Payoff

by Douglas Corleone

  “Your husband will pay to have it back?”

  “Yes, Edgar will pay any price to have it returned.”

  The masked man tilted his head as though he was suddenly curious. “Eight and a half million dollars, even?”

  Emma didn’t know how to respond. Clearly it wasn’t a serious question. Edgar’s stuff had some monetary value, but mostly it was sentimental. Edgar hardly kept anything in the house. Especially in recent months, since their marriage began teetering on the precipice of divorce. Surely much of his wealth was hidden. Technically, the Trentons were worth north of ten million. But Emma doubted he maintained anywhere near that much in their bank accounts.

  “I don’t know,” she conceded. “He’ll pay, I don’t know how much, but a lot.”

  “A lot,” he repeated. Over his shoulder he said something in Spanish. Whatever he said caused the other man in the room to laugh.

  “How about you?” the man said. “How much would Mister Trenton pay for your life?”

  She scoffed, then immediately regretted it. “You’d have to ask him. Shall I get him on the phone?”

  His lips curled in an uneven grin. “That will not be necessary. I can reach him in Berlin if I need to.”

  A thought occurred to her and with it a glimmer of hope. It had to be coming up on dawn here in California, which meant that the banks would soon be opening in New York. And it was already midday in Western Europe.

  “Edgar can wire the money to you right away if you’d like.” She could hear the desperation in her own voice, but it was no matter. These men knew she was desperate.

  The man in front of her motioned to the other, and the other approached. This one was carrying a large black case, the mere sight of which induced in Emma an irrational terror.

  “What is that?” she cried.

  The man sitting on his haunches in front of her took the case and set it on the floor. He clicked open one of the latches, then another. “It is a carrying case for a bandola. You know what it is, a bandola?”

  Her mind reached. “It’s a mandolin.”

  “No, not exactly.” He lifted the lid of the case. “It is a string instrument, yes, so you receive some points, Missus Trenton.”

  She searched the man’s face. He appeared to be smiling. Then her eyes fell on the open case, and her stomach lurched. She became short of breath, couldn’t seem to draw in any air at all. The man in front of her paid no attention as she struggled for oxygen.

  All the while, she surveyed the contents of the case. There were stun guns, another knife, a handgun that looked to be a .22. There was a crowbar. But what frightened her most were the medical supplies. In a transparent plastic box topped with a wide red cross sat a syringe, a blue liquid chemical, a variety of pills, and latex gloves.

  “What are you going to do with me?” she cried.

  “We are going to play a little game I call ‘My Husband Loves Me, My Husband Loves Me Not.’”

  The man removed the transparent box from the case and opened it in front of her. Across the room, a laptop monitor lit the area around it with an unnatural glow.

  The man kneeling before her removed the jar containing the blue chemical, held it up to Emma’s wet eyes. “Do you like frogs?” he said.

  Emma didn’t reply, her eyes transfixed on whatever it was in that jar.

  “You are trying to decipher what I am holding,” he said.

  Again she said nothing.

  Over his shoulder the man said, “Tell me when you have him on the line.” To Emma, he said, “We are contacting your husband, just as you wish.”

  He then used the syringe to pierce the foil covering the jar and extracted a significant amount of the blue liquid. He removed the syringe, eyed the tip, flicked it with his fingernail as she’d seen Dr. House do hundreds of times on television.

  “It is very important to eliminate the air bubbles,” he said. “Very important. Even when you are administering poison.”

  Chapter 4

  “I have Edgar Trenton’s assistant,” the man with the laptop said. It was the first time Emma had heard him speak English.

  To Emma, the man kneeling in front of her said, “That would be Valerie, yes?”

  Emma bowed her head, yes.

  “Your husband is fucking her, no?”

  She swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  “And yet you remain married to him.”

  “For the time being.” Her voice had leveled out; she felt a numbing sensation swelling in her gut. The fear was somehow subsiding the more they spoke—in the same way that pain faded when you were about to pass out.

  I’m going into shock.

  “Ah, I see. Because of your daughter, yes? When your daughter is of age, then it is ‘Adiós, Mister Trenton. Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.’” He chuckled at his own words. “Probably I should have waited a couple years until you were in charge of half his finances. I get the feeling you would be far easier to persuade than your husband.”

  “You want my husband to wire you money from Berlin.”

  It was his turn to ignore her. Instead of offering a reply, he reached for Emma’s left forearm and twisted it hard. Pain shot upward from her bound wrist.

  “Keep your arm like this. Do not move it.”

  He removed one of the latex gloves from his kit and tied it tight around her arm, just above the elbow. Then he reached back into the bandola case and removed a packet of matches.

  Emma squinted to read the cover, to no avail.

  He removed one of the matches and struck it against the pack. The match lit, the reflection of the flame flickering in her captor’s eyes as he scanned her arm.

  In a few seconds the match was nearly burned down.

  “There she is,” he said quietly.

  “Who?”

  “Your vein.”

  The masked man blew out the match, and the smell of burnt sulfur blended with her blood and his cigarette breath. With one gloved hand he held her left forearm; with the other he held the syringe a few inches over the vein.

  “Do we have Edgar?” Although he was speaking to his fellow intruder, his eyes never left Emma’s arm.

  “Valerie is looking for him. He is apparently in a theater but she does not know which one.”

  The man with the syringe sighed. “Tell this Valerie that we do not have all night.”

  The one with the laptop turned. “If one of them becomes suspicious, they will contact the authorities.”

  “So then, we are on a clock.” Looking into Emma’s eyes, he whispered, “Ticktock, ticktock, ticktock.”

  “Please,” Emma said.

  The man shook his head. “I am afraid we are going to have to start without your husband.”

  “Start what?” she said, the fear creeping back into her voice.

  He held up the syringe. “This is the venom of an amphibian known as Dendrobates tinctorius ‘azureus.’ It is a species of poison dart frog known for its color, which is azure or bright blue.” He tilted the syringe so that she could see the liquid moving inside. “Their venom is toxic to humans. However, the frogs rarely cause casualties unless the venom comes into contact with an open wound or sore. See, it takes a large dose of the venom to cause death in humans, and the dart frogs, despite their name, have no way of injecting their target.” He paused, holding the syringe in front of her eyes. “This, in case you are wondering, is considered a large dose.”

  Without another word, he punctured Emma’s skin with the tip of the syringe, pressed down on the plunger, and watched the blue liquid travel up her vein.

  She cried out, but the man slapped a gloved hand over her mouth.

  “Quiet,” he said. “The venom has an immediate effect. You are no doubt feeling it already in your nerves and muscles.”

  Emma’s eyes went so wide, she could feel them bulge from their sockets. She fought against her restraints.

  “Within minutes,” he said, “you will be completely paralyzed. And then, one by one, each of yo
ur vital organs will begin to shut down.”

  Emma felt the venom going to work, something alien traveling through her veins, shutting down nerves, numbing her, freezing her muscles. She felt a terror so raw, she thought it would stop her heart.

  Her body slumped forward.

  Her thoughts broke into millions of tiny fragments.

  Her cells were losing their struggle for life.

  “There is little time for me to administer the antidote,” the man said. “I will do so only if your husband agrees to wire the eight and a half million dollars to my Cayman accounts immediately.”

  He looked back at the man with the computer. “Of course, first his lover Valerie will have to locate him, and she does not appear to be having much success.”

  The man with the computer said, “Valerie says Edgar is inaccessible. She cannot reach him, because of security, regardless of the emergency.”

  The man in front of Emma carefully replaced his items into the bandola case. The matches he slipped into his front pocket. Then he closed the lid of the case and locked it.

  He looked her in the eyes. “I am sorry, Emma. I am afraid we are out of time.”

  Across the room, the laptop snapped shut, extinguishing the glow of the monitor and throwing the room back into complete darkness.

  Emma tried to move her lips but she couldn’t speak. The man rolled her onto her back, her neck lolling so that she could see the stairs the intruders had used to enter her home, only now she saw everything entirely upside down.

  Footfalls again filled the house. The other two men were descending the stairs from the top floor to the floor with the master bedroom, then the final ten steps leading down into the great room. In the darkness, she could barely make out their black boots.

  The man with the laptop joined the others. The man with the bandola case sank to one knee, kissed his gloved fingers, then placed those fingers against Emma’s bloody lips. “Farewell, Emma.”

  He stood and moved to join the others. Her eyes followed his every step until he reached the stairs. With no small degree of effort, Emma raised her gaze to meet his for one last time.

  When she did, she saw that the two men from upstairs were carrying something together. It appeared to be a body wrapped in a sheet. The men turned to descend the stairs leading back to the vestibule and the door that led outside.

  A sound she didn’t recognize emanated from Emma’s throat.

  All four men stopped and looked back at her.

  The man who had done all the speaking took a step forward. “Emma would like to say good-bye to her daughter,” he said quietly to the others.

  He reached into his pocket and plucked from it his packet of matches. He tore one off and struck it against the flint. With one gloved hand he ripped the sheet off, revealing Olivia’s face in the blush of the flame.

  The flesh around Olivia’s eyes was crimson.

  Her mouth was gagged.

  Her shoulders were bare.

  She was awake, her entire face a mask of terror.

  The match slowly burned down till the flame reached the man’s gloved fingers and extinguished itself.

  It was the last Emma saw of her daughter, Olivia.

  Chapter 5

  Never ask for a loan or a favor. Both have to be repaid, and without fail, the interest will be far greater than you could ever have anticipated.

  So it was with Edgar Trenton, chairman and CEO of Carousel Pictures in Burbank. In another lifetime, I’d asked the studio mogul to extend me a courtesy. Instead he granted me an outright favor, and I’d been in his debt ever since. Today that debt was about to come due.

  Years ago, after my six-year-old daughter, Hailey, was stolen from our home in Georgetown and my wife, Tasha, took her own life, an opportunist named Will Collins wrote a book about the abduction, the subsequent investigation, and the whole sordid aftermath. The book did about as well as Collins’s previous attempts at bestsellerdom, which was to say, his publisher was able to move a paltry three thousand copies. The book was a bust. How could it have been anything but? The story had no ending, no resolution. My daughter was never found and the authorities stopped looking. By the time the book was published, people had lost interest.

  Of course, that was a risk all true crime writers took, from Truman Capote to Ann Rule to Diane Fanning. If you wanted to write about a crime, you had to get involved early; then it was up to law enforcement and twelve men and women in a jury box to see that your story contained closure. If any of them failed in their task, so did your art. At least in terms of book sales. Not so with movies.

  Movie studios like Carousel Pictures simply inserted the words BASED ON A TRUE STORY in the opening credits; then they had license to end the film however they liked. Carousel optioned Will Collins’s story for something to the tune of five thousand dollars, a real steal if the studio ultimately buys the rights and makes the picture. But then, that rarely happens. Far more often, the option expires and no studio ever picks it up again. The author’s dream of seeing his work on the silver screen dissipates like a cloud of smoke and then it’s back to the old drawing board. Or keyboard or legal pad, or whatever writers use these days.

  But some authors get lucky. A bigwig like Edgar Trenton reads the book on the toilet and loves it, thinks, We could do something about that awful ending, retrofit it Hollywood style. He sends it to a down-in-the-mouth screenwriter, who salivates at the thought of making fifty grand for adapting someone else’s sweat and agrees to draft a script. A hundred and ten pages later, the bigwig receives the script, reads it, and typically tosses it aside if not directly into the trash bin. Once in a while, however, the studio exec will fall in love with the script; he’ll see his own genius in it. After all, he’s the one who rescued the book from the remainder piles. He’ll send the script out to major agencies like CAA and William Morris and tell them it’s a hot property. “See if Daniel Craig or Clive Owen or Ewan McGregor wants to play this character Fisk. No? All right, then get me Jason Statham.”

  Once a big star is attached, the film has a hell of a good shot at moving forward. Suddenly, you have a talented director with a proven track record, someone like Arthur Baglin, and everyone else is on board. That was the case with Will Collins’s masterpiece, Unfathomable: When the Daughter of a U.S. Marshal Went Missing in Our Nation’s Capital.

  The U.S. Marshal was me. The daughter was mine. But the story was ultimately owned by Edgar Trenton.

  Until I paid him a visit and convinced him to let it go.

  I offered to pay him, of course. Five grand for the option, another fifty for the script, and whatever other costs he’d incurred.

  He flatly refused payment. “This can’t be about money,” he’d told me. “Because if it is, regardless of how much you pay me, I’m getting the raw deal. We have Artie Baglin directing. We have Jason Statham in negotiations to play you. This picture could conceivably make the studio a couple hundred million worldwide. No, if I’m going to scrap the film, I’m going to do it as a favor to you. Because I’m also a father with a little girl, and I can only imagine what you’ve already been through.”

  I told him I appreciated the gesture but that I didn’t accept favors.

  “I’d much rather pay you,” I said.

  But Edgar Trenton wouldn’t budge.

  So, he’d done me a favor. And I walked out of his office on the lot in Burbank feeling as though I’d scored one hell of a good deal.

  And I had, no question about it.

  That is, until this morning, when I received a telephone call from Edgar, and he told me that his own daughter, Olivia, had been taken by four masked men during a violent home invasion in Calabasas, California, less than six hours ago.

  Chapter 6

  Twenty minutes after I touched down at LAX, a limousine took me north on the 405 past Santa Monica and West Hollywood to the Ventura Freeway and the hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

  The size of the Trentons’ estate in Calabasas didn’t
surprise me; before trying to persuade Edgar not to film the Fisk family’s tragic story, I’d researched how much studio execs earned. Even the studio execs with flawed track records, such as Edgar’s. Suffice it to say, money would never be an issue for him. At least not in the way it was for 99 percent of the country.

  I also wasn’t surprised to find no police presence, though I’d hoped Edgar came to his senses. But no, he’d received a very specific demand for eight and a half million dollars and no involvement of the authorities, and he was hell-bent on following the kidnappers’ instructions to the letter. With the notable exception of contacting me, of course.

  “Please, Simon,” he’d pleaded over the phone. “I can’t go this alone.”

  When I stepped out of the limo onto the circular driveway, Edgar Trenton was there to greet me. He’d gained a couple dozen pounds since I first met him, and his salt-and-pepper hair had lost its pepper.

  We shook hands and I said, “Before you show me anything, I have to repeat the advice I gave you over the phone. Let me bring in the feds.”

  “Simon, I hate to have to say this, I really do. But there’s no time to mince words, and it may be the only thing I can say to make you understand.” He paused and looked me square in the eye. “We only met because I’ve read your story. I know it inside and out. And though it pains me to ask, what exactly did the feds achieve for you when Hailey was snatched from your house?”

  One thing about the players in Hollywood, they knew how to tug at your heartstrings. How many hours I sat up in bed in the black of night second-guessing the decisions I’d made in those first ninety-six hours of Hailey’s disappearance, I’ll never be able to calculate.

  “All right,” I said. “We do this your way, for now.”

  “Follow me.”

  Leaving my single piece of luggage in the trunk of the limo, I followed Edgar around the side of the grand house, to a door he said was used almost exclusively by the help.

  “Almost exclusively?”

  “Occasionally we ask guests to use this entrance. Particularly if we’re throwing a large party. Otherwise the driveway in front of the main entrance can become severely backed up.”