W. Griffin: The Hostage

The Mastersons and the Darbys, both on their second tours in Buenos Aires, had opted for embassy houses in San Isidro, rather than for apartments in Palermo or Belgrano.

Their first tours had taught them there was a downside to the elegant apartments the embassy leased in the city. They were of course closer to the embassy, but they were noisy, sometimes the elevators and the air-conditioning didn't work, and parking required negotiating a narrow access road to a crowded garage sometimes two floors below street level. And they had communal swimming pools, if they had swimming pools at all.

The houses the embassy leased in San Isidro were nice, and came with a garden, a quincho- outdoor barbecue-and a swimming pool. This was important if you had kids, and the Mastersons had three. The schools were better in San Isidro, and the shopping, and Avenida Libertador was lined with nice shops and lots of good restaurants. And of course there were easy-access garages for what the State Department called Privately Owned Vehicles.

The Masterson POV was a dark green 2004 Chrysler Town amp; Country van. With three kids, all with bicycles, you needed something that large. But it was big, and Betsy didn't even like to think about trying to park what the Mastersons called "the Bus" in an underground garage in the city.

When she went to Buenos Aires, to have lunch with Jack or whatever, she never used a garage. The Bus had diplomat license plates, and that meant you could park anywhere you wanted. You couldn't be ticketed or towed. Or even stopped for speeding. Diplomatic immunity.

The price for the house and the nice shops, good restaurants, and better schools of San Isidro was the twice-a-day thirty-sometimes forty-five-minute ride through the insane traffic on Libertador to the embassy. But Jack paid that.

Her bartender-one of four tending the oval bar island-came up with a bottle of Lagarde in one hand and a fresh glass in the other. He asked with a raised eyebrow if she wanted the new glass.

"This is fine, thank you," Betsy said in Spanish.

The bartender filled her glass almost to the brim.

I probably shouldn't have done that, she thought. The way they pour in here, two glasses is half a bottle, and with half a bottle in me I'm probably going to say something- however well deserved-to Jack that I'll regret later.

But she picked the glass up carefully and took a good swallow from it.

She looked up at the two enormous television screens mounted high on the wall for the bar patrons. One of them showed a soccer game-what Argentines, as well as most of the world, called "football"-and the other was tuned to a news channel.

There was no sound that she could hear.

Typical Argentina, she thought unkindly. Rather than make a decision to provide the audio to one channel, which would annoy the watchers of the other, compromise by turning both off. That way, nobody should be annoyed.

She didn't really understand the football, so she turned her attention to the news. There was another demonstration at the American embassy. Hordes of people banging on drums and kitchen pots, and waving banners, including several of Che Guevara-which for some reason really annoyed Jack-being held behind barriers by the Mounted Police.

That's probably why Jack's late. He couldn't get out of the embassy. But he could have called.

The image of a distinguished-looking, gray-bearded man in a business suit standing before a microphone came on the screen. Betsy recognized him as the prominent businessman whose college-aged son had been a high-profile kidnapping victim. As the demands for ransom went higher and higher, the kidnappers had cut off the boy's fingers, one by one, and sent them to his father to prove he was still alive. Shortly after the father paid, the boy's body-shot in the head-was found. The father was now one of the biggest thorns in the side of the President and his administration.

Kidnapping-sometimes with the participation of the cops-was big business in Argentina. The Buenos Aires Herald, the American-owned English-language newspaper, had that morning run the story of the kidnapping of a thirteen-year-old girl, thought to be sold into prostitution.

Such a beautiful country with such ugly problems.

The image shifted to one of a second-rate American movie star being herded through a horde of fans at the Ezeiza airport.

Betsy took a healthy swallow of the merlot, checked the entrance again for signs of her husband, and returned her attention to the TV screen.

Ten minutes later-well, enough's enough. To hell with him. Let him stand on the curb and try to flag a taxi down. I'm sorry it's not raining- she laid her American Express card on the bar, caught the bartender's eye, and pointed at the card. He smiled, and nodded, and walked to the cash register.

When he laid the tab on the bar before her, she saw that the two glasses of the really nice merlot and the very nice plate of mixed cheeses and crackers came to $24.50 in Argentine pesos. Or eight bucks U.S.

She felt a twinge of guilt. The Mastersons had lived well enough on their first tour, when the peso equaled the dollar. Now, with the dramatic devaluation of the peso, they lived like kings. It was indeed nice, but also it was difficult to completely enjoy with so many suffering so visibly.

She nodded, and he picked up the tab and her credit card and went back to the cash register. Betsy went in her purse and took out a wad of pesos and pulled a five-peso note from it. For some reason, you couldn't put the tip on a credit card. Five pesos was about twenty percent, and Jack was always telling her that the Argentines were grateful for ten percent. But the bartender was a nice young man who always took good care of her, and he probably didn't make much money. Five pesos was a buck sixty.

When the bartender came back with the American Express form, she signed it, took the carbon, laid the five-peso note on the original, and pushed it across the bar to him.

"Muchas gracias, senora."

"You're welcome," Betsy said in Spanish.

She put the credit card in her wallet, and then the wallet in her purse, and closed it. She slipped off the bar stool and walked toward the entrance. This gave her a view of the kitchen, intentionally on display behind a plate-glass wall. She was always fascinated at what, in a sense, was really a feeding frenzy. She thought there must be twenty men in chef's whites tending a half-dozen stainless steel stoves, a huge, wood-fired parrilla grill, and other kitchen equipment. All busy as hell. The no-smoking dining room of the Kansas was enormous and usually full.

The entrance foyer was crowded with people giving their names to the greeter-girls to get on the get-seated roster. One of the greeters saw Betsy coming and walked quickly to hold open the door for her.

Betsy went out onto Avenida Libertador, and looked up and down the street; no husband. She turned right on the sidewalk toward what she thought of as the Park-Yourself entrance to the Kansas parking lot. There were two entrances to the large parking area behind the restaurant. The other provided valet parking.

Betsy never used it. She had decided long ago, when they had first started coming to the Kansas, that it was really a pain in the you-know-where. The valet parkers were young kids who opened the door for you, handed you a claim check, and then hopped behind the wheel and took off with a squeal of tires into the parking lot, where they proved their manhood by coming as close to other cars as they could without taking off a fender.

And then when you left, you had to find the claim check, and stand outside waiting for a parker to show up so you could give it to him. He then took off at a run into the parking lot. A couple of minutes later, the Bus would arrive with a squeal of tires, and the parker would jump out with a big smile and a hand out for his tip.