James Siegel - Detour

It was the letter R .

It reminded him of something.

The letters from Galina. And the granddaughter she was determined to protect at all costs.

Her father is looking for her. He won’t stop till he finds her. As you know, R has the power and means to do so.

R.

And Paul finally understood.

THIRTY-EIGHT

They called it a fault tree . The moribund boys in the loss adjuster department called it that.

When tragedy struck, something was lost, a building burned to the ground, a plane felled from the sky, a bridge collapsing into a river—you needed to apportion blame.

So you worked backward.

You created a fault tree.

You started with the twigs —all the little facts you knew, everything. Then you tried to ascertain which ones led back to the branches . To the trunk itself. If you were lucky, if you did your homework and took your time, you made it all the way back to the roots .

There was nothing much to do in his cell but clear wood, attempt to untangle the branches, and put it all back together.

That’s what he did.

He cut and pruned and sawed and snapped, and in the end he made a tree.

It began with a Colombian baby nurse.

She helped American couples flooding her country in search of instant families. A good woman really, someone who knew what it’s like to desperately want a family, because she had one once, a daughter, at least, who might’ve looked much like Joelle.

The Colombian nurse worked for an American lawyer. Maybe not all the time, a lot of the time. An adoption lawyer, sending couples who’d tried everything short of baby-snatching to a country whose first export was cocaine and second was coffee, but third was children. A country with almost as many unwanted kidnappings as unwanted kids.

This lawyer had rejected tax or corporate law and entered the ranks of legal aid, where general disillusionment had eventually led him into foreign adoptions. He put needy babies together with needy families, and he got to pat himself on the back and make a good living at the same time.

Just not good enough.

One day he picked up the phone and a tout whispered in his ear. He was off to the races. Or the hard court, the domed stadium, the baseball diamond, the hockey rink, whichever and wherever men in uniforms played games for the lure of the money, the pleasure of fans, and the deliriousness but mostly agony of the bettors.

With the lawyer it was agony.

He was a respectable man with a dirty habit. And a dangerously ballooning debt. He owed the wrong guys.

Back to the baby nurse in Bogotá.

Her daughter had a daughter with someone.

Let’s call him R .

Let’s imagine he was the wrong kind of person, the guy you wouldn’t want your daughter bringing home from a date. Someone dangerous and abusive. Even criminal.

Definitely criminal.

Once I thought my own daughter was safe from him. I was wrong.

Something happened to the nurse’s daughter.

She was killed, kidnapped, made to disappear, something, because suddenly, it was just the baby nurse and her granddaughter. The daughter was gone, yes, but the little girl—she survived.

Only there was a problem.

Her father is looking for her. He won’t stop till he finds her. As you know, R has the power and means to do so.

The nurse needed to act. Fast.

She needed to get her granddaughter away from R, and the only way to do that was to get her out of the country.

How?

By going to the one person who could help her. The one person who knew how to get kids out of the country because, after all, that’s what he did for a living. She appealed to the adoption lawyer for assistance. One more Colombian child he needed to help el norte .

Only this child was different. This child had a price on her head. Oddly enough, there was price dancing around the lawyer’s head too. All that money he owed to the wrong guys—the Russians with yellow teeth and CCCP tattoos on their arms.

Sure, he wrote, I’ll help. You came to the right guy. No problem.

Just one little stipulation.

Money.

Not the usual legal fees. No.

Enough to get him out of hock to the Muscovites and enable him to keep all those professional sports prognosticators in business. Lots and lots of money. And then he told her how to get it.

Here’s the deal, he told the baby nurse. Here’s how.

I send you couples looking to adopt, just like before. Every so often—not every time, not even every other time, just now and then—one of these couples will have the bad misfortune to be kidnapped. It’s endemic in your country, isn’t it? What can a lawyer do about that?

Who’s going to kidnap them?

Those Marxists in the hills, the ones who’ve helped kidnapping surpass soccer as the Colombian national pastime.

And what was FARC going to do with these kidnapped couples? Easy. Everyone knew that FARC made their money the old-fashioned way—they earned it. How they earned it was through the sale and smuggling of pure, uncut Colombian cocaine.

Mules were their method of choice, but they fit a prototype that must have been summarized in every U.S. Customs training film. Colombian, poor, and disreputable. For every two mules who got through, one was snagged, vacuum-cleaned, and exported back home.

What if these mules could be middle-class, American, and thoroughly respectable? What then? What if the unfortunate husbands could be sent through customs packing millions of dollars of cocaine in order to rescue their wives and babies?

The baby nurse simply had to take this idea, this piece of pure brilliance, to FARC. Oh yes, and assist here and there in the kidnappings. There was that .

Everyone would get their heart’s fondest wish. The nurse would get her granddaughter to safety. FARC would get a foolproof, surefire pipeline to New York. And the adoption lawyer? He’d get the money to keep the Russians off his back and bet the over-unders and the points.

He who saves one child saves his ass.

And for a time it worked. A long time, if you judged by the age of the letters.

Something happened.

Paul. The actuary’s actuary, who always figured the odds, but never considered the odds of his nurse leaving the hotel with one baby and returning with another. The last round-tripper on the Goldstein Express.

Suitably duped, doped, and dumped in front of a burned-out safe house. And then almost slow-roasted to a crisp in the New Jersey swamps.

How did that happen?

Remember what the lawyer told him before extinguishing his own life?

It’s those assholes with Uzis and kerosene I’m worried about.

They’re starting to put it together. They’re closing in.

And earlier, after they’d driven back from the swamp, when Paul asked him who their near murderers were?

Those right-wing paramilitary nuts. Manuel Riojas, he said. He’s in jail. They’re not.

And remember what the nurse wrote in that letter?

He won’t stop looking till he finds her. R has the power and means to do so.

They seemed to be talking about two different people.

Unless, of course, they weren’t.

Miles was scared enough to put a gun to his head and blow his brains out.

Galina was scared enough to send her granddaughter off to another country and to never see her again.

One scared of R. One scared of Riojas.

Think of this R carved not into the desk of a defunct taxi garage, but right into the trunk of the fault tree. And then you understand.