Uncommon Youth

by Charles Fox

  I just lay there on the grass until they got some food. I think some of them drove off, or another came or something like that. They carried me off for a couple hundred yards, and I lay there for hours. They brought me beans, those awful things they eat in Mexico, refried beans. In Italy, it’s pasta with beans and salad. The cheapest thing, you know. Awful stuff. And wine. Just what I needed.

  In the morning, Martine woke early and was instantly alarmed.

  Martine:

  Every night Paul would come home. He was out late very often, but he always came home. That night he didn’t. We had kept missing each other the night before. Marcello and I met and Paul had just gone, then Jutta and I went to the movies, and he had just gone, and so on. Then on this night, the two guys outside our house were gone. In the morning I looked at Jutta and we both said that there was something strange. Very early in the morning, six or seven, we went over to Marcello’s house and we woke him up, and he said, “Oh, it’s nothing. He’s always like this.” But we thought that something was wrong.

  Martine and Jutta left Marcello’s and went to Piazza Navona to try to find someone who had seen him the night before.

  Four hundred miles south of Rome, Paul was waiting where they had left him on the ground.

  Paul:

  They left me there for an interminable amount of time. When the next night came they moved me. They said, “Get up,” and took me by the arms. I was still blindfolded. They walked one on either side of me. It was rough ground, it had been plowed, agricultural. They turned me around and around and made me march in circles and then they’d get me in the car and drive me a half mile and then I’d get out again and I’d walk again in circles. We walked all night. It was probably always the same field. Slept for an hour, and then little short drives in a car, a Fiat 600. They didn’t say anything. As it was getting light we went to sleep on the ground, on some grass. I woke up with a hell of a headache. They gave me coffee and I had to take a shit, which was as embarrassing as hell. They were all watching me and I was blindfolded. They made me wait till it got dark before we went on walking, we walked the whole night.

  I don’t think they knew where they wanted to take me. They had caught me and they weren’t ready and they were getting things together. We walked again that night, in and out of the car, just like the previous night. I went to sleep again at four in the morning.

  It was some time during these two days that Gail got the phone call from the kidnappers’ spokesman, the man who liked to be called Fifty. Presumably, Fifty then called either the newspapers or the police themselves, or both, because in the morning of the thirteenth the story appeared on the wires in which she was quoted as saying she thought it must have been a joke. Perhaps these words were squeezed out of her by surprise or her desperate hope or denial. When she called Big Paul, she spoke very differently.

  Gail:

  I called Big Paul in London. We both just cried our eyes out on the phone. We couldn’t talk. Finally I said, “This is kind of silly. We’re both crying like babies. Why don’t we talk later?” When I called later he was practical, mostly worried about me. There wasn’t anything anybody could do at that point. He asked, “Is there any way you think I could help you? Do you think I should try and come down? I’m not supposed to come to Italy, I’ll be arrested, but should I come?” I said, “Of course not. That doesn’t make any sense. That wouldn’t be the answer.” And it was “What should we do, what should we do?”

  Gail knew immediately what to do. Paul would have spent the night either at Martine’s, Marcello’s, or at her place. She called Marcello and asked when the last time was he had seen Paul.

  Marcello replied that he hadn’t seen him in three days. “We were supposed to meet yesterday in Gaeta for lunch. He didn’t show up, but you know how Paul is. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Who was he with the last time you saw him?”

  “He was with this Sue Johnson in a restaurant in Piazza Navona.”

  Gail didn’t say anything about the caller who claimed Paul was kidnapped.

  After the twins appeared at his door, Marcello had gone back to bed but after Gail’s call he went out into the street and began looking. In Piazza Navona he found people who had witnessed the row between Paul and Danielle at three a.m. He also came across a man who claimed to have seen Paul still later.

  Marcello:

  Somebody said they saw him crossing a bridge, there were two people with him. There may have been three, it was too far away. He was sure it was Paul. When you know someone and you see him more than once in the night, you know how he is dressed and Paul is taller than most Italians.

  In the evening the police came and they asked me a lot of questions. Then they told me that somebody phoned Gail and said Paul had been kidnapped. However, the words “joke” and “hoax” had been uttered and they would not go away. They lost the boy sympathy, a commodity in short supply for him anyway, and they enraged the kidnappers.

  Among those who read the story on the wires were Paul’s grandfather in London and, more important, the grandfather’s troubleshooter, an ex-CIA man, Fletcher Chace.

  Chace was in Calgary at the time. The OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) Oil Embargo would break out in less than ninety days, sending the price of oil sky-high. Behind the scenes the Western oil companies were wrestling with the issue. Chace wrote in his journal, “On the 9th of July, I was meeting with some Arabs on behalf of the old man in Calgary, Canada. On the 13th I read in the newspapers that Paul had been kidnapped. The old man was sending me to the Middle East anyway. When I called him he told me to come and see him in London on the way so we could talk about it.”

  Chace caught a night flight from Calgary to London. A kidnapping was the kind of assignment he relished.

  His ex-wife Patsy said of him:

  He loves adventure. He’s not afraid of danger, he’s a classic ladies’ man. I told him I wouldn’t marry him if he went back into the Frogmen. But he married me and went back anyway. He was a Frogman in the Marines, Special Forces, in World War II, and Korea. He did one hundred sixteen missions behind enemy lines and has the DSO [Distinguished Service Order], second highest medal of valor in the British Army, very unusual. He’s a karate black belt. His first wife left him to marry his younger brother. His second was a famous model. That didn’t last long. He was in the Hall of Fame at Harvard, the greatest stroke in the history of the university rowing team. They called him Spike Chace. They didn’t say Harvard won, they said Spike won. I met him in 1950 when I was going out with one of his friends, now president of Coca-Cola. We were married for twenty-three years and I was never bored. I don’t think he should know we’ve talked. He can’t be trusted. He’ll be very nice and then stab you in the back. He likes to pit one person against another and keep the upper hand. He respects people who stand up to him. Old Man Getty’s the same way. There is something in his relationship with Old Man Getty. I think the two of them like to sit around and count their money.

  The kidnappers were thrown into a panic when they realized that the kidnapping was not being taken seriously, and strove to stop such talk with a letter to be hand-delivered overnight.

  Paul:

  Late that night it began to pour. They took me into a hut, a place where you keep tools. One of them dried me off, another gave me some clothes, and another made a fire on the dirt floor. There was no fireplace. They made some pasta. That’s when they took the blindfold off for the first time. I had to sit at the other side of the hut, looking at the wall so I couldn’t see them.

  The man I call Piccolo—“the small one” in Italian—brought me paper and a ballpoint pen. I think he was in the car with me, but I don’t know. He dictated a letter to me, low Italian, not my style. It takes a mouse’s brain to work that out. It was just a nice letter saying we’ll get in touch, I’m okay, they’re treating me nice and all that. I addressed the envelope to Marcello and Martine because I didn’t want them knowing where my moth
er lived.

  When Chace arrived at London Heathrow in the late morning, he took a taxi to the Westbury Hotel on Bond Street in Mayfair, showered, then rested for precisely two hours and drove down to Old Paul’s country mansion, Sutton Place.

  Chace:

  We discussed our affairs. We didn’t know what was involved in Paul’s disappearance, if it was a genuine kidnapping. We had no ransom note. The boy had been missing for a couple of days and no one was sure if he’d really been kidnapped.

  The old man told me, “Go to Rome on your way to the Middle East and get it straightened out. The boy is missing. Get him back.”

  I chose the name of Lawrence as a cover name for this assignment. When you pick a false name, you don’t pick a name with your own initials.

  Martine and Jutta were keeping up their search in Rome.

  Martine:

  For two days we looked for him. We went to every friend’s house and we looked. Someone said Paul was seen on the bridge with two guys, and I thought about the guys that were in the street outside our place. Then it came out in the newspapers that he was missing. Then when I came back in the afternoon there was a letter lying on my bed. I saw at once that it was Paul’s handwriting. It was addressed to me, but inside was a note that began “Cara Mama…” So we took the letter to Gail’s apartment, because it said, “Don’t call the police,” but Gail was not there. The concierge told us she was away, maybe even out of the country, not living in Italy anymore.

  We waited outside her building until it got dark, but no one came. We didn’t know what to do. On one hand we knew the truth, but we didn’t know if it would help if we went to the police, if we said one word too much, boom, the kidnappers must kill him. Finally we decided we had to call the police, we couldn’t just leave Paul, we knew something was really wrong. When we were waiting, Jutta and I talked secretly together, and we said they can’t know that Paul knew these people. We never told anyone, not even Gail, that Paul was deeply involved with the malavita. We’d already had our experience. The police came and picked us up, and they took us to the questura. Gail was upset at us because we called the police, but there was no other choice. Jutta and I were taken to different departments and we showed them the letter and they laughed. Nobody took it seriously. The police told us, “Okay, we’ll take the letter, thank you very much, you can go now.”

  They went back to Gail’s apartment. This time she was home.

  Later still that night Gail received another visitor.

  Gail:

  An Inspector from the squadra mobile came to see me. He is a funny little man, very friendly, apparently casual, but then not very forthright, I think. He was very interested in my pictures and furniture. He wanted to know how much they cost, how much the rent was, and why I had not paid the rent this month. He seemed to know everything. I told him I was moving out and had paid the last month’s rent when I moved in. He still seemed more interested in how I lived, the way I lived, than in the kidnapping.

  He asked me if anyone in the Getty family had ever even alluded to kidnapping. I said, “Do you want me to really tell you the truth? Yes.” What do you think, in a family like that? It happens every time someone takes too long coming back from the bathroom. These people have a very different sense of humor than Italians. Jokingly, the children’s father has alluded. I don’t remember Little Paul mentioning it. Never. But it is the kind of thing in conversation, just being silly, which could have come up.

  Martine referred to a conversation, it seems to me, because when she came to see me she was in bad shape. She said, “I don’t know what to do. I hope you believe me.” We discussed it, but she never ever suggested to me that he had in any way talked about a kidnapping. I think she talked about a joke they had made at some point. She didn’t mislead me in the least, but I can see that if somebody got hold of it they could take it out of context.

  The Inspector assured Gail that what had passed between them would remain in the strictest confidence.

  The following morning news and the content of Paul’s letter appeared in Rome’s principal newspaper, Il Messaggero.

  The letter read:

  Dear Mother,

  Since Monday after midnight until 3.00 on Tuesday, I have been in the hands of the kidnappers. The telephone call that you received was real. I beg you, do not put my life in danger, have me killed. Please stay away from the police. Do not think that this is a game that I have set up. I beg you, try to put yourself in contact with my kidnappers. Do not tell the Italian police or the foreign police because my life is involved. They will certainly kill me so I wait with trepidation for your interest for my freedom, by paying the money that my kidnappers will ask. I repeat, from the police you will stop the inquiries if you don’t want me to be killed and please do not take too long. If you love me, mother, what I have said should be enough. Lots of kisses to everybody.

  P.S. If you delay, my kidnappers will cut off a finger and they will send it to you by registered post. I beg you, do not have even the most minimum intervention by the police because otherwise they will kill me. I love you,

  Paul

  I send my regards to everybody. Communicate with us over the radio, always by radio.

  Gail realized, as she said:

  The press’s reaction was not to Paul’s letter, but to the fact that the mother was not home, and the girl could not deliver the letter. Their reaction was how horribly shocking that the mother didn’t care, or didn’t believe, because the mother wasn’t home, she had gone out to a movie. The letter was secondary. It was stupid of Martine. She should have just left when she found I was not there. Instead, she used her own head, and she’s hardly a Rhodes Scholar. She got taken down to the police headquarters. The press was on her like, zing. I guess she made a comment like, “I don’t think it’s a hoax,” or “Paul said this or that.” Who knows what she said, or how scared she was. It must have been her complete lack of Italian, she thinks she speaks Italian, but she doesn’t really at all.

  9.

  On July 15, Chace flew into Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport and drove into the city. The man who liked to be in control and couldn’t be trusted kept a daily log.

  Chace:

  I checked into the Eden Hotel. I had a good working relationship with them. The concierge got tipped like any concierge gets tipped. The telephonist got tipped. Paid the switchboard girl to keep quiet and have also taken care of the manager of the Hotel. I didn’t pay him anything. He was in on the deal. He put me in a room next to his, on the top floor, overlooking the park, so I had a little security in my room. We used to talk, he and I. He was a very nice fellow. I didn’t have to pay everyone, because if you tip a concierge well, the rest of the hotel is under control. I could then live on a few lire and a smile.

  Chace’s first order of business was to go around to see Gail the following morning:

  Met Gail at her apartment with Luigi Della Ratta, the croupier, otherwise known as Lou, super stud. Gail didn’t remember meeting me before, although we’d been at the same cocktail party in Rome in 1958. She told me that the kidnappers were calling her and were worried by the idea that it was a hoax. She complained to me that she was being overwhelmed by the press.

  Gail said that, despite Lou’s presence, Chace made a pass at her, which she rejected. It could not have helped the situation, given that Chace thought himself a ladies’ man despite the fact that his first wife had left him to marry his younger brother.

  After he left her apartment, he went into the streets and began to investigate Paul’s friends and habits. As he put it, “Feeling my way, talking daily with Gail. Lou is always around.”

  The kidnappers now moved Paul deeper into the mountains. Here, Paul makes it evident that his captors were people with whom he had spoken of his plan to stage a kidnapping to fund a palace in Marrakesh, his “island of eternal happiness.” It also becomes clear that his captors had ridden rough-shod over any agreement they may have made with the boy. Once more, we
must wonder about Rick Boyd’s account of an abduction gone bad and whether the row in Piazza Navona with Danielle Devret wasn’t staged to throw people off the scent, or perhaps was she setting him up?

  Paul:

  We had dinner in the hut: pasta, cheese, and all that. Then they removed my blindfold. They told me to keep my head down too: “Watch out. Don’t play no jive games with us.” Then we left. We went in the fields, up a mountain and down the other side. All the way up the fucking mountain. It was steep. I was exhausted and they only gave me Sambuca to drink, it’s like ouzo, killer stuff. It’s made from the sambuca plant, looks like elderberry. Very good to chew. It’s sugar, mostly. They swigged at the bottle too. They kept me pretty drunk.

  We must have walked about fifteen miles. It was drizzling. We walked through underbrush like poison ivy. It gives you a rash. When we got to the top of the hill, there was a dirt road. They blindfolded me and they put me on the floor of a car. We drove along the top, fast. It became asphalt. I did not try to keep track of what was going on. Then they stopped; it was getting light.

  We walked a few yards up a steep rise to a bunker right off the road. It was built like the houses in Laurel Canyon, built into the side, half inside the hill. The sides of the walls were ground-level and stairs were underneath. It was small, very simple. There were bullet holes in the walls and people had fucked in there. Stairs down, two windows, steel door, and the road right underneath. There was writing around the place in German: “Sieg Heil.” There were slits in the wall where they stuck the guns out, so it must have been as high as a man. Through a slit, there was a view of a mountaintop. It looked over something; I think it was the sea. I never saw because I was lying down all the time. There was no way to get out. I slept on little branches, a blanket under me and a blanket on top.