James Grippando - A King's ransom

“Look at you, you’re dancing!”

“I think I do have it,” I said.

Our guitar-playing friend was singing again, his voice stronger. The pace quickened, but I kept right up with it. Alex moved closer, shrinking the space between our bodies.

“You’re pretty good for a gringo.”

“Why do you say ‘for a gringo’?”

“Because a Colombian man would never let me lead.”

“I think you’d lead if you were dancing with Fred Astaire.”

“Fred who?”

“He’s a famous-”

She pinched my ribs, smiling. “I know who he is. No se puede dar papaya, ” she added, her favorite expression.

“Don’t be so naive,” I said, translating.

“That’s right,” she said softly. “I might just walk all over you.”

The music stopped, but we didn’t pull apart. We remained in our dance pose, her right hand in my left. Slowly her left hand slid from my hip toward my back, then up gently toward my shoulder blades. Instinctively I did the same to her, my fingers traveling from the gentle curve of her hip to the small of her back. Our bodies drew closer, so close that the space between us was almost gone. I tingled with the imagined feeling of her breasts pressed against me. Her breath caressed my neck as she looked up at me, la mujer with the dark brown eyes.

She moved her hand across my back, caressing me. Almost involuntarily I duplicated the light swirling motion across the warm, bare skin of her back. It was firm and very smooth, until the tips of my fingers found a slight ridge in the skin, then another ridge below it. Faded scars that I hadn’t noticed before. Now that my touch had discovered them, I could actually see them as I looked past her shoulder at the reflection of her back in the window behind her.

She stiffened in my arms, seeming to have sensed my discovery. “Do they frighten you?”

“What?” I said, playing dumb.

“You found my scars, no?”

“They’re nothing, really.”

“You’re lying.”

I counted five of them, each an inch long and about a quarter inch wide. They appeared to be the remnants of old wounds that had never been treated properly. “It looks like. . you were stabbed.”

“That’s because I was.”

She pulled away and stepped back, as if suddenly self-conscious.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s all right. It was a very long time ago. I was a sixteen-year-old girl.”

“What happened?”

“I tried to quit FARC.”

“They stab you for that?”

“It’s a lifelong commitment. They don’t like quitters.”

I tried not to look stunned. “Isn’t it dangerous for you to come back to Colombia?”

“For Sonia Bernal, yes, it would be very dangerous. If she were alive. But she was stabbed five times in the back and left for dead in a gutter at the side of the road outside Cali almost fifteen years ago.”

“Sonia was your real name?”

“That was my FARC name. And to answer your question, none of that seems real to me anymore.”

“I’m beginning to know how you feel.”

She came toward me and patted me gently on the cheek, sort of symbolically slapping me out of my daze. “Don’t worry. It only makes me tougher inside. More determined to get your father back. Good night, Nick.”

I watched as she turned and headed back to her bedroom alone. I tried not to stare, but I was strangely fixated on the scars on her back.

It was wild to think of her as having been one of them .

For some reason I thought back to that first day we’d spent together in Bogota, when she’d snapped at me for trying to inject even the slightest diversion into her scheduled itinerary. To prove her point, she’d angrily driven me up to the top of the hill to see the once-pleasant neighborhoods of northern Bogota that crime had transformed into little fortresses. I’d wondered back then if her concern went beyond my safety. Even now I didn’t know what to think, though one thing I was sure of.

I’d never known a woman like Alex.

Customs at Miami International Airport was a breeze. At least it was for Alex. She sailed through without a bag search. Apparently an unmarried white male in his late twenties who’d made two very short trips between Miami and Colombia in the last month set off all kinds of bells and whistles. My bags they wanted to see.

I told Alex to go on without me.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. We’ll talk later.”

She was gone just a second before the customs agents exposed to the world my dependency on American-made toilet paper. I stuffed my personal items back in the bag, closed it up, and was ready to move on.

“Would you mind coming with us, please?” asked the agent.

I took a half step back, surprised. The elderly couple behind me took about five steps back, as if to announce that they weren’t traveling with me.

“What’s this about?”

“We’d like to ask you some questions. Could you please step out of the line?”

At this point my lawyerly instincts were kicking in, but I didn’t want to make a scene. “Sure,” I said. I grabbed my bag and followed the agent through an exit designated for airport employees and law enforcement. The agent used his electronic passkey to get us through another set of secured doors. On the other side was FBI Agent Huitt.

“Long time no see, Nick,” he said.

His sidekick was with him, the young female agent who rarely said anything but looked as if she could break me in two if she’d wanted to.

“Am I being detained?” I asked, knowing the legal significance of the word.

“Not at all,” said Huitt. “Just want to ask you some questions. You’re free to go if you don’t want to talk.”

“Then it was nice talking to you,” I said. “See ya.”

As I turned, he said, “Where’d you get the two hundred and four thousand dollars?”

I stopped, but I didn’t answer. Two-oh-four was the exact amount we’d wire-transferred, even though we’d ended up paying only a hundred.

He said, “Your Miami bank filled out a suspicious-transaction report. You must have acted nervous when you went in to wire the money, Nick.”

“It’s my money. If I want to wire it to Bogota and walk out of the bank with a suitcase full of cash, that’s my business.”

“Sure, so long as it really is your money. For your sake, I hope it didn’t come from your father’s partner.”

The remark had me thinking of Alex’s advice to borrow the full ransom from Guillermo. “It didn’t come from him.”

“I promised to get you and your entire family full immunity if you’d help me expose Guillermo Cruz for what he is. No way in hell the U.S. Attorney’s going to go for that deal if you start spreading around dirty money.”

“I pulled together every penny of that money with help from no one but my closest friends. I mortgaged my house, I-”

“Yeah, yeah. Spare me the sob story.”

“Then spare me the grief. We don’t need your immunity.”

“Let me give you a little advice. You keep crawling around with snakes, you’re going to get bitten. It happened to your old man, it can happen to you.”

“What do you know about my father?”

He stepped closer and spoke in a low, threatening tone. “I know that kidnappings like this one are rarely a case of an innocent person being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know that your father went down to Colombia with five Nicaraguans to buy three shrimp boats that I suspect haven’t been used for shrimping in a very long time. I know all about the people he bought the boats from, and I know how vindictive they can be when someone double-crosses them in their particularly unseemly line of commerce. What do you know about your father, Nick?”