The Danger

by Dick Francis

  “That is ridiculous.”

  “Perhaps fifty thousand more, to cover your expenses.”

  “Still ridiculous.”

  We looked at each other assessingly. In the normal course of events negotiation of a ransom price was not conducted like this. On the other hand, what was there to prevent it?

  “Five million,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “It must be five,” he said.

  “The Jockey Club has no money. The Jockey Club is just a social club, made up of people. They aren’t all rich people. They cannot pay five million. They do not have five million.”

  He shook his head without anger. “They are rich. They have five million, certainly. I know.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  His eyelids flickered slightly, but all he said again was, “Five million.”

  “Two hundred thousand. Positively no more.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  He stalked away and disappeared between the laurel bushes, and I guessed he wanted to think and not have me watch him at it.

  The Swiss bank account was fascinating, I thought: and clearly he intended to move the money more or less at once from ZL237/42806 to another account number, another bank even, and wanted to be sure the Jockey Club hadn’t thought of a way of stopping him or tracing him, or laying a trap. As some of England’s top banking brains could be found either in or advising the Jockey Club, his precautions made excellent sense.

  One victim in return for the ransom itself.

  One victim to return when the ransom had disappeared into further anonymity.

  Morgan Freemantle for money, Andrew Douglas for time.

  No drops to be ambushed by hepped-up carabinieri: no stacks of tatty—and photographed—notes: just numbers, stored electronically, sophisticated and safe. Subtract the numbers from the gentlemen of the Jockey Club, add the total, telex it to Switzerland.

  With his money in Zurich, Giuseppe-Peter could lose himself in South America and not be affected by its endemic inflation. Swiss francs would ride any storm.

  Alessia’s ransom, at a guess, had gone to Switzerland the day it had been paid, changed into francs, perhaps, by a laundryman. Same for the racecourse owner, earlier. Even with the Dominic operation showing a heavy loss, Giuseppe-Peter must already have amassed an English million. I wondered if he had set a target at which he would stop, and I wondered also whether once a kidnapper, always a kidnapper, addicted: in his case, for ever and ever.

  I found I still thought of him as Giuseppe-Peter, from long habit. Pietro Goldoni seemed a stranger.

  He came back eventually and stood in front of me, looking down.

  “I am a businessman,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Stand up when you talk to me.”

  I thrust away the first overwhelming instinct to refuse. Never antagonize your kidnapper: victim lesson number two. Make him pleased with you; make him like you; he will be less ready to kill.

  Sod the training manual, I thought mordantly: and stood up.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Every time I am here, stand up.”

  “All right.”

  “You will make the recording. You understand what I wish to say. You will say it.” He paused briefly. “If I do not like what you say, we will start again.”

  I nodded.

  He pulled the black tape recorder from the leather bag and switched it on. Then he plucked the sheet of instructions from his jacket pocket, shook it open, and held it, with his own version towards me, for me to read. He gestured to me to start, and I cleared my voice and said as unemotionally as I could manage:

  “This is Andrew Douglas. The ransom demand for Morgan Freemantle is now reduced to five million pounds . . .”

  Giuseppe-Peter switched off the machine.

  “I did not tell you to say that,” he said intensely.

  “No,” I agreed mildly. “But it might save time.”

  He pursed his lips, considered, told me to start again, and pressed the record buttons.

  “This is Andrew Douglas. The ransom demand for Morgan Freemantle is now reduced to five million pounds. This money is to be sent by certified banker’s draft to the Credit Helvetia, Zurich, Switzerland, to be lodged in account number ZL237/42806. When that account has been credited with the money, Morgan Freemantle will be returned. After that there are to be no police investigations. If there are no investigations, and if the money in the Swiss bank has been paid clear of all restrictions and may be moved to other accounts without stoppage, I will be freed.”

  I halted. He pressed the stop buttons and said, “You have not finished.”

  I looked at him.

  “You will say that unless these things happen, you will be killed.”

  His dark eyes looked straight at mine; level, at my own height. I saw only certainty. He pressed the start buttons again and waited.

  “I am told,” I said in a dry voice, “that unless these conditions are met, I will be killed.”

  He nodded sharply and switched off.

  I thought: he will kill me anyway. He put his tape recorder into one section of his bag and began feeling into another section for something else. I had the most dreadful lurch of fear in my gut and tried with the severest physical will to control it. But it wasn’t a gun or a knife that he brought out of the bag: it was a cola bottle containing a milky-looking liquid.

  The reaction was almost as bad. In spite of the chilly air, I was sweating.

  He appeared not to have noticed. He was unscrewing the cap and looking in the bag for what proved to be a fat, plastic, gaily-striped drinking straw.

  “Soup,” he said. He put the straw into the bottle and offered it to my mouth.

  I sucked. It was chicken soup, cold, fairly thick. I drank all of it quite fast, afraid he would snatch it away.

  He watched without comment. When I’d finished he threw the straw on the ground, screwed the top on the bottle and replaced it in the bag. Then he gave me another long, considering, concentrated stare, and abruptly went away.

  I sat down regrettably weakly on the loamy ground.

  God dammit, I thought. God dammit to hell.

  It is in myself, I thought, as in every victim; the hopeless feeling of indignity, the sickening guilt of having been snatched.

  A prisoner, naked, alone, afraid, dependent on one’s enemy for food . . . all the classic ingredients of victim breakdown syndrome. The training manual come to life. Knowing so well what it was like from other people’s accounts didn’t sufficiently shield one from the shock of the reality.

  In the future I would understand what I was told not just in the head but with every remembered pulse.

  If there were a future.

  19

  Rain came again, at first in big heavy individual drops, splashing with sharp taps on the dead leaves, and then quite soon in a downpour. I stood up and let the rain act as a shower, soaking my hair, running down my body, cold and oddly pleasant.

  I drank some of it again, getting quite good at swallowing without choking. How really extraordinary I must look, I thought, standing there in the clearing getting wet.

  My long-ago Scottish ancestors had gone naked into battle, whooping and roaring down the heather hillsides with sword and shield alone and frightening the souls out of the enemy. If those distant clansmen, Highland born in long-gone centuries, could choose to fight as nature made them, then so should I settle for the same sternness of spirit in this day.

  I wondered if the Highlanders had been fortified before they set off by distillations of barley. It would give one more courage, I thought, than chicken soup.

  It went on raining for hours, heavily and without pause. Only when it again began to get dark did it ease off, and by then the ground round the tree was so wet that sitting on it was near to a mud bath. Still, having stood all day, I sat. If it rained the next day, I thought wryly, the mud would wash off.

  The night was again lo
ng and cold, but not to the point of hypothermia. My skin dried when the rain stopped. Eventually, against all the odds, I again went to sleep.

  I spent the damp dawn and an hour or two after it feeling grindingly hungry and drearily wondering whether Giuseppe-Peter would ever come back: but he did. He came as before, stepping quietly, confidently, through the laurel screen, wearing the same jacket, carrying the same bag.

  I stood up at his approach. He made no comment; merely noted it. There was a fuzz of moisture on his sleek hair, a matter of a hundred percent humidity rather than actual drizzle, and he walked carefully, picking his way between puddles.

  It was Tuesday, I thought.

  He had brought another bottle of soup, warm this time, reddish-brown, tasting vaguely of beef. I drank it more slowly than the day before, moderately trusting this time that he wouldn’t snatch it away. He waited until I’d finished, threw away the straw, screwed the cap on the bottle, as before.

  “You are outside,” he said unexpectedly, “while I make a place inside. One more day. Or two.”

  After a stunned moment I said, “Clothes . . .”

  He shook his head. “No.” Then, glancing at the clouds, he said, “Rain is clean.”

  I almost nodded, an infinitesimal movement, which he saw.

  “In England,” he said, “you defeated me. Here, I defeat you.”

  I said nothing.

  “I have been told it was you, in England. You who found the boy.” He shrugged suddenly, frustratedly, and I guessed he still didn’t know how we’d done it. “To take people back from kidnap, it is your job. I did not know it was a job, except for the police.”

  “Yes,” I said neutrally.

  “You will never defeat me again,” he said seriously.

  He put a hand into the bag and brought out a much creased, much traveled copy of the picture of himself, which, as he unfolded it, I saw to be one of the original printing, from way back in Bologna.

  “It was you, who drew this,” he said. “Because of this, I had to leave Italy. I went to England. In England, again this picture. Everywhere. Because of this I came to America. This picture is here now, is it not?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You hunted me. I caught you. That is the difference.”

  He was immensely pleased with what he was saying.

  “Soon, I will look different. I will change. When I have the ransom I will disappear. And this time you will not send the police to arrest my men. This time I will stop you.”

  I didn’t ask how. There was no point.

  “You are like me,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Yes . . . but between us, I will win.”

  There could always be a moment, I supposed, in which enemies came to acknowledge an unwilling respect for each other, even though the enmity between them remained unchanged and deep. There was such a moment then: on his side at least.

  “You are strong,” he said, “like me.”

  There seemed to be no possible answer.

  “It is good to defeat a strong man.”

  It was the sort of buzz I would have been glad not to give him.

  “For me,” I said, “are you asking a ransom?”

  He looked at me levelly and said, “No.”

  “Why not?” I asked; and I thought, why ask, you don’t want to know the answer.

  “For Freemantle,” he said merely, “I will get five million pounds.”

  “The Jockey Club won’t pay five million pounds,” I said.

  “They will.”

  “Morgan Freemantle isn’t much loved,” I said. “The members of the Jockey Club will resent every penny screwed out of them. They will hold off, they’ll argue, they’ll take weeks deciding whether each member should contribute an equal amount, or whether the rich should give more. They will keep you waiting . . . and every day you have to wait, you risk the American police finding you. The Americans are brilliant at finding kidnappers . . . I expect you know.”

  “If you want food you will not talk like this.”

  I fell silent.

  After a pause he said, “I expect they will not pay exactly five million. But there are many members. About one hundred. They can pay thirty thousand pounds each, of that I am sure. That is three million pounds. Tomorrow you will make another tape. You will tell them that is the final reduction. For that, I let Freemantle go. If they will not pay, I will kill him, and you also, and bury you here in this ground.” He pointed briefly to the earth under our feet. “Tomorrow you will say this on the tape.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And believe me,” he said soberly. “I do not intend to spend all my life in prison. If I am in danger of it, I will kill, to prevent it.”

  I did believe him. I could see the truth of it in his face.

  After a moment I said, “You have courage. You will wait. The Jockey Club will pay when the amount is not too much. When they can pay what their conscience . . . their guilt . . . tells them they must. When they can shrug and grit their teeth, and complain . . . but pay . . . that’s what the amount will be. A total of about one quarter of one million pounds, maximum, I would expect.”

  “More,” he said positively, shaking his head.

  “If you should kill Freemantle, the Jockey Club would regret it, but in their hearts many members wouldn’t grieve. If you demand too much, they will refuse . . . and you may end with nothing . . . just the risk of prison . . . for murder.” I spoke without emphasis, without persuasion: simply as if reciting moderately unexciting facts.

  “It was you,” he said bitterly. “You made me wait six weeks for the ransom for Alessia Cenci. If I did not wait, did not reduce the ransom . . . I would have nothing. A dead girl is no use . . . I understand now what you do.” He paused. “This time, I defeat you.”

  I didn’t answer. I knew I had him firmly hooked again into the kidnapper’s basic dilemma: whether to settle for what he could get, or risk holding out for what he wanted. I was guessing that the Jockey Club would grumble but finally pay half a million pounds, which meant five thousand pounds per member, if he was right about their numbers. At Liberty Market we would, I thought, have advised agreeing to that sort of sum; five percent of the original demand. The expenses of this kidnap would be high: trying too hard to beat the profit down to zero would be dangerous to the victim.

  With luck, I thought, Giuseppe-Peter and I would in the end negotiate a reasonable price for Morgan Freemantle, and the senior steward would return safely home: and that, I supposed, was what I had basically come to America to achieve. After that . . . for myself . . . it depended on how certain Giuseppe-Peter was that he could vanish . . . and on how he felt about me . . . and on whether he considered me a danger to him for life.

  Which I would be. I would be.

  I didn’t see how he could possibly set me free. I wouldn’t have done, if I had been he.

  I thrust the starkly unbearable thought away. While Morgan Freemantle lived in captivity, so would I . . . probably.

  “Tomorrow,” Giuseppe-Peter said, “when I come, you will say on the tape that one of Freemantle’s fingers will be cut off next week on Wednesday, if three million pounds are not paid before then.”

  He gave me another long calculating stare as if he would read my beliefs, my weaknesses, my fears, my knowledge; and I looked straight back at him, seeing the obverse of myself, seeing the demon born in every human.

  It was true that we were alike, I supposed, in many ways, not just in age, in build, in physical strength. We organized, we plotted, and we each in our way sought battle. The same battle . . . different sides. The same primary weapons . . . lies, threats, and fear.

  But what he stole, I strove to restore. Where he wantonly laid waste, I tried to rebuild. He crumbled his victims, I worked to make them whole. His satisfaction lay in taking them, mine in seeing them free. The obverse of me . . .

  As before he turned away abruptly and departed, and I was left with an urge to ca
ll after him, to beg him to stay, just to talk. I didn’t want him to go. I wanted his company, enemy or not.

  I was infinitely tired of that clearing, that tree, that mud, that cold, those handcuffs. Twenty-four empty hours stretched ahead, a barren landscape of loneliness and discomfort and inevitable hunger. It began raining again, hard slanting stuff driven now by a rising wind, and I twisted my hands to grip the tree, hating it, trying to shake it, to hurt it, furiously venting on it a surge of raw unmanageable despair.

  That wouldn’t do, I thought coldly, stopping almost at once. If I went that way, I would crack into pieces. I let my hands fall away. I put my face blindly to the sky, eyes shut, and concentrated merely on drinking.

  A leaf fell into my mouth. I spat it out. Another fell on my forehead. I opened my eyes and saw that most of the rest of the dead leaves had come down.

  The wind, I thought. But I took hold of the tree again more gently and shook it, and saw a tremor run up through it to the twigs. Three more leaves fell off, fluttering down wetly.

  Two days ago the tree had immovably resisted the same treatment. Instead of shaking it again I bumped my back against it several times, giving it shocks. I could feel movement in the trunk that had definitely not been there before: and under my feet, under the earth, something moved.

  I scraped wildly at the place with my toes and then circled the tree and sat down with a rush, rubbing with my fingers until I could feel a hard surface come clear. Then I stood round where I’d been before, and bumped hard against the trunk, and looked down and saw what I’d uncovered.

  A root.

  ONE HAS TO be pretty desperate to try to dig up a tree with one’s fingernails, and desperate would be a fair description of Andrew Douglas that rainy November morning.

  Let it pour, I thought. Let this sodden soaking glorious rain go on and on turning my prison into a swamp. Let this nice glorious fantastic loamy mud turn liquid . . . let this stubborn little tree not have a taproot its own height.

  It rained. I hardly felt it. I cleared the mud from the root until I could get my fingers right around it, to grasp. I could feel it stretching away sideways, tugging against my tug.