“What did that bulldog of yours say—a jar of mustard or mustard seeds? I can’t remember.”
“The seeds, I think.”
“You destroyed my whole life,” Capetta sighed, going back to writing his list. “Is that enough for you? Or do you want the details?”
He looked up at Andrew.
“You want the details, of course!” he said. “I had two children, Mr. Stilman—a seven-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl. Sam and Lea. My wife developed medical complications after Sam was born, and the doctors told us we couldn’t have another child. We’d always wanted Sam to have a little brother or sister. Paolina, my wife, is from Uruguay. She is also a teacher; children are her life. She teaches history, and her students are much younger than mine. When we finally admitted to ourselves that there was no hope of a second child, we decided to adopt. I don’t need to tell you it’s a long and tedious process. Some families wait years before they attain their dream. Then we heard how, in China, they don’t know what to do with the thousands of babies abandoned each year. Their population control laws allow only one child per family. The Chinese authorities are very strict about it, but many couples don’t have the money to buy contraceptives. When they have a second child they can’t afford to pay the fine, so sometimes they have no choice but to abandon the child at an orphanage.
“Many of these kids spend their whole lives inside the walls of an orphanage and receive only a very basic education—a pretty hopeless existence. I’m deeply religious and I was convinced the Lord had put us through this to open our eyes to the suffering of others, so we could become the parents of a child given up by its birth family. By going the China route—absolutely legally, I assure you—we stood a good chance of adopting in a reasonable amount of time. And that’s what happened. We went through all of the background checks and were approved for adoption. After paying the orphanage a five-thousand-dollar processing fee—and I can tell you that was quite a chunk of our savings—we experienced the second-happiest moment of our lives, after Sam’s birth. We went to China to get Lea on May 2, 2009. She’d just turned two, according to her documents. You should have seen how thrilled Sam was when we came back with his little sister. He was crazy about her. For several months we were the happiest family in the world. Of course it wasn’t easy getting Lea used to us in the beginning. She cried a lot and she was scared of everything, but we were so loving and affectionate and gentle with her that after a few months she gave us a wonderful gift: she started calling us Mom and Dad.” Capetta broke off. “Sit down,” he told Pilguez. “I can feel you standing behind me, and it’s very unpleasant.”
“I didn’t want to interrupt you.”
“Well, you have,” Capetta said.
“Go on, Mr. Capetta,” Andrew pressed him.
“One evening last fall, I took the train home as usual. I sat down and opened up my newspaper the way I always do. That evening—I don’t need to remind you what date it was, do I, Mr. Stilman?—my eye was drawn to an article about a Chinese orphanage in Hunan province. You wrote very movingly about the mothers who’d lost their reason for living because the most precious thing of all—their child—had been stolen from them. They wait for death the way you’d watch for a friend to arrive: those were your exact words. I don’t cry easily, but I cried when I read your article, Mr. Stilman. I was crying as I folded up the paper, and I went on crying later that evening after I’d kissed my daughter goodnight.
“I immediately assumed she was one of those stolen children. It all added up—the dates, the place, the sum of money we’d paid the orphanage. I knew it with every fiber of my being, but for several weeks I refused to face up to it. True faith dictates compassion. We owe it to God to cherish the compassionate nature He entrusted to us when He gave us the gift of life. One second of desertion or cowardice or cruelty is all it takes for us to lose our dignity forever. Some believers fear the darkness of hell. As a professor of theology, that always makes me smile. Hell is a lot closer than we think: it opens its doors to us whenever we lose sight of our humanity.
“These thoughts haunted me day and night. How could I be an accomplice, even a passive one, to such an abomination? How could I keep hearing Lea call us Mom and Dad when I knew that in another house, in another place, her real parents were crying out her name and mourning her absence? We had wanted to give all our love to an unwanted little girl, not take in a stolen child.
“I was tormented by guilt, and finally told my wife everything. Paolina didn’t want to hear it. Lea was her daughter as much as mine. Lea was our child. Here with us, she would have a better life, an education, a future. Over there, her parents couldn’t provide for her or make sure she was healthy. Paolina and I had a terrible fight. I criticized her logic. To hear her talk, you’d have thought it was perfectly okay to kidnap the children of all the poor people in the world! I told her the things she was saying were shameful; that she didn’t have the right to talk that way. I really hurt her, and that was the end of our discussion about Lea.
“While Paolina strived to carry on as if everything was normal, I set about searching, day after day. I have a few Chinese colleagues who respected what I was trying to do, and offered to help. I sent e-mails and made contacts, and bit by bit, information began to trickle in. I soon had to face the truth. Lea had been forcibly taken away from her parents when she was fifteen months old. You know the facts as well as I do: in August 2009, a squad of corrupt policemen burst into a number of small villages in Hunan province and kidnapped babies and toddlers. Lea must have been playing in front of her house when they arrived. The police grabbed her from under her mother’s nose, and beat the woman black and blue when she started fighting for her child.
“I owe a great deal to a dear colleague, William Huang, who heads the Department of East Asian Studies. He travels to China often, and maintains many valuable contacts there. I gave him a photo of Lea. It only took him one trip to find out the terrible truth. The detectives dispatched by Beijing to arrest the bastards responsible for the trafficking had found Lea’s birth parents. They live in a tiny village about a hundred miles from the orphanage.
“In early December last year, Paolina took Sam to Uruguay for a week to visit her parents. We’d agreed that Lea and I would stay here. She was so trusting. She trusted me . . . But the truth was staring at us both, and I had made up my mind. The day after my wife and son left, I got on a plane with Lea. Because of my daughter’s origins and my intentions, I’d had no difficulty obtaining our visas. There was an official guide waiting for us at Beijing airport. He took the plane with us to Changsha, and then accompanied us to her village.
“You can’t imagine how I felt during that twenty-five-hour trip, Mr. Stilman. I kept wanting to turn back each time Lea smiled at me, filled with wonder at the sight of the cartoons playing on the little screen on the seat in front of her, or called me ‘Dad’ and asked me where we were going. So when the plane started its descent, I told her the truth—well, most of it. I told her we were going to visit the country where she’d been born, and in her childish gaze I saw a mixture of amazement and joy.
“And then we reached her village. It was a far cry from New York: dirt roads and dry stone houses, most of them without electricity. Lea was surprised by everything she saw; she held on to my hand and kept letting out little cries of joy. The world’s a wonderful place to discover when you’re three years old, isn’t it?
“We knocked on the door of a small farmhouse, and a man opened the door. When he caught sight of Lea he was speechless. Our eyes met, and he realized why we were there. His eyes filled with tears; so did mine. Lea was staring at him, probably wondering who the man was and why the sight of her should make him cry. He turned and shouted out his wife’s name. When I saw her, the last shred of hope that I was still nurturing instantly vanished. The resemblance between them was striking—Lea was the spitting image of her birth mother.
“
Have you ever contemplated the beauty of nature when it is reborn in spring, Mr. Stilman? It can make you doubt that winter ever existed. The face of that woman was the most heartbreaking thing I’d ever seen. She knelt down in front of Lea, her entire body shaking, and held out a hand to her. I watched as the most indestructible bond in life was forged anew. Showing no fear and not the slightest hesitation, Lea took a step towards the woman. She placed a hand on her mother’s face and caressed her cheek, as she took in the features of the woman who had given birth to her, and then she put her arms around her neck.
“That frail-looking woman swept my little girl off the ground and hugged her close. She was crying and covering Lea with kisses. Her husband went up to them and held them both tight in his arms.
“I stayed with them for seven days, and for those seven days Lea had two fathers. During that all too short week, I gradually made her understand that she had returned home; that her life was here. I promised her we would come back and see her, and that one day she’d cross the ocean again to pay us a visit. I was lying, but I knew there was no other way. I had no strength left in me.
“The guide, who’d also been our interpreter, understood what I was going through; we talked a lot. The sixth evening, as I lay weeping in the darkness, Lea’s father came over to my bed and asked me to follow him. We went outside. It was cold. He placed a blanket over my shoulders, then we sat on the steps in front of the house and he offered me a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I accepted that evening. I was hoping the acrid taste of the tobacco would dull the pain that held me in its grip. The next morning, the guide and I agreed to leave in the early afternoon, when Lea would be taking her nap. There was no way I could have said goodbye to her.
“After lunch I laid her down for the last time and spoke to her lovingly. I told her that I was going on a journey, that she’d be very happy here, and that one day we’d see each other again. She fell asleep in my arms. I kissed her forehead and breathed in her smell one last time, storing it up to remember it until the end of my life. And then I left.”
Capetta took a handkerchief out of his pocket, mopped his eyes, folded it back up and took a deep breath before continuing his story.
“When we’d left New York, I had written Paolina a long letter in which I explained what I was about to do—what I had to do on my own, because we hadn’t found the strength to take Lea back together. I wrote that in time we would get through this terrible ordeal. I told her I was sorry, and begged her to think of what the future would hold in store for us if I didn’t do this. Would we be able to watch our child grow up, constantly fearing the moment when she would learn the truth? Every adopted child wants to find its origins at some point. The ones who can’t agonize over it all their lives. There’s nothing anyone can do; it’s just the way people are made. What would we have told her when she found out? That we had always known where her parents were? That we had been unwilling accomplices to her kidnapping? That our only excuse was that we loved her? We would have deserved it if she rejected us, but it would have been too late for her to start over with her birth family.
“In my letter, I told my wife that we hadn’t adopted a child only to orphan her all over again when she grew up.
“My wife loved our daughter more than anything. You don’t love someone just because you have the same genes. They’d never been apart, except when Paolina left for Uruguay with Sam.
“You must think I’m a monster, separating them like that, Mr. Stilman. But the thing was, when Lea first came to us, she kept repeating a word that we took for baby’s babble. She would cry out niang all day long. Niang, niang, niang, she’d keep saying, looking at the door. Later on, when I asked my colleague if it meant something, he told me sorrowfully that in Chinese, niang means mother. Lea had been calling to her mother for weeks, and we hadn’t understood.
“She was our daughter for less than two years. When she’s seven or eight, maybe even sooner, she’ll have erased us from her memory. As for me, I’ll still be able to see her face if I live to be a hundred. Until the very last moment of my life, I’ll be able to hear her childish laughter and shouts and smell the scent of her round little cheeks. You never forget your child, even if that child was never truly yours.
“When I got back from China, the apartment had been cleared out. Paolina had taken everything except our bed, the kitchen table and a chair. There wasn’t a single toy left in Sam’s room. And on the kitchen table, in the spot where I’d left the letter in which I’d begged her to forgive me one day, she had written just one word in red ink: Never.
“I don’t know where they are. I don’t know if she’s left the U.S., if she’s taken my son to Uruguay, or if she’s simply in another city.”
The three men remained silent for a moment.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Pilguez asked.
“What would I have said to them? That I’d kidnapped my daughter and that my wife had paid me back for it by running away with our son? So they could hunt her down? So they could arrest her? So that social services could place Sam with a foster family until a judge sorted out our story and decided on his fate? No, I didn’t do it. We’ve had our share of suffering. You see, Mr. Stilman, desperation can sometimes transform itself into anger. I’ve damaged your car, but you’ve destroyed my family and my life.”
“I’m truly sorry, Mr. Capetta.”
“Now you are, because you sympathize with my pain, but tomorrow morning you’ll tell yourself it wasn’t your fault, that you were only doing your job, and that you’re proud of doing it. You reported the truth. Fair enough. But there’s one question I want to ask you, Mr. Stilman.”
“Anything.”
“You wrote in your article that five hundred American families, maybe even a thousand, had been mixed up—in all innocence—in this child trafficking business. Before that article went to press, did you think for one single moment about the tragedy you were going to inflict upon them?”
Andrew lowered his eyes.
“That’s what I thought,” Capetta sighed. Then he handed Pilguez the list of words the policeman had ordered him to write.
“Here’s your stupid list.”
Pilguez took the sheet of paper. He took the copies of the three letters Andrew had recovered from the newspaper’s security division out of his pocket and placed them on the table.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “It’s not the same handwriting.”
“What are you talking about?” Capetta asked.
“Mr. Stilman received some death threats. I thought perhaps you’d written one of them.”
“Is that why you came?”
“Among other things, yes.”
“I went to that parking garage to get revenge, but I wasn’t capable of it.”
Capetta took the letters and glanced at the first one.
“I could never kill anyone,” he said, putting the sheet of paper back on the table.
He paled as he picked up the second letter.
“Have you still got the envelope this letter came in?” he asked, his voice trembling.
“Yes, why?”
“Can I see it?”
“First answer the question,” Pilguez broke in.
“I recognize this handwriting,” Capetta murmured. “It’s my wife’s. Do you remember if there was a foreign stamp on it? I suppose you’d have noticed a stamp from Uruguay?”
“I’ll check first thing tomorrow,” Andrew replied.
“Thank you, Mr. Stilman. It’s important for me to know.”
Pilguez and Andrew got up and said goodbye to the theology professor. As the three of them exited, Capetta called out to Andrew.
“Mr. Stilman, I told you back there I’d be incapable of killing anyone.”
“Have you changed your mind?” Pilguez asked.
“No, but after what’s happened, I can’t say the
same for Paolina. I wouldn’t take her threats lightly if I were you.”
* * *
Pilguez and Andrew took the subway back downtown. At that time of day, it was the fastest way to get to Andrew’s office.
“I have to admit you’ve got a talent for winning people over,” said Pilguez.
“Why didn’t you tell him you’re a cop?”
“If he knew he was talking a cop he’d have invoked his right to remain silent and insisted on having his lawyer present. Believe me, it was better for him to think I’m your bodyguard, even if it’s not very flattering.”
“But you’re retired, aren’t you?”
“Yes, that’s right. What can I say? I can’t get used to it.”
“I wouldn’t have thought up that idea of dictating a list to compare the handwriting.”
“What, you think I make it up as I go along? I’ve been a cop for a long time.”
“But the list of ingredients was totally stupid.”
“I promised the friends I’m staying with I’d make them dinner tonight, and it so happens that that is my shopping list. I was worried I’d forget something. Not so stupid after all, huh, Mr. Journalist?” Pilguez grew serious. “Capetta’s story was heartbreaking. Does it ever occur to you to think about the consequences of what you write about people?”
“Have you never made a mistake in the course of your long career, Inspector? Haven’t you ever ruined the life of an innocent person just because you were sure your suspicions were correct, or because you wanted to wrap up an investigation at any price?”
“You bet I have. In my line of business, choosing whether or not to turn a blind eye is an everyday dilemma. Do you send a petty criminal behind bars, with all that that entails, or do you let it slide? Do you give your report an accusatory slant or not? Depends on the circumstances. Every crime is a special case. Every criminal has his own story. Some you’d like to shoot in the head; others, you want to give them a second chance. But I was just a cop, not a judge.”