Bel Canto(14)

“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.”