James Siegel - Detour

He was one of those people whose names were always followed by the word alleged. It was alleged, for example, that he had his own zoo on one of his many haciendas, used to allegedly feed his rivals to the tigers. That he allegedly enjoyed dropping people from a Blackhawk helicopter into a pool of writhing piranhas. That he offered human sacrifices in bloody and bizarre rites of Santeria—that was alleged too. He was clearly the stuff of tabloids; the tabloids took full and voracious advantage.

Paul and Joanna passed the newspapers back and forth till the ink stained their hands and their eyes grew blurry.

ONE NIGHT JOANNA WOKE PAUL AND ASKED HIM TO LOOK IN ON the baby.

It took Paul a moment to understand that she was deluded.

That they weren’t in the hotel room sleeping next to Joelle, but in a locked room with no air.

His face stung where the man had repeatedly smashed him with the rifle butt, a beating that had lasted at least five minutes and felt much longer. He’d lost at least one tooth; his lip was split open and still covered in dried blood. Afterward, they’d had to watch contritely from the center of the floor as two guards came in and hammered a new piece of wood back into place, muttering at them the whole time.

“Shhh,” Paul whispered to Joanna. “You’re sleeping.”

She opened her eyes.

“I thought I heard . . .” She began to cry. Soft, muffled sobs that seemed even more nakedly pitiable with no other sounds around to cloak them.

Paul put his arms around her. “Please, Joanna. We’ll get out of this. They’re not going to kill us—they had their chance when they caught us at the window. We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to get Joelle back. I promise.”

He wondered if promising Joanna anything was a good idea. But hope was the one commodity that hadn’t been taken away from them. Not yet.

Then she did a strange thing. She stopped crying and disentangled herself from his arms. She put a finger to his lips.

“Listen,” she whispered.

“What? I don’t hear anything,” he said. Only the sound of their breathing. Soft, regular, and strangely in sync.

“Listen,” she said again.

Then he heard it.

“It’s the TV,” he said.

“Maybe it’s real.”

“Probably not. No.”

“Listen, Paul. Listen. It’s her. ”

A baby crying.

Just like in Galina’s house, only different than Galina’s house.

“I know,” Joanna said. “I just know. ”

In Galina’s house the sound of a baby crying had frightened them.

Here it had exactly the opposite effect.

She wrapped herself around him in the dark. She put her head on his chest, and both of them lay there and listened to the sound as if it were a beautiful rhapsody. As if it were their song.

IN THE MORNING THE MAN CAME BACK.

This time he wasn’t alone.

Someone of evident importance was with him. Paul could tell from the way his attacker deferred to him. His role had changed; he was there to interpret now.

This became clear when the new man looked at Paul and Joanna and said something in Spanish.

“He asked you to sit down,” their original captor said.

Paul knew what the man had asked them to do. But he was still smarting from his previous beating. He thought it better to think things over before committing to even the simplest action. The man had asked them to sit, fine—maybe it was better to make sure he wanted them to sit. Joanna had remained stationary for another reason, he knew. Sheer willfulness, courage in the face of fire.

The man motioned them to the two plastic chairs. Once upon a time those chairs must’ve sat in the courtyard, that heavenly vista they’d fleetingly glimpsed before it disappeared again behind newly nailed oak. Dirt was ingrained in the white plastic, the kind that accumulates after too many winters spent outdoors.

They sat.

The man in charge spoke to them in soft, measured tones. He focused mostly on Paul, maintaining eye contact between puffs of a thick pungent cigar sending blue plumes of smoke drifting gently up to the ceiling. Paul recognized the brand: the box on Galina’s mantelpiece. He had a scraggly beard; his skin was pocked from childhood acne. He spoke entirely in Spanish, at a pace leisurely enough to allow his lieutenant—that’s how Paul thought of him now—to translate his words into English.

“This is what you are going to do for us,” the man said.

And they finally learned why they were there.

THIRTEEN

There were three boxes of condoms on the table.

A French brand. Cheval, the boxes said, over the picture of a white stallion with fiery eyes and windswept mane.

An Indian woman wearing incongruous-looking bifocals was bent over the table, carefully stretching out the condoms one at a time. She was wearing black latex gloves and no top. Just a gray sports bra with a black Nike swoosh on it.

At the other end of the table, another woman wearing black latex gloves and sports bra was methodically chopping up blocks of white powder with a gleaming surgical scalpel. The lieutenant was leaning against the door, eyes fixed on the half-naked women like a man in love.

Paul was sitting against the wall, waiting.

They’d made him give himself two enemas spaced an hour apart. As he waited for the second one to take effect, he stared at the thirty-two bulging condoms already gathered in the middle of the table and tried not to feel sick.

He was reminded of one of those inane reality shows that had so recently swept the country. Fear Factor —wasn’t that the one? Raw pig brains, bloody offal, cow intestines, laid out on a table before three or four greedy contestants. Go ahead —the smarmy host intoned every week— whoever gets the most down wins.

And didn’t they dive in with unabashed gusto? Didn’t they chow down to the last morsel, their eyes firmly on the prize? It helped Paul to think of them. They were his newfound role models. If they could do it, so could he.

After all, he wasn’t striving for mere money here. The grand prize on this show was two lives.

His wife’s and his daughter’s.

Thirty-two condoms became thirty-three. The woman at the end of the table had just added to the pile.

He felt the familiar rumblings in his gut. He asked Arias—that was the lieutenant’s name—if he could go to the bathroom.

Arias nodded and beckoned him forward. The women kept working without interruption, assembly line workers who hadn’t yet heard the lunch whistle.

Arias opened the door and pushed him out. There was a bathroom just down the hall. Arias watched him as he went in and swung the door shut behind him.

The door didn’t make it to the closed position.

Of course not. Arias’ booted foot stopped it, just as it had stopped it the first time Paul ran to the bathroom.

The door swung back the other way as Paul sat down on the dirt-streaked toilet seat and tried not to notice Arias watching him. That was kind of hard. He closed his eyes and thought of his bathroom back home, where a dog-eared copy of The Sporting News Baseball Stats sat just to the right of the toilet. Not because he particularly liked baseball—he didn’t. He liked stats. He visualized page 77—Derek Jeter. Batting average, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases. Numbers always told a story, didn’t they? It comforted him to think of numbers now. Numbers imposed order on the universe—you could lean on them, take comfort in them. They always added up.

For the second time in an hour, it felt as if every bit of his insides had come out of him. Then, with Arias still watching, he stood up and cleaned himself.