Ransom (22 page)

She looked bewildered. “A passport?”

“It's French, but at least you can get in as a tourist. Now, is there some money you can get at?”

“Are you coming with me?”

“No.”

“I'm not going alone.”

“I'll put you in touch with my dad. He'd help if I asked him. He could get you a job, singing or something.”

“Come with me, it's too dangerous to stay. You don't know my fiancé.”

“He's not going to do anything.”

She held her face in her hands, and Ransom couldn't tell if she was crying or thinking. Then she began to sob, her shoulders heaving more and more violently until she was gasping for breath. Ransom laid his hand on her shoulder. She drew away.

The businessman looked deeply troubled, as if he were about to start crying himself. Tentatively, he said, “Let's all be funky babes, okay?”

Finally, Marilyn looked up, wiping her cheeks with the Kleenex; all at once she was composed. “Where did you get a passport?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I'm just curious.”

“I don't think we should be hanging around in public in your boyfriend's neighborhood,” Ransom said. “Call me tomorrow at the coffee shop. Get a passport photo and I'll see if I can get the thing fixed.”

Ransom went daily to the Pathan, buying Annette's fix and checking for news from the border. Afternoons, while she slept, he returned to the bazaar and lingered over tea in one of the shops. Evenings, he read to her from a coverless paperback copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
that he had bought from a broke Canadian in Delhi for a few rupees. Annette didn't like to read but she liked to be read to. Ransom wasn't sure how much she was following; it was a strange book even if you weren't wrecked on smack.

On the thirteenth day, he saw the Australian's pendant for sale in the bazaar. It seemed like an omen. He went immediately back to the fort, and waited until Annette was on the declining slope of her afternoon fix to tell her that he wanted her to leave. If there was going to be trouble, he wanted Annette to be free and clear. Worrying about her was sapping him. He felt that he would have to do something soon, and her presence limited his options.

“Listen,” he said. “This is important. Do you still have friends in Katmandu?”

She shrugged and smiled. “I have friends in Katmandu, I
have friends in Goa, I have friends in Paris, friends
partout. Trop d'amis
.” Annette laughed. “
Amis de trop
.”

He took her by the shoulders. “Annette, listen to me.”

“You know where I have no friends?
Le Japon
. No friends in Japan. It is why I want to go there. Because I know no one and no one knows me. When I was a little girl my mother said,
They live in paper houses in Japan
. And I wanted to go see. Paper houses. I tried to imagine it. Can we go there?”

He gripped her shoulders tightly. “Annette, this is serious. Things could get bad here. We have enough for a plane ticket. You go to Katmandu and stay with your friends. I'll meet you there as soon as I can.”

She frowned. “Not alone.”

“I have to wait for Ian.”

“You want to give me the dump again.”

Ransom shook his head. “I just don't want anything to happen to you. I'll come get you as soon as Ian shows up.”

“I rest here with you.”

Ransom knew she wasn't going to change her mind. He also knew that his idea wasn't practical. She was in no shape to travel alone. Yet it seemed more dangerous for her to stay. He'd been having nightmares about the incident in the bazaar.

That evening he brought the subject up again, but Annette put her hands over her ears and began to sing whenever he tried to speak.

The Pathan was more discursive than usual on the morning of the seventeenth day. He inquired after Annette and took note of the weather, getting hotter.

“Doesn't it ever rain around here?” Ransom asked.

“Not often.”

“I wish it would, just for a change.”

The Pathan wanted to discuss the business climate. The government was stepping up border patrols. Rival tribes were fighting over the smuggling routes. Ransom guessed he was being softened up for a price hike.

“It is especially dangerous for amateurs,” the Pathan said. He shook his head slowly and frowned.

Ransom registered a new note in the conversation. He felt his heart in his chest, as if it had just started pumping a moment before.

“You've got news for me?”

The Pathan raised his eyebrows in a way that indicated amazement, either at Ransom's acuity or at his lack of tact in coming so abruptly to the point. He scrupulously smoothed the baggy folds of his sleeves.

“There is a rumor.”

Ransom waited.

“The men your friend contacted across the border are not honest men. They require a payment for his safe return.”

“Why haven't I been approached?” Ransom demanded.

The answer came to him without any hint from the Pathan, who looked out impassively over the bazaar, as if he had lost interest in the conversation.

“How much?” Ransom said. He guessed that whoever had Ian would know exactly how much he was planning to pay on delivery and would ask for a little more. For a moment Ransom was almost relieved, knowing finally what the situation was, and what was required, but at
the same time he didn't feel that he knew anything for certain.

“If you wish, I can look into the matter,” the Pathan said.

Ransom doubted that an inquiry was necessary, but he had to observe the Pathan's ritual. That he appear to trust the Pathan was crucial, now that he didn't know if he could.

He went back to the fort, finding Annette awake.

“
Une maison de papier
,” she said. “We will have to be so careful not to smoke in bed.”

Ransom didn't know what she was talking about.

“I will write on the walls, I think.
L'histoire de ma vie
. At night our home will be like a lantern—we will be shadow people moving across the light.” He had always loved her imagination, the way she had of investing the hard edges of the world with an aura of fantasy, but at the moment she just seemed like a junkie. He didn't tell her about his conversation with the Pathan.

That afternoon Ransom was told that the kidnappers would settle for nothing less than two thousand dollars. Ransom had a little more than eighteen hundred in his money belt, and wondered if the Pathan had any way of knowing this.

“I don't have that much.”

“Then your friend is dead.”

“Tell them I have fifteen hundred.” This was the amount Ian would have promised on delivery of the hash.

“I do not believe they will change their minds.”

“What if I wired for money?”

The Pathan said, “Where do you think you are?” He was looking at Ransom intently now, having shed the bored manner of a man performing an unwanted and unprofitable office.

“I need proof.” He could think of no way to get the two hundred, but felt he had to keep the process moving forward.

“I was asked to show you this,” the Pathan said. He reached into a leather pouch on his holster belt and removed a gold signet ring.

“That doesn't prove anything. Why didn't he send a note?”

The Pathan shrugged. “These are not literary men.”

“But how do I know he's alive?” Until that moment it hadn't really occurred to him that Ian might be dead. Even if he came up with the money he had no guarantee except the Pathan's word.

“I believe he is alive,” the Pathan said.

“I have to think this through.”

“Do you have the money?”

Ransom shook his head. “Not all of it.”

“Perhaps,” the Pathan said, “I could assist you with the balance.”

And then Ransom realized that he had been waiting to say this.

“In exchange for what?” Ransom said.

Annette was sleeping on the pallet with her mouth open. Ransom knelt down beside her and pushed her hair away from her eyes. He timed her breathing: twelve a minute, low even for an addict. He watched an insect work its way
up the earthen wall beside the pallet, its shadow large and oblong in the lamplight, and wondered if there was a right thing to do.

“Ransom?”

“I'm here.”

“
Quelle heure est-il?
”

“Afternoon.”

“I think it is time.”

“There's something I have to talk to you about.”

“Not now.”

“Yes. Now.”

She turned to look at him. Her face was slack. He tried to remember her as she had been in Katmandu. The outlines of beauty were still there. But in Katmandu her eyes had a fire that seemed to illuminate whatever they touched. When she pointed to her favorite of eight identical arms on a temple statue, it became obviously the one that might begin to move at any minute. She herself was always moving, and would explain what she was doing even as she was doing it, as if she wanted to ensure the reality of her actions. She hardly seemed to sleep, and when she woke she immediately shook Ransom awake to relate her dreams in astounding detail. She wanted to do and see everything, but now she looked like she'd seen enough.

“You're killing yourself,” he said.

“So American for you to say it,” she said. “Christopher Ransom, yankee cowboy,
non?
You think we choose to do things. You think you control your fate.”

“You don't have to be a junkie.”

“It makes me happy. I
choose
to be happy, you say. I
say, it chooses me. The only thing is I accept the consequences.”

“Even if it means dying?”

She shrugged.

“Do you really think we're not responsible for our actions? You wouldn't blame me if I began to beat you? If I killed you?”

Annette shook her head. She seemed to have lost interest in the conversation.

“You are crying,” she said, when she looked up. She reached up and wiped his cheek.

Ransom said, “Annette.”

“Don't be sad,” she said. “Maybe you take a little fix with me.”

Ransom shook his head.

“Give me one. I want you to do it.”

“Ian's in trouble,” he said.

She sighed dreamily. “Don't worry. You will think of something,
non?
”

“I need your help”

“You do what's best.”

“Listen to me.”

“Please. Not now. Give me a fix.” She reached down and stroked his knee. “Then we make love, maybe.” They hadn't since she started shooting up again. The drug had swallowed all of her desire, and he found he didn't want her as she was now.

She walked her fingers up toward his crotch. He pushed her hand away. “I'm trying to talk to you.”

“Please.”

Ransom had no illusions about his complicity in Annette's
habit, but he felt that some last shred of principle was upheld by his refusal to stick the needle into her arm. Now it seemed a cheap distinction. Annette was beyond thinking. He had allowed her to do this to herself. For this he had to accept responsibility, and for the rest of it.

“All right,” he said.

Annette sat up on the pallet. She had rolled up the sleeve of her shirt. The arm was thin and pale, speckled near the joint with needle marks. Ransom took the bandana from around his neck and tied her off. He swabbed her arm with alcohol, then wiped the needle.

“A little more,” she said, when Ransom started to heat the spoon over the flame of the oil lamp. “Okay?”

A little more, then. Ransom wanted her to be out of it for the next few hours, didn't want her to know what he had to do. He wished her a long, cool rush that would lift her beyond the clammy mud walls, beyond the gray hills outside to a white, featureless place. He wished he could join her there. He shook more powder from the packet into the spoon. When the powder had melted, he put the spoon down on the pallet. He drew the liquid into the syringe, then held it up to look for bubbles.

He missed the vein on the first try. His hands were shaking. When he tried to pull it out a peak of white flesh rose around the needle. He clutched her elbow tighter. The second time the needle slipped easily into the vein. He raised his thumb and depressed the plunger.

Where he drew the needle out, a tiny red bubble blossomed and burst. Annette's face unclenched and she sank down onto the pallet with a sigh.

Ransom staggered down the stairs. Outside, he got down on his hands and knees and vomited.

He found the Pathan in the bazaar.

“You have decided,” the Pathan asked.

Ransom nodded. There was nothing he could say.

“You have somewhere . . . to go?”

“I won't bother you,” Ransom said.

The Pathan nodded solemnly. He reached under his shirt and held out a dirty white envelope.

“Two hundred dollars,” the Pathan said, “as a token of good faith. When I return you will have the rest of the money for me, as agreed.”

Ransom let him stand there, holding the envelope. The Pathan waited; he would not insist. Finally Ransom took the envelope and shoved it into his pocket.

“Two hours,” the Pathan said. He turned and walked off through the bazaar. Ransom imagined rifle sights on the receding blue turban.

Sweat stinging his eyes, Ransom ran along the river, sunlight glancing from the ripples where a tree stump broke the surface. Everything shimmered, the sandy expanse of the flood plain blanching out like a snowfield and losing all features and solidity even as he felt the hard dirt under his feet; the trees along the levee receding, the Imadegawa Bridge appearing too frail and insubstantial to bear traffic. The white noise of his brain merged with the high whine of cicadas.