The Catalonian Candidate
by Bruce Cantwell
Part Two - The Trojan Horse
Intro Extra
Don't Trust This Horse
‘O unhappy citizens, what madness?
Do you think the enemy’s sailed away? Or do you think
any Greek gift’s free of treachery? Is that Ulysses’s reputation?
Either there are Greeks in hiding, concealed by the wood,
or it’s been built as a machine to use against our walls,
or spy on our homes, or fall on the city from above,
or it hides some other trick: Trojans, don’t trust this horse.
Whatever it is, I’m afraid of Greeks even those bearing gifts.’
Virgil, The Aeneid Book II
Chapter 10
The Wrong Man
“My name is Michael Santore.”
The woman rose abruptly and stepped back. She looked from one captor to the other. She seemed uncertain what to do next. That’s when Santore spotted the machete in her hand and thought his situation could go one of three ways. They could use him as a hostage to get to Kaplan. They could let him go. They could lop off his head to cover their mistake.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” the woman asked, her voice attempting bravado, her body language less assured.
“My wallet is in my pants,” said Santore. “You’ll find my ID in there.”
She glared at Travis.
“He’s Kaplan,” said the chauffeur. “He had Kaplan’s phone.”
“Kaplan gave me his phone so that I could pick up the senator’s speech,” Santore said.
The other guy moved to the corner of the storage space to Santore’s left where his clothes were balled up. He took out the wallet and looked at the ID.
“Michael O. Santore,” the other guy confirmed. Santore took some comfort hearing the third captor speak English. Although English-speakers were as adept as non-English speakers at committing senseless acts of violence, he was less squeamish about being shot than beheaded.
“I am soooo sorry,” apologized the woman. She dropped the machete. Travis and the other guy hastily took off their robes and scarves. It relieved Santore to see their faces. Beneath the robes, they dressed like Portlanders. Hoodies, jeans, running shoes. But Santore flinched when they drew box cutters from their jeans and came at him.
“Let me do that,” said the woman. She took the box cutter from Travis and knelt to cut the duck tape securing Santore’s legs. The other guy freed his wrists.
Santore broke down in tears. It surprised everyone, Santore most of all. His upper body heaved with sobs. He felt the woman’s hand on his cheek. Her face was close, but his eyes now avoided hers, a boy far too old to cry.
“Did we hurt you?”
He felt compelled to answer the question correctly, which involved taking stock. The blow to the back of the head must have hurt, but he had lost consciousness so quickly that he could no longer recall it. There was a generalized ache in his head when he came to. That had been crowded out by so many other sensations. Numbness in his wrists would go away. The gut punches had hurt, but the pain didn’t last. He was still cold and wet, but he wasn’t injured. At the moment, his prevailing emotion was more of relief than of injury.
“I’ll live,” Santore said.
Saying those words and not having them immediately contradicted filled him with such a rush of relief that he repeated them. “I’ll live.”
This time he could see through his tear-filled eyes that the woman looked relieved. He needed that confirmation for him to fully believe it.
He tensed again as the door clattered open. The storage space flooded with light.
“Don’t shoot!” Santore cried reflexively, now fearing a trigger-happy SWAT or special ops team more than his benign captors.
As he rose from his chair, hands in the air, Agent Butterfield, the retired marine with whom Santore had worked to arrange security for the evening’s event, approached.
He handed Santore a bath towel. “Dry yourself with this.”
It seemed an obvious statement, but under such confounding circumstances, simple instructions were very helpful.
“Thank you,” said Santore.
Butterfield ordered the other guy to give Santore his tux. He obeyed.
“We’ll give you some privacy to get dressed. Pee in one of the buckets. Open the door when you’re ready.”
Butterfield shepherded the captors out of the unit and closed the door. Santore removed his wet underwear, tossed it into one of the empty buckets, dried himself with the towel, and put his tux back on, minus the tie. He’d thought of Butterfield’s words about the bucket as a suggestion, but as his body unclenched, his bladder followed orders. He remembered the dinner and looked at his watch. A couple of hours had passed. He’d missed the evening’s speakers but might still get back in time for some schmoozing.
When he opened the door, he was face to face with George Kaplan for the second time that evening. The campaign manager, now appropriately dressed for the fundraising dinner, couldn’t have looked more out of place here.
“Are you all right?” asked Kaplan.
Santore nodded.
“I’m awfully sorry about this.”
Stepping into the bracing February air, Santore’s mind raced to make sense of his surroundings. The harsh light came from the headlights of three Chevy Suburbans. His eyes adjusted enough to find the faces of his captors standing by their stretch limo. They looked contrite. The woman had put her robe back on, probably for modesty’s sake, but not the headscarf or veil.
The whole absurd scene now struck him funny. He started to laugh.
The other guy, who appeared to be in his mid-thirties and of the same uncertain ethnicity as Travis, sheepishly approached Santore offering up his hand. “I am Edouard. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
Santore had completely forgotten his compromised hand. Edouard grasped it firmly. Santore winced. Edouard released it instantly and backed away.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No hard feelings,” said Santore.
“I am Mateo,” said the chauffeur formerly known as Travis. He didn’t offer his hand after witnessing Edouard’s error but held it up in a little friendly wave. “Sorry about the water, too.”
“All dry,” Santore said.
The woman approached him but could not look him in the eye. “I am Desiree. Forgive me.”
“Forgive me,” mocked Edouard. She lunged at him and fought like a cat. Edouard protected his eyes and groin until Mateo could pin her arms behind her back. “You always come up with these hare-brained schemes,” she spat. “Why can’t you make an honest living?”
“You’re one to talk,” Edouard countered.
“You said people did this for kicks. You said they got enjoyment out of it! I do not see any enjoyment here.”
Santore thought of telling her that her role in the abduction had given him pleasure but thought better of it. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” he said.
“You didn’t even set up the credit card payment right,” she said to Edouard. “All this was for nothing!”
“Check on that,” said Kaplan to an assistant.
The assistant instantly went over to talk to Edouard.
Santore felt a hand on his back. “The senator would like a word with you,” said Butterfield.
Butterfield led him to Guy Morton’s Suburban. Santore slid into the back seat beside him, and Butterfield closed the door leaving the two men alone.
“What are you drinking?” asked Morton.
This unanticipated private meeting with the senator seemed more surreal than the abduction.
“Scotch and soda?”
Morton made two scotch and sodas from the mini bar as he spoke. “Here’s the story. It was our third fundraiser of the day, probably the twelfth, thirteenth of the week, and that was just that week. You can imagine what it’s like listening to this old man blather on and on reusing the same focus-group-tested bullet points in various combinations at three meals a day and cocktails. Hell, I’m a politician, I’m in love with the sound of my own voice, but can you imagine what it’s like to be my campaign manager? That evening, the TV was tuned to some cable news show and one of those deplorable hostage videos came on. George said to me, ‘Guy, sometimes I would willingly trade places with one of those poor bastards if it got me out of a fundraiser.’”
Santore sipped his drink.
“What with George’s birthday coming up, and what with George being a man who has everything, I thought to myself, ‘Self? What is it George would like more than anything?’”
Santore smiled.
“I remembered meeting that charming young woman somewhere in central Washington. We hit three separate harvest festivals that day, so I can’t remember where, but it was a lovely October day. I remember that much. Sunny, mid-sixties. I was in shirt-sleeves. I genuinely like farmers. They’re good people. I’d say they are closer to the earth than we are, but the way we’ve complicated our farm bill over the decades, they have to pay more attention to our D.C. shenanigans than mother nature. And those poor migrant workers who sweat and toil to get those lovely, ripe, delicious Washington apples from those orchards to our tables: I like them too. I know most of them can’t vote, but while they’re here, they’re part of the community.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Santore, who relied upon a fair number of undocumented workers for inexpensive labor himself. They clinked glasses.
“I asked that young woman if she had a family. She said yes. I asked her if her family owned a farm. I was pretty sure that I knew the answer, but I did ask. She came from a family of pickers. Since it was late October, I wondered if there were more crops to pick after apple season. She confessed to me that there wasn’t much work.
“I wished her family luck, and would have left it at that, but before I could, she told me that during the winter her family worked as extreme kidnappers. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“Not before tonight,” said Santore.
“Neither had I,” said the senator. “She immediately produced a postcard for her business with one of those QR codes on it. Just out of curiosity, I went to her website, and I won’t say that I was shocked, but I was surprised.”
Santore nodded.
“The menu listed various kinds of bindings, hands only, hands and feet, gagged or un-gagged, tossed in the trunk or tossed in the back seat, evasive maneuvers, light shock, sleep deprivation, water boarding, fully clothed or stripped to the skivvies, mild punishment. She explained they were careful not to cross over into sexual gratification because that put them in competition with prostitution. That could get them in trouble with organized crime.
“Ordinarily, I would have squirreled that little episode away as an amusing campaign anecdote had George not expressed a preference for abduction over fundraisers. Today’s his birthday, and he already has enough ties. Unfortunately…”
“No harm done,” said Santore. “Now we both have a story to tell.”
“After the election,” Morton suggested.
“Of course.”
“And that’s all there was to it,” Santore told Walter Forbes and Jane Greer as they sipped iced tea on the private boat deck of his Lake Oswego McMansion.
“Thank you for seeing us,” said Forbes.
“No worries,” said Santore. “I’m behind Morton one-hundred-percent.”
As far as Forbes could tell, Santore had faithfully explained his participation in the hostage video that Greer found on Kaplan’s YouTube account with a customized search on his phone’s IP address. Though Forbes believed Santore’s story, he didn’t believe that’s all there was to it.