 We Are Holding the President Hostage
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A Mafia Don swings into action when terrorists
capture his daughter and grandson.
EVEN HERE, MARIA THOUGHT, a pebble’s throw from the
grimy once-ornate facade of the Egyptian Museum, the fetid stew of Cairo
in July hung in the air, noxious and unhealthy. From the car she could see
shimmering thermal patterns, like ghostly dervishes, whirling through the
late-afternoon falluca traffic on the river.
Joey’s rubber ball made pocking sounds against the
rear deck of the Mercedes. It printed smudges in the dusty surface but
left no damage, and she let him amuse himself. Her gaze drifted toward the
hodgepodge of vehicles thrashing forward in the streets: ramshackle buses
choked with people, trucks belching dark exhausts, cars of every vintage,
donkeys pulling flatbed carts, a slow-moving river of molasses. She
contemplated the impending Friday run to Alexandria. It would be a
gut-wrenching punishment.
One more time she looked at her watch. Robert had told
her that the schedule called for the delegation to be finished with the
museum tour by four, which meant five or thereabouts, acknowledging the
Egyptian penchant for defying punctuality. It was now fifteen minutes past
five.
"Can’t duck this one," Robert had apologized at
breakfast, offering his mock-exasperated smile, mischievous under his
shock of sandy hair, which made him appear so deceptively yielding and
innocent. How misleading, she thought, warmed, once again, by the image.
After all, hadn’t he defied the vaunted all-powerful Padre? She allowed
herself a private grin as a momentary picture of her father, like a bit of
flotsam on the slate gray of the Nile, passed briefly on the flow of
memory. Padre! Her voice could never say it, although it resonated often
in her mind. He is daddy, she protested, yet again, whispering the word.
"What?" Joey asked, coming to the open window.
"Nothing, sweets."
"We’ll be late, Mommy."
"Late for what?" she asked patiently.
"For a swim." Joey pouted. "You promised."
"Then I’ll keep it. Even if it’s dark."
"But I’m afraid of the dark, Mommy."
She was disturbed that her irritation had made her say
that. Impatience and the heat, she rationalized.
"We’ll make it, sweets. You’ll see," she said
gently, putting out her hand, ruffling his hair. He smiled and went back
to the rear of the car, resuming his game.
The Assistant Secretary was a classmate from Princeton,
Robert had explained with his usual bias, one of the foot soldiers who
ventured into the muck of irreversible entropy, which was, specifically,
modern Egypt and the Arab world in general. Robert, ever the antiquarian,
often vented his contempt for the modern world using the Arab example. The
visit of the Assistant Secretary had set him off that morning.
"Their entire culture is dominated by a mentality that
will not rest until it gets the upper hand, which is impossible, like
immortality. Yet they continue to haggle away like traders in the
marketplace. They have a sweetness in them that is very attractive, but
they cannot compromise."
"Are you saying we shouldn’t deal with them?"
Maria asked gently. She had heard the monologue before.
"Not shouldn’t. Can’t."
"That goes nowhere."
"Why must there always be a somewhere?" Robert
asked.
"For an archaeologist, you are remarkably cynical,"
she said, an old refrain.
"For the daughter of the Mafia don, you are remarkably
hopeful."
"I just don’t believe in the sins of the fathers
falling on the heads of the children. Look at me. Living proof." She had
bent over and kissed his cool forehead. Painful issues, once grating and
divisive, had finally reduced themselves to domestic banter, for which she
was grateful.
"Someday," he replied, "somebody like me will be
poking around in our rubble."
"And what will they find?"
"Artifacts and a lesson too late to learn."
It was obligatory for Americans, especially in the case
of first-timers like Robert’s Princeton friend, whose name was Bigelow,
to view the geegaws of antiquity in the musty museum. American voluntary
contributions attempted to hold back further decay, but they were
sufficient only to provide for figurative sandbags to top the barricades.
Maria’s husband was an exchange professor of Egyptian
antiquities from Amherst doing research under a government grant. He was,
therefore, frequently asked to shepherd official visitors through the
museum. Normally, especially in the stifling summers, he had begged off on
Fridays. Unfortunately, his Princeton connection made his attendance
obligatory.
"But where is Daddy?" Joey whined, exhibiting his
five-year-old petulance. He suddenly lost the rhythm of the ball, which
bounced out of range and rolled along the macadam of the parking lot. The
ball came to rest under a car.
"Now look what you’ve done," Maria said, sliding
out of the driver’s side and following her son to the car. Six men sat
in the car’s interior, which surprised her mildly since the windows were
pulled up and the temperature was nearly one hundred. She tapped on the
window.
"My son’s ball," she said in pidgin Arabic,
offering an accompaniment of miming gestures. She assumed, from the men’s
rough appearance, that they did not speak English. The men scowled back at
her, her intrusion an obvious annoyance. Hoping that her phony smile was
ingratiating, she stumbled through another awkward explanation, using her
hands to illustrate the location of the ball.
The men looked at her with frigid indifference, which
was baffling. Even her persistent tapping against the drawn window could
not stir them. Her attention was suddenly diverted by Joey’s attempt to
crawl beneath the car to get at the ball. She pulled at his legs, dragging
him to safety.
"Are you crazy?" she said, waving a finger in front
of his nose. "They could suddenly start to move." Wouldn’t put it
past these hard cases, she thought.
Tamping down the momentary panic, she tapped the window
again with her knuckles.
"Just move the damned car," she said, this time in
English, feeling the anger rise as she mumbled to herself. "You
indifferent bastards." She had absolutely no doubt that they understood
her request.
The driver lifted heavy-hooded eyes and dismissed her
with a wave of his hand. He was a young man with a black scraggly beard
and an expression of unsmiling menace. Still, she would not be
intimidated. Not the daughter of the Padre. Again she tapped on the window
with her knuckles, angling them to use her wedding ring to increase the
noise level.
One of the men in the back seat waved his finger at her
and snarled. Another tried to wave her away. She tapped again. Arab
machismo, she decided with contempt. To these stubborn asses, a woman was
nothing. It stirred her rage, reinforced her female consciousness, and
stiffened her resolve. She continued to tap insistently against the
window.
They apparently got the message. She saw the man sitting
to the right of the driver move his lips, muttering some words to the
others which she could not hear. Without rolling down the window, the
driver gunned the motor and moved forward by half a car’s length, just
enough for Joey to scoop up the ball. She waved her hand, resisting the
temptation to raise her middle finger, and mimed a sarcastic thank-you to
the men. She wished she could emulate her father’s expression at such
moments, that look which telescoped the message of harnessed hate which
could strike consummate fear in those who received it.
But the men barely glanced her way. After the ball had
been removed, the car was driven back into its original position.
"Hope you bastards fry," she mumbled as she grabbed
Joey’s hand and led him back to their car. Her anger triggered her
curiosity. Why would six grown men sit in a locked car in the parking lot
of the Egyptian Museum on a steaming Friday afternoon? It jogged a shard
of memory. Men in cars. The image subliminally absorbed in childhood
suggested that six grown men sitting in a locked automobile, watchful and
waiting, ignoring heat and discomfort, were about to perform something
momentous and probably violent.
In memory, she heard her father’s voice admonishing
her gently but firmly, "Go to your school." Or was it "Help Mama"
or "Go play with your dollies"? A signal for her disappearance, an
absolute order for her obedience. It meant "none of your business."
She recalled cars filled with adult men with gruff
voices and odd names. Even now, the smell of them was vivid, odors of
masculinity, winey, garlicky, thick with the pall of cigar smoke and
masking peppermints. Always with the memory came the feel of her father’s
gentle hands stroking her thighs as she sat on his lap scrunched against
his chest. Occasionally his lips would brush against her cheek and his
breath would sing past her ear. Daddy’s little girl.
The guilt of survival bubbled up inside of her. Total
containment inevitably failed. Without warning, it attacked her like a
sudden volcanic eruption blowing the head off her control. The men in the
car had set it off, starting the endless, chain of recall, the curse of
memory. She railed against her brothers for stupidly making her the last
sibling. Yet it was pointless to admonish two dead brothers. She was the
dregs at the bottom of the pot, the only survivor of the three Padronelli
children. Which put the onus on Joey, the grandson, the worshiped one,
whose wiry little body throbbed with the beat of Padronelli blood.
The mystique of the blood. One would think it had been
pumped directly from the veins of St. Peter himself instead of that
product of a Naples slum that had been the American Padronelli, the
dynastic beginning. Often she had suspected that the name itself,
Padronelli, with its obvious diminutive, was his synthetic concoction, a
private joke. Later, visiting Naples, she had found two columns of
Padronellis in the telephone directory, which considerably dampened her
suspicions.
It didn’t matter, however. By then the myth was
irrevocably cut into the stone of history. He was her father’s father,
the patrone of patrones. He had died, as befits the invulnerable, in bed,
twenty years before her birth. By then the blood-encrusted mace had been
passed to her own father, who embellished the throne from his Greenwich
Village castle and consolidated the Kingdom, the mythical land of Mafiosa
bounded by the East River, the Atlantic, the Hudson, and mysterious other
liquid points in the universe.
To his everlasting credit, Robert had stood before the
Padre and fought for her as if she were the lady locked in the castle
turret. A lousy no-money professor with the temerity to court and win the
heart of awesome daddy’s little girl. "We want no part of your scummy
life," he had shouted, flinging down the gauntlet in the face of the
Padre’s loyal pistolas.
Secretly, of course, she knew that the old bastard was
delighted to have her safely ensconced in the embrace of this handsome
young WASP from Boston. "Some of the boys checked the family out," the
Padre had told her.
There were always some of the boys to check things out.
And worse. Their house was always filled with them. No one, not herself or
her mother or her brothers Gino and Mario, ever ventured into the mean
streets without some of the boys within sight or earshot.
Of course they were not boys, but men like those in the
locked car—malevolent, humorless, dark-eyed, and menacing, their
Draconian energy held in check by the mythical power of the charismatic
Padre and the mumbo-jumbo code of honor that underpinned the myth. What
acts these men performed, even then, seemed outside the pale of what
ordinary mortals did to survive. Doing business, the Padre called it. She
was never certain what that meant, only that it was violent and rapacious.
Whatever all that Gothic energy was supposed to produce,
it couldn’t have been money alone. The Padronellis had lived modestly in
a two-story brick house in that corner of Greenwich Village known as
Little Italy.
Yet the enterprise had claimed her two older brothers
and, one might speculate, her mother as well. A grieving heart also kills,
she had discovered. Suddenly she shook her head, hoping the movement would
dislodge the memories.
She resented the six men for having induced them,
looking their way suddenly, catching the metallic glint of sunbeam on
metal, another familiar image engraved in memory. Not that. Was her
imagination running away with her? Go play with your dolly, she ordered
herself, reaching out to once again ruffle Joey’s thick sandy hair.
But the image had induced a sense of discomfort. The men
in the car and all her resultant memories had taken the patience out of
the exercise. She now resented her husband’s reluctance to meet their
time frame. Friend or no friend, his obligation was still to his family
first, one of the few inherited values she had preserved.
She looked toward the museum entrance. The official
caravan of three shiny Mercedes limousines with little Egyptian flags
perched on their fenders waited as chauffeurs watched the entrance for
emerging signs of their VIP guest. Maria assumed that the usual security
types would be inside protecting their charge as he poked around the
mummies and sculptures of animal-faced deities of the old Egyptian
dynasties.
There was no escaping the signs of tightening security
and paranoia that had gripped the government. It was no secret that the
fanatic Islamic Brotherhood made life difficult for the moderate posture
of the Egyptian President.
Signs of the Islamic fundamentalist tide were everywhere
in the city. One could see frightening anti-Western graffiti slogans on
walls and in handbills scattered on the city streets like confetti. From
the American press, she read occasional stories of murders, kidnappings,
and student riots, echoes of which filtered through the walls of their
comfortable apartment in Cairo and their rented villa in Alexandria.
No cause for anxiety, Robert had soothed. This was Egypt
not Lebanon. Americans were not being plucked off the streets or murdered
in airplanes.
For her part, she managed to blithely eschew most
information that contained reports of violence and bloodshed. One does not
grow up as the daughter of a Mafia boss without acquiring certain
protective characteristics. Think it’s easy, she had asked herself ad
infinitum, to be perpetually balanced on the razor’s edge between pride
and loathing, between profound love and dark uneasy guilt?
Robert also had the wisdom to accept the fact of the
fierce mutual love between father and daughter. Maria and her father spoke
frequently on the phone, an achievement in itself, considering the
reliability of the Egyptian telephone system. If Joey was out on some
school project she would have to catalog his routine and the events of his
young life. The Padre doted on every word. A baby tooth gone. An "A"
on a test. A clever retort. Apparently the stuff of grandfatherly ecstasy.
"Mommy. When is Daddy coming?" Joey whined. His tone
mirrored her own thoughts.
"Soon."
But soon didn’t seem early enough and her voice lacked
conviction. Joey shrugged, shook his head, and pouted. Again she looked
toward the museum’s entrance. Not far from the limousines, a young boy
in striped pajamas squatted next to a ramshackle ice-cream cart. The boy
sat staring into space, his eyes transfixed in an attitude that the
Egyptians called kayf, staring into nothingness. She felt Joey’s
tug on her arm.
"Absolutely not," she said without looking at the
boy. No explanation was required. Eating ice cream purchased from a street
vendor was like playing Russian roulette with one’s stomach.
"I have to go peepee," Joey said.
She looked down at his sweaty little face and smiled. He
could, of course, have tinkled against the car’s tire, a favorite habit
in this part of the world. Not the grandson of the great Padre, she told
herself with a pursed smile, as she grasped Joey’s hand and started
moving toward the museum’s entrance.
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