She wasn’t happy about it, I could see that, lawyerly calculations transfiguring her face as she weighed the hassle of running up the boulevard with her husband and baby in tow before leaving for her eight o’clock class. I watched her reach back to remove the clip from her hair and shake it loose. “I guess,” she said. “But no Italian.” She’d set down her briefcase in the entry hall, where the phone was, and she put a thumb in her mouth a moment—a habit of hers; she was a fingernail chewer—before she said, “What about Chinese?” She shrugged before I could. “As long as it’s quick, I don’t really care.”
I was about to agree with her, about to rise up out of the grip of the couch and do my best to minister to the baby and get us out the door, en famille, when the phone rang. Clover answered. “Hello?
Uh-huh, this is she.”
My right knee cracked as I stood, a reminder of the torn ACL I’d suffered in high school when I’d made the slightest miscalculation regarding the drop off the backside of a boulder while snowboarding at Mammoth.
“Jeannie?” my wife said, her eyebrows lifting in two perfect arches. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, Jeannie—how are you?”
There was a long pause as Jeannie said what she was going to say and then my wife said, “Oh, no, there must be some mistake. The baby’s fine. She’s right here in her carrier, fast asleep.” And her voice grew heartier, surprise and confusion riding the cusp of the joke,
“She could use a fresh diaper, judging from the smell of her, but that’s her daddy’s job, or it’s going to be if we ever expect to—”
And then there was another pause, longer this time, and I watched my wife’s gaze shift from the form of the sleeping baby in her terry-cloth jumpsuit to where I was standing beside the couch.
Her eyes, in soft focus for the baby, hardened as they climbed from my shoetops to my face, where they rested like two balls of granite.
Anybody would have melted under that kind of scrutiny. My wife, the lawyer. It would be a long night, I could see that. There would be no Chinese, no food of any kind. I found myself denying everything, telling her how scattered Jeannie was and how she must have mixed us up with the Lovetts—she remembered Tony Lovett, worked in sfx? Yeah, they’d just lost their baby, a little girl, yeah. No, it was awful. I told her we’d all chipped in—“Me too, I put in a fifty, and that was excessive, I know it, but I felt I had to, you know?
Because of the baby. Because what if it happened to us?” I went on in that vein till I ran out of breath and when I tried to be nonchalant about it and go to the refrigerator for another beer, she blocked my way. “Where’s the money?” she said.
We were two feet apart. I didn’t like the look she was giving me because it spared nothing. I could have kept it up, could have said,
“What money?” injecting all the trampled innocence I could summon into my voice, but I didn’t. I merely bent to the cabinet under the sink, extracted the white plastic bag and handed it to her.
She took it as if it were the bleeding corpse of our daughter—or no, of our relationship that went back three years to the time when I was up onstage, gilded in light, my message elided under the hammer of the guitar and the thump of the bass. She didn’t look inside. She just held my eyes. “You know this is fraud, don’t you?” she said. “A felony offense. They can lock you up for this. You know that.”
She wasn’t asking a question, she was making a demand. And I wasn’t about to answer her because the baby was dead and she was dead too. Radko was dead, Jeannie the secretary whose last name I didn’t even know and Joel Chinowski and all the rest of them. Very slowly, button by button, I did up my shirt. Then I set my empty beer bottle down on the counter as carefully as if it were full to the lip and went on out the door and into the night, looking for somebody I could tell all about it.
When they took Aquiles Maldonado’s mother, on a morning so hot it all but seared the hide off the hundred and twenty thousand stray dogs in Caracas, give or take a few, no one would have guessed they would keep her as long as they did. Her husband was dead, murdered in a robbery attempt six years earlier, and he would remain unconcerned and uncommunicative. But there were the household servants and the employees of the machine shop ready to run through the compound beating their breasts, and while her own mother was as feeble as a dandelion gone to seed, she was supremely capable of worry. As were Marita’s four grown sons and Aquiles’ six children by five different aficionadas, whom she looked after, fed, scolded and sent off to school each morning. There was concern, plenty of concern, and it rose up and raced through the community the minute the news hit the streets. “They took Marita Villalba,”
people shouted from window to window while others shouted back,
“Who?”
“Who?” voices cried out in outrage and astonishment. “Who?
Aquiles Maldonado’s mother, that’s who!”
At that time, Aquiles was playing for Baltimore, in the American League, away from home from the start of spring training in late February to the conclusion of the regular season in the first week of October. He was thirty years old and had worked his way through four teams with a fierce determination to reach the zenith of his profession—he was now the Birds’ closer, pitching with grit and fluidity at the end of the first year of his two-year, eleven-point-five-million-dollar contract, despite the sharp burn he felt up under the rotator cuff of his pitching arm every time he changed his release point, about which he had told no one. There were three weeks left in the season, and the team, which had already been eliminated from playoff contention by the aggressive play of the Red Sox and Yankees, was just going through the motions. But not Aquiles. Every time he was handed the ball with a lead to protect, however infrequently, he bore down with a fury so uncompromising you would have thought every cent of his eleven-point-five-million U.S. guaranteed dollars rode on each and every pitch.
He was doing his pre-game stretching and joking with the team’s other Venezuelan player, Chucho Rangel, about the two tattooed giieras they’d taken back to the hotel the night before, when the call came through. It was from his brother Nestor, and the moment he heard his brother’s voice, he knew the news was bad.
“They got Mami,” Nestor sobbed into the receiver.
“Who did?”
There was a pause, as if his brother were calling from beneath the sea and needed to surface to catch his breath. “I don’t know,” he said, “the gangsters, the FARC, whoever.”
The field was the green of dreams, the stands spotted with fans come early for batting practice and autographs. He turned away from Chucho and the rest of them, hunched over his cell. “For what?” And then, because the word slipped into his mouth: “For ransom?”
Another pause, and when his brother came back to him his voice was as pinched and hollow as if he were talking through his snorkel: “What do you think, pendejo?”
“It just shouldn’t be so hot this time of year,” she’d been saying to Romulo Cordero, foreman of the machine shop her son had bought her when he signed his first big league contract. “I’ve never seen it like this—have you? Maybe in my mother’s time …”
The children were at school, under supervision of the nuns and the watchful eye of Christ in heaven, the lathes were turning with their insectoid drone and she was in the back office, both fans going full speed and directed at her face and the three buttons of cleavage she allowed herself on the hottest days. Marita Villalba was forty-seven years old, thirty pounds heavier than she’d like to be, but pretty still and so full of life (and, let’s face it, money and respectability) that half the bachelors of the neighborhood—and all the widowers—were mad for the sight of her. Romulo Cordero, a married man and father of nine, wasn’t immune to her charms, but he was an employee first and never allowed himself to forget it. “In the nineteen sixties, when I was a boy,” he said, pausing to sweeten his voice, “—but you would have been too young to remember—it was a hundred nineteen degrees by eleven in the morning every day for a week and people were placing bets on when it would break a hundred and twenty—”
He never got to finish the story. At that moment, four men in the uniform of the federal police strode sweating into the office to crowd the little dirt-floored room with its walls of unpainted plywood and the rusting filing cabinets and the oversized Steelcase desk on which Marita Villalba did her accounts. “I’ve already paid,”
she said, barely glancing up at them.
Their leader, a tall stoop-shouldered man with a congenitally deformed eye and a reek of the barrio who didn’t look anything like a policeman, casually unholstered his gun. “We don’t know anything about that. My instructions are to bring you to the station for questioning.”
And so it began.
When they got outside, to the courtyard, where the shop stood adjacent to the two-story frame house with its hardwood floors and tile roof, the tall one, who was referred to variously as “Capitan” and
“El Ojo” by the others, held open the door of a blistered pale purple Honda with yellow racing stripes that was like no police vehicle Marita Villalba or Romulo Cordero had ever seen. Marita balked.
“Are you sure we have to go through with this?” she said, gesturing to the dusty backseat of the car, to the open gate of the compound and the city festering beyond it. “Can’t we settle this right here?” She was digging in her purse for her checkbook, when the tall one said abruptly, “I’ll call headquarters.” Then he turned to Romulo Cordero. “Hand me your cell phone.”
Alarm signals began to go off in Marita Villalba’s head. She sized up the three other men—boys, they were boys, street urchins dressed up in stolen uniforms with automatic pistols worth more than their own lives and the lives of all their ancestors combined clutched in nervous hands—even as Romulo Cordero unhooked the cell phone from his belt and handed it to the tall man with the drooping eye.
“Hello?” the man said into the phone. “District headquarters?
Yes, this is”—and he gave a name he invented out of the scorched air of the swollen morning—“and we have the Villalba woman.” He paused. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I see: she must come in in person.”
Marita glanced at her foreman and they shared a look: the phone was dead, had been dead for two weeks and more, the batteries corroded in the shell of the housing and new ones on order, endlessly on order, and they both broke for the open door of the shop at the same instant. It was hopeless. The weapons spoke their rapid language, dust clawed at her face and Romulo Cordero went down with two red flowers blooming against the scuffed leather of the tooled boot on his right foot, and the teenagers—the boys who should have been in school, should have been working at some honest trade under an honest master—seized Aquiles Maldonado’s mother by the loose flesh of her upper arms, about which she was very sensitive, and forced her into the car. It took a minute, no more.
And then they were gone.
Accompanied by a bodyguard and his brother Nestor, Aquiles mounted the five flights of listing stairs at the Central Police Headquarters and found his way, by trial and error, through a dim dripping congeries of hallways to the offices of the Anti-Extortion and Kidnap Division. The door was open. Commissioner Diosado Salas, Chief of the Division, was sitting behind his desk. “It’s an honor,” he said, rising to greet them and waving a hand to indicate the two chairs set before the desk. “Please, please,” he said, and Aquiles and Nestor, with a glance for the bodyguard, who positioned himself just outside the door, eased tentatively into the chairs.
The office looked like any other, bookshelves collapsing under the weight of papers curling at the edges, sagging Venetian blinds, a poor pale yellowish light descending from the fixtures in the ceiling, but the desk, nearly as massive as the one Aquiles’ mother kept in her office at the machine shop, had been purged of the usual accoutrements—there were no papers, no files, no staplers or pens, not even a telephone or computer. Instead, a white cloth had been spread neatly over the surface, and aside from the two pale blue cuffs of the Chief ’s shirtsleeves and the pelota of his clenched brown hands, there were but four objects on the table: three newspaper clippings and a single sheet of white paper with something inscribed across it in what looked to be twenty-point type.
All the way up the stairs, his brother and the bodyguard wheezing behind him, Aquiles had been preparing a speech—“I’ll pay anything, do anything they say, just so long as they release her unharmed and as soon as possible, or expeditiously, I mean expeditiously, isn’t that the legal term?”—but now, before he could open his mouth, the Chief leaned back in the chair and snapped his fingers in the direction of the door at the rear of the room. Instantly, the door flew open and a waiter from the Fundador Café whirled across the floor with his tray held high, bowing briefly to each of them before setting down three white ceramic plates and three Coca-Colas in their sculpted greenish bottles designed to fit the hand like the waist of a woman. In the center of each plate was a steaming reina pepeada—a maize cake stuffed with avocado, chicken, potatoes, carrots and mayonnaise, Aquiles’ favorite, the very thing he hungered for during all those months of exile in the north. “Please, please,” the Chief said. “We eat. Then we talk.”
Aquiles was fresh off the plane. There was no question of finishing the season, of worrying about bills, paychecks, the bachelor apartment he shared with Chucho Rangel in a high-rise within sight of Camden Yards or the milk-white Porsche in the parking garage beneath it, and the Orioles’ manager, Frank Bowden, had given him his consent immediately. Not that it was anything more than a formality. Aquiles would have been on the next plane no matter what anyone said, even if they were in the playoffs, even the World Series. His mother was in danger. And he had come to save her. But he hadn’t eaten since breakfast the previous day, and before he knew what he was doing, the sandwich was gone.
The room became very quiet. There was no sound but for the whirring of the fans and the faint mastication of the Chief, a small-boned man with an overlarge head and a crown of dark snaking hair that pulled away from his scalp as if an invisible hand were eternally tugging at it. Into the silence came the first reminder of the gravity of the situation: Nestor, his face clasped in both hands, had begun to sob in a quiet soughing way. “Our mother,” he choked,
“she used to cook reinas for us, all her life she used to cook. And now, now—”
“Hush,” the Chief said, his voice soft and expressive. “We’ll get her back, don’t you worry.” And then, to Aquiles, in a different voice altogether, an official voice, hard with overuse, he said: “So you’ve heard from them.”
“Yes. A man called my cell—and I don’t know how he got the number—”
The Chief gave him a bitter smile, as if to say Don’t be naïve.
Aquiles flushed. “He didn’t say hello or anything, just ‘We have the package,’ that was all, and then he hung up.”
Nestor lifted his head. They both looked to the Chief.
“Typical,” he said. “You won’t hear from them for another week, maybe two. Maybe more.”
Aquiles was stunned. “A week? But don’t they want the money?”
The Chief leaned into the desk, the black pits of his eyes locked on Aquiles. “What money? Did anybody say anything about money?”
“No, but that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? They wouldn’t”—and here an inadmissible thought invaded his head—“they’re not sadists, are they? They’re not…,” but he couldn’t go on. Finally, gathering himself, he said, “They don’t kidnap mothers just for the amusement of it, do they?”
Smiling his bitter smile, the Chief boxed the slip of white paper so that it was facing Aquiles and pushed it across the table with the tips of two fingers. On it, in those outsized letters, was written a single figure: ELEVEN-POINT-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. In the next moment he was brandishing the newspaper clippings, shaking them so that the paper crackled with the violence of it, and Aquiles could see what they were: articles in the local press proclaiming the beisbol star Aquiles Maldonado a national hero second only to Simon Bolivar and Hugo Chavez. In each of them, the figure of eleven-point-five million dollars had been underlined in red ink.
“This is what they want,” the Chief said finally, “money, yes. And now that they have your attention they will come back to you with a figure, maybe five million or so—they’d demand it all and more, except that they know you will not pay them a cent, not now or ever.”
“What do you mean?’
“I mean we do not negotiate with criminals.”
“But what about my mother?”
He sighed. “We will get her back, don’t you worry. It may take time and perhaps even a certain degree of pain”—here he reached down beneath the desk and with some effort set a two-quart pickle jar on the table before him—“but have no fear.”
Aquiles stole a look at his brother. Nestor had jammed his forefinger into his mouth and was biting down as if to snap it in two, a habit he’d developed in childhood and had been unable to break.
These were not pickles floating in the clear astringent liquid.
“Yes,” the Chief said, “this is the next step. It is called proof of life.”
It took a moment for the horror to settle in.
“But these fingers—there are four of them here, plus two small toes, one great toe and a left ear—represent cases we have resolved.
Happily resolved. What I’m telling you is be prepared. First you will receive the proof of life, then the demand for money.” He paused.
And then his fist came down, hard, on the desktop. “But you will not pay them, no matter what.”
“I will,” Aquiles insisted. “I’ll pay them anything.”
“You won’t. You can’t. Because if you do, then every ballplayer’s family will be at risk, don’t you understand that? And, I hate to say this, but you’ve brought it on yourself. I mean, please—driving a vermilion Hummer through the streets of this town? Parading around with your gold necklaces and these disgraceful women, these putas with their great inflated tits and swollen behinds? Did you really have to go and paint your compound the color of a ripe tangerine?”