Fortune's Deadly Descent (2 page)

We finally wrench to a stop in a village so remote it appears unreachable except by train. A sign reads “Saint-Corbenay” above a vacant concrete platform. Half-timbered houses line a twisty, cobbled street. The village continues down a hill, obscured from the train. I see no cars, only a red tractor alone in a vineyard. Several Dutch bikes, all black, lean against a house made of charcoal-colored stones. The depth of a Prussian blue sky is like a painting. I’m pretty sure Cézanne, van Gogh, and Picasso all once lived nearby, and I think, for a split second, that the light is so extraordinary it appears as if the sky and trees are portraits of the real thing.

One by one, the passengers in line give up, set their bottled water back in the cooler, and head toward their seats. I follow with a fistful of napkins as people cram into the aisle, chattering madly, craning to see out both sides of the train. I know very few words in French, but it’s clear everyone wants to know if we should get off.

Down the aisle I rehearse what I
do
know—
pardonnez-moi, pardonnez-moi
—and am met with a dozen kinds of sneer. The heat has made us all ill tempered. It doesn’t help that I can’t explain my reason for pushing past.
Merci
, I add for good measure. Seven years of living in Zurich hasn’t erased my American urge to smile big and long at strangers.

Warm air begins to circulate. The doors in
économie
have opened. A crowd clots in front of me. A slightly older woman seems to have fainted. Two men carry her out to the platform, while her husband and several others fan her body with newspapers and hats. They unfurl a travel-size blanket into the air like a makeshift wall to block the sun. They look Southeastern European, their eyes and cheekbones dark and wide, the women pear-shaped with dark,
peppered gray hair. The way the men wave off assistance makes me think they speak even less French than I do.

Had we flown, we’d have already finished lunch, and by now be poking around the outdoor food markets. Instead, there’s this miserable afternoon. Yet Benny hasn’t once complained.

“
Pardonnez-moi
,” I say again, without much effect.

“I’m trying to reach my
son
,” I finally blurt in English. “Can you
please
move?”

Arms and legs begin to fold and turn. I retrieve my smile, my
merci
with a few
beaucoups
, and push through.

I finally reach our compartment and look inside. I check the number, look again. My purse lies next to the open
Paris Match
. Benny’s backpack is gone. The picnic basket’s contents are strewn on the seat opposite. There is no sign of Benny.

I dip my head into the aisle and search both ways. “
Benny
?” On tiptoes, I peer over the patchwork of heads, then crouch and squint through a thicket of legs.

I’m not yet above worrying about coming off as a fool, a hysterical American. “Benny!” I call more insistently, and then with a tinge of anger. Why would he think it’s OK to wander off like this? I wipe my neck and forehead with the wad of napkins, drop them on the seat, then shove my way into the crowd. What’s the word for boy? My boy.
Mon garcon
? I yell in English, “My son! Has anyone seen my son?”

The rumble of voices settles, tired faces turn toward me. “Who speaks English? Someone?” Nothing. I try, “
Hat jemand hier Deutsch sprechen?
” and the faces turn away. I thread my way to the washroom, yank open the tinny door, and am met with the stink of hot urine mixed with a sweet, flowery perfume. The faucet is running in the sink, but no one is there. Instinctively, I shut it off.

I slam the door. Panic squeezes my throat. Goosebumps flurry across my sweaty skin.

My rational mind tells me he can’t have gone far. Through the window, I see that the only passengers who’ve gotten off are the old woman who’s fainted and several others helping her. I reach the open door and lean out. The air seems scorched, fetid with manure. A string of cyclists pedal a distant road on the horizon. On the platform, the old woman has recovered and she is laughing, dazed, while her husband shakes his head.

Where is Benny?

I turn back and push my way into the next car. He must’ve gone this way; otherwise, he’d have passed me returning from the café.

“Has anyone seen a little boy? A lost boy?” I squeeze through more fatigued gawkers at the windows. “Please. I can’t find my son!”

The train feels vast—there are only two directions to go, but there may as well be hundreds. Why did he take his
backpack
? Did he think we were getting off? He never would have picked up his beloved backpack with chocolate-covered hands. Someone else must have carried it.

A finger pecks my shoulder. I gasp and spin, expecting to see Benny’s frightened eyes, but instead I’m face-to-face with a tall man whose choppy brown hair obscures half an eye. “Can I help you find him?” he asks, his accent heavy French, his teeth bright white against his deeply tanned skin. He looks like a young Picasso, round faced, the same wry stare.

“What’s his name, your son?” this man asks, tossing the hair from his eye. “Give me a rundown of what he was wearing.”

Rundown
. The word immediately sounds wrong, as if out of an old detective movie.

I freeze. I can’t remember Benny’s clothes, nor can I call up the words to describe him—at that moment he’s more feeling than flesh, a hole gutting me, the fleeting scent of chocolate and oranges, small arms tugging at my neck. I blink away the sweat stinging my eyes. Which shorts does he have on? Which shoes? Oh god. Something.
Anything
.

“Chocolate,” I say, my eyes welling with tears. “He has chocolate all over his face and hands.” A dark realization unfolds behind my eyes. A sick glimpse into the future. I’m not going to Paris with Benny. We won’t be eating at Jardin Bleu or touring the kitchen afterward. We won’t be riding the train home with Benicio, playing board games in an air-conditioned compartment. We’ll never again be the family we’ve become. The only thing left of Benny will be his chocolate fingerprints, somewhere on this train.

“We will find him,” the stranger says to me. And then he takes charge, shouting down the aisle in French.

My mouth fills with a salty, metallic taste. “I bit my tongue,” I say, aware of a shriek lingering in the dark. “Did I scream?”

Benicio sits up and peels the hair from my face. “Let me get you some water.”

I reach for his hand but he’s already gone. In his place, our old dog, Pinto, rises from the floor and licks my fingers.

It’s been five days. A fresh dose of anguish fills my limbs. Today, of all days, is Benny’s eighth birthday. I can’t face the still air in the kitchen, Benny’s phantom shape on his stepstool, his little boy hands orchestrating sugar, salt, herbs. “Try
this
, Mutti—”

Benicio returns, reaches for the bedside lamp.

“No,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

He lowers himself onto the bed, hands me the water, and says, “I wasn’t asleep.”

My swallows are loud and vulgar-sounding in the dark. I set the glass on the side table, half-finished.

Three years ago to the day, in this same bed, I watched the sun crest over Fraumünster Church, reflect off its spire, and lay a gold stripe across Benicio’s cheeks as he slept. I was dreading the call from Isabel. Every year it comes on Benny’s birthday and never
fails to confuse him, to dim the light of our celebration a little. But then Benny’s big eyes appeared in the crack of the bedroom door, he burst in, all sleep smell and strawberry shampoo, dragging the floppy yellow bear he’d loved to a sheen. Suddenly Isabel’s call seemed nothing more than a token, a tiny price of admission I was happy to pay.

The raw memory of this threatens to close off my throat.

“We have no choice but to get through this day, sweetheart,” Benicio says.

A simple thought. A simple thing to say, and yet I can’t understand where he finds the strength.

“What if he thinks we’re angry with him?” I say. “What if he’s worried we’ll blame him for going off with a stranger?” I realize I’m digging my nails into my skull as if to rake out the misery. “It’s been
five days
, Benicio,” I blurt. “If it’s ransom they’re after, then why hasn’t anyone called?”

We already know the answer. A chalky, baby-faced Swede from Interpol named Isak Larrson has explained, and re-explained, that in such cases as ours, families become more desperate the more time passes, and the more desperation, the more the payoff in the end. We could wait a week, or longer. Here in Zurich people know that seven years ago I acquired a family fortune. Of all the horrific scenarios, kidnapping for ransom is the one we pray for.

“I can’t stand this, Benicio,” I say, and flick on the lamp. “We need to go back to France and look for him.”

Benicio shakes his head.

“We should never have listened to the police.”

“Sweetheart,” he says.

“No.” I wave him off. “I don’t want to hear it.”

He and the Swede disagree with me, but I can’t help thinking we should’ve stayed in Saint-Corbenay. Beyond that is my
gut suspicion that Isabel is behind this…Yes, she’s locked away in a Mexican prison, at least for a few more months. But I know what she’s capable of. And unlike Jonathon, the courts in Mexico allowed her to phone Benny every year on his birthday. What else might they let her do? How much access to the outside world does she
have
?

The scar from Jonathon’s knife itches my ribs. Pain wedges behind it like a tiny balloon expanding between the bones.

I press Benicio’s palm to my face, feeling him cup the sharp angle of my cheek. I’m evaporating, dissolving. All I manage to keep down is broth and the spongy centers of
schwarzbrot
. The act of chewing, especially first thing each morning in that silent, awful kitchen, makes me sick to my stomach. How Benicio finds the wherewithal to eat, I have no idea.

Which of us will tell Isabel about Benny? How will we play this game? Thoughts like these continue to weave like prickly threads through my reasoning.

“Today could be the day,” Benicio says. He folds his arms around me and I sense his gaze looking out beyond me. If he were facing me I could read his eyes as easily as if words were forming across their watery, bloodshot veneer. They’re overwrought, as one would expect, but they’re also cold, filled with an agony separate from my own.
It’s your fault
, they say.
Your fault our child is gone
.

He pulls away, stands, rubbing his lower back. “I’m going to get dressed and check with Isak, in case…”

He’s still within arm’s reach, but the room is so saturated by stillness I feel completely alone, adrift in my own bed. Rarely do I worry over the fact that we aren’t legally husband and wife—it’s just a technicality, nothing that kept us from adopting Benny here
in Switzerland, nothing that has kept us from being a family in the truest, deepest sense of the word. Yet, today it somehow feels like an important oversight, a failure.

In a moment, I’ll crawl out from under the eiderdown, dress, halfheartedly wash my face, then join the two men in the other room. That’s how it’s gone each morning, but as of yesterday, the bits of information they feed me have started to seem censored. At first, I thought I was just being paranoid. But twice I caught a look exchanged between Benicio and Isak—the exact look Benicio and I give each other when we’re trying to hide something from Benny. What is it they’re not saying?

I watch as Benicio strolls off in the boxers he now sleeps in so he can leap from bed into action should he need to. The cut of his back stirs something in me, memories of the pleasure he’s brought me over the years. He once danced naked across this floor, bumping and grinding to a Spanish song on the radio, calling out, “
Caliente!
,” winking and flinging air-kisses at me. Benicio is the funniest man I’ve ever known. It’s not hard to imagine how good he was at stand-up, decades ago in LA. The first time we kissed, we knew our lives could end any moment at the hand of Isabel or his cousin Leon, yet we laughed so hard the cackling devolved into a weepy gulping for air. Of course, it
wasn’t
the last time, but the possibility amplified our senses, and that heightened state became our standard in the years that followed. I’m still so
attracted
to him, the grace of his body, the scent of his smooth caramel skin.

I squeeze the eiderdown as he crosses the room, wanting to say, “Come back to bed, love,” as if nothing has changed…but everything has, and I’m appalled at myself for this moment of yearning.

Benicio lifts his clothes from the chair by the window. Behind him, dawn has finally broken, smoky and red, as he slides into his jeans.

“I’ll start the coffee,” he says and turns for the door, T-shirt in hand, as if he can’t bear my eyes on him a second longer.

Later that afternoon, I’m hunched over my dining room table turned Interpol office, obsessively rereading the written statement I gave Inspector Moreau and his underling. I refuse to stop searching for the tiny forgotten detail.
Rundown
, the mysterious Frenchman had said. Why had that stuck in my ear? Once the questioning began—on the platform beneath the Saint-Corbenay sign—he managed to disappear. No one remembers seeing him walk off or reboard after the air-conditioning was fixed. Now, like everyone else on the train that day, he’s a suspect too.

His description given by a witness closely matches what I saw, though hers has more detail. Mid to late thirties, lean, tall, wearing faded jeans and a fitted short-sleeved khaki shirt. Clean-shaven. Brown, sad-looking eyes. He’d rested a hand on the seat in front of her and she’d seen how rough it looked, the nails chewed or chipped, a stain of something dark beneath them. But it was his wristwatch that had drawn her attention—a silver Bulova on a black leather band, the same watch her late husband had worn. She’d caught herself staring, she said, thinking of him. The report ends with her name, Helena Watson, sixty-five, a Brit living in the sixth arrondissement of Paris.