In this moment of crisis, we clenched hands and Alan looked at me—somewhat desperately, I thought—for a decision. I tried to assess his strength, and wondered whether he was a good fighter. (Probably not—he was a Yale man.) My stomach churned, but I forced myself to concentrate. We had only two options: We could remain in the long black limo, hope it could be extricated from the ditch, and hope our volunteer driver really was the kind and innocuous man he had appeared to be.
Or we could bolt from the car, scramble out of the ditch, and as quickly as possible, put our rescuers and their car between ourselves and the man who had so generously offered us a ride. The two men were still shouting, and began to pound and slap the driver’s window. Even so, Alan leaned towards staying. After all, he reasoned, it was only one man, and there were two of us. Surely we could overpower him and escape if it proved necessary.
I wanted to bolt. Even though there were two men in the “rescue” car, as opposed to only one in our vehicle, I had become certain, in some wholly subjective way that our man was crazy, and I’d heard that crazy people can be quite strong. Plus, our apparent rescuers, the men who had just run us off the road, warned Alan that we were with “un homme méchant! mauvais!”—A wicked man. But the deciding factor was that these two men had actually gone to the trouble of following us out of the bar, chasing us down, running our car off the road and into a dusty ditch, and were now expending a great deal of energy trying to convince us of something.
Surely that constellation of actions bespoke a serious purpose, such as rescuing two foolish young travelers from a lifetime of misery in the North African desert. The two men must be rescuers; kidnappers were not likely to go to so much trouble, or to risk scratching or even denting their shiny black late-model Mercedes in the process.
