A King's ransom

“Like what?”

“It has to be a question that Joaquin can pass along to your father. Something that only your father would know.”

“What’s his favorite color?”

“Nothing subjective,” she said. “Make it a verifiable fact.”

“How about the question we used the last time? The name of the golden retriever I had when I was a kid.”

“I need a new one. They could have asked him that two weeks ago and killed him yesterday.”

“What’s his wedding anniversary?”

“No good. If their plan was to kill him and pretend he was still alive, they surely would have gotten every birthday and anniversary out of him before pulling the trigger.”

Put on the spot, I couldn’t think of anything. I sensed urgency from Alex. Finally it hit me, the drowning that Jenna had told me about.

“How old was his sister when she drowned?”

“Perfect,” said Alex.

Immediately I wanted to retract it, but Alex was already passing it along to Joaquin. He wrapped things up with a simple “Adios, amigos.”

Alex switched off the radio, took one look at my expression, and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“That question I asked you to pass along to Joaquin. It’s not a good one.”

“Nonsense. It was exactly the kind of thing Joaquin wouldn’t be able to find out unless your father was alive to tell him.”

“The problem is, Dad never told me about his sister.”

“You mean you don’t know the answer to your own question?” she snapped.

“I know the answer. But it’s something that my father never shared with me. It’s obviously a subject that he has difficulty talking about, maybe even something he just didn’t want me to know. The last thing I wanted to do was ask a proof-of-life question that upsets him.”

She stowed the radio in her backpack, threw it over her shoulder. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but your dad has more things to worry about than whether his son knows or doesn’t know his personal demons. Three million more things, to be exact.”

I couldn’t argue.

She turned and started down the stone trail. I followed, the two of us descending deeper into the fog.

48

Matthew’s head was still smarting. The blow he’d taken from the rifle butt during the attack at the river had rendered him unconscious for nearly a full day. The three-inch gash had been crudely stitched by Aida, a thirteen-year-old girl of a guerrilla who claimed to know how to sew. She knew nothing about the need for sterilized needles, however, and trying to get the wound properly cleaned and bandaged was about as likely as room service. All day long Matthew would search himself for a few square centimeters of clothing that weren’t covered in grime, and then he’d dab the pus away. It galled him to think that after all he’d been through he could seriously end up dying from infection.

“El vaso, por favor,” he said to a passing guard. One of these lowlifes had stolen his only possession, a cracked rice bowl that he’d been using to collect clean rainwater, both for drinking and for washing his head wound.

The guard just kept walking, not his concern.

Matthew could easily have exploded, but he forced himself to remember that he was better off this week than last. He was out of his hole in the ground, though still held separately from the other prisoners. He spent his days beneath a stretch of canvas behind the guerrillas’ smoky hut, while the others were housed on the other side of the slope in army tents that had come with the last mule train of supplies. He’d seen Nisho once, but only from a distance. He’d passed the entire group on his way to a bathroom break. Jan, Emilio, the old-looking Colombian, and Rosa were seated around a small fire, eating. Nisho was off to the side by herself, curled into a ball beneath a blanket.

It was hard for him to say how long it had been since the rape. The weather was in such a cold, drizzly pattern that one day was utterly indistinguishable from the next. He wished for a pen and paper just to mark the passage of time. The guards who brought him food or took him to the latrine would generally tell him nothing. He would ask how long he’d been in captivity, what day it was, how many days till Christmas. Their response was always along the lines of “?Que te importa?”

What does it matter to you?

It had gotten to the point where he just didn’t talk to the guerrillas and they didn’t talk to him. Except for this morning. A few hours after dawn Aida had brought him breakfast, the usual slop. Silence was the normal routine, but this time she’d placed the tin at his feet and, out of the blue, asked the strangest question.

“How old was your sister when she drowned?”

It had so completely thrown him that, instinctively, he almost asked her to repeat it. But he was certain he’d heard her correctly. “Who wants to know?”

“Your son. Now answer the question.”

“Seven,” he replied.

Without another word, she turned and left.

Elation had been his immediate reaction. The videotape had been a good sign of progress, but this question from Nick was the first real confirmation that his family was in contact with his kidnappers. All along, his biggest fear had been that his wife and children wouldn’t know whether he was dead or alive, and that not knowing would make their lives an even worse hell than his.

As the morning passed, the elation gave way to more complicated emotions. His sister’s drowning had always been a very private matter, one he’d never even mentioned to his son. It disturbed him to know that Nick was aware of it, and he worried what, exactly, Nick had been told about the whole horrible incident. His mother had her version. The coroner had another. For Matthew the worst version of all was his own. Because it was the truth, and he’d seen it with the eyes of a five-year-old boy.

It was raining again. Heavy drops pattered loudly atop his canvas tarp. The pattering was softer in the background, a soothing sound of a light shower on the jungle canopy. He stared off to the middle distance, letting his mind escape this place. Part of him resisted, but he needed to go back to that rainy morning in the Florida Keys almost fifty years ago. .

“Run, Stacy, run!”

Matthew was struggling to get free, his drunken old man sprawled on the floor and pulling at his ankle. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother rising from behind the couch, her nose bloodied. She lunged forward and kicked his father in the groin.

He yelped, but it had worked. Matthew was suddenly free. His mother wrestled his old man down the way he’d seen her do it so many times before. She held him in a contorted hammerlock with his left arm behind his back. His right arm she pulled straight down, between his legs, and out the back side like an inverted tail. Anytime he squirmed, she tugged, and he felt it right where it hurt most.

“Go, kids!” she shouted.

Matthew froze. His mother was a small woman, and he knew she couldn’t hold a man as big and drunk as his father for long.

“Mom, no!”

“I said, go!” she shouted.

“I’ll kill you!” his father growled. “I’ll kill every one of you bastards!”

“Take your sister and go!” his mother shouted.

“But, Mom!”

She locked eyes with her son, her face straining with intensity. “Listen to me, Matthew. Go right now! Go far