Page 45 of Nobody's Fool

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 saywewait.

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’tall 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, soI 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 thatway. 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.”

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