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CHAPTER ELEVEN

I’d just taken my first step down to the subway, hurrying to catch the next train, which, according to my app, would leave in three minutes, when Polly called me back.

“They’re on the highway,” she says. “I think she’s heading into the city.”

“Are you sure she’s in the car?”

“We think so, yeah. She’s sitting in the back. A male is driving. Dark blue Cadillac Escalade. Connecticut plates. Gary and I are following. I’ll drop a pin so you can track us.”

I check my phone when I hear the proverbial and literal pin drop. Their car is heading west on 95 toward the George Washington Bridge. If she’d stayed in the Greenwich area, it would have made sense for me to drive up and try to confront her. But now that Maybe Victoria is this far on the move, it is better to stay still and see where she is going. I head into the simply named Hot Bagel Shop and order up a sesame bagel with a schmear—Molly taught me that word—of whitefish spread and cream cheese. I keep an eye on the pin drop. When the car takes the Hutchinson River Parkway, I figure the odds are Polly is correct about her heading into New York City.

Twenty minutes later, New York City is confirmed when the car pulls onto West Forty-Eighth Street heading toward Broadway. The traffic is, as expected, stop and go, mostly stop. I’m still standing at the counter at the bagel shop. A few minutes later, Polly says, “Photo incoming.”

I check my WhatsApp. The little wheel spins, and the photo comes into focus.

A woman wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses is stepping out of a Cadillac Escalade. She’s innocuously dressed in blue jeans, a gray sweatshirt, white sneakers.

It’s Anna/Victoria.

“That’s her, right?” Penny says.

“Yes.”

“I’m following her on foot,” Polly says. “We are in Times Square. Gary is going to continue following the Escalade.”

“I’m on my way,” I say and rush back to the subway. I look for any train heading toward the Times Square area. There are always plenty. I jump on the subway and check the app. There’s spotty service down here so I’m not getting an update. When I arrive at Forty-Second Street/Broadway, I head up into the sunlight and the cacophony, and the app springs back to life.

The pin is four blocks away.

I call Polly. “What’s she doing?”

“Just walking.”

“How about the car?”

“Hold on, let me link in Gary.” A few seconds pass. “Gary?”

“The driver parked the Escalade in a garage,” Gary says. “He’s walking toward you guys, I think.”

“Do you have eyes on him?” I ask.

“Negative,” Gary says. “I figured it would be smarter to double-park and wait by the garage. When they come back, I’ll be back on them.”

“Smart thinking,” I say.

“Thanks, Teach.”

“Kierce,” Polly says, “how far away are you?”

“Three blocks and closing,” I say.

I look at the screen as I move, which is no easy feat in Times Square. It’s still fairly early in the morning, but the costumed beggars or whatever you call them are already out in force. As anyone who has visited Times Square in the past decade knows, it is flooded with costumed Batmans and Spider-Mans and Olafs and Minions and Elmos and Mickey Mouses (Mice?), hoping for tourists to take a photo with them in exchange for fees or tips. I always find this particularly weird. Mickey Mouse is about Disney, right? Not New York City. Why would you want a photograph with Mickey Mouse here? And these costumed cretins may seem harmless, but I know from my time on the force, they create a lot of crime. Some tourists snap photos not realizing that Mickey expects a tip for that and when you don’t pay, it leads to intimidation and even violence. Some of those hidden by costumes get overly “handsy,” if you catch my drift, and there is a fine line between quirky and creepy, or maybe the line isn’t so fine, but too often, the whole experience lands in the creepy and flirts over toward the downright criminal.

I wish I’d brought earphones, but I hadn’t, so I have to keep the phone next to my ear.

“Oh, one other thing,” Gary says.

“What?”

“The driver.”

“What about him?”

“Stiff gait. Too big a sports coat. Shifty eyes. I think he may be carrying.”

“He probably doubles as her security,” Polly says.

“We know Belmonds like their privacy,” Gary adds.

“Hold up,” Polly says.

“What is it?” I ask.

Polly says, “I’m on Forty-Second Street in front of the New Amsterdam Theatre and… Gary, is the driver wearing a camelhair sports coat?”

I’m getting bumped by too many people, so I press against the window of a Red Lobster that feels like it’s coated with drawn butter. I stick to it. Diners stare at me. I check the phone and see that I’m within a hundred yards of Anna. She’s right here on Forty-Second Street. I hurry my pace.

And suddenly, there she is. I pull up.

Anna. Victoria. Whatever.

She’s talking with Camelhair Coat Driver, though I know him by another dumb in-my-head nickname.

Gun Guy. He’s Gun Guy from the other night at the estate.

My hands form fists. I owe that dude a sucker punch.

They finish talking under the marquee. There is a big crowd now flowing into the theater. Gun Guy opens one of the doors. Anna walks through a metal detector—a metal detector to see a Broadway musical—what a country—and enters. Gun Guy watches through the windowed door. Satisfied, he moves away.

I say into the phone, “Polly?”

“I’ll stay on him.”

Gary asks, “Could you see anything, Polly?”

“She went inside and got her ticket scanned,” Polly says. “I guess she’s seeing the musical.”

Gary: “Is it Hamilton ?”

“No.”

“ Wicked ?”

“No.”

“Should I keep guessing, Polly, or do you want to tell me?”

“Guys,” I say.

I’m not sure of the move here. I head toward the box office. A security guard has me go through the metal detector. I head over to the box office window. “Any seats available?” I ask.

The guy behind the window could only look more bored if he were unconscious. He sighs and says, “For when?”

“The current show?”

“Sold out.”

“Standing room?”

He frowns. “What part of ‘sold out’ is confusing to you?”

“Boy, you’re a turn-the-world-on-with-your-smile kind of guy,” I say. “Thank you for just brightening my day.”

He manages to hide the bleeding psychological wound made by my rapier wit. I head back outside and stand under the marquee. In the old days you might find some guy, usually in a shiny Mets jacket, scalping an extra ticket. No more. Even safe-scuzzy moments like whispering to a strange guy “Got a ticket?” have been ruined by apps and the internet.

So I wait for the show to end. Or should I say we wait.

Polly follows Gun Guy to the Yard House, where he orders a burger, fries, and a beer. Gary stays in his double-parked car by the garage. I first go to one of those crap souvenir stores and buy a pair of AirPod knockoffs. I hook them up to my Bluetooth and test them with Polly and Gary. The treble is terrible, but I can hear them fine. I spend the next couple of hours waiting for the musical to end. I try to sneak in during the intermission, but I get rebuffed. I take a few moments to think about all this. By all accounts, Victoria Belmond is a recluse. She has done no interviews since her return from kidnapping. Every once in a while, a journalist will try to track her down, but by and large, journalists have moved on to easier prey. If this happened back in the seventies or eighties, like, say, Patricia Hearst, the story would still be worth pursuing. Sure, people might still have an interest in Victoria Belmond, but it isn’t as though it would be an everyday thing. Stories no longer capture our collective attention that way. We don’t all watch a kid being rescued from falling down a well anymore, and I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or bad. Add into all this the obvious: Big money eases the way. The Belmond family has been willing to spend a great deal of capital to keep Victoria out of the spotlight. No one really knows whether she eventually remembered anything about her time in captivity or not. Is her mind still a blank—or did she process it all—or heck, has she been faking amnesia? I saw one rumor online that Victoria Belmond eventually remembered everything, and rather than have the kidnapper arrested, the wealthy Belmond family hired a mercenary group to handle the justice in their own brutal way.

I doubt that, but who knows?

Point is, it has been years, and no one is really paying much attention anymore, so trips like this into Manhattan are no longer a big security risk for her, I imagine. If anything, it is wiser to hide in plain sight. She lives her life, it seems, albeit quietly and uniquely, blending the clandestine domicile on the enormous Connecticut estate with seemingly the freedom to enjoy a Broadway show in the Big Apple.

I wonder what her life has been like. I wonder whether this is really my Anna from Spain or just a case of mistaken identity. I wonder about what really happened that awful morning in the Costa del Sol. Not to get too deep here, but part of me is still there, in that bed, waking up in the bright sunlight and screaming, screaming still, screaming so that even now, nearly a quarter century later, I still feel, more than hear, the echoes.

See what I mean about getting too deep?

After I flew home from Málaga Airport, once I listened to my panicked father and hurried to the airport and boarded the first plane out to the United States, I found sleep elusive. I don’t know about PTSD or something like that, but I kept dreaming I was waking up next to a faceless dead girl. I couldn’t move on. I would check the Spanish news for updates, but there was nothing. It was then I started to drink. Just a little. Just to help me close my eyes. I had no ambition left, so I deferred medical school for a year. Then two years. Then the little drinking became a lot of drinking. I didn’t go to med school. I forgot about all my plans, my lifelong goal of becoming a physician, all of that lost in a bottle with a dead girl I now know is very much alive.

A little more than two hours after the show began, Polly dings me. I hit answer and we are all on the same call. Polly says, “The driver paid his tab. He’s on the move, walking back toward the theater.”

That means I can’t just hang out here anymore. Gun Guy will see and probably recognize me. I head toward the ticket scanner/security guard on the other side of the marquee, the one who hasn’t already seen me try to enter. “Can I ask you a favor?” I say.

“You can ask, I guess.”

“I went to this play with my niece Pammy last Thursday.”

Note: When you lie, add specifics. Names. Dates.

“Okay.”

“Anyway, Pammy loved it and so I was hoping that I could just quickly run inside and buy her a souvenir sweatshirt.”

“I think they sell them at that shop next door.”

“They do,” I say, “but they’re pretty shoddy knockoffs. Also—and I know this is corny—but I want to get her the official sweatshirt from the theater itself. You know. As a real memento.”

The guard has heard it all before, but he’s also a human being. “You have to wait for the show to let out.”

“Of course,” I say. “I mean, I know it gets crowded so maybe the moment the show ends?”

It takes a little more haranguing, but the ticket scanner agrees. When the show lets out and the crowd begins to rise from their seats, he lets me in. I hurry over toward the souvenir vendor and feign studying the various items. The ticket scanner loses interest in me as the theatergoers stream out in a waterfall of flesh. There are side exits off the orchestra seats, I see now, and I worry Anna may depart that way. I swim upstream, against the tide of musical emigrants, so I can try to position myself to see all exits. I have my new “AirTods” in my ears, so I check in with my students.

“Polly?” I say.

“I’m here,” she says.

“Where is the driver now?”

“He’s pacing out front. Under the marquee.”

Okay, good. That means Anna will most likely be exiting out the front. My eyes scan the crowd while I’m also trying to blend in. I don’t want Anna to see me first and bolt again. That part still confuses me, by the way. Anna or Victoria or Whoever came to my class. Not the other way around. That couldn’t be a coincidence. My class is in the old public bathhouse down on the Lower East Side—that’s not a place you happen by or casually stroll through.

She had come to see me. She had sought me out.

The crowd surged and then began to thin out. Still no sign of Anna. I wondered whether I had missed her. As I said before, there are plenty of exits. I can’t keep my eyes on all of them. I move closer to the standing-room area and look down at the stage.

That’s when I spot her.

She is still in her seat, facing the stage, her back to me. She seems to be still watching the show. Or something. I don’t know what. The dark maroon curtain is closed now. I can’t see her face, but I wonder what the deal is, why she remains in the seat. Does she not want to deal with the crowds? Was she emotionally overwhelmed by the musical? Does she just want to spend a few moments to soak in the grandeur of the ornate art nouveau interior? Does she want to prolong the time she has alone in this quiet theater before Gun Guy bustles her back to her prison-mansion?

I have no idea. But I see no reason to wait.

I start down the aisle toward her. Her seat is primo, center orchestra, eight or ten rows back. Three, four hundred dollars at minimum. There are a few stragglers, maybe twenty or thirty people left, but there is no one near Anna.

I whisper “Going on mute” into the AirTod microphone and hit the mute button.

Polly says, “Driver is checking his watch, starting to look impatient.”

I keep moving until I reach her row. Anna’s seat is third from the end. I slide in quickly and take the chair next to hers. When I land, she startles and looks at me.

“Anna,” I say.

“Stay away from me.”

She starts to rise. I gently but firmly put my hand on her forearm, trying to figure a way to keep her in place but not wanting to use force. This isn’t easy and I realize I’m probably crossing a line here.

I try again. “Anna—”

“Why do you keep calling me that? That’s not my name.”

I meet her eyes now. In my mind, there is no doubt it’s Anna from Fuengirola, but I also recognize the very human capability of deluding ourselves via our own wants and narratives. So I work to stay neutral.

“Would you prefer,” I say, “that I call you Victoria?”

Her eyes flare and settle. I hit a nerve.

“How did you find me?” she whispers.

“I followed you from my class,” I say. “Didn’t your security guards tell you they threw me off your estate?”

Confusion crosses her face. “What are you talking about?”

“Your house in Connecticut. I tried cutting through the woods, but your driver came at me with a Doberman and a gun.”

Anna shakes her head. “I don’t know you,” she insists, but I hear doubt in her voice. She starts to rise again. When I tighten my grip, she glares at it and then at me. No choice. I have to let her go. She stands. I do the same. I follow her down the row of seats toward the opposite aisle.

“We met in Spain,” I say.

“I’ve never been to Spain.”

“Fuengirola, to be precise. On the Costa del Sol. We met there twenty-two years ago.”

She continues to move, shaking her head almost as though she’s trying to convince herself.

“You’re mistaken.”

“It was you,” I say. “I thought you were dead.”

She shakes her head harder.

“You went by the name Anna. We met on the dance floor of the Discoteca Palmeras. You had an apartment nearby.”

I see her hesitate now.

“I checked the dates,” I say. “It would have been about three years after you first”—I can’t find the right word so I settle for—“disappeared.”

In my earphones I hear Polly say, “Driver is talking to ticket taker. Looks like he’s heading inside.”

Shit.

Anna says to me, “I’ve never seen you before.”

“Then why did you come to my class?”

“I can’t stay,” she says. “He’ll be worried.”

“Who?” But there’s no point. I have a business card in my hand, which only has my name and phone number on it. “Take this.”

“What? No.”

“Call me,” I say.

She shakes her head, but she also takes the card. Then she looks at me and says, “You’re not lying? You really knew me?”

Before I can say yes, I hear Polly in my earphone: “The driver is inside now.”

“Your driver,” I say to her. “He’s in the theater.”

“Duck down!” she says in a panic. I do. I drop down to my knees and stay low as I hear that same Gun Guy voice call out, “Hey, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Anna says quickly. “I just… I’m sorry. This theater is just so beautiful, you know.”

“Uh-huh,” he says. Then: “We better go.”

Anna nods. Then, before she disappears up the aisle, she looks down at me and whispers, “Don’t tell anyone you saw me. Please.”