Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (14 page)

Soon, I had picked up an unwelcome guest, a red-eyed man reeking of alcohol who kept grabbing my shoulder. I jerked myself away but the man persisted.

“You're so pretty. Pretty eyes,” he slurred in Spanish.

I tried to ignore him, but he grabbed my hand. This had happened to me before and I had found that the best tactic was to stop, face the man head on, and shout at him. But I didn't have the strength. I just wanted him to go away. I wanted the whole damn town to go away. I wanted my money back and my clothes back and I wanted my faith in short-term vacation romances back.

I sped up to a run. My pursuer was out of sight within minutes but I kept up my pace anyway. I realized I was making a scene—I was the only foreigner in this part of town, not to mention that I was racing through the streets, but I needed this journey to end as soon as humanly possible.

Red-faced and panting for breath, I finally arrived at the police station, a peeling white structure surrounded by a large fence, where in place of grass, there was just a huge rectangle of mud separated by a concrete pathway. I walked up to a bored-looking guard at the entrance and tried to explain what had happened.

“I was walking down the street an hour ago . . .” I got out between gulps of air.

“Did you get robbed?”

“Kind of.”

“What did they take?”

“My boyfriend.”

By the look he gave me, I suspected this was not the kind of thing that went on all the time, not even in Limón.

“The people who took him,” I added, “they said they were from the police.”

“Who's your boyfriend?”

“Michel Omar. He's from Kuwait.”

“Hang on.” The guard picked up a handheld radio and asked about everyone who'd been brought in during the past hour. “No one named Michel? No one from Kuwait?”

He turned to me and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, whoever it was who took him, they didn't bring him here.”

Great. Now where was I supposed to look?

“Though they might have been from the OIJ. You might want to try going there.”

It was another six blocks to the federal building, which meant I would have to brave the streets of Limón again. I turned away from the guard and headed in the direction he had pointed me in, too exhausted to keep running.

Retracing my steps for three blocks, I thought how ironic it would be for something to happen to me on my walk. I was halfway between the police station and the feds' office—how fitting.

Fifteen minutes later, after having been shouted at, groped at, and stumbled into, I brushed the hair away from my face and dragged myself up the steps of my destination. I was mentally drained and out of breath, but I figured that as far as bad days went, this one could not possibly get any worse.

Figuring that your day could not possibly get any worse is the kind of thought it's safe to have in a place like, say, SeaWorld. What's the worst-case scenario? The cotton-candy machine is broken, the dolphins are out with a bad case of the sniffles, the puffer fish get deflated. Fall into the sea-lion tank, and you can safely assume that your day is about as bad as it can get.

However, find yourself stranded in a foreign country, your companion suddenly snatched out from under you by a group of plain-clothed men in a pickup who claim they are on official business, and you can be assured that your day is unlikely to start looking up any time soon.

Walking up to the information window at the offices of the OIJ, I wasn't certain what would constitute good news in this case. If Michel was actually here, it would mean that he'd been arrested. If he wasn't here, it meant he had been kidnapped. A criminal or a hostage? Which did I prefer?

At the moment, what I really preferred was a carefree day at the beach followed by a candlelit dinner and a massage, but the slender, bearded man behind the window wasn't selling tickets to Manzanillo, romantic meals, or hot oil. All he had for me was information, news I wasn't sure I wanted to hear.

“Kuwait?” he asked, slightly amused. “There's no one here from Kuwait.”

“Thanks anyway.” I turned to go, wondering how I was going to get home now.

“But your boyfriend is here,” the official slyly informed me.

“What?”

He handed me a passport bearing a photo that was obviously Michel.

“Is this your boyfriend?”

It wasn't the time to explain the exact nature of our relationship (besides, I didn't know how to say “fling” in Spanish) so I just nodded.

“As you can see, it's not a passport from Kuwait.”

I rifled through the pages filled with stamps from countries all over Latin America and turned to the cover: Trinidad and Tobago.

“Have you given him any money?”

I didn't know how to respond.

“Look, why don't you come back here, take a seat, and we'll have a little chat. I'm a detective. My name's Luís. Don't worry. You're safe now.”

Lu
í
is was a kind man with sad eyes who gently offered me a seat and a steaming cup of coffee.

“Your boyfriend, Charles—”

“His name is Charles?”

“Yes. Did you give Charles any money?”

He hadn't really taken anything from me. I'd offered every time— and it was just food I'd bought him, plus the 320 dollars I'd given him to reclaim his passport. “What exactly do you mean?” I asked.

“Charles is a con man. The last woman he tried to swindle, he gave her a story about a bank transfer coming from Kuwait.”

I hung my head.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Later that night, having recovered my suitcase and my cash in return for a strenuous day of testifying, I lay depressed and confused in the hotel room that Luís and his partner, Walter, had found me for the night. Too much had happened too fast and I hadn't had time to make sense of it all.

Staring up at the ceiling in a glum mood, I was startled to hear a knock at my door. I hesitated to answer it: I'd had enough excitement for one day and wasn't up for company. Of course, there was always the remote chance that this was opportunity visiting me, but then the knock came twice, eliminating this as a possibility.

“Wendy?” a voice called. “Wendy, open up.”

Who possibly knew I was here?

“Wendy, don't be afraid. It's Luís.”

Great. Now the Costa Rican FBI was knocking on my door. I climbed out of bed and opened the door to find myself face to face with the five men who not three hours earlier had grabbed Michel and tossed him into their truck. What did they need? More testimony? My passport number?

“We're going out for drinks and dancing and thought you might want to come along.”

This was too confusing. First, the man I cared about turned out to be my enemy. Now the people who took the man I cared about wanted to be my friends. I was going to have to start making these people wear color-coded name tags to tell them apart.

An hour later, seated at the bar of a cheesy seventies-style dance club, I found myself surrounded by rum and Cokes, federal officials, and the reflecting lights of a disco ball. I was still depressed, but at least now I was semi-intoxicated, accompanied by others, and well illuminated.

Luís did his best to cheer me up, moving from lighthearted topics like Top 40 Bee Gees tunes to the best cocktails in Costa Rica, but even his jovial attempt at conversation was unsuccessful at pulling me out of my black mood.

I fell into a distracted silence, and as if reading my thoughts Luís leaned over and whispered to me, “Just remember, we are the good guys.”

I wanted to believe he was good. He was warm and gentle— but, then again, that was how Michel had seemed. How could I possibly have been so wrong?

Good guys, bad guys. Was life as black and white as that?

In the stories I grew up with as a child, it wasn't too difficult to tell the protagonists from the people who were antagonizing them. The antagonists were the ones wearing black clothes and big pointy hats who wandered about trying to interest young maidens in large, shiny poisonous apples. Run across someone with green skin, crooked fingers, moles, and a raspy voice, and it was a pretty strong indication that you didn't want to give them your name for a twenty-five-thousand-dollar international money transfer.

But Michel had none of these traits. He had been funny and sweet and had taken me to the doctor when I was sick. How could he have betrayed me? This was the first question I planned on asking him. The previous night, I'd done a little bit of cautious detective work of my own and after some innocuous-seeming but intentional questioning at the disco, I'd gotten Michel's current whereabouts out of Luís. Impelled by a surge of angry determination, I'd fearlessly marched through Limón in the morning, where
I
became the one frightening people on the streets. I had demanded directions of anyone I encountered without as much as an explanation, a kind word, an introductory greeting, or a smile.

Now I was on a rickety bus wandering through territory I didn't recognize, wondering if I would even be allowed in to see him. But I had come this far and I wasn't going to back out now.

“This is it,” the driver shouted to me.

I stood up and walked to the front of the bus.

“Good luck,” he said as I stepped onto the street.

The doors shut behind me as I took stock of my location—the green countryside, the pastures with grazing horses—had the driver made a mistake? I turned around to ask him, but the bus was already in motion. It sped away, leaving me alone at the side of a remote two-lane highway.

There were only four buildings within my sight: two farmhouses, a small restaurant with two kids playing in front, and a lime-colored building surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. Was this the prison?

I walked across the street. As I neared the building, two men came into view, obviously guards. This had to be the place. Now, how was I going to convince them to let me see Michel?

“I'm here to see my boyfriend. He was brought here yesterday,” I informed the closest of the two uniformed men sitting in the guardhouse.

“Visiting days are Thursdays and Sundays. Come back then.”

“I have to leave the country tomorrow,” I fibbed. “I'm flying back to the States. Please, isn't there anything you can do?”

The older guard in the rear approached the window and addressed his partner. “It's okay. They just brought him in. He's entitled to one special visit. They'll let her in to see him.”

With a nonchalant shrug, the guard pulled open the gate, and for the first time in my life, I stepped onto the grounds of a prison.

One of the most intoxicating aspects of travel is that it gives you the ability to wander through a foreign environment without feeling like you're actually part of it. There is a dreamlike quality to moving through an unfamiliar place, a sense of false protection—the way that journalists and photographers can often believe they are somehow outside of the story—as if bombs and gunfire somehow respected a reporter's observer status, understanding that writers are merely there as witnesses.

This was how I felt walking up to the door to the main office of the prison: It was not real. Real things only happened in New York and Los Angeles (and once in a great while in Miami). This was Costa Rica, an otherworldly state that I would soon wake up from. Here it was acceptable for me to visit a jail cell (something I would never have considered in my own country). In fact, it was necessary. I had never met anyone who had been arrested before and I needed to understand. For the moment anyway, irresponsibility had taken a backseat to my quest for answers.

A female guard who had patted me down minutes earlier accompanied me to the administrative office and asked me to take a seat on a bench. I sat down in what could have been any Costa Rican business office. There was a large counter staffed by two employees, conference rooms off to the sides, and people walking around with files.

“Charles will be with you in a moment,” the woman behind the counter said.

I smiled back at her and waited. What would Michel—what would Charles—what would whatever-the-hell-his-name-was have to say to me?

I watched a fly zip across the room, its buzz suddenly audible to me in Dolby 3-D stereo. An imaginary music score began playing in my head. I was simply the character in a movie. None of this was really happening.

Looking up, I saw Michel only steps away from me, which only heightened the strangeness of the situation. This was the same man I had spent the past week sleeping next to and here he was in a prison.

He sat down calmly at my side and waited for me to react. There were so many things I needed to know, so many things his betrayal had made me question.

“I just came to ask you why.”

Even though I had asked, I was still determined not to believe a word Michel told me. He was a liar and a thief. I wasn't interested in what he had to say. I had come to visit him to allay a nagging worry I'd had since his arrest—I had always been such a good judge of character, able to size up a person within minutes of meeting them. I needed to figure out how I had been so wrong about Michel.

Michel was speaking to me, laying out his confession, but I wasn't really interested. In my mind, I was a little girl with her hands over her ears singing to shut out the sound of his voice. There was no reason to trust him now. There he was droning on about innocence and regret, words I had no reason to believe, except that they weren't the words he was using at all. I suddenly heard what he was saying. It was a huge confession, a horrible one. He was giving me the names and dates of all the crimes he had committed. I was stunned. I was the plaintiff, he was the defendant, and he had suddenly provided me with all the evidence I needed to destroy him.

There was a stint as a mercenary, a guerrilla, involvement with even less reputable groups. He had fled his home country after his brother was assassinated for treason. From there, he had wandered the world, surviving as best he could. The money I had given him was to go toward leaving Costa Rica to go anywhere but Trinidad and Tobago—that passport was fake. There were additional details, some of which I do not remember, some of which I choose not to write. But by the time the guard came to take him away a half hour later, I was torn by conflicting urges: the gut instinct to flee from the dangerous man in front of me and the journalist's desire to stay, to remain part of what had turned out the be the most interesting story of my life so far.