Warriors in Paradise (27 page)

Part 3 – Caleb

Chapter 9: The Conundrum

Life is but a mirror

I
have always lived my life one day at a time.

Very early on, I realized that I was different from others. My body has never been an extension of my mind but behaves more as if it were another me. I would think I could jump just so high, but my body would prove me wrong and jump even higher.

My mother likes to tell a story about when I was a year old. One of her friends was visiting and my mother brought her to the bedroom to see me, but I was nowhere to be found. She got a little concerned, and they both started looking for me everywhere in the apartment. They looked in the kitchen, the lower cabinets, behind the living- and dining-room furniture, in the closet, under the bed, in the bathroom, and there was no sign of me. However, she could hear me giggling softly, and she asked her friend, “Do you hear him? Caleb is here. I can hear him. Do you think he’s between the walls?”

In the second or third look around the apartment, my mother found me sitting inside the bathroom sink, looking at them with a smile on my face and chuckling. Apparently, I had used pressure on the toilet and sink wall to climb all the way up and sit in the sink basin. Each time they had looked for me in the bathroom, they were looking down, not imagining that a one-year-old could climb on his own into the sink.

I remember I liked to climb trees and explore rooftops. The rooftop of my building was my second home. I knew every nook and cranny. My mother would say that I could climb before I could walk. I cannot remember when I started walking, but I also cannot remember when I started climbing, so I suppose she might have been right.

I have learned to trust my body. That is why I was so enamored with urban gymnastics, what they called parkour. As soon as I saw those kids in Bridgeport running onto buildings, jumping over walls, and diving into windows, I knew that it was for me.

In school races running heats, I thought several of my companions could run faster and would arrive at the finish line before me. However, once I started running, my body would take over, and I left everyone behind.

Charlie and Santi know how far they can go and what they can do. I have an idea, but generally, I underestimate my capability. It was like that in the case of the three-story townhouse where Jack Taylor lived. I wasn’t sure that I could climb all the way up to the third-story window, so I just let my body do what my body does best: take risks and do so without conscious thought.

Charlie, in all his wisdom, says that I am an idiot savant because despite all of my mental disabilities, I show prodigious physical abilities far in excess of what would be considered normal. Perhaps he is not completely wrong. I feel I am a little like Temple Grandin, the autistic animal expert who sees the world in a series of numbers and symbols and can arrange them in her brain. I also see my surroundings differently than other people do. I like to think that I see them in a four-dimensional plane that I can travel through, while normal people see them in three dimensions as a path to walk on.

That is why I am probably more of a doer than a talker. That is why I like hard sciences such as mathematics and physics. Law and economics are too soft for my liking. I like to do what makes hard sense.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why I get along so well with Charlie and Santi—because they are so different from me. They are both talkers, natural extroverts, and both like law, sociology, and economics. We complement each other, and, of course, they make me laugh.

I see life as a mirror: it reflects back what I do, not what I think I’ll do.

What a puzzle

We were driving quietly back to Jonathan’s place, each of us lost in his private thoughts. I was thinking that it was going to be extremely hard to get the girls back, given the money, the power, and the influence these people had. I was sure there was a way to liberate them, but I couldn’t see beyond the wall of high-level people Coombs had mentioned.

We arrived at Jonathan’s house. As we entered, Miranda, Charlie’s mother, asked, “How did it go?”

Jonathan said, “Charlie will tell you everything.” He turned around and said to us, “I have to make a few calls. We will reconvene in the kitchen in twenty minutes.” He went up the stairs to his studio.

Santi said, “Miranda, I need to call Mexico and check my e-mail. What telephone and computer can I use?”

She responded, “Use the cell phone I gave you and the laptop on the dining room table.” She turned to us and said, “I am all ears. Tell me everything that happened.”

Charlie looked at me, and I nodded.

I told her about most of what had happened from the time we arrived at Jack Taylor’s townhouse to the moment we left Coombs’s house. But I didn’t tell her about the people who had lost their lives.

She said, “And how are you going to arrange to meet these powerful people? If you try to make an appointment with any of them, they probably would not give you one. And if they did, it would be in three to six months’ time.”

“We don’t know,” I responded. “That is why we’re meeting back here in the kitchen—so we can discuss our next moves. However, what I do know is that we are not going to get to see them by making appointments. I suggest we each think about our options and meet back in the kitchen with Jonathan and Santi.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Miranda.

Charlie and I went down to the basement. I lay down on my bed to think.

What a puzzle, I thought. Fortunately, I love puzzles.

Caleb’s flashback

I was two and a half years old when I solved my first jigsaw puzzle.

My mom was both my mother and father. I carry her surname, Jackson. I love her, and I am very proud of her achievements. My mother is a tough black woman.

When she was my age, she met my father at a dance club where my father was singing and playing the blues. He was a guitar player. My father saw her and fell for her immediately. He was eighteen years her senior. As soon as he had a rest break, he came over to my mother’s table and charmed his way into her heart.

Three months later, she was expecting me.

My father had a gig in Chicago and promised to return. He never did.

Every time I asked about him, my mother would tell me, “Son, Papa was a rolling stone; wherever he laid his hat was his home.’ I later realized that those words were lyrics from a song called “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” by the Temptations.

She had me when she was nineteen years old and never married or dated formally since. She would tell me, “A person worth her beans has to face the consequences of her actions. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I do not want to make another mistake with another man.”

I have good memories of growing up in Hartford. It is a unique city in Connecticut, since most of its population is black or brown. Caucasians are less than 30 percent of the population, blacks are close to 40 percent, and the rest are mostly of Hispanic descent. Thus, I never felt that I was a minority.

My mother showed a little reverse discrimination when saying things like, “Whatever a white man can do, a black man can do better. The reason that they do not allow us to attend the top schools in the nation is because they know that we are better than they are.”

Of course, she has always been color-blind where Charlie is concerned. And, of course, she stopped being racist as soon as Obama became president, saying, “A person is allowed to be dumb once in a while, but not every time, all of the time. Racism is for assholes! And I have been an asshole for too long!”

She worked at the post office in our neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut. She began as a clerk, then became a letter carrier, and now, she is the branch manager.

Sometimes packages are damaged or the addresses are illegible. The post office keeps these packages for several months waiting for somebody to claim them. After six months, or when they run out of space, the packages are sent to a central storage depot. The more damaged packages are thrown into the garbage.

My mother brought me a puzzle that had been destined for the garbage. I didn’t have many toys when I was growing up because we didn’t have a lot of money. That puzzle for me was the greatest gift I had ever received.

I was very happy.

When my mother explained to me what I had to do by joining two pieces of the jigsaw, I worked all day long for the next three days, until I had put together a puzzle made for children six to eight years old. Not bad for a two-and-half-year-old.

I have loved puzzles ever since.

I felt so pleased with myself, and I could see my mother was also feeling very proud of my achievement. Every birthday and Christmas from then on, I would get a puzzle. The harder the puzzle, the better.

My mother framed my first puzzle, and it is still hanging on her living-room wall.

Beginnings of a plan

I stood up and walked up the stairs to the breakfast room.

“We will solve this puzzle!” I promised myself. All we needed was a good strategy.

Miranda, Charlie, and Santi were sitting down having coffee. I walked over to the counter, grabbed a mug, and served myself some freshly made coffee. It wasn’t as good as Santi’s Veracruz coffee, but it was good enough. Jonathan came down and did the same. Then he sat down with us.

I surprised everybody by starting the conversation, asking a rhetorical question, “How can we, lacking the sophistication, standing, history, and resources, enter the auction, find the girls, and bring them home safely?

“We cannot go to the authorities, or the newspapers, or television. Nobody is going to believe us. And if they do, how long would it be before they are fired, meet an accidental death, or are exiled to a remote island?

“We have really gotten ourselves into a terrible jam, and we are now the enemies of some of the most powerful people in the world. And none of it is because of our own doing. We cannot stop the auction. The auction will take place, and these people will probably go on with their lives scot-free. However, we might be able to find some key individual we could blackmail. Once we find him, following Jonathan’s teachings, we could threaten him with something that he would never allow to happen, and then we could make him release the girls.

“So, we start by finding this key individual.”

“That would be the auction manager,” said Charlie.

“So what do we do?” asked Santi. “Do we try to expose him? And if we do, how do we to do that? The people in the Corporation control the media. We might find some willing reporters, but if push comes to shove, any stories they write are going to be killed by the editors, and the reporters will find themselves out of a job. What are we to do?”

“We use guerrilla tactics,” said Charlie. “We find the object or person of his passion, the person or thing he loves most. We take that from him, and then we offer to trade it for the girls. If the auction manager feels that he cannot afford to reject our offer, he will return the girls to us.”

“I think we were all thinking along the same lines. That’s why I went upstairs to make a few discreet calls to some colleagues and friends,” said Jonathan.

“This is what I have found out,” he said to us while opening a folder. “Rupert Pattinson, the auction manager, is sixty-one years old.” He showed us a photograph of a very distinguished white male with green eyes on a chiseled face, a strong mouth, and solid, regular features. “He married late. His daughter is twenty-three and his son twenty. Apparently, his son is gay and trouble prone. Rupert lives in a house next to the hotel with his wife, son, and daughter. His wife and daughter are currently on their annual shopping trip in Europe, which she regularly does during the same week of the DC Forum and auction.”

Charlie said, “I like the way both of you are thinking. I propose we take Rupert Pattinson’s son and exchange him for the girls. However, if that doesn’t work, we can always try to use force to find and liberate the girls. I don’t see any other options. What do you think?”

Santi said, “It would have been nice if his wife and daughter were here. His wife and two kids would have made a better bargaining package than just his son. However, we cannot wait for them to come back from Europe or cry over spilled milk. We only have today and tomorrow to act.

“So I propose we go now in two vehicles and scout the hotel, the property, and the house. Let us disguise ourselves as much as possible in the little time that we have so that we don’t lead them back to us.

“Jonathan and Miranda can act like a married couple and go into the hotel asking for the prices and availability of rooms. Meanwhile, the three of us will do some reconnaissance by driving around.

“What do you think?” asked Santi.

Miranda said, “It sounds like a plan. Let’s do it.”

I had to admit that Santi was also an idiot savant where puzzles were concerned. I started solving the intractable jigsaw puzzle, and he finished it.

Illusion and disguise