The Puzzled Heart (8 page)

Harriet immediately began showing the layout in the manner of a real estate agent, flinging open doors and identifying the rooms. When they came to the room where Reed had been heard singing “Loch Lomond,” Harriet tried the door and reacted with shocked disbelief to find it locked. “Open this door at once,” she imperiously said.

“One of our roommates is sick in there,” the renter of the apartment said. “We really can’t disturb her. That room is no different than the others.”

“
From
the others, please,” Harriet insisted. “Let us try to preserve what is left to us of a once proud language. No different it may be, but we want to see it. We will tiptoe in no farther than the entrance to look around.” Banny, meanwhile, had jumped up on the door, perhaps feeling it her doggy duty to embody Kate’s fervor.

“What a cute puppy,” the young woman said, a last diversionary tactic.

“Open the damn door—
now
,” Toni ordered. For a moment Kate expected her to flourish a revolver, but she withheld that gesture, if only for a moment.
“Open the door or I’ll force it open,” she said. She retreated down the hall, clearly readying herself for a run and a lunge to smash the door in. “Stand back, Reed,” she shouted.
“Here I come
.”

“All right, all right,” the young woman said. “Here’s the key.” And she removed it from her pocket. “I told you this wouldn’t work,” she said to the three other young women. Glumly, she gave Toni the key. Toni handed it to Kate, who found her hand shaking as she put the key in the lock. Toni retrieved the key, opened the door, and stepped back. Kate moved in and Reed moved out, into each other’s arms. Banny leapt up on Reed.

“And who the hell is this?” Reed asked, bending down to seize the puppy. “And where’s the brandy? Don’t Saint Bernards always have a small cask of brandy around their necks when they rescue people?”

Reed, Kate, and Banny were about to set off for home when Toni appeared with the two operators. Someday I must ask them their names, Kate thought, and stop considering them only by their function.

Toni asked the men to make sure no one left the apartment, and then asked Reed and Kate to sit down a moment and listen to her. “Please,” she all but commanded, as they looked reluctant. “Harriet has those young women corralled in a room. She’s keeping them away from telephones, and doing her best, which we know will be stunning, to fill them with apprehension. Naturally, she’s muttering on about the
illegality of this apartment, but I told her, never mind that, just keep them worried.

“I have a proposition,” Toni said then, “a plan which I think will be a good, if chancy idea. But it’s you two who will have to implement it, so let me outline it and then you can tell me what you think. Here’s my plan. So far, no one knows that Reed has been found and liberated, except those four tootsies locked in the room with Harriet. I have no doubt they are getting very nervous and regretting their part in this kidnapping.”

“From what I saw of them,” Reed interrupted, “I think you are right, except perhaps for the blonde with the short skirt. She seemed almost to be enjoying herself.”

“We’ll have to watch out for her with special care,” Toni responded, while Kate looked at Reed with speculation and concern. “What I should do at this moment is call the police and turn them in on a kidnapping charge. The police will, I think, certainly with your lawyerly help”—she nodded at Reed—“persuade the girls to turn state’s evidence, that is, to gain immunity in exchange for ratting on the others—that is, the boys. That would be a very useful thing to do, and I certainly would like to nab those boys and scare the shit out of them. However, there’s another way.” She paused, making certain she had the attention of her listeners.

“This would be a lot harder on you two,” she said, “and whether or not we do it depends on how eager
you are to catch, not the boys and girls, but the grownups and the organization, if any, behind all this. I don’t think the boys originated this plan, but I could be mistaken. Reed, Kate had a theory involving disaffected students of hers, and she was certainly right up to a point. But I think those students were simply instruments of a larger and more dangerous purpose.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Reed said.

“Good.” Toni looked at Kate. “What I suggest is this: we don’t rescue Reed publicly. We don’t call the police. We hold the girls for a time, let Kate write the article the kidnappers demanded—let me get this whole plan out,” she insisted, as Kate started to object, “and keep the girls happy while, at least for a few days, we try to root out the adult manipulators.”

“I won’t write an article saying I’ve repudiated feminism and joined the Christian right, and that’s final,” Kate said with some asperity.

“I agree with her,” Reed said. “Even if we later set forth all the reasons for her having done it, the harm would be done.”

“All right, all right,” Toni said. “I won’t argue the point. But let’s say that Kate writes something—what is yet to be decided. Will you go along with the rest of the plan?”

Reed and Kate looked at each other. “I’m sorry you haven’t more time to consider,” Toni said, “but if I’m going to call the police I have to decide that soon. Delays are hard to explain.”

Reed took Kate’s hand. “Let’s say we won’t call them, if Kate agrees. What next, or haven’t you got that far? And do Kate and I just camp out here?”

“I thought you might have a friend you can impose on,” Toni said. “Preferably one without any doormen or lobby attendants.”

“There’s Leslie,” Kate said. “She lives in a loft. It’s just a matter of pressing buttons and then having them send the elevator down. Of course, there’s always the chance of someone else in the building coming in or out.”

“We’ll have to risk that. Can you call her?”

Kate looked at Reed, who nodded. “All right,” Kate said, walking over to the phone. The telephone conversation was short. Leslie, being an old and true friend, had simply said, if you’re in trouble, come and stay. I’ll give you the bedroom.

“Which,” Kate explained to Reed on the way down there in Toni’s car, “means that they are giving us the only enclosed room in the loft. They’ll sleep on a futon in the living room. Very good of them. There’s privacy as to sight, though not a lot as to sound, if you see what I mean.”

“We’ll whisper,” he said, consoling her.

But when they arrived, Leslie and Jane, having welcomed them, exclaimed suitably over Banny asleep in Reed’s arms, and asked if there was anything they needed, announced they were going out for the evening. “Previous engagement,” Jane said, before their protests reached expression. “A friend is doing a gig
and we’ll stay for the party afterward. Help yourself to anything you want. We’ll satisfy our curiosity in the morning.” Leslie hugged Kate again, and they left.

Reed pointed to a bottle of Scotch prominently offered on the kitchen counter.

“Would you rather have a brandy?” Kate asked.

“Well, surely it’s never too early to begin to train her to bring brandy, though she does look rather young,” Reed remarked. He put Banny down on the couch beside Kate, and went for the Scotch. “How old is she? Where did you get her, and is she to be part of the family? As to your question, Scotch would be fine.” He poured some for himself and Kate. “Is there something for Banny?”

Poor Banny, Kate thought, destined to be our only topic of conversation. “She isn’t ours to keep,” Kate said as they returned to what Kate called the living room, although it was only a section of the loft with living room furniture. “She’s on loan, as the excuse for undetected messages. I’ll explain it all sometime. You talk, Reed. Tell me what happened. Are you really all right?”

“I think we should keep her as our mascot. She’ll give us an excuse to meet in the park and exchange kisses. All right, yes, I’m all right. I got nabbed, was kept for a day or two in the smelly room of one of the guys who nabbed me, and then I was moved to the place where you found me. It was only a matter of a few days, though it seemed like forever.”

“It seemed that way to me too. Were they mean to you?”

They sipped their Scotch. To Kate’s discomfort, conversation between her and Reed, which had not seemed possible in Toni’s presence, was still a bit stilted, awkward, not at all what she had supposed it would be when finally—or
if
, as for a time she had thought—they met.

“Not mean.” Reed contemplated his glass, emptied it, and then took Kate’s hand. “Just seductive,” he said, “continually, and more and more persuasively. That was after we got to the girls’ apartment, of course.”

“What did they want to seduce you to do?”

“Screw them. As acrobatically as possible, I assumed.” Reed took a large swallow of Scotch and got up to fetch more. He took Kate’s glass too.

“Did you resist,” Kate asked, “and if so, why, and if not, why not?” She realized that her tone did not achieve quite the quality of playful indifference for which she had aimed.

Reed answered flatly enough. “Good question. I’d like to say it was out of determined fidelity to you, despite the temptations and their temporary nature, but the truth my darling is that if a fuck would have got me out of there, I would have been more than willing, even without the flaunted lusciousness of the seducers. The last nymph, the blonde, half naked and alluring, did her best. I suggested that we repair to a hotel where we could enjoy ourselves in guaranteed
isolation. When she declined that, I knew I’d been right.”

“Right about what? Am I being particularly stupid?”

“No, just insufficiently male. I’d suspected from the beginning that what they wanted were photographs, video, and stills. Think what they could have done with them. ‘Feminist’s husband finds relief at last,’ or whatever nastiness they, with the eager help of the media, might have made public. Not to mention that such pictures would not do my career any particular good, whatever delight they might have given the majority of my colleagues. They went on about wanting mature men like me, blah, blah, but when the blonde refused the hotel, I knew they had to stay where the cameras were operating. I do hope Harriet looks for them.”

“Hadn’t we better let her know?”

“I daresay she and Toni will have thought of searching the place. They were clever to figure out where I’d be.”

“I figured it out,” Kate said, with a degree of insistence that surprised her. “Not that they didn’t do good work. Oh, damn.”

“Please don’t cry, Kate, that is a quite unsuitable response to my return. Finish your drink. Tell me about every moment you spent since I failed to show up at that restaurant. Because Toni is right. We’ve got to get our wits working. We’ve got to figure out, starting tomorrow, who was behind all this. Sure, it was
boyish and girlish pranks, but they didn’t invent it, and they didn’t work out the details. They told me that I would be kept until you wrote an article saying you were no longer a feminist but were embracing all the family values of the Christian right. I said no one would believe it, but they said you had only a short time in which to comply. I hope like hell you didn’t.”

“I didn’t, but I would have if we hadn’t found you. And I can’t stop crying. Did you really want to screw those girls?”

“Passionately. Have you ever heard the phrase
to fuck somebody
, as in ‘He really fucked me over, man?’ I would have enjoyed fucking them over nine ways to Christmas. But I didn’t. Kate, what’s happened to your sense of humor?”

“I think I’ve lost it,” Kate said.

“No you haven’t,” Reed said. “Never, never. It must have been horrible for you. I was just locked up, fed regularly, and shown a parade of seductive young things. You were sick with worry. If you want to really laugh, try to think of our positions reversed.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Kate said.

“No,” Reed said, “it’s not. It was a mean and horrible thing to do to you, and I have every intention of finding the people behind this and making them pay. It’s not any different, except in degree, from fundamentalist violence everywhere. If people don’t see things their way, they deserve to suffer. I knew this country had become vulnerable to terrorists, and now I know it personally. So do you. Shall we get
really drunk? I wish we could switch to champagne, however inadvisable that would be, but we’re lucky to have what we do. You have good friends, Kate.”

And at last she smiled.

Six