All That's Left to Tell(2)

“Mr. Laurent,” she said. “May I call you Marc, now that we know each other a little better?”

“May I call you Jo?” he said to her, the first undercurrent of sarcasm he’d managed since his capture, because even in his state he’d bristled at her use of the word hospitably.

He expected she would leave the room, or call a man back in to slam his chair to the ground, or to slap him—something for this first expression of impertinence—but instead she said, “When I’m in the room alone with you, you’re certainly welcome.

“Mr. Laurent,” she continued. “Marc. We called some of the numbers you gave to us. Business associates. More business associates. Mr. Gregory McGuire expressed grave concern for you. But not one family member. None among that list of numbers.”

“No one in my family has the kind of money you’re looking for.”

She laughed lightly at this, a few high, musical notes that gradually deepened.

“You’re not talking to Saabir, who thinks all Americans are wealthy. I know what kind of money your family doesn’t have. And I don’t think for a minute the Pepsi corporation is going to hand over ten million dollars for a mid-level executive. Easier to promote someone else than sell that many cans of soda.”

“Thank you.”

“No offense intended. But a corporation being what it is, they’ll work harder to keep your capture a secret than to ransom you. Which is why we need the numbers of family members. We can find them ourselves in good time, but that’s only likely to extend your stay.”

“Are you American?”

“That you will never know for sure. Regardless of what happens, you’ll never see my face.”

“They must pay you well.”

She shifted in her chair at this and resettled herself.

“We won’t be talking about my motives. Or how I became radicalized, as they say.”

“I can’t believe you’re a woman,” he said.

“Can’t believe it or don’t believe it?”

“Either. A fundamentalist Muslim group would not hire a woman as its interrogator.”

“Is that what this is? An interrogation? Does it feel that way to you? And as I said, you have no idea who I am, who we are, and what our motives may be.”

He strained to loosen the rope around his wrists, not because he hoped to escape, but because sitting in the chair with his arms behind his back made his shoulders ache. He’d held no thought of escaping from the moment of his capture; the despair and fear that most would feel were numbed by the presence of all the days of these past two months, and even the weeks before them that had followed him onto his flight. He used to be terrified of flying, but midway over the Atlantic, when out the window he watched the unvariegated water meet in a distant haze the indifferent blue of the sky, he thought if the plane nose-dived at that point, he would feel no terror because of despair. And then he’d felt his face warm with a different kind of panic: that this move at age forty-seven, after his wife had left him, was an anguished effort to reignite a life that had never burned with a particular fervor in the first place.

“I’m sorry about the bound hands, but it’s the only way.”

“You think if you untied them that the first thing I’d do is snatch the blindfold from my eyes? I don’t care all that much what you look like.”

“After a while, maybe we’ll see.”

He felt the familiar tightening of his grief in his larynx but forced it down.

“So, Marc, you had a wife.”

“Yes, I had a wife. Did you find out her name on the Internet?”

“We did. Lynne. Lynne Laurent. Why do so many people seem to choose to marry for the musicality of their new name?”

“It’s as good a reason as any.”

“That may be true. Did she take you for everything you had?”

“No. She didn’t take me for anything.” Which had ultimately proven true in other ways. But in the isolation and confinement of these last six days, the gilded edges of his early memories of her—that morning when, from the porch of their first home together, she turned back to smile at him as he left and her robe slipped from her shoulder, or the time she’d cut her forearm so badly that it had to be stitched, and she’d winced when he gripped his homemade tourniquet with his hand, and later he’d contemplated her dried blood on his fingers in ways that had unsettled him—had begun to glow with increasing heat.

“No affection for you at all?”

“I’m not saying that. But she’s not going to fund-raise for the cause, if that’s what you’re thinking. I haven’t spoken to her since I arrived here.” Which was true but for the two voice messages she’d left. “What you’ll get for your phone call is maybe a measure of concern. Maybe.”

“No brothers? No sisters?”

“Two sisters. One lives on a farm in Indiana in a little ranch home on sixty acres they rent to local corn growers in order to make ends meet. The other lives in a tiny apartment in Chicago where she’s trying to patch her life back together after bouts of alcoholism. She borrows money from me.”

“No children?” she asked.

At this he felt his eyes tighten under the blindfold and sting at the corners.