“With all due respect. That’s not the right knife.”
He blinked, glanced at the expensive blade he held in his hand, and looked back at me. I was standing next to the gleaming stainless-steel commercial range eight feet away.
His confident smirk slipped a few notches from confusion. “I’m quite sure it will do the job adequately.”
The reply, in Portuguese, had just a tinge of an urbane accent. Joao Consuelo Cabral was, after all, from the most privileged class of Rio de Janeiro. If Brazil had Kennedys, the Consuelos would be them -- without the great hair and noblesse oblige, that is. It was his kitchen in which we now stood, at his imported marble-topped center island with the double sinks and built-in warming oven in his multi-million dollar mountain-top home.
I would bet that until that moment, he’d spent a sum total of five minutes in that room. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d appreciate the fine art of cooking. Probably had people for that. To cook. To open his wine. To spread his Prato cheese. I have a hard time liking people who acquire the best of things, just to have the best of things, and never use them. Nice kitchens should be used as playgrounds and laboratories. Porsches are to be driven hard and pushed to the limits. Horses are to be ridden and loved and made to feel like part of the family. Swimsuit models are to be, well, enough with that. You get the point. I have a thing for cooking, and a thing for languages. Some people are good at sports or crossword puzzles. I’m good with food and words.
I leaned back against the range and folded my arms. Scratched at my beard. Sighed and shook my head slowly like some thoughtful professor. Yeah, that’s me; Il Professore.
“No, Joao, that is a Wusthof frozen food knife.” My Portuguese had an accent too. American. “Not a bad make, but I prefer Shuns. See the nicely serrated edges, like the teeth of a saw? They’re made for slicing through unthawed meats. But notice now the part of the handle that connects the metal to the wood. It flares slightly wider as it melds into the handle. That’s the bolster. There’s not much of that on this particular knife, is there? Do you see? Only about a centimeter.”
He couldn’t tell if I was pulling his leg. The wealthy Brazilian stole another glance at the knife, “I do not intend to use that part of it for what I have to do. All that is important is the cutting edge.”
“Well, there you are. That’s the problem.”
“The problem? For you, perhaps.”
“No, Joao, for you. You’re not planning on using a slicing motion, are you? What you have in mind is sticking that knife deep into my chest or stomach, correct?”
That woke him up. He blinked a few times, caught a breath, then nodded and took a step forward, the smirk finding solid footing again on his tanned, surgically-improved face. “You are correct. I will enjoy hearing your very articulate description of how it feels to die that way.”
I gauged the distance between us and kept talking, “Well, you see, the moment you do that and the knife meets a tough obstacle, such as my . . .” the word escaped me, so I switched to the English, or maybe it’s Latin, or, whatever, “sternum bone or a rib, your hand will slide forward onto the serrated edge and cut you. You could even lose a finger or two in the process.”
Consuelo stopped in his tracks. He pondered my words of wisdom, looked around him, then switched the Wustof to his right hand, reached over to the enormous knife block, examined a few, and selected a large hollow-ground Santoku.
I clapped in approval. “Excellent choice! Large bolster. Extremely sharp, with good heft. Very good for slicing or plunging. But let me ask you this, does it not feel a tad, I don’t know, extravagant? For the purpose? A bit too much knife? After all, it’s not like you’re entering a sword fight.”
“You are mocking me now.” The eight feet between us had shrunk to five.
I shifted my weight imperceptibly to the balls of my feet. “You think? Of course I am, you steaming pile of donkey shit.”
His eyes widened at the insult. He’d probably never been called that before. To his face, anyway. I was happy to be the first. Getting him mad was the whole idea.
I kept at it: “And another thing. You should be ashamed. A real man, a renaissance man, knows his way around his own kitchen and all its wonders. Especially one constructed with such an eye for quality and purposefulness. For that reason alone I’d wager it was not designed by you. There is magic done here. Alchemy. But that’s beside the point. Just as you have never prepared a single meal here, you obviously have never been in a knife-fight before. You think size is everything, the length of the blade.”
“Vai-te foder! You’re about to feel the length –“
But he couldn’t finish the threat, because in the time it took him to say “fuck you!” the distance was closed, the arm holding the knife blocked, twisted, and trapped uselessly at the side of his head, while a lovely little paring knife with an inlaid rosewood handle, which had been cupped in the my palm with the three-inch blade hidden along the inside of my wrist, was now pressing against the Brazilian’s jugular vein.
I lowered my voice and whispered in his ear, “In a knife-fight, Joao, it is better to be small and fast than big and heavy.”
He caught his breath and tested my strength by trying to pull away. It didn’t take him long to realize the futility of that, so he relaxed.
To his surprise, I released his grip on his arm, pulled the knife away from his neck, took a few steps backward, and spread my hands wide. “Good. Now, what do you say? Shall we have another go? Seriously. Take your pick of weapons.” I held out the paring knife. “I’ll even let you try this pretty little one.”
The Brazilian stared at the knife, then at my face, then back at the knife, unsure of what just transpired. I felt a little sorry for him. One minute he had all the advantage over this strange intruder, the next minute, he was shaking from the adrenaline shooting through his veins, confused and stunned by how quickly I had turned the tables on him. Consuelo lowered the arm holding the Santoku, rubbed his sore shoulder, and set the blade on the countertop.
“No. I think I would rather not.”
“Good. I’m surprised. You’re not as stupid as you look.” I put down the paring knife. “Now, let’s learn from that experience. Lesson one, and this is a really good thing to get . . . don’t fuck with me.”
I took a step forward. “Lesson two, if you fuck with me, you will lose. Period. Every time.”
Intimidation can prevent a world of hurt. Sun Tzu: Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
I brought my face to within inches of the Brazilian’s. “Lesson three, if you do not fuck with me, you can get on with your perfect little life, with all the benefits of family and political connections and ill-gotten money, and you’ll never see me again.”
Broken, Joao Consuelo Cabral could not hold my gaze. He would have given me the keys to his kingdom. His voice came out a whimper, “I don’t even know who you are. How would I fuck with you? What do you want from me? Money? The safe is in my bedroom. I’ll go get the cash that’s in there.”
Uh, yeah. Along with the Glock 36 I happened to know was sitting in the safe as well. You know, he really should treat his housekeeper better. She even told me where his substantial porn collection was stashed. Even then I could imagine how hard he was trying to figure out how to get his hands on it. The gun. Not the porn. But the pathetic look on his face told me he’d decided against any such foolishness.
“No, my friend. I didn’t come here for money. I’m going to take back something that doesn’t belong to you. Something nonetheless you and others consider very precious.” His face grew pale. I think he finally figured it out.
The zip-ties were in the thigh pocket of the black cargo pants I was wearing. Consuelo’s wrists were soon secured to the imported SubZero freezer, a washcloth shoved into his mouth and a strip of duct tape keeping it there.
I leaned down and whispered into his ear. “Yes. Now you truly understand what’s happening. I’m taking the boy. Listen to me closely, because your life depends on what I’m about to tell you. If you ever, ever, EVER, try to get him back, I’ll pay you another visit. And next time, it won’t end so pleasantly. This I promise.”
On my way out I slipped the little knife back into the block and grabbed an apple from a ceramic bowl next to it, taking a languorous bite of it as I cast a look back.
Consuelo was watching with pure rage and humiliation in his eyes. Which, of course, compelled me to wave and blow him a kiss. I can be a real grade-A asshole when I want to be. It’s a gift.
Forty-two minutes later, I stood next to a large man with skin the color of mahogany at a private air strip on the outskirts of Rio, carefully peeling off the fake beard. I dislike wearing fake beards about as much as I dislike wearing nail polish and lipstick, but they do come in handy in my line of work. Fake beards, that is. Hey. Don’t get the wrong idea.
“Every time I wear one of these damn things, I lose a little more skin.”
The other man spoke in a deep rumble. “Exfoliation is good for your complexion.”
“You learn that in the NFL?”
“Absofuckinlootly.”
For nine years, Cleat Williams played defensive end for Baltimore and Denver. He was truly fearsome and massive and wonderful to behold, chasing down quarterbacks half his size. Flattening dainty wide receivers before they took two steps. Roaring like a sated lion over a vanquished foe. God, I loved watching him play.
But what the players who feared him and the fans who adored him never knew was that inside that helmet and behind that raging scowl and bone-crushing muscle is a brilliant mind. The man reads everything he can get his hands on and retains almost every word. Cleat can speak with knowledge on almost every subject. When he opens his mouth, that is. Which isn’t often.
So now, after a successful career in the professional football league, future Hall of Famer Cletus Falstaff Williams works for the Royce Foundation. He is, at various times, body guard, mechanic, navigator, fixer, specialist-finder, government briber, and body-hider.
He also, not for nothing, happens to be my best friend.
Back in the moment, Cleat gestures with a subtle nod of the head toward the scene before us: a man on his knees with his arms completely encircling a little boy, faces buried in each other’s necks, their bodies shaking in sobs of joy and relief.
“Never gets old, seeing that.”
“Never.” I tossed the beard into a smoldering refuse bin. The hair immediately burst into flame. “Let’s get them home. We have a long flight.”
We made our way to the awaiting jet, pausing for a moment next to the boy and his father, reluctant to interrupt their reunion.
Finally, I put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Jason, we better be going.”
He looked up. His eyes were full of tears, but his face looked ten years younger, absent now of the burden he’d carried for so long. “Yes, yes. Of course. Thank you. Thank you again. I’m . . .”
I stopped him short. “Okay. I know. Enough. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
After a quick systems check and a call to the small tower for clearance, the Citation X sped down the runway and lifted smoothly into the air. I was at the controls, Cleat in second seat. In the back of the small business jet, Jason Kirkpatrick and his five-year old son, Michael, were strapped into separate seats, still managing to hold each other’s hands tightly. No more tears, now. Only grins and non-stop chatter. They had a lot of catching up to do.
It had been a year and a half since Jason’s Brazilian-born wife, Lula, had fled with their son to Rio under false pretenses without Jason’s permission. She’d met Joao Consuela Cabral at a charity event during which she was evidently completely swept off her feet. Jason found their emails later which charted first the seduction, the affair, the courtship, and ultimately the parental kidnapping. A quick divorce in a Rio courthouse, unrecognized by U.S. law, led to a similarly quick custody decision by a friendly judge in Rio awarding Lula sole parental rights.
Jason fought with everything he had, but the deck was stacked against him. His appeals fell on deaf and unsympathetic ears.
When Lula died in a car accident two months later, Jason thought he could finally get his son back, since he was the only surviving parent. But his hopes were continually crushed by one Brazilian court decision after another, which inexplicably allowed Consuelo to adopt and keep the boy.
He explored every legal option he could think of, exhausting his savings, his retirement accounts, maxing out his credit. He sold everything he had to keep up the fight. But in the end, even though U.S. law and a Hague Convention treaty governing international parental rights were on his side, he was simply no match for the powerful Consuelo Cabral family. What they want, in Brazil, they get. And for some reason, even though he was not their blood kin, they wanted Michael.
Brazilian news coverage of the story painted Jason as a disingenuous party looking for a big payday; a father who hadn’t cared about his boy until the Consuelo Cabrals adopted him and who was now angling for a large financial settlement. The blatantly biased reports forced Jason to keep a low profile for his own safety, so when I found him he was living in a dodgy Rio hotel under an assumed name, working at a rental car counter at the International airport just to stay near his son, clinging to the last tenuous shreds of hope, while Michael’s ersatz father was living in his mansion, telling the boy lies while feeding one rumor after another to the panting Brazilian media.
“There are only two conditions to our helping you,” I told Jason that day. “One, when this is over you mentally box up everything about us and never, I mean never, tell anyone how you got your son back. And two, don’t make us regret this. Live your life well. Be good to Michael. Make the right choices. Make it worthwhile.”
That was it. The contract. The sum total of the agreement. No signature required. No legal review. No money changed hands. The Royce Foundation would rescue Michael Kirkpatrick from what the U.S. government considered an illegal kidnapping, but was unable or unwilling politically to remedy, in return for exactly nothing.
I eased forward on the throttle. The powerful twin Rolls-Royce turbofan engines quickly pushed the jet to 600 knots as the coastline melted beneath us and the majestic blue Atlantic took its place. Cleat and I were busy scanning the skies for other aircraft.
“The Colonel was happy with the gift?”
Cleat nodded. “That he was. Already has his eye on a new Ferrari. Found it on eBay.”
I couldn’t believe it. “That idiot! What the hell is he thinking? When they step back and take a look at this, he’s the first one they’ll suspect of letting us escape their airspace. How many times did you tell him to keep a low-profile?”
“Not our problem. We get them back, get them on our way, that’s it. What happens to him doesn’t concern us.”
I wasn’t so sure. Not that the Colonel knew anything, other than his small part of the scheme. But it was my experience that as much as we meticulously prepared for every eventuality, changes were never good. Unless, of course, I was making them.
The radio chirped. Air traffic control signing off, wishing a happy trip for what the controller been told was a jet full of corporate executives on their merry way to a meeting in Argentina.
I thanked them in English, the lingua franca of international aviation. I dropped in just a tint of a Portuguese accent to keep up appearances before switching off the plane’s transponder and turning the jet east, farther out over the ocean. Farther away from the flight plan Cleat had filed. Farther away from any pursuit the Consuelo Cabrals could inevitably manage to launch. Inevitable because the country’s President, a lifelong friend of the powerful family, would be notified by Joao immediately, so it was only a matter of minutes before the Air Force Colonel would be ordered to send out a squadron of Dassault Mirages to find the Citation and force us to return.
But power breeds greed. And greed breeds weakness. And weakness breeds opportunity. Thanks to a generous contribution to the aging officer’s Cayman numbered bank account, those fighter jets would head south, never coming within a hundred miles of the three men and one boy in the foundation’s private jet. A very nice private jet, might I add. One that was a joy to fly.
Once far enough out to sea, we made a turn northward. I set a new heading to Mexico City, where we stopped only long enough to refuel and grab a couple of really tasty fish tacos before landing at Teterboro Airport just outside New York City, eight and a quarter hours later.
I love to fly. Give me some wings and a motor and I’m all go. But I was dog damn tired after such a long trip. Cleat helped Jason and Michael over to a waiting car which would take them to Newark Liberty airport and yet another long flight to their future home while I shut down the jet and discretely removed the fake magnetic tail numbers.
Cleat handed Jason a thick envelope. I knew what he was telling him; “Okay, so to make sure. You’re clear on this? Pay cash for everything you can. Don’t get credit cards or cell phones for at least a year. Go somewhere Consuelo would never guess, not near relatives or anywhere you ever lived before. Change your names. Change the way you dress. Blend in. Create a new story, a new history, a new future.”
The envelope contained instructions on how to establish a new identity and enough money for the father and son to start a new life, but not enough to live on easy street. Jason would have to get a job within a few months.
His young son was already asleep in the back seat of the Town Car when I walked up. Jason ducked to get in beside him, then straightened, determined to get one last answer. “Please. You know what I need. It’s going to drive me crazy. I have to ask again. I couldn’t even get our own government to get my boy back. Not the State Department, not the F.B.I. Nobody. Nobody I went to would help. But you did. Why?”
A large hand gently pushed him back down to the seat. Before he shut the door, Cleat leaned in close and said, “We know. But no more questions, Mr. Kirkpatrick. We have our reasons, not the least of which is your own safety. Put the past behind you and don’t look back. Take this gift and make the most of it. That’s all we ask.”
He nodded, reluctantly, and settled into the soft leather. We watched the car pull away.
“Kyle, tell me the truth. Would you be satisfied with that answer?” Cleat asked.
“Nope. Not a chance. But, listen, this is how I figure it. If a doctor cures you of cancer, would you want to know exactly how he did it? Or would you thank your good luck and get on with living your life?”
He shrugged, looked up at the sky, and let out a laugh. “First thing I’d do is have a really large drink. Then find my woman and make her feel all kinds of alive.”
“You are a wise, wise man.”