The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado

When they took Aquiles Maldonado's mother, on a morning so hot it all but seared the hide off the 120,000 stray dogs in Caracas, give or take a few, no one would have guessed they would keep her as long as they did. Her husband was dead, murdered in a robbery attempt six years earlier, and he would remain unconcerned and uncommunicative. But there were the household servants and the employees of the machine shop ready to run through the compound beating their breasts, and while her own mother was as feeble as a dandelion gone to seed, she was supremely capable of worry. As were Marita's four grown sons and Aquiles's six children by five different aficionadas, whom she looked after, fed, scolded and sent off to school each morning. There was concern, plenty of concern, and it rose up and raced through the community the minute the news hit the streets. "They took Marita Villalba," people shouted from window to window while others shouted back, "Who?"

"Who?" voices cried out in outrage and astonishment. "Who? Aquiles Maldonado's mother, that's who!"

At that time, Aquiles was playing for Baltimore, in the American League, away from home from the start of spring training in late February to the conclusion of the regular season in the first week of October. He was 30 years old and had worked his way through four teams with a fierce determination to reach the zenith of his profession; he was now the Birds' closer, pitching with grit and fluidity at the end of the first year of his two-year, $11.5 million contract, despite the sharp burn he felt up under the rotator cuff of his pitching arm every time he changed his release point, about which he had told no one. There were three weeks left in the season, and the team, which had already been eliminated from playoff contention by the aggressive play of the Red Sox and Yankees, was just going through the motions. But not Aquiles. Every time he was handed the ball with a lead to protect, however infrequently, he bore down with a fury so uncompromising, you would have thought every cent of his 11.5 million U.S. guaranteed dollars rode on each and every pitch.

He was doing his pregame stretching and joking with the team's other Venezuelan player, Chucho Rangel, about the two tattooed güeras they'd taken back to the hotel the night before when the call came through. It was from his brother Néstor, and the moment he heard his brother's voice, he knew the news was bad.

"They got Mami," Néstor sobbed into the receiver.

"Who did?"

There was a pause, as if his brother were calling from beneath the sea and needed to surface to catch his breath. "I don't know," he said. "The gangsters, the FARC, whoever."

The field was the green of dreams, the stands spotted with fans come early for batting practice and autographs. He turned away from Chucho and the rest of them, hunched over his cell. "For what?" And then because the word slipped into his mouth, "For ransom?"

Another pause, and when his brother came back to him, his voice was as pinched and hollow as if he were talking through his snorkel. "What do you think, pendejo?"

"It just shouldn't be so hot this time of year," she'd been saying to Rómulo Cordero, foreman of the machine shop her son had bought her when he signed his first big-league contract. "I've never seen it like this---have you? Maybe in my mother's time...."

The children were at school, under supervision of the nuns and the watchful eye of Christ in heaven, the lathes were turning with their insectoid drone, and she was in the back office, both fans going full speed and directed at her face and the three buttons of cleavage she allowed herself on the hottest days. Marita Villalba was 47 years old, 30 pounds heavier than she'd like to be but pretty still and so full of life (and, let's face it, money and respectability) that half the bachelors of the neighborhood---and all the widowers---were mad for the sight of her. Rómulo Cordero, a married man and father of nine, wasn't immune to her charms, but he was an employee first and never allowed himself to forget it. "In the 1960s when I was a boy," he said, pausing to sweeten his voice, "but you would have been too young to remember, it was 119 degrees by 11 in the morning every day for a week, and people were placing bets on when it would break 120---"

He never got to finish the story. At that moment four men in the uniform of the federal police strode sweating into the office to crowd the little dirt-floored room, with its walls of unpainted plywood and the rusting filing cabinets and the oversized Steelcase desk on which Marita Villalba did her accounts. "I've already paid," she said, barely glancing up at them.

Their leader, a tall stoop-shouldered man with a congenitally deformed eye and a reek of the barrio who didn't look anything like a policeman, casually unholstered his gun. "We don't know anything about that. My instructions are to bring you to the station for questioning."

And so it began.

When they got outside to the courtyard, where the shop stood adjacent to the two-story frame house with its hardwood floors and tile roof, the tall one, who was referred to variously as Capitán and El Ojo by the others, held open the door of a blistered pale-purple Honda with yellow racing stripes that was like no police vehicle Marita Villalba or Rómulo Cordero had ever seen. Marita balked. "Are you sure we have to go through with this?" she said, gesturing to the dusty backseat of the car, to the open gate of the compound and the city festering beyond it. "Can't we settle this right here?" She was digging in her purse for her checkbook when the tall one said abruptly, "I'll call headquarters." Then he turned to Rómulo Cordero. "Hand me your cell phone."

Alarm signals began to go off in Marita Villalba's head. She sized up the three other men---boys, they were boys, street urchins dressed up in stolen uniforms with automatic pistols worth more than their own lives and the lives of all their ancestors combined clutched in nervous hands---even as Rómulo Cordero unhooked the cell phone from his belt and handed it to the tall man with the drooping eye.

"Hello?" the man said into the phone. "District headquarters? Yes, this is"---and he gave a name he invented out of the scorched air of the swollen morning---"and we have the Villalba woman." He paused. "Yes," he said, "yes, I see. She must come in person."

Marita glanced at her foreman, and they shared a look. The phone was dead, had been dead for two weeks and more, the batteries corroded in the shell of the housing and new ones on order, endlessly on order, and they both broke for the open door of the shop at the same instant. It was hopeless. The weapons spoke their rapid language, dust clawed at her face and Rómulo Cordero went down with two red flowers blooming against the scuffed leather of the tooled boot on his right foot, and the teenagers---the boys who should have been in school, should have been working at some honest trade under an honest master---seized Aquiles Maldonado's mother by the loose flesh of her upper arms, about which she was very sensitive, and forced her into the car. It took a minute, no more. And then they were gone.

Accompanied by a bodyguard and his brother Néstor, Aquiles mounted the five flights of listing stairs at the Central Police Headquarters and found his way by trial and error through a dim dripping congeries of hallways to the offices of the antiextortion and kidnap division. The door was open. Commissioner Diosado Salas, Chief of the Division, was (continued on page 120)Unlucky Mother(continued from page 76) sitting behind his desk. "It's an honor," he said, rising to greet them and waving a hand to indicate the two chairs set before the desk. "Please, please," he said, and Aquiles and Néstor, with a glance for the bodyguard, who had positioned himself just outside the door, eased tentatively into the chairs.

The office looked like any other, bookshelves collapsing under the weight of papers curling at the edges, sagging venetian blinds, a poor pale-yellowish light descending from the fixtures in the ceiling, but the desk, nearly as massive as the one Aquiles's mother kept in her office at the machine shop, had been purged of the usual accoutrements---there were no papers, no files, no staplers or pens, not even a telephone or computer. Instead a white cloth had been spread neatly over the surface, and aside from the two pale-blue cuffs of the Chief's shirtsleeves and the pelota of his clenched brown hands, there were but four objects on the table: three newspaper clippings and a single sheet of white paper with something inscribed across it in what looked to be 20-point type.

All the way up the stairs, his brother and the bodyguard wheezing behind him, Aquiles had been preparing a speech---"I'll pay anything, do anything they say, just so long as they release her unharmed and as soon as possible, or expeditiously, I mean, expeditiously, isn't that the legal term?"---but now, before he could open his mouth, the Chief leaned back in the chair and snapped his fingers in the direction of the door at the rear of the room. Instantly the door flew open, and a waiter from the Fundador Cafe whirled across the floor with his tray held high, bowing briefly to each of them before setting down three white ceramic plates and three Coca-Colas in their sculpted greenish bottles designed to fit the hand like the waist of a woman. In the center of each plate was a steaming reina pepeada---a maize cake stuffed with avocado, chicken, potatoes, carrots and mayonnaise---Aquiles's favorite, the very thing he hungered for during all those months of exile in the north. "Please, please," the Chief said. "We eat. Then we talk."

Aquiles was fresh off the plane. There was no question of finishing the season, of worrying about bills, paychecks, the bachelor apartment he shared with Chucho Rangel in a highrise within sight of Camden Yards or the milk-white Porsche in the parking garage beneath it, and the Orioles' manager, Frank Bowden, had given Aquiles his consent immediately. Not that it was anything more than a formality. Aquiles would have been on the next plane no matter what anyone said, even if they were in the playoffs, even the World Series. His mother was in danger. And he had come to save her. But he hadn't eaten since breakfast the previous day, and before he knew what he was doing, the sandwich was gone.

The room became very quiet. There was no sound but for the whirring of the fans and the faint mastication of the Chief, a small-boned man with an overlarge head and a crown of dark snaking hair that pulled away from his scalp as if an invisible hand were eternally tugging at it. Into the silence came the first reminder of the gravity of the situation: Néstor, his face clasped in both hands, had begun to sob in a quiet, soughing way. "Our mother," he choked, "she used to cook. reinas for us, all her life she used to cook. And now, now------"

"Hush," the Chief said, his voice soft and expressive. "We'll get her back, don't you worry." And then, to Aquiles, in a different voice altogether, an official voice, hard with overuse, he said, "So you've heard from them."

"Yes. A man called my cell---and I don't know how he got the number------"

The Chief gave him a bitter smile, as if to say Don't be naive.

Aquiles flushed. "He didn't say hello or anything, just 'We have the package.' That was all, and then he hung up."

Néstor lifted his head. They both looked to the Chief.

"Typical," he said. "You won't hear from them for another week, maybe two. Maybe more."

Aquiles was stunned. "A week? But don't they want the money?"

The Chief leaned into the desk, the black pits of his eyes locked on Aquiles. "What money? Did anybody say anything about money?"

"No, but that's what this is all about, isn't it? They wouldn't"---and here an inadmissible thought invaded his head---"They're not sadists, are they? They're not...." But he couldn't go on. Finally, gathering himself, he said, "They don't kidnap mothers just for the amusement of it, do they?"

Smiling his bitter smile, the Chief boxed the slip of white paper so that it was facing Aquiles and pushed it across the table with the tips of two fingers. On it in those outsize letters was written a single figure: $11.5 million. In the next moment he was brandishing the newspaper clippings, shaking them so that the paper crackled with the violence of it, and Aquiles could see what they were: articles in the local press proclaiming the béisbol star Aquiles Mal-donado a national hero second only to Simón Bolívar and Hugo Chávez. In each of them the figure of $11.5 million had been underlined in red ink. "This is what they want," the Chief said finally, "money, yes. And now that they have your attention they will come back to you with a figure, maybe $5 million or so---they'd demand it all and more, except that they know you will not pay them a cent, not now or ever."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we do not negotiate with criminals."

"But what about my mother?"

He sighed. "We will get her back, don't you worry. It may take time and perhaps even a certain degree of pain"---here he reached down beneath the desk and with some effort set a two-quart pickle jar on the table before him---"but have no fear."

Aquiles stole a look at his brother. Néstor had jammed his forefinger into his mouth and was biting down as if to snap it in two, a habit he'd developed in childhood and had been unable to break. These were not pickles floating in the clear astringent liquid.

"Yes," the Chief said, "this is the next step. It is called proof of life."

It took a moment for the horror to settle in.

"But these fingers---there are four of them here, plus two small toes, one great toe and a left ear---represent cases we have resolved. Happily resolved. What I'm telling you is be prepared. First you will receive the proof of life, then the demand for money." He paused. And then his fist came down, hard, on the desktop. "But you will not pay them, no matter what."

"I will," Aquiles insisted. "I'll pay them anything."

"You won't. You can't. Because if you do, then every ballplayer's family will be at risk, don't you understand that? And, I hate to say this, but you've brought it on yourself. I mean, please---driving a vermilion Hummer through the streets of this town? Parading around with your gold necklaces and these disgraceful women, these putas with their great inflated tits and swollen behinds? Did you really have to go and paint your compound the color of a ripe tangerine?"

Aquiles felt the anger coming up in him, but as soon as he detected it, it was gone: The man was right. He should have left his mother where she was, left her to the respectability of poverty, should have changed his name and come home in rags, wearing a beard and a false nose. He should never in his life have picked up a baseball.

"All right," the Chief was saying, and he stood to conclude the meeting. "They call you, you call me."

Both brothers rose awkwardly, the empty plate staring up at Aquiles like the blanched unblinking eye of accusation, the jar of horrors grinning beside it. The bodyguard poked his head in the door.

"Oh, but wait, wait, I almost forgot." The Chief snapped his fingers once again, and an assistant strode through the rear door with a cellophane package of crisp white baseballs in one hand and a Magic Marker in the other. "If you wouldn't mind," the Chief said. "For my son Aldo, with best wishes."

•

She was wedged between two of the boys in the cramped backseat of the car, the heat oppressive, the stink of confinement unbearable. El Ojo sat up front beside the other boy, who drove with an utter disregard for life. At first she tried to shout out the window at pedestrians, shrieking till she thought the glass of the windshield would shatter, but the boy to her right---pinch-faced, with two rotted teeth like fangs and a pair of lifeless black eyes---slapped her, and she slapped him right back, the guttersnipe, the little hoodlum, and who did he think he was? How dare he? Beyond that she remembered nothing, because the boy punched her then, punched her with all the coiled fury of his pipe-stem arm and balled fist, and the car jolted on its springs and the tires screamed and she passed into unconsciousness.

When she came back to the world, she was in a skiff on a river she'd never seen before, its waters thick as paste, all the birds and insects in the universe screaming in unison. Her wrists had been tied behind her and her ankles bound with a loop of frayed plastic cord. The ache in her jaw stole up on her, her tongue probing the teeth there and tasting her own blood, and that made her angry, furious, and she focused all her rage on the boy who'd hit her---there he was, sitting athwart the seat in the bow, crushed beneath the weight of his sloped shoulders and the insolent wedge of the back of his head. She wanted to cry out and accuse him, but she caught herself, because what if the boat tipped, what then? She was helpless. No one, not even the Olympic butterfly champion, could swim with all four limbs bound. So she lay there on the rocking floor of the boat, soaked through with the bilge, the sun lashing her as she breathed the fumes of the engine and stared up into a seared fragment of the sky, waiting her chance.

Finally, and it seemed as if they'd been on that river for days, though that was an impossibility, the engine choked on its own fumes, and they cut across the current to the far bank. El Ojo---she saw now that he had been the one at the tiller---sprang out and seized a rope trailing from the branch of a jutting tree, and then the boy, the one who'd assaulted her, reached back to cut the cord at her ankles with a flick of his knife, and he too was in the murky water, hauling the skiff ashore. She endured the thumps and bumps and the helpless feeling they gave her, and then, when he thrust a hand under her arm to lead her up onto the bank, the best she could do was mutter, "You stink. All of you. Don't you have any pride? Can't you even wash yourselves? Do you wear your clothes till they rot, is that it?" And then, when that got no response: "What about your mothers---what would they think?"

They were on the bank now, El Ojo and the others taking pains to secrete the boat in the undergrowth, where they piled sticks and river-run debris atop it. The boy who had hold of her just gave her his cold vampire's smile, the two stubs of his teeth stabbing at his lower lip. "We don't got no mothers," he said softly. "We're guerrillas."

"Hoodlums, you mean," she snapped back at him. "Criminals, narcotraficantes, kidnappers, cowards."

It came so quickly she had no time to react, the arm snaking out, the wrist uncoiling to bring the flat of his hand across her face, right where it had begun to bruise. And then, for good measure, he slapped her again.

"Hey, Eduardo, shithead," El Ojo rasped. "Get your ass over here and give us a hand. What do you think this is, a nightclub?"

The others laughed. Her face stung, and already the flies and mosquitoes were probing at the place where it had swelled along the line of her jaw. She dropped her chin to her shoulder for protection, but she didn't say anything. To this point she'd been too indignant to be scared, but now with the light fading into the trees and the mud sucking at her shoes and the ugly nameless things of the jungle creeping from their holes and dens to lay siege to the night, she began to feel the dread spread its wings inside her. This was about Aquiles. About her son, the major leaguer, the pride of her life. They wanted him, wanted his money he'd worked so hard to acquire since he was a barefoot boy molding a glove out of old milk cartons and firing rocks at a target nailed to a tree, the money he'd earned by his sweat and talent---and the fame, the glory, the pride that came with it. They had no pride themselves, no human decency, but they would do anything to corrupt it. She'd heard the stories of the abductions, the mutilations, the families who'd paid ransom for their daughters, sons, parents, grandparents, even the family dog, only to pay again and again until hope gave way to despair.

But then, even as they took hold of her and began to march her through the jungle, she saw her son's face rise before her, his portrait just as it appeared on his Topps card, one leg lifted in the windup and that little half smile he gave when he was embarrassed because the photographer was there and the photographer had posed him. He'll come for me, she said to herself. I know he will.

•

For Aquiles, the next three weeks were purgatorial. Each day he awoke sweating in the silence of dawn and performed his stretching exercises on the Turkish carpet until the maid brought him his orange juice and the protein drink into which he mixed the contents of three raw eggs, two ounces of wheat-grass and a tablespoon of brewer's yeast. Then he sat dazed in front of the high-definition plasma TV he'd bought his mother for her 45th birthday, surrounded by his children (withdrawn from school for their own protection) and the unforgivably homely but capable girl from the provinces, Suspira Salvatoros, who'd been brought in to see after their welfare in the absence of his mother. In the corner muttering darkly sat his abuela, the electric ghost of his mother's features flitting across her face as she rattled her rosary and picked at the wart under her right eye till a thin line of serum ran down her cheek. The TV gave him nothing, not joy or even release, each show more stupefyingly banal than the last---how could people go about the business of winning prizes, putting on costumes and spouting dialogue, singing, dancing, stirring soft-shell crabs and cilantro in a fry pan for Christ's sake, when his mother, Marita Villalba, was in the hands of criminals who refused even to communicate, let alone negotiate? Even baseball, even the playoffs, came to mean nothing to him.

And then, one bleak changeless morning, the sun like a firebrick tossed in the window and all Caracas up in arms over the abduction---free marita was scrawled in white soap on the windows of half the cars in town---he was cracking the eggs over his protein drink when Suspira Salvatoros knocked at the door. "Don Aquiles," she murmured, sidling into the room in her shy fumbling way, her eyes downcast, "something has come for you. A missive." In her hand---bitten fingernails, a swell of fat---there was a single dirty white envelope, too thick for a letter and stained with a smear of something he couldn't name. He felt as if his chest had been torn open, as if his still-beating heart had been snatched out of him and flung down on the carpet with the letter that dropped from his ineffectual fingers. Suspira Salvatoros began to cry. And gradually, painfully, as if he were bending for the rosin bag in a nightmare defeat in which he could get no one out and the fans were jeering and the manager frozen in the dugout, he bent for the envelope and clutched it to him, hating the feel of it, the weight of it, the guilt and horror and accusation it carried.

Inside was a human finger, the little finger of the left hand, two inches of bone, cartilage and flesh gone the color of old meat, and at the tip of it, a manicured nail, painted red. For a long while he stood there, weak-kneed, the finger cold in the palm of his hand, and then he reverently folded it back into the envelope, secreted it in the inside pocket of his shirt closest to his heart and flung himself out the door. In the next moment he sprang into the car---the Hummer, and so what if it was the color of poppies and arterial blood? So much the worse for them, the desecrators, the criminals, the punks, and he was going to track them down if it was the last thing he did. Within minutes he'd reached the police headquarters and pounded up the five flights of stairs, the ashen-faced bodyguard plodding along behind him. Without a word for anyone he burst into the Chief's office and laid the envelope on the desk before him.

The Chief had been arrested in the act of biting into a sweet cake while simultaneously blowing the steam off a cup of coffee, the morning newspaper propped up in front of him. He gave Aquiles a knowing look, set down the cake and extracted the finger from the envelope.

"I'll pay," Aquiles said. "Just let me pay. Please, God. She's all I care about."

The Chief held the finger out before him, studying it as if it were the most pedestrian thing in the world, a new sort of pen he'd been presented by the Boys' Auxiliary, a stick of that dried-out bread the Italians serve with their antipasto. "You will not pay them," he said without glancing up.

"I will." Aquiles couldn't help raising his voice. "The minute they call, I swear I'll give them anything, I don't care---"

Now the Chief raised his eyes. "Your presumption is that this is your mother's finger?"

Aquiles just stared at him.

"She uses this shade of nail polish?"

"Yes, I---I assume---"

"Amateurs," the Chief spat. "We're on to them. We'll have them, believe me. And you---assume nothing."

The office seemed to quaver then as if the walls were closing in. Aquiles had begun to take deep breaths as he did on the mound when the situation was perilous, runner on first, no outs, a one-run ball game. "My mother's in pain," he said.

"Your mother is not in pain. Not physical pain, at any rate." The Chief had set the severed finger down on the napkin that cradled the sweet bun and brought the mug to his lips. He took a sip of the coffee and then set the mug down, too.

"This is not your mother's finger," he said finally. "This is not, in fact, even the finger of a female. Look at it. Look closely. This," he pronounced, again lifting the mug to his lips, "is the finger of a man, a young man, maybe even a boy, playing revolutionary. They like that, the boys. Dressing up, hiding out in the jungle. Calling themselves"---and here he let out his bitter laugh---"guerrillas."

•

She was a week in the jungle, huddled over a filthy stew pot thick with chunks of carpincho, some with the hide still on it, her digestion in turmoil, the insects burrowing into her, her dress---the shift she'd been wearing when they came for her---so foul it was like a layer of grease applied to her body. Then they took her farther into the jungle to a crude airstrip---the kind the narcotraficantes employ in their evil trade---and she was forced into a Cessna airplane with El Ojo, the boy with the pitiless eyes and an older man, the pilot, and they sailed high over the broken spine of the countryside and up into the mountains. At first she was afraid they were taking her across the border to Colombia to trade her to the FARC rebels there, but she could see by the sun that they were heading southeast, and that was small comfort because every minute they were in the air, she was that many more miles from her home and rescue. Their destination---it appeared as a cluster of frame cottages with thatched roofs and the splotched yawning mouth of a dried-up swimming pool---gave up nothing, not a road or even a path, to connect it with the outside world.

The landing was rough, very rough, the little plane lurching and pitching like one of those infernal rides at the fair, and when she climbed down out of the cockpit she had to bend at the waist and release the contents of her stomach in the grass no one had thought to cut. The boy, her tormentor, the one they called Eduardo, gave her a shove from behind so that she fell to her knees in her own mess, so hurt and confused and angry she had to fight to keep from crying in front of him. And then there were other boys there, a host of them, teenagers in dirty camouflage fatigues with the machine rifles slung over their shoulders, their faces blooming as they greeted Eduardo and El Ojo and then narrowing in suspicion as they regarded her. No one said a word to her. They unloaded the plane---beer, rum, cigarettes, pornographic magazines, sacks of rice and three cartons of noodles in a cup---and then ambled over to a crude table set up in the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing, talking and joking all the while. She heard the hiss of the first beer and then a chorus of hisses as one after another they popped the aluminum tabs and pressed the cans to their lips, and she stood and gazed up at the barren sky and then let her eyes drop to the palisade of the jungle that went on unbroken as far as she could see.

Within a week they'd accepted her. There was always one assigned to guard her, though for the life of her she couldn't imagine why---unless she could sprout wings like a turpial and soar out over the trees, she was a prisoner here just as surely as if she'd been locked away in a cell---but aside from that, they gave her free rein. Once she'd recovered from the shock of that inhuman flight, she began to poke through the dilapidated buildings, just to do something, just to keep occupied, and the first thing she found was a tin washtub. It was nothing to collect fragments of wood at the edge of the clearing and build a fire ring of loose stone. She heated water in the tub, shaved a bar of soap she found in the latrine, wrapped herself in the blanket they gave her and washed first her hair, then her dress. The boys were drunk on the yeasty warm beer, sporadically shooting at something in the woods until El Ojo rose in a rage from his nap and cursed them, but soon they gathered round and solemnly stripped down to their underwear and handed her their filth-stiffened garments, murmuring, "Please, senora" and "Would you mind?" and "Me too, me too." All except Eduardo, that is. He just sneered and lived in his dirt.

Ultimately, she knew these boys better than they knew themselves, boys playing soldier in the mornings, béisbol and fútbol in the afternoons, gathering to drink and boast and lie as the sun fell into the trees. They were the spawn of prostitutes and addicts, uneducated, unwanted, unloved, raised by grandmothers, raised by no one. They knew nothing but cruelty. Their teeth were bad. They'd be dead by 30. As the days accumulated she began to gather herbs at the edge of the jungle and sort through the store of cans and rice and dried meat and beans, sweetening the clearing on the hilltop with the ambrosial smell of her cooking. She found a garden hose and ran it from the creek that gave them their water to the lip of the empty swimming pool and soon the boys were cannonballing into the water, their shrieks of joy echoing through the trees even as the cool clear water cleansed and firmed their flesh and took the rankness out of their hair. Even El Ojo began to come round to hold out his tin plate or have his shirt washed, and before long he took to sitting in the shade beside her just to pass the time of day. "These kids," he would say and shake his head in a slow portentous way, and she could only cluck her tongue in agreement. "You're a good mother," he told her one night in his cat's tongue of a voice, "and I'm sorry we had to take you." He paused to lick the ends of the cigarette he'd rolled, and then he passed it to her. "But this is life."

And then one morning as she was pressing out the corn cakes to bake on a tin sheet over the fire for the arepas she planned to serve for breakfast and dinner, too, there was a stir among the boys---a knot of them gathered round the table and El Ojo there, brandishing a pair of metal shears. "You," he was saying, pointing the shears at Eduardo, "you're the tough guy. Make the sacrifice."

She was 30 feet from them, crouched over a stump, both hands thick with corn meal. Eduardo fastened his eyes on her. "She's the hostage," he spat. "Not me."

"She's a good person," El Ojo said, "a saint, better than you'll ever be. I won't touch her---no one will. Now hold out your hand."

The boy never flinched. Even when the shears bit, even when metal contacted metal and the blood drained from his face. And all the while he never took his eyes from her.

•

By the time the call came, the one Aquiles had been awaiting breathlessly through five and a half months of sleepless nights and paralyzed days, spring training was well under way. Twice the kidnappers had called to name their price---the first time it was $5 million, just as the Chief had predicted, and the next, inexplicably, it had dropped to two---but the voice on the other end of the phone, as hoarse and buzzing as the rattle of an inflamed serpent, never gave directions as to where to deliver it. Aquiles fell into despair, his children turned on each other like demons so that their disputations rang through the courtyard in a continual clangor, his abuela's face was an open sore, and Suspira Salvatoros cleaned and cooked with a vengeance even as she waded in amongst the children like the referee of an eternal wrestling match. And then the call came. From the Chief. Aquiles pressed the cell to his ear and murmured, "Bueno?" and the Chief's voice roared back at him: "We've found her!"

"Where?"

"My informants tell me they have her at an abandoned tourist camp in Estado Bolívar."

"But that's hundreds of miles from here."

"Yes," the Chief said. "The amateurs."

"I'm coming with you," Aquiles said.

"No. Absolutely no. Too dangerous. You'll just be in the way."

"I'm coming."

"No," the Chief said.

"I give you my solemn pledge that I will sign one truckload of baseballs for the sons and daughters of every man in the federal police district of Caracas, and I will give to your son, Aldo, my complete 2003, 2004 and 2005 sets of Topps baseball cards direct from the USA."

There was a pause, then the Chief's voice came back at him: "We leave in one hour. Bring a pair of boots."

•

They flew south in a commercial airliner, the Chief and 10 of his men in camouflage fatigues with the patch of the Federal Police on the right shoulder and Aquiles in gum boots, blue jeans and an old baseball jersey from his days with the Caracas Lions, and then they took a commandeered produce truck to the end of the last stretch of the last road on the map and got down to hike through the jungle. The terrain was difficult. Insects thickened the air. No sooner did they cross one foaming yellow cataract than they had to cross another, the ground underfoot as slippery as if it had been oiled, the trees alive with the continuous screech of birds and monkeys. And they were going uphill, always uphill, gaining altitude with each uncertain step.

Though the Chief had insisted that Aquiles stay to the rear---"That's all we need," he said, "you getting shot, and I can see the headlines already: 'Venezuelan Baseball Star Killed in Attempt to Save His Sainted Mother'"---Aquiles's training regimen had made him a man of iron, and time and again he found himself well out in front of the squad. Repeatedly the Chief had to call him back in a terse whisper, and he slowed to let the others catch up. It was vital that they stay together, the Chief maintained, because there were no trails here and they didn't know what they were looking for except that it was up ahead somewhere, high up through the mass of vegetation that barely gave up the light, and that it would reveal itself when they came close enough.

Then, some four hours later, when the men had gone gray in the face and they were all of them as soaked through as if they'd been standing fully clothed under the barracks shower, the strangest thing happened. The Chief had called a halt to check his compass reading and allow the men to collapse in the vegetation and squeeze the blood, pus and excess water from their boots, and Aquiles, though he could barely brook the delay, paused to slap mosquitoes on the back of his neck and raise the canteen of Gatorade to his mouth. That was when the scent came to him, a faint odor of cooking that insinuated itself along the narrow olfactory avenue between the reeking perfume of jungle blooms and the fecal stench of the mud. But this was no ordinary smell, no generic scent you might encounter in the alley out back of a restaurant or drifting from a barrio window---this was his mother's cooking! His mother's! He could even name the dish: tripe stew! "Jefe," he said, taking hold of the Chief's arm and pulling him to his feet, "do you smell that?"

They approached the camp warily, the Chief's men fanning out with their weapons held rigidly before them. Surprise was of the essence, the Chief had insisted, adding chillingly that the guerrillas were known to slit the throats of their captives rather than give them up and so they must be eliminated before they knew what hit them. Aquiles felt the moment acutely. He'd never been so tense, so unnerved, in all his life. But he was a closer, and a closer lived on the naked edge of catastrophe every time he touched the ball, and as he moved forward with the rest of them, he felt the strength infuse him and knew he would be ready when the moment came.

There were sounds now---shouts and curses and cries of rapture amid a great splash and heave of water in motion---and then Aquiles parted the fronds of a palm and the whole scene was made visible. He saw rough huts under a diamond sky, a swimming pool exploding with splashing limbs and ecstatic faces, and there, not 30 feet away, the cook fire and the stooping form of a woman, white-haired, thin as bone. It took him a moment to understand that this was his mother, work-hardened and deprived of her makeup and the Clairol Nice 'n Easy he sent her by the cardboard case from the north. His first emotion, and he hated himself for it, was shame, shame for her and for himself, too. And then as the voices caromed round the pool--- "Oaf! Fool! Get off me, Humberto, you ass!"---he felt nothing but anger.

He would never know who started the shooting, whether it was one of the guerrillas or the Chief and his men, but the noise of it, the lethal stutter that saw the naked figures jolted out of the pool and the water bloom with color, started him forward. He stepped from the bushes, oblivious to danger, stopping only to snatch a rock from the ground and mold it to his hand in the way he'd done 10,000 times when he was a boy. That was when the skinny kid with the dead eyes sprang up out of nowhere to put a knife to his mother's throat, and what was the point of that? Aquiles couldn't understand. One night there was victory, another night defeat. But you played the game just the same---you didn't blow up the ballpark or shoot the opposing batter. You didn't extort money from the people who'd earned it through God-given talent and hard work. You didn't threaten mothers. That wasn't right. That was impermissible. And so he cocked his arm and let fly with his fastball that had been clocked at 98 miles an hour on the radar gun at Camden Yards while 45,000 people stamped and shouted and chanted his name---High and inside, he was thinking, high and inside---and without complicating matters, let's just say that his aim was true.

•

Unfortunately Marita Villalba never fully recovered from her ordeal. She would awaken in the night, smelling game roasting over a campfire---smelling carpincho with its rodent's hide intact---and she seemed lost in her own kitchen. She gave up dyeing her hair, rarely wore makeup or jewelry. The machine shop was nothing to her, and when Rómulo Cordero, hobbled by his wounds, had to step down, she didn't even come downstairs to attend his retirement party, though the smell of the arepas, empanadas and chivo en coco radiated through the windows and up out of the yard and into the streets for blocks around. More and more she was content to let Suspira Salvatoros look after the kitchen and the children while she sat in the sun with her own mother, their collective fingers, all 20 of them, busy with the intricate needlepoint designs for which they became modestly famous in the immediate neighborhood.

Aquiles went back to the major leagues midway through the season, but after that moment of truth on the hilltop in the jungle of Estado Bolívar, he just couldn't summon the fire anymore. That, combined with the injury to his rotator cuff, spelled disaster. He was shelled each time he went to the mound, the boos rising in chorus till the manager took the ball from him for the last time, and he cleared waivers and came home to stay, his glory gone but the contract guaranteed. The first thing he did was take Suspira Salvatoros to the altar, defeating the ambitions of any number of young and not-so-young women whose curses and lamentations could be heard echoing through the streets for weeks to come. Then he hired a team of painters to whitewash every corner of the compound, even to the tiles of the roof. And finally---and this was perhaps the hardest thing of all---he sold the vermilion Hummer to a TV actor known for his sensitive eyes and hyperactive jaw, replacing it with a used van of uncertain provenance and a color indistinguishable from the dirt of the streets.

They were Boys with Automatic Pistols Worth More Than Their Own Lives.

The room became very quiet. There was no sound but for the fans and the faint mastication of the Chief.