“Yes. He put his fingertip on my forehead, then ran it down my face and pressed it on my throat. He said there was no time.”
“I see,” she said, and then it sounded as if she were impatiently brushing crumbs from whatever she was wearing. “Saabir is a complex man. We are only in control of so much, you know. When there’s a bombing, or something like a drone strike, even in a different part of the country, some people get upset. Almost everyone sees themselves as innocents, at that point. And some want revenge. You’re nearby, and you’re not an innocent, but in some ways, for them, it would be even better if you were.”
“So others know I’m here.”
“Twenty million people, Marc. It’s hard to keep a secret. We may have to move you at some point.”
“It’s not like I was getting comfortable here.”
“No.” She sat quietly for a full minute, and then said, “We spoke to your mother. She has a charming Midwestern accent.”
“My mother.” He doubted it.
“We heard a dog barking in the background.”
“Penny,” he said involuntarily.
“Pardon?”
“The dog’s name.”
“Of course. She kept saying, your mother, if you’d only come back for the funeral. If you’d only come back for the funeral, you would be safe. Now she’s worried about losing both of you. Both you and Claire.”
“I don’t believe you even spoke to her.”
“Both you and Claire,” she said again.
“Look,” he said. “If I had some information you could extort from me, why not call in Saabir and have him beat it out of me?”
“Yes. As if that’s all he’s good for,” she said. “As if that would do nothing to him.”
“There’s not a thing I can tell you, Josephine.”
His use of the name she’d told him took the edge from her voice.
“We don’t want information. You know that. We want money.”
“Yeah, money. Right.”
“Your mother said she still lives on the little lake in southern Michigan where you grew up. She lived there even after your father left. You have to truly love a place to stay there after you’ve been brokenhearted.”
“You must have a great Internet connection.”
“She said that you were a fearless little boy, at least with regard to the lake. There was a raft that floated on empty oil barrels at the place where the water got deep. When you saw your older sisters sunning themselves on it, past the point you could reach, you taught yourself to swim at age five so you could cannonball off the tip of that raft in order to splash them and get them to scream. She told me that you and Penny Senior used to wander around in the shallows of the reeds, and when you weren’t tossing a tennis ball to the dog, you were trying to attract leeches that you’d joyfully pluck from your skin then drop in salt water just to watch them squirm. She said that you used to have underwater races with your friends, and that you were so good at holding your breath that once one of your friends started crying when you didn’t come up because he thought you’d drowned.”
His face flushed warm, and the images spun through him like water down a drain. He could see his dog, a springer spaniel, poised above the shallows of the lake, her tail vibrating in anticipation, her brown eyes the color of her coat open wide as she searched for minnows before plunging her head beneath the surface. The blindfold left him increasingly vulnerable to memory because he couldn’t use his vision to distract himself with objects in the room.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” she said. “The mundane things that rack your heart when you’re away from everything you’ve known.”
“I—” he said. “Some of those things were right. Some weren’t. You have a very good imagination.”
“Which weren’t right?”
This he wouldn’t answer.
“And yes, I do have a very good imagination.”
“Can I ask you a question? How old are you?”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s not that I would mind you knowing in other circumstances. But when and if you leave here, that’s not information I want you to have.”
“But you told me yesterday about the love who brought you here.”
She didn’t respond to this, and sat quietly, and it dawned on him that the more he learned about her the less likely it was that he would leave alive.
“It’s funny in a way,” he said.
“What is?”
“That you would use childhood memories of your hostages as a means to get a ransom.”
“Missing home can be more powerful than a good beating, as you put it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, you didn’t. You’re very careful with the words you choose, I think. That would be much harder if we were to sit here for hours with you blindfolded. But for now we don’t have that much time.”
“What do you do when you’re not here? Do you have other guests assigned to you?”
“Guests.” She laughed. “Why do you ask? Are you jealous?”
“Did you actually talk to my mother?”