The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Wouldn’t he use his own key?”

  “He’s loaded down with three big bags—remember?” And, in response, the buzzer sounded, and Kevin pushed the door open.

  He bounded up the two flights of stairs and ran on tiptoes down the narrow corridor toward the apartment marked 3-C, with Jules close behind him. Kevin whipped his service revolver from its shoulder holster, and stepping back a short distance, he aimed his shoulder at the door and, charging at the door, crashed it open. “Everybody freeze!” he shouted.

  They were in a kitchen, and a television set was going. Steve Allen was hosting The Tonight Show. An open window let in the warm summer night’s breeze, stirring cretonne curtains, and across the street a neon sign advertising Budweiser beer flashed on and off.

  A tall dark-haired young man, who would have been Miguel, the older Fernandez brother, immediately jumped to his feet. “Hands against the wall!” Kevin ordered, and the young man quickly obeyed. In a kitchen chair sat Cyril, with his upper body bound in what appeared to be clothesline, though his hands were free. He appeared to have been drinking a beer. “Hey—Pop! What the hell?” Cyril cried.

  A revolver lay on the kitchen table, and Kevin quickly pocketed this. “Untie your son,” he said, and rapidly began to frisk the other man, who leaned, hands upward, face forward, against the kitchen wall.

  But when Jules started to undo the knots, which seemed rather loosely tied, the clothesline, which looked seriously frayed in several places, immediately broke apart into pieces and fell to the floor, and Cyril was instantly freed.

  Then Kevin Shaughnessy yanked the telephone from the wall, and hurled it out the open window. “Now let’s get out of here,” he said, and herded Jules and Cyril out of the apartment, down the stairs, and out into the waiting station wagon. Putting the car into gear, Kevin and his two passengers headed for the Brooklyn Bridge. The plan was for Kevin to drive them to the greater security of the apartment at 1000 Park Avenue. Hannah and Bathy were driving from the country to meet them there.

  “Did you pay them the money, Pop?” Cyril asked as they headed for the bridge.

  “You weren’t very well tied up,” his father said drily. “The rope they tied you with broke the minute I touched it.”

  “If I’d tried to break loose, they’d have shot me, Pop! You saw he had a gun!”

  “You told me the room you were in didn’t have any windows.”

  “I told you what they said to tell you, Pop!” He turned to Kevin. “Who’re you?”

  “An old friend of the family,” Kevin said.

  “Did you pay them the money, Pop?”

  “What difference does it make?” his father said. “You’re free now.”

  “Do you know that’s the biggest ransom demand in history, Pop? The biggest in history! I wasn’t sure you’d pay it. But why wasn’t there anything in the papers, Pop? Why wasn’t it on TV?”

  “I took care of that.”

  “Every day they’d buy all the papers, looking for something. Every day they’d watch the TV news. But there was—nothing. The biggest ransom in history—but it didn’t even make the news. We thought it would make big headlines.”

  “‘We’ thought?”

  “They thought. Why didn’t it make big headlines? You did pay them the money, didn’t you, Pop?”

  “No, I did not.”

  Cyril looked crushed. “But, Pop,” he said. “I don’t understand. Then how did you—?”

  “We’ll discuss all this when we get home, Cyril,” his father said.

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, while Kevin Shaughnessy chain-smoked cigarettes.

  At the apartment, Hannah Liebling greeted her son with open arms. “Oh, my poor baby!” she sobbed. “What a terrible thing you’ve been through! Oh, look at you, my poor baby! Look at the circles under your eyes. How tired you must be, my poor baby. Just get some rest now, darling. It’s so late. You must get some rest.…”

  In the library of the apartment, Kevin Shaughnessy had fixed himself a stiff drink. When Jules and Hannah joined him there, it was nearly two in the morning. “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Liebling,” he said, “this has been an unusual case. But I think my job for you is finished.”

  “Thank you so much, Mr. Shaughnessy,” Hannah said. “We couldn’t have done any of this without you. And everything worked out just the way you said it would. You were brilliant … brilliant.”

  “There’s just one more thing,” he said, and he reached into his pocket. “When I was searching Fernandez, I found these. Three ticket stubs. They’re for My Fair Lady, Wednesday night’s performance. The night before last. The tickets were purchased with your son’s American Express card.” He handed the stubs to Jules.

  “Obviously they stole his credit card,” Hannah said.

  “If so, they were very nice and returned it to him. I checked his billfold, and everything was in order, including three hundred dollars in cash.”

  Jules stared at the ticket stubs.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Liebling, I am left with the strong impression that while your son was claiming to be tied in a chair at gunpoint, he and the Fernandez brothers were off enjoying a Broadway musical.”

  Jules tore up the stubs and tossed them in a wastebasket. “I see your point, Mr. Shaughnessy,” he said at last. “I presume you’ll have your bill prepared for me in the morning.”

  And that should have been the end of the episode. But it was not, not quite.

  The next morning a policeman stood at the door of the apartment. “Mr. Liebling, we have a warrant for the arrest of your son, Cyril Liebling.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

  “Who is bringing this charge?”

  “Mr. Miguel Fernandez, who is the legal guardian of his younger brother, Jose Fernandez, a minor. The senior Mr. Fernandez charges that while your son was a guest in his house, he caught your son in the act of sexually molesting his younger brother.”

  And so Cyril was led away from 1000 Park Avenue in handcuffs.

  This event generated enough headlines to have satisfied anyone, particularly in the New York tabloids, the Post, the News, and the Daily Mirror:

  HEIR SEIZED ON SEX CHARGE!

  —Post

  BOOZE BARON’S SON CALLED PEDERAST!

  —News

  BILLIONAIRE MOLESTED H.S. HONOR STUDENT, VICTIM CLAIMS!

  —Daily Mirror

  Meanwhile, Ingraham lawyers tried to arrange for Cyril’s release on bond. The New York County Prosecutor’s Office had set bail at $5,000,000.

  Then, two days later, the telephone rang in the apartment. “This is Joey Fernandez,” the boy’s voice said. “My brother Mike says to tell you that we’ll drop all charges if you’ll pay us one-point-two-five million dollars.”

  “Let me handle this one,” Hannah said, seizing the phone from her husband. “Mr. Fernandez,” she said, “I don’t know who you are, or what you are, or what you represent. But I know this. I know that molesting a minor may be a felony, but kidnapping is a high federal crime, carrying a sentence of up to life imprisonment. I have your ransom note, written in your or your brother’s hand. All your telephone calls to our homes in Westchester and New York have been recorded, including this one, and I have the tapes. We also have a witness who will testify that he found my son in your apartment, tied to a chair, and guarded by your brother with a gun in full view. If you do not drop all charges against my son within fifteen minutes, I will turn all this material over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Good-bye.” She dropped the receiver in its cradle.

  Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. It was the New York City chief of detectives. “Mrs. Liebling, the Fernandez brothers have dropped all charges against Cyril,” he said. “They have admitted that this was all a hoax.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Would you like us to press charges, Mrs. Liebling? Hoax or not, it was still an extortion attempt.”

>   “I think not,” she said. “There has been too much about this case in the press already.”

  “I’m making arrangements for your son’s immediate release.”

  “Thank you. May I ask what was the purpose of this hoax?”

  “Publicity. It seems the younger Fernandez wants to be a rock ’n’ roll star. Believe it or not, it seems that, as a result of this, young Fernandez has already got himself an agent. It’s a strange world we live in, Mrs. Liebling.”

  “It certainly is,” she said.

  “You know,” his father said to Cyril that night, “the trouble with you is that you’ve never been able to do anything right. If you’d been able to conceive of a really clever extortion plot, and been able to carry it out, I’d have been impressed. I’d have actually admired you for it. I’d have thought: This young man has brains! This young man has moxie! He’s really going places. But your little plot was stupid from the beginning. You lied about where you were going that evening. You said you were going to see a show that wasn’t even playing. You had the car headed the wrong way. And on, and on, and on—one stupid blunder after another! Your plot was so stupid and transparent that it wasn’t even laughable. It was just pathetic. Because you’ll never be able to do anything right, nothing will ever work for you. You have no future. You are completely hopeless. Now let me show you a young man on whom the future of this family rests.”

  He had ordered Noah’s governess to wake him up and bring him downstairs to the music room. Noah stood there sleepily in his pajamas, rubbing his eyes, unaware of what any of this was about. He was eight years old.

  “This is the young man on whom the future of this family hangs!” his father declared. “This is my hope! This is my promise! This is the future of my company, my family, and all my dreams! This is the real man in the family, Cyril—not you. Do you know what my first impulse was when you called last Sunday night? It was to let them dispatch you—you stupid, worthless piece of scum!”

  “Oh, Jules,” Hannah sobbed. “Jules … Jules …” As Noah’s governess, equally mystified, led him back upstairs to bed.

  To this day, Noah Liebling has never been able to forget that scene.

  It wasn’t a very happy funeral. That may sound like an odd thing to say, but there are such things as happy funerals, when family members and old friends stand up and offer happy reminiscences, and tell funny stories about the deceased; they joke a little, and no word is unkind. And everyone leaves feeling a little better, somehow believing that death isn’t such a bad thing to have happen to you, after all. But Jules Liebling’s funeral in the winter of 1974 wasn’t one of those.

  It wasn’t happy because it was obvious, from the stony expression on her face, that Hannah Liebling was mad as hell about something. What she was mad about was that there were so few people there. But what did she expect? Thousands of mourners? There’d been no public announcement of this funeral. The death notices of the Billionaire Booze Baron had all concluded with the sentence, “Funeral plans are as yet incomplete,” which was what Hannah had requested. There’d been no further publicity. Perhaps Hannah was angry because, although she insisted she wanted her husband’s funeral to be small and private, she’d really been hoping that the funeral home would somehow miraculously fill to overflowing with mourners. But since so few people knew about it, that hadn’t happened, and so Hannah was sore.

  The services were held in one of the smaller rooms at Frank E. Campbell’s on Madison Avenue. The only flowers were an arrangement of Hannah’s giant white dahlias, from the gardens at Grandmont, at the head of the coffin. An organist played a few riffs and variations on “Happy Days Are Here Again” because, believe it or not, Jules had been a lifelong Democrat and an ardent supporter of the New Deal. After all, FDR supported repeal. A rabbi said the Kaddish, first in English, then in Hebrew, though Jules had never been a pious Jew. The visitors’ book contained no more than two dozen signatures.

  A few of Jules’s more important distributors had been notified, and they were there with their wives. They had come to provide a show of loyalty to the new boss. Noah and Hannah had come in together, and were seated in the front row. Ruth Liebling Hower, who had not yet reverted to being a countess, flew in from California and joined them there. Noah saw Bathsheba Sachs come in and quietly take a seat in the back row, but he did not look back in her direction again, and when it was time for them all to get up and go, she had already left. There were a few other close associates of Jules’s from the office. The only person visibly weeping was Jules’s longtime secretary, Edith Ackerman, who had brought her niece, who was severely retarded, but who nevertheless behaved herself very well. Noah, seated between her and his mother, noticed that Ruth was drunk, and she tripped and nearly fell when leaving the pew, but no one else appeared to notice anything. There were a few other people whom Noah didn’t recognize.

  After the service, there was no trip to the cemetery because there was to be no burial. The hearse departed with the coffin to the crematorium, and there was no cortege. When it was over, Hannah went directly home without speaking to anyone.

  Noah went outside to the front steps of Campbell’s to have a cigarette. In those days everybody smoked. Later, it became so dangerous to light a cigarette within shouting distance of another human being that Noah had finally said the hell with it and quit. As he stood there, patting his jacket pockets in search of a book of matches, he became aware of a tall, older, slightly stooped man standing on the steps with him. The man seemed oddly dressed for a funeral, in a full-length lynx coat that nearly touched the tops of blue suede Gucci loafers. And something about the older man looked familiar, but Noah couldn’t place him.

  “Need a light?” the man said. The man’s voice sounded familiar, too, but still Noah couldn’t attach a name to that middle-aged face.

  “Oh, thanks,” Noah said, and the older man lighted Noah’s cigarette with a gold Dunhill lighter. That little gesture—the way he flipped the lighter open—also rang a bell, and Noah thought: This is someone I’ve met before, but who?

  “And so now, I suppose, the mantle will fall upon your shoulders,” the man said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Noah said.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you.”

  “I feel I should, but no, I’m afraid—”

  “It’s Cyril.”

  “Cyril!” The afternoon was chilly, and now a cloud passed across the sun, and a wind swept up Madison Avenue. “Cyril,” he said again. A gesture was called for, and Noah extended his hand, and the two shook hands.

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  They stood there awkwardly a moment, suddenly shy in each other’s presence, their eyes averted. Though it embarrassed Noah not to recognize his brother, it was understandable. He had not seen Cyril in over ten years. Cyril had let his hair grow longer, nearly shoulder length, and now it was silvery, the color of his long lynx coat. He had also taken to wearing a single gold earring in his left earlobe, long before this sort of thing would become a fashion commonplace, and an affectation that Cyril would later abandon. There had been another episode—not as serious as the kidnapping one—and Cyril had finally been banished from the Liebling household by their father. Noah knew about this episode, of course, but no one in the family ever spoke of it. Cyril had been treated as a non-person: out of sight, out of mind.

  Cyril had been banished to the West Side because, in those days—the early 1960s—it was felt that people who lived on the West Side could live exactly as they wished. If one wished to live differently from the way normal people lived, one could do it on the West Side. The West Side was like a foreign country, and West Siders never ventured East. Cyril had been provided with a generous living allowance. His father would not have thrown his son out on the street. Still, he had been banished from Grandmont and from 1000 Park Avenue, and that banishment would not end until some time after his father’s death, when Hannah came up with the idea of divid
ing the apartment horizontally and giving Cyril the upper floor.

  Because of the difference in their ages—Noah was now twenty-five and Cyril was forty—Noah and his brother had never been close. Still, this meeting with Cyril on the steps of Frank E. Campbell’s Funeral Chapel was difficult for Noah, and he stood there mutely, trying to think of something to say. But it was difficult because too much time had passed, there was too much ground to cover, and besides, all that ground had slipped away. He stood there, rocking on the balls of his feet, while the wind whipped up the canyon of the street, carrying with it the smell of coming snow. He felt he should deliver to his brother some sign of affection—a hug, a slap on the back, a soft punch to the shoulder—but the moment for that seemed to have passed. He felt he should say, “Gee, you’re looking great!” But in fact, Cyril did not look great. He merely looked strange, and foreign. And he could not simply say, “Well, good-bye!” So he found himself shaking Cyril’s hand again and saying, “Cyril. Well!”

  “Yes. Well. Well. Indeed.”

  “Well.”

  “And so now I assume the mantle of the Ingraham Corporation is about to fall upon your shoulders,” Cyril said.

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “It was supposed to fall on mine, you know. The mantle. But that was years ago.”

  “Yes, I know. Would you have wanted it?”

  “Oh, yes, I think so, though that’s a forlorn hope now. This is supposed to be a disreputable business. And, as you know, I’ve become quite a disreputable person. I think I’d have been admirably suited to it. I think I’d have done quite well with it.” There was a sudden twinkle in his eye, and the ice seemed finally to be beginning to break. “And what about you, baby brother? Are you ready to assume it? This golden, disreputable mantle?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Noah said.

  “Only think so? Don’t you know so? Don’t you want it?”