Ransom

by Jon Cleary

  “Lisa Malone.” Lisa smoothed back her own hair, looked down at the holes in the knees of her stockings. She reached out for her handbag, but Carole grabbed it and also took Sylvia’s. “There’s nothing in there but what any woman carries.”

  Carole smiled, nodded at the gun in her hand. “Today I was carrying this in mine. You can fix your face when we get where we’re going.”

  “Where are you taking us? And why?”

  Carole just shook her head, but Sylvia said, “We’re somewhere on Long Island -1 heard us come over the Queensboro Bridge.”

  “Very smart, Mrs Forte,” said Carole. “You must be a great help to your husband if you are always so observant.”

  Lisa suddenly tightened her gaze on the woman opposite her. “Are you Mrs Michael Forte? The Mayor’s wife?”

  “I’m surprised you recognize me. You’re not American, are you?” But Sylvia was pleased: one never really knew how much interest the rest of the world took in Americans, especially American wives.

  “No, Dutch.” Then Lisa corrected herself: she would have to get used to the idea: “Or Dutch-Australian, I suppose. My husband is an Australian and that’s where I live. I still can’t believe this is happening - ” She glanced at the gun

  in Carole’s hand. “I don’t think it would happen back home.”

  “You’re not going to get hurt,” said Carole. “If Mrs Forte’s husband listens to reason you will be released within thirty-six hours.”

  “Thirty-six hours?” Sylvia looked at her watch, pondered for a while, then looked up. “You’re waiting till tomorrow, Election Day? Is this a political kidnapping, then?”

  “Very smart again, Mrs Forte.” Carole looked at Lisa. “You’re not part of the politics, Mrs - Malone? You’re just unfortunate. You might say you’re one of the poor non-voters caught in the cross-fire. It happens too often in this country.” Beneath the wrapround dark glasses the wide sensitive mouth suddenly thinned with bitterness. “But Mrs Forte’s husband and men like him never know it and never care. But he’ll know now.”

  Chapter Two

  Malone stuck the stamps on the postcards and put the cards into his pocket; he would post them when he and Lisa went out to lunch. They were not large cards but it had taken him half an hour to compose the messages on the backs of the three of them. His police reports had never been noted for their literary quality; their only virtue had been their brevity. Something like that had been good enough for Russ Clements, his sidekick in Y Division back home (though now he came to think of it he and Russ were no longer partners: Inspectors did not have sidekicks, only subordinates and superiors); but the cards to his parents and to Lisa’s had needed more thought. Jan and Elisabeth Pretorious were sophisticated, educated people: her father, a lover of Proust, would not be satisfied with Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. Malone had never read a line of Proust, but he gathered he was a French poof and he did not think he and Marcel would think along the same lines; he was not himself an uneducated reader, but Paris of long ago was not his territory. Con and Brigid, his own parents, though uneducated, had the Irish respect for garrulity: they might not look for fine words but they wanted a lot of them. He had been sweating out these messages everywhere they stopped off and he was glad these cards were the last he would have to send. The telephone was sometimes a bloody nuisance, but it had its advantages. He was the same thing to all men on the phone.

  He looked at his watch: what the hell was keeping Lisa? She was the most punctual woman he had ever met and though she had set no time to meet him back here at the hotel, she had mentioned an early lunch which, for a hungry man like himself, was any time after eleven-thirty. It was

  now 12.20 and she had been gone three hours. He began to worry, thinking of what Captain Jefferson had told him that morning of the increasing number of attacks on women in broad daylight.

  “Sometimes I think this city is like Vietnam - we can never win. Last year we had 912 murders - this year up to the end of last month we’ve had 924 and we got two months to go. I’m not boasting - I’m ashamed to be quoting the figures to you. But maybe it’s the same all over, eh? I mean the figures going up. Maybe we been fighting the wrong enemy, the Communists and such. Maybe the criminals, the villains as the British call ‘em, are gonna take over the free world.”

  Captain Jefferson had been the officer who had greeted Malone at Police Headquarters and taken him on the conducted tour. He was a middle-aged Negro and Malone had at once recognized him for what he was, a desk detective who had grown fat in his chair and cynical in his lazy routine; there were one or two like him at Police Headquarters back home, their only difference from him the colour of their skin. He was a man of only medium height but must have weighed more than Malone; the latter guessed that if Jefferson had to take a physical he would fail it. He had been friendly enough, but Malone, as sensitive as litmus paper when it came to reception of himself, guessed that Jefferson was a professional greeter: the smile on the plump-cheeked black face was part of his police equipment, like the gold shield that he carried in his pocket. Malone wondered how long he had been in this job, how many other unwelcome visitors he had escorted around Head quarters.

  Malone had been surprised when he had approached Police Headquarters. He had not known what to expect, but he had not, for instance, expected New York to accommodate its law enforcement headquarters in circumstances that compared so unfavourably with those in London, a much older and less affluent city. The New York accom-

  modation did not look any better than what was afforded back in Sydney, only larger. The surroundings looked as if they had been designed to bleed out any optimism any rookie policeman might have nurtured that he was contributing to a Brave New World. Shops and loft buildings, shabby and decrepit enough to have been shipped over wholesale from the back streets of eighteenth-century London, were thrown up against the brown cliffs of the police building; Malone wondered if it was a licensed area for cut-price gin-mills and whorehouses where the trainees in the Vice Squad could learn their trade, till he noticed policemen and policewomen coming and going in and out of the buildings; the tenements were annexes of Headquarters itself. On the green-domed tower on top of Headquarters the clock had stopped at 7.15 (on what morning or night of what day of what year ? Had crime finally brought time to a standstill?) and the front of the main building was veiled by scaffolding (was the building being demolished or just patched up?). Inside the building he had a feeling of deja vu: the citizens of the world, with a few exceptions, usually those in a police state, expected their police to work in an environment designed to give them no more encouragement than the villains they were expected to catch. Drab walls that matched the morning complexion of an old whore; light that filtered down like the illumination from a tax budget that had blown its fuse several levels higher; floors that magnified the sound of every footfall, as if soft-footed cops were all right out on the beat but suspect in their own headquarters. Home sweet bloody home, Malone thought: I should have brought some ceremonial gifts, a few bones, from the tribe Down Under.

  “You saw the construction work going on outside?” said Jefferson. “That’ll be the first renovations we’ve had here in God knows how long, and we got a bunch of anarchists to thank for it.”

  Malone then remembered an item he had read in the newspapers before he had left Sydney: only the worst

  aspects of any country were news in another country. “That was where they planted the bomb?”

  “Right there. Blew out three rooms and killed two of our guys and injured another six. But we got the jerks who did it -they’re down in The Tombs waiting trial. We got them in only two days.”

  “Good going.”

  “It didn’t satisfy everybody. Some people wanted to know why it took us so long. Others wanted to know why we could act so fast and efficiently when it was a coupla cops who were killed, but took our time when ordinary citizens were murdered. You can’t win.”

  “Do you expect
to?” asked Malone.

  “We have a force of just 30,000 men,” said Jefferson, reciting figures with the slightly defensive air of a man who had too often been exposed to criticism by outsiders, “and if we doubled it, then we might, and I repeat might, just begin to start controlling this town again. How many you got in Sydney, Inspector?”

  Malone had left Sydney two days after his promotion had been gazetted: he was just a little slow in replying to being addressed as Inspector. “Eh? Oh, just over seven thousand, I think. But that covers the whole State. We have State police forces in Australia, not city.”

  “Seven thousand for how many people?”

  “About four and a half, maybe five million.” Malone had never been good at statistics. It never meant anything to him that the crime rate had risen 10 or 15 or 20 per cent in a year, that there was one man in prison for every 422 or 844 walking around outside, 50 per cent of whom might be just as larcenous as the man locked up. When crime became just a statistical problem, he would give up. Involvement, with both criminals and their victims, was his strength and his weakness, but it was what kept him in his job. You could never become involved with percentages.

  “We got about twelve million - two million here on Manhattan alone, eleven miles long by two miles at its widest

  point - and Christ knows how many come in every day to work. Three, four, maybe even another five million.” He sounded tired, as if suddenly he realized the futility of fighting statistics. Then he smiled, as if he also realized he was letting the side down in front of a stranger. “But we survive. Us cops, I mean.”

  “Where would they be if we didn’t?” Malone grinned in reply. He knew Jefferson would know whom he meant by they, the outsiders, the taxpayers who expected miracles, who hated cops but always came demanding help and sympathy when things went wrong with them personally.

  Jefferson’s smile widened, became personal and not official: he recognized a member of the club. “We should swap reminiscences, Inspector. Maybe we could have lunch-?”

  Then a young uniformed policeman came hurrying down the long corridor where they stood. At once Malone, an expert at reading expressions, knew that something unusually serious had occurred: cops, even young ones, did not normally look as agitated as this one. Jefferson, another expert, saw the policeman coming and moved towards him: young Fairfax looked as if he had come to announce the outbreak of World War Three.

  “Captain, you’re wanted in the Commissioner’s office at once. The Mayor’s wife has just been kidnapped!”

  Jefferson looked quizzically at the young policeman, then shook his head. “I was gonna say you must be joking -Okay, Tim, I’ll go along right now. Will you show Inspector Malone the way out?” He came back to Malone. “You heard that ? I been in the force thirty-three years and I can still be surprised. Jesus!” He shook his big round head again; for the first time Malone saw the flecks of grey in the dark crinkly hair. “Looks like we might not get together again, Inspector. But you understand - “

  He held out his hand and Malone shook it. “I’ll read the papers and see how you make out. Good luck. I’m just glad I’m not in your shoes.”

  “It’s not my pigeon, but when something like this happens -the Mayor’s wife-Jesus!” He shook his head yet again. He reminded Malone of a bush cop who had just realized what a jungle a city could be; but Jefferson was too old and bitterly experienced for that image to be true. “Everybody’s gonna be called in on this. If you were thinking of robbing a bank or something, now’s the time.”

  He waved a plump hand, then went off down the corridor, walking quickly and with that surprisingly light step that some heavyweight men have, as if it was all they had been able to reclaim from the long gone spring of their youth. Or perhaps, Malone thought, it’s just the thought of getting away from his desk for a while.

  “Have the kidnappers made any demands?” he asked Fairfax.

  “I couldn’t say, sir. I’m afraid at my rank we’re always the last to know.”

  “Too true,” said Malone. “I never knew a thing till I got to sergeant. But ignorance is bliss. It just doesn’t pay as well.”

  “Too true, sir,” said Fairfax, but his smile showed he meant no offence by echoing Malone.

  So Malone had come back to the hotel, the policeman in him wanting to stay at Headquarters and watch another force in action during an emergency such as this, the ordinary man in him wanting to be gone from it and glad that he did not live in this city of extraordinary violence. He stood up and walked to the window, looked out on the street below. Two black women, big and round as barrels, were rolling along on the other side of the street; they passed a white derelict sprawled on the steps of a condemned tenement, said something to each other and looked the other way; Malone didn’t need to be able to see their faces, their contempt was outlined in the straightening of their round bodies. A young white woman with two small children came down the street and passed the derelict; neither she nor the children gave him a glance: he was part of the scene to them, one

  urith the garbage in the gutter, the scraps of newspaper blowing along the sidewalk. Malone all at once felt a deep sadness for the two million people who lived here on Manhattan. They were walking about in their own graveyard.

  The phone rang and he picked it up, wondering where Lisa was calling from. Had she discovered that a Pretorious had founded New Amsterdam, was she now being feted at the Holland Society and she wanted him to join her? What had a Malone founded ? Gome to think of it, what had any Irishman founded? “Sir, there is a Captain Jefferson downstairs here. May I send him up?”

  Malone put down the phone, puzzled and beginning to be worried. Why would a captain of detectives, in the middle of an emergency, come all the way uptown to call on him at the hotel? Why hadn’t he just phoned?

  He had the door open before Jefferson knocked on it. “What’s the matter? Has my wife been hurt or something?”

  Jefferson’s plump face creased in puzzlement. “How did you know?”

  “Know what? Christ, I don’t know anything! But you haven’t come all the way up here for that lunch - “

  “No.” Jefferson’s voice was a rumble of despair. “I wish that was the reason - “

  “Come in.” Malone closed the door. Jefferson had not yet told him anything, but he knew that for the first time in his life a cop had come to him with bad news; he could not remember the number of times he had knocked on strangers’ doors and with a feeling of utter helplessness watched their faces crumble and their eyes go opaque as he had delivered the bad news he had been burdened with. He leaned back on the door for support he might need and said, “What has happened to my wife?”

  “The kidnappers took her with them when they took the Mayor’s wife.”

  Malone did need the door: he felt his legs go weak. One part of his mind, the professional part, wondered if his eyes went blank: for a moment he could not see Jefferson or any-

  thing else in the room. Then he blinked, blurted out, “I don’t believe it! Why the hell would they want to take her-?”

  “They said it was an accident.” Jefferson told Malone all the police so far knew, that the kidnapping appeared to have taken place somewhere in the Cornwall Gardens building where Mrs Forte’s dentist had his office, that a young blond man in dark glasses had slugged the garage attendant, that the kidnapped women must have been in a grey delivery truck that had been driven at speed out of the garage as another man had driven down into it. “Accidents like this do happen. You’re a cop - you know that - “

  “Did the kidnappers phone or what?”

  “Some woman called the Mayor, told him they had his wife and another woman named Malone, an Australian. I didn’t know about your wife when I got to the Commissioner’s office - I didn’t know about her till the Commissioner went down to City Hall to see the Mayor, then called me back. I was going to call you from Headquarters, then I thought it better - ” He made a vague gesture.

  “Thanks. I’m glad
you didn’t phone - I’d have thought it was someone trying a sick joke.” He moved across and sat down on the bed. “How’s the Mayor taking it?”

  “I don’t know - I haven’t seen him. But a coupla kidnappings we’ve had in the past, while he’s been Mayor, he’s really ridden us. He’s so uptight about law and order, there are some cops wonder if he knows what we’re up against.”

  “What do the kidnappers want? Money for my wife as well?”

  “I don’t know what sort of demands they’re making. If they’re socking the Mayor, you can bet the price is gonna be high - he’s a very rich man. Maybe they’ll include your wife in the price.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” Then Malone looked up. “Sorry, it just made my wife sound like some sort of commodity.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with kidnappers - “

  “Once. The only time we’ve had a kidnapping in my State in my time.”

  “I’ve been on three of them and I know the history of most of the big ones here in this country. As far as kidnappers are concerned, their victims are a commodity and nothing else. That’s brutal, I know, but you’re a cop and sympathetic bullshit isn’t gonna be any comfort to you. Not when you come to think about it.”

  Malone nodded, looked out the window from where he sat. The buildings uptown glimmered dully like stacked mesas of pure quartz; behind all those windows how many other people had just been shocked into numbness? An ambulance’s siren wailed down in the street: pain never stopped: dying, like living, was a daily occurrence. He looked up at Jefferson again, almost unable to ask the question: “Do you think my wife - and the Mayor’s wife-are still alive?”

  The answer seemed to sicken Jefferson as much as the question. “We can’t tell. You know the statistics - no, maybe you don’t. Most times the kidnappers panic-Jesus, why am I talking to you like this!” His face screwed up in pain and he dropped his chin on his chest. He stood in silence for a few moments till he had regained his composure. Through the thin wall there came the sound of a television set in the next room: a studio audience laughed their heads off and a band struck up a pell-mell tune: someone had just won a prize for making a fool of himself. Jefferson raised his head and listened to the laughter as if puzzled, then looked back at Malone. “It’s not gonna be easy for you, Malone. It’s never easy for anyone in these circumstances, but it’s gonna be harder for you. You’re a cop and you’re not gonna believe any of the crap we usually dole out under the heading of ‘hope for the best’. I’d like to say the chances are your wife is okay and unharmed, but we just plain don’t know.”