Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “She walks like one of those ducks out here. She waddles.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Fantazyland. It’s a great place, Dad.”

  “Look.” Teddy swallowed. “Don’t see everything without me. I’m coming out. In a couple of days. Join you. We’ll want to see some of it together.”

  “I’ve seen about all of it, Dad. I can show you. I even know how most things work.”

  Teddy felt he had to hang up. Soon. He had not many moments of control left. “Toby? Ask your mother to call me. Tonight. She knows when and where.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you soon, Toby. Wednesday. Thursday at the latest.”

  “Okay.”

  Teddy replaced the receiver. He looked around his office—at the faces of the people in his office.

  “Well,” he said. “Toby seems to have made it to Fantazyland.”

  Ria’s eyes were bathed in tears. She was grinning.

  “Excuse me.” Teddy stood up. “A moment.”

  He went into his bathroom and closed the door.

  * * *

  In his office, his staff sat silently.

  Ria blew her nose.

  Through the bathroom door they could hear the tap water splashing hard into the basin.

  Then they heard another sound—frightening, until they recognized it.

  They did not look at each other. Of course, they were embarrassed.

  Finally, the final-draft speech writer said, “It seems His Excellency, the Ambassador, is blubbering in the bathroom.”

  Ria Marti closed her notebook.

  She said, “I think this meeting is over.”

  Sixty-Six

  There was only one constable at the main gate of Fantazyland. Because of Christina’s feet, she and Toby were moving slowly. The constable paid them no particular attention. They had washed their hands and faces, tried to clean their clothes. Fantazyland constables were not very concerned with people who were leaving. Just those who were entering.

  Holding his mother’s hand, Toby had plenty of time to look around. Of course he looked back at Uncle Whimsy’s Hat. From here, the side of the mountainous, black Stovepipe Hat seemed absolutely smooth. The bright-colored gondolas popping out of its top seemed not big enough to carry ants. To its left were the stone turrets of Princess Daphne’s Flower Castle.

  In the turn-of-the-century square itself, the Flags of All Nations atop the buildings were straight out in the wind. The Firemen’s Band was playing, Glory, glory hallelujah…

  A voice said, “Toby….”

  Toby saw no one he recognized. Tourists wandered around. There was the constable; the girl dressed as Princess Daphne, handing flowers to little girls; a sad-faced clown, his white-painted lips curving down; an upright turtle, five and a half feet tall…

  “Hey, Toby….”

  Toby looked closely at the clown. His makeup didn’t seem very well applied. And his eyes seemed odd. Only his right eye was moving, back and forth, back and forth, in some kind of a signal.

  Toby looked down the clown’s costume. On the ground near his huge feet were a few drops of blood.

  Toby looked back up, into the clown’s face.

  The clown darted his eye back and forth again.

  “See ya, kid.”

  Toby grinned.

  He gave a little wave with his free hand, only waist high.

  His mother did not see him.

  Sixty-Seven

  Wednesday, Ambassador Teodoro Rinaldi walked into the V.I.P. lounge at San Francisco Airport, where his wife and son were waiting for him. He dropped his briefcase and put one arm around Toby and the other around Christina.

  The family embraced wordlessly.

  “Your luggage will be right up, sir,” the stewardess said.

  “I know.” The Ambassador smiled at her. “Someone’s downstairs waiting for it.”

  Finally, Teddy said, “We might as well sit down while we’re waiting. What’s wrong with your feet?”

  Christina dropped back down into her chair. “Plumb wore out. They’ll be all better tomorrow.”

  Toby jumped onto the divan next to his father. “Fac’ is,” he said. “I’m hungry. Pizza!”

  Again, Teddy put his arm around him.

  Returning to the airport was not as difficult for Christina as she thought it would be. She had spent such awful hours there. But this time Toby was with her and they hadn’t had to wait long for Teddy.

  Christina and Teddy had talked at length on the telephone both Monday and Tuesday nights. Monday night Teddy told her Resolution 1176R had passed in the United Nations, with only nine no votes and one abstention—the United States. Tuesday Teddy told her Pat Skinner had been fired from the State Department.

  “I guess Pat misread my face at some point,” Teddy said.

  To them both the grand news was that “the boss” had endowed a chair of international diplomacy at Kennedy, provided Teddy be granted the chair for the first three years. Christina detected the kind hand of Ria Marti behind the endowment and the provision. Surely, “the boss” had not thought of it himself. Three years in Cambridge, living quietly with Teddy and Toby…

  Late Monday afternoon, from Fantazyland’s parking lot, Christina had called Bernard Silvermine at the Red Star-Silvermine Motel.

  “Mr. Silvermine? May I make a reservation for two, for tonight? In the name of Rinaldi—Christina Rinaldi and son, Toby….”

  Bernard Silvermine had a kilted bagpiper piping in the motel driveway when they arrived at dusk.

  Tuesday and Wednesday, waiting for Teddy, playing around the motel pool, eating in the coffee shop, Toby told Christina some things about what he knew had happened.

  His stories, of course, were childish. He was precise about some things: nearly being hit by a train, attacked by a shark in the river, falling down the side of Uncle Whimsy’s Hat.

  He was most vague about the kidnapper.

  When she asked specific questions, Toby seemed to find it difficult to remember. How old was the kidnapper? Well, he was older than Dad—about fifty. Yes, he did limp. He had a wooden leg, you see, like a pirate. Glass eye? No, the man didn’t have a glass eye. He said the man had said his name was O’Brien, and he lived on a ranch in Texas.

  Christina had not told Teddy about The Hall of Knives—how, without thinking, without even knowing she was doing it, she had killed a man. She would tell him when he was rested. Or maybe never.

  Now Toby was sitting on his legs on the airport divan, facing his father, jabbering about Fantazyland and about many people and things that are not what they seem.

  Smiling broadly, Teddy looked at Christina.

  Christina asked, “Did Mrs. Brown send the carpets to the cleaning department at the museum, as I suggested?”

  Teddy looked surprised. “Mrs. Brown?”

  “Yes.”

  Teddy said, “Mrs. Brown isn’t at the legation anymore.”

  “She isn’t? Teddy!” Christina sat up in her chair. “Where’s Mrs. Brown?”

  Teddy’s grin was the broadest she’d ever seen on his face. “Downstairs. She insisted on taking charge of our luggage herself. Don’t know why she thinks any of it might get lost….”

  Toby said, “Yeaaaaaaa! Will she come to Fantazyland with us?”

  Teddy said, “I don’t think you could keep her away with a bazooka.”

  Toby said, “I can show you some marvelous things.”

  “I’m sure you can,” his father said.

  “I know Fantazyland pretty well now. Almost better than anybody, I bet.”

  Teddy look at Christina. “Maybe your mother doesn’t feel like going back to Fantazyland.”

  Christina’s stomach churned at the thought.

  Teddy and Toby were looking at her, hoping she’d say yes.

  She put out a hand to each of them.

  “Anything to be together,” she said.

  SAFEKEEPING

  (THE SECOND SNATCH)
r />   In memory of M.A.M., who told me to close my eyes, then asked me what I saw.

  1

  In Which Noses and Other Outstanding Matters Are Discussed

  “Burnes?” Mrs. Jencks enquired generally of the small room filled with six beds, six eight-year-old boys scurrying to get dressed, and odd pieces of clothing on the beds, on the boys, in the air, on the floor, underfoot and in hand as weapons.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Headmaster wants to see you straight off.”

  “I can’t find my stocking, sir.”

  In the doorway, Mrs. Jencks still couldn’t be sure which boy had answered her and thus identified himself as Burnes. All the youngest gentlemen at Wolsley School called everyone over five feet in height sir. At their age everyone, including the gardener and the imbecile from the village who collected the wash, was in a position of authority over them, by size if not by rank, and if there was a word to placate authority, sir was the word.

  Wisely, Mrs. Jencks maintained her expression of benign maternity while waiting at the door. It was this expression of bemused patience, and her ample, maternal dimensions, which had won and kept for her the job of matron of Wolsley School. Parents and faculty both perceived Mrs. Jencks as a bosom into which anyone would be happy to sob. Three decades of students, however, had penetrated Mrs. Jencks’ placid expression and knew it to connote nothing more than painless indifference to the world at large. They also knew that nothing had nestled against her bosom in all those years except crumbs from her tea cakes.

  “Hurry along,” Mrs. Jencks said, as a general admonition.

  Eight-year-old boys haven’t that many years’ dressing practice behind them. When given a square foot of cold floor on which simultaneously to hop and execute one of life’s First Things, including shoe strings and ties, the result is similar to that of any great, unexpected human undertaking: confusion, consternation, and disputation. Out of that room, in twelve minutes, six eight-year-old boys were expected to march, toiletted, washed, brushed, dressed identically in kneepants, kneesocks, shoes, shirt, tie, the Wolsley School blazer and cap, six made beds behind them. Occasionally, it almost happened; expectations were almost fulfilled, but never, of course, with more than two of the six dressed entirely in their own clothes.

  Doubtlessly, parents are smarter now, but in the early 1940s they sincerely wished to believe, or wished their friends to believe, or wished their children to believe, that they sent their children off to school or camp with some continuing sense of identity. Name tags were sewn into every article of clothing with thread staunch enough to do its umbilical duty. Traditionally, parents need to believe something of the sort when, in truth, they are throwing their children to the public, their clothes after them.

  Jaime Pomfrey, two beds west of Burnes’, had name tags in his stockings stiffer than the rest, and placed uncomfortably below the fold. This was one lad at school who seldom forgot his mother. He wrote her each Sunday and cursed her each morning. Very shortly he became adept, via diversionary tactics, argument, offers to dispense bloody noses, at getting anyone’s stockings but his own on his legs. His own stockings remained balled neatly in his drawer.

  “Burnes,” said Mrs. Jencks. “Headmaster wants you before Chapel.”

  “Yes, sir, but I can’t find a stocking.”

  “Hurry along.”

  At the shrill sound of a bell, the future of Britain agitated each other to the door, narrowly circumnavigated Mrs. Jencks, and threw themselves suicidally down the stairwell. Left amid the confusion of the room, one bare foot elevated from the cold floor, was—as marked in the school register—Robert James Saint James Burnes Walter Farhall-Pladroman, S.Nob. To this son of a nobleman, Mrs. Jencks’ girth appeared to be holding the door jambs at a distance from each other wider than normal. On the high plateau of her bosom sparkled a necklace of early morning toast crumbs.

  “You are Burnes, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, ma’am.”

  “You little ones confuse me the first year or two. Until your noses grow.”

  “Noses, ma’am?”

  “Find a stocking somewhere, Burnes. Headmaster’s waiting.”

  As “Headmaster’s Waiting” was a disaster on an all-school scale comparable only to the Union Jack’s touching the ground, an element of such magnitude that it was capable of causing faculty as well as students to rush from playing field and classroom, even of causing parents to rush from London, Robby was forced to accept the inevitable: that Pomfrey had won again. He went to Pomfrey’s drawer and pulled on one of Pomfrey’s stockings.

  Hopping in a fruitless effort to adjust Pomfrey’s identity against his shin, Robby Burnes (as he was generally known by people who had something other to do with their lives than remember all his names) followed Mrs. Jencks down the stairwell, across the courtyard, through the smells of hot chocolate, past the coughfilled, sneeze-filled chapel, and into Admin. Wing, wherein Headmaster had his study. Seeing Mrs. Jencks hurrying from behind over a long course distracted Robby from speculating what difficulty he had caused, precipitating his impending interview with Headmaster. Mrs. Jencks achieved forward motion by the action of each cheek upon the other: The right would rest against the left, which would contract and propel the right outward and onward again—which was intensely interesting to Robby. He wondered if such an athletic device would survive a long scrimmage.

  “Aha, there you are, Burnes! That is Burnes, isn’t it, Mrs. Jencks?”

  “Yes, Headmaster. I have trouble with them, too, sir, until they get noses. A bit slow dressing this morning. Missed breakfast altogether, he has.”

  “Tadpoles will be tadpoles, Mrs. Jencks.”

  On Headmaster’s desk was a finished breakfast tray.

  Headmaster, Robby knew, divided the world between tadpoles and honored parents. Parents considered him England’s greatest boy handler. Boys considered him England’s greatest parent handler. He achieved these reputes mainly by keeping a threadbare nine-by-twelve Persian carpet on his study floor. The rug served the double purpose of giving the tadpoles a touch of home (as all, typically, thus far in their lives had been brought up in the back rooms of their parents’ homes, those rooms relegated to servants, wornout rugs and boys) and thus suggested to the boys they could speak freely, confidentially, to Headmaster, as they had been in the habit of speaking at home only to Nanny and Cook. To honored parents, the worn carpet bespoke Headmaster’s selfless, soulful dedication to the education of boys. Over the decades, the worn carpet in Headmaster’s study had attracted contributions to the school’s endowment many, many times its own original worth. Headmaster himself, as he paced restlessly in his black, academic robe, seemed oblivious of the magic carpet beneath his feet. Headmaster’s eye, Robby noticed, repeatedly checked the decanter of sherry on the sideboard, as if the rate of evaporation was a cause of concern to him.

  “I went to the funeral yesterday,” Headmaster said. “Very nice. Although, I must say, two coffins in the one aisle were a bit much, even in this day and age.”

  “Sit down, Burnes,” Mrs. Jencks suggested.

  “Yes, yes, sit down, Burnes.”

  “Funeral, sir?”

  “Good heavens. I always start at the back of things. Comes from being a Latin scholar, my wife used to say. She’s dead, too, of course.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Years ago. Do enough Latin and see what happens to you. Begin starting everything at the wrong end.”

  “Sir?”

  “Latin’s the curse of the English school system. Never understand why your honored parents keep expecting us to ladle it out. They conquered Britain, you know.”

  “Our parents, sir? Did they need to?”

  “The Romans. Why should we spend centuries learning the language of a bunch of beasts we spent centuries throwing off the yoke of? Tell me that.”

  “I’ll look it up, sir.”

  “I daresay if the Germans conquer us, two thousand years from now English
schoolboys will be translating Mein Kampf as reverently as they’re made to swallow Caesar’s Gallic Wars today. It’s all the same bully rubbish, you see.”

  “I see, sir.”

  Mrs. Jencks cleared her throat. “Very instructive, sir. I’m sure.”

  “People wonder why I accepted the position of Headmaster of Wolsley School, ur…”

  “Indeed I did, sir.”

  “…ur. What’s your name?”

  “Robby Nose, sir.”

  “Burnes, Headmaster.”

  “Burnes, yes, of course. The funeral. I accepted the position of Headmaster simply to get away from the teaching of Latin. Can you understand that?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “How many times can a British subject read the reports of legions of Roman jackanapes marching up and down our green hills, laying waste our villages, slaughtering our young males and despoiling our virgins?”

  “I haven’t read that book yet, sir.”

  “No. And it’s a jolly good thing you’re not going to. You’re off to America this afternoon, and the best thing about America is they’ve never been conquered and therefore have no regard for anyone’s language, including the one they pick-pocketed from us. You’ll never have to know Latin in America, lad. Or English.”

  “Sir?”

  “Is he sniffling, Mrs. Jencks?”

  “I think he’s confused, sir, what with the Romans and all.”

  “Your parents, Burnes. Their London house was in Mayfair?”

  “Yes, sir. Mayfair.”

  “A direct hit. Damned foolish of them, too, I might say. If they ever conquer Britain, they’ll want those Mayfair houses, mark my words.”

  “Who, sir? The Romans?”

  “Am I not being clear, Mrs. Jencks?”

  “It’s the shock, Headmaster. It takes a moment.”

  “Ah, well, yes. Cheer up, Burnes. Things could be worse, you know. You could have been at home with your honored parents getting bombed instead of enjoying the safety, the staunch peace, the security we provide here at Wolsley School.”

  “Thank you, sir.”