The Return: A Novel (52 page)

“Well, I’d like to get my daughter back. That’ll do for the moment. Beyond that, I’ll be happy with whatever comes.” He waved.
“Vaya con Dios, corazón mío,”
he said, and walked away down the dock.

21

In the rattling black of the car trunk, Carmel Marder struggled to control her hysteria. This failed and she screamed, or, rather, made animal noises behind her tape gag. Tears and snot flowed freely out of her, soaking the rough cloth of the bag over her head. She cursed in horrified mumbles, cursed her mother for dying so stupidly, her father for going crazy and coming down to this dreadful place, she cursed Mexico, she cursed herself for her own arrogance, for the bottomless stupidity of her sacrifice.

After some time, this ended and she entered a zone of despair so deep that it passed for calm. I am indeed helpless, she thought, but after all I have been helpless before. Perhaps this passion for control that’s been my life is not all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe that was an illusion and this is the reality: we are helpless and dependent; it’s the human condition; fate takes us when and where it will. Here, her father appeared in the depth of her mind, a memory as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. Her grandmother had just died; it was a funeral Mass with an open coffin. She was ten and viewing the body with her father beside her. People were crying, but her father was not crying and she wanted to know why. She also wanted to know where her grandmother
went
, but she didn’t mention that. Even at ten, the logistics of heaven seemed absurd to her. Her little mind skidded away from these mysteries; she was already an engineer. Her father had said—she heard these words now in the roaring darkness, as if he were saying them into her ear—I’m sad because I won’t see her again, and I loved her, but I also believe that she still exists and she believed that too, and she’s still with me, just like you’re with me, but invisible. I can feel her. That’s why love is greater than death.

That was one thing: her father was not afraid of death the way everyone else was. Another thing: she remembered driving in the car with him out on Long Island—they were coming back from sailing—and the radio had played one of those civil defense announcements they used to have, and the announcer’s voice told them that this is a test, this is only a test, if this had been a real emergency you would have been given instructions, and so on. Her father had said, Thus, the meaning of life, and he’d explained it, as he explained everything to her. It had become a joke in the family, a tagline, when any gnarly difficulty arose: This is a test, this is only a test.

And, of course, he meant death too, although she didn’t understand that then. Now she did, and with that came from out of nowhere a feeling of deep peace.

*   *   *

They’d taken Statch to a place that stank of onions, where she’d lain on concrete for a very long time. They’d allowed her to piss in a bucket and then tossed her back in the trunk. The sack had stayed on her head. She was stiff when they dragged her out and sick from the tailpipe fumes. As she stumbled along between the two men, she heard a familiar sound and became aware of a familiar odor. The sound was the jangling of rigging slapping aluminum masts; the smell was the sea. They were taking her aboard a boat. Her heart lifted a little. Water was good.

They stopped. Someone said, “Let’s see the little bitch,” and the hood was yanked off her head. They were at the end of a dock in the Playa Diamante marina. It was early in the evening, and the lampposts that lined the dock’s edge were already lit, illuminating the men standing there as if on a stage. There were three men beside the two thugs who had hold of her, but only one of them was important. She looked at his face and then quickly looked away, as we do when there is a monstrous occurrence on the street, a jumper landing on the sidewalk. She understood that she had never met anyone like that before.

He was a small man, not much taller than she was, and about the same age as her father. She thought, inanely, of the movies, in which actors contrive to express evil, and she thought it was like the difference between a movie explosion, all orange fireballs, and an actual detonation of high explosives in real life: an enormously more bone-chilling event, with the shock wave of invisible death and the predatory hum of flying debris. The photos she and everyone saw of captured drug lords also had nothing to do with this man’s face. It was the difference between a tiger in the zoo and a tiger in the wild making its leap at you. This guy was free-ranging, a lord of life and death. He was a fossil from deep Mexico, the land of ripping living hearts out on pyramids, of conquistadores roasting Indians alive. She stared at him and he stared back with his inhuman stare, mildly curious perhaps, with a crude, suspicious intelligence; it was like looking into the black reflective eyes of a mantis.

One of her captors handed Melchor Cuello her .22 pistol and told him where they’d found it. He hefted it, worked the action, and then in a quick movement stuck his arm straight out and pointed the muzzle at her forehead. She made herself hold his gaze, and the tableau lasted for what seemed like a long time. Then Cuello snorted, gave the pistol back to the other man, and said, “Give it to Gabriel. Maybe he’ll stick it up her pussy and fire a couple of rounds. He likes that kind of shit, right?”

All the men laughed at this boyish pranksterism, and after a brief conversation that Statch could not hear, the men dragged Statch to the end of the dock and dropped her into a fiberglass skiff with a big outboard on it. They dropped in too and did not bother to replace her hood. It didn’t matter what she saw now, nor was there anyone around to recognize her. She was glad to be able to breathe and see, but she thought that no hood was not a good sign with respect to her possibility of survival. They were delivering her into the hands of El Cochinillo himself.

The boat took off with a roar, and soon its hull was planing over the light chop in the harbor, each jolt causing Statch’s head to bounce painfully against the deck. She used her legs to shift her position, and now she could see above the gunwale and could watch Playa Diamante recede until it was just a whitish line against the green backdrop of the sierra. They were going quite far out to sea, enough so that she could feel the motion of the craft change, from riding chop to breasting actual Pacific rollers. Her two guards stood by the wheel, talking and smoking, and paid her no attention at all until they cut the throttle and came slowly up under the stern of an enormous white yacht.

Statch had spent a good deal of her life around boats but had never been on a private vessel as large as this one, a great white fiberglass monument at least 140 feet long. As they led her up the ladder, she passed a youth in a white uniform of shorts and tunic, mopping the deck. He met her eyes and then looked quickly away. He hadn’t seen anyone.

They led her forward across a broad deck with small round tables and chairs on it, under an awning, then down a set of stairs and through a corridor lined with narrow doors. They went through a hatchway and down another set of stairs and now they were below the waterline, in the working areas of the great yacht. It was hot down here and airless, and she could hear the thud of the diesels.

They opened a door. One of the men grinned at her and pulled the tape off her mouth.

“Scream as much as you want,
chica.
No one to hear you out here.”

The man grabbed one of her buttocks, shoved her into the room, and closed the door. She heard the click as it locked.

The room was some kind of storeroom, she imagined, but void of any stores, and its fiberglass surfaces were perfectly clean and smelled faintly of Clorox. Light came from an overhead bulb protected by a steel grille. The thought came that if you wanted to torture someone, and could afford it, an offshore yacht would be a great choice. No one would hear the screams, and disposal of the remains would not be a problem. Fighting the panic—for what would this room be but a torture chamber—she dropped to her knees and lowered her head to the floor and shook her upper body violently. Her notebook, her Rotring 600 pen, and her tiny Swiss Army knife dropped to the deck. She shifted position so she was on her back and wiggled around until she grasped the knife. In a minute she’d used the little razor-sharp blade to slice through the plastic cable ties that bound her hands. She stuck the knife and the notebook into her breast pocket again and took the cap off the pen. It was not much of a weapon, but it was made of solid brass and it had a steel tip. She sat herself in a corner with her hands behind her back and waited.

The horror of the blank room, no watch to mark the passing minutes—time itself dissolved, the present moment, which the sages teach us to live in perpetually, was now the essence of horror. But after some moments of hellish desperation, Statch reached back to the memory of the peace she’d experienced while locked in the trunk. She reflected that she was a trained mind in a trained body, she had resources that her captors did not begin to understand, and so she controlled her breathing as she’d learned to do to still the tension of a swim meet, and from there she moved to contemplating the thrill of competition. While not willing, quite, to work to Olympic standards, she was nevertheless a champion; she liked winning, and it now occurred to her that this was a competition too, with the medal being her life, and a fierce joy bloomed in her heart.

Then without preamble her mental theater lit up with an unnaturally vivid scene. She must have been fourteen or so, she was on a lake in the Berkshires with her father, at a cottage they’d rented for the summer, and they were exhausted and laughing, having just swum to the other side and back. She’d been able to beat him over long distances for several years and had just then done it again, and he was complaining about being an old man; she recalled exactly the moment when she focused on the scars on his back, seeing them as if for the first time, the livid mark above his left hip and the other, like an inverted question mark, over his right shoulder blade. She asked him how he got the scars and he answered that they were old war wounds, as he always did; he said a typewriter had fallen on him, the usual joke; but she was at the age when children acquire a passionate interest in the truth and the evasions that adults have used previously can no longer stand. No, really.

He always said he’d had an office job in air force intelligence, but now she pressed him. Intelligence? Was he a spy, did he go on secret missions, was that how he got the scars? And, after some fencing, which she furiously rejected, he told her the story, in bold strokes. You killed people? Yes, he’d killed people; he’d killed a boy not much older than she was. How did you feel, she asked, and she could see him considering the facile, comfortable lie, and then he said, I felt elated. There’s a joy in combat, partly because he’s dead and you’re not, and partly because we’re ferocious creatures, we humans. She had not known then about his escape with Skelly, or about the angelic voices.

Would it have changed her life? It didn’t matter, but she now recalled what they
had
talked about, about the war and about Skelly, how he was an extreme example, how he was terrified and exultant at the same time, a born soldier. She wondered why this passage had popped so vividly into her mind, and she decided that it was related to her situation now and what she planned to do with her pathetic weapon. It was chemicals, she guessed, flooding her system—competition, combat, the desire to live and prevail, sports and war, really the same thing. And she recalled another thing her father had said that afternoon, when she’d asked if women could feel like that. He said, Oh, yeah, but in spades. Your mother, for example, is much, much fiercer than I am. You are too. That’s the real reason why they don’t let women into combat. They’d take over the world.

*   *   *

She heard the key turn in the lock. The door opened and Gabriel Cuello walked in, dressed in a maroon velour bathrobe and canvas slippers. He had her pistol in his hand. He nudged the door shut with his foot and walked into the center of the room.

“Little gringa bitch, I knew I would see you again,” he said.

She pushed herself into a corner of the room, as if retreating, holding her hands behind her back. He came closer. She got up into a squat, with her back against the angle where two bulkheads joined.

He waggled the pistol. “Were you going to shoot me with this little thing?”

“If I had the opportunity,” she said.

He didn’t like her tone; frowning, he came a step closer, until he stood over her. She could smell his cologne.

“You know,
chiquita
, I can tell you have no fucking idea what is going to happen to you. I can tell you think that because you’re a gringa
,
your daddy or the marines are going to save you. You are going to show me some respect now, understand? You are going to do everything I tell you and you are going to smile, because—”

“I thought you only liked to fuck dead girls,” she said, “which is fine with me, because, frankly, I’d rather be dead than do anything with an ugly little pervert like you.”

He smiled and nodded. “Uh huh. Keep it up,
chiquita.
We’ll see how smart you talk when I’m shittin’ in your mouth. You’ll be begging me to shit in your mouth, you’ll see. You can start by sucking on this.”

He dropped the pistol into his bathrobe pocket, opened the robe, and leaned forward, his right hand reaching for her hair.

She exploded out of her crouch with all the force of her powerful leg muscles, ramming the crown of her head into his nose. He staggered back, but she followed him, her left hand grasping the collar of his robe. Her right hand drove the steel pen tip into his throat. She felt it penetrate deep into his trachea.

He tore himself away now, his eyes bulging, hands clutching at his throat. He grasped the pen, tore it out. Blood gushed from the wound in a spray. He was coughing; she could hear the blood gurgling in his trachea as he struggled to breathe against the blood that dripped down from the wound into his bronchial tubes. She took careful aim, set herself, and kicked him as hard as she could, driving her foot into his naked genitals. His knees sagged, he doubled over, his face was going purple. She backed up and took a short run, hitting him low, and knocking him off his feet. The pistol flew from the pocket of his robe and skittered, spinning, across the floor. She picked it up. It was still cocked. She shot once into his head. He collapsed and lay still.