Ann Patchett (7 page)

“I’m coming,” Ruben Iglesias said, not to the
door but to the armed man behind him. “I know where my door is.” He knew his
life was probably over, and the knowledge of this fact gave him a temerity that
he found useful.

“Slowly,” General Benjamin instructed.

“Slowly, slowly, yes, tell me, please. I’ve
never opened a door,” the Vice President said under his breath, and then opened
the door at his own pace, which was neither slow nor fast.

The man waiting on the front porch was
extremely fair, and he wore his white-yellow hair neatly parted and combed
back. His white shirt with a black tie and black trousers made him look very
much like an earnest representative of an American religion. One imagined there
was a suit jacket that had been surrendered to the heat, or perhaps it was off
to show the red-cross armband that he wore. Ruben Iglesias wanted to bring the
man in out of the harsh sun. Already his forehead and the tops of his cheeks
had begun to burn red. The Vice President looked past him, down the path
through his own front yard, or what he had come to think of as his own front
yard. The house, in fact, was not his, nor was the lawn, the staff, the soft
beds or fluffy towels. Everything came with the job and would be inventoried
upon their departure. Their own possessions were in storage and there was a
time he had thought hopefully that their things would stay exactly where they
were while he and his family made their inevitable transition into the
presidential mansion. Through the narrow opening of the front gate he saw an
angry knot of police officers, military personnel, and reporters. Somewhere in
a tree a camera flash popped a bright light.

“Joachim Messner,” the man said, extending his
hand. “I am with the International Red Cross.” He spoke in French, and when the
Vice President squinted at him he repeated his statement in mediocre Spanish.

His manner was so calm, so seemingly unaware of
the chaos that surrounded them, that he could have been taking a Sunday morning
collection. The Red Cross was always there to help the victims of earthquakes
and floods, the very ones Vice President Iglesias was sent to comfort and
assess. Ruben Iglesias shook hands with the man and then held up a finger,
indicating that he should wait. “The Red Cross,” he said to the bank of guns
behind him.

Again there was a conference between the three
Generals and it was agreed that this could be allowed. “Are you sure you want
to come in?” the Vice President asked quietly in English. His English was
imperfect, perhaps on par with Messner’s Spanish. “There’s no saying that
they’ll let you out.”

“They’ll let me out,” he said, stepping inside.
“The problem is that there are too many hostages. More hostages is not what
they’re looking for now.” He looked around at the terrorists and then back to the
Vice President. “Your face is not well.”

Ruben Iglesias shrugged to indicate that he was
philosophical about it
all,
having received the kinder
end of the gun, but Messner took it to mean that he had not understood the
question.

“I speak English, French, German, and Italian,”
he said in English. “I’m Swiss. I speak a little Spanish.” He held up two
fingers and placed them about a centimeter apart, as if to say that the amount
of Spanish he spoke would fit into this space. “This isn’t my region. I was on
vacation, can you imagine that? I am fascinated by your ruins. I am a tourist
and they call me into work.” Joachim Messner seemed inordinately casual, like a
neighbor stopping in to borrow eggs and staying too long to chat. “I should
bring in a translator if I’m going to work in Spanish. I have one outside.”

The Vice President nodded but frankly hadn’t
caught half of what Messner had said. He knew a little English but only when
the words were spoken one at a time and he hadn’t recently been clubbed in the head
with a gun. He thought there was something in there about a translator. Even if
there wasn’t, he’d like one anyway.
“Traductor,”
he
told the General.

“Traductor,”
General Benjamin said, and scanned
the floor, working off a dim memory from the night before.
“Traductor?”

Gen,
who
was helpful
but not heroic by nature, lay still for a moment remembering the sharp point of
pressure the gun had made against his chest. Even if he said nothing they would
remember sooner or later that he was the translator. “Would you mind?” he
whispered to Mr. Hosokawa.

“Go on,” he said, and touched Gen’s shoulder.

There was a moment of quiet and then Gen
Watanabe raised a tentative hand.

General Alfredo waved him up. Gen, like most of
the men, had taken off his shoes and he stooped down now to put them back on,
but the General snapped at him impatiently. Gen, embarrassed, worked a path
around the guests in his sock feet. He thought it would be rude to step over
someone. He apologized quietly as he walked.
Perdon,
perdonare,
pardon
me.

“Joachim Messner,” the Red Cross man said in
English, shaking Gen’s hand. “English, French, do you have a preference?”

Gen shook his head.

“French, then, if it’s all the same. Are you
all right?” Messner asked in French. His face was such a remarkable assemblage
of colors. The very blue of his eyes, the very white of his skin, red where the
sun had burned his cheeks and lips, the yellow hair which was the color of the
white corn Gen had seen once in
America
.
He was all primary colors, Gen thought. From such a face any beginning was
possible.

“We are well.”

“Have you been mistreated?”

“Spanish,” General Alfredo said.

Gen explained and then said again, cutting his
eyes to the Vice President, that they were well. The Vice President did not look
well at all.

“Tell them I will act as their liaison.” Messner
thought for a minute, repeated the sentence fairly well in Spanish himself. Then
smiled at Gen and said in French, “I shouldn’t try. I’ll get something terribly
wrong and then we’ll all be in trouble.”

“Spanish,” General Alfredo said.

“He says he struggles with Spanish.”

Alfredo nodded.

“What we want, of course, is the unconditional
release of all the hostages, unharmed. What we will settle for at present are
some of the extras.” Messner glanced around at his feet, the carpet of
well-dressed guests and white-jacketed waiters who craned their heads towards
him. The whole picture was extremely unnatural. “This is too many people. You’re
probably out of food now or you will be by tonight. There’s no need for this
many. I say release the women, the staff, anyone who is sick, anyone you can do
without. We’ll start there.”

“In return?” the General said.

“In return, enough food, pillows,
blankets, cigarettes.
What do you need?”

“We have demands.”

Messner nodded. He was serious yet weary, as if
this were a conversation he had ten times a day before breakfast, as if every
other birthday party ended up in just such a knot. “I’m sure you do and I’m
sure they’ll be heard. What I’m telling you is that this”—he spread his arm
forward to make clear he meant the people on the floor—“is untenable to
everyone. Release the extras now, the ones you don’t need, and it will be taken
as a goodwill gesture. You establish yourself as reasonable people.”

“Who is to say we are reasonable?” General
Benjamin asked Gen, who passed it on.

“You’ve had control of the property for twelve
hours and no one is dead. No one is dead, are they?” Messner said to Gen. Gen
shook his head once and translated the first half of the statement. “That makes
you reasonable in my book.”

“Tell them to send us President Masuda. We came
here for the President and for him we will let everyone go.” He gestured
expansively across the room. “Look at these people! I don’t even know how many
people there are.
Two hundred?
More?
You tell me one man for two hundred is not a reasonable exchange.”

“They won’t give you the President,” Messner
said.

“That’s who we came for.”

Messner sighed and nodded seriously. “Well, I
came here on vacation. It seems that no one is going to get what they want.”

All the time Ruben Iglesias stood beside Gen,
passively listening to the conversation as if he had no real interest in its
outcome. He was the highest-ranking political official in the room and yet no
one was looking to him to be either the leader or the valuable,
near-presidential hostage replacement. Ask the average citizen in this
beautiful country so bereft of mass communication
who
the Vice President was and chances are they would shrug and turn away. Vice
presidents were merely calling cards, things sent in lieu of things desired. They
were replaceable, exchangeable. No war was fought or won over the inspiring
words of a vice president, and no one understood this more clearly than the
Vice President of the host country.

“Give them up,” Ruben told the Generals calmly.
“This man is right. Masuda would never come in here.” Funny, but at that moment
he was thinking,
come in here,
as in—this house, my
house. Masuda had always excluded Ruben. He did not know his children. He never
asked to dance with Ruben’s wife at state dinners. It was one thing to want a
common man on your
ticket,
it was something else
entirely to want him at your dinner table. “I know how these things go. Give
them the women, the extras, and it sends them a message that you are people
they can work with.” When the First Federal Bank was taken over two years ago
they gave up nothing, not a single customer or teller. They hanged the bank’s
manager in the front portico for the media to photograph. Everyone remembered
how that one ended: every last terrorist shot against the marble walls. What
Ruben wanted to tell them was that these things never worked out. No demands
were ever met, or were ever honestly met. No one got away with the money and a
handful of comrades liberated from some high-security prison. The question was
only how much time it would take to wear them down, and how many people would
be killed in the process.

General Benjamin lifted one finger and poked at
the bloodstained dinner napkin the Vice President held against his face. Ruben
took it fairly well. “Did we ask you?”

“It is my house,” he said, feeling slightly
nauseated from a wave of pain.

“Go back to the floor.”

Ruben wanted to lie down, and so he turned away
without remark. He felt nearly sad when Messner took his arm and stopped him.

“Someone needs to sew up that cut,” Messner
said. “I’m going to call in a medic.”

“No medics, no sewing,” General Alfredo said. “It
was never a pretty face.”

“You can’t leave him bleeding like that.”

The General shrugged. “I can.”

The Vice President listened. He could not plead
his own case. And really, the thought of a needle now that this great soreness
had settled in, the headache and hot pressure behind his eyes, well, he wasn’t
entirely sure he wasn’t pulling for the terrorists to win this particular
argument.

“Nothing will proceed if this man bleeds to
death.” Messner’s voice was calm to balance out the seriousness of his
statement.

To death?
the
Vice
President thought.

General Hector, who did not make much in the
way of contributions, told the governess to go upstairs and find her sewing
kit. He clapped twice, like a schoolteacher calling the children to attention,
and she was up and stumbling, her left foot having fallen asleep. As soon as
she was gone, his son, Marco, who was just a little boy of four, cried in
agony, as he believed the hired girl to be his own mother. “Settle this now,”
General Hector said gravely.

Ruben Iglesias turned his swollen face to
Joachim Messner. A sewing kit was not what he had in mind. He was not a loose
button, a hem in need of shortening. This was not the jungle and he was not a
primitive man. Twice in his life he had had stitches before and they were
neatly done in a hospital, sterile instruments waiting in flat silver pans.

“Is there a doctor here?” Messner asked Gen.

Gen did not know but he sent the question out
across the room in one language after another.

“We must have invited at least one doctor,”
Ruben Iglesias said, though with the building pressure in his head he could not
remember anything.

The girl, Esmeralda, was coming down the stairs
now with a square wicker box held under one arm. She would not have stood out
among so many woman dressed in evening wear. She was a country girl in a
uniform, a black skirt and blouse, a white collar and cuffs, her dark, long
braid, as big around as a child’s fist, sliding across her back with every
step. But now everyone in the room looked at her, the way she moved so easily,
the way she seemed completely comfortable, as if this was any other day in her
life and she had a moment to finish some mending. Her eyes were smart, and she
kept her chin up. Suddenly, the whole room saw her as beautiful and the marble
staircase she walked on shimmered in her light. Gen repeated his call, doctor,
doctor, while the Vice President was moved to say the girl’s name, “Esmeralda.”