Ransom

by Jon Cleary

  Jefferson nodded. “I wouldn’t count on anything coming of it.”

  “A bloke named Frank Padua came here tonight, tried to offer a deal to the Mayor. When I asked the woman who rang if she knew Padua, she hedged.”

  “Did you get the impression that she knew Padua?”

  “I couldn’t tell - I’m not very good at reading voices over the phone. I was trying to keep her talking, so I told her that

  Padua said he was their go-between. That seemed to hit her -she said nothing for quite a while, as if she were thinking about it, then she just hung up.”

  “Did the Mayor give you a rundown on Padua?” Malone nodded. “What was the deal?”

  “They didn’t get down to specifics.” Malone outlined the conversation with Padua. “The Mayor thought Padua was flying a kite, but I don’t know. From the reaction of that woman, maybe Padua does know something, does have a connection that can help us.”

  “Padua with the Mafia? It’s possible, I suppose. I don’t know him well. He was never in my precinct and by the time I got down to Headquarters he’d sort of retired from politics.”

  Malone picked up Padua’s card from the side table where it still lay. “That’s his address. I’d like to go and see him.”

  “Officially or unofficially?”

  “Here, I’m very unofficial. I’m not even an ordinary citizen with a vote.”

  “Don’t be sour with me, Scobie. I’m on your side.”

  John Jefferson over the past year had almost lost interest in being a policeman; all he looked forward to was retirement. When he had first joined the force he had had no ambition beyond reaching Sergeant; he had surprised both himself and Mary, his wife, at how well he had done in the examinations for promotion. But even when he had reached Lieutenant he had not thought he would get beyond it and had been content. He had not first a^t appreciated it, but his lack of ambition had been the reason for his popularity and also the reason why Commissioner Hungerford had promoted him to Captain and brought him into Headquarters as a special assistant. But he had soon realized that he was no more than window-dressing, another black face with its propaganda value; the job had been given to him because the really ambitious, black or white, would not have wanted it. He was a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year reception clerk, a widower who had too much time to think about his dead

  wife, to think about politics, to wish for escape into a retirement that might be dull but would at least not call for a blind eye to principles.

  “Enough to come with me?” Malone told him of the Mayor’s threat to arrest him if he tried to see Padua.

  Jefferson chewed on his bottom lip, then shrugged. “Why not? Sure, I’ll come.”

  Malone, having invited him, now looked at him carefully, not wanting to bring the other man out on a limb that might break off under them. “Officially or unofficially?”

  Jefferson sighed. “I don’t really care. I been sitting on my ass for four years - now they got me on my feet, they can’t be too surprised if I sometimes walk into the wrong house.”

  Malone grinned, the adrenalin of optimism running in him again if only because he too was off his arse and on his feet. “I’ll get my raincoat. It sounds a bastard of a night.”

  “It could get worse.”

  Malone told the Forte children he was going out but did not say where.

  “Are you going to see this Mr Padua?” said Roger.

  “Are you trying to be a detective?”

  “No offence, Inspector, but a cop is the last thing I’d want to be - none of the guys would speak to me.” Malone and Jefferson exchanged resigned expressions. “But you didn’t answer my question, Inspector.”

  “Okay, yes, I’m going to see Mr Padua. But I don’t think you’d better tell that to anyone, least of all your father.”

  “Good luck, Inspector,” said Pier, cool and political. “We want Mother back any way you can find her.”

  Malone and Jefferson went out a side door, avoiding Denning, who was in a small waiting-room off the main hall. As they got into Jefferson’s car he said, “I came off duty at eight - I’m due back at eight in the morning, an hour before the deadline. Another guy and I are splitting the liaison duty between us.”

  “So it’s going to be an unofficial visit after all?”

  “Isn’t a cop supposed to be always on duty?”

  “Will it get you into any trouble?”

  “Depends what results we get. You get the right result and up top they’ll always turn a blind eye to how you got it. You better slide down out of sight till I get away from here. There are some newspaper guys parked across the street. They wanted to come in, but Denning wouldn’t let ‘em. He hates ‘em and they hate him. Makes for a nice little rapport in a situation like this.”

  Malone slid down in the seat, feeling ridiculous, even criminal. “I’m beginning to feel like Ned Kelly.”

  “Who’s he?”

  But Malone didn’t want to go into that again. “Feller I knew back home. Okay to come up?”

  “All clear. Jesus, what a night! They’ve closed all the airports between Washington and Boston, did you know that?” Jefferson drove the car across to Second Avenue and headed downtown, driving carefully and leaning forward to peer through the windscreen that seemed to be dissolving under the amount of rain hitting it. “I dunno where the hell we’re gonna have to take those jerks to put them on a plane for Cuba.”

  Malone sat quietly in the corner of the seat, now and again flinching instinctively as water was flung up by a passing car. Still flashing on his memory were the images of the Fortes and behind them Lisa and himself. Worry had gone further, into deep loneliness; without admitting the surrender he was already accepting the possibility that Lisa might not return; this was the delayed repayment for that month of windfalls. The optimism he had felt as he had come out of Gracie Mansion had gone as suddenly as his hat might have been whipped away from his head by the wind. This short trip through the storm-distorted night was only a diversion, something to distract him through the sleepless hours till they brought him the final dreadful news. What was it he had thought about his mother and the Irish digging of graves ?

  “You don’t want to give up hope,” said Jefferson.

  Malone looked up, puzzled and surprised. Were the blacks, like the Celts, also digging graves before they were needed ? “I’m still hoping,” he said defensively.

  “Not then, you weren’t. I’ve seen that look on too many other faces, Scobie. You’d recognize it yourself if you looked in a mirror.”

  “Would you be optimistic if you were in my place?”

  Jefferson pulled the car up at a red light: it glowed like a bleeding eye through the water running down the windscreen. “If you want the truth - and I think you do - no, I wouldn’t be optimistic. Kidnappers are a different breed of criminal from any other. For one thing, there are practically no professional kidnappers, guys who make a career of it. Professionals at anything usually act to a pattern, it’s part of being professional. They apply logic and that’s the main thing that helps us cops - you can always apply logic against logic and come up with some sort of answer. With kidnappers - ” The blood turned to creme-de-menthe; and Jefferson drove on. “You never know what the bastards are gonna do. Especially political kidnappers.”

  “So why did you tell me not to give up hope?”

  “What else did you expect me to say?” Jefferson glanced at Malone and the latter understood the look and the question: the black man was offering his friendship.

  Then Jefferson turned the car down a cross-street, slowed to look for a parking spot, found none and finally double-parked. “I don’t think there’ll be any squad cars out on a night like this handing out tickets. One of the advantages of being a police captain is you can always get traffic violations fixed. My small contribution to corruption.”

  “I do the same thing back home,” said Malone, making his small contribution to friendship.

  Jefferson wound down
his window, peered out through the rain. “That’s the address. Padua’s doing all right if the whole house is his. You own a town house in this area, you’re paying maybe a quarter of a million bucks for it. Even the taxes would break me.”

  They ran up the few steps through the rain, huddled against the grille guarding the front door. Malone could not see much of the house, but it did not look large; for a quarter of a million dollars he would have expected Buckingham Palace or maybe the Vatican; not a house that looked no more than thirty feet wide and seemed to be no more than three or four stories high. And had no garage: a suburban man, he shook his head at such a lack.

  The front door opened and a young, white-jacketed manservant looked cautiously out at them through the grille. Jefferson introduced Malone and himself, showed his badge; the manservant surveyed them suspiciously, then let them into the narrow hall and went away to see his master. Jefferson looked after him. “I thought he was gonna leave us out there in the rain. They don’t like us.”

  Malone didn’t know who they were and he didn’t know whether Jefferson, when he said us, meant blacks or a cop. “Who are they?”

  “Puerto Ricans. He’s one.”

  And I think I’ve got problems back home: at least there the dislike of a cop is simple and all of one colour.

  The manservant came back, face as blank as the back of his hand, told them Mr Padua would see them and led them upstairs to the most sumptuously furnished room Malone had ever been in.

  Sumptuous was not the word Malone thought of; but even he, a man of not much taste, who judged rooms only on the comfort of their beds or chairs, knew that someone had gone too far in the furnishing of this particular room. There was nothing in it that was garish, but somehow he knew there was too much of everything: too many pictures on the walls, too much rich comfort in the chairs and sofas, too many valuable ornaments, too much expense. This is a rich man who has let someone else spend his money while he thinks he’s been buying advice. Then Malone grinned at himself, the count-the-pennies big-time spender who knew when other people spent too much. Then he remembered Lisa’s

  gentle ribbing of his stinginess and the memory was too poignant; he acknowledged Padua’s greeting with a brusque nod and turned his face away. Padua stared at him for a moment, then looked at Jefferson.

  “Is this an official visit, Captain? Did Inspector Malone suggest it?”

  “No-on both counts, Mr Padua. But I can call up Headquarters and have them make it official if that’s the way you want it.”

  “Let’s see what you have to say first.”

  Padua gestured them to chairs, but remained standing in front of the big marble-surrounded fireplace. The wrought-iron grate held small logs of wood that looked to Malone as if they might be taken out every day and dusted, but there were no smoke stains around the fireplace and he wondered when a fire had last been lit in it. A fire would only have been another unnecessary ornament to the room: the central heating was much too warm for Malone’s comfort.

  Jefferson looked at Malone and the latter took the hint: since their visit was unofficial, maybe he’d like to do the talking. “Mr Padua, after you left tonight I talked to one of the kidnappers - a woman.”

  “What did she have to say?”

  I’d hate to play this bloke poker: he’d play his cards from inside his pocket. “I mentioned your name to her- “

  He waited for a reaction, but Padua’s face was as smooth and cold as the marble behind him. “So?”

  “She said she was not prepared to have you or your connections come into the act unless you were going to help her and her partner. Otherwise -” Malone glanced at Jefferson, but the latter was looking at Padua, not a hint on his big dark face that he felt any puzzlement or surprise at Malone’s lie. Talking about professionals, Malone thought …

  “Otherwise?” said Padua, another professional.

  “She implied they had not let off their last bomb.” Christ, what am I saying? I am borrowing threats from

  people who hate the society I am supposed to respect, I’m graduating by proxy to guerilla warfare to get my wife back. And yet why not ? What else did he value in life more than Lisa?

  For the first time Padua showed some reaction. He had long ago lost any fear of physical violence; he had been inoculated against it in boyhood. Unlike Sam Forte he often looked back. Sometimes in early spring, when bitter nostalgia ran in him like a fever, he would call for his car and be driven downtown to Battery Park, the eyepiece to the telescope back to the past. He would look south and over towards the Jersey shore: there in the cold March winds he had worked with his father, taking their boat out as soon as word came in that the shad were running. There had been fights with other fishermen, with no quarter given for his being only a boy; at fourteen he had had his skull laid open by a bailing-hook wielded by a man old enough to be his grandfather. His father had died violently, shot in the back in a waterfront brawl. Frank Padua had been sixteen then and, covered in his father’s blood, he had carried the body to the parish church so that the priest could administer the last rites to Angelo Padua before his soul was as cold and useless as his body. Frank Padua then and now did not fear for anything that might happen to himself.

  Himself personally, his body or his soul: but he feared for his possessions, for his house and his respectability that was as new and expensive as any of the furnishings that surrounded him. A bomb planted outside his front door would be something he could never hope to survive. The Establishment might be marked for destruction by the urban guerillas (he knew the battle lines as well as any war correspondent; any real social climber today had to be a military historian), but the bombing of his house would not admit him as a welcome refugee into the Establishment. He was still on a temporary visa from his past.

  He was fifty-eight years old and he had been twelve when he had first seen Manhattan as the future: the telescope had

  been turned the other way around then. Boys on the Jersey shore had had their heroes: Dutch Schultz, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth; he had yearned to be like Mayor Jimmy Walker and the bosses of Tammany Hall. He had crossed the water from Jersey to Manhattan in 1930, a bad year to be going anywhere, and within six months he had discovered there were other, bigger men than the politicians, rich old-family men who were a law unto themselves. They had become his heroes and he had determined that some day he would join them. But for a poor fisherman’s son from New Jersey the way uptown was far tougher and longer than a mere subway ride. He had had to make commitments along the way: even Christ, he supposed, had had his debts when they finally nailed him to the cross.

  “Why should they want to threaten me like that?”

  “I don’t know.” Malone knew he had scored with this wild punch; but where was he to go from here? “Unless you know more than you think you know.”

  Padua looked at him sharply. “What do you mean by that?”

  Malone shrugged; the remark meant as much to him as it did to Padua. I’ve worked in the dark before, he thought, but I’ve never been bloody blindfolded too. “If you told us what you know, maybe Captain Jefferson and I could take them off your back.”

  “I am only the go-between,” said Padua. “My connections asked me to see the Mayor - “

  “Put us on to your connections.”

  “I can’t do that- “

  Suddenly all the anger and frustration of the long day burst out of Malone. He grabbed Padua by the front of his jacket, stood over him. “By Christ, I’ll do you, Padua! Tell us who they are!”

  Padua, unafraid, looked at Jefferson. “Captain- “

  But Jefferson did not move and his dark face remained expressionless.

  Malone, blind with fury now, raised his hand and

  whipped the knuckles across Padua’s face. Padua fell back, jerking free of Malone’s grip, and fell over a small table. A vase fell to the floor and was shattered. There was a gasp from Padua as his foot crunched into a piece of the vase; he staggered back as Malone came a
fter him. They were up against the fireplace now; Malone swung wildly to grab Padua again, missed, and his hand swept a small figurine from the mantelpiece and it, too, shattered as it hit the floor.

  “No! No!” Padua stopped, let himself be snatched at by Malone. “Don’t break anything more!”

  “Tell us who your connections are!”

  Malone hit Padua again. He had never been as blindly savage as this before; but before this he had never lost anyone as dear to him as Lisa. Jefferson still remained unmoving as Padua was pushed across the fireplace. Padua’s arm came up to protect his face as Malone hit him again, his elbow swept along the mantelpiece and three more figurines were knocked to the floor.

  “No-please! No more! I’ll call them! Please!”

  Malone let Padua go and the latter stepped away, his foot again crunching on a piece of china. He looked down dazedly at his broken treasures, then up at Malone.

  “I could have you killed, you know that?” Padua’s voice was still soft, but his own anger was as furious as that of Malone.

  “I’m sure you could,” said Malone. “Your connections would fix that for you. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  “You better tell us who they are, Mr Padua,” said Jefferson quietly. “Otherwise Inspector Malone is likely to wreck all this room of yours.”

  “The Mayor might not like cops acting the way you two are.” A note of resistance, a whistling into the wind, flickered in Padua’s voice.

  “The Mayor knows as well as you and I do that he doesn’t run the law,” said Jefferson. “And I don’t believe you’d complain to him, anyway. Gome on, Padua - !” Abruptly his voice sharpened. “Who are your connections?”

  !3i

  Padua hesitated, then said, “I’ll have to call them - “

  Malone picked up the phone on the table beside the fireplace. “Here!”