No one wants to deal. The best I could do was get them committed to a Bronx hospital, because it was safer than putting them in a juvenile hall.”
“Hospital?”
“Yeah, a mental hospital. They’d do their time popping meds instead of getting gang-raped. Trust me—it was heaven next to your average juvenile prison. For them it was the safest place on earth. Anyway, when I got to court and began mistaking Julio for Juan, and María for Maggie, I thought I might be in trouble. I told my supervisor he had to lessen my caseload—that I was committing borderline malpractice. He said keep dreaming. I left.”
“So you went from juvenile delinquents to Colombian babies.”
“Yeah. I thought I’d get involved at an earlier stage of development. It pays better. What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Hard to believe you always wanted to be an insurance man. What did you do—fall into it?”
No, not fall, Paul thought. My mom died, he wanted to say. My mom died and I got scared. He felt like explaining this to Miles, that like Einstein, he was merely trying to impose order and probability on a cold universe.
“More or less,” was all he said.
A dirt road appeared to the passenger side of the car—not so much a road as an indentation in the muck. A trail to nowhere in particular.
Miles slowed, then pulled over.
“They said a dirt road about three miles down,” he said, trying to peer ahead down the mostly hidden path. “Oh well . . .” He turned the car into the opening, bouncing over a small hump.
Suddenly, cattails were scouring both sides of the Buick, making it feel as if they were traveling through a car wash. Paul, who’d hated roller coasters as a kid, hadn’t liked car washes much either. His fervid imagination had attributed a malevolence to those stiff bristles, smothering sponges, and scalding jets of water.
He felt the same kind of vulnerability now. The car was safety. Outside in the swamp, who knew?