Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “As far as you know, he did not even check to confirm Toby’s reservation on that flight?”

  “No. Why should he? We were there in plenty of time, and someone was going to do that ’specially for us at the gate.”

  “Did you give him Toby’s name?”

  “Not his whole name. I think the first thing I said was, ‘This is Toby. He’ll be traveling with you to San Francisco, Flight 203. Here’s his travel packet. What do we do?”

  “And, although layin’ his charm out for you and the boy, Mrs. Brown, in fact the airline’s counter representative told you to wait until you got to the gate before checking in?”

  “Yes. So I’d be sure to meet the stewardess.” Mrs. Brown’s cheeks turned pink. “I’m pretty sure the young man thought I was Toby’s grandmother.”

  Colonel Turnbull said to the Ambassador, “The reservation was not confirmed.”

  The Ambassador said, “I see that.”

  Mrs. Brown looked worriedly from one to the other. “Did I do something wrong?”

  Colonel Turnbull said, “No, Mrs. Brown. It’s just that we need to check Brandt Airlines’ routine for children traveling alone.”

  The Ambassador said, “It would make sense to have children checked in at the boarding gate. It would make sure that they were accompanied by an adult to that point. And it would allow the adult to meet the flight’s stewardess, to have personal contact with whoever would be with the child during the flight.”

  “Steward,” said Mrs. Brown. “It was a steward. He was waiting for us. And he told me I couldn’t go through security with Toby.”

  “Wait a minute, Mrs. Brown,” Colonel Turnbull said.

  “I’m just saying I never did go to Gate 18 with Toby. The airline’s steward met us in the corridor. Just as we were comin’ to security, this young man came up to us. He said, ‘Is this Toby Rinaldi?’ I said, ‘Yes, he is. I’m Mrs. Brown. Are you the young man from the airline?’ and he said he was.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “Of course I got his’ name. Willins.”

  “Willins?”

  “Willins,” said Mrs. Brown. “Two I’s, two L’s. I always make sure of names, especially if I’m handing Toby over to someone. He asked for Toby’s ticket and his information packet, looked at them as well as he could, poor boy, said, ‘That’s okay,’ then picked up Toby’s bag and headed back toward the airline terminal with it. He told us to wait for him there.”

  “Mrs. Brown, did this person show you any credentials proving he was an airline’s representative?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t ask.”

  “Then how do you know he was from the airline?”

  “He was waiting for us. He knew Toby’s name. He was wearing one of those blazers all the airlines’ representatives wear. At least, the men do.”

  Colonel Turnbull sighed. “Can you describe this man Willins to us?”

  “I didn’t like him, at first. He wasn’t tall, but he had very big shoulders and chest. At first, something about him struck me as untrustworthy, but then I saw one of his eyes was perfectly still. I guess it was glass.”

  Turnbull’s head jerked up.

  “He had a glass eye?”

  “Yes, sir, I think so. And his face was rough and scratched. He had my sympathy, lookin’ at him.”

  Colonel Turnbull hesitated. “What else did you and this Willins man say to each other?”

  “He didn’t say much. When he came back, Toby asked to have his name tag pinned on him. The man—Willins—didn’t seem to care much about that, so I asked him if I could do it, and he said, ‘Sure,’ so I pinned it on Toby, makin’ a kind of ceremony out of it.”

  The Colonel cut in. “Is there anything else you can think of that might help us, Mrs. Brown?”

  “Why, no, sir. I don’t think so.” Agony was in her eyes.

  “Just one more thing, Mrs. Brown: you didn’t actually see Toby get aboard that airplane?”

  “How could I have, sir? I was left way down the corridor. Last I saw of Toby was walkin’ down that corridor beside the airline’s representative.”

  “I see.”

  Mrs. Brown was crying quietly.

  Colonel Turnbull said to the room at large, “I’d like to interview the rest of the staff.”

  Mrs. Brown said, “I’ll get them, sir.”

  The two men watched Mrs. Brown walk across the bare floor to the library door.

  The Ambassador asked, “You’ll be joining my wife, Colonel?”

  The Colonel looked at his watch. “I’ll fly to the Coast immediately.”

  “That’s good,” the Ambassador said. “Someone should be with her.”

  Six

  Closer to Baltimore than Washington, Simon Cord pulled off the highway into a McDonald’s parking lot.

  He held the door open for a family leaving the restaurant, a mother carrying one child while towing another along by hand, followed by a tired-looking husband putting his billfold back into his pocket. The man nodded his thanks at Cord.

  At the side of the restaurant, Cord dialed the Rinaldi family’s private number at the Residence in New York. At the instructions of the operator, he stuck a correct assortment of coins into the slot.

  The phone answered on the first ring.

  “Ambassador Rinaldi,” Cord said.

  “Speaking.”

  “You’re Ambassador Rinaldi?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  Cord was surprised the Ambassador answered his own phone, and on the first ring. That was good: he had already gotten the message.

  “Mr. Ambassador, we have your son. Tobias.”

  Cord listened to the silence for a moment. Then he heard the Ambassador take a breath.

  “Let there be no mistake about it, Mr. Ambassador. The people I work for do not want Resolution 1176R submitted to the United Nations.”

  “What have you to do with the closing of the Persian Gulf to the shipping of oil?” The Ambassador was expostulating, nearly blurting. “What has that to do with my son?”

  “I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “What has it to do with you?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. All I know is what I’m told by the people I work for.”

  “Who do you work for?” The Ambassador was shouting. “Who’s hired you?”

  “I’m just hired to do a job—”

  “What job?”

  “Kidnap your son. We’ve done that.”

  “Brave! Some man you must be. Kidnap an eight-year-old child—”

  “Man enough to murder him.”

  “What?”

  “If you give that speech. If you submit Resolution 1176R to the United Nations, we’ll kill your son. And we won’t give him a nice death. Child or no. We’ll make sure the body is found so you and your wife will see what your child went through before he died.”

  Cord listened. The Ambassador was breathing heavily.

  The Ambassador said, “Bastard.”

  “Oh, I’m much worse than a bastard, Mr. Ambassador. Do you doubt it?”

  “…No.”

  “Listen: if you’re having any problems with this—if you think we haven’t got your kid, or if you think we won’t kill him—would you like us to send you his ear, or a finger or something?”

  “Where are you?” the Ambassador said.

  “How about answering my question? You want to get your son’s foot in the mail? We don’t want you to have any doubt at all.”

  “I have no doubt,” the Ambassador said.

  “No doubt?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Just be a good boy, Mr. Ambassador, and do what you’re supposed to do. No Resolution.”

  Cord hung up.

  The restaurant was about half full. Every table where people sat was littered with paper. There was more paper visible than food.

  Cord walked down an aisle between the tables, toward the front door. A handbag was on the floor. He p
icked it up and handed it to an elderly woman eating a hamburger.

  He smiled. “You might lose it,” he said.

  “How nice of you,” she said, taking it with her free hand. “There are still gentlemen in the world….”

  Seven

  Going to the airport, Christina had been happier than she had been in a long time. She had had ten days of good exercise, tennis morning and afternoon, plenty of sunshine by the pool, healthy diet, early nights, good novels to read. Better than all that, for ten days she had been away from New York, away from the Embassy, away from Teddy, with his tired, drawn face, his long, diplomatic, involved answers to her most simple questions. Better than anything, relaxed, refreshed, she now got to spend a few days with her son, Toby, alone, together with him, exploring Fantazyland. She had felt fit to take on the world.

  In recent months, no matter how she had tried to suppress it, her discontent had been growing. Nothing is ideal, she had tried to assure herself. No one is perfectly happy. What is that line? Every happily married woman is putting up with something she can’t stand? Something like that….

  Day in and day out, night after night, Christina realized she was putting up with more and more things she really couldn’t stand. At breakfast every morning, gently, firmly, conversationally, Teddy, in fact, would give her her orders for the day: what invitations she was to accept, what invitations she was to send, what letters she was to write, what phone calls she was to make, what, in each case, she was to say and how she was to say it. He would tell her with whom she was to have lunch, and where, and what was to be said at lunch. In the afternoon, what members of the legation staff she was to see and how she was to handle them. Where dinner would be and at what time, roughly how she should dress, with whom she should make a point of speaking, and again, what she should say—always what she should say. And late at night, she and Teddy would sit in their robes in their bedroom for another half hour or hour, and again conversationally, as if it weren’t desperately important, Christina would report to Teddy in detail everything she had seen, heard or otherwise perceived during that day. Teddy complimented her continually and referred to her as “my eyes, my ears, my heart.”

  She had become better at her job as she had come to know well most of the people with whom she had to deal. She developed a subtlety at working around evasive answers while answering evasively herself. Sometimes she even saw the whole diplomatic process as an amusing game: You’ve got a fact, and I want it; I’ve got a fact and you’re not going to get it unless I want you to have it.

  Odd things bothered her. At first, her facial muscles literally hurt from smiling. Her feet and the small of her back hurt from the constant cocktail parties and receptions. She consulted a doctor, who told her that standing still for prolonged periods was the most difficult and unnatural exercise the human body could perform. She learned to find excuses for walking across a room, up or down a flight of stairs, to the ladies’ room, to go sit next to someone for a fiveor six-minute chat. Whenever she could escape the legation, she would go for as much of a walk around New York as time permitted. And even though she would restrict herself to a single glass of wine at each function, every morning when she awoke there would be the mild headache, the stale taste in her mouth—complaints from sinuses and lungs that had consumed too much of other people’s cigar, pipe, cigarette smoke and whiskey, gin and vodka fumes.

  Her job. Her sensible mother had said that marriage was a job. What she meant, of course, was the job of being a wife, helpmate, mother, friend, sexual partner…. She did not mean the job of being a professional diplomat.

  Christina Finch was born and raised in Flemmington, Pennsylvania, which in those days was shifting from a strictly agricultural area to a mixed suburban, rural community. Most of the farms were being given up. Two, redesigned to look like college campuses, had become headquarters for international corporations. One had been turned into a country club. Most had been turned into housing developments.

  Her mother’s family, the Reardons, owned most of the best farmland and, except for a few acres of road frontage here and there, had held onto it. Each of her three uncles still ran a sizable farm. Her father had put together his initially small country law practice with a real estate brokerage firm and an insurance agency and done very well. There was some grumbling among the established families of the town that Ol’ Finch had made a fortune developing everybody’s real estate but his wife’s family’s, which was left intact at ever-increasing values. But the town elected him mayor four terms running.

  Christina’s two older brothers had been the football and basketball stars of the town. One had gone on to West Point. The younger had taken his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and then surprised the world by becoming a minister.

  Christina’s own youth had been as ideal as possible. At school, although no mean basketball player herself, she led the cheerleading at her brothers’ more noted athletic events, absolutely secure in their protection of her. Summers she spent working around her uncles’ farms, again absolutely secure in their protection. Being the mayor’s daughter, Christina became an expert buffer, making peace between youngsters born in the town and those moving into it. She was vice-president of her sophomore class and president of her senior class.

  She had had no difficulty adjusting to college in North Carolina. Knowing her home would always be waiting, she dreamed vague dreams of New York and London and Paris but had no real expectation of ever being part of that world.

  Then some committee asked her to play hostess to this diplomat from the Middle East who was coming to Chapel Hill to give a lecture.

  She was at the airport on time, looking for a man in flowing robes and thick dark glasses. No such man appeared.

  Finally, a slim, handsome but slightly tired-looking man, dressed in blue corduroy trousers, came up to her and said, “Hey, are you from the college?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here to pick up someone named Rinaldi?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Are you here to see him, too?”

  “I’m Rinaldi,” he said.

  “My God!” she said. “You’re a diplomat?”

  Seeing her shock, he said, “I guess I’m not.”

  The hotel where he was to stay, being state owned and run, did not serve meals on Sunday, so Christina found herself spending more time with him than she expected. She discovered he loved roast beef sandwiches with mayonnaise and strawberry milk shakes. Sunday night he said he didn’t particularly want to go back to the hotel and rest, so they saw a movie. They stopped by an off-campus eatery and had beer and pizza. He didn’t say much about himself, and she was too mystified by him to ask. He did say he had gone to school in Switzerland and to college in the United States. He said he liked listening to The Who but liked Eric Clapton even better.

  The next day at the lecture she saw him for the first time as a diplomat, dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt and red tie. She thought his lecture brilliant. Members of the audience that she knew were there to boo ended up asking respectful questions.

  At the airport, saying goodbye to her, he touched his lips to her cheek so easily, so briefly, she wasn’t really aware he had kissed her until after he had left. She knew she had fallen in love with Teddy Rinaldi, but she told herself it was just a schoolgirl infatuation for a sophisticated older man.

  Wednesday he called her and asked if she could spend the weekend with him in Washington. She said no, thought for forty-five minutes, called him back and yelled, “Yes!”

  Shortly, she knew it was Teddy Rinaldi she loved, his children she wished to be her children. Over long dinners he would try to describe the world of diplomacy. Only vaguely did she realize he was trying to warn her. Dumbly, she kept nodding her head yes.

  Diplomacy: hadn’t she been the town peacemaker? President of her senior class? Hadn’t her father been reelected three times as mayor of Flemmington, Pennsylvania?

  When they were first married, stationed
in London, there had been frequent trips, vacations, breaks from routine. There had been Teddy’s business trips home, long weekends in Scotland or Wales, or an occasional week in Portugal, or on the King’s yacht in the Mediterranean, or skiing as part of the entourage in Switzerland. Even after Teddy was assigned to the United Nations in New York, there had been summer weekends on Long Island or Martha’s Vineyard, winter weekends in Stowe, and vacations in Saint Croix or the Laurentians. And she and Toby and Mrs. Brown had spent many happy weeks at Christina’s home in Pennsylvania.

  Since Resolution 1176R had been conceived by Teddy and the King, there had been no such breaks.

  In fact, she could not remember a single quiet dinner alone with her husband in over a year. Once, when Teddy had flu, he spent three days in bed. He worked there, too, but at least for three days she felt she had some of his personal attention.

  What was most wrong with present circumstances was that it never let up. Christina was never seeing Teddy except formally, professionally. She was never seeing Toby at all. She felt she was losing touch with herself. One night before she had left New York, Teddy, tired and discouraged, had told her that it might be months yet before he would be scheduled to submit Resolution 1176R to the United Nations. Some African emergency had arisen. Christina was no longer sure she believed in Resolution 1176R.

  Despite what her life had become, regardless of how hard she tried at her job, she remained Christina Finch, from Flemmington, Pennsylvania. To the diplomatic community (and to Teddy, she knew) she was only the Ambassador’s young American wife, bright, attractive, very nice, of course, but without the training, the background necessary for such a position.

  During crisis circumstances, Christina was not considered. Suddenly, Ria Marti would appear at Teddy’s left elbow. Ria would know what was going on. Ria would represent the legation at receptions and dinners. Christina would find herself waiting in the bedroom late at night while Teddy and Ria consulted in the legation’s office, or at Ria’s apartment. At four o’clock one morning when Teddy came in from Ria’s apartment, Christina threw a framed photograph of Toby at him.