Ransom

by Jon Cleary

  “Thank you,” said Sylvia Forte huskily.

  “Okay,” said Abel, “we’ll do it your way. But remember -anything happens to us, these two dames go out with us.”

  A minute later the convoy was ready to move off. Lewton, about to step into another squad car with Malone and Cartwright, stopped and looked back towards the end of the line. The civilian cars had tagged on, led by a station wagon on the roof of which a man was setting up a camera.

  “Who are they, for Christ’s sake?”

  Sheriff Narvo, standing by his own car, looked back. “It’s the reporters and TV guys, Captain. They followed you out here from Manhattan.”

  “Jesus,” said Lewton, “they make a circus of everything!”

  The Police Department helicopter was over Riverhead when the message came for it to turn back to Kennedy Airport.

  “Keep going!” shouted Commissioner Hungerford above the clatter of the helicopter’s blades, and the pilot nodded. “We’ll turn back when we see the convoy.”

  Michael Forte and Manny Pearl, sitting in the rear seats, looked down on the roiled and muddy waters of Great Peconic Bay; then as they flew on they saw over to their right the flooded potato fields around Bridgehampton. One or two houses had been unroofed and trees lay on their sides, their torn-up roots looking like black claws frozen in a death agony. In the marinas and anchorages around the shore smashed boats were locked together like so much floating junk; out in the middle of the bay a lone yacht, its mast snapped off, drifted like a dead gull. There was no sign of any bird life, but on the roads a few cars were moving, and in the marinas small dark figures clambered over the wreckage like scavenging rats over a rubbish dump. Out to the east the sun, pink and weak, was struggling like a derelict out of a torn blanket of cloud.

  “There they are!” Hungerford pointed down.

  “It looks like a Presidential motorcade,” said Forte. “Do they need all those cars?”

  Hungerford was looking at the scene below through binoculars. “I can count only eight police cars. Who the hell are the rest?”

  Manny Pearl also had binoculars to his eyes. “The other six are TV and press, I’d say. There’s a guy with a TV camera mounted on top of that station wagon.”

  “They’re really moving,” said Hungerford. “I hope the son-of-a-bitch falls off. The freedom of the goddam press is the greatest abuse of democracy I know of.”

  Forte, tired, worried and afraid, still managed a grin. “You sound like the KGB, Des.”

  “At least those guys can turn a deaf ear to criticism.” Then Hungerford glanced at the pilot and shouted, “You heard none of that, you understand!”

  The pilot grinned, pointed to the earphones he wore and shook his head. He swung the helicopter about, took it down closer to the convoy of cars as it picked up Sunrise Highway. The long snake of fourteen vehicles slid around two slower-moving cars on the highway, raced on past the flooded and battered countryside. On the roofs of the police cars the spinning red signal lights were as bright as drops of blood in the slanting light coming up from the east.

  Forte took the binoculars from Manny Pearl and looked down, trying to pick out which car Sylvia might be travelling in. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder and the latter took the helicopter down lower. Forte saw the third police car in the line waver a little, then caught a quick glance of someone as they looked out of the car and up at him.

  Then he saw another face appear at a rear side window, but the angle was too acute, the face too distorted by the window glass, for him to be able to identify it. The pilot swung the helicopter up as it moved on too fast for the cars below, went round in a wide circle and came back. Michael Forte focused the glasses again, kept them aimed on the third car in the convoy, but no faces appeared this time at the car’s window. She doesn’t know I’m up here, he thought. And felt an insane, suicidal urge to plunge out of the helicopter and down on to the swiftly speeding car below.

  In the rear seat of the car Sylvia and Lisa, hands free now, sat side by side, each slumped in her own confused despair. Sylvia held her swollen wrist, but she was hardly aware of the pain of it; she had reached a stage where another bruise or cut or even a broken bone would have been absorbed in the general numbness that contained her. She had looked out at the helicopter when it had clattered overhead, but it had been a reflex action, a response to Abel’s reaction to it.

  Sitting up front beside Julie, who was driving, he had turned back to them, his gun held on the back of the seat. “They got you watched from all angles, but it ain’t gonna help you. That right, baby?”

  Julie, driving the car with almost automatic reflexes, like a woman at the end of a hard day’s motoring, nodded glumly. The last three-quarters of an hour had seen everything crumble into dust, a bitter dust that she could taste as if fate had force-fed it to her. But the last forty-five minutes, she guessed, had been only the climax; disaster had begun creeping up on her last night. If she had been capable of further tears she would have wept; but they would have been tears of self-pity and she was not capable of that either. Till the storm had struck last night everything had seemed so perfect. Even the kidnapping had seemed perfect: there had not even been the danger associated with other kidnappings, the collection of the ransom: the ransom would just have been taken to a plane and flown out of the country. That would still happen, she guessed, but now everyone, including her father and mother, knew who the kidnappers were. Worst of all, she had become Abel’s prisoner, though he might not yet think of her that way.

  From the moment he had snatched the phone from her in the cottage she had known she had lost control of the whole operation. It was now just a war between Abel and the police: but he hated her too, the traitor in the ranks.

  Abel reached for the microphone of the car radio. “Captain, you hear me? Tell that chopper to get outa here!”

  “He’s leaving now. It’s - ” Lewton’s voice faded as his car passed under a bridge ” - and the Mayor.”

  At that Sylvia leaned quickly forward, but the helicopter was already swinging up and away, heading back towards Kennedy Airport. Abel switched off the radio and looked back at her.

  “He must be pretty worried, eh? Mrs Malone’s old man didn’t look too good either.”

  “Leave them alone,” said Julie.

  He gave her the old look out of the corners of his eyes, the old look that said he trusted no one. “You on their side? I been waiting for you to tell me that.”

  “I’m on nobody’s side,” she said dully.

  “What about those guys in The Tombs? That brother of yours ? Jesus, baby, did you use me! I come all the way from Kansas City for thisV For the first time she realized he was afraid; he looked wildly backwards and forward of them. “Nobody, not even my old man, ever conned me like you’ve done!”

  She continued to stare ahead of her, deaf to his abuse as he went on swearing at her. He was one with Carole Cox now, part of the past: she did not have to live with either of them any more. Once in Cuba she would find some way of escaping from him. But she felt sorry for the two women in the back of the car. God knew what was going to happen to them.

  She slowed down as the police car up front began to slow. Abel swung round, then relaxed. “Must be a county line. Mustn’t forget - what you call it, Teach?”

  “Protocol,” she said mechanically: they had completed the circle to their first relationship, teacher and student: then she had been as unresponsive to him as she was now.

  “She used to teach me English,” Abel told the women in the back seat. He turned round, peering out through the rear window as the Suffolk County cars and motor cycle men peeled off and the Nassau County squad took over. “She used to read us poetry. There was one line some of us really dug - or me, anyway. That one by that Limey faggot Oscar Wilde-you remember, baby? We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”’

  He struck a chord in her and she looked at him in surprise: he had never told her anything like t
his before. “You liked the poetry?”

  “I thought I did. But it’s like everything else - a load of crap!”

  “You must have liked it once,” said Lisa, as surprised as Julie at the unexpected chink in the boy.

  “Maybe. But that was before she turned out to be a bitch like all the rest of you.”

  The convoy sped on. They were on the Southern State Parkway now and the traffic was thickening. The sirens were wailing and the early morning drivers, pulling their cars over to the slow lanes as the bull team waved them aside, were staring out in puzzlement as the long cavalcade, sirens going, red lights spinning, and the cameraman, crouched perilously on the roof platform of the station wagon at the end of the line, swept by. By the time the convoy had picked up the New York Police Department’s escort, had swung over to the Belt Parkway and was approaching the airport, traffic on the parkway had slowed to a crawl. The drivers on the parkway were listening to their radios: the convoy swept by to the sound-track of the commentary on its own progress. Some drivers up ahead, warned of the coming of the convoy, looked out and waved as it went past: as Michael Forte had said, it could have been a Presidential motorcade.

  At the airport several mobile control trucks were waiting, the producers telling their cameramen parked around the area what they wanted. “Joe, you concentrate on the Mayor and the other dame’s husband, what’s his name, Mahoney, Moroney- “

  “Malone,” said an assistant, eye on the higher job.

  “Okay, Malone, Balone. Jesus, what’s it matter? Who’ll remember tomorrow? Pete, you stick with the kidnappers. Angelo, you stay around the terminal buildings - I’ll cut away to you for reaction shots from the crowd when things get slow out on the field - “

  “Ah Christ, Merv, don’t I ever get to see any action? That riot last week, where was I - ?”

  “Angie boy, I’m saving you up for Armageddon. You’ll be right up front for that. Walter - where the hell’s Walter?”

  “He’s gone for a crap, Merv. Just in case it’s a long day, he said - “

  In her apartment in the Bronx, slopping around in slippers and dressing-gown, Polly Nussbaum kept glancing at the television set as she prepared her breakfast. God, the Mayor, do him a favour. Give him back his wife safe and sound. And that Mrs Malone, too. What a world you let us make for ourselves, God. You should be disgusted, I wouldn’t blame you.

  In his town house in Manhattan Frank Padua had switched on the television set in his bedroom, watched it as his manservant brought in his breakfast tray. He made no comment, vocal or mental, as he looked at the pictures on the screen. Whatever happened out at Kennedy Airport would make little, if any, difference to his life.

  “Tell them to have the car out front in an hour,” he told the manservant. “I’m going down to vote. You should vote too, Tony.”

  “Who would I vote for, Mr Padua? Anyone in particular? Mr Forte, maybe?”

  Padua spread his hands. “Anyone you like, Tony. It’s a free country.”

  In Brooklyn Auguste Giuffre came out of early Mass and went into the presbytery next door to the church for his usual morning cup of coffee with Father Lupi. He looked at the television set in the priest’s study and shook his head in disapproval. “It’s a terrible world, Padre. Too much violence.”

  “I said Mass this morning for the safe return of those poor women.”

  “I noticed, Padre. You’re a thoughtful man.”

  “Are you going to vote for the Mayor today?”

  “Who else? He’s a nice Italian boy.”

  He looked back at the screen. The long convoy had reached the airport, was moving down the perimeter of the field to the far end on the edge of Jamaica Bay. A big jet stood there and parked some distance from it was a semicircle of police cars, trucks, buses, three ambulances, two fire engines and a helicopter. He had to admire the efficiency

  of the City of New York. It was just a pity it was in the wrong hands.

  “You look flushed, Don Auguste.”

  “Just a little fall chill, Padre.”

  The radio in the police car crackled and Lewton said, “Yes? Any trouble?”

  “Pig,” said Abel, “what’re you trying to pull? That goddam army down there - you think we’re gonna drive into the middle of that?”

  “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Okay, you tell ‘em they all gotta get the hell outa there -and remember, I can hear every word you say. But first, you pull your car outa this line - you and us are gonna stay right here till every one of them bastards is moved right outa there.”

  Lewton, riding in the front seat with the driver, switched off for a moment and looked back at Gartwright, in the back seat beside Malone. “This son-of-a-bitch is too smart. Do we agree to what he wants?”

  “What else can we do?” Gartwright said.

  Lewton spoke into the microphone again. “All cars? Turn round and head back to the other end of the runway.”

  Then a gruff angry voice came on the air as Lewton flicked the switch over. “This is the Commissioner, Captain. Who gave that order?”

  Lewton motioned to the driver to slow down, watched the other cars swing away and go back the way they had come. “With all due respect, Commissioner, I’m afraid our friends are giving the orders. They also want everyone moved away from the plane. We have to stay here till you are all at the other end of the runway. Special Agent Cartwright and I agree that we have no argument, sir.” Put that in your cigarette holder and smoke it, Commissioner sir.

  Lewton had never been a lover of the FBI but now he was glad Cartwright was here. “Our friend is getting impatient. Will you give the order for the area to be cleared, sir?”

  The two cars were stationary now and Malone, looking across at the other car, could see Lisa. He waved to her and she waved back. Christ, he thought, so near and yet so far: cliches were often so brutally truthful. Every minute or so there was a deafening roar, cored with a shrill whine, as a plane came in low above them and touched down on the runway. Over on the parallel runway planes were taking off, climbing steeply and banking sharply, spreading their dark peacock tails of smoke against the now bright sun. The airport might be closed for a hurricane: it did not stop for the affairs of men. Life and death could not be fitted into a traffic schedule.

  Three hundred yards down the perimeter the helicopter lifted off from beside the parked 707. Then the police cars and trucks, the green buses, the fire engines and the ambulances pulled away and the long convoy came up the edge of the field. It went past, faces in all the vehicles turned towards the two stationary police cars, and the big aircraft was left alone right out at the far end of the field. Behind it stretched the bay, lit by copper glints as the sun struck on its muddied waters. A ragged arrowhead of birds came in against the sun, splintered into fragments and settled down into the marshes surrounding one of the low islands out in the bay. But for the planes coming in every minute above them, the two police cars and the big jet could have been a thousand miles from civilization.

  The radio in front of Lewton crackled on again. “Okay, pig. Let’s go.”

  As the two cars approached the plane Abel suddenly snapped, “Who’s that? I said everybody, everybody, outa there!”

  “It’s the Mayor,” said Lewton.

  Michael Forte had been standing by the foot of the steps

  leading up to the aircraft. As the two cars rolled to a stop twenty yards away, he stepped forward, his hands up.

  “That’s far enough!” Abel yelled, and his gun came out of the window of the car. “What you doing here, man?”

  “I came to see that my wife is all right. I’m not armed.”

  Another plane screamed overhead and Abel waited till it had gone. “Who’s in the plane? You know?”

  “The five men you asked for and a crew of four to fly the plane.”

  Abel picked up the microphone. “Okay, Commissioner, you hear me ? You in touch with the crew of that plane ? Tell ‘em I want ‘em all outa there,
tell ‘em to come down to the bottom of the steps. And make it quick, pig!”

  In the other car Cartwright looked at Malone and Lewton. “You’re right, he is smart. But what’s with the girl? Out at Sunday Harbor she told her folks she did it for her brother -I got the feeling the whole idea was hers.”

  “Me too,” said Malone, and looked across again at the other car. He could see Julie Birmingham, her arms resting on the wheel, staring straight ahead of her as if she had no interest at all in what was going on, a chauffeuse who only wanted her passengers to get out so that she could drive away from here. “If only we could get to her - “

  “How?” said Cartwright. “Let’s see what she does now.”

  The four members of the plane’s crew had come down out of the aircraft and stood at the foot of the steps. Julie, holding a gun, got out of the car and leaned for a moment against its door, as if trying to ease the cramp of the long drive from her legs. Then unhurriedly, almost stiff-legged, she walked across to the crew. She passed Michael Forte without a glance and he looked at her with a mixture of pleading and puzzlement. She gestured to each of the crew to come forward in turn, moved round behind him and ran her free hand down over his coveralls.

  “Recognize any of those men?” Malone asked.

  “Three of them are FBI men,” said Cartwright. “The

  other guy must be the pilot. Poor bastard - I hope he’s being paid a good rate for the job.”

  “I thought they would have used an Air Force plane,” said Malone.

  “That would be one aircraft the Cubans would never let land. They’d probably shoot it down.”