Page 54 of Nobody's Fool

I look at him. I don’t say anything. I just look at him. And he knows. “Oh damn.” He leans back and pats the area beneath the bow in his tie. “Tell me.”

I do. I quickly tell him about the class, about Anna showing up, about following her, about our confrontation at the Times Square theater, all of it. As I do, my mind keeps flashing back to that long-distance call from Spain, the panic in my father’s normally smooth voice:

“Just go to the airport. Right now. Don’t talk to anyone. Get on the next plane home. Or at least, to the USA. I don’t care what city…”

My father taps his finger on the table as he listens. When I finish, he says, “I won’t insult you by asking if you’re sure it’s the same girl.”

I don’t reply.

He keeps tapping. “You realize, of course, this is good news. It means you didn’t…”

I feel something welling up inside me, but what he is saying is true. I had wondered about the truth and considered every possibility after stumbling away from that “dead” body, after realizing I didn’t have my wallet or phone, after visiting the local police, that cop Carlos Osorio who didn’t believe me at first, and then suddenly wanted to talk to me, though I never found out why because—

“… Don’t talk to anyone. Get on the next plane to the USA. I don’t care what city—”

“But, Dad—”

“You are a brown kid in a foreign country.”

“But maybe—”

“No one cares about the truth. You have to listen to me. You’ll be blamed. Here’s my credit card number. Get on the next plane.”

I listened. I took the next flight out, which ended up going to Atlanta. By the time I arrived, my father had already arranged for me to stay with my aunt in Tulsa for a little while. Just a month. Then two. Just to be on the safe side. We kept expecting Carlos Osorio to call my house in New Jersey, kept expecting law enforcement to knock on our door with some kind of extradition warrant for me to return to Spain.

But that never happened.

We never heard from Osorio. We never read about a body being found. And once I came back from Tulsa, my father and I never talked about it again.

Dad puts down his chopsticks. “So your Anna is really Victoria Belmond.”

“Seems so.”

“So what’s your theory on all this?”

I thought again about Sherlock’s axiom warning against theorizing too quickly. “I’m not sure.”

“When we first came to this country,” my father says, “the Patty Hearst kidnapping was a big story. Do you know about it?”

I nod. I had thought about that too.

“She was nineteen when radicals kidnapped her,” Dad continues. “Soon she was making statements against her own family and holding up banks. At one point, two of her kidnappers were arrested for shoplifting. She jumped out of the getaway van and sprayed the store with machine gun rounds.”

“I remember.”

“When they found her, Hearst claimed—still claims—that she was brainwashed and coerced, even raped. But they still found her guilty. So no one fully knows the truth. Something like this might have happened to Anna… I mean, Victoria… or maybe not. She could have been forced into it. She took a lot of drugs. You told me that yourself. The dealer, the one who told you to run, he could have been the kidnapper. Or working with them. They could have kidnapped the girl and brought her to Spain and got her hooked on drugs.”

I nod. I’ve thought about this possibility already, but I can’t make myself buy it. Yes, we took drugs. Yes, a more potent chemical was probably sneaked into what we—or at least, I—took that last night. But Anna didn’t have cravings or track marks or any of that. I’d have known if she was addicted or controlled by some kind of narcotic.

Wouldn’t I?

Her best friend back then, her only friend, was our dealer, a man from the Netherlands everyone called Buzz. I had figured that Buzz was how Anna kept herself financially afloat, that she sold drugs for him or something. I didn’t look too hard into this. I was on vacation. It was new. I was having fun. Was I supposed to have done more?

It had been Buzz who first heard my scream and burst into the room.

“Oh my god, what did you do…?”

My dad put his hand on my forearm. “It’s okay, Sami.”