Crim City 6: Cooking a Poison-Laced Meal

No nightly news. No intrepid journalists. No embassies, or city council, or Committee of the Red Cross. No airport (although I’m told there are at least three helicopter pads on the island, probably more). No hospitals. No public transport, theaters, libraries, museums. No grocery stores. No decent pizza.

Each day we make a list of our options:

1) Pack up things, wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, walk out front door, catch motorcycle taxi to the Kalgasa pier, ferry to the mainland.

Risks: We’ll be kidnapped, mutilated, shot.

2) Stay. Wait. Make the most of bad situation. Carry on with Internet activity. Continue blogging. Contact old friend at New York Times.

Risks: Extortion, execution, torture, death. Having to extort from, execute, torture, kill someone else.

3) Request for help from friends or family.

Risks: What are they going to do? Why bring them into it? Who knows how far the threads of Banki Kalgasa are spun?

4) NZ Prime Minister John Key. President Barack Obama. Secretary Ban Ki-moon.

Risks: Really?

5) Plead with the ancient Mr. Binatang — bull-faced former vice admiral and supreme boss of this cloistered clan — for our lives, a passage home, with promises of untold bounty to be sent later.

Risks: Mr. Binatang never hinted at a ransom. Might offend, alarm, enrage.

6) Contract one of the local liberators who keep emailing us their special deals.

Risks: Emails might be intercepted. Not enough money. We’ve got $675 in pocket and another $4000 buried in a secret location, as per the Umbrella Man’s advice.

7) Cook poison-laced meal. Wife’s idea. Okay, fine. Where’s the poison come from? I ask. Lithium battery, she shoots back. Cell phone. Read about it somewhere. Boil it in water. Stir it into béchamel sauce, or a meat pie.

Risks: Cell phone batteries are required for our survival. Mr. Binatang and his crew grow suspicious of our desire to feed, they make us eat the dish first (like in the movies). Or they don’t die; they lock us in that mysterious metal trunk in the storeroom which no one ever opens.

8) Steal a gun or two. Mostly AR-15s, machine pistols, and some strange looking rifles from Burma, so my wife informs me, suddenly a connoisseur (she’s good at asking questions). Escape in the night. Long trek down pitch black jungle to the Merendam marina. Hijack boat to Sibolga.

Risks: Everything from self-shooting, snakebite, drowning, to the sort of heat-of-the-moment spousal arguments that leave one feeling downcast for a week. Also, see #1.

My wife has a headache, fever and a strange rash on her neck. “Not waiting here forever,” she says.

“I told you to leave me. I’m not your Siegfried, not the man you married. I’ll never be that man again.”

“Maybe I should have listened,” she says.

There are dogs, dogs everywhere.

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