The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid

  “Hello,” said Charlie to the man. “I’m traveling with my father. He’s over with our luggage. He’s asked me to purchase passage for two to Bogotá, Colombia.”

  “Certainly,” said the desk clerk. Using a key attached to his belt, the clerk unlocked a drawer beneath the desk and slid it open. He pulled out a rectangular pad of paper and set it on the desktop. Charlie glanced down at it; it was a sheaf of empty boarding passes.

  “The seven o’clock flight,” said Charlie.

  The clerk flipped open a large, spiral-bound book and began poring through it. “Ah, yes,” he said. “There are still seats available.”

  Just then a ruckus broke out. Someone was shouting in a loud, accusatory tone. Some ten feet behind Charlie, a young Arab boy was tussling with a man in a sports coat.

  “He’s got it right there, on his wrist,” the boy shouted. “Thief! Voleur!”

  The Air France clerk, hearing this commotion, apologized briefly to Charlie and ran over to help mediate the confrontation that was currently taking place right in front of his counter. The pad of empty boarding passes had been left.

  Charlie turned around to spectate; Amir was holding on to the man’s arm, keeping him a reluctant captive while the Air France clerk waved over the airport security. “What has happened?” asked the clerk, in English.

  “He stole my friend’s watch,” said Amir. “I saw that man bump into him. Next thing I know, I look over and he’s wearing his watch!”

  Charlie walked quickly to Amir’s side. “What’s going on?”

  “Where’s your watch, Charlie?” asked Amir. He reached over and pushed up the sleeve of Charlie’s left arm; his wrist was bare.

  “It’s gone!” shouted Charlie. “My Rolex! My father gave it to me!”

  “He took it,” said Amir, pointing at the man. “I saw him bump up against you. I saw it happen.”

  “I did not,” said the man, aghast. “I did no such thing.”

  “Show us your wrist,” demanded Amir. When the man refused, he said again, “Come on, show us your wrist, then.”

  Sporting a look of disbelief, the man conceded and pushed back the sleeve of his jacket. There, on his wrist, was Charlie’s silver watch. The man looked as surprised to see it there as anyone. The airport security pushed forward; the man quickly fumbled with the snap and dropped it to the floor as if it were a poisonous snake. “I—I . . . ,” he stammered, “I have no idea how such a thing . . . I don’t know how that got there.”

  Charlie knelt down and picked up the watch from the carpet. He flipped it over in his fingers and said, “Yep, it’s mine.” By this time, a policeman had arrived. Charlie brandished the back of the watch for his benefit. “It’s got my name on it. Tenth birthday present.”

  “Arrest this man,” said Amir. The policeman moved toward the accused, prepared to follow Amir’s suggestion, before Charlie stopped him.

  “I don’t wish to press charges,” said Charlie.

  “You don’t?” asked the policeman.

  “You don’t?” asked Amir.

  “No,” said Charlie. “He seems like a nice guy. He deserves a second chance. Besides, Amir, we have a flight to make. We can’t be delayed.”

  Amir looked genuinely disappointed as the man was led away by the police officer, presumably to be asked a series of questions and to be released once it was clear that the man was not, in fact, a thief. The Air France clerk turned to Charlie and, ironing the front of his suit with his hands, said, “I do apologize for this, sir. Do you wish to complete your purchase?”

  “I need to find my father,” said Charlie. “I need to tell him what’s happened.”

  “Understandable,” said the clerk. “Please do come find me when you’re prepared to finish the transaction.”

  The man returned to his desk; Charlie watched him greet the next customer after tidying the surface of his desk. He placed the pad of boarding passes back into its secured desk drawer, though the clerk could not have ascertained that the pad was lighter by exactly two passes. Charlie and Amir quickly walked away, into the swirling crowds.

  In the men’s restroom, they squeezed into a toilet stall. Charlie produced the two purloined boarding passes; Amir searched his pockets for a writing utensil.

  “Shoot,” he said. “You got something to write with?”

  Charlie gave a sardonic smile before reaching into his pocket and pulling out the Sheaffer Imperial. They shared a look, briefly, before the pen once again traded hands.

  Charlie had the necessary information written on the back of his hand; he’d gleaned it from one of the departure boards in the main concourse. “Bogotá, Colombia,” he said. “Flight 458. Leaving seven thirty p.m.”

  “Gate?”

  “Twelve. What should we put down for the seats?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Amir. “Call it a clerical error if we double book. What’s the flight code?”

  “Ah, right. 4B22AF9.”

  “Got it.” He handed one of the passes to Charlie. Putting the cap back on the Sheaffer Imperial, he twirled it a few times between his fingers before handing it, too, back to its rightful owner.

  “No,” said Charlie. “You should keep it. I did give it to you, after all.”

  The boy paused, holding the pen in his hand, before he flipped it into his pocket. “Thanks, Charlie.” Amir then shook his sleeve aside to read the time on the watch on his wrist. “We’ve got an hour. Care to grab a bite?”

  Charlie held out his hand.

  “What?” asked Amir.

  “Watch,” said Charlie.

  “Oh,” said Amir, undoing the Rolex’s clasp from his wrist and letting it fall into his opposing palm. He handed it back to Charlie sheepishly.

  It was to be an eighteen-hour flight, including a planned pit stop in Senegal for refueling. Charlie and Amir quietly settled in for the ride. Thankfully, the flight had been undersold and the seats they’d chosen remained unspoken for. About an hour into the flight, a stewardess distributed postcards to each of the passengers that they might keep their loved ones at home apprised of their travels. Amir handed his to Charlie and then promptly put his chair back, nestling into the headrest to sleep. Charlie looked out the window for a time, watching the patchwork of pastoral French farmland far below with its errant tufts of cotton floating between, before setting his pen to the postcard to write.

  Dear Father,

  Don’t worry about me. I’m safe. I’m sorry for everything. I’ve got to set some things to right. Home soon.

  Love, Charlie

  He reread the words a few times, his eyes straying on that word love. It was a word he’d never used in relation to his father. He imagined his father, now, sitting in his study. He imagined the sun setting, its red glow visible through the plantation blinds of the windows. He imagined that his father hadn’t turned on the lights in the room yet, and the gloom of dusk was settling on everything in the study, masking it. He imagined his father not even noticing this, sitting in his desk chair and staring out the window. He imagined the telex machine clattering away in the corner, spilling sheaves of ticker tape, unread, onto the wood-tiled floor. There was an ache in Charlie’s chest, imagining the scene, an ache he was barely able to dispel in order to appear presentable to the stewardess when she arrived to take the finished postcard.

  “It will arrive tomorrow,” explained the stewardess. “We send them from a return flight at the stopover.”

  “Thanks,” said Charlie. He then rested his head against the wall of the airplane and stared out the window as the ground below the plane became covered in a pinkish blanket of clouds. It soon disappeared altogether in blackness. He fell asleep.

  He slept fitfully, crammed against the wall of the plane and enduring the frequent heaves of turbulence that rocked the cabin. When he finally gave in to wakefulness, it was still dark. The light was on in the seat next to him; he looked over to see Amir awake and stirring cream into a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  ?
??Did you sleep?” asked Charlie groggily.

  “A bit, yeah,” said Amir. “You?”

  “I think so.”

  Amir stirred at his coffee; the cream had long since dispersed, but still he continued stirring. He seemed to be winding something, or wishing something unwound. “Not too late to back out, you know,” he said.

  “It is,” said Charlie.

  “No one’s gonna fault you for this. You’re a kid, Charlie. That was part of the reason the folder was so tight—you weren’t gonna be harmed. Kid chumps get forgiven; not so for grown-ups.”

  “I have a responsibility, Amir. I have to do it.” Charlie was implacable.

  Amir sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Then here’s the deal. We’re going to catch the bus to a village called El Toro. Some ways out of town, there’s a crossroads. At the crossroads, there’s a shack of a shop, a little bodega. That’s where I leave you, yeah? I won’t be able to get any closer to the school without being spotted. If you want me to make it out of this little caper of yours—”

  “I do,” interrupted Charlie.

  “If you want me to make it out, you don’t say a word about me. I’m not even here right now. I’m rolling out dough at Abdel Wahab right now, got it? Which is what I should be doing, anyway.” He lifted the coffee cup to his mouth and took a long slug.

  “El Toro,” prompted Charlie. “Little bodega.”

  “Right. Talk to the counter boy. Tell him you want a Coke and a lime in a paper cup.”

  “Coke and a lime . . .”

  “In a paper cup. It’s very important that you order this exact thing, yeah?”

  “Got it. In a paper cup.”

  “See, the bodega is a kind of secret receiving station for the school. No one can know where the exact location of the school is, unless they’re proper on the whiz, turned out, yeah? But occasionally someone from the straight world will show up, wanting to join or needing some help from the Headmaster. People travel from all over—all sorts of folks. They want something from the school; locals petition the school for this and that. The Headmaster does what he can.” Amir took another sip of his coffee. “Order your Coke with lime; someone will come to take you to the school. You might want to think about what you plan to do from that point on.”

  “Of course,” scoffed Charlie. “Already done.”

  Amir eyed him suspiciously.

  “I know exactly what I’m doing, Amir,” said Charlie, as if speaking it were enough to make it so. He turned his head and looked out into the blackness of the window. The hum of the airplane engine droned around them and the stewardesses walked the aisle, collecting empty glasses and finished postcards, as the sun rose somewhere, distantly, over the wing of the plane. The coast of Africa was below them; the whole Atlantic lay before them and their final destination.

  Did he? Did he know?

  Chapter

  TWENTY

  Colombia hove into sight below the plane; Charlie watched it appear, all dense forests of thick green, as far as the eye could see. The city of Bogotá grew out of this blanket of trees like a toy construction built inside some teeming native garden. It was early morning, though to Charlie it felt like time had stopped altogether. The last thirty-six hours had been such a blur, between sleeping in the alcove of the church, to finding Amir, to their binging two flights to Paris and Bogotá. Sleep no longer seemed like a thing he needed; he was neither hungry nor thirsty. He only wanted his revenge.

  They filed off the plane, two in a long line of zombielike passengers, transformed that way by the duration of the flight and the transference of time zones. The air was thick and sodden and it enveloped Charlie like cellophane as he stepped down the gangway onto the tarmac. A barrier of tall, crooked trees surrounded the landing strip; beyond them, a few high-rises dared breach the lowest-hanging clouds of a gray sky. Inside the terminal, women had laid out blankets and were selling handwoven baskets and cornhusk dolls. While the rest of the passengers waited for their luggage to be delivered, Charlie and Amir walked swiftly to the front doors of the airport. A brightly colored bus, looking as if it had seen action in both world wars and lived to tell the tale, was parked out front. Amir approached the driver and spoke to him in Spanish. When he’d had his answer, he turned to Charlie.

  “This is our bus,” said Amir.

  Charlie waved him closer and said quietly, “Do you want to steer a chump for the fare?”

  “Charlie,” said Amir. “Look around. Who you going to bing from?”

  Sure enough, a casual survey of their surroundings would be enough to quash that idea very quickly. The men and women gathering at the bus stop clearly did not have two pennies to rub together, let alone the sort of cash that would warrant them a target for two kids on the whiz. The two boys gathered the cash they had in their pockets and retreated to the currency exchange kiosk, a corrugated-tin-roofed affair, where they were given an exploitative rate on a few small stacks of pesos. Returning to the open doors of the bus, Amir paid out the full fare for the both of them.

  “El Toro,” the bus driver repeated to Amir, once he’d counted out the cash he’d been given and had issued two ticket stubs. “Sí.”

  The ancient, lumbering vehicle made several more stops before it hit the open road, taking on a wild cross section of this Latin American country’s people: young men traveling for work, businessmen in suits they tried desperately to keep clean in the bus’s down-at-heel environment, women with crying babies, women with quiet babies, old native men in colorful garb, a young married couple cradling two chickens. Charlie almost forgot the near-impossible quest before him while watching each of these fellow bus riders and imagining what fantastic story they might engender in his writing notebook.

  Amir and Charlie were among the first passengers to board the bus; they were the last remaining when, some two hours later, the bus trundled into a dirt square in the middle of a few forlorn buildings and came to a wheezing stop. Charlie peered out of the mud-streaked window, marveling at the wild green jungle that rose up around the little hamlet like it was about to swallow everything whole.

  “El Toro!” shouted the driver from the front of the bus.

  Amir gave Charlie an elbow in the rib. “This is us,” he said.

  “This is El Toro?” asked Charlie, astounded that so few structures could constitute a village.

  The driver must’ve registered the shock in Charlie’s voice, because he let out a loud guffaw and said something, presumably demeaning, in Spanish. Amir didn’t bother to translate it for his friend.

  They stepped down into the dirt of El Toro like two astronauts newly arrived on the moon. Their Colombian surroundings enveloped them; Charlie felt as if he were hallucinating, so great were the heaviness of the humid air and the gravity of his journey bearing down on his mind. The boys’ jet lag only contributed to this feeling of alienness. Before they’d barely touched down, the bus doors slammed closed behind them and the ancient vehicle lumbered away, its gears grinding audibly as it disappeared into the jungle. A spray of mud from one of the tires shellacked Charlie’s left pant leg—but at this point, what did it really matter?

  A flock of chickens pecked at the bare dirt of the road. A man in a cowboy hat appeared from the doorway of one of the shanties and eyed them suspiciously.

  “This way,” said Amir quietly. “Let’s do this fast.”

  The road through the village jogged a few times before it branched in two just beyond the last structure; they followed the leftward tine of this Y intersection, opposite the one their bus had negotiated. A few more hovels appeared in the trees periodically, by the side of the road, but soon they were beyond all sign of human habitation. The mountains, thick with alien-looking trees, loomed about them. The gray clouds hung low. Mist clung to the topmost branches of the forest canopy. Birdsong, strange and loud, echoed through the valleys and ravines. It was an ominous scene. Charlie, for the first time in his and Amir’s wild odyssey, felt something like fear and loneliness.

/>   They walked for several miles, dodging the puddles and fallen tree limbs that made the road more like an obstacle course than any kind of usable thoroughfare. Charlie’s pants had become thoroughly checkered with mud flecks and his dress shirt had become torn at the elbows. He’d begun to look like someone who’d survived a bear attack at an awards ceremony. With every mile they walked, Amir became increasingly agitated, his eyes ever straying into the dense brush on the side of the road. His pace had quickened; whenever Charlie had fallen too far behind, he would whisper some loud admonition to keep up, to keep pace. Charlie did his best to accommodate his guide.

  They must’ve climbed in elevation, as the mist that had hovered only in the treetops had descended on the road itself, blotting out their surroundings and enveloping them in a dense, warm haze. Walking the road was not unlike navigating some thick cloud bank.

  They didn’t speak for some time; after a few more miles had passed, Amir said tensely, “So you’re just not going to tell me, is that it?”

  “What?” asked Charlie.

  “Your plan.”

  “I wouldn’t want to disappoint you,” said Charlie.

  “I get it.”

  “You do?”

  “You don’t actually have a plan.”

  Charlie didn’t answer.

  “Do you?” pressed Amir, his voice rising.

  Charlie chose to remain silent, his eyes intent on the road in front of him. He’d had a lot of time to ponder Amir’s question. In fact, he happened to share his friend’s curiosity. Thing was, he was still so exhilarated by the fact that he was doing something, that he had, you’ll perhaps be surprised to know, not entirely made up his mind as to what he was doing. You may know the feeling: when you’re stuck on something or trying to take on a particularly daunting obstacle, even the illusion of progress can provide some relief. For instance: say you decided that you wanted to write a novel, but realized as you began that novel writing, despite its appearances, is no easy task. And so you press open the first blank page of your composition notebook, write CHAPTER ONE in your very best penmanship at the top margin, and call it good for the day, satisfied that at least some progress was made.