Ransom

by Jon Cleary

  senior campaign workers, he had been besieged by reporters and spur-of-the-moment well-wishers among the hotel guests. The maelstrom had swung him round and he had found himself looking up at the famous clock.

  Beneath it several generations of college lovers had met for dates; his own class at Harvard had regarded it as a stopwatch on romance. The record for getting a girl from under the clock and into a bed in one of the rooms upstairs had been nine minutes; he had never been interested in records and at college had been a shy slow lover. By the time he met Sylvia he was no longer at college, though she was at Barnard. He had met her only once here in the lobby and that had been on an election eve just like tonight, the night before he had been elected Congressman for the first time. He had never asked her if she had ever met anyone else beneath the clock, because she never would have told him if she had. It had been part of an unspoken agreement between them that they had never mentioned past love affairs. Despite their disagreements and rows there had been for him no other women in his life: love began and ended with her. Looking up at the clock tonight he had made a decision.

  “If Sylvia is not returned alive tomorrow, I’m resigning as Mayor - whether I’m voted in or not.”

  “Don’t start thinking about that now - that can wait - “

  Michael shook his head. “No, I’m telling you now. If my political future is just between you and me, then it will be over tomorrow. I don’t want any more of it.”

  The planning of his son’s career had not always been smooth going for Sam Forte. He saw the danger signs again and he adopted the same approach as always: you never won arguments with Michael by fiercely disagreeing with him. He had inherited his mother’s Calabrian temper when it came to argument; Sam knew it would be his son’s major weakness if ever he became President. Sam himself had a temper, but it had long gone cold, the fire of it dampened down by his rigid control. He stood with his back to the

  fireplace, looked round the room as if he were inspecting it for the first time, then back at Michael.

  “And if Sylvia comes back safely - as I’m sure she will - ?”

  “What makes you so sure?” But then Michael made a gesture of dismissal. “Never mind - that’s just another one of your political statements. You always hedge your bets, don’t you? What hedge have you got if I don’t go through with what you’ve spent all these years planning?”

  “None at all,” said Sam softly. “Neither has Sylvia. We are both depending on you.”

  Michael looked as if he were about to swear, then thought better of it. He twisted his mouth, the unspoken words bitter in it, and turned his head away. I’ve won, thought Sam; but managed to feel some pity for his son.

  Michael could feel the petit mat of boyhood coming back: the old, almost forgotten feeling of detachment gripped him. He was in this room yet not of it; at the edge of his consciousness a white-haired man, faintly familiar, lifted a commanding arm. The floor seemed to move and rumble beneath his feet, yet his feet felt as if they were resting on nothing but air: but his whole life had been built on a foundation just as insubstantial. He did not need to move his head to look around the room; he saw it whole from the outside while still in it. Though he had never listened to it before, he could now hear the ormolu clock ticking: four years ticked away while the minute hand did not move. Voices rang in the room and in his skull, echoes of memories that he could not quite grasp. Suddenly the room was gone: he stood in a grey emptiness, an infinity of nothingness. He heard a moan in his head, the room spun round, then there was a sharp blow on his jaw and a frightening confusion.

  He blinked and looked up, lost and dazed. He lay on the floor between his desk and his chair. The white-haired man, whom he now recognized again as his father, was bending over him. He heard a door open and slam, then Manny Pearl was crouched beside him.

  “Mike! Mike, are you all right?”

  He sat up, felt his jaw. “Did I faint?”

  “It was one of those seizures you used to have as a boy.” Sam Forte himself looked on the point of collapse; he sat down heavily in the nearest chair. “You made a terrible gurgling noise, then just fell out of your chair.”

  Michael, assisted by Manny Pearl, got to his feet and moved across to lie down on the couch. “I must have cracked my jaw as I fell.” He took the glass of water Pearl offered him, looked up at the little man’s strained face. “I’ll be all right. It was probably just exhaustion brought it on.”

  “We had doctors, the best, look at him when he was young,” said Sam Forte. “They said there was probably a little damage to the skull when he was being born. Nothing, they said, it happens to lots of babies.”

  “Maybe we better take you home, Mike, get you to bed.”

  “I have to make that broadcast - “

  “Someone else can do it for you. Pat Brendan or Des Hungerford. Maybe even your father.”

  Sam Forte shook his head. “Not me. Can I have a glass of that water, Manny?”

  “You look almost as bushed as Mike.” Manny Pearl poured a glass of water for the old man, looked at him and his son: he could have been another son and a brother, so concerned was he for them. He had dedicated himself to Michael Forte and not just for political reasons. He had a natural warmth of affection, but too much of his life had been spent in an atmosphere where friendship, if it wasn’t suspected or spurned, was only an instrument to be used. Then he had met Michael Forte and the Italian rich boy and the Jewish delicatessen owner’s son had discovered how much they had in common; a respect and a deep liking for each other had soon made itself felt. Wherever Mike went from now on, to the White House or oblivion, Manny hoped he would take him with him. “Maybe Pat Brendan would be best.”

  “No.” Michael sat up, recovered now. His powers of

  recovery had always been exceptional, his stamina that of a football tackle or, as he was, the complete politician. Or almost complete, he thought … “I have to do it myself. The kidnappers won’t take much notice of anyone else. I’ve done little enough as it is. I just wish now I’d gone with Malone.”

  “You could lose your job over this,” said Malone.

  “Maybe,” said Jefferson, holding the car steady against the cross-wind as they came up out of the Queens Midtown Tunnel on to the Long Island Expressway. The storm showed no sign of abating; the wind and the rain seemed to have become stronger and heavier. There was little traffic on the expressway and what there was of it was slowed almost to a crawl. “The rumour is that the Commissioner himself could be out of a job after tomorrow’s elections. If he gets the axe, he’s not gonna be worried about me.”

  “You don’t sound worried.”

  “I am, though. For your wife and Mrs Forte.” He glanced sideways at Malone. “It’s all of a sudden become as personal for me as it is for you.” Then he saw the strain in Malone’s face, the pain in the eyes as the Australian looked at him, and he amended what he had said: “Well, not quite. But almost.”

  Malone knew that he did not have to thank the black man for his commitment; they had reached a stage where words were becoming less and less necessary. When he had come out of the Mayor’s office Jefferson had been waiting for him. He had grabbed Malone’s arm and hustled him through the crush of inquiring reporters.

  “Inspector Malone will be in my office up at Headquarters,” Jefferson had said. “Tell your guys up there they can see him in ten minutes. But he’s saying nothing just now.”

  Once down in Jefferson’s car Malone had looked at him. “Is that where we’re going - Headquarters?”

  “No. I don’t think anyone is gonna come out in this rain to tail us up there - they’ll just call their own boys who are already there, the regular police beat men. We’ll go up to Headquarters eventually, but not just now.”

  Now, out on Long Island, Malone said, “Where do we go first?”

  “We’ll try the local precinct house. They’d know where the high school principal lives - I guess they have as much trouble with the kids
out here as they do in most places.”

  They pulled up outside the precinct house, looked out at the swirling rain lit by the green bowl of the light above the door.

  “Can you swim underwater?” Jefferson said. “Makes me think we’re gonna step out into an aquarium.”

  They ran through the rain, finished up in a room empty of people but for the duty sergeant dozing at the front desk. He straightened up, stiffening a little as the two wet strangers came bursting in. Jefferson produced his badge and the sergeant, a burly man with a nimbus of red hair round a freckled scalp, nodded and looked with interest at Malone.

  “That’s why I’m alone here - everybody else is out prowling around looking for your wife, Inspector, and the Mayor’s.”

  “You can see we’re really trying,” Jefferson said to Malone. “I don’t think the kidnappers are out of the New York area, but we sent out the usual 13-state alarm- that links us with all the State and local police right up and down the eastern seaboard.”

  “But I gotta be frank,” said the sergeant, “I don’t think they’re gonna find much till this storm lets up. The high school principal ? Sure, I know him. My kid goes there. His name’s Hellibrand. You want me to call him first? He mightn’t open his door, you knock on it this time of night.”

  While the sergeant dialled the high school principal’s

  number, Malone looked about him. It was just like home: even the pictures on the walls could have been the same, except there were more black portraits here than there had been back in the police station at Randwick, in Sydney, where he had first started on the beat. There were the usual scuffed desk and chairs: nothing from any police supply depot ever seemed to have been new: everything was created as an instant antique. There was a framed picture of the American flag high up on one wall, too high evidently for it ever to have been cleaned: the Union was badly fly-speckled, some of the stars almost obliterated, the stripes fragmented. There were graffiti scribbled on the walls, none obscene enough to warrant scrubbing off; and there was a framed notice that spelled out in large letters: Your Rights. Jefferson nodded at it.

  “I know a cop who suddenly went word-blind when they hung that in his precinct house.”

  “If I meet up with those buggers who are holding my wife, I’m not spelling out their rights for them.”

  “We won’t go that far. We’ll hand it over to the Department before then.”

  The desk sergeant hung up the phone. “Hellibrand will see you at the school. You want someone to go with you? There’s a guy out in the squad room.”

  But Jefferson declined the offer, asked directions to the school, and he and Malone hurried out to the car again. They had trouble finding their way about in the storm, but ten minutes later they were being led into the main building of the Zachary Taylor High School by the principal.

  Hellibrand was a plump, curly-haired man in his mid-forties who at another time of day might have been jovial; now he was irritable and curious as to why two policemen, one of them an Australian, should want to look through copies of the school year-book. When Jefferson explained who Malone was, the irritation suddenly went out of Helli-brand’s face, to be replaced by genuine sympathy.

  “Well, of course. If there’s anything I can do-Latrobe?

  No, I can’t remember anyone of that name - I have a good memory for names. You have to have, if you don’t want your school to be just a great big blur of anonymity. How far do you want to look back? Five, six years? There they are. God knows what the kids in them have achieved since. One of them I know, is already a guest of the government. He got life for shooting his father. He wasn’t one of the more promising students.”

  Malone and Jefferson had been flicking through the books. Young faces smiled up at them, re-touched to give them all the same look of bland confidence: in a school year-book, Malone guessed, there was no place for a young person’s doubts. Then he stopped, finger pressed down on a face: thin, unsmiling, a white streak in the dark hair. “That’s Latrobe.”

  Hellibrand looked at the caption under the photo. “Mark Birmingham ? You mean you think he’s one of the men who kidnapped your wife?”

  “No, he’s in The Tombs on a bomb conspiracy charge. He’s an anarchist. But we think he can give us a lead. Where does he come from?”

  Hellibrand ran a hand through his hair, shook his head worriedly. “I find it hard to believe - an anarchist! You work your ass off trying to help these kids - you admit to yourself maybe our generation and the one before it fouled up this country for them, but you try to help them - “

  “We know, Mr Hellibrand,” said Jefferson patiently. “But what about this kid Birmingham?”

  “He was always a quiet kid, hard to approach- but his marks were always good, when he left here he could have taken his pick of any college he wanted to go to. His father wanted him to go to Yale, where he’d been, but the kid picked a small college - somewhere in the mid-West, I think. Don’t quote me, but I think he was trying to get away from his old man.”

  “What does that mean?” said Jefferson.

  “Nothing.” Hellibrand abruptly seemed to realize he had

  fallen into the three-o’clock-in-the-morning trap: confiding in total strangers. “Forget I said it, Captain.”

  “Who is his father?”

  “Willard Birmingham - he’s a lawyer with one of the big insurance companies.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Over in Waquoit, near Garden City. I can call him - “

  “No, I think it’ll be better if we drop in on him unannounced. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to get in touch with him.”

  Hellibrand frowned, as if he had been accused of preaching revolution to his students. “Captain, I’d be the last one to want to interfere with the police’s duty. It’s a sad commentary on the way things are, but teachers need the law these days. Why, only last week- “

  Malone and Jefferson escaped out to their car, drove off while Hellibrand was still locking up the school again. “I was rude,” said Jefferson, “but I’m not interested in his problems. He’ll have more next week and the week after that and the week after that - he can wait for my sympathetic ear.”

  “How far to - Waquoit?”

  “We’re practically there. I’ve never been out here, but I’ve heard about it. It was a development put up after the war - it catered to the middle-class conservatives and it’s never changed its character. At least on the surface - “

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Over the past seven or eight years, like a lot of other areas like it, it’s had as much trouble with its kids as the ghettos. Drugs, things like that. This kid Mark Birmingham just seems to have gone all the way.”

  They found the Birmingham house, got out of the car and ran through the rain up on to the front porch. They had to press the bell three times before a light appeared behind the small barred window in the front door and a voice, husky with sleep and apprehension, said something, then repeated it more loudly. “Who’s there? What do you want?”

  Jefferson had to shout to make himself heard above the noise of the storm. The door was opened a few inches, but still held on a chain, and half a face peered out at them.

  “Here’s my badge, Mr Birmingham. It’s important that we see you. It’s about your son Mark.”

  The chain rattled and the door swung open. Malone and Jefferson shook the water from their coats, then stepped into a warm entrance hall that instantly suggested that this was a comfortable house, a family house where every penny that could be afforded had been spent to make it a home in which the occupants could be cosseted and protected. Yet the farther Malone went into the house the more he felt something, or someone, was missing. The account had been paid but the goods, the ambience, were still waiting to be collected.

  Willard Birmingham was a tall, well-built man with a slight stoop; handsome and grey-haired, he would have got second glances from women much younger than himself. He was dressed in pyj
amas and a silk dressing-gown and he had the bewildered, dishevelled air of a man who was still not quite certain that he was wide awake. Elizabeth Birmingham, dark-haired, slim, good-looking, dressed in a silk dressing-gown buttoned to her neck, stood at the foot of the stairs that led to the upper floor.

  “It’s about Mark,” Birmingham explained to his wife, and led Malone and Jefferson through an archway into a large living-room. Mrs Birmingham followed them, going to stand beside her husband and take his hand in hers. “Has he asked to see us?”

  Jefferson looked at them in surprise. “You know where he

  is

  ?’

  The Birminghams looked at each other, then the husband nodded shamefacedly. “We’ve known all along. We recognized him the first day his picture appeared in the newspapers, even though he’d grown his hair and dyed the white streak in it.”

  “We have been trying to make up our minds whether to

  go see him,” said Mrs Birmingham. “We didn’t know whether he would want us to - we haven’t seen or heard from him in almost two years - “

  “We tried to do our best for him - ” There was no whining note in Birmingham’s voice; he stated a fact but he was puzzled by it. “We gave him a good home - “

  Malone had heard it all before, in another accent; he even felt he had been in this room before. He was taking in his surroundings without moving his head; he had been in a dozen rooms like this on the North Shore back home in Sydney. The paintings on the wall that said the owner wanted them to be of his impressions of the world, not the artist’s; the too-impeccable taste of the furnishings that made one look for just one note out of place; the books on the coffee table that would be dusted just as carefully as the furniture. They turn everything into a museum without realizing it, Malone thought, and then they wonder why their kids leave home.