Ransom (17 page)

“Oh, he don’t talk, except to be insulting to me.” The transvestite reached out a hand through the bars at Malone, but the latter stepped back; suddenly the black spat at him and the spittle hit Malone in the face. His immediate reaction was to lunge forward, but Jefferson put an arm in front of him. The transvestite giggled delightedly and wiggled his hips, swaying the skirt from side to side. “We fed up with your insults too, white honey.”

Malone wiped his face with his handkerchief, looked at Jefferson. “Maybe I had better go downstairs. You’ll probably get further without me up here.”

“Why don’t both of you get lost?” That was a man from the next cell, a huge brute who looked as if, were he to put his mind and strength to it, he could bend the bars that encaged him like vermicelli stalks. “You pigs stink up the place.”

Jefferson ignored him, looked back at Latrobe. “You could maybe save the lives of two women, Latrobe, if you talked to us.”

Latrobe still said nothing, but now turned his face to the wall beside his head. The giant in the next cell pressed his face against the bars, making himself even uglier; his small dark eyes, surrounded by scar tissue, stared out on either side of the yellow bar that split his broad face. He put a huge paw down and rubbed the front of his trousers.

“They white pussy? You saving ‘em for yo’self, black

Pig?”

Malone suddenly knew he had to get out of this place, at

once, before he tried to reach in through the bars to get at

these men who hated him. He abruptly wheeled about and

walked down to the entrance gate. As he did so the chanting

started up again: Kill, Kill, Kill, a litany of hate whose

echoes he knew would never die away in his ears. Cops were

disliked in Australia, but he had never met anything like

this: he was branded by both his badge and his skin, and the

latter he could never hand in. You could not resign from

your race: the men yelling and screaming and spitting at

him on either side of him told him that; they knew it even

better than he did. He understood their hatred of him, yet

he hated them for it. If any one of the men had stepped out

of his cell Malone knew he would have attacked him, would

have vented all his fury on the black skin that faced and

taunted him.

The young guard let him through the gate and he stood on the landing outside the elevator. A senior guard, also a black, had just stepped out of the elevator and he looked angrily at Malone.

“I dunno who you are, mister, but you asked for that.” Jefferson came through the gate and the guard captain turned to him. “They should never have let you up here, not this time of night. Christ, don’t you think we got enough trouble on our hands?”

“I’m sorry, but we needed some information. We didn’t get it, unfortunately.” Jefferson looked at Malone. “You all right, Scobie?”

Malone stood facing the wall, both hands leaning on it;

he looked like a suspect about to be frisked by the two black law officers. He was trembling, something he could not remember ever having had happen to him before; he felt cold, as if a fever had suddenly left him. The shouting and the banging on the cell bars was still going on, and behind it all was the loud mad laughter of a prisoner who had suddenly gone hysterical.

“All my bloody life,” said Malone dazedly, talking to himself as much as to the two middle-aged black men behind him, “I’ve tried to tell myself I was tolerant, that I didn’t care a bugger what colour a man’s skin was. But just then, for a minute or two, I was a bloody racist. I’d have killed any one of those bastards, if you’d let me at him. Just because he was a bloody nigger.” He dropped his arms, turned round, stared at the two dark faces looking at him expression-lessly. “And don’t tell me you understand, because I won’t believe you. I don’t understand myself, not now anyway.”

The two blacks exchanged glances, then Jefferson pressed the button for the elevator. “Let’s go downstairs, Scobie.”

The shouting and banging were dying away as Malone and Jefferson got into the elevator. They rode down in silence and when they got out Jefferson, still saying nothing, led the way to the Warden’s office. Davidson, The Female Eunuch nowhere in sight now, was poring over some papers. He looked up as the two men came in.

“There was a ruckus up there. Captain Hemmings blew his top because I let you go up.” Davidson was a tall angular man whose unflappability had been his main recommendation towards his promotion; he knew that the world, its joys and griefs, its wars and riots, would never alter its course because of anything he might do. Come Judgment Day he would be standing patiently in line, reading a paperback, while everyone else was adding up his merits or demerits. He would take neither heaven nor hell for granted, but he would accept the fact that, wherever he was bound, someone else had already booked his place for him. He accepted The

Tombs and everything in it as a fact of life. “I was just about to send up the riot squad.”

“It was all just noise, nothing serious,” said Jefferson, but he did not look at Malone. “Phil, could we have a look at what you took off Latrobe when he came in?”

“Sure.” Davidson picked up his phone. When he put it down he said, “You get anything out of him? Nothing? Neither have we. We get silent bastards in here, but most of ‘em are psychos or junkies. But he just seems to have withdrawn from the human race. Can’t say I blame him, the section of it he’s got up there with him on that floor.’

“Why did you put that fag in with him?”

“I had nowhere else to put the fag. I got a whole block of them on the fourth floor, but there was no room for that one. If I put him in a cell with any of the straights, they’d rape him before we locked the door. He’s safe enough with Latrobe.”

A guard brought in a tin tray in a cloth bag. A tag was tied to the bag: Charles Latrobe and the date of his admission. When the guard had gone out Jefferson ran his fingers through the few belongings in the tray.

“Not much there.” A wallet, some money, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, a pearl-handled penknife, a gold signet ring. “No social security card, nothing like that?”

“That’s all he had on him,” said Davidson. “The wallet had nothing but those dollar bills in it, not even a driver’s licence. Just as if he knew he was gonna be picked up and he was gonna have nothing on him that would identify him.”

“What about the pen and ring?” Malone was almost his normal self again. The experience upstairs had almost wrenched him apart; but he had to remember that the safe recovery of Lisa was his sole objective. He tried being a cop again: “That’s a pretty expensive Parker pen, isn’t it? How many anarchists go around with those?”

“Fred Parker, maybe,” said Jefferson, then grinned with embarrassment. “Sorry.”

Malone recognized the small, poor joke for what it was: an attempt by Jefferson to tell him that the mood upstairs was forgotten. He managed a smile in return. “It was probably a present from someone. We don’t do it back home, but don’t you Americans give graduation presents or something?”

“We celebrate everything,” said Jefferson with only mild sarcasm. “I remember when I was a kid I was sorry I wasn’t a Jew - I missed out on bar mitzvah presents. Latrobe isn’t old enough to have graduated from college. This could be a high school graduation present.”

“The ring could be anything,” said Davidson, holding it up to the light. “On the head of it it’s just got two colours, black and gold, with the initials ZT laid over it. Those could be his initials, Z.T. Z? Zeke? Zachary?”

“Could it be a high school ring?” Jefferson took the ring. “ZT. There’s the Zachary Taylor High School out on Long Island. Did anybody check this out?”

“Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. That’s the job of you guys up at Headquarters, John. We just look after them when you bring ‘em in. We don’t get paid for playing detective.”

Jefferson gave him a sourly amused look, then said, “If Latrobe was so keen on hiding his identity, why did he keep something like this?”

“Sentiment,” said Malone. “Maybe some girl gave it to him, or his parents. Maybe that and the fountain pen are the only links he has with who he really is, and he couldn’t give them up. He’s a brave man who chops off his past. For most of us it would be like chopping off an arm.”

Jefferson looked at Davidson. “That’s why we get paid for playing detective.”

“I’m very impressed,” said Davidson, but he smiled, “I hope you get somewhere. But where do you go from here?”

“I think we’d do better to go straight out to the school.”

“This time of night?”

“There’ll be a caretaker, or someone in the neighbourhood

who can tell us where we can find the principal.” He looked up at the clock on the wall above Davidson’s head. “I’ve never been on a case where I’ve had to watch the clock like this. Ten hours - it’s not long.”

“One thing before we go,” Malone said to Davidson. “That white streak in Latrobe’s hair - Did you run any photos of him in the newspapers ? Nobody came forward to identify him from that?”

“That streak has only come out since he’s been in here. That’s been two months now. It must have been dyed when they first brought him in. In daylight you can still see the streaks of dyed hair in it. The photo in the newspapers didn’t show it. No, nobody’s come forward. For him or any of them.”

Malone nodded, then gestured towards the phone. “May I call the Mayor, just to let him know where I am. And just in case he’s had another message.”

Davidson waved at the phone and Malone waited for the switchboard operator to connect him. Then: “Inspector Malone? This is Lieutenant Denning. The Mayor has been trying to reach you for the last hour. He wants you to call him at City Hall.”

Malone pressed down the receiver buttons, then asked to be connected to City Hall. While he was waiting he looked at Jefferson. “I’m not daring to hope, but do you think - ?”

Jefferson shrugged, but his face remained blank. “We could have been lucky. Let’s hope so.”

Then Michael Forte came on the phone. “Inspector Malone ? Scobie - where have you been ? Where are you now?” It was impossible to tell from his voice what news he had. “Get across here to City Hall as soon as you can. Something’s come up.”

Chapter Seven

“Why do so many American men always wear black socks?” said Lisa. “They look like a lot of defrocked priests.”

“What?” Sylvia looked up from examining the ladders in her stockings.

“Nothing. Just making conversation. But I might just as well save my breath.”

“I just don’t feel like talking. Chattering isn’t going to help us in this situation.”

“I’m not suggesting we chatter. I want to talk - about trying to escape from here.”

“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it. We’d never get out of this room - and that boy outside would beat us up unmercifully just for trying.”

“That’s a risk we’d have to take. God, haven’t you risked anything in your life ? Have you always waited for everything to be cut and dried and safeV

Sylvia took her time about answering. She did not think she was any less brave than Lisa; but all her adult life had been given to weighing percentages. She did not think she would lack courage if instant action were required, certainly not lack it enough to immobilize her. Years ago, out on the Sound, she and her father had been caught in a sudden storm, their small craft driven before the wind like a crippled bird. She had never been so frightened, not until these past hours; but she had not panicked, had reacted instinctively to her father’s shouted instructions and had helped bring the boat and themselves back to safety. She had hated and been frightened of storms ever since, and this was part of the reason she did not want to risk the attempt to escape from this cottage: the storm outside might be less dangerous than the boy in the next room, but it still held its fear for her. It,

and the certainty in her own mind that Abel would hear them escaping, were percentages she could not ignore.

“He’ll hear us - “

“With the noise of the storm? And he’s got the television on, too. Look how loudly we’ve had to knock each time we’ve wanted to go to the bathroom.”

“You’ll never get those boards off- “

Lisa had been standing by the window examining the boards. They were planks, six inches wide by an inch thick, cut to fit exactly the width of the windows to the outer edges of the frame; Abel, who had cut the boards, had allowed no room for leverage between the wall and the raised edge of the frame. Each plank was held by three big nails at either end, each nail driven right into the timber. “If we could slide something in under the end of one of the boards - “

“What, for instance?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you be constructive?” It was only in the past half-hour that they had begun to snap at each other. Though they were not stumbling over each other, their prison room was proving too small for them; they did not have to adapt, as long-term prisoners in a penitentiary would have to, and their nerves were rebelling against the proximity of each other. They did not know each other well enough to make allowances. They had nothing in common but their predicament and it was not proving enough, despite its seriousness. “What if your husband can’t do anything for us?”

“Then will be the time to think about escaping - “

“It’ll be too bloody late then!” There was an echo in her ear of Scobie: she couldn’t remember using bloody before, it was not one of her words. Oh God, let me see him again! Get us out of here - please! She turned back to the window, began to run her fingers up and down the edges of the boards, searching for some leverage.

Sylvia stood up, lifted her head and listened: it was an instinctive habit she had, as if she could hear nothing unless she strained for it. She heard the storm outside, the rain

hammering against the shutters and the wind blasting its way through trees; she moved to the door and listened to the voices on the television set out in the living-room. Then she took the belt of her suit from where it hung on the end of the bed. “Try that. That buckle is brass - it may not bend.”

It was a big square buckle with the initial S worked into the centre of it. “I might ruin it,” said Lisa. “That’s an expensive suit - “

“Goddammit, do you want to get out of here or not? What’s more important - getting away from here or worrying about my suit? Or were you just talking -just chattering?”

“No, I wasn’t just talking! I’ll damned well show you!”

Lisa turned her back on Sylvia, began looking for a gap where she could insert a corner of the buckle under one of the boards. She was trembling with temper and her fingers fumbled; then she found a slit under the bottom board. She had to get down on her knees to get at it. The end of the buckle slid under the edge of the board, but not far enough to give her any leverage. She took off her shoe.

“What the devil are you going to do?”

“I’m going to have to hammer it under the board. Are you having second thoughts about me ruining the buckle?”

“No, I’m not. I just think he’ll be sure to hear you - “

They were snarling at each other like two women who had been chained to each other for months. Perhaps all prisoners went through this mood, Lisa thought. The anatomy of captivity was something she had never studied; how many prisoners employed a PR consultant? The sudden wayward thought amused her, relaxed her. She sat back on her heels and looked up at Sylvia.

“Why are we picking at each other? We already have someone else to fight - why fight each other?”

Sylvia hesitated, then nodded. “I’m sorry. What can I do to help?”

“Keep an ear to the door while I try and hammer this buckle in.”

It took four heavy whacks with Lisa’s shoe to push the buckle in under the edge of the board. Being tall, she never wore really high heels; she was doubly fortunate that current fashion dictated solid chunky heels designed to help fashionable women escape from boarded-up rooms. After each hard tap she stopped and looked at Sylvia; the latter, ear pressed to the door, would listen and then nod to go on. Abel, a man not given to much reading, was filling in the hours waiting for Carole by looking at an old movie on television. Pat O’Brien, machine-gun voice punctuated with machine-gun fire, drowned out the sound of the shoe heel whacking against the buckle.

Lisa did not have enough strength in her wrists and forearms to use the buckle as a lever. Sylvia came and stood over her and together they pushed as hard as they could against the makeshift lever. The nails holding the board gave just a little; then the buckle began to bend. Lisa, massaging her hands and wrists, pulled out the buckle and reversed it.

“We’ll have to drag the board out at least half an inch so we can get our fingers under it.”

Sylvia was also massaging her hands. “I don’t think the buckle is going to hold. Bonwit Teller should put steel ones on their suits.”

“That other store - Bergdorf Goodman?-is better for escape kits.”

They were joking out of the hysteria of exhaustion as much as anything else; but also out of the fear that had begun to increase now they had committed themselves. Beyond the bedroom door gangsters or police, someone, went down under a storm of bullets. And on the other side of the boarded-up window the real storm, the other enemy, beat against the shutters, mocking them.

They tried again, pushing hard against the buckle. Suddenly Sylvia’s hands, oily with sweat, slid off Lisa’s; as they did so, her long nails, breaking off, gouged into the back of Lisa’s right hand. Lisa let out a stifled gasp of pain,

let go the buckle and it clattered to the floor. Instantly both women turned towards the door, Lisa holding the back of her hand to her mouth.

But Warner Brothers had come to their rescue: thank God they had made noisy movies in the Thirties. Pat O’Brien yelled at Glenda Farrell and she yelled back: in those days one never heard a pin drop nor a brass buckle, perhaps not even a house brick. Lisa, still sucking her hand, picked up the buckle.

“That’s no good. We’ll have to find something else.”

Sylvia looked at her broken nails, then at Lisa’s blood-streaked hand. “You better put something on that, in case it becomes infected - “

“What, for instance?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Spit, even - “

They were snapping at each other again; frustration was smarting as much as the bloody marks on Lisa’s hand. Lisa got up, began to move angrily about the room, searching -for what? She abruptly pulled up, tried to steady herself. She wanted to weep, but that would only weaken her further; she was not afraid of nor ashamed of tears, but this was not the moment for them. Pain and disappointment had temporarily made her lose her normal coherence of thought; the walls closed in on her, closing her mind. She looked about her, trying to see everything in the room individually and in its turn; she remembered Scobie telling her that it was the way a good detective worked, always dismembering everything. Then, moving towards the furniture, she began to inspect every piece in detail.

She found what she was looking for with the dressing-table: its legs unscrewed, the screw a thick threaded iron bolt. As she took off the leg, Sylvia pushed one of the chairs forward to prop up the dressing-table. The two women looked at each other and nodded, their differences forgotten again. Lisa shoved the bolt end of the leg in beneath the board; there was just enough space to get some purchase. But when they pulled on the leg the board did not budge.

“We need a fulcrum,” said Sylvia. “We’ll get more leverage pushing instead of pulling.”

Lisa glanced at her with amused admiration. “Where did you learn that?”

“It’s a political maxim,” said Sylvia, and smiled at her own reply; she was beginning to feel light-hearted, almost convinced now that they were going to escape “I’ll unscrew one of the other legs - we can use that.”

She pushed the chair in squarely against the dressing-table, took off the other front leg. It was what they needed: held underneath the leg that Lisa pushed against, it gave them enough leverage to raise the end of the board. Lisa felt the board slowly coming away from the window frame; her wrists felt as if they were cracking, but she kept pushing with all her strength. Both of them, concentrating on what they were doing, did not notice the sudden silence in the other room: Pat O’Brien and the machine-guns had been replaced by a soft-sell commercial. The board suddenly gave, lifting off the window frame with a screech of nails. And in the split moment afterwards they did hear the silence out in the living-room, then the sharp scrape of a chair on the floor.

Lisa snatched the curtains together, fell on her bed, held the dressing-table leg against her breast as she hastily pulled the blankets up over her. Sylvia had fallen on her bed, done the same: pale with fear, eyes closed, they looked like women who had finally collapsed from exhaustion. They heard the key being turned in the lock, then the door opened.

Abel stood there looking down at the two women. For the first time he saw them without their glaring back at him. They were good-looking dames, even if one of them was almost old enough to be his mother. He had seen dames like them on Michigan Avenue back home, the well-dressed bitches whose husbands ran Chicago, who never saw the poor neighbourhoods, who preferred to believe ghettos only happened in other countries but never in America. He had

hated those dames he had never known and now he transferred that hatred to the two women lying here asleep.

He stared at them, suddenly excited by his power over them; then his feeling of power made him magnanimous. He’d let them get a good night’s sleep: tomorrow might be their last day. He switched out the light, closed the door and •locked it.

Lisa opened her eyes, saw absolutely nothing in the blackness. She sat up, turned towards Sylvia; but there was only blackness there too. Then her eyes became accustomed to the darkness and she saw the thin sliver of light under the door; but it illuminated nothing, only seemed to deepen the darkness of the rest of the room. Lisa slid off her bed, groped towards Sylvia’s bed, banged her knee against it and once again had to stifle a cry of pain. She fell on Sylvia, felt her way up the latter’s body, whispered in her ear, “We can’t put the light on again. We’ll have to work in the dark.”

“Oh God, is it worth it?”

Lisa shook her, feeling the hopeless listlessness in the body under her hands. “We’ve got to! If we stay here and he finds that loose board in the morning - “

She felt Sylvia’s body stiffen. “We should never have started - “

“But we did\ Come on - help me-”

She felt her way round Sylvia’s bed and to the window. She dragged back the curtains and groped for the loosened board; one pull on it told her it would come away with no difficulty. She eased it back, careful in the darkness of the long protruding nails. Then she felt Sylvia touch her.

“It may take us hours in the dark - “

“We’ll take it in turns.” She was feeling beneath the second board from the bottom; now the bottom board had been removed there was space to slide the dressing-table leg in between the board and the inner edge of the frame. “Where’s my shoe? I’m lopsided.”

She found her shoe, put it on and then began to work. It took them an hour to remove enough boards for them to be

able to reach up and snap back the window catch. By that time they had barked knuckles, aching wrists and nerves ready to burst through their skin; when they spoke to each other it was only to snarl abusively. But they were committed now to the same end: escape. There was no turning back.

The sound of the storm penetrated the bedroom more clearly as they removed the boards. But out in the living-room another old movie had begun: Akim Tamiroff was dying this time to Paramount’s machine-guns. Lisa gently eased the window up, drew back her head as the wind whistled in through the slats of the shutters.

“Get your jacket and your handbag. You go out first and hold the shutters so they won’t bang, while I get out.”

“Which way shall we go?”

“To the left, I think. I remember when Abel came back in the truck this afternoon, I heard him drive up from that direction. The road or the street must be that way. Once we’re there we’ll look for the nearest lights.”

Though she had been listening to the sound of the storm for hours, Lisa was shocked at the fury of it when she pushed open the shutters. One of them slammed back at her, almost breaking her wrist; she had to push hard against it to prevent its banging against the window frame. Though she was now looking out of the room she could still see nothing; the whirling roaring darkness suddenly had its own terror for her. But she fought against the erupting fear in her, pushed Sylvia out of the window.