Ransom (8 page)

“I don’t know. I’ve always been taught that America is a classless society, though I don’t believe that.”

“It isn’t,” said Sylvia with an almost arrogant lack of apology; she had never seen any virtue in egalitarianism. “That girl has had the advantage of some money - and she’s obviously educated. But the boy-” She shook her head. “I’ve been trying to put my finger on his accent. It’s not New York. Though perhaps it is - ” She looked at Lisa, said, with still no attempt at apology or false democracy, “I don’t meet too many like him, not even as the Mayor’s wife.”

“I don’t like him,” said Lisa, and shuddered. “I wonder what she sees in him?”

“Politics make strange bedfellows,” said Sylvia, and

thought of the dormitory of disparate characters and egos in City Hall. “An old but very true cliche.”

Carole sat in the living-room of the cottage fighting hard against the memories that pressed in on her like the revived symptoms of a long dormant disease. She had made a mistake in choosing this place as their hide-out, but nowhere else had seemed better. And perhaps subconsciously, she thought, there had been the desire for the sense of security afforded by the familiar. She had lived for too long in limbo.

She had taken off the dark glasses and the wig, and the removal of the disguise, simple though it was, only served to identify her more with this room. She rubbed her eyes, wondering if she should put the glasses back on. Here, away from the curious gaze of the two women in the bedroom, she did not need the camouflage. But they did help to cloud the past, to dim the memories that distracted her.

She looked at her watch, wondering how much longer Abel would be. Perhaps she had made a mistake in letting him go to make the second call to Mayor Forte; but she knew his temperament, or thought she did, and knew he thought of himself as her equal partner in this job. Job: it sounded a mundane word for an act of revenge. But she had been determined all along that she would not allow her approach to the … the job … to become overheated. Coolness had always been her forte (she giggled like a schoolgirl; how would Michael Forte like that?) and she knew the value of it. One didn’t wait four years to avenge your husband’s death and then blow it all by letting anger and rhetoric, the faults that Roy himself had never been able to contain, spoil the execution of it.

Abel should be arriving back within the next ten minutes. They had timed the trip three times; she had been surprised

how much pleasure she had got out of planning the details of the operation. (Operation: that was a better word. She would use it in future, even if it might make her sound like a female general.) She could recite every detail even in reverse order; she had overlooked nothing. She just hoped that Mayor Forte would overlook nothing in the part of the operation that she had assigned to him. She was not going to enjoy killing the two women in the next room, even though their deaths might be forced on her. A memory shook her, Roy lying lifeless in her arms, and she got up quickly, desperate for something that would distract her.

Then she heard the car drive up beside the cottage, heard Abel get out, open the garage doors and drive the car in. Then he was letting himself in the back door and she went out into the kitchen to greet him, clutching at him with an eagerness that surprised and delighted him.

“It’s all right, baby.” He held her to him, kissed her brow. He took off his dark glasses, was once again amazed at how beautiful she was and that she had chosen him from among a dozen guys who would have let her trample over them. “No trouble at all. It’s gonna rain, though.”

“Just the edge of the storm.” She could hear the wind blowing through the stunted trees that surrounded the house, the trees that her father had kept because he valued privacy and which she was now thankful for. “We’ll be all right.”

She kissed him, ashamed of herself. He would never know what a poor substitute he was for Roy, that when this was over she was going to disappear from his life; but he had been the only man she had met in four years whom she felt she could trust. But she wondered if in their love-making he sometimes became aware of her remoteness, if he realized that the fierceness of her passion at times was no more than a disguise like the dark glasses and the wig.

“Did you talk to Forte himself?”

Abel nodded, still enjoying having her in his arms; he would hold her forever like this if she would let him, not even wanting to screw her, just hold her. “And the other

guy - Malone. Forte was hedging, playing for time, but I let him know we’re not gonna be fu - ” She shook her head and he grinned. “Messed up.”

“You kept it cool?”

He leaned away from her, hurt. “Baby, trust me. I’m not gonna spoil it for us, you know that.”

“I’m sorry.” She kissed him again, gently disengaged herself from his arms. “You dumped the truck okay?”

“In Flushing. It could stand there in the street for a week before anyone looks at it. Nobody’s gonna trace it to us. You’re not starting to worry, are you?”

Carole smiled, shook her head. They had been extremely careful about the vehicles they had used in the operation. A week ago, on successive nights, Abel had stolen the two trucks and brought them to the house with the two-car garage she had rented in Jamaica. Her own car, with its Missouri plates, had been left in a garage in Flushing; Abel had picked it up from there this afternoon when he had dumped the black truck. The grey truck, minus plates, was still in the garage at the house in Jamaica, but she had rented the house under a false name and she would never be going back there. In less than twenty-four hours everything would be over, one way or another, and they would be on their way, leaving not a clue behind. Leaving the last remnant of her life behind too.

“How’re they?” Abel nodded towards the bedroom door.

“I think we better feed them now.”

“Why bother?” But he saw the sudden stiffening in her face and he grinned quickly. He had taken off his blond wig and under his own dark hair his thin face looked older, the blue eyes warily sensitive to changes in feeling towards himself. The grin revived the boyish look and he was relieved when she smiled back at him. He kissed her cheek. “I was just joking. What’ll we give ‘em?”

Carole busied herself with cans, making a noise with them as if trying to exorcise the ghosts that had been troubling her over the past hour.

“Lobster soup - why the hell did I buy that?”

Abel showed a glimpse of the shrewdness that had attracted her in the first place, that had made her think of him as a possible accomplice; but sometimes he could be embarrassingly shrewd: “Looks like you’re trying to prove to Mrs Forte that you’re as good as she is. You don’t have to, baby. You’re better.”

She looked at him curiously, catching a reflection of herself in his words that was another reminder of her parents: their influence was still with her. “You really think so? Why should I want to do that?”

He hesitated before replying. “Baby, I don’t know anything about you - ” Again there was the stiffening in her face, and he held up a placatory hand. “Okay, I know -you’ll tell me all that in your own time. But I’m not blind -you don’t come from the same sorta neighbourhood I do. You’ve had - privileges. You belong to the sorta people I been hating all my life.”

“Do you hate me for that?”

He touched her jawline tenderly with one finger. “I’ll never hate you - for any reason. But that don’t say you’ve forgotten where you came from - all this” He waved a hand at their surroundings. “When you were a girl here, it meant something to you, didn’t it, that your mom put on a party as good as your friends threw? Am I right?”

It was her turn to hesitate, then she nodded. “Some day I’ll tell you all about it.”

They put on their dark glasses and wigs again, smiling at each other as they did so: they were still new enough to the game to be amused by parts of it. They took in soup, sandwiches and coffee to the two women in the bedroom. Sylvia, ear pressed to the door, had heard the conversation that had gone on out in the kitchen; the cottage was not large and the walls were thin. As soon as the door was opened, Sylvia said to Abel, “Did you talk to my husband?”

Abel nodded. “He didn’t say much, but it seems like he

isn’t hurrying himself. Maybe you’re not the number one priority.”

“I don’t believe that!” Sylvia turned her back, her face going white and taut. Then after a moment she said, “Put the tray over there.”

There was a rattle of cups and saucers as the tray shook in Abel’s hands, but Carole put a restraining hand on his arm. She shook her head at him, then said, “Don’t start giving orders, Mrs Forte. I’ve warned you once. You keep on this way and you’ll get no food at all. It doesn’t matter to us whether you’re fed or not.”

Sylvia still had her back turned. “That’s up to you. I am not going to kow-tow to you.”

“Kow-tow? Is that what you get when you go down to Chinatown soliciting votes for your husband, patting all the kids on the head, being Mrs Goody Two Shoes?”

Lisa, standing by her bed, watched the three Americans; this was not her war. She wanted to take the tray from Abel, usher him and the girl out of the room, placate Sylvia Forte; but she sensed that all three might turn on her. Outsiders were never welcome in a civil war.

“You’re very different from your public image, aren’t you?” Carole had taken over the baiting, aroused in her turn by Sylvia Forte’s arrogance. “All that devotion to good works, all that bit about wanting to show New Yorker^ their heritage - ‘

Sylvia turned back slowly, looked the two kidnappers up and down. Oh God, Lisa thought, don’t start fighting them, just let them go! “Do you belong to the Weathermen?”

“I belong to nobody but myself,” said Carole, suddenly stiff with her own cold dignity.

“And to me, baby,” said Abel.

Carole relaxed, smiled. “And to you.”

Lisa, watching Sylvia’s face, waited for some sarcastic remark; but Sylvia was not stupid, knew the right moment when to concede. She moved away, sat down in a chair and put a hand over her eyes, borrowing Michael’s strategy. It

was a strategic withdrawal, not a surrender. She would never kow-tow to these people, but she realized nothing was to be gained by antagonizing them. The boy might be provoked into blind anger and that might be dangerous. The girl would remain cold and nothing would alter the course she had planned for herself. The horrifying discovery was that she had glimpsed something of herself in the girl. They both knew what they wanted.

Then Lisa said quietly, “May we have the tray? We’re both very hungry.”

Carole looked at her for the first time. “You sound as if you are going to be sensible, Mrs Malone.”

“How is my husband? Does he know that I’m here?”

“He’s okay,” said Abel. “He understands what’s happening. He’s not gonna be any trouble.”

“I didn’t think he would be.” Lisa smiled with rueful irony; but the image of Scobie was in her mind and she smiled also with love. “He’s like me. All we want is to go home.”

Sylvia lowered her hand from her face and looked up. “Why don’t you let Mrs Malone go? You don’t want her.”

“No, that’s right,” said Carole. “And I’m sorry we had to bring you here, Mrs Malone.” She looked at Lisa, at the innocent stranger who would have to die tomorrow if the ransom demands were not met, and felt sick and sad. Violence had its own impetus: that had killed Roy. And as soon as she thought of him all pity for anyone else, stranger or not, disappeared. Abruptly she went out of the room, saying as she went, “Your husband had just better work on the Mayor, that’s all.”

Abel stared at the two women, his face bony and hard behind the dark glasses, then he went out, locking the door again. The wind had risen and they could hear it rattling the shutters outside the boarded-up windows, like some beast trying to get in at them.

“They’re going to kill us,” said Sylvia.

Chapter Four

Malone got out of the police car, waited for Jefferson to ease his bulk out of it. “We could’ve walked over here,” said Jefferson, “but I gotta keep in touch on the radio, just in case. Stick around, Stan. Anyone wants to give you a ticket, tell him you know a cop.”

“I’ll do that, Captain,” said the driver with the tired smile of a man who had listened too long to tired jokes.

Malone had been looking about him, at the towering block of the Manhattan House of Detention, The Tombs as it was called, above him, at the shabby bail bond shops across the narrow street. The shops surprised him. He hadn’t known what to expect, perhaps upstairs offices with small brass signs by their doors: the shops, with large signs painted across their windows, somehow reminded him of pawn-shops. But of course that was what they were, shops where men pawned their liberty.

A figure went by, long-haired and covered from neck to ankles in a huge shaggy fur coat. Jefferson looked after it and Malone said, “What do you do? Root it or shoot it?”

“I dunno, I try not to be too square, but I guess I got old-fashioned eyes or something. I have to keep telling myself to accept ‘em, that they’re today and I’m just a bit of yesterday that’s left over.” As they crossed the sidewalk he said, “I hope I did the right thing in asking you if you wanted to come over here with me.”

“It’s better than sitting on my bum back at the hotel.”

“That’s what I thought.”

After the second phone call to Forte’s office and the subsequent discussion which had been only words going in circles, Malone had wanted to escape from the ornate room and the stifling atmosphere brought in by the men who

surrounded Michael Forte. He had realized that the Mayor himself had wanted to escape, if only back into his official routine. Malone could not understand why the kidnappers’ demands could not be met at once, but he knew he would get no answer to such a question if he asked it in the company the Mayor kept. He would have to wait till he was alone with Michael Forte again. But then he would not make it a question: it would be a demand.

He had come out of the Mayor’s room escorted by Manny Pearl. “I suggested to the Mayor that it might be better - for you, for all of us - if you moved out of your hotel and went up to Gracie Mansion.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Malone.

“It would save you from being pestered by the press. And - ” He glanced at Malone, wondering how sensitive the Australian was. “And maybe you and the Mayor can be of some comfort to each other.”

“He would be more comforting if he agreed to release those blokes you are holding.”

Then John Jefferson had come down the carpeted corridor to them. “I’ll take the Inspector off your hands, Mr Pearl. I’m on my way over to The Tombs. Maybe he’d like to come.”

“What’s happening?” Pearl asked.

“We gotta work quietly - that’s all we can do for the time being. There are two guys from the Department over at The Tombs now with an FBI man - they’re questioning Parker and the other men we’re holding. I thought you might like to listen in, Inspector.”

“Is that usually allowed?”

“No. But so long as you promise not to interfere, we’ll be glad to have you. It might help convince you we’re trying to do something to get your wife back.”

Now, as they crossed the sidewalk to the entrance of the detention house, Jefferson said, “You’re not gonna be impressed by this place. We got no excuses - except lack of money. We’re the richest country in the world, but we never

seem to have enough money to solve our worst problems. There are worse prisons in the world than this one, I guess, but that doesn’t excuse what you’re gonna see now.”

Malone had never been in a jail in which one stepped immediately in off a city street. Jefferson tapped on a door and it was opened by a uniformed guard. Malone at once recognized the sour smell that was prison stink and felt the tension; yet behind him a boy and girl were passing by, arms wrapped round each other, and across the narrow street two old women, eyes rejuvenated by malicious envy, went clucking by like ancient fowls. The guard clanged the door behind Malone and Jefferson and opened another door to allow them into the main lobby, a narrow hall crowded with guards who had the same air about them as Malone had seen on prisoners, a boredom laced with tension. The guards in this crowded building were as much prisoners as the men they guarded.

“You carry a gun?” Jefferson asked.

Malone, surprised, shook his head. “This far from home?”

“I’m never without mine. That’s what life’s like nowadays - I put it on before I put my pants on.” He checked his gun with the duty officer in the tiny cubicle in the corner of the lobby, signed a book, introduced Malone to the duty officer, then stepped up to the bars that separated the entrance lobby from a second, inner lobby. A guard opened a door in the bars and Jefferson and Malone stepped through.

“Hi, Jack. How’s it been?”

“Same old routine, Captain.” The guard, like most of the men in uniform in the cramped lobby, was black. Though he could not have been more than thirty he had the battered, slightly abstract expression that Malone had seen on the faces of old prize-fighters, men who had spent all their lives having hell knocked out of them in the preliminaries. This guard would never rise above his present job, would never get higher billing, and he knew it. “We had another two suicides last night. Maybe if enough of ‘em did that, we could solve the accommodation problem.”

“This place was designed in 1933 to hold 900 inmates,” Jefferson explained to Malone. “It was designed in the immediate post-Prohibition era, when the whole approach to crime was punitive and when practically all criminals were white. Today the average day to day population is between fourteen and fifteen hundred. It’s an overloaded pressure cooker.”

“How long do you keep men here?”

“It varies. Some guys come and go in a day, depending on their charges. Others - ” Jefferson shrugged. “If they got smart lawyers, ones who can keep getting remands, they can be here a year, maybe two. Only thing is, the lawyers prove too smart - their clients usually go crazy.”

The guard came back and led them into a side room. It was the sort of room familiar to Malone, designed to eliminate all cheer and encouragement, sterilized even of hope. Three men were there, two of them sitting on the metal chairs, the third resting his behind on the bare table. They all stood up as Jefferson and Malone entered; but Malone had the feeling they had not done it out of deference but only to relieve the tedium of whatever they had been doing for the past hour. They were introduced to him as Captain Lewton and Lieutenant Markowitz of the Police Department, and Special Agent Butlin of the FBI.

“We’re getting nowhere so far, John.” Lewton was a tall, thin man with an unhappy mouth and eyes yellowed with ague or bitterness. “The bastards won’t see us.”

“They don’t have to,” Jefferson told Malone. “Since they haven’t yet been convicted, they still have most of their rights. One of them being that they can refuse to be questioned on anything that doesn’t concern them. And they’re claiming the kidnapping has nothing to do with them.”

“But the ransom has!” Malone, suddenly affected by the atmosphere of the jail, had the feeling that doors were being slammed on him; from somewhere beyond the closed door of the interviewing room there came the loud clang of iron against iron, a sound as cold and dead on the ear as that of

doom itself, and abruptly he was as without hope as any of the prisoners in the building. Anger shook him as he thought of Lisa held prisoner somewhere, possibly already dead (the thought was there in the dark corners of his mind like a plague-carrying rat). The world was standing still and waiting with its hands in its pockets; and some anarchists somewhere in this building who did not believe in the rule of law were invoking it to wash their hands of the lives of two women they had never met. Suddenly he wanted to tear this bare, negative room to pieces. He felt like an innocent man just condemned to life imprisonment. He thumped the table with his fist. “Jesus, can’t you drag them down here? We’re trying to save the lives of two women - what rights do these bastards have against that fact?”

“I don’t know what the law is in Australia,” said Lewton quietly, “but in this country, since the Supreme Court decided in its wisdom that the guilty have as many rights as the innocent, we work with our hands tied.”

Malone, despite his emotional state, recognized the sour hyperbole and understood it. Only in police states did the police ever think the law worked for them: there had been times back home when he had thought he had been wearing the handcuffs and not the lawbreaker he had brought in. He simmered down, aware again of doors clanging outside: he had to find some way of surviving in this cage of frustration that enclosed him.

Then a door behind Lewton opened and a grey-haired white man in uniform came in. With him was a young black guard and a second black with an Afro hair-do and wearing a red-and-black dashiki over his blue jeans and his white T-shirt.