Ransom

by Jon Cleary

  “She’s going up into the plane,” said Malone, eyes again on Julie Birmingham. “I wonder if she’ll pull anything on that bugger while she’s up in there?”

  “What makes you think she might?” Lewton asked.

  Another plane went overhead and Malone had to wait to reply. “I don’t know that she will. But she’s our only hope. If that plane takes off, Christ knows if we’ll ever see any of them alive again.”

  “If it comes to the crunch, the Cubans will let them land. They’ll have to.”

  “I’m not going to bet my wife’s life on it,” said Malone, and looked across at Michael Forte. “And I think the Mayor feels the same way.”

  Julie Birmingham appeared again at the door of the plane, stood for just a moment looking out and about her, like some traveller getting her first sight of New York, uncertain now whether she should have made the journey; then she came down the steps, still with the same unhurried, stiff-legged walk and crossed to the other car. A moment later both offside doors swung open and Abel, gun in hand, and Lisa and Sylvia got out. Sylvia looked across at her husband, opened her mouth, but whatever she said was lost in the screaming roar of another plane as it came in to land.

  Then abruptly Malone opened his door and got out. Abel swung round, the gun coming up, and Malone, knees buckling after his having been in the car so long, gut tensing for the impact of the bullet, flung up his hands.

  ” shoot!” Only his last word came out of the shriek

  of the receding plane.

  “Stay where you are! Captain - you and the other pigs

  get outa the car! Come on, move! Take your guns out and throw ‘em over here! Come on!” For the first time there was a note of panic in Abel’s voice; his head was ready to burst now and suddenly he remembered the attacks he used to have as a kid. Jesus, he mustn’t let himself slip out of himself like he used to in those attacks! Nobody had ever told him why they happened to him; maybe they had something to do with the way he was born, when his grandmother, a clumsy old bitch, had been the midwife. But they always finished up the same way, with him out like a light on the ground. “Move, move!”

  Lewton, Cartwright and the driver got out of the car, the driver moving round to join the others. The three of them took their guns from their holsters and tossed them towards Abel.

  “Pick ‘em up, baby.”

  Julie, face expressionless, picked up the guns, put one in her handbag and handed the other two to Abel. He slid one into each pocket of his jacket, suddenly grinned. His headache was easing, he wasn’t going to have one of those goddam attacks. Freedom lay just three or four steps behind him.

  Then Malone said, “I’m going with you.”

  A plane went over and Abel, in the storm of sound, looked in silent amazement at him. The noise faded and he said, “You what?”

  “I’m going with you. I’m not armed, so you’ve got nothing to worry about. But if anything happens to my wife, I want to be with her.”

  “And I want to be with mine,” said Michael Forte. “I’m coming too.”

  “Like shit you are! You must think I’m crazy - “

  “Let them come,” said Julie.

  “Nothing doing! Jesus, what do we want them for?”

  “We’ll be two more hostages,” said Malone, speaking quietly but arguing with more force than he had ever done before. “If you land in Havana with the Mayor of New York,

  a political figure like Mr Forte, as your hostage, Fidel Castro is going to give you the freedom of Cuba.”

  “Still nothing doing,” snapped Abel. But then another plane roared overhead and in the few seconds of ear-splitting noise the expression on his face changed. All his life he had been a nobody. Jesus Christ, wouldn’t it be something to be a somebody !

  Then in the sudden return of quiet Julie said, “If you don’t let them come, Abel, then I don’t go.”

  He turned his head sharply and in that moment Malone moved. He had never moved faster; tired though he was, the old reflexes were still there. Six or seven yards separated him from Abel and he covered the distance in a running, diving tackle. He felt the bullet tear through the shoulder of his raincoat, then he hit Abel around the knees and they both went down as another plane screamed overhead, its huge shape cutting off the sun for just a moment. By the time the sound had coned away to silence, Malone had knocked Abel unconscious.

  He was still punching the thin, insensible face under the torn-off wig when Lewton and Cartwright dragged him away.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Australia sounds a nice peaceful place to me,” said Jefferson. “If I wanted to retire there, would they let me in?”

  It was an effort for Malone to look squarely into the black, friendly face. “I don’t think so, John. But if ever you want a recommendation - ”

  Jefferson smiled. “I wouldn’t embarrass you, Scobie, by trying to come out there.”

  Malone nodded, already embarrassed. To change the subject he said, “Did they tell you what I was trying to do to that bloke yesterday?” He shook his head, shivered a little despite the warmth of the overheated room where they sat. “I was just like that cop who killed Julie Birmingham’s husband.”

  “If her side of that story was true.”

  “Who are you trying to protect? Me or that cop?”

  “I don’t know that other guy, don’t even know what his name was. I know you - or I think I do.”

  “You don’t, John. After yesterday, I wouldn’t place any bets that I know myself. One of my faults up till now has been that I’ve always got myself too involved in a case - I found it almost bloody impossible to be objective. But I’ve never been as bad as I was yesterday - “

  “Scobie, those two are locked up and they’re gonna go up for a long stretch. You’re a bloody hero - ” He smiled at the adjective: Americans did not seem able to use the word the same way Australians did. “Nobody’s blaming you - “

  “I don’t care very much whether they are or not. It’s what I feel myself. I just don’t think I was much of an advertisement for law and order.”

  They were in one of the VIP lounges at Kennedy. Jefferson had driven the Malones out to the airport, and a

  Qantas official had brought them in here to get them away from the attention of reporters and photographers. Lisa had gone to the ladies’ room and Malone and Jefferson had been left to say their awkward and regretful farewell to each other.

  Yesterday morning now seemed an age away. Malone had only a confused memory of what had happened after Lewton and Cartwright had pulled him off Abel. Julie Birmingham had dropped her gun before anyone had demanded it of her and stood silently and listlessly as one of the FBI men had run forward and grabbed her. Planes had continued to scream in overhead as Cartwright and the other FBI men had run up into the aircraft. There had been the rising whine of sirens as the police convoy came speeding back along the perimeter. Parker and the other four anarchists, all handcuffed to the one long chain, had come out of the aircraft with Cartwright and the FBI men following them. There was a moment of comparative silence between the arriving planes and during it the anarchists passed close to Julie Birmingham.

  “Mark!”

  Mark Birmingham paused, the chain rattling as the others paused with him. His thin, serious face looked grey, the streak in his hair standing out like a white scar. “It was no use, Julie. But thanks - “

  Then the convoy arrived, another plane roared overhead, and everything had become an even more confused memory. Malone and Lisa were put into a car, each holding the other’s hand tightly; Michael and Sylvia Forte got into another car. Malone saw Willard and Elizabeth Birmingham standing helplessly by a police car, trying to move forward to their son and daughter but held back by a barrier of four policemen. Commissioner Hungerford was standing in the middle of a circle of senior police officers, like a general surrounded by aides in an out-of-date painting of an out-of-date war, and photographers were scurrying about, aiming their cameras and shooting l
ike harmless guerillas. Then the cars carrying the Malones and the Fortes, escorted by four police

  cars, were screaming away from the scene. Malone had looked back through the rear window of the car, and at seventy miles an hour the whole nightmarish happening receded and disappeared as if from a television screen that had suddenly gone blank.

  The Malones, at the insistence of the Fortes, had stayed at Gracie Mansion. “No,” Malone had said at first, “we’d like to be alone, just as I’m sure you would.”

  “There is no place in New York where you can be alone,” Michael Forte had said. “The media boys will plague you. Manny has been taking calls for you - you’re wanted on every TV show from Johnny Carson to the Galloping Gourmet. More important, Scobie - Sylvia and I want you to stay. If you’re leaving tomorrow, as you say, we’d like you to leave with at least one friendly impression of New York.”

  By evening both Lisa and Sylvia had recovered from their ordeal, if only for the time being. Dinner had been a quiet affair, with only the Malones, the Fortes and their children and old Sam Forte at the table. Sylvia’s parents had been at the house all day, but Malone and Lisa had not met them. Instead the Malones had spent the day together in their room, resting, and quietly and gently savouring the fact that they were together again and that the horror of the past twenty-four hours was over. When they had come down for dinner they had re-established their security in each other.

  “Voting will finish in another half-hour,” said Sam Forte as they were served coffee. “Beautiful coffee, Sylvia. Are you going down to the Biltmore, Michael?”

  “Only if we win.”

  “It will look ungracious if you lose and you don’t go down there. But, of course, you’ll win.”

  “Joe Burgmann called an hour ago. He said voting has been very light, the worst turn-out for years.”

  “I’ll feel differently tomorrow, I suppose,” said Sylvia, “but the election now seems anti-climatic - I mean, after what Lisa and I have been through.”

  Pier said, “Inspector, I heard Captain Jefferson say last night you had some photos of Mrs Mai one. May I have one? The girls at school are going to be asking me what Mrs Malone is like- “

  “I’d like one too,” said her brother. “I think you and Mother are gonna be the pin-ups at school. For a while, anyway,” he added with the unwitting callousness of his age.

  Lisa smiled. “Ahead of Raquel Welch? Of course. Your mother and I may never achieve such a rating again. Unless - ” She looked across at Sylvia.

  Sylvia shook her head: ambition was dead, or at most stone cold. “That’s too far off- another four years at least.”

  “You mean the White House?” said Roger. “I’ll be in college by then and nobody there ever pins up a President or his wife. Geez, I’d be expelled or something.”

  “I’ll wait till you’re out of college, then,” said Michael Forte, and looked at his own father, “before I make my run.”

  “In the meantime,” Sylvia said to the Malones, “please come back and see us here.”

  Malone had grinned, shaken his head. “This city is too expensive for a cop on my pay. Especially when it almost cost me my wife, too.”

  “He’s always pinching pennies,” said Lisa, but her hand on Malone’s told him how priceless he was to her.

  Now, at the airport, she was coming towards him and Jefferson. The two men stood up as she and the airline official arrived at the same moment.

  “Inspector Malone, it’s time to board the aircraft.”

  Lisa put out her hand to Jefferson. “Goodbye, Captain. I wish you could manage to come out our way some time.”

  “I may do that,” said Jefferson, and glanced at Malone. “Just to see how you run things Down Under.”

  “How do you think they’ll run things here now?” said Malone, and opened the copy of The New York Times he carried.

  Jefferson shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.

  Somehow, I got the feeling the Mayor wouldn’t have minded if he had lost.”

  Malone spread out the front page of the newspaper, looked at the two photos side by side. In one Michael and Sylvia Forte stood frozen in the moment they were about to step into the police car on the tarmac yesterday morning; their happiness was poignant, their strained, tearful faces needing no smiles to highlight what they felt. In the other photo, taken by flashlight in the lobby of the Biltmore, their smiles were a face wide, Michael with one arm raised in the traditional salute of victory. But, whether it was a trick of the camera or the truth, there was no light at all in his eyes.

  “I’m glad the New York voters at least showed they had a heart,” said Lisa. “It would have been callous if they had voted for the other man.”

  “I wonder,” said Malone, and led Lisa towards the gate, the plane and home.