Kidnapped and a Daring Escape (19 page)

    
"How convenient. And am I correct that the day before the flight, your
group went to Tierradentro and that both Paolo and Giuglio came along?"

    
"Yes."

    
"Did either of the two disappear around or shortly before dinner?"

    
"No, but they could have told someone else or your mystery man
could have overheard them."

    
"That kidnapping was set in motion days if not weeks earlier,
including the transfer of the 200,000 euros to some bank in Antigua.
Does either of these two strike you as capable of even thinking up
something like this, let alone make contacts with FARC people or
ex-para
criminal elements?"

    
"Don’t be ridiculous. Both are hopeless intellectuals."

    
"That’s my assessment of them too. And am I also correct if I assume
that the professor prepared the schedule for the sights you should visit
and even made all arrangements for the flight, the taxi, the Jeep, and the
horses?"

    
Her anger at André for trying to prove Franco was behind it, stoked by
his calm, logical interrogation, boils over when he refers to Franco again
as ‘the professor’. She does not want to hear another word. "Stop it.
You’re despicable. I hate you," she screams, jumps up and darts away,
down toward the lake.

    
She doesn’t know how she lands hard on the sand after only a few
steps, with André almost on top of her. "Let me go," she screams again,
hitting out at him. His hand on her mouth smothers her next scream. She
bites hard and then hears his calming voice: "Quiet, Bianca, calm down,
please. I hear horses."

    
Instantly, fear replaces anger. Did she hear correctly? He removes his
hand from her mouth, and she whispers: "What?"

    
"There are horses on the other side of the lake."

    
"What do we do?"

    
"Stop fighting for a start, and then wait. I’ll try to get a peek."

    
He lets go of her and crawls toward the edge of the boulder behind
which he tackled her.

    
"Eight horses, six riders, two pack horses," she hears him whisper. He
brings the hand she bit to his mouth. She sees him suck. Did I bite him
to the blood? Shame assails her. "They are watering them on the shore,"
he adds. "Oh, shit. They’ve a dog too."

    
"You think they saw us?"

    
"I don’t think so, and right now the dog doesn’t have our scent."
Pausing between sentences, he continues: "They’re getting on their
horses again … And now they ride off … up the track … they’ve
disappeared in the forest. We can get back to our camp."

    
She rises and sees him hold the soft flesh at the base of his left hand.
I hurt him. Tears water her eyes. He prevented me from betraying us to
the riders, and I bit him. He drapes an arm over her shoulder, and she
buries her face on his chest, remorse tasting bitter. He embraces her.

    
"It’s all right, Bianca. It’s all right."

    
She would almost prefer it if he accused her of something, anything,
rather than offering forgiveness. After a while, she disengages and says:
"Show me your hand."

    
She sees deep teeth marks. Blood is seeping from some. "Oh, André,"
she sobs, "I’m so sorry," hiding her face again on his chest, a new bout
of guilt assailing her.

    
He raises her face by the chin. Soft lips brush hers briefly.

    
"Come, let’s pack and get ready to go."

    
"Shouldn’t we bandage the bite?"

    
"No, you’re not poisonous, but you may kiss it."

A half-sob, half-chuckle escapes her lips, as her mouth once more
approaches the base of his hand, but this time for a kiss.

* * *
 

André realizes that his revelations have deeply shaken Bianca. He
suspects that her violent reaction to it is in part, at least, caused by her
guilt about having had sex with him. He has no regrets that they made
love, and it was making love, not only on his part, but on hers too, rather
than simply succumbing to a surge of lust, particularly the second time
when she returned his caresses and kisses. He fully understands that her
only choice is to fight his conjecture about her own fiancé being behind
the kidnapping. It would be devastating, too shattering and humiliating
to think otherwise. But he is also confident that ultimately the force of
logic will win. He has planted the seed of suspicion. She will search her
memory about whether she can account for the professor’s whereabouts
in the crucial hours between seven and nine the night before the flight.
In the meantime, he will leave it at that, unless she brings it up. He is, in
fact, surprised and relieved by how well she has taken the whole ordeal
so far. It points to a resilient nature.

    
Right now, his focus is on escaping. He is certain the six riders he saw
are the reinforcement
el commandante
has summoned. By now, the four
he stopped at the ridge must surely be back at the camp, and that opens
the possibility that the reinforcement has already heard of their failure.
He doesn’t envy the four. They are in for a hiding.

    
"Where do we go?" Bianca asks, as he shoulders the pack and rifle.
"Continue on the path down the valley?"

    
"It may be wiser not to." The bite marks on his left hand have started
to throb. He prevents his right to reach for them. He does not want to
draw her attention to it and make her feel even more guilty. "If the
reinforcement already heard that we got away from the first group, and
they could well have, their dog may be able to pick up our scent at the
campsite. Put yourself into their position. They’ll reckon that two
fugitives who don’t know the area are most likely to stick to the track. So
that’s where they’ll search first and they’ll soon be tearing down that
track again. With horses they are much faster than we can ever be and
would easily catch up with us. So I think we shouldn’t even go back to
the track but directly strike out west and try to reach the road from Santa
Rosa to San Sebastian. There should be several small villages along that
road from where we might be able to get transport to a bigger town and
ultimately back to Popayàn."

    
When she starts walking back the way they came in, he points along
the shore in the other direction. "This way, Bianca."

    
He heads straight into the trees. The ground rises sharply from the
edge of the lake, with boulders and other obstacles slowing their
progress. But once beyond the lake, the terrain flattens out. The forest
becomes more open. They can sometimes walk side by side.

    
"Do you still think our kidnappers are from FARC?" Bianca questions.

    
"I’m more and more inclined to think not … more likely
ex-paras
."

    
"I think they are FARC, because
el commandante
offered me Karl
Marx’s
Das Kapital
when I begged him for reading material. That’s the
kind of book FARC people would have."

    
"That’s a good point, but
el commandante
was going to rape you and
sexual abuse of woman hostages is usually against the known FARC
honor code. So I think they belong to a criminal
ex-paras
splinter group.
There’s another thing that point to that. ‘
La bête
’ and ‘
le trapu
’ are the
same man —"

    
"Who are ‘
la bête
’ and ‘
le trapu
’?"

    
"Sorry. I have this bad habit of giving people nicknames. ‘
La bête
’ is
the leader of the group that seized us below San José de Isnos, and ‘
le
trapu
’ is the man I overheard talking in the bar in Popayàn. ‘
Le trapu
’
means ‘the squat one’. And I’m 100 percent certain that they are one and
the same. They have the same stature and their voices sounded identical.
The way he was talking in the bar, it looks to me more like he is
ex-paras
."

    
"I thought you didn’t see either of the two men."

    
"I saw ‘
le trapu
’ quite clearly. I only saw the mystery man from the
back." He knows he is treading on dangerous grounds by simply
mentioning the other man.

    
She remains quiet for a while and again walks behind him. Suddenly
she catches up again and begs: "André, will you forgive me, please?"

    
"For biting me? Yes, I probably would have done the same."

    
"Also for calling you ridiculous," she adds in a soft voice.

    
"Look, Bianca. I fully understand that my conjecture about your fiancé
must be deeply distressing. It wouldn’t be natural otherwise."

    
She avoids looking at him. He wants to say more. He wants to tell her
that, although he would like to conquer her heart, his accusations were
not motivated by envy or jealousy of a rival, but the result of logic and
elimination. However, he stops himself. It is wiser to let her come to that
conclusion herself.

    
Where forest changes to open grassland with the occasional cops of
trees, they take a break. It is midmorning and André guesses that they
have not covered more than about six miles as the crow flies since they
left the lake behind.

    
"What nickname did you give me?" Bianca asks after they sit.

    
"I didn’t give you a nickname. I had this strange feeling that your real
name would be just perfect, and I was right."

    
"I like my name, but I don’t see how it fits me."

    
"The white of your eyes is flawless. Not a single blemish. It makes
your dark pupils that much more vivid, not to speak of the perfect white
of your breasts."

    
"You’re teasing me. Anyway you didn’t know about my breasts then,"
she replies, a weak smile lighting up her eyes.

    
"No, I could only guess."

    
"And what nickname did you —"

    
"Don’t ask! I don’t want to make you mad again."

    
"Yes, I want to know."

    
"
Monsieur maladroit
."

    
"Because of his dancing?"

    
"Yes, I saw him step on your toes."

    
"Did he?"

    
"Yes."

    
"What other nicknames did you give people we encountered?"

    
"
La souris
for the driver of the Jeep —"

    
She chuckles. "Yes, he looked like a mouse."

    
"
Le vilain
for
el commandante
,
la bonne
for the young cook."

    
"Have you done this for long?"

    
"Yes, my father does it. He usually names people after animals and
already as a small child I found this fun, so I copied him."

    
"Did he have a nickname for you?"

    
"More than one. As a small child, I was
monsieur pourquoi
, later I
became
monsieur sait-tout
and more recently he called me
monsieur le
coucou
."

    
"Why?"

    
"Because I had affairs with married women; so to speak, laying my
eggs in someone else’s nest. You see, Bianca, this is my sad lot. I fall for
women who are already hitched up."

    
She breaks eye contact.

    
"Are you close to your father?" she asks after a moment of silence.