The fact that the cleaning ladies had closed the restroom for a few minutes reassured Sam, but not entirely. He stood across from the door and waited but kept looking up and down to see if Remi might have chosen another restroom and would be returning.
He had a memory of a restroom at O’Hare Airport in Chicago that had two sets of doors, one opening onto the concourse, where he’d entered, and the other, on the opposite wall, opening onto a different concourse. Could this ladies’ room have two entrances? He saw a woman coming out, speaking on a cell phone. He said, “Excuse me.”
She stopped walking, the phone still to her ear.
He said, “Does that restroom have two exits?”
The woman looked back at it and then at him, as though she were wondering what he could possibly mean.
He answered for her. “I guess not.” He hurried on. He had wasted too much time. He called Remi’s cell phone again, but it was still off. He listened to part of the message and hung up. He came to a gate where there were two women in airline uniforms, talking in Russian as they stood at a counter.
“Hello,” he said. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes, sir,” said one. “How can I help you?”
“My wife went to a restroom but didn’t return. And it’s not like her. She would call me on her cell phone if she went anywhere else. I’ve been calling her, but her phone is turned off. I’m very worried about her. She would never do this.”
“Is she . . . perhaps ill?”
“She wasn’t a while ago when we arrived from Budapest. Can you get in touch with airport police?”
The two women looked at each other uncomfortably. “Yes, I can,” said one. “How long has she been gone?”
He glanced at his watch. “About a half hour. I know it doesn’t sound long, but, I swear to you, she would never do this without telling me.”
“It’s a big airport. Could she be lost?”
“Anyone could get lost. But if she were, she would be even more likely to call me.”
“Let me page her.”
“Sure. But please call the police too.”
The woman picked up a telephone, pressed a button, then held the receiver against her arm. “What’s her name?”
“Remi Fargo.”
“Would Mrs. Remi Fargo please pick up a white courtesy telephone or go to any Aeroflot desk. Mrs. Remi Fargo, please pick up a white courtesy telephone.” She hung up the phone and smiled reassuringly. “She should be calling us in a moment.”
“Please call the police.”
“We should wait a few minutes to give her time to call.”
“She’s had plenty of time to use her own cell phone to call,” Sam said, getting agitated. “Please call the police.” He spotted two uniformed police officers walking along the concourse. “Excuse me.” He turned and ran after them.
As he came up on the two cops, he saw them look quickly over their shoulders at him, their bodies tensed for an attack. He smiled as well as he could. “Do you speak English?”
They looked confused, so he began to walk back toward the airline desk, beckoning them to follow. When they arrived, he said to the airline woman, “Please, tell them my problem.”
The woman spoke to them in rapid Russian, a quick exchange during which she gestured at Sam, at the telephone, and at the concourse and which included shrugs, head shaking, and apologies. Both cops spoke with the monotone formality of cops all over the world.
The woman said to Sam, “Do you have a picture of Mrs. Fargo?”
Sam brought one up on his cell phone and held it up for the others to study. The cop who did most of the talking used the radio on his belt, then put it back. Through the airline woman he said, “We’d like you to come with us. We’ll try to help.”
Sam thanked the women and hurried off with the police officers. They went into another of the nondescript, unmarked doors off the concourse. They took Sam into an office with several police officers at desks and others watching television monitors. One of the cops, a young man with blond hair and a scholarly demeanor, said, “Sir? Please sit here and I’ll take your report.”
Sam was relieved to see a police officer who spoke English. “I’m not filing an insurance claim or something. My wife has disappeared and that means something has happened to her.”
“We have to start with the report and then the help.” The next ten minutes were taken up by Sam recounting what had happened, describing Remi and then showing the cop and others the picture on his phone.
“I took that picture only a few hours ago, before we got on the plane in Budapest.”
The young man asked Sam to e-mail him the picture, then downloaded it. He explained what he was doing as he sent it to various police substations in the airport, then to the cell phones of patrolmen and plainclothes officers around it.
Sam felt his hopes rise. They knew what they were doing. They knew how to find someone. They had a good chance of spotting her. He felt a little foolish for feeling so pessimistic about them at first.
The cop asked more questions—about his flight to Moscow, what gate he and Remi had used to deplane, and when exactly she had gone off to the restroom. He was transmitting this information to someone. He seemed to read Sam’s mind. “There are investigators looking at the surveillance tapes of those areas to pick out your wife and see where she went.”
For the next half hour Sam sat in the office, waiting. The cops came in and out, answered phones, and conferred with one another. Nobody spoke to him, but he occasionally caught one of them looking at him surreptitiously. He was painfully, fearfully aware that in this kind of emergency, seconds counted. He didn’t want conversation, he wanted them to find Remi, so he remained silent and watched. Then the half hour was an hour, then two hours. He called the house in La Jolla and left a message, explaining what was happening.
When two and a half hours had passed, several cops came in who had different uniforms—outdoor uniforms. The fabric, boots, belts, and hats were black. These men were also more heavily armed than the airport police.
When Sam had first come in, officers had smiled at him. “Don’t worry. This is the most important Russian airport. It’s like a bank vault. Nobody can steal a woman from here.” Later on, another had said, “This place is more heavily guarded than anything in your country. Even if a woman were kidnapped, they’d never get her out of the building.” Still later, it became, “They could never get her past the airport gates.”
When it was time for the Fargos’ plane for Kazakhstan to board, Sam and two of the new police officers went to the gate and scanned the waiting area, showed the airline personnel pictures of Remi but were greeted with head shaking and pursed lips. They stayed until the door to the jetway was locked, the jetway was retracted from the plane, and the plane was pushed out onto the tarmac.
Sam looked in every direction, hoping to see the slender, graceful form of a woman far off in the distance, running to catch the plane. He just saw thousands of busy, preoccupied passengers, trying to keep track of their belongings and their children, as they made their way toward other boarding gates.
NIZHNY NOVGOROD, RUSSIA
REMI FARGO WAS HALF AWARE, NOT AWAKE BUT STRUGGLING toward consciousness, as a free diver struggles upward toward the light, striving to burst through the surface to gasp that first breath of air.
She was in a dark place that was so soft that she couldn’t feel her muscles push against anything solid, and she seemed to have sunk into it. After a huge mental effort, she realized that she was inside a big cardboard barrel, on top of some rags or cloths, and that more had been dumped on top of her and then the barrel closed. There must be airholes, she thought, but she saw none, and her few minutes of effort made her lose consciousness again.