The following piece is based on a true story.
The Five Dollar Ransom
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
My friend Cynthia and I are in the
Ben Thanh night market in Saigon for dinner and shopping, and afterwards, I
talk her into going to the Saigon Saigon
Bar at the Caravelle Hotel. “That’s where the Americans hung out during the
Vietnam War,” I tell her. This is her first visit to Vietnam, my second, so I’m
a bit bossy about where to go, what to do.
She wants to take a tuk-tuk; I
insist on taking a Mai Linh Taxi. Our tour guide a year ago said that only Mai
Linh and Vinasun are okay to take. “Tuk-tuks are not safe. Mai Linh is.”
As if on cue, a green and white Mai
Linh taxi appears in front of us, and I open the door and pull Cynthia in. “The
Caravelle Hotel,” I tell the driver. He makes a few turns and there we are; we
could have walked. Cynthia, who’s our banker and manages our spending money,
pulls out her wallet to pay. But then, we’re stumped because the meter is
showing 600,000 dong. The exchange rate is 20,000 dong to a dollar.
“Well, how much is that?” we say,
staring at all the zeros. We’re both Math challenged.
We even ask the driver, “How much is
that in dollars?”
He doesn’t seem to know, and after
trying to do the math once more, we give up, and Cynthia hands him 60,000 dong.
The driver takes the bills, then
says, “More, more.”
“We already paid you. It can’t be
more than that,” Cynthia says, but the man continues his mantra of “more.”
“Well then, maybe we should go to a
police station to talk this over,” I suggest. It seems like a reasonable idea.
He starts the car, and says, “All
right, we go to police station.”
For a few minutes, Cynthia and I
actually believe he’ll take us to the police station. He drives on to a wide
highway and seems to be leaving the city behind us. “Are we there yet?” we ask
him several times, as the city lights fade to darkness.
“It’s far far away,” he replies.
By the third time he says this, I’m
frightened and I place my hands against the taxi door, only to discover there
are no handles. Cynthia makes the same discovery. We can’t open the windows nor
doors. We’re trapped.
A rush of adrenalin surges through me, and
I’m blathering, “Oh-my-God-oh-my-God.” Cynthia pulls out her cell phone and our
hotel calling card, and in the darkness, she strains to read the tiny print. I
fish out my own cell phone to light the card, but she still can’t read it.
Just then a car whizzes past us, and
instinctively I try to attract the driver’s attention — I wave and rap my
window.
On hearing me, our driver slams his
hands down and reaches for the glove compartment. I know he has a weapon in
there, a gun perhaps: he will take it out, turn around and shoot us. But
fortunately he stops himself. He says, “If I let you down here, it will cost
you more to pay a taxi to get you back.”
I’m still not understanding the full
scope of our predicament and I tell him, “I don’t care, let us out right now!”
“It will cost you much, much more,”
he repeats in broken English.
Then, something clicks in my head.
We are talking about money. We are his captives. We are talking about ransom.
Cynthia who is by nature very calm,
says in a soothing voice, “Why don’t you stop the car so we can talk?”
The man actually pulls over and turns
off the ignition.
My mind is whirring, and I remember
past visits with my mother to wet markets where she would bargain for fish or
pork. I can’t stop myself; my Bargaining Gene kicks in.
I recall that our driver wasn’t too
knowledgeable with the dong-dollar exchange, and I tell him, “We are two old
ladies on a holiday in Saigon.” Cynthia hits me with her elbow and rolls her
eyes upward. I continue, “We have a few
dollars with us and we will give you some, but take us back to the Caravelle.”
It is he who says, “Five dollars.
Give me five dollars.”
Cynthia gasps.
I’m now in the negotiating mood, and
I pull out five singles from my wallet. I fan out the bills so he can see them
but not get them. “We have five dollars, but take us back.”
“Give it now!” he says.
If I do that, there’s no guarantee
he’ll drive us back. In a firm voice I say, “No! Take us back, open door, and I
give you the five dollars.’
Miraculously he makes a U-turn and
heads back to the city. Now and then he tries to grab the money, but I don’t
let him. In the meantime, Cynthia and I are praying; we started praying when we
discovered we were trapped.
After a long ride and after many
Hail Marys, we are back in front of the Caravelle. Cynthia and I have a plan:
she will exit first, and write down the plate number. I will take my time and
pay him his five dollars.
We do just this, but before handing
the money to the guy, who’s shorter than me but stockier, I scold him, “We are
old enough to be your mother, and you cheat us this way.”
He doesn’t care; he just grabs the
money from me.
My legs are shaking as we make our
way to the Caravelle. The security guards there say we have to go to a police
station to report the matter. Cynthia and I look at each other; we don’t want
to go to a police station. We go up to the Saigon
Saigon Bar where we have drinks.
When we have more or less pulled
ourselves together she confesses that after she realized we were kidnapped, she
tucked away her money in her shoes. Then
she shakes her head and says, “Five dollars, five dollars. I want to see his
face when he goes to the money changer.”
We have a few laughs but we both
know that was a close shave.
Later, we report the kidnapping to
our own hotel concierge. The next day we learn that that green and white Mai
Linh Taxi we were in was fake.
When my husband hears about the bargaining
and the five dollar ransom, he says the cabbie never had a chance.
~~
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Tags: travel, Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, Saigon, story
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