When someone in a seat behind you pulls out a trumpet and begins loudly playing merengue, prompting dozens of passengers to rise from their seats and dance as your plane sits on a runway at JFK Airport, it’s a clue that this reporting trip may not be like the others.

It was December 2004 and I thought I was headed for a quick, easy trip to the Dominican Republic to interview Pedro Martinez, the dazzling pitcher who had just signed with the New York Mets. After helping the Boston Red Sox win their first World Series title in 86 years, he agreed to inflict his unique style of torture on batters by often outsmarting them instead of overpowering them and to share his uncommon wit and insight in yet another big city.

By then, Martinez had done enough as a pitcher to be a sure bet for the Baseball Hall of Fame, where, at 43, he is finally headed Sunday. I was looking forward to the interview because Martinez could be as entertaining off the mound as he was on it.

In the 2004 season, he had called the Yankees “his daddy,” and he once told them to wake Babe Ruth from the dead so he could drill him. In this era of coddled athletes who are afraid to say anything controversial or revealing, he said what was on his mind, often colorfully.

With Christmas about a week away, I hoped the interview would be a fast one. I needed to get the article done, and then get home.

But first I needed Martinez.

As I sat on the runway at JFK, with the trumpet blaring in my ears and people swinging their hips down both aisles of the plane-turned-nightclub, I thought, how hard could this be?

Fly into Santo Domingo. Interview Martinez the next day. Fly home the day after. That was my plan. His agent, Fernando Cuza, assured me it could happen.

It didn’t. The day after I arrived, Martinez spoke at a news conference at the InterContinental Hotel. My plan was to grab him afterward to talk, just the way I had interviewed countless athletes before.

But this was not like anything before. In the news conference room, waiters were handing out piña coladas, rum punch and mimosas.

One reporter asked Martinez about the pressures of playing in New York: “How are you going to deal with entering the wolf’s mouth?”

Martinez said: “How am I going to deal with it? I’m going to go into the wolf’s mouth and pull out his teeth!”

Nearly everyone laughed. Some raised their drinks to toast him.

I asked his personal public relations manager, Elvira Trinidad, where I could interview Martinez after the news conference. She said, sorry, he was busy. Probably later. Maybe later. How long would I be in town? Not for long, I said.

As Martinez made his way to the hotel’s driveway, where his bumblebee-yellow Ferrari was waiting, I trotted behind him. Security guards kept me away. I called his name, but no answer. Please, I just needed a few minutes. Couldn’t he spare just a few?

Just before climbing into his car, he smiled my way. Then he drove off.

There might not seem to be a good reason why, four days later, I was still in Santo Domingo, at a dance club past midnight, playing a percussion instrument in a merengue band. So let me explain.

By then I had looked for Martinez in his hometown, the village of Manoguayabo. His agent had told me that Martinez might be there, so I spent a day there, dodging motorbikes and inhaling air wet with the smell of gasoline.

I heard that he had built houses there for family and that he had paid for the construction of Parroquia Inmaculada Concepción de María, the village’s teal-colored church. And that he had persuaded government officials to pave Calle San Miguel, the village’s main road, so people would not lose their shoes in the mud there anymore. And that he was building a new school.

God bless, Pedro Martinez, they said, nearly in unison. But only God seemed to know the whereabouts of this angel.

People swore to me that they had just seen him, at the bodega down the street, or in front of his house, or at the ballfield around the corner, where a group of boys were playing baseball, using slabs of cardboard for bases and a tattered green button-down shirt for home plate. If I hurried, the people in the town said, I could catch him.

So I jogged from place to place, from dirt road to dirt road. But still, no Pedro.

At one point, I knocked on the gate to his house one more time. A man who answered looked at me and shook his head with concern and sympathy. I was coated with a veil of dirt and my hair was stuck to my face with sweat. He let me tour the outdoor property.

There was a main house and a guesthouse, both modest. Roosters. A lazy, round-bellied Doberman pinscher resting by a pool. Lime, hibiscus and mango trees.

But no Pedro.

The next day, I looked for him at a Dominican League game. I was assured he would be there. But after nine innings of baseball and of cheerleaders dancing atop the dugouts, their uniforms cut low and cut high and their sparkly eye shadow glittering in the sun, no luck.

On and on the search went. I was told by Martinez’s agent, public relations people, townspeople, family and friends that he would meet me in various places all over the city. I sat through a three-hour performance of Latin dancers at a hotel. No Pedro. I sat so long at a restaurant known for its sancocho, a traditional meat soup, and its mofongo, a fried plantain dish, that the place closed for the night while I was still there. And still no Pedro.

At one point in my maddening search, the man who was acting as my driver and guide said he needed to stop at the villa of a European ambassador. We walked in to find the gray-haired diplomat sitting on a giant couch, a young woman perched on his lap.

The woman decided that I needed to learn how to dance the bachata. A mini bachata lesson ensued. But, of course, no Pedro.

That night, back in my hotel, I decided that I had had enough of Pedro Martinez. He surely knew that I was trying every way possible to interview him, so why couldn’t he cooperate? I certainly knew that I was spending more and more of the sports department’s budget, and getting nowhere — and that Christmas was creeping closer.

I vowed to give Martinez one more day before I headed home. Just one more day.

His agent, Cuza, told me not to worry. Martinez would meet us at a cafe downtown that night. No lie.

I showed up and ended up at a table with Cuza and Moises Alou, then still a standout major league outfielder whose family was baseball royalty in the Dominican Republic. I asked Alou when Martinez might show up. He did not know.

But then Cuza got a phone call. Martinez was on his way — not to the cafe, but to a nightclub nearby.

A short while later, I found myself on a dance floor at the club, staring at the front door. Still no Pedro.

Alou, noticing I was upset, handed me a percussion instrument that is something like a cylindrical washboard. It was called a guiro, and came with a stick that you run along the cylinder’s ridges to make a noise.

I ended up playing it for hours, and actually seemed to be good at it. Even Martinez might have been impressed if he had shown up at the club, but, of course, he didn’t.

It was now four days before Christmas, and five days since I had landed in the Dominican Republic. I was about to give up, but I went back to Manoguayabo, putting in one last search for Martinez before my flight out the next morning. Next door to his house, a few people invited me to sip a cold drink on the small patio of an old bodega as the sun went down.

And then, in the distance, a figure walked toward us. It was dusk and I could barely see the person’s face. But as he came closer, the men on the terrace rose to their feet and raised their drinks. “Pedro!” they cried.

At that point, from my perspective, Martinez was hardly worth a toast. Or a smile. Still, I pulled out my notebook.

“Juliet, my friend!” he said to me.

And that’s how I got my interview.

He told me about growing up in the town we were now in, sleeping at least two to a mattress in a house with dirt floors, bedsheets separating the interior rooms. How he played baseball using tree branches or broomstick handles for bats and fruit, rolled-up socks or the heads of his sisters’ dolls for balls. How, when he eventually made it big, he felt like a lion on the mound, fighting for the people he loved and the people of his village.

“I want them to use me now while I have this fame,” he said.

He sounded sincere.

He said that he sometimes headed to his mother’s house in the mountains so he could relax by working in the garden, where he liked to “clean up the flowers and make them pretty.” Orchids, he said, were his favorite because they were so delicate.

So after all this effort to find him, here we were talking about — of all things — hibiscuses and roses and how chatting to them and complimenting them helped them grow strong and beautiful. And yet it was a moment that probably captured who Martinez was and is: a singular combination of power and poetry, competitive enough to hit batters without apology and playful enough to dance among the Shea Stadium sprinklers when they accidentally went off while he was on the field.

That happened when he was a Met. The best years of his career happened when he was in Boston. In both places, and everywhere else he played, he was an original, doing things and saying things in his own way. So as he prepares for his Hall of Fame induction this weekend, it makes sense to me that my journey to interview him 11 years ago was so long and winding, so unusual and even wondrous.

It was, in the end, just so Pedro.