Talking over the second voice, Harrington said, “Is that me? It doesn’t sound like me.”
“Hold it,” the head FBI man said, and the technician stopped the tape and ran it backward again. To Harrington the head FBI man said, “Let’s just listen.”
“Oh, of course,” Harrington said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, I was merely startled.”
“Run it,” the head FBI man said, and the tape started forward again.
“Hello?” His own voice sounded lighter to him than he would have guessed; not so manly. He didn’t much like it.
“Is that Herbert Harrington?” It was a female voice, middle–aged, New York City accent, rather truculent. An irascible–sounding woman, like one of your lady cabdrivers.
“Yes, it is. Who’s calling, please?”
“We have your boy.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, ‘We have your boy.’ It means we kidnapped him, we’re the kidnappers. I’m one of the kidnappers, this is the phone call.”
“Oh, yes! Of course, I’m sorry. Maurice phoned me when he got home.”
“What?”
“My chauffeur. He was very upset, he said it was extremely difficult to drive while chained to the steering wheel.”
Small pause. Then, the woman’s voice again; “Look, let’s start all over. We have your boy.”
“Yes, you said that. And this is the phone call.”
“Right. All right. Your Bobby’s fine. And he’ll–”
“What say?”
“I said, ‘Your Bobby’s fine. And he’ll stay–”
“Are you sure you have the right number?”
“Jimmy! I didn’t mean–I meant Jimmy. Your Jimmy’s fine. And he’ll stay fine just as long as you cooperate.”
Silence. Far in the background one of those telephone company noises took place; boop–boop–boop–boop–boopboop–beep–boop–boop–boop.
The woman’s voice; “Did you hear me?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well? You gonna cooperate or aren’t you gonna cooperate?”
“Of course I’ll cooperate.”
“At last. Okay. That’s good. And the first thing is, you don’t call the police.”
“Oh, dear.”
“What?”
“I do wish you’d told me before. Or told Maurice, that would have been best.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, the fact is, I’ve already called them. In fact, they’re here right now.” (That had been the moment when the head FBI man had started waving his arms back and forth in a negative manner; Harrington remembered now his decision at that point not to mention to the woman that the call was being recorded. But weren’t there court decisions to the effect that people had to be informed if their calls were being recorded?)
“You already called them.”
“Well, it did seem the thing to do. Maurice said you people carried guns and seemed extremely menacing.”
“All right, all right. We’ll forget that part. The point is, you want your kid back, right?”
Slight hesitation. “Well, of course.” (Listening to the tape now, Harrington could see where that hesitation might very easily be misconstrued. But he hadn’t been thinking it over, or anything like that, it was merely that the question had been raised so suddenly it had startled him. Naturally he wanted Jimmy back, he was a fine lad, an excellent boy. There were times when Harrington wished he’d named this son Herbert, rather than having thrown the name away on his first son by his first marriage; the actual Herbert, now a twenty–eight–year–old hippie on a commune in Chad, had little to recommend him. In fact, nothing. In fact, it was good sound business sense on the kidnappers’ part to steal Jimmy rather than Herbert Jr., since Harrington doubted very much he would pay one hundred fifty thousand dollars for the return of that clod.)
“All right. You want him back. But it will cost you.”
“Yes, I’d rather thought it would. You people speak of that as the ransom, don’t you?”
“What? Yeah, right, the ransom. That’s what this call’s all about.”
“I thought as much.”
“Yeah. Okay, here it is. Tomorrow, you get a hundred–” Clatter, clatter. “Damn it!”
“Beg pardon?”
“Hold on, I lost my–” Rattling sounds. “Just a minute, it’s–” More rattling sounds. “Okay, here we go. Tomorrow, you get a hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash. In old–”
“I doubt I could go that high.”
“–bills. You–What?”
“You say tomorrow. I take it time is of the essence here, and I’m not sure I could gather a hundred fifty thousand in cash in one day. I might be able to do eighty–five.”
“Wait a minute, you’re going ahead of me.”
“I’m what?”
“Here it is. That’s up to you. The longer it takes, the longer it’ll be before you see your Buh–Jimmy again.”
“Oh, I see, it isn’t necessarily tomorrow.”
“It’s whenever you want him back, Buster.” She was sounding really very irascible by this point.
“I was just thinking, if you wanted to complete this operation tomorrow, you might settle for eighty–five thousand.”
“I said a hundred fifty thousand, and I meant a hundred fifty thousand. You think we’re gonna haggle?”
“Certainly not. I’m not dickering over the well–being of my child, it’s merely that I thought, within the time frame you appeared to be contem–”
“All right, all right, let it go. It’s a hundred fifty thousand. no matter what.”
“Very well.” He sounded a bit chilly himself by this time, and listening to the recording now he could only applaud his decision then to let the woman see a bit of his irritation.
“Okay. We’ll go over it again. Tomorrow you get–well–as soon as you can, okay? As soon as you can, you get a hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash. In old bills. You pack it in a suitcase, and stay by your phone. I’ll call again to give you the next instructions.” (It was during that statement of the woman’s that the head FBI man had extended toward Harrington a slip of paper containing the penciled words, “Tell her to prove it.”)
“Urn. Prove it.”
“What?”
“I said, prove it.”
“Prove what? That I’m gonna call you again?” (During which, the head FBI man had been with great exaggeration mouthing the sentence, “That they have the kid!”)
“No, urn–Oh! That you have the kid. My son. Jimmy.”
“Of course we have him, why would I call you if we didn’t have him?”
“Well, I just want you to prove it, that’s all.”
“Prove it how? He isn’t here by the phone.”
“Well, I don’t know how.”
“Okay, look. Check this with the chauffeur. The Caddy was too wide for the truck. The planks broke. We all wore Mickey Mouse masks. We drove a blue Caprice. Okay?”
(The head FBI man had been nodding.) “That’s fine.”
“You’re satisfied, bub?”
“Yes. Thank you very much.”
“Yeah.” It sounded very sour indeed. “I’ll call you by four o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
“Well, there’s a possibility–” (click) “–I’ll be called to Washington tomorrow to appear before the SEC, but–Hello? Hello?” (away from the phone) “I believe she hung up.”
“Okay,” the head FBI man said. “Switch it off.”
The tape technician switched it off.
The head FBI man said, “You recognize the voice?”
“I didn’t recognize either voice,” Harrington said. “Did that really sound like me?”
“Yeah, it sounded like you. But the other one didn’t sound like anybody else you know, bub?”
“How could it?”
“Maybe a disgruntled former employee? A servant out here, somebody like that?”
&n
bsp; “Well, she did sound disgruntled enough, I’ll say that for her. But the voice doesn’t ring any bells at all. I’m sorry.”
The head FBI man shrugged. “Sometimes it pans out,” he said. “Usually it don’t.” Nodding thoughtfully toward the tape machine, he said, “There’s some interesting things in there.”
“Really?”
“We didn’t know it was a Caprice.”
“A caprice? I’d call it something more serious than that.”
“The kind of car,” the head FBI man said. “Your chauffeur just said it was a blue car, so that’s a piece of information we picked up.”
“Oh, very good.”
“And that slip of the tongue there. Be interesting to find out who this ‘Bobby’ is.”
“Do you suppose they kidnapped more than one child today? Maybe they’re making a whole raft of phone calls.”
The head FBI man frowned, thinking that over. “Mass kidnappings?” He turned to one of the assistant FBI men who’d been hovering all evening in the corners of the room. “Look into that, Kirby,” he said. “See do we have any more kidnapping reports today.”
“Right.” The assistant FBI man faded from the room, not like a person walking out of a room, but like a television picture fading from the screen when the power has been turned off.
“Another thing,” the head FBI man said, turning back to Harrington. “It sounded at one point there like she was reading a prepared statement.”
“Yes, I noticed that,” Harrington said. “I think she lost her place for a minute there.”
“Could be the kidnappers sent a dummy out to make the call, somebody that isn’t really part of the gang. So if we traced the call and got her, she wouldn’t be able to tell us anything.”
“Very clever,” Harrington said.
The head FBI man nodded. “We’re up against a shrewd gang of professionals,” he said, with a kind of gloomy satisfaction. “That’ll make it tough to catch them. On the other hand, it means the boy is probably safe. It’s your amateurs that panic and start killing people; your professionals don’t do that.”
“It all seemed very professional to me, too,” Harrington said. “Speaking as a layman, that is. But the truck, and the school bus, and so forth.”
“Very carefully planned.” The head FBI man stroked his craggy jaw. “I keep thinking I’ve seen that MO somewhere before,” he said.
“MO?”
“Modus operandi. Method of operations.”
“Isn’t that interesting,” Harrington said. “The way the initials work in both Latin and English.”
“Yeah,” the head FBI man said. “I’ll have to run it through our computers down in Washington, see do we come up with something.” He nodded thoughtfully, then became more brisk. “Now,” he said, “about the payoff.”
“Yes,” Harrington said. “I was wondering about that.”
“We’ll try to recover your money, naturally,” the head FBI man said. “We’ll even try to set a trap with it if we can, though I think this bunch is probably too sharp for that.”
“I got that impression,” Harrington said.
“The main point is to recover the child. The money is secondary.”
“Certainly.”
The head FBI man nodded again, and said, “How long do you think it’ll take to get the money together?”
“Well, it’s too late to do anything tonight.” Harrington frowned, considering the problem. “I’ll call my accountant in the morning, work out the best way to handle this, from a variety of points of view. You may not be aware of this, but money paid to a kidnapper is not deductible on your income tax.”
The head FBI man looked interested. “It isn’t?”
“No. I remember running across that while looking up something for a client. I don’t recall the justification; possibly it’s considered payment for a service, non–business connected.”
“I’ve never had much to do over on the Treasury side,” the head FBI man said.
“In any event, there are various ways of going about it. Sale of securities, depending on whether it would be long–term or short–term gains, possibly loans against my margin accounts where my portfolio has increased sufficiently in value, various possibilities. Well, I’ll talk it over with Markham in the morning.”
“But how long do you figure it’ll take?”
“Really, you know,” Harrington said, “the most difficult part is going to be conversion of assets to cash, actual paper money. I don’t believe I know anyone who deals in cash.”
“Banks do,” the head FBI man said.
“Eh? Oh, of course! I never think of them that way.”
“I still want to know how long. Two days? Three?”
“Oh, good Lord, no. I should have the liquidity by noon. One at the latest.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Certainly tomorrow. Then it all depends how long it takes to bring the currency out here.”
“We’ll take care of that,” the head FBI man said. He was frowning deeply, studying Harrington’s face. “Mr. Harrington,” he said. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“That business about the eighty–five thousand, that was all you could raise tomorrow. Do you mean you really were haggling?”
Harrington thought about it. In sudden surprise, he said, “Why, yes! I do believe I was.”
The head FBI man looked at him. He didn’t say anything.
“It was just force of habit,” Harrington said. Then, when the head FBI man continued to gaze at him unspeaking, he added, “I certainly wasn’t going to turn the deal down.”
Chapter 18
* * *
After dinner, Jimmy went back to work. The fact that the boards were nailed to the outside of the window frames rather than the inside made his task a bit more difficult, but not impossible. He had removed one board before the cooking woman had brought him his dinner–how unearthly an adult wearing a Mickey Mouse mask could look in just the glow of a flashlight–and now he was removing more. They were fairly narrow boards, and he thought it likely he’d have to deal with four of them before making a space wide enough to climb out through.
His method was simple, but time–consuming. With the screwdriver, he would pry the board a bit loose, then oil the nails as he worked to keep them from squeaking. A bit at a time, prying and oiling, prying and oiling, he would loosen the board from the window frame. The final fraction was always the trickiest, since he didn’t want the board to fall out onto the ground below; managing to avoid that, he would bring the board inside, then use the pliers to snap each nail off short. After oiling the nails once more, he would put the board back in place, the stubby nails slipping a short distance into their former seats in the window frame. The boards looked the same as before, but would pop out at the touch of a finger.
It was that last part that took the extra time. The job would have been much quicker and simpler if all he had to do was bash the boards out and depart. But in the first place he never knew when they might decide to come back up and double–check on him, and in the second place he wanted to leave them with a certain amount of misdirection and confusion. Therefore he took the extra time to do the job right, and considered it time well spent.
Outside, in those intervals when he had a board out of the window space, he could hear the rain continuing to pound. This room faced the back of the house, and there was no light outside at all, nothing but pitch blackness and the sound of pelting rain.
Some water did splash in from time to time, but not enough to give him away. A worse problem was the cold; a chill wet wind blew in whenever he had a board off the window, and his jacket just wasn’t warm enough for weather like this. When he’d put it on this morning, the worst climate he’d expected to be exposed to was the air–conditioning in Dr. Schraubenzieher’s office.
Well, one did have to expect to rough it from time to time in this life. With which thought Jimmy snapped the last nail that needed t
o be snapped, picked up the oilcan, oiled the nails in this fourth board, and carefully reinserted the board into the window, thus not only restoring the original appearance of the room, but also eliminating again that whistling wind.
What next? The tools and oilcan went into the toolbox, and the toolbox went into the space beneath the floorboard he had previously loosened. Flashing the light around the room, he reassured himself he wasn’t leaving any unnecessary clues in his wake, and then turned to the rope.
Jimmy The Kid Page 11
