James Siegel - Detour

“Perhaps she went shopping,” the concierge offered.

“Did you see them leave the hotel?”

“No. I was busy with several guests.”

“Well, did anyone see them leave the hotel?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Breidbart. Why don’t we ask?”

The concierge led him over to the front desk, where he interrupted the registration clerk, who was in the middle of checking in a guest. He spoke to him in Spanish, gesturing to Paul. Paul heard him mention Galina’s name, then niña, that word again. The registration clerk looked at Paul, then back to the concierge, and shook his head.

“He didn’t see them,” the concierge said. “Come with me.”

They walked outside the hotel where the doorman who’d just helped them into the elevator was flirting with a striking woman in a midriff-baring tank top.

The doorman immediately straightened up, deserting the woman in midsentence. After the concierge had explained the problem, he looked over at Paul and slowly nodded.

“Sí,” the doorman said. Apparently, he had seen Galina and Joelle leave the hotel. “Hace una hora . . .”

An hour ago. Which would have been just after he and Joanna had left the hotel.

“Ahh, mystery solved,” the concierge said, smiling stupidly. “She is taking your baby for a walk.”

His baby had been napping.

Why would Galina take a sleeping baby for a walk?

Paul felt dizzy; the ground seemed to be tipping. The concierge was still talking to him, but Paul wasn’t processing the words. There was a steady hum in the air.

“She’s taken my baby,” Paul said.

The doorman and concierge were looking at him oddly.

“Did you hear what I said? She’s taken my baby. ”

“Yes,” the concierge finally responded. “For a walk, Mr. Breidbart.”

“I want you to call the police.”

“Policía?”

“Yes. Call them.”

“I think you are maybe too excited here . . .”

“Yes, I am excited.” The ground was tipping one way, then the other. The sun had gone cold. “My baby’s been taken. I’m excited about that. Call the police.”

“I don’t think . . .”

“Call the police.”

“You are accusing your nurse of kidnapping, Mr. Breidbart.” It was said as a statement, not a question, and it seemed to Paul that the concierge’s voice had somehow changed, gone from warm and helpful to cool and unhelpful.

“My baby was napping. The nurse told us to go get some fresh air. Then she left the hotel two minutes later and she’s not back.”

“The baby woke up perhaps.”

“Perhaps you’re right. All the same, I want you to call the police.”

“Maybe we wait a little and see if she returns, no?”

“No.”

“She has been used as a nurse many times here, Mr. Breidbart.” Yes, the concierge’s tone had definitely undergone a transformation.

Paul was accusing a Colombian woman of a crime.

A sweet-looking Colombian woman with laugh lines and patient gray eyes who was taking care of a Colombian baby. A baby that he, an American, was spiriting out of the country because there evidently weren’t enough American babies to go around.

“I don’t care how many times she’s been used. She took my baby without permission. She didn’t tell us. I need to talk to the police.”

The concierge might not have agreed with him and might not have even liked him, but he was still a concierge.

“If that’s what you want, sir,” he said stiffly.

He walked back into the lobby and up to his desk, where he lifted the phone with painful resignation and dialed out. Paul waited silently as the concierge said a few Spanish words into the receiver. He hung up the phone with undue force. The click echoed through the sterile lobby, causing several people to look up with alarmed and puzzled expressions.

THE POLICEMEN HAD THICK BLACK LEATHER BOOTS AND GUNS THAT looked like Uzis strapped to their hips.

Paul didn’t notice any black nightsticks.

The concierge spoke to them in Spanish while Paul patiently listened. In the interim between the concierge’s call and the policemen’s arrival, Paul had called Joanna again.

No news.

One of the policemen spoke decent English. Even if he hadn’t, his meaning would have been all too evident.

“Why you think your nurse stole your baby ?” he said. He didn’t look like he wanted an answer.

Paul explained as best he could. Joelle was napping, the nurse had suggested that they leave, then she’d left herself. She had neither asked permission nor left a note. They didn’t know where she was.

“He says this woman is good.” The he the policeman was referring to was the concierge, who was standing off to the side with a semiscowl on his face. In the game of good cop, bad cop, it would’ve been hard to choose who was who.

“Perhaps you didn’t understand me,” Paul said, and saw the policeman flinch. He remembered those bloodied heads sticking out of the ground, and for a moment he wondered whether he would already have been slugged on the head and hauled off to jail for making false accusations if he hadn’t been an American.

He was in the middle of explaining the rightfulness of his position, of laying out all the reasons for his full-fledged panic, of carefully explaining why his nurse wouldn’t simply have gotten up and left with their baby unless she had something bad in mind, when Galina walked into the lobby with Joelle.

EIGHT

Hours after Paul had apologized to the police, the concierge, and Galina—in that order—then apologized to Galina again, just to make sure she understood how sorry he was, he lay on the bed with Joanna and wondered aloud if paranoia wasn’t part of the strange new province of parenthood.

“We’re in a foreign country, Paul,” Joanna said, and Paul couldn’t help thinking she was right figuratively as well. “We came into our room and our baby was gone. She didn’t tell us she was taking her. No. ”

In point of fact, Galina had told them that she was taking Joelle. She’d left a note tucked under the cream-colored ashtray in the bathroom—when they got back upstairs, Galina had gone in and retrieved it. Perhaps if they hadn’t been so quick to panic, they would’ve seen it. And known that Joelle had woken up from her nap just two seconds after Paul had closed the door. And that her forehead had felt just a little hot to Galina—not dangerously feverish, no, but a little hot, and that Galina wasn’t the type to take chances. And they would’ve known that among the things they hadn’t brought with them from New York was a thermometer. For which Galina had taken Joelle in search of a pharmacy. To purchase with her own money.

As it turned out, Joelle had a 101-degree temperature. Nothing to worry about with a baby, Galina reassured them, but something that had definitely needed to be checked out.

Galina forgave them, yet he noted an unmistakable glimmer of hurt in those soft gray eyes. Even anger. Something that said even saintly patience has its limits.

THE NEXT DAY PABLO TOOK THEM TO THE U.S. EMBASSY.

When they entered the outer gate, where they were forced to walk through not one, but two metal detectors, they passed a familiar face coming the opposite way.

The bird-watcher. The somnolent man who’d patiently sat for eighteen hours on the plane with them.

“Hello,” he greeted them. He was already wearing the uniform of the bush. A safari shirt with large pleated pockets, khaki knee-length shorts, and thick brown hiking boots.

“Hello,” Paul said.

“Ahh,” he said, repositioning his glasses and staring down at Joelle as if she were a new species of Colombian finch. “Yours?”