Ransom (25 page)

Malone looked across the street, cursed worriedly, then looked back at Lewton. “If those buggers take my wife on to the plane at the airport, you’re going to have to tie me down. Christ, do you think I’m just going to stand there and do nothing while they take my wife off into the wild blue yonder? If the Cubans still won’t play ball, what happens then?”

Lewton looked as worried and as pained as Malone. “Scobie, I wish to Christ I knew. But I’m asking you - what else can we do unless those kidnappers make a mistake and we can take advantage of it?”

“What about police marksmen?” asked Jefferson. “Could they pick them off when they come out?”

“There’ll be everything waiting for us at Kennedy-police and FBI marksmen, the Emergency Service squad, the lot. But you can’t pick a guy off if he has a gun stuck in the side of Mrs Malone or Mrs Forte.” He stared across at the cottage. “Our best bet, I thought, was gonna be the girl -I thought with her folks out here, we might have got through to her. But the young punk seems to be running things now - and no amount of talking is ever gonna get through to him.”

Then a uniformed patrolman came round the back corner of the house. “They’re calling from across the street, Captain.”

In the kitchen Cartwright was on the phone. Lewton went past him into the hallway and picked up the phone there. Malone stood irresolute for a moment, then went into the living-room and picked up the phone he saw on a side table. Abel, still nameless to the men listening to him, was doing the talking: “We’re gonna get started now, pig. No delays, you unnerstand? You have those guys from The Tombs out at the airport by the time we get there. And no tricks, you unnerstand? We’re gonna have a gun in the guts of the women all the way. You give us a nice friendly escort and the women are gonna be all right.”

“Can I speak to my wife?” said Malone.

“Who’s that?” Abel’s voice was sharp, nervously suspicious.

“Malone. I’d like to speak to my wife.” Malone could hear Lewton and Cartwright listening in on the other extensions; they said nothing but he could feel their presence in the other rooms; he was butting in on their jurisdiction, but he sensed their understanding. “Let me speak to her, just to assure me she’s all right, then we’ll agree to everything you ask.”

“You ain’t in any position not to agree, man.” There was a pause, then Malone heard him say faintly, as if his head were turned away from the phone, “Stay outa this, baby.

You leave everything to me from now on. Look, man - ” The voice came back to the phone. “You’re gonna see your wife in about two minutes - you’re gonna see she’s okay. That all the concession you gonna get. Now let’s get moving - “

“You bastard!” But the phone had gone dead in Malone’s ear. He stared at it, then slammed it down as Lewton and Cartwright came into the living-room. He said nothing for a moment, pressing down the fury that shook him, then he looked at the two men. “You’re right. The girl hasn’t got a say in it. He’s running the show. If she’s everything her parents say she is, how the hell did she ever pick up with a bastard like that?”

“We’ll ask her that when we take them,” said Cartwright, and tried to sound hopeful. “Well, we better get going. I don’t think he’s the sort who’s going to be too patient.”

Jefferson stood in the living-room archway and Lewton turned to him. “John, radio the Commissioner and the Mayor, tell ‘em to turn back and meet us at Kennedy. We’ll go in along Sunrise, then on to the Southern State, across on Laurelton, then on to the Belt Parkway. I’ve looked up the map and that should give us the clearest route - at this time of morning there shouldn’t be too much traffic around. We’ll drop Sheriff Narvo and his men off at the county line -ask the Nassau County fellers to pick us up there and take over the escort. Our own men can meet us at the Queens line and take us on to the airport. Tell ‘em to get a bull team out on bikes, clear the traffic ahead as much as they can. Give strict orders no smart-ass is to try anything on his own -we’ll play the game strictly according to their rules across the street until we get to the airport. Unless - “

“Unless what?”

Lewton shrugged. “I dunno. Just unless.”

Then Sheriff Narvo came into the hallway, flung open the front door. “He’s come out of the house to the car - he’s got one of the women with him!”

The men in the living-room went out of the house in a

rush, unconcerned now with remaining hidden. They stood outside the front door, at the top of the sloping, water-gullied lawn. Across the street Abel had come out of the front door of the cottage, pushing Lisa ahead of him and keeping himself screened by her from the police cars that had now come down the street. The cars were parked in the middle of the roadway, their two-man crews standing behind them, their guns out of their holsters but held out of sight of the armed man they were all watching. Four motor cycle cops were standing behind the line of cars, their motor cycles resting on their stands.

Lewton took a bullhorn from one of the patrolmen standing nearby and handed it to Malone. “It may encourage your wife to know you’re here.”

Malone gratefully took the bullhorn, aimed it across the street. “Lisa! This is Scobie!”

Lisa missed her step, pulled up and looked wildly around, then over towards Malone. Abel moved in closer behind her, putting his arm around her and shoving the gun hard into her back. But Lisa, eyes straining to see the familiar figure standing in front of the house across the street, felt neither Abel’s arm nor his gun.

“Scobie!”

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, her throat closing up; then she managed to shout, “Yes!”

“Mrs Forte - how’s she?”

“She’s all right!”

It was an inane conversation, Malone’s bullhorned bellow booming across the quiet street, and Lisa’s thin, exhausted voice shrieking her replies. It was like the conversations that go on between travellers on a ship and their friends waiting to greet them on the wharf. Malone, years ago when he had been attached to the Pillaging Squad on the Sydney wharves, had listened to exchanges just like this. No one had been in danger in those days and he had often laughed at the vacuous dialogues. But no one in the street this morning laughed;

every simple word between the husband and wife had a poignancy for those who were listening. All but Abel.

He shoved Lisa into the front seat of the car, got in beside her. For a moment he was facing away from the street, a good part of his range of view blocked by the cottage. Dave Butlin, down behind one of the police cars, suddenly made a move, his gun held ready. Gartwright grabbed the bullhorn from Malone.

“Stay where you are, Dave! Let them come out!” Gartwright lowered the bullhorn. “I’ll have that young smart-ass moved to Nome, Alaska, so help me!”

Butlin looked back at Cartwright, grimaced, then nodded and moved back behind the police car. Cartwright looked at Lewton, who was focusing a pair of binoculars on the cottage across the street.

“Looks like he can’t get it to start. If it’s been out there all night, it could have water in the plugs.”

Abel got out of the car, pushing Lisa ahead of him again. He looked across at the Royce house and shouted, “We want one of the squad cars!”

“He can have mine,” said Jefferson, took out his keys and made to move down the path.

“Stay where you are, pig!”

Abel pushed Lisa ahead of him around to the front of the house. The front door opened again and Julie, holding a gun, came out with Sylvia Forte. Elizabeth Birmingham, standing on the sodden lawn beside Malone, waved a weak arm; but Julie, if she saw the greeting, took no notice of it. The four people on the other side of the street, the hostages in front and the kidnappers behind, moved like a small deputation down the driveway and out into the road. As they did so Malone and the others moved down the path of the Royce house.

“Okay, that’s far enough.” Abel, one hand holding tightly to the collar of Lisa’s suit, brought his gun up menacingly. “We want your car, Captain - Lewton, you say your name was? No tricks - which is your car?”

Malone, now only forty feet away, stared at Lisa, unable to believe the nightmare of what was happening: the actual fact of seeing her held by the kidnappers was less credible than all the hours he had spent since she had been reported prisoner. The surrounding scene did not help to make anything more real; policeman though he was, this was not the sort of police scene he was used to. This looked much more militaristic: the helmeted men, the sub-machine-guns held by some of them: cops had become warriors. The line of cars suggested armoured vehicles; one of the cars at the end, a late arrival, still had its red light spinning, like the modern equivalent of a battle banner. But this was war, so why should he find it hard to believe ?

Lisa stared back at him; then he heard her say hoarsely, “Darling

And at that moment Willard Birmingham said, “Julie - “

Malone looked at the other three who had emerged from the house for the first time. Sylvia Forte was even more wan and exhausted-looking than Lisa; he noticed she carried one arm in the front of her jacket, as if she had broken or sprained her wrist. The young man with his long blond hair looked like a thousand other kids he had seen all over the world; it was somehow galling that this bastard, who had caused him so much pain and worry, should look so anonymous. But he would have picked the girl out in any company and he would remember her for ever. She looked as strained and exhausted as the other two women in front of her and she was as beautiful as either of them. There was no look of defiance about her: she looked what she was, an ordinary girl who had suddenly found herself in a situation she could no longer control.

Lewton nodded. “That’s my car over there. You’re sure you want to go through with this? You let Mrs Forte and Mrs Malone go now and I’ll do what I can for you with the D.A.”

Julie looked at Abel, but he shook his head fiercely. She was not wearing her wig and neither of them wore their dark

glasses; no expression on their faces was hidden from each other or from the watchers.

Abel looked back at Lewton. “Nothing doing, pig. You better be sure that plane is waiting for us at Kennedy. Malone, don’t you let ‘em forget one minute that we got your wife - ” He dug Lisa in the back with the gun and she flinched.

“Just don’t knock her around or by Christ - “

“Nobody’s gonna knock her around, man - but don’t you go handing me no threats. You just see those other bastards don’t try no tricks. You want your missus back, you see they all behave. Okay, let’s go.”

“Just a minute,” said Lewton. Some civilian cars had come to the end of the streets and a few people stood in a tight, curious group. It was still early and he wondered how they had got here. But sensation, he guessed, had its own smell. He hated to think what the flies would be like when they got to Kennedy. “To see we get a clear run right through to the airport, we’ll precede you with two cars and those four motor cycle men - I’ll be in one of the cars. The other cars will tail you. At the county lines they’ll be changed each time - no tricks,” he assured Abel as the latter stiffened with suspicion. “We just want to get you to that plane as quickly and with as little fuss as possible. Your husband will meet us at the airport, Mrs Forte.”

“Thank you,” said Sylvia Forte huskily.

“Okay,” said Abel, “we’ll do it your way. But remember -anything happens to us, these two dames go out with us.”

A minute later the convoy was ready to move off. Lewton, about to step into another squad car with Malone and Cartwright, stopped and looked back towards the end of the line. The civilian cars had tagged on, led by a station wagon on the roof of which a man was setting up a camera.

“Who are they, for Christ’s sake?”

Sheriff Narvo, standing by his own car, looked back. “It’s the reporters and TV guys, Captain. They followed you out here from Manhattan.”

“Jesus,” said Lewton, “they make a circus of everything!”

The Police Department helicopter was over Riverhead when the message came for it to turn back to Kennedy Airport.

“Keep going!” shouted Commissioner Hungerford above the clatter of the helicopter’s blades, and the pilot nodded. “We’ll turn back when we see the convoy.”

Michael Forte and Manny Pearl, sitting in the rear seats, looked down on the roiled and muddy waters of Great Peconic Bay; then as they flew on they saw over to their right the flooded potato fields around Bridgehampton. One or two houses had been unroofed and trees lay on their sides, their torn-up roots looking like black claws frozen in a death agony. In the marinas and anchorages around the shore smashed boats were locked together like so much floating junk; out in the middle of the bay a lone yacht, its mast snapped off, drifted like a dead gull. There was no sign of any bird life, but on the roads a few cars were moving, and in the marinas small dark figures clambered over the wreckage like scavenging rats over a rubbish dump. Out to the east the sun, pink and weak, was struggling like a derelict out of a torn blanket of cloud.

“There they are!” Hungerford pointed down.

“It looks like a Presidential motorcade,” said Forte. “Do they need all those cars?”

Hungerford was looking at the scene below through binoculars. “I can count only eight police cars. Who the hell are the rest?”

Manny Pearl also had binoculars to his eyes. “The other six are TV and press, I’d say. There’s a guy with a TV camera mounted on top of that station wagon.”

“They’re really moving,” said Hungerford. “I hope the son-of-a-bitch falls off. The freedom of the goddam press is the greatest abuse of democracy I know of.”

Forte, tired, worried and afraid, still managed a grin. “You sound like the KGB, Des.”

“At least those guys can turn a deaf ear to criticism.” Then Hungerford glanced at the pilot and shouted, “You heard none of that, you understand!”

The pilot grinned, pointed to the earphones he wore and shook his head. He swung the helicopter about, took it down closer to the convoy of cars as it picked up Sunrise Highway. The long snake of fourteen vehicles slid around two slower-moving cars on the highway, raced on past the flooded and battered countryside. On the roofs of the police cars the spinning red signal lights were as bright as drops of blood in the slanting light coming up from the east.

Forte took the binoculars from Manny Pearl and looked down, trying to pick out which car Sylvia might be travelling in. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder and the latter took the helicopter down lower. Forte saw the third police car in the line waver a little, then caught a quick glance of someone as they looked out of the car and up at him.

Then he saw another face appear at a rear side window, but the angle was too acute, the face too distorted by the window glass, for him to be able to identify it. The pilot swung the helicopter up as it moved on too fast for the cars below, went round in a wide circle and came back. Michael Forte focused the glasses again, kept them aimed on the third car in the convoy, but no faces appeared this time at the car’s window. She doesn’t know I’m up here, he thought. And felt an insane, suicidal urge to plunge out of the helicopter and down on to the swiftly speeding car below.

In the rear seat of the car Sylvia and Lisa, hands free now, sat side by side, each slumped in her own confused despair. Sylvia held her swollen wrist, but she was hardly aware of the pain of it; she had reached a stage where another bruise or cut or even a broken bone would have been absorbed in the general numbness that contained her. She had looked out at the helicopter when it had clattered overhead, but it had been a reflex action, a response to Abel’s reaction to it.

Sitting up front beside Julie, who was driving, he had turned back to them, his gun held on the back of the seat. “They got you watched from all angles, but it ain’t gonna help you. That right, baby?”

Julie, driving the car with almost automatic reflexes, like a woman at the end of a hard day’s motoring, nodded glumly. The last three-quarters of an hour had seen everything crumble into dust, a bitter dust that she could taste as if fate had force-fed it to her. But the last forty-five minutes, she guessed, had been only the climax; disaster had begun creeping up on her last night. If she had been capable of further tears she would have wept; but they would have been tears of self-pity and she was not capable of that either. Till the storm had struck last night everything had seemed so perfect. Even the kidnapping had seemed perfect: there had not even been the danger associated with other kidnappings, the collection of the ransom: the ransom would just have been taken to a plane and flown out of the country. That would still happen, she guessed, but now everyone, including her father and mother, knew who the kidnappers were. Worst of all, she had become Abel’s prisoner, though he might not yet think of her that way.

From the moment he had snatched the phone from her in the cottage she had known she had lost control of the whole operation. It was now just a war between Abel and the police: but he hated her too, the traitor in the ranks.

Abel reached for the microphone of the car radio. “Captain, you hear me? Tell that chopper to get outa here!”

“He’s leaving now. It’s - ” Lewton’s voice faded as his car passed under a bridge ” - and the Mayor.”

At that Sylvia leaned quickly forward, but the helicopter was already swinging up and away, heading back towards Kennedy Airport. Abel switched off the radio and looked back at her.

“He must be pretty worried, eh? Mrs Malone’s old man didn’t look too good either.”

“Leave them alone,” said Julie.

He gave her the old look out of the corners of his eyes, the old look that said he trusted no one. “You on their side? I been waiting for you to tell me that.”

“I’m on nobody’s side,” she said dully.

“What about those guys in The Tombs? That brother of yours ? Jesus, baby, did you use me! I come all the way from Kansas City for thisV For the first time she realized he was afraid; he looked wildly backwards and forward of them. “Nobody, not even my old man, ever conned me like you’ve done!”

She continued to stare ahead of her, deaf to his abuse as he went on swearing at her. He was one with Carole Cox now, part of the past: she did not have to live with either of them any more. Once in Cuba she would find some way of escaping from him. But she felt sorry for the two women in the back of the car. God knew what was going to happen to them.