The Kidnappers

by Willo Davis Roberts

  Where was the math book? I’d dropped it in the elevator. Had the man named Studen picked it up, or was it still there, where someone would find it?

  It would be Sophie, I decided, who’d get worried enough to go to Mom and Father and report that I was missing. It would probably spoil the party. My mother would be very upset. I wasn’t sure if my father would be upset or angry. Probably a little of each.

  I felt sorry for Mom because she’d worked hard to make it a good party. What would they do with all that food if they had to send the guests home?

  Mark says I’m the kind of person who doesn’t know when to keep quiet. Maybe this was one of those times, but I felt compelled to talk.

  “I’ve been gone long enough so someone’s sure to miss me by now,” I said. “My father told me not to go outside, and my brother and sister and Pink know I was only going down to the sixth floor to get Mark a math book. So maybe they’ll realize I’m still in the building. Maybe they’ll check out the whole place and find us.”

  “All anybody’d have to do,” Willie pointed out, “is deny we were in the apartment. Unless they get warrants for every apartment in the building, they can’t get in and look around.”

  I scrutinized the ordinary furnishings of the room. “What have you tried so far?”

  “Yelling, when they first grabbed me. So they gagged me when they brought me up in the service elevator, in case somebody was around. They locked me in here with a key, but they didn’t leave it in the lock. And they haven’t given me a newspaper so I could push it under the door and knock a key out onto it, to pull it back to me. The carpet’s right at the bottom of the door, so that wouldn’t have worked anyway. And I think at least one of them’s been here all the time, keeping an eye on me.”

  “If there’s only one man here, and we could get him to open the door for some reason, maybe the two of us could jump him,” I suggested.

  “Tedesco, the one with the earring, is really strong,” Willie said. “I doubt if we could overpower him. If he comes in, though, we can try it.”

  “We need to attract attention from someone else. Somehow,” I said.

  “Like building a fire in the wastebasket? Making a lot of smoke? I thought of that. Except I don’t have any matches. And I’d probably die of smoke inhalation before anyone even noticed what was going on.”

  “I wonder how long it would take,” I said thoughtfully, “if we filled the bathtub and let it run over, before it leaked through the ceiling and somebody noticed it on the next floor down? They’d investigate that, for sure.”

  “It would probably run under the door into the hallway before it went through the floor. They’d come and stop us. Studen is using the room right next to this one, so he’d be down the hallway often enough to catch us.”

  “Mark says I’m always being irritating, to get attention.” I walked to the window and looked out.

  “I’ll testify to that,” Willie agreed.

  I turned my head to look at him, unable to decide if he was looking really mean or not. “I never meant to hit you in the nose and make it bleed,” I told him.

  “It hurt,” Willie said. “It hurt a lot.”

  “You still want to beat me up?” I asked.

  “Not until after we get out of here,” Willie conceded. And then, at the same time, we both started to laugh.

  It didn’t last long, though, because there was nothing funny about our predicament. I was afraid that what I’d suggested was true; even if Mr. Groves paid a big ransom, they wouldn’t let us go for fear it would lessen their chances to get away.

  “Well,” I said finally, “if we can’t figure a way to get out, we’ll have to figure a way to get someone else to come in. Forcibly, if they have to. We’ve ruled out setting a fire or causing a flood. So what else is there?”

  “You’re the one with the imagination. I remember that tall story you told Mr. Epperson about what happened to your essay on Shakespeare. I thought he was going to give you an A just for being so inventive, even if he didn’t believe you. So you tell me.”

  I looked out the window again. “It just happens that I really did leave the paper on the kitchen table, and it stuck to the bottom of that pan of cinnamon rolls Junie was making, and she put it in the oven and it caught fire. And when I rewrote it, he marked it down to a B because it was a day late.” I pressed my face against the glass. “There are hundreds of people down there. They’d probably help us if they knew about us.”

  “The window won’t open. I tried it,” Willie said.

  “How about the one in the bathroom? Is that sealed shut, too?”

  “Yes. I tried to break it by hammering on it with the end of a plunger I found under the sink in the bathroom, but the glass wouldn’t break. And Tedesco heard me banging and came and took away the plunger.”

  “So we can’t drop notes on anybody below.” I stared across the street, at the next apartment building. It was a Saturday night. Many of the windows were dark. People had gone out to dinner or the movies or to a concert or something.

  Yet there were a few lights on. Directly across from us an old lady sat in the window. Not looking at us, but down at something on a table in front of her, maybe doing a crossword puzzle. I waved my hands around, but she didn’t look up. People in the city don’t pay much attention to what’s going on in windows across the street.

  One level down, a guy in his undershirt looked as if he might be watching television. He had a can in one hand, and as I watched he lifted it to take a swig.

  Two windows over, on that same level, a young man was working at a computer. He had a can beside him, too.

  None of them so much as glanced my way.

  If only one of our own windows was visible from here! Of course Mark and Sophie and Pink might not even be in the rooms on this side of the building now; if everybody had missed me, they might be in a panic, trying to find me.

  Far below, a police car passed the intersection, sandwiched between yellow taxis. The police officer in it had probably seen Tedesco’s picture, probably knew Willie had been kidnapped, maybe by this time even knew that I had disappeared.

  If I were writing this as a story, I’d have figured out a way to escape.

  And then I thought of something.

  “Is there a mirror in the bathroom?”

  “One on the front of the medicine chest,” Willie offered. “What good will that do us?”

  “Is it one we could pry off? Take screws out of the door or something, and get it apart so we could bring the mirror part in here? My mom used to say that when I was four I could take anything apart, including things she’d just told me didn’t come apart. I took all the doohickeys off the backs of clocks for years, until I finally got shocked taking apart an electric digital. I didn’t trust clocks after that.”

  Willie went into the bathroom and I followed him. He was inspecting the mirror on the medicine chest door. “I don’t see how we’d get it apart. It takes a Phillips screwdriver even to get the hinges off the door, and the mirror seems to be made right into the door before they put the pieces of it together.”

  We looked around for something to use as a screwdriver, and found nothing that would work even on an ordinary screw.

  In the apartment beyond the bathroom door, the telephone rang.

  We stopped moving, then ran to put our ears against the door, hoping to be able to hear something. There was a murmuring of a man’s voice, but we couldn’t make out the words.

  Frustrated, Willie and I stared at each other.

  How much time did we have? They might get the ransom money tonight, or surely by tomorrow; then what would they do with us?

  Willie must have been thinking the same thing. “They could just leave us locked in here, I suppose. Mr. Zoulas would find our bodies when he comes back from Paris.”

  “They might leave something for us to eat,” I said, but I didn’t believe it, and I could tell by Willie’s face that he didn’t believe it, either.


  Somewhere a door closed audibly.

  Were we alone in the apartment now, or had one of them stayed behind to guard us against escape?

  We stopped breathing to listen.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Out in the living room something thumped.

  So much for the hope that we were alone. If there was nobody to stop us, we might be able to break down a door, or take out the hinges if we could improvise a tool to do it. But that would make enough noise to bring the remaining kidnapper down on us.

  Then there was a murmur of voices, almost—but not quite—understandable. So there were still two of them here.

  “I wish we could hear what they’re talking about,” Willie said, grinding his teeth in frustration. “It’s never quite loud enough.”

  Without explaining, because I wanted to hear, too, I took the water glass that sat beside the sink. I pressed the open top of it against the door, then leaned my ear against the bottom.

  “Can you hear better?” Willie hissed, and I motioned for him to be quiet. When he shut up, I could actually make out a few words.

  “—picking up the ransom now.”

  Willie could tell from my face that I’d heard something significant. He leaned closer, as if he, too, might be able to hear something, even without the conducting glass.

  And then we lucked out, in a way. Because the two men who were talking were coming along the hallway, and their voices became clearer. We could both hear them.

  “Stupid,” one of them was saying. “Why did you bring him here?” The voice was vaguely familiar, though I didn’t immediately place it.

  “Because it was the closest and the easiest,” the second voice responded with irritation.

  “Tedesco,” Willie whispered, identifying the second speaker.

  “And the most dangerous,” the first man replied. “Now he’ll have to be taken care of, too.”

  Me? I wondered. Were they talking about me? What did they mean by taken care of?

  “If everything goes all right, Studen should be back here in half an hour, an hour at the most. I gotta clear out the rest of our stuff, and we’re ready to go.” Their voices faded out then as they either walked past our door or entered one of the other rooms.

  I straightened up and took the glass away from the door. “I always wondered if that really worked, using a glass to amplify sound,” I said. I was trying to sound cool, but I was shaking, so I don’t think I fooled Willie.

  Willie had gone pale. He leaned against the wall, and I decided he was pretty shaky, too. When his voice came out in a whisper, I didn’t know if he was trying to be very quiet, or if he felt too weak to speak any louder.

  “Studen’s gone after the ransom,” he said. “What if . . . what if my dad couldn’t get it together after all?”

  “Do you know how much they were demanding?” I asked, also keeping it low.

  “Not exactly, but a lot. Enough to split three ways and live happily ever after, from the way it sounded.” Willie sank down onto the edge of the bathtub, as if his legs wouldn’t hold him up anymore.

  “Who’s the third guy?” I asked, and right about then a horrible suspicion began to seep into my mind. “What’s his name?” Had I really recognized his voice?

  “I don’t remember what they called him. And I don’t know what his part is in the kidnapping, but he’s in for a share of the money. Bishop, how do you think they’re going to take care of us?”

  “I don’t know. But we’ve got an hour at the most, maybe less, to think of something, before they do whatever they’re going to do.” I looked wildly around the bathroom for a weapon, for a place to hide, for some kind of miracle. It was just an ordinary bathroom.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, Joe,” Willie said. It was the first time I could remember he’d ever called me by my first name.

  “I don’t think we can,” I said slowly.

  “Are we giving up, then? We just sit here and wait for them to shoot us, or smuggle our bodies out to the Dumpster?”

  Willie was scared, really scared, but I couldn’t gloat over seeing him that way. I was scared, too.

  The kidnappers were back in the hallway. “Give me a hand with this stuff,” Tedesco said, and I heard something . . . a suitcase? . . . bump against the bathroom door as they passed.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t leave the kids unguarded. That Bishop kid is inventive,” the other man said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he figured out a way to blow up this place and leave a hole in the wall so big the entire police force would come to investigate.”

  “Ah, they’re locked in. What can they do? Here, you take this one . . .” The voices trailed off, still audible but we couldn’t make out the words anymore.

  Willie swallowed. “He sounded like he knows you.”

  It couldn’t be, I thought. But his voice . . . surely I knew that voice. And I knew who it sounded like. I just didn’t want to believe it.

  “Maybe he does,” I said, sounding hollow. I started pulling open drawers, looking for anything that might be useful. “It sounds a lot like Ernie. Our chauffeur.”

  Willie blinked, gulped again, and asked, “What are you looking for?”

  “A tool. Something to build a bomb. A . . .” My voice trickled off to nothing. In the drawer was a hand mirror, and I stared at it. I couldn’t let myself be so scared I couldn’t think.

  “Can you really build a bomb?” Willie asked hopefully.

  “Not with anything I’ve found so far. I think Mark knows the general principle, but Father said he’d skin him alive if he ever caught him with one of those instruction books again. He found it on a bus.”

  I reached into the drawer and took out the mirror. “This one’s smaller than the mirror on the medicine chest, but maybe it will work.”

  “For what?” Willie trailed me back to the bedroom window, depending on me to come up with an idea.

  “Maybe I can attract attention from the building across the street. Let’s find out.”

  I held up the mirror and tried twisting it up and down, back and forth, trying to pick up enough light with it to flash into one of those apartment windows across the narrow street.

  The result was so pale I could barely make out the flashes. Nobody in the windows—the old lady, the guy at the computer, the man watching TV—noticed a thing.

  “It’s not bright enough,” Willie said.

  “No. It’s not. I need something to produce more light.” My mind was racing, already counting those few remaining minutes before our captors decided to deal with us. Mom said once she thought I lived 90 percent of my life inside my head, oblivious to what was going on in the real world. Well, it was time it paid off. My life—our lives—might depend on it.

  “I read something once,” I mused as the memory came back. “About Thomas Edison, a biography. I think it was him. His mother needed an operation. A long time ago, you know, before electricity was common. If I remember right, it was an emergency, and the doctor had to perform the surgery there in her house, on the kitchen table. It was night, and I guess they had kerosene lamps, but they didn’t give enough light so he could see very well. So Edison, if it was him, got all the mirrors he could find, and grouped them behind the lamps, and it made twice as much light as the lamps alone. Take the shade off that lamp beside the bed, and off the floor lamp, too, and bring them over here . . .”

  It seemed perfectly natural to give orders to Willie, and he followed them without hesitation. It wasn’t Willie I was afraid of any longer, and he’d forgotten we’d been enemies only yesterday.

  “A flashlight would be easier,” he complained as he positioned the floor lamp beside me. “What’ll I put the small lamp on? Maybe I can slide the nightstand over by the window.”

  “Since we don’t have a flashlight, this’ll have to do.” We plugged the two lamps in, and then I flipped the mirror around so it picked up the extra light and flashed it out across the darkness.

  “You know Morse code, or wh
at?” Willie asked.

  “Yeah. I don’t know if anybody else does, but almost everybody recognizes a distress signal, don’t they? SOS . . . dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot.”

  The signal flashed on the building facing us was still not as bright as I’d have liked, though it was a little bit brighter. I concentrated on the guy with the computer, but he was so absorbed in whatever was on his screen that he didn’t notice when the light was focused on him. I repeated the pattern for a minute or so, wondering how he could ignore it.

  Finally he got up and moved away from the window.

  I sighed in frustration, shifting my weight so that I moved my foot. I looked down, then, because I had stepped on something.

  A spoon. I retrieved it and held it up.

  “Oh, I must have dropped that when they let me have some ice cream,” Willie said. “It’s not much of a tool, is it?”

  “A table knife would be better. Maybe this would work, though.” I set the mirror aside and walked over to the door to look at it closely. “You ever take a door off its hinges?”

  “No. What good would that do, anyway? It’s still locked.”

  “True. But I’ve read about doing this, and I saw my uncle do it once. If we can pry out that rod that drops in from the top of the hinge, we might be able to work the door enough to break it off at the lock, enough so we could squeeze out the crack and get to a phone. Here, you try that, like this, see? And I’ll keep trying Morse code at the window.”

  “The spoon’s not really thin enough,” Willie grunted after his first attempt.

  I picked up the mirror again, pausing to look around one more time. “Is that a closet over there? Are there any wire hangers in it? Maybe one of them would have a section thin enough to fit in that crack. Once the bolt starts to loosen even a little bit, you could get the edge of the spoon under it.”

  “Okay. I’ll try that,” Willie agreed.

  While he worked on the door, I went through the whole pattern of sending signals across the street, blinking my SOS at the man watching TV. Again, he wasn’t aware of anything but his program.