The street was crowded and raucous and electric rock music blaring from
speakers set out on sidewalks, an opera’s aria, tango music from a
nearby cantina. Portenos strolled down the cobblestones of the
Caminito, a pedestrian thoroughfare, browsing at the stalls of an
open-air market. People came in and out of the restaurant, repeatedly
colliding with Ben and Anna without apology.
Ben noticed a gaggle of young boys in their late teens or early
twenties, a roving gang of eight or more toughs, heading toward him and
Anna, talking loudly, laughing, drunk on alcohol and testosterone. Anna
muttered something to Ben out of the side of her mouth, something he
couldn’t quite understand. Several of the guys were staring directly at
him and Anna with something more than idle curiosity, and in an instant
the gang surrounded them.
“Run!” he shouted, and he was slugged in the stomach by a fist.
He protected his abdomen with both arms, as something slammed into his
left kidney a foot! and he lunged forward to ward off the attack. He
heard Anna scream, but it seemed to come from a great distance. He was
blocked, hemmed in; his assailants, though evidently teenagers, seemed
to be trained in combat. He couldn’t move, and he was being pummeled.
In his peripheral vision he could see Anna flinging one of the attackers
aside with surprising strength, but then several more grabbed her. Ben
tried to break free, but was overwhelmed by a barrage of fists and
kicks.
He saw the glint of knife blades, and a knife slashed against his side.
A hot line of sensation exploded into vast pain, and he grabbed the hand
holding the knife, twisted it hard, and heard a yelp. He kicked at his
attackers, slammed wildly with his fists, connecting a few times, and he
felt an elbow jabbed into his rib cage, then a knee in his stomach.
Breath left him, and he gasped helplessly, then a foot kicked him in the
testicles and he doubled over in pain.
He heard the whoop of a siren, and he heard Anna shout, “Over here! Oh,
thank God!” A foot kicked him hard on the side of his head, and he
could taste blood. He flung his hands out, half protectively, half in
an attempt to grab whatever he could, to stop the pummeling; he heard
shouting, new voices, and he lurched to his feet to see a couple of
policemen shouting at his accosters.
One of the cops grabbed him, yelled, “jVamos, vamos par aca, que los
vamos a sacar de acd!” Come on, get over here, we’ll get you out of
here! Another cop pulled Anna toward the cruiser. Somehow he made it
to the police car, saw the door open, felt a shove, and he was inside.
The door slammed behind him, and all the shouts and screams of the crowd
were muted.
“You all right?” one of the cops said from the front seat.
Ben groaned.
Anna said, “Gracias!” Ben noticed that her blouse was torn, her pearl
choker was gone. “We’re American …” she began, then seemed to think
for a moment. “My purse,” she said. “Shit. My money was in there.”
“Passport?” Ben managed to croak out.
“Back in the room.” The car was moving. She turned to him. “My God,
what was that? You O.K.” Ben?”
“I’m not sure.” The screaming pain in his groin was beginning to
subside. There was a sticky warmth where he’d been slashed by the
knife. He touched his side, felt the blood.
The car swung into traffic, barreling down the road. “That was no
random attack,” Anna said. “That was deliberate. Planned,
coordinated.”
Ben looked at her dully. “Thank you,” he said to the policemen in the
front seat.
There was no reply. He realized that there was a Plexiglas barrier
between the front and back seats, and he heard Anna say, “The partition
?”
The Plexiglas had not been there before; it had just come up. Ben did
not hear a police radio, or maybe the sound wasn’t coming through the
Plexiglas.
Anna seemed to notice the same thing at the same moment, for she leaned
forward and banged on the Plexiglas, but the two policemen didn’t
respond.
The back doors locked automatically.
“Oh, my God,” Anna breathed. “They’re not cops.”
They pulled at the door handles, which did not yield. They grabbed at
the door lock buttons, but they would not move.
“Where’s your gun?” Ben whispered.
“I don’t have one!”
Headlights flashed by as the car accelerated down a four-lane highway.
They were now clearly outside the city limits. Ben hammered at the
Plexiglas partition with both fists, but neither the driver nor the
passenger in the front seat seemed to notice.
The car swerved onto an exit ramp. In a few minutes they were on a
dark, two-lane road, lined with tall trees, and then without warning
they turned off the road into an unlit cul-de-sac within a copse of tall
trees.
The engine was switched off. For a moment there was silence,
interrupted only by the sound of an occasional car passing by.
The two men in the front seat seemed to be conferring. Then the
passenger got out and went around to the back of the car. The trunk
popped open.
In a moment he returned to his side of the car, clutching in his left
hand something that looked like a piece of cloth. In his right he held
a handgun. Then the driver got out, taking a gun from a shoulder
holster. The back doors unlocked.
The driver, apparently in charge, yanked open the door on Anna’s side
and waved the gun at her. She got out slowly, put her hands up. He
stepped back and, with his free left hand, slammed the car door shut,
leaving Ben alone in the backseat.
The deserted country road, the weapons … this was a classic execution.
The other false policeman–or perhaps they were real ones; did it make
any difference?–walked to where Anna stood, her hands in the air, and
began frisking her for weapons, beginning with her underarms. His hands
lingered on her breasts.
He ran his hands down her side, moving them into her crotch, his fingers
spending too much time there as well, then moved down the inside of her
legs to her ankles. He pulled back, seemed to determine her safe. Then
he took a burlap sack and placed it over her head, tightening it around
her neck.
The driver barked something, and she fell to her knees and clasped her
hands behind her back.
Ben saw with horror what was about to happen to her. “No!”
The driver shouted another order, and the younger cop opened the car
door, pointing his weapon at Ben. “Step out slowly,” he said in fluent
English.
There was no hope of making a dash for the road, nor of grabbing Anna
and taking her to safety. Not faced with two men with guns. He got out
of the car, thrust his hands in the air, and the younger one began
frisking him too, this time more roughly.
“No esta enfierrado,” the man said. He’s clean.
To Ben, he said conversationally, “Any sudden movements and we’ll kill
you. Understand?”
Yes, I understand. They’ll kill us both.
A burlap sack went over his head. It stank of a horse barn, and was
cinched tight at his neck, too tight, choking him. Everything was dark.
He croaked, “Hey, watch it!”
“Shut the hell up,” one of the men said. It sounded like the older
man’s voice. “Or I kill you and no one find your body for days, hear
me?”
He heard Anna whisper, “Go along with them for now. We don’t exactly
have a choice.”
He felt something hard pressed against the back of his head. “Kneel,” a
voice said.
He knelt, and without being asked, he clasped his hands behind his back.
“What do you want?” Ben said.
“Shut the hell up!” one of them shouted. Something hard cracked
against the back of his head. He groaned in pain.
His abductors didn’t want to talk. They were going to die in this
godforsaken field off a dark road in the middle of a country he didn’t
know. He was thinking of how it all began, at the Bahnhofplatz in
Zurich, with his near-death, or did it really begin with Peter’s
disappearance? He recalled the agony of Peter’s murder in the country
inn in rural Switzerland, but instead of demoralizing him, the memory
gave him resolve. If he were killed here, at least he would have the
satisfaction of knowing that he had done everything he could to find his
brother’s murderers, and if he had failed to bring them to justice, or
to discover what their reasons were, at least he had come close. He
would leave behind no wife, no child, and in time he would be mostly
forgotten by his friends, but in the history of the world all our lives