I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you’re looking for a ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But I do have a very particular set of skills …
In my head, I practiced the lines that worked out so well for Liam Neeson. When his daughter was abducted by Albanian human traffickers in Taken, he was smooth in getting her out of trouble. I just hoped I didn’t have to explain that my very particular skills, whatever I have of them, were related to farming.
Last month, my wife and I visited her parents in southern Italy. I had a few friends who visited Albania that praised it for being both beautiful and – this is where I get interested – cheap. Because there is an overnight ferry near my wife’s hometown that docks in Albania, I suggested we cross the Adriatic Sea and spend a few days there.
We made our way to the bus station in Durrës, where we landed, to find that the official transportation website for Albania was not exactly accurate: The bus we thought we could get at 10 a.m. did not exist. We needed to get to Shkodër, a city two hours north, but was told the only bus going there was later in the day. It was early in the morning, but the temperature was well on its way to its peak in the high 90s.
Little did we know we were being watched at the bus station. Suddenly, a middle-aged Albanian came up to us.
“Shkodër? Shkodër? Fushë Krujë Shkodër. Come.”
A taxi ride to a town 70 miles away seemed like an indulgence. “What about trains?” we asked him.
“Trains don’t work,” he said, switching to Italian, a language in which he seemed to have a few more words.
We had traveled enough to know the hard sell when we saw it. Surely, the port town of Durrës, one of the biggest cities in Albania, had a train station nearby. Therefore, we walked around with our luggage for an hour, went to a café to use their internet to look for any evidence of trains online ... and then ended up back at the bus station.
“Thirty euros,” the man said, when he saw us a second time. “Fushë Krujë Shkodër. Come.”
Thirty euros (about $35) was three times as much as the bus would cost. My wife and I looked at each other, to see if either of us had any resistance left. I handed him the notes, after which he motioned to a younger guy standing in the shade whom we hadn’t seen before. This guy had sunglasses and curly hair and didn’t say anything to us. In total, he looked like the dutiful henchman in mafia movies from the '80s.
They took us around the corner of the bus station and then behind another building. There were no taxis in sight. Suddenly, we stopped at a beat-up sedan that was over 20 years old. The middle-aged man opened the door for us, while his silent collaborator slid into the driver’s seat.
Despite being 40, there are still times when I feel like I’ve failed at becoming an adult. It probably didn’t require a very strong sense of self-preservation to not get in that car. I knew that most people would have turned and quickly walked in another direction, preferably toward a crowd. Even someone with a need for adventure or a secret death drive would be considerate of their spouse’s safety and avoid putting them in danger.
The old sedan tore down the road with us in its backseat. There was no air conditioning and no seatbelts. Our phones had no internet and couldn’t make calls. The only thing we could do was follow along on Google Maps to make sure we were at least heading in the right direction.
“How long will it take?” we asked the middle-aged man.
“Yes, yes, we get there,” he said, and then said something in Albanian to the driver.
Before I left for Albania, I had joked with my friends that they might have to bid for me somewhere underground to get me back. Now that I was thinking about it seriously, though, I realized I was neither young nor pretty enough to be sold for the usual human trafficking means. I read online some people captured in Albania ended up as slave labor on Greek farms, but that outcome seemed less likely than being shook down on a deserted road before being brought back, robbed and “disposed of,” or held for ransom.
“My kids, in Italy,” the middle-aged man said. He smiled. Was he trying to keep us calm before arriving at some dodgy place that held our fate?
Then the car pulled off the road.
I had never been so happy to see a hotel, furniture shop, car wash and other banal signs of development that, in this case, indicated we weren’t going to be murdered. The quiet sidekick took our luggage out of the trunk and set it on the shoulder of the road. When the middle-aged man said “Fushë Krujë” again, we realized this was where we were dropped off and where we could get another bus to Shkodër. Although 30 euros was an exorbitant price for a 20-minute car ride, in the context of potentially getting kidnapped, it felt like a cheap education. And, fortunately, the two Albanian men stayed long enough to flag down a minibus for us heading to Shkodër.
Taken 4 is coming out next year. As much as one has to admire the “particular skills” of Liam Neeson in the film series, part of me always wondered why people around him were always getting kidnapped. Now, however, it all feels a little more plausible.
