We sat round the breakfast table with Nelson. Luís was almost smiling.
‘Now we have to discuss tactics,’ Nelson said. He was wearing a particularly bright purple shirt. Tufts of grey chest hair peeked through its open neck. He spoke carefully and rapidly, very much in control. He had proved himself to us with his suspicion of the hoax ransom demand; it was becoming easier to trust him.
‘OK,’ said Luís.
‘We must decide how much you are prepared to pay for Isabel.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ Luís protested. ‘The answer is everything.’
‘No, that’s not the answer,’ said Nelson. ‘Remember, this is a commercial transaction. The answer is the lowest amount you can get away with. Look, the kidnappers can’t know exactly how much money you have. We will come to a point where we have to say this is our final offer. Then, provided the kidnappers believe us, they will hand over your daughter.’
Luís took a deep breath. ‘OK.’
‘Good. Now, how much do you think you could get your hands on? In cash.’
Suddenly I felt awkward. Here I was about to hear all about the personal business of a man I hardly knew, in fact the owner of a rival bank to my employer. I began to stand up. ‘Perhaps I should leave you to it...’
Luís held up his hand. ‘No. Stay. Please.’
I paused. He meant it. Nelson nodded. ‘OK,’ I said, and sat down.
‘I can probably raise up to five million dollars,’ said Luís. ‘Maybe a little more. But it will mean talking to some of my colleagues. I’ll have to borrow money.’
‘Good,’ said Nelson. ‘I’d hope to get away with a lot less than that.’ He pulled out his notebook and biro. ‘We should think about some numbers. The average settlement at the moment in Rio is about two hundred thousand dollars. But I think they know how wealthy you are, or at least they can make a good guess. The first demand was high.’
‘I can’t pay fifty million,’ said Luís.
‘Nor will they expect you to. Another rule of thumb is that the final settlement is about one tenth of the initial sum offered. In this case that’s five million dollars. But that’s still too high for the market in Rio right now.’
‘I could pay it if necessary. Somehow.’
Nelson held up his hand. ‘No. I think two million should be fine. You should be able to claim a million back from Dekker’s insurers anyway, although you will probably have to put up the cash to start with.’
‘Perhaps Dekker could provide it?’ I suggested.
Luís’s eyes narrowed for an instant. ‘No, thank you. I don’t want to borrow money from Ricardo Ross.’
The speed of his reaction surprised me, but in a way I was pleased to see that he could still think shrewdly.
Nelson and Luís argued back and forth on the target figure, and eventually settled for three million dollars.
‘OK. We have a number,’ said Nelson. ‘We can’t expect to come to an agreement of the price too quickly. We have to let the kidnappers string things out a bit, feel that they’ve had a proper negotiation. Otherwise they won’t believe three million is our final offer.’
Luís opened his mouth to protest.
‘Offering more money won’t get Isabel released any faster, believe me.’
Luís saw the logic and nodded.
‘I suggest we start off with a million dollars, then move it up in half-million chunks until we get to two million. Then we need to raise our offer in ever smaller amounts so that it seems as though each rise is a struggle. We will aim to stop the negotiations just short of three million.’
It seems a long way to come down from fifty million to one million,’ said Luís doubtfully.
‘Believe me, one million is a big first offer for a kidnapping.’
We believed him. Zico called on Thursday night. He treated Luís’s offer of one million dollars with derision. He said he knew that Luís owned Banco Horizonte. Luís explained that he only owned part of it, and that he couldn’t sell his stake. He performed well. He sounded cool at the beginning, and then as the conversation went on he displayed more tension. His assertion that he couldn’t raise more than a million sounded credible to me.
I listened to the tape played back. Although I couldn’t understand what was said, I was fascinated by Zico’s voice. Calm, measured, cold, intelligent. The compulsory threats to Isabel had none of the mindless violence of the first hoax caller. But the coldness was menacing in its own way. Zico wouldn’t kill Isabel unless it suited him. But if it suited him...
The police came. They took the tape of the conversation away for analysis of Zico’s voice. They had traced the call to a mobile phone somewhere in a crowded shopping street in the northern zone. Mobile phones were common in Rio. The land-line system was so bad that its citizens had been driven to using them instead. And they were virtually impossible to trace.
A dozen policemen were searching the Tijuca forest but so far they had found nothing.
Maria fussed over both Luís and me. She seemed to be taking it well, until she would suddenly run from the room, trying to hold back tears. Cordelia would come round for a couple of hours every day, but she found the waiting stressful. She had become withdrawn, a different person from the tough woman I had met at the children’s shelter. She had stopped going there. Just for the time being, she said.
I stayed at Luís’s apartment during the day, and my hotel at night. A couple of times I went out for walks through the wealthy streets of Ipanema. It was good to get out into the world, to see people shopping at the expensive boutiques, to wander past the up-market stalls selling flowers or rugs or Indian jewellery. Ipanema was a forest of luxury apartment buildings crammed together between the beach and the lagoon. Every now and then an old colonial-style building squatted among them, but old by Ipanema’s standards probably meant less than fifty years. I found a pleasant bar in one of these and stopped for a beer. I had read somewhere that ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ had been written by a man who hung out in a bar somewhere round here, watching the local talent go by. There were indeed many young, tanned and lovely girls who walked past. But they just reminded me of Isabel.
I tried to imagine where she was, what kind of state she was in. Was she well fed? Was she allowed to wash? It was hard for us here, it must be harder for her there. But she was a strong woman mentally. If anyone could cope with an ordeal like that, she could.
I shouldn’t have left her alone. I shouldn’t have left her alone!
I avoided Ipanema beach. After the kidnap, I had forgotten my stabbing there. I wanted it to stay forgotten. My fears of money-laundering and concerns about Dekker were pushed to the back of my mind. I just wanted Isabel to be freed.
I spoke to Ricardo regularly, keeping him informed of the progress of negotiations. It was comforting to hear Ricardo’s calm voice every day. He seemed impressed with Nelson as a negotiator. He was happy to continue footing the bill for the hotel. He had spoken to Luís, who had made a firm request that I be allowed to stay.
I spoke to Jamie, too. He was sympathetic. He said the whole office was in shock. But life had to go on. In particular, selling the Mexico deal had to go on. It wasn’t going well, and there were still a lot of bonds on Dekker’s books. The situation in Mexico itself was looking rocky: people were beginning to ask questions about whether the government would be able to refinance its borrowings that were maturing this year.
I didn’t care.
The police came again. They had fitted Zico’s voice to two previous recordings they had taken of kidnappers. In both cases the victims had been treated well and eventually released. This lifted Luís’s spirits. And mine.