Kidnapped and a Daring Escape (16 page)

    
The two men who have sought refuge in the
superpàramo
are both
hiding behind tall tufts, their boots just visible. His first victim presses
a hand on his thigh. Through the telescopic sight André sees blood
oozing out. His face looks familiar and he recognizes him as the one he
nicknamed ‘
le premier
’. He points the telescope to the second victim.
That man is lying face down, but occasionally his right hand twitches.
There is blood under his shoulder. He is relieved that both are only
injured and that their injuries do not seem fatal, provided they get
medical attention.

    
He rises.

    
"What are you doing? Get down, André," Bianca whispers. She has
abandoned the safety of the boulder and is lying on the ground near him.

    
He smiles at her. "No need to whisper. I just want to communicate
with them."

    
He puts his hands like a bullhorn in front of his mouth and shouts:
"Come back … Help your wounded comrades … I will not shoot again
unless you shoot."

    
He repeats it a second time. ‘
Le premier
’ raises himself into a sitting
position, still pressing both hands on his thigh. The second lifts his head
and shouts something André does not catch. The other two guys only get
up when ‘
le premier
’ orders them to come, and then they approach
cautiously.

    
"You have first-aid stuff?" André shouts.

    
The man shakes his head.

    
"Tell your men to leave the guns in the grass and I will bring you
some."

    
"André, you’re crazy. You aren’t going to them and leave me here
alone."

    
"No, Bianca, I’m not crazy, and you can come with me. If I help their
wounded I may be able to convince them to go back to their camp and
leave us alone."

    
"Oh, André," she moans. "I’m frightened. Why are you always so
reckless?"

    
He watches the two uninjured guys remove all guns and place them a
good sixty feet away from their wounded comrades. He shoulders his
pack, holds his own rifle at the ready, and says: "Come, Bianca. Courage."

    
He carefully negotiates his way down, Bianca at his heels, and stops
some fifteen feet in front of the two men standing next to ‘
le premier
’.

    
"
Gracias, señores
. Let’s have a truce and help the injured. Agreed?
But don’t think that you can take me by surprise. Have you heard of
karate?"

    
Both nod.

    
"I am a black belt. I can kill you with my bare hands. So no sudden
movements. Always move slowly. OK?"

    
Again they nod. He asks Bianca to find the first-aid box in the pack
and quickly inspects both wounded men. He tells ‘
le premier
’ that the
other man’s shoulder wound needs help more urgently to stem the
bleeding.

    
"You have any
aguardiente
?"

    
‘
Le premier
’ pulls a small metal flask from his front pocket.

    
André orders the other two to free the man’s shoulder and offers him
several swallows of the
aguardiente
.

    
"Your knife," he says to one of them and the man passes it to him
without hesitation. He disinfects it with alcohol. He tells the two to hold
the wounded man’s upper body rigid. Then he hands him one of the
socks in the pack, saying: "Bite down hard on this."

    
After carefully extracting the bullet, he stems the bleeding with a wad
of dressing gauze and tells the man to hold it firmly in place. Although
still in pain, his face relaxes. He murmurs: "
Gracias, señor."

    
Next, André offers ‘
le premier
’ the
aguardiente
before he starts
working on his wound. It takes a bit longer to find the bullet and the man
cries out several times. But finally it is out and André stops the blood. By
that time, the wound of the first is no longer bleeding. He tapes the
remainder of the gauze on both wounds.

    
Not much is spoken while he works, except for his orders. André
notices that Bianca always stays close by him, holding the rifle within
easy reach. He takes it back when he is finished.

    
"And now,
señores
, I suggest you return to your camp so that the
wounded get prompt medical attention, and that you let
la señorita
and
me go unhindered on our way. I’ll check that the dogs are dead."

    
"
Si, de acuerdo, señor. Gracias
," ‘
le premier
’ replies. "
Buen viaje,
señores. Gracias
." he repeats, bending his head forward several times.

    
"
Bien
," André answers and says to Bianca in Italian without turning
away from the men: "Up you go, Bianca. I’ll follow."

    
He retreats, walking sideways, one eye constantly on the four men, his
weapon ready to fire, should any of them make a false move. But they do
not. They seem to be totally bewildered by the turn of events. When he
is some fifty yards above them he starts climbing properly, checking
every two or three steps what they are doing. He passes by both dogs.
They are dead. He and Bianca reach the top when the two wounded ones
are finally helped to their feet. They slowly walk away, ‘
le premier
’
leaning heavily on the shoulders of the uninjured guys.

* * *

"So, that’s done," remarks André, Bianca reckons more to himself, while
he sets down the pack and takes some things from an outside pocket.

    
The emotional stress of the last twenty-four hours, coupled with
André’s unpredictable and confusing behavior is more than she can take.
"Is that all you find to say? So that’s done… After what you just did?
Providing first aid to the people you shot because they were after your
skin? And they accept it as if this were the most natural thing? … Who
are you really? I don’t believe you are a journalist."

    
"Why?" He proffers her the bar of chocolate and the bag of figs. "Here
have some. That’s our lunch."

    
"See, now that I’ve found you out, you try to distract me. You knew
something was going to happen when we were in San Agustin. I want to
know who you really are." She does not take the items he holds out for
her.

    
"Take some. There’s no other food for lunch," he urges, pushing the
bar and figs into her hands. "You want to know my life’s story? OK. I’m
André Villier, 28 years old, born in the general hospital in Montreux —"

    
"See, you’re still avoiding to give me straight answer," she cuts in.

    
"— My father is a carpenter," he continues without interruption, "who
has lived his whole life in the village of Cherneux above Montreux
overlooking the Lake of Geneva. My mother is a seamstress, a very good
one I dare say, originally from the Ticino — you know where that is? —
and I don’t know how she ever ended up marrying my father. She’s much
smarter than him, but they still love each other after almost forty years of
marriage. I’ve got an older sister, married with two children, a cute girl
of eight and a stroppy boy of ten. I went to highschool in Montreux,
naturally did my compulsory four-months military training as any good
Swiss citizen does, and then did a degree in philosophy at the
Università
della Svizzera Italiana
in Lugano. After that I traveled for more than two
years around the world, helping out much of that time as a mountain
guide in New Zealand. I seriously considered settling there, but met a
Scottish professor, an avid climber himself, who teaches at the University
of Edinburgh and who convinced me to do a Masters Degree in journalism in his department. For the last one-and-a half years I have worked
mainly freelance as an investigative journalist. My reports have appeared
in over a dozen newspapers and news magazines in France, Germany,
England, Switzerland, and Italy, and the fees I received barely allow me
to survive. I’m still unattached and as far as I know I have no offsprings
… Oh, and my past and present hobbies are mountain climbing, cliff
jumping and paragliding, karate, classical music, and obviously beautiful
women."

    
It all sounds so ordinary — the life of a young man, maybe a bit more
enterprising than most of the ones of her acquaintance. It just does not fit
the actions she observed. "And you want me to believe that? You’re an
expert in weapons and use them without the slightest hesitation. You
fired five shots. Each one hit its target. I watched, I was too afraid to stay
behind the boulder. I had to see what was going on —"

    
"First, yes, I used the rifle, but not without hesitation. It doesn’t feel
good to shoot at people. Second, one shot missed. The first shot on the
second dog."

    
"No, it didn’t. I saw the animal jerk. The shot only wounded him. But
that’s beside the point. You seem to know the mentality of guerrillas and
how they work, and I’m more and more convinced that, when you begged
me to stay on the San Agustin side and not to go to San José de Isnos,
you knew that we would be kidnapped. And even knowing that you came
along. I want the truth."

    
"Is there such a thing as ‘the truth’, an absolute truth? … No, Bianca,
there isn’t —"

    
"You see, whenever I ask an awkward question and you don’t want to
answer, you try to distract me."

    
Again he continues as if she had not interrupted him. "The circumstances that define a situation or event and the value system of the
individual making the evaluation or judgment define his or her truth. We
don’t know what the real world looks like. We only know our own
personal perceptions of it. There is no such thing as objectivity, and
anybody who believes there is is either a fool or ignorant or a religious
zealot. The closest thing to objectivity is what I would call a consensus
of equal minds, of many people sharing the same view on something.
Any counterexample or shift in values will shatter than consensus. So,
there is no absolute truth, at least not one that we can ever know with
certainty."

    
"Stop it! André how can I trust you if you lie to me?"

    
"Bianca, I’ve never told you a lie, not in the past and not just now. I
may have withheld things from you, not to deceive you, but because I
wasn’t certain about them."

    
"But how did you know something bad was going to happen?"

    
"As I told you, I came to Colombia on an investigative assignment, to
get an interview with a member of the FARC leadership. I was supposed
to meet with a FARC representative in a shady bar in Popayàn. While
waiting there I overheard parts of a conversation between two men, one
a local, the other a foreigner. I only saw the face of the local. They were
talking about kidnapping a woman. It seemed like their final session
before it was supposed to happen. They mainly talked about money
already transferred and money to be transferred. One of the things I heard
was that the Jeep the woman would be traveling in was to be intercepted
before it reached San José ‘of something’. I didn’t catch the full name,
but when I heard you mention San José de Isnos, it sounded familiar. I
knew neither when this would happen nor who the instigator of it was.
And then on the
Alto de Lavapatas
I suddenly saw the parallels. There
was the Jeep in front of me, there were you, a rich Italian woman, and the
Jeep was going to take us to that town —"

    
As he speaks, a shiver goes up her spine. His somber face, as he
begged her not to go across the river, rises in her mind. "Why didn’t you
tell me what you knew?" she interrupts him.

    
"Would you have believed me? No, Bianca, you would have laughed.
You’d have thought me crazy and probably justifiable so."

    
"And knowing that —"

    
"— not knowing, only suspecting."

    
"And suspecting that, you still came along. Why?"

    
He does not answer, just meets her eyes. His tell her more clearly why
than any words would have. She lowers her head, overwhelmed and
bewildered by the feelings expressed in them and at the same time
ashamed that she has doubted him again, that only two days earlier she
had even convinced herself he was party to the kidnapping. She
remembers his words after she mocked him and said that she was going
to San José de Isnos: ‘So be it. I’ll come along.’ He had been willing to
risk his life for her, risked it already several times since.