James Siegel - Detour

“No.”

“No? It’s okay, Paul—we’re just shooting the shit. You can tell me—some of your best friends are Jews, yada yada yada . . . but come on, you mean to tell me you don’t curse the Yids every time you open the paper? You think Osama picked Jew York because he hates the Yankees?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, sure, you don’t know . But you can guess . You can have a sneaking suspicion. Come on, Paul: Jews—yea or nay?”

“Nay,” Paul said, surrendering to peer pressure. He wanted the bird-watcher to smile at him, pat him on the back, hail-fellow-well-met. He wanted to get out of this garage and save his wife.

The blow to the back of his neck drove his face straight into the table. He came up sputtering blood.

“Paul. Paul . . .” The bird-watcher slowly shook his head, but the image became increasingly blurred—Paul’s eyes were tearing up. “I’m surprised at you. Tom is a Jew. You offended him deeply. Why would you want to go and insult Tom like that?”

Paul tried to tell him he didn’t mean it, he was just trying to be liked. He was in too much pain to speak. Initial numbness had given way to a searing and excruciating agony. Thick drops of blood were leaking onto the table.

“Try to avoid offending us from here on, Paul. Just a word of advice, okay? One friend to another. Me, I’m the calm type, but Tom’s been up on more brutality charges than the LAPD. Now, where we? What else was Miles Goldstein?”

He got Paul a tissue, then waited patiently until Paul cleared enough blood from his throat to answer.

“I don’t know,” Paul whispered. “He was a kind of drug dealer, I think.”

“Ya think ?” The bird-watcher smiled, but it wasn’t the kind of smile Paul had been seeking. No.

“Yeah, Miles Goldstein was a drug dealer. You’re right. Absolutely. Who did the dirty work for him? Who were his couriers?”

Me.

Paul said, “Really. I want to call my lawyer.”

“Really. You really, really want to?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“You haven’t . . . I’m supposed to get a call. You haven’t read me my rights.”

“There’s a reason for that, Paul.”

“What reason?”

“You don’t have any.”

“What?”

“See, we could read your rights to you, but you don’t have any rights. Where’ve you been? It’s Giuliani time.”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Paul said.

“No, Paul, you’re not a terrorist. You’re a mule. You’re a culero . You’re an up-the-ass FedEx package. We know what you are. But Goldstein was playing ball with those crafty little left-handers in Che Stadium. You know, FARC is a federally designated terrorist group . Yeah—they’re on the list—the one with Osama and Hezbollah. That’s why we supply Colombia with Special Ops nuts and really cool hardware. So if Goldstein was in business with terrorists and you were in business with Goldstein, well, that makes you . . . let me see, what does that make him, Tom?”

“That makes him subject to the newly drafted laws of national security. Or, as we like to say, rat-fucked by Ridge.”

“Yeah,” the bird-watcher said, “that’s about the size of it. No, Paul, you don’t get a call. You don’t get a lawyer. You don’t get three hots and a smoke. You don’t get out of here. Not unless we say so. And speaking of your fucked situation in life, I’d love to know how Miles and you walked into his office in Williamsburg and only you walked out.”

THEY PUT HIM IN A CELL, WHICH REALLY WASN’T ONE.

It didn’t have a toilet or a sink. Unlike the room in Colombia, it didn’t have a bed. It was just empty space surrounded by bare wall and what looked like a newly installed metal door.

If he wanted to lie down and sleep—and he did, desperately—he would have to lie directly on the concrete floor.

He tried, lay on his back and stared up at a single caged bulb, which didn’t appear to be shutting off anytime soon. It was enclosed in metal so he couldn’t reach up and break it, use it as a weapon, even against himself. No suicides on their watch.

Before throwing him in here they’d badgered him with questions—the majority of which he’d tried to answer. Mostly, he’d tried to explain what had happened. The kidnapping in Bogotá, the awful position in which he’d found himself, forced to choose between his wife and daughter and breaking six different federal drug statutes.

He couldn’t tell whether they believed him or whether they thought he was making it all up.

They asked him a lot of questions about Miles. Interrupted by an occasional change of pace: What school did Paul go to? What does an actuary make? Which company did Joanna work for?

Every time he mentioned his wife’s name, he felt a dull ache in the center of his chest. Everything he’d done, he’d done for them. Jo and Jo. He was no closer to freeing them. They were receding into the distance. It was as if he were pulling them up the side of a mountain, really putting his shoulder to it, only the rope kept slipping through his hands, dropping them further and further away.

AFTER A FEW HOURS IN HIS CELL THE BIRD-WATCHER CAME FOR him again.

Tom was missing in action.

“You know what really aggravates me, Paul?” the bird-watcher said. He was inhaling deeply on a Winston, holding in the smoke till the little vein in his forehead throbbed, then letting it out in a blue wispy stream.

“No,” Paul said.

“That was a rhetorical question, Paul. I appreciate you finally grasping the nuances of DEA interrogation, but I wasn’t actually seeking an answer. What really aggravates me, what sticks in my craw, is that I worked this asshole for a year and a half, and now he’s dead. A really bad case of coitus interruptus. I’ve got blue balls the size of grapefruits. Know what that feels like?”

Paul kept quiet this time.

“It doesn’t feel good, Paul. It hurts. All I’ve got to show for it is lots of free miles on American—and I’ve got to put those back into an agency pool. You believe it? All those boring trips to Bogotá watching Bruce Almighty and sitting next to shitbags like you, and I get a trip to San Juan next Christmas—if I’m lucky. And I don’t feel lucky. I mean, a year and a half and I end up with you ? The last round-tripper on the Goldstein Express.”

Paul had been the last of many, the bird-watcher explained. It had taken him a long time to figure it out. He’d patiently followed the money trail. From Goldstein to Colombia and back. This close to wrapping it up, this close, and then . . .

“So what happened in his house, Paul? Monetary disagreement? Contractual dispute?”

“I told you,” Paul said. “He shot himself.”

“Maybe. Only I’m inclined not to believe you. You’ve got the bad luck to be the one left holding the bag. Sucks, doesn’t it? I need my pound of flesh, and you’re it. He shot himself? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I don’t give a shit.”

“I keep telling you, they kidnapped us. Miles set us up with a driver. And a nurse . . . Galina . She switched babies, and when we went to confront her . . .”

Paul stopped here. The whole thing sounded implausible, even to him. The bird-watcher seemed to be in no mood for any story providing Paul with even a shred of innocence. He was busy lighting another cigarette and staring off into space.

There was another reason Paul stopped speaking.

A few things were penknifed into the table. Some dirty epithets, a couple of crude drawings, and a heart cleft in two.

Paul was looking at the letter carved into the larger half of the jagged heart.