Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  Toby hesitated. “He talks to people.”

  “See? Okay. He’s a salesman. That’s his profession. Other people rob. Run numbers. Sharks. That’s their business. See? It all works out. Everybody has kids, see.”

  “You have kids?”

  “I dunno. None nobody ever tol’ me about.” Spike laughed. “And there’s no Superman, neither. There are cops, sure, but they don’t go flyin’ through the air in no big cape.” Looking at Toby, Spike’s good eye glinted. “Mos’ly, they sit in the middle doin’ as well as they can for themselves, if you get what I mean, takin’ anythin’ that comes down the pike.” He continued to look at Toby. “I see you don’ unnerstand me. Lemme say this: people you call cops are always botherin’ people tryin’ to make their way. Got that?”

  Toby ran his eyes over the scraps of paper and cardboard again.

  Spike returned to examining the ceiling. “Fac’ is, there was this cop in Newark—this big, fat cop, a detective, belly hangin’ over his belt, life had been so good to him, big, fat belly. And he shot a frien’ of mine. Kilt him. That wasn’t fair. All this frien’ of mine was doin’ was takin’ things outa a warehouse after dark. Nothin’ to get kilt about. The cop said my frien’ had a gun and pulled it. See, that isn’t fair, Toby. The cop shoulda least let my frien’ get off a shot or two at him before he shot him dead. Right?

  “So what they do in a case like this—when a cop shoots somebody they give him a vacation, a kinda reward, only they call it a suspension and they have a big investigation while everybody forgets about it ever happening, and so they can say, sure, it was all right for the cop to shoot ol’ Joe or Pete or whatever the stiff’s name. You probably know all this from television. You gotta know something. Where you been all your life? Eight years old!”

  Sitting on the edge of a bed in a San Francisco motel, Toby’s eyes began to close. He was hot. Only two days before he had been in school in New Hampshire.

  “But I didn’t forget. This particular guy was a frien’ o’ mine.

  “So while this particular big, fat cop was on vacation, I hung aroun’ outside his house one morning. He came out. Swimming suit. Beach towels. Six-pack beer. Put the stuff in the trunk of his car. Nice vacation. Shot somebody so he got to go to the beach.

  “I follow him down outside Red Bank. Watch him take a swim, swallow couple beers, begin to settle down on the beach.

  “Hour or so later, he stands up, all hot and sweaty, jumps in the ocean again, starts back.

  “Only, I’m on the beach with my knife. Big knife.”

  Through his eyelashes Toby watched Spike show with his hands how big a knife it was.

  “He looks at me funny like, ’cause I’m the only one on the beach in clothes.”

  “Anyway, I stick the knife into the top of his big belly, push it sideways and down. Then I do the same with the other side of his stomach. Make a big flap, you know? Then I stuck my fingers in along the top of the flap, grabbed a lota flesh and guts and pulled down.

  “With him lookin’ down at himself, all his guts spillin’ out on the beach.”

  For an instant, Toby saw Spike clearly, very clearly—more clearly than he had ever seen anything or anyone before. Then he saw Spike lurch, the room heave.

  Spike said, “I didn’t stay for a swim. It was a hot day, too.”

  Toby ran for the bathroom.

  Kneeling by the toilet, vomiting cheeseburger, french fries, milk, he heard Spike in the bedroom laughing so hard he was coughing for breath.

  * * *

  “Hey, kid. You awake?”

  In his bed in the dark motel room, Toby was awake. He was naked. He was hungry.

  He didn’t answer.

  Spike said, “I tol’ ya I’d tell ya a story. A real story.”

  Fourteen

  “I don’t know,” Ria Marti said.

  In the back of the limousine she was sitting on the right-hand side. The car was oozing up the Avenue of the Americas. It was quarter to eleven at night.

  The Ambassador had gotten himself through a long cocktail party at the Italian Embassy. He had even had a forty-five minute private consultation with the Japanese Ambassador in the Embassy’s library. They had gone on to the CBS television studio, where the Ambassador had taped an interview for the next day’s morning news.

  Neither had had anything much to eat. Ria thought Teddy unusually pale.

  “You don’t know what?” Rinaldi asked absently.

  “I’m sitting on some kind of a powder keg,” Ria said. “And I don’t know what it is.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “You can’t be public relations officer for an embassy without developing a sixth sense. Something’s wrong, and I know it.”

  “First time I’ve ever heard you plead female intuition.”

  “It’s more than that. I suspect you almost goofed.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “When Roger Mudd asked you if His Majesty has a secret police force to keep track of students and radicals….”

  “I get asked that all the time. Funny how some rumors never die.”

  “And you deny it all the time.”

  “I denied it tonight.”

  Ria put her hand on his. “Teddy, you hesitated. You licked your lips. When you answered, your mouth was dry.”

  He took his hand away and said nothing.

  “You can’t get away with that on television,” she said. “Just wait. Tomorrow every news group in the country will call with the same damned question.”

  They were being driven by Louis, the Jamaican.

  “Something is going on,” he said.

  She said, “Is it Toby?”

  He said, “Wait until we get to the Residence.”

  * * *

  The houseman-valet, Pav, as usual, was on late-night duty. He had set out cold sandwiches and brandy in the library.

  After the library door was closed, Ria handed Teddy a plate of sandwiches and a brandy and soda. The hand that took the sandwich plate was shaking. He put the plate down, drank half the brandy and soda, went to the side table and refilled the glass.

  Ria watched him silently.

  “Guess I’m not very good at my job,” he said.

  “In fact,” she said, sitting on the divan and drawing her legs up, “you are.”

  “Funny,” he said. “The boss wasn’t too pleased by my marrying an American citizen. Especially an American girl with the Christian name Christina.”

  Ria was just listening.

  “Yet he expressed enough joy when Toby was born. Regarded him almost as one of his own sons.”

  “Toby,” Ria said.

  Teddy drew a deep breath. “Toby is missing.”

  Ria sat up, putting her feet on the floor.

  “We’re pretty sure kidnapped. Mrs. Brown put him on the plane to San Francisco this afternoon. He did not get off the plane. Christina was waiting to meet him.”

  “Oh, Teddy! God! How awful!”

  Teddy shrugged at the inadequacy of the word.

  “The Resolution,” Ria said.

  “I’ve had a call. Ria, Toby’s dead if I submit the Resolution.”

  “Teddy, Teddy,” Ria said.

  “So…”

  “Is Christina returning?”

  Teddy hesitated. “Not at the moment. Makes more sense to leave her out there—where Toby knows she is.” He turned his back on Ria. “The point is…” He choked. “…We don’t know where Toby is.”

  “Oh, Teddy.”

  She started across the room toward him, but he turned abruptly.

  “Regarding the press, Ria: no notice of this is to be given out. The Residence staff, of course, knows about it because most of them have been questioned. They’ve been sworn to silence. For Toby’s sake, your staff and the Embassy staff in general is not to know about it. There are to be no leaks.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

  “Business as usual. To get the Resolution accepted, it
is imperative no one thinks this Embassy is under any particular strain. If the press should make any inquiries on this matter, you are to stonewall them absolutely. Toby is at Fantazyland with his mother.”

  “Don’t worry about that part of it,” Ria said. “I’ll do my job.”

  “I know. I’m sure of it.”

  “What’s being done?” she asked. “You haven’t gone to the local police, have you? You couldn’t have. The F.B.I.?”

  “No.” He looked into his brandy glass. “No.”

  “Oh!” she said. Her eyes grew wide. “Oh! It is true!”

  Teddy was looking at her blankly.

  “That’s why you clutched up on television!”

  “I deny it.” Teddy put down his glass. “His Majesty’s government does not have a secret intelligence arm in this country.”

  “And you never knew it!” She collapsed on the divan. “I never knew it. It’s true!”

  Teddy said, “Some jobs are more difficult than others.”

  “Are they any good?” she asked. “I mean, is this the best way…?”

  Teddy said, “They haven’t made a good impression on me so far, but I don’t know. Don’t seem to have many choices just now.”

  He gave himself more brandy, this time adding soda.

  “Look, Ria. I’d rather be left alone just now. I suspect we’ve got long days ahead of us…”

  She stood up immediately.

  “Can’t I help you, Teddy? Are you sure you wouldn’t want me to stay with you tonight?”

  “Thanks,” he said. “No.”

  “It might be a good idea,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “It might be.”

  “Then let me stay.”

  “No,” he said. “Somehow it would be too…I don’t know, Ria…significant?”

  Fifteen

  The beam from Cord’s penlight ran down the chipped directory in the outer lobby of the apartment house on New York’s West Eighty-Ninth Street. It stopped at “4C—Du owski.”

  Cord did not ring the bell. He pressed the palm of his gloved hand against the glass door. It swung open.

  In the dimly lit lobby, he found the door to the fire stairs next to the elevator. It being quarter past three in the morning, he used the stairs. He did not know what he would find, or do, in Apartment 4C, but he did not want restless residents of the building remembering they heard someone using the elevator at that hour.

  The fourth-floor corridor walls were yellow veneered brick. There was the smell of fish.

  The door to 4C was locked. Again, he did not ring the bell. He kicked the door handle hard with his heel. The door sprang open, bounced off the wall.

  There were no lights on in the apartment.

  Cord entered and closed the door.

  “Dubrowski?” he said quietly.

  With his penlight he found a light switch and clicked it on.

  There was one camp chair next to a floor lamp facing a small, portable television set on its own packing crate. There was a record player, five or six albums propped against it. Against one wall was a large, cheap mirror. Strewn on the floor in front of it on a six-by-six plastic mat was a complete set of weights. The place smelled of stale sweat.

  Cord switched on the bedroom light before entering. Against the far wall near the windows were stacks of magazines. There were also two or three cardboard containers of Kaufmann’s Hi-Protein tablets. Next to the head of the bed a telephone was on an orange crate. On the floor right next to the cot was a pair of hand weights.

  There were also a hypodermic syringe, a tablespoon with a blackened bowl, a paper packet of matches, a half dozen burned-out matches on the floor, and four clear plastic packets. Only one of the packets was empty.

  Dubrowski was on the cot. His eyes were open, the pupils angled oddly, downward, toward the floor. His teeth were deep in his tongue. The tip of his tongue was purple. There was dried blood on his teeth.

  He was naked. Dubrowski was broad shouldered, thin hipped. There was not an ounce of fat on him. His pectoral, stomach, thigh and calf muscles had been highly developed.

  He was in tip-top shape, for a corpse—for someone who had OD’d.

  Cord turned off the lights and left the apartment, closing the door behind him.

  Sixteen

  Christina was awake. She had spent the night awake, staring at the bedroom ceiling, trying not to think of what might be happening to Toby, not to sob out loud. If Colonel Turnbull hadn’t been on the living-room couch, she would have turned on her light, gotten up, taken another warm shower, prowled around. Instead she had passed the night listening to him through the thin door, snoring, coughing.

  Shortly after dawn she heard him get up, rumble around the living room. The only access to the bathroom was through her bedroom.

  The bungalow’s front door closed, and then there was silence.

  Christina got up and went into the living room. The sofa looked more lumpy than ever. It looked like it had been through a wrestling match with a bear.

  It was too early to call Teddy in New York. She was sure he wasn’t sleeping, either. But she was also sure he would call her if there had been any news.

  “Just follow your own instincts,” Colonel Turnbull had said.

  Christina returned to the bedroom to get dressed.

  Seventeen

  At five minutes past seven in the morning, Toby walked into the lobby of the Red Star-Silvermine Motel.

  There was a man behind the reception desk, seventy years old or more, sorting slips of paper. His head was bald on top but white hair fluffed out over his ears.

  Toby said to him, “Where’s the silver mine?”

  The man said, “You’re lookin’at it. I’m the Silvermine. My name could be Goldmine or Platinummine, I suppose, but the natural humility of my family limited their aspirations. Still, better to be a Silvermine than a Coppermine or a Coalmine, I’ve always figured. I’m one of the natural wonders of California, son. Right up there with Disneyland, Fantazyland and Hollywood. I’m a walkin’ Silvermine.”

  “I’m going to Fantazyland,” Toby said.

  “Are you, now? Better watch out those mechanical crocodiles don’t get a bite of you.” Silvermine put down his sorted papers. “Nothin’s worse than bein’ bitten by a crocodile with automatic dentures.”

  “Have you even been bitten by a mechanical crocodile?”

  “’Course! How do you suppose my hair got this way? When I was bit, the ouch was so bad my hair shot out over my ears and it’s been stuck out that way ever since. You wouldn’t want your hair to look like this, would you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I thought not. I haven’t seen you before. You must be young Jackson. When your Pa came in last night, he just wrote in the register, ‘Jackson, son.’ I obliged him to write down his first name and he wrote, ‘Jack Jackson, son.’ I asked him to impart your name. He wrote, ‘Jack Jackson, son, Jack Jackson.’ Are you Jack Jackson, son, Jack Jackson’s son?”

  Toby didn’t understand. He said, “My mother’s coming to get me. She’s late. Then we’re going to Fantazyland.”

  “Well, then, Jack Jackson, Jack Jackson’s son. What can I do for you? You’re up early.”

  “The waitress said I had to ask you if I can charge breakfast in the coffee shop.”

  “Old man not up yet, uh? Sure you can. Kids get hungry whether other people are awake or asleep. I remember that. Let’s see, you’re in Room 102, right?”

  Mr. Silvermine came from behind the counter. He was wearing plaid shorts and sandals.

  “I’ll come down and introduce you properly to the waitress. How come you’re dressed that way? Long pants, blazer. Don’t see many people ’round here dressed that way. Least not kids. You’ll be hot.”

  Going down the corridor, Mr. Silvermine pointed through a window. “You seen our swimming pool?”

  “Yes,” Toby said. “It’s nice.”

  “That’s a special kind of water we have in the
swimming pool, you know. You jump into it and you’re guaranteed to get wet. All over. Try it. You might like it.”

  “Where can we buy things?”

  “Like what?”

  “Toothbrush. Pajamas. Clothes.”

  “You guys travel light, uh? Sure you’re not a couple of desperadoes? Bank robbers on the lam?”

  “My luggage got lost. On the airplane.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s how they keep airplanes flyin’, you know. They feed ’em a whole mess of luggage, and the airplane chews it all up and just spits out what it don’t want. Luggage is airplane condiments. Gives ’em energy. I guess your particular airplane found your suitcase mighty tasty. Anyway, there’s a shopping center across the road.” As he walked, Mr. Silvermine waved his hand over his shoulder. “Get anything you want there. Only, you’d better drive across. Motorists don’t respect you enough to slow down for you unless you’re wrapped in just as much tin as they are.”

  “If a telephone call comes for us and we’re at the pool, would you let us know?”

  “Better’n that. I’d transfer the call out to you.”

  “My mother’s going to call,” Toby said.

  Mr. Silvermine said to the waitress: “This is Jack Jackson, Jack Jackson’s son. Feed him up and put it on the bill for Room 102. This young man’s goin’ to Fantazyland, and we ought to fatten him up for the crocodiles. An airplane’s already eaten his luggage.”

  * * *

  Toby had to knock several times on the door to Room 102.

  Finally, hair tousled, a towel wrapped around him, Spike opened the door.

  Both his eyes were wide, staring. His mouth was slightly open.

  He looked up and down the corridor quickly, grabbed Toby by the neck and yanked him into the room.

  “How did you get out? Where did you go?”

  “I went to breakfast.”

  “Jeez!”

  “I was hungry.”

  “You’re supposed to stay with me!”

  “You were asleep.”

  “I know I was asleep. I’m supposed to sit up with you all night, starin’ at cha? Fac’ is, you’re a dumb kid!”