“That makes him subject to the newly drafted laws of national security. Or, as we like to say, rat-fucked by Ridge.”
“Yeah,” the bird-watcher said, “that’s about the size of it. No, Paul, you don’t get a call. You don’t get a lawyer. You don’t get three hots and a smoke. You don’t get out of here. Not unless we say so. And speaking of your fucked situation in life, I’d love to know how Miles and you walked into his office in Williamsburg and only you walked out.”
THEY PUT HIM IN A CELL, WHICH REALLY WASN’T ONE.
It didn’t have a toilet or a sink. Unlike the room in Colombia, it didn’t have a bed. It was just empty space surrounded by bare wall and what looked like a newly installed metal door.
If he wanted to lie down and sleep—and he did, desperately—he would have to lie directly on the concrete floor.
He tried, lay on his back and stared up at a single caged bulb, which didn’t appear to be shutting off anytime soon. It was enclosed in metal so he couldn’t reach up and break it, use it as a weapon, even against himself. No suicides on their watch.
Before throwing him in here they’d badgered him with questions—the majority of which he’d tried to answer. Mostly, he’d tried to explain what had happened. The kidnapping in Bogotá, the awful position in which he’d found himself, forced to choose between his wife and daughter and breaking six different federal drug statutes.
He couldn’t tell whether they believed him or whether they thought he was making it all up.
They asked him a lot of questions about Miles. Interrupted by an occasional change of pace: What school did Paul go to? What does an actuary make? Which company did Joanna work for?
Every time he mentioned his wife’s name, he felt a dull ache in the center of his chest. Everything he’d done, he’d done for them. Jo and Jo. He was no closer to freeing them. They were receding into the distance. It was as if he were pulling them up the side of a mountain, really putting his shoulder to it, only the rope kept slipping through his hands, dropping them further and further away.
AFTER A FEW HOURS IN HIS CELL THE BIRD-WATCHER CAME FOR him again.
Tom was missing in action.
“You know what really aggravates me, Paul?” the bird-watcher said. He was inhaling deeply on a Winston, holding in the smoke till the little vein in his forehead throbbed, then letting it out in a blue wispy stream.
“No,” Paul said.
“That was a rhetorical question, Paul. I appreciate you finally grasping the nuances of DEA interrogation, but I wasn’t actually seeking an answer. What really aggravates me, what sticks in my craw, is that I worked this asshole for a year and a half, and now he’s dead. A really bad case of coitus interruptus. I’ve got blue balls the size of grapefruits. Know what that feels like?”
Paul kept quiet this time.
“It doesn’t feel good, Paul. It hurts. All I’ve got to show for it is lots of free miles on American—and I’ve got to put those back into an agency pool. You believe it? All those boring trips to Bogotá watching Bruce Almighty and sitting next to shitbags like you, and I get a trip to San Juan next Christmas—if I’m lucky. And I don’t feel lucky. I mean, a year and a half and I end up with you? The last round-tripper on the Goldstein Express.”
Paul had been the last of many, the bird-watcher explained. It had taken him a long time to figure it out. He’d patiently followed the money trail. From Goldstein to Colombia and back. This close to wrapping it up, this close, and then . . .
“So what happened in his house, Paul? Monetary disagreement? Contractual dispute?”
“I told you,” Paul said. “He shot himself.”
“Maybe. Only I’m inclined not to believe you. You’ve got the bad luck to be the one left holding the bag. Sucks, doesn’t it? I need my pound of flesh, and you’re it. He shot himself? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I don’t give a shit.”
“I keep telling you, they kidnapped us. Miles set us up with a driver. And a nurse . . . Galina. She switched babies, and when we went to confront her . . .”
Paul stopped here. The whole thing sounded implausible, even to him. The bird-watcher seemed to be in no mood for any story providing Paul with even a shred of innocence. He was busy lighting another cigarette and staring off into space.
There was another reason Paul stopped speaking.
A few things were penknifed into the table. Some dirty epithets, a couple of crude drawings, and a heart cleft in two.
Paul was looking at the letter carved into the larger half of the jagged heart.
It was the letter R.
It reminded him of something.
The letters from Galina. And the granddaughter she was determined to protect at all costs.
Her father is looking for her. He won’t stop till he finds her. As you know, R has the power and means to do so.
R.
And Paul finally understood.
THIRTY-EIGHT
They called it a fault tree. The moribund boys in the loss adjuster department called it that.
When tragedy struck, something was lost, a building burned to the ground, a plane felled from the sky, a bridge collapsing into a river—you needed to apportion blame.
So you worked backward.
You created a fault tree.
You started with the twigs—all the little facts you knew, everything. Then you tried to ascertain which ones led back to the branches. To the trunk itself. If you were lucky, if you did your homework and took your time, you made it all the way back to the roots.
There was nothing much to do in his cell but clear wood, attempt to untangle the branches, and put it all back together.
That’s what he did.
He cut and pruned and sawed and snapped, and in the end he made a tree.
It began with a Colombian baby nurse.
She helped American couples flooding her country in search of instant families. A good woman really, someone who knew what it’s like to desperately want a family, because she had one once, a daughter, at least, who might’ve looked much like Joelle.
The Colombian nurse worked for an American lawyer. Maybe not all the time, a lot of the time. An adoption lawyer, sending couples who’d tried everything short of baby-snatching to a country whose first export was cocaine and second was coffee, but third was children. A country with almost as many unwanted kidnappings as unwanted kids.
This lawyer had rejected tax or corporate law and entered the ranks of legal aid, where general disillusionment had eventually led him into foreign adoptions. He put needy babies together with needy families, and he got to pat himself on the back and make a good living at the same time.
Just not good enough.
One day he picked up the phone and a tout whispered in his ear. He was off to the races. Or the hard court, the domed stadium, the baseball diamond, the hockey rink, whichever and wherever men in uniforms played games for the lure of the money, the pleasure of fans, and the deliriousness but mostly agony of the bettors.
With the lawyer it was agony.
He was a respectable man with a dirty habit. And a dangerously ballooning debt. He owed the wrong guys.