The Wonders (31 page)

Leon had to stand up. No one noticed except Minh because they were all immersed in their own grief, but he had to move. His whole body was knotting up. What Hap had feared had come true. Something had been wrong, but Leon had lacked the courage to authorize Hap's intervention. At least Hap had taken the initiative without authorization. And yet . . . When the negotiator began to speak again, Leon had to pace around behind the chairs to ease the contraction of his muscles.

“Two men got out of the cab of the truck. They were a hundred yards away, two twitching shadows. The third figure stayed in the truck and I couldn't see whether it was Lady. We switched on the floodlight attached to the roof of our van, but it didn't do much to illuminate the inside of the cab.”

As he listened to the negotiator talk, Leon felt as if his mind was rolling over and over, a great wave traversing the ocean. He moved to perch on the edge of the sofa, holding Minh's sweating hand in his tight grip. Her head was bowed as if sorrow had weight and was dragging it down.

“It was a cleared area near a new plantation. I had an armed man hiding in the back of my van as I always do. That's normal procedure. I've done it plenty of times, and the exchange happens like a business transaction. But Hap and I both knew something was bad when we saw the bruises in the footage, right, Hap?” The negotiator looked to Hap, who gave a slight nod, turned away. His face was gray and lumpy, a piece of pummeled lead. The negotiator went on. “Professionals wouldn't harm a hostage; that would be stupid. They get their ransom for undamaged goods. So I was already cautious. I'd made special arrangements to have a dozen armed men hidden around the exchange location, just in case. Something smelled wrong.

“So after they had gotten out and were standing beside their vehicle, I lifted the case off the seat beside me, thought better and put it down again, got out of the van, and started walking toward them. I've done this twenty, thirty times. Never for this much money, but always the same routine. We meet halfway in the no-man's-land between the cars. I make sure the hostage is okay, then we do the swap. But they set off from their vehicle without bringing the hostage, and I knew right away.” He paused, took a sip of the coffee sitting on the tray beside him, patted his face again with his hands as if to wake himself up.

“I guess I'm trying to say to you that it was probably all over before we even finalized the meet. It was Lady in the cab of the truck, but . . .”

At a signal from Hap, the negotiator went on. “When we met in the middle of the no-man's-land between the cars, I could see one of the kidnappers was trembling, and that's when I was one hundred percent sure. He was young, skinny, grubby, and obviously terrified. I told them to get Lady from the truck and bring her to me immediately or no deal. Normally I would have had the money in my case under my arm, but being already
suspicious, I'd left it in the van to give myself a bit of leeway. ‘Bring me the woman and I'll get the cash,' I said to them. The young one pulled his gun and aimed it at me. The kid was shaking so badly he could easily have shot me by mistake, and his friend saw that and grabbed the gun from him. It was stupid and frightening and the air was thick with panic. These weren't professionals, or if they were, something had happened and they were reacting very badly. It had to be the worst thing possible.”

The negotiator had whistled to his friend in the car, who jumped out and aimed his high-powered rifle at the kidnappers, who in turn ducked and raced, bent low, to the truck. The negotiator saw that when the first man jumped into the driver's seat, the third shadowy passenger who had been left in the cab slumped to the side. It had to be Kathryn, and she was clearly not conscious. The negotiator gave a silent signal to the men he had planted around the site, and when the truck took off and screeched in a U-turn to escape, it was met by a row of four masked men aiming guns at the driver. They dragged the kidnappers from the truck, but it was too late. Kathryn was already dead.

A
FTER THE NEGOTIATOR
had arranged to have Kathryn's body transported to the US, and before the police became involved, the negotiator's team took the kidnappers to a safe house in Colombia to interrogate them. The story they heard was of men faced with a phenomenon that unseated all their assumptions, the effect Kathryn had on everyone.

They would have taken any one of the three Wonders, the men said, but Kathryn had been lagging behind, easy to pick off. Everything had been calm and professional inside the plane that was flying them under the radar. Kathryn was hooded and silent. Her captors stayed alert and tense until she was secured in the house in the mountains.

Once they removed the hood and her cape inside the small room where she was imprisoned, they couldn't stop staring. For the first day, she said little and didn't resist their furtive touches of her wool. Then for no reason, they said, she began to laugh. They were already unsure, afraid they might have made a mistake in taking someone so high-profile. One of the men
smacked her when she spat at him. They slipped into an uneasy quiet, taking turns to sleep while the leader put together the ransom demand.

After the demand had been sent, Kathryn heard them talking about the ransom. She laughed and told them they should have asked for more. She told them they were stupid and amateur. One of the men brought out a bottle of rum to calm everyone down. He passed the bottle around. Soon they moved on to another bottle.

There were two kidnappers on guard and two sleeping when the cattle prod, which had only been used once for the first recording, was retrieved from another room by the youngest, most inflamed gang member. The noise of his drunken shouting woke everyone. He waved the prod in front of Kathryn as the others urged him to settle down, to remember why they were there. “She can't feel it,” he said to them, circling her like a man with a burning brand edging around a tiger. “Look at her, she's not human. She's an animal. They don't feel the things we do. See?” And he jabbed her with the prod.

The others watched as Kathryn jerked about under the electric current, then fell to the floor. One nudged her with the toe of his boot. There were now five men in the room. Three were trying to talk the other two into settling down, reminding them that this was business, that Kathryn was their meal ticket. The first young man edged around her, leaning in to look closely at her head, her pale ears. When his boot accidentally contacted her buttock her body jerked involuntarily even though she was unconscious. He jumped back, startled, then kicked her. She lay motionless.

“See?” he slurred. “It can't feel anything. It's a dumb animal.”

After a few seconds she woke, still shackled to the wall next to the camp bed in the small dank room in the mountainside
jungle. When the leader saw the facial bruising that had been hidden as she lay on the floor, he recognized they were in trouble. He had her lifted back onto the bed and tied her into a sitting position. He got on the computer and made the demand to bring forward the ransom handover, and he uploaded footage to prove she was still alive. The drunken man who had kicked her was locked in the room next door. But it wasn't long before the drunk broke out, propelled by lust and a revulsion at his own urges, and wrestled a gun from his fellow kidnapper.

“If they had taken one of you men,” the negotiator told everyone at Overington, “everything would have been different.”

Kathryn's body was flown to Overington. There was a quick private service. Rhona, who had been gifted with power of attorney for each of the Wonders when they signed up, ordered that Kathryn be cremated so that no one else could violate her body.

T
HE PROFESSIONAL COUNSELORS
failed to come up with a single consolation that Leon hadn't read in a self-help book. The household at Overington stumbled through the next few days, trying to avoid speaking about Kathryn, trying not to imagine her last moments. All they could manage was a sorrowful mask, behind which lay the immovable glutinous gray mound of their grief.

Rhona, when she finally emerged from her room, leaning on Hap, called a meeting. She asked them to bring everything personal from Kathryn's quarters. She wanted to touch Kathryn's things, hold them in her hands, sniff them and think about Kathryn, before the distant relatives who had swarmed out of nowhere when Lady Lamb went global came to lay claim to everything from the dead woman they used to despise. And who had shunned them in return.

All morning Leon and Minh carried the cosmetics and medicines and perfumes and trinkets and ornaments piece by piece from Kathryn's quarters to the floor in the common room.
Christos and Yuri brought out the capes and cloaks, the
ao dai
and the saris, the shoes. Kyle brought the jewelry trees, walking so slowly and with such a somber face he could have been a priest holding aloft burning candelabras at a requiem mass. When everything was piled in a messy heap on the carpet, Rhona pulled her chair next to the mound and lifted objects with care. She turned them over, examined them, pressed them against her face, rubbed them between her palms.

There were many cloaks in the pile. At first Kathryn had balked at wearing anything over her wool, but she came to love the cloaks. The drama of the cloak as it furled around her. The privacy against the gaze of the curious. Cloaks of rich ruby red and gold. Sea blue-green woven with alternate threads of silver and color that caught the light when she moved. Satin and silk and cotton and rayon. Some were patterned with paisley swirls and others with traditional tartans.

Christos was the first to pull on a cloak. He chose a midnight-blue velvet. Too short, of course, and not wide enough. But the neck had a long drawstring of silk plaited cord that he tied in a loose knot at his throat. He drew the cloak in close, covering his arms. He pressed his cheek to his shoulder and breathed in deeply.

“I can smell her.”

Yuri picked up her most fantastic cloak, the one she wore to impress at parties. It was the padded silk of a Chinese emperor's robe, hand-embroidered in scarlet and gold and green with the scene of a palace on a hillside and the sun rising behind it, peasants working in the fields below, their conical hats tipped against the sun's rays, pantaloons puffed out above the shimmering silver of the watery rice fields. Yuri draped it over his shoulders, and his knees buckled a little under the weight.

Rhona swung a flimsy ivory silk and antique lace cloak across her shoulders. She was too short, and it dragged behind her on
the ground. Hap shook his head, but she stared at him until he relented and picked up a denim cape, short, more of a swing jacket, and draped it across his shoulders. It made the others laugh, seeing him embarrassed in such an incongruous piece of clothing when they had only ever seen him wearing fatigues. Minh ran, still laughing, to the pile and took a cloak made of colorful braided plastic from the rubbish dumps of the Philippines that Kathryn had commissioned and paid fifty times what the makers asked.

“Kyle?” Rhona asked. He was in the corner of the room, away from the others. After the revelation about the leaks, even though he had continued to work for the Wonders, he had distanced himself, spent even less time with the household than before. “It's okay. Really, hon. You know, Kathryn told me she was sorry she couldn't be what you wanted. She'd forgiven you for the leaks. We all accepted, in the end at least, that they had worked for us.”

Kyle turned his face to the wall beside him. He lifted his hand to his brow. His Adam's apple was bobbing up and down.

“Oh, darling.” Rhona picked up a pea-green velvet cloak and took it over to Kyle. She arranged it over his shoulders and pulled it tight so it swaddled him while he stood passively, hunched over, weeping. Leon felt the familiar rise of a swollen sob in his chest. How badly he had misjudged Kyle. Kyle had been devoted to Kathryn from the first moment he met her. It was as simple as that.

“What about you, Leon?” Minh grasped his arm and led him to the pile. The plastic braid of her cloak rustled as she walked. Leon had a sudden memory of Kathryn striding in front of him into a New York penthouse where a private show was to be held. The cloak hissed and crackled as she moved, and when they reached the doorway where a servant in white tails was bowing as he held open the sturdy oak door, she turned to Leon and laughed. “Should I tell them that this cloak came out of a garbage dump?”