Fading gold plush enveloped me in the form of an uncomfortable armchair. I oozed out of the chair with my back resting on the seat and my neck bent awkwardly against the seat back. The TV in front of me played on as dots of light danced in kaleidoscope colors and showed me Laura Croft kicking ass in “Tomb Rader.”

I never heard the front door buzz a questioning, “Can we enter?” Nor did I hear the electric lock open with a deeper buzz giving its positive response. As I sat in repose, I was approached from the threshold that separated the TV room of my hostel from the entryway by the figure of the caretaker.

“Do you understand me?” came his greeting.

“What?”

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Well, you haven’t said anything yet, I thought. But why not go with a positive answer? “Yes,” I answered in Spanish, and added “mas o menos” (more or less), eluding to my Spanish ability as well as to my understanding of what he wanted from me out of this conversation.

“Good. Can you come with me?”

“Sure!” I was always one to accept strange offers from equally strange people.

I slid the rest of the way off the sado-masochist inspired chair and followed him into the kitchen. Sitting at a kitchen table covered with a white-plastic flower-patterned tablecloth were two foreign girls, each with their backs to us as we came in. The caretaker pulled out one of the chairs for me next to one of the travelers, while he took the other on the far side of the small round table for himself.

“You can translate?” he asked me in Spanish as he gestured to himself then the two women whom we had sat with. I looked to them as he motioned at them with a tight wave of his arm. They both looked at me wanting to know what I was doing there at the table with them. They wore serious faces that seemed to exude a “take no shit from anyone” sentiment.

“Sure,” I answered him again, adding a monotone cover to my voice to match the girls’ apparent mood.

“He is translate,” came the man’s English summary to the girls of what my role was. Having me not say it myself seemed to defeat the purpose of my being there. Perhaps he felt he had to make the girls feel at ease with another person being drawn into what I would come to know as a very bad luck experience. Not luck in that it was an accident, but luck in that it could have been anyone.

“OK, what’s going on?,” I asked of the two girls in English.

From them came Dutch coated English accents. “We were robbed.”
That sucks, I thought. But nothing new. My philosophy has always been not to travel with anything you don’t mind leaving where you go. I myself had my entire wallet, complete with credit cards, stolen from me on my first South American day. I had been traveling with someone who had her camera stolen, had replaced it, then had the new one stolen a week later in a different country. Theft was not surprising, it had become as commonplace as tripping over a crack in the always-uneven South American sidewalk. Regardless, I would help in what way I could.

“They took our bags from our room while we were out last night,” came the next installment to the story. “A man climbed up the outside of the building into the room next to ours, then came into our room and threw our bags out the window, then followed them by jumping out the same window, two stories up.”

“All we have left if what we are wearing,” added the other. Ok, that really does suck.

After telling me this, they both looked stern for a moment. Not angry, but as if they were trying very hard to be brave about it. Well, at least now I knew the plot. The next step was figuring out my part in it. I turned to the hostel caretaker and asked him in Spanish, “What do you want me to find out?”

He explained to me that he needed to know where the security guards took them after they let them know what happened. “What security guards?,” I wondered. They were staying at another hostel than mine just on the other side of the street and owned by the same family. I knew their hostel could not be any better than mine, and security guards were not wasted on poor gringos traveling in budget accommodations. So, what guards? Perhaps he meant the police. I asked the two girls where they were taken last night after the burglary, purposely leaving out the exact “who” that had taken them there to try and lessen the confusion, on my part at least. Their answer however had the opposite effect.

“We don’t remember.”

I knew there was something I was missing. But, I felt it was not my role to understand the logic, only the language. I let the caretaker know their answer. He didn’t seem upset at their having forgotten, but he did seem disappointed. “I’m not angry, just very disappointed,” I could hear him saying, taking his cue from gilt-tripping parents around the world. At times language barriers dissolve like sugar in water, as if they never existed.

“Tell them we need to go and talk to the guards/police, they might know where the girls were taken last night.”

I translated his Spanish into English as he stood up to go, deciding to use the word police since I thought “guard” was much to expensive a rental for this neighborhood. The girls looked at each other and talked to each other in Dutch, as a third language was put into the cultural blender as “mix” was forcibly accelerated into “pure.” I looked to the caretaker who had stopped half way to the door when he realized we hadn’t followed. I looked to him as the girls discussed something that was beyond my translation abilities, and eyed him in a way that suggested I was at a loss as to what they were saying to each other. After a quick council, they turned to me and said, “What police? We never talked to the police.” Whoops. Either “guard” was the right term after all and my artistic license in translating confused things, or he was having me question the wrong people.

“He wants us to go see the ‘guard?’” I asked with the intonation of a bashful question.

“Make the leap!,” I thought. Guard, police, police, guard, whatever. Help me out! Gringo in distress, just trying to do the right thing.

“Yaw, let's see the guard again,” was their very Dutch-sounding reply. Finally, with some understanding of each other we all got up to leave and followed the caretaker out the hostel entrance and down the street.

The bright Santiago sun gave light to everything. The air boiled under its pressure and worked its way into our muscles, relaxing out some of our tenseness as we briskly walked down the forever cracked and uneven sidewalk. Two sun crisped blocks later we crossed the street and approached a red-round guard post. The two Dutch girls informed me that this was where they went last night to report the theft. It is apparently a link to the police, an intermediary. It gave one the feel that the actual police were important diplomats, too consumed with higher duties to dirty their hands in mopping up common criminal activities.

The glass encased prescription pill bottle looking guard post sported three men wearing bright red polo shirts with either khakis or jeans. The two girls and I stood a few feet away as the caretaker approached the kiosk. He spoke easily with a few of the red-shirts, his body posture and slowed gestures mimicking his easy mannered approach to the neighborhood watchdogs. A short conversation later, he came over to where the girls and I had been chatting. He told us what his sleuthing had uncovered. Nothing new, it turned out. For me though, every time someone told me about the robbery a new detail seemed to emerge. This time I found out a cab driver had picked up the thief and driven him to a house a few blocks away with the bags. New to me, but old-hat for everyone else involved. I was only there to translate, thinking was out of the question, especially if the information loop was to be set up to exclude me. The caretaker did have one more thing that the girls didn’t: a phone number. He had been able to describe the cab driver to the security personnel with two words and a mime. “Fat man,” he said, as his hands outlined a Saint Nicholas paunch. That was all the detail anyone apparently needed, as they all knew whom he meant before he had finished tracing the outline of the rotund belly. From his hand, reflecting the sunlight off its white surface, was the cab company’s business card. “I’ve got his number,” he said. “The taxi driver will know where the bags are,” he remarked with a Colombo-esque glare in his eyes.

I let the girls know what was going on as we crossed the street again, making our way to a pay phone. As he dialed, I tried making light conversation with the two travelers. I felt extremely sorry for them. They had been shuffled around like a deck of cards from one person to another, giving their story over and over until they left out facts because of the deleting qualities of the umpteenth repetition, too many explanations makes one cut the synopsis short, at times omitting facts. I could tell they were still upset by the whole event and the process that followed.

“And we leave tonight at 7,” one of the girls was saying. I looked at my watch, 5:15 pm. Not good for them. Their bags had been stolen on the final night of their trip. Everything they owned for two months was ripped from them as they celebrated their completed journey. Wearing everything they owned and having been left with one plastic bag of souvenirs, they would return home without their journals, pictures, clothing, bags, or feeling of security. Family members would meet them at the airport, they would ask about their trip, wonder aloud where there bags were, and they would have to explain the entire ordeal again, this time in Dutch. I felt bad for them. I knew they continued to keep strong. Eyes were too intense, and muscles were too taught for them yet to be ok with what happened.

“Want an ice-cream? I’ll buy,” I offered them. They were older than I was, but the way they were trying to show bravery when they were upset and scared reminded me of children trying not to cry in front of their parents, showing them how strong they could be. I did what a parent would, pacify them with comfort, using the common and reliable form of food. They each got an ice cream from a small store’s freezer next to the phone booth that our caretaker was still on, and I bought a soda, so we could all relax just a bit together. They let down their tough girl acts for a while and began to smile. Their grins didn’t beam too brightly or big though, less the tears decide to feel enough bravado to stream down their cheeks. I turned the conversation to the Disney parts of travel and away from the emotional tempest of losing everything.

His phone call completed, our caretaker hung up the phone, and walked toward us. Dejected, but still hopeful, he told me that the cab driver that we needed to talk to only worked nights. He told us not to worry, and that by eight o’clock that night he would have the information regarding the address that we needed.

“Let’s take a cab and we can just drive around. Maybe it will come back to them. I’ll pay,” he told me. I told the girls his plan and they seemed doubtful that they would be able to remember a location they had been taken to by security guards they had never met, in a city they didn’t know, of which they had seen through drunken distraught eyes, that had to pierce through darkened streets at 4am. Taken separately these factors would not give a betting man very good odds on their chances of returning to the same spot. Taken as a whole, finding the same place in Chile’s capitol city would be harder than getting an indie music video on MTV.

He hailed a cab and we drove the area. I felt like a member of some vigilante group, combing the streets for corrupt individuals and handling the situation with street justice. Where would this lead though? No offence to the poor girls, but I did not feel it was my place to rough up anyone for information, an idea I knew was perculating in the mind of the caretaker.

“I remember stone streets.” I translated the memory and we took a left.

“I remember houses only of the left side of the road.”

“That depends which way you’re facing though, doesn’t it?” I asked the Dutch girl that had offered the memory.

“Just tell him,” she told me, referring to the caretaker. I did. We didn’t turn.

“I remember those giant metal containers that you see at docks.”

“Shipping containers?” I ventured.

“Yes, if that is what they are called.”

She had had to use that word as much in English as I had to in Spanish. I translated around it, avoiding the actual name for them. “Big metal boxes you see in ports,” I told him.

“Or it could have been a giant metal fence,” she interrupted.

I wondered how productive this city tour of the bad parts of town would be when the caretaker didn’t even acknowledge the last translation I gave him about the cargo crates possibly having been mistaken for a large metal fence.

“And there were bars on the windows!”

“Yes, bars on the windows,” the other confirmed.

Tallying everything up, we were looking for a stone street with large metal cargo boxes (most probably a fence since Santiago is not on the coast), houses on the left (or right) side of the street – depending in which direction you were headed - and barred windows.

On the bright side they’ve described away roughly 1/3 of Santiago’s residence, only 2/3 of the city left to search. Even putting a positive spin of the issue, I was not ready to start knocking on 4 million doors. But it wasn’t their fault. How could they be expected to remember a specific house out of the millions whose foundations were shallowly buried in Chilean soil?

Our caretaker told the cabby to stop, I had a feeling he felt the futility of the search and was going to tell him to turn around and head back to the hostel. Instead, he thanked the driver, patted him on the back, paid, and motioned for us to follow him out into the street. Apparently he had found what the girls were describing.

“I know this area like this,” he said as he showed me the palm of his hand. He turned away from us and with a quick step headed down the rock-paved street we had stopped on. There were houses on one side of the street, the direction we were walking they stood to our right.

“No, this is wrong. The houses are on the wrong side of the street,” one of the Dutch girls advised us.

I translated, but our caretaker strode on.

“I remember that phone!” one of the Dutch girls informed us as we passed a public phone imprisoned within a metal cage to deter theft. Its bright blue and lime green colorations were typical of Chile, as was its chic metal encasing.

“This is it,” one of them said breathlessly and in a frightened calm.

“There are a lot of thieves in this part of town,” said the caretaker. I translated. The girls nodded in unison, unsmiling. I sure was glad three gringos and one thirty-something Chilean were walking around the streets of this neighborhood. Wearing the skins of two Dutch girls and an American, we were not exactly camouflaged into our surroundings.

We passed by two plastic garbage cans overflowing with rags, shoes, paper, blankets, and rotting food. “This is what they do,” the caretaker said motioning to the flood of garbage spilling from and surrounding the cans. “The take what they can, dump anything they can’t sell, and get rid of the rest as soon as they can.”

Looking at the piles of un-sellable things, tossed out by hurried “juevones” I wondered how many people had been robbed since the garbage men had last been by, dozens, by the look of it.

The girls started rooting through the garbage, pinching at things as they picked them up, not wanting to touch anything more than they had to. Using broken metal rods that had been added to the pile they poked and prodded the pile, coercing it to show them some of their un-sellable items: film, journals, papers, anything.

As I watched the two girls route around the garbage like homeless searching for uneaten food or recyclable cans and bottles, I asked our caretaker if the extremes to what our thief went through to rob these girls of everything they had and force them to look through rotting garbage on the last day in Santiago was normal.

“What he did even surprises me. But these aren’t brave thieves, they rob from stores and anyone who isn’t watching their bags.”

“So, do they use knifes or guns or anything?”

“No, they just take then run. They’re not very…”

“Brave?”

He laughed, “No, not at all.”

The girls done searching through the filth retuned to where the caretaker and I were talking empty handed. We walked the length of the street stopping at each garbage can as we did, as the girls lifted the lids and dug deep or kicked over rags and bags that lay beside full cans, always finding nothing that had been taken from them.

“Now what?” they asked me.

“Now what?” I asked the caretaker.

“Now we go back to the hostel.”

“That’s it?” I thought.

“We’ll have the bags back in two days at the most,” he told me in a John Wayne swagger.

Wow, he sure seemed confident in that.

“Like this,” he said again showing me the palm of his hand.

I translated what he had told me to the girls, even the “like this,” showing them the palm of my hand just as he had done to me.

“How is he so sure?” I could tell the girls were excited, but didn’t want to get their hopes up and have their things taken away from them twice. I asked him how he could know.

“Tonight I will call the cab driver,” (I had forgotten he had the number) “find out exactly where the address is, and pay someone around here for information on who took the bags. For five thousand pesos you can get any information you want. These people here love to smoke marijuana, you offer them five thousand pesos, enough for them to buy drugs, and they’ll tell you anything you want. Then I’ll go with my friend, a police officer, and he’ll shove his badge in faces and really find things out.”

Man, did he love the vigilante thing. I wondered if he had ever played “Grand Theft Auto.” Maybe the vigilante-oriented video game was modeled after him, forget Miami, this is Santiago!

I told the girls what he had said and wondered what they would think of this man. They seemed predictably surprised. Here was this man, whom none of us really knew, who was willing to go “action movie” on his thieving countrymen for the benefit of two foreign girls who were leaving the country that very day.

“Thank you,” they said in a cautious surprise.

He didn’t need my translation for that and seemed very proud of himself as we walked back to our hostel.

An hour later, the girls had taken a taxi to the airport where their Holland destined plane would fly them. I imagined them getting in to cab with no bags, checking in at the counter with no bags, boarding the plane with no bags, landing in Holland, meeting their family, going home, and telling one story first out of their two month collection of stories while they have no bags.

What happened to the girls and their bags after I left them is still unknown to me. I don’t know how our care-taking vigilante fared up against the “cowardly” thieves of Santiago. I’d like to think everything worked out, all their belongings were recovered, and the thieves repented on their wrongdoing and found a way to make money in tuff economic hardships that didn’t rely on such a direct form of acquiring international currency.

I myself continued my journey and wondered which lives I would stumble into next.

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