James Siegel - Detour

That would’ve been lovely, she decided.

Toward the end of the day she noticed a tiny stream of amber light peeking through the boarded-up window. A small piece of wood was missing now, blown off in yesterday’s fusillade.

She put her face against it, drinking in the smells.

Nightshade. Peat. Chickenshit.

She put one eye there.

Galina was standing outside with someone. She could only see half of them. But she had the strong sensation she knew the other person. Those brown shoes. The tan cotton pants with a sharp crease down the front.

Yes, she thought. Of course.

What was he doing here?

FORTY-THREE

He came home from the mental hospital, locked his door, and fished the piece of folded paper out of the bottom of his sock drawer. The page he’d ripped from Miles’ phone book in an office reeking of blood.

He sat and stared at the number written in spidery blue ink.

Think of it as his lottery number.

Lotteries were a joke around the halls of his company—the kind of thing actuaries snickered at over morning coffee. These numbers were a one-in-a-million long shot that might just come in.

Cross your fingers.

He took a deep breath and dialed the long-distance number.

When they’d lost the two million dollars’ worth of drugs in the New Jersey swamp, he’d thought he’d lost something more important. The only thing in the world he had left to bargain with. He’d been wrong about that.

He’d discovered he had something even better. When he constructed the fault tree that day, he’d understood that its gnarly branches might save him. All of them.

That he might be able to bargain his family to freedom.

Only he wouldn’t be bargaining with FARC. No.

This negotiation would be conducted with a party of two, and only two.

There was Galina. And there was someone else.

It had occurred to him only when he remembered back to that awful day it began, when they’d gone to Galina’s house and woken up somewhere else.

Before their world turned topsy-turvy, while they were still making perfectly polite conversation over escopolamina -laced coffee, Galina’s lumbering dog had picked up a slipper sitting on the doormat and dropped it at someone’s feet.

Boom.

The sound of one shoe dropping, just before the other one did.

Dogs are creatures of habit.

Does Galina live alone? Paul had asked on the ride to Galina’s house. And Pablo had hesitated a long moment before saying yes. Why?

Because she didn’t live alone.

She had a husband.

“Hola?” Pablo’s voice, clear and intimate, as if he were sitting right there.

“Hello, Pablo.”

He obviously recognized his voice. Yes. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been the ensuing silence.

Paul took a deep breath. Then asked the question he’d been dreading since he’d picked up the phone—even before that, on the long ride home from the hospital.

“Are my wife and daughter still alive?”

Nothing else mattered but the answer to this question. Everything hinged on it.

“Yes,” Pablo said.

Now it was Paul’s turn to be silent. Not entirely. He gave an involuntary half-sob, the kind of sound you utter when you make it out of a vicious undertow and discover you’re surprisingly and gloriously alive.

Okay, go.

“I met your granddaughter today,” Paul said.

“Who?”

Pablo had answered the way Paul would’ve expected him to, but there was the slightest quaver in that one word that spoke volumes.

“Your granddaughter.”

“I don’t understand what—”

“The little girl you sent to America so her father wouldn’t get her. I don’t blame you. Riojas wouldn’t be my idea of an ideal son-in-law either. Are you following me so far, Pablo? If I’m speaking English words you don’t understand, please tell me. I need you to understand everything I’m saying today. Every word. Okay?”

“Yes,” Pablo said. “I understand.”

“Good. You sent your little girl to America because you wanted her to be safe. You arranged things with a lawyer we both know because you knew he could get her out of the country. And because he was going to adopt her as his own. That was the deal, Pablo. Am I right so far?”

“Yes.”

“You broke all contact with your granddaughter. You did this for her own safety. I understand. It made perfect sense. And you took comfort in knowing that she was being raised in a nice home in Brooklyn. Far away from Manuel Riojas. Under a new name. Ruth. That Miles was keeping his promise. To raise her, protect her, even love her. Isn’t that what Galina made him swear?”

“Yes.”

“After all, you were keeping your part of the bargain, weren’t you? The two of you? Whenever he asked you to, whenever he gave you the word, you’d help kidnap some couple for your friends in FARC. Just like you agreed to. You did your part and Miles did his. Right?”

“My granddaughter. Where did you . . . ?”

“What did he send you, Pablo? Pictures? Birthday photos? Once a year, so you could put them in a secret album and look at them now and then? A little letter here and there so you’d know everything’s okay? What did he tell you? That Ruth’s just a typical American kid, living a typical American life? That she’s popular in school, pride of the community, the apple of her father’s eye?”

“What are you saying? Is something . . . ?”

“Let me tell you about Ruth. Listen closely. She’s not a typical American kid. Not exactly. She’s not pulling As in school. She’s not on the cheerleading squad. She’s not dating the captain of the football team. She won’t be going to the senior prom this year. Or any year. She isn’t doing any of the things Miles told you she was. None of them. That was fiction, that was made up. Do you understand?”

“Where is she?”

“Not in a nice house in Brooklyn. Not in a nice boarding school in Connecticut. She’s in a hospital.”

Silence.

“What kind of hospital. Is she sick?”

“Yes. No. Not in her body—in her mind. I have no idea what she went through back in Colombia. I can guess. I have no idea whether she was sick enough to be put in that hospital, or whether being there made her sick enough to stay. I don’t know. What I do know is that Miles never adopted her. I’m pretty sure he never intended to. The day after he picked her up, he dumped her there. She’s spent most of her life looking through bars.”

Crying. Paul could distinctly hear the sound of Pablo sobbing.

“How is she?” Pablo asked.

“How’s my wife ?” Paul replied. “How’s my daughter ?”

Silence again.

“What do you want?” Pablo said. Okay—he’d weathered the storm, he’d come through the other side, and now he was beginning to catch on.

“What I’ve always wanted. Them . On a plane to New York.”

Long ago Pablo and Galina had brokered a deal.

Now it was time for another one, for Paul to use the bargaining chip of all bargaining chips and implement the plan he’d hit on back in that DEA cell.

“Think of it as a prisoner exchange. FARC does exchanges all the time, don’t they? With the Colombian government or the USDF? One of theirs for one of ours? Think of this as another exchange, Pablo. Your granddaughter for my wife and child. Okay, it’s a little different this time. FARC won’t be making the exchange. You will. You and your wife. My guess is, that won’t be so easy. I don’t care. You’ll find a way to do it. Fast. ”

There was one last thing.