T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

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 Rómulo 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 Néstor, 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 Néstor, 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: Néstor, 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.”

Néstor 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 Simón Bolívar and Hugo Chávez. 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. Néstor 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.”