Bel Canto(32)



“Name?” General Alfredo asked a man sitting on a red ottoman near the fireplace.

“Oscar Mendoza.” The man took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his mouth. He was finishing off a piece of cake.

“Any identification?”

Mr. Mendoza took out his wallet, found a driver’s license, a credit card, pictures of his five daughters. General Hector copied down the information. He wrote down his address. General Benjamin picked up the pictures and studied them. “Occupation?” he said.





“Contractor.” Mr. Mendoza did not like them having his address. He lived only five miles from here. He had planned on bidding to build the factory that he had been told Mr. Hosokawa had come to his country to develop. Instead he had slept on a floor, said good-bye to his wife and his grand string of girls for who knew how long, and had to consider the possibility that he might be shot.

“Your health?”

Mr. Mendoza shrugged. “Good enough I would think. I’m here.”

“But do you know?” General Benjamin said, trying to remember the tone that the doctor had taken with him when he had gone to the city years before to see about his shingles. “Do you have any conditions?”

Mr. Mendoza looked as if he were being asked about the internal workings of his wristwatch. “I wouldn’t know.”

Gen came along behind them and waited while they asked a few more questions, all of them remarkable only in what unhelpful answers they engendered. They were trying to get rid of more hostages. They were trying to discern who else might be dying. The death of the accompanist had made them nervous. The crowd outside, which had quieted for a while, had begun to bellow again once they saw the body tucked inside its white tablecloth. “Mur-der! Mur-der!” they chanted. From the street there came a constant barrage of bullhorned messages and demands. The phone rang and rang and rang with would-be negotiators. Soon, all of the terrorists were going to have to be allowed to sleep. The Generals were bickering in some shorthand nonsense that Gen couldn’t follow. General Hector stopped the argument by taking out his pistol and shooting the clock on the mantel. There were too many people to watch, even with the crowd cut in half. They went from man to man, asking, printing down the answers and names. Gen served in the cases where Spanish was not understood. It was the foreigners they placed their hopes on anyway. Foreign governments willing to pay foreign ransoms. The Generals were having to rethink their failed mission. If they couldn’t get the President, then there should still be something in it for their troubles. They planned to talk to every hostage in the room, to assess and rank them to see who would be most beneficial in getting comrades released from high-altitude prisons, for getting money for the cause. But the polling process lacked science. The guests played down their own importance when questioned.

“No, I don’t run the company, not exactly.”

“I am only one member on a board of many.”

“This diplomatic post is not as it seems. It was arranged by my brother-in-law.”

No one was quite willing to lie, but they tugged down the edges of the truth. The note-taking made them nervous.

“All of this information will be checked by our people on the outside,” Alfredo said again and again, and Gen translated it into French and German, Greek and Portuguese, each time careful to say their people outside. Something a translator should never do.

In the middle of an interview with a Dane who was thought to be a potential backer for the nonexistent Nansei project, General Benjamin, the upper right portion of his faces in flames, turned to Gen. “How did you get to be so smart?” he said in an accusatory tone, as if there was a secret cache of intelligence hidden somewhere in the house that Gen was hoarding all for himself.

Gen felt tired, not smart. He felt hungry. Sleep was singing him lullabies. He longed for what was left of his sandwich. “Sir?” he said. He could see Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane Coss sitting quietly together, unable to speak because their translator was busy with the terrorists’ footwork.

“Where did you learn so many languages?”

Gen had no interest in telling his story. Was his sandwich still beneath the chair? The cake? He was wondering whether or not they would qualify for release and feeling a sad resignation in the knowledge they would not. “University,” he said simply, and turned his eyes back to the man they were questioning.

When they made their lists of those to keep and those to send away, Gen should have been on the top of the list to go. He was worth no money, he had no leverage. He was as much an employee, a workingman, as the ones who had fine-sliced the onions for dinner. But when the lists were drawn up his name did not appear anywhere. He was somehow beneath their thought altogether. Not that he would have gone without Mr. Hosokawa. He would have chosen to stay like that young priest, but everyone likes to be asked. Once the interviews were completed and the final decisions were made it was late in the evening. All around the room lamps were clicked on. Gen was given the task of making copies of the lists. He had somehow become the secretary to the whole event.

In the end, counting the translator (he added his own name), it was decided that thirty-nine hostages would be kept. The final number was forty, because Father Arguedas again refused to leave. With fifteen soldiers and three generals, it gave them very nearly the two-hostages-for-every-one-captor ratio that they had decided upon as being reasonable. Considering that the original plan was for eighteen terrorists to take one president, the recalculation felt to be as much as they could reasonably handle. What they wanted, what would have been best, would be to tease out the release of the extras, to keep them all for another week and then let them dribble out, a few here and there in exchange for demands that were met. But the terrorists were tired. The hostages had needs and complaints. They took on the weight of a roomful of restless children all needing to be shushed and petted and entertained. They wanted them gone.

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