The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

“If you don’t mind, I’ll stay here with Karyn,” Proxmire said.

  “Why should I mind?” Martinetti said.

  They looked at one another steadily, and something indefinable passed between them. I wondered what kind of relationships lay below the proper surface in this nice Hillsborough house-but it wasn’t any of my business. I had enough to worry about.

  Martinetti turned on his heel and I followed him through the living room and down the side hallway and through the ornate double doors into his study. He went over to the bar and got a glass from behind it and took that and the decanter to his desk. I sat on the couch facing him. He said, “Help yourself if you want a drink,” and poured his glass three-quarters full.

  The silence deepened after a time, seeming to gain volume, so that it was like a screaming cacophony of sound just beyond the range of hearing. I developed a headache from listening to it, from the tension of waiting. I made a couple of attempts at conversation, but Martinetti was not having any. He sat there drinking and staring at a point high on the wall above his stereo components, moving just a little every now and then to ease a cramped muscle. He did not look at me at all.

  I got up a couple of times and prowled the room, looking at the books on the shelves, the hammered-copper curios, the stereo unit. The books were stuffy English classics and modern romances and biographical studies, the records were fugues, Chopin and Bartok and Shostakovich, mood and dinner music-but no jazz; none of it much interested me. I went through a half-dozen more cigarettes, and there was a rasping in my chest now and I knew that the next one would bring on the coughing. I could hear Erika’s voice saying over and over in my mind, When are you going to grow up? Do you think you’ve got the body of a teenager? When are you going to grow up?

  * * * *

  The call came at nine minutes past four.

  The sound of the bell seemed to explode in the strained, deafening hush of the room. Martinetti came half out of his chair in a convulsive movement, freezing there, his eyes bulging toward the phone, his hands gripping the edge of the desk. I got on my feet and swallowed against a dryness in my throat.

  Martinetti gave a kind of shiver, as if to regenerate mobility, and then caught up the receiver with his right hand. He said, “Hello?” in a hoarse whispering voice.

  He did not say anything else for more than a minute. He held the instrument pressed tightly to his ear, the hand white and rigid around it, his face a mask of intense concentration as he listened. Finally he said, “Yes, I understand,” paused, said, “Please, I’m doing just as you want, don’t hurt my-”

  His mouth clamped shut, and the hand holding the receiver dropped slowly to his side. After a moment he reached out and placed the handset in its cradle and sank back down in his chair. He put his head in his hands.

  I went up to the desk and saw that his shoulders were trembling almost imperceptibly, as if he might be silently weeping. I gave him thirty seconds, and then I said softly, “Mr. Martinetti.”

  His head jerked up, and he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. There was a grayness to the taut skin across his cheekbones, but his eyes were dry.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked him. “The call-?”

  “No, no,” he said, and took a deep shuddering breath. “I … it’s just that I … I feel drained, purged, after all that waiting. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  There was a sharp rapping on the entrance doors, and one of them swung open and Proxmire came quickly into the study. Karyn Martinetti was behind him, her face the color of dirty snow. Proxmire said, “We heard the telephone. Was that-?”

  Martinetti said, “Yes.”

  “What did he say? Is Gary all right?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Well, what did he say?”

  Martinetti looked at him dully.

  “Damn it, man, did he give you instructions for delivering the ransom money?” Proxmire demanded.

  Martinetti seemed not to notice. “Yes.”

  I said, “When will it be?”

  “Tonight.”

  “What time?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a dirt road leading off Old Southbridge Road, up in the hills back of San Bruno,” Martinetti said woodenly. “You’re to drive in there exactly one mile. You’ll leave your car in a turnaround there and walk down the embankment at the left side of the road until you reach a flat sandstone rock. You’ll put the money on top of the rock and return to your car. Then you’ll turn the car around and go back the way you came.”

  I thought it over. “It sounds kind of isolated. He’d be leaving himself wide open to a trap, if you’d played it the other way and called the police.”

  “Not really,” Proxmire said. “I know that area, and there’s another road at the bottom of the embankment. If he waits down there, there are a dozen streets he can slip into once he has the money.”

  I nodded, and said to Martinetti, “Was there anything else?”

  “A warning,” he answered softly. “No police, and no tricks. If he’s picked up, and doesn’t return to a certain place at a certain time, there is someone with the boy who has instructions to …” He broke off, and dry-washed his face savagely with both hands. “When he has the money, we’ll get a call telling us where to find Gary. That’s all.”

  I took a breath. “Have you got a map of the drop area?”

  “I think there’s one in the hall table.”

  “I’ll get it,” Proxmire said. He went to where Karyn Martinetti was standing with both hands hooked onto the couch in front of the fireplace, took her arm, and led her out of the room.

  Martinetti got up and took the decanter over to the alcove. He poured a small one into his glass, drank it off, shuddered, and put the decanter away behind the bar. He said, “I’ve had enough of that.”

  I did not say anything, but I thought that he was probably right.

  Proxmire came back alone, with a map of the San Francisco Peninsula. I spread it open on Martinetti’s desk. He pointed out the area, and the spot of the drop as near as he could tell it by scale. I familiarized myself with it, and with the route I would take to get there, and then folded the map and put it into my coat pocket.

  It was about the kind of thing I had expected: simple enough, well planned, not much margin for error. Except for a few minutes alone in the darkness with three hundred thousand dollars, it would be a cakewalk for me; as long as nothing went wrong, it did not seem to be worth anywhere near the fifteen hundred dollars I was getting for it.

  * * * *

  6

  Time crawled like a fat gray slug.

  Seconds became lifetimes, and minutes became miniature eternities. The waiting before had been bad, but this was something else again. You could feel the pressure building, building, like a tangible entity through the dark and silent house.

  Martinetti had professed a desire to be alone, and Proxmire and I had gone out to sit in the living room with Karyn Martinetti. It was a nice living room-a copper-hooded fireplace similar in styling but somewhat larger than the one in the study, some good stark seascapes of the cypress-dotted coastline between Monterey and Big Sur, a low rock planter wall that right-angled into the room between the bay window and the fireplace and had some green vines twisting down along the stones almost to the floor-but the air in there seemed stagnant, as if it had been closed up for a very long time. I had to breathe through my mouth after a while. My headache gained magnitude to where the dull pain had a lancing rhythm, like the muted throb of a two-cycle engine.

  Cassy came with coffee and more sandwiches. I got two cups of the strong black liquid down, but the ham-on-whole-wheat seemed to stick in a glutinous mass in my throat. Proxmire and Karyn Martinetti neither ate nor drank anything; they were sitting on the couch, at opposite ends, like two sculpted bookends holding up nothing at all.

  The door chimes sounded just past six, and Proxmire was
on his feet and moving with long strides into the entrance hall before the echo of them faded into silence. From where I was sitting I could look into the hall, and I saw him open the door and admit Allan Channing.

  Channing, dressed as he had been that morning, was carrying a brown leather suitcase in his right hand. It looked very heavy. He glanced into the living room and saw me, but he made no acknowledgment. He told Proxmire that Martinetti was waiting for him, and the two of them disappeared into the side hall.

  A couple of minutes passed, and Proxmire came back and sat down stoically and watched Karyn Martinetti out of half-lidded eyes. I tried another cigarette, and the coughing started, and I ground it out immediately. My chest felt as if a steel band were being tightened around it, suffocating me. The weight of this whole thing was beginning to settle squarely on my shoulders now; the others were assuming passive roles. If anything went wrong tonight …

  Well, all right, I told myself. All you have to do is follow the instructions. No games and no heroics; hell, you’re not even inclined that way. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?

  I decided I needed some fresh air. I went out onto the terrace and walked over to the outdoor bar. It was constructed of stone, with a slant-backed wooden roof; four leather-topped stools were arranged before it. I sat on one of them, facing toward the house and pool.

  It was full dark now, and the night air held the clean, mild bite of autumn frost. The stars seemed cold and synthetic in the ebon sky. There was a yellow-gold half moon, like a canted, halved orange slice, sitting directly overhead; the edges of its curvature were of a slightly darker coloration, rindlike. It shone on the water in the swimming pool in a long, slender, golden streamer.

  I felt better, sitting out there. The drapes were pulled closed over the bay window, and I could not see inside; I thought that was just as well. From the direction of the creek running across the rear of the Martinetti property, there was the commingled sound of crickets and night birds singing full-throated and yet very soft, without worry and without sadness.

  The music they made seemed to have a deep lure for me, like that haunting oboe melody in Hamlin town, and I left the outdoor bar and walked to the creek across the thick dew-scented grass. I reached the bank and the heavy shadows cast by the tall, staid eucalyptus, and began to walk toward the rock garden at the far end of the grounds.

  The creek bed was rocky and littered with branches and leaves and silt. A thin, tired stream meandered across the stones in the exact center, but when the winter rains came, the creek would be swollen and rushing with muddy brown run-off water. The banks were irregular and not at all steep, and I thought to hell with it and climbed down to give the frail and weary stream some company for a short while.

  I walked slowly, listening to the night music, smelling the dampness of the earth and of green things growing fresh and strong. The cold air felt very good in my lungs, and I took long swallows of it and thought about nothing at all.

  I drew parallel with the rock garden, and the stunted shapes of the shrubs and plants were silky black shadows against the lighter color of the sky. I reached the high redwood boundary fence and went past it fifteen yards or so, and there was a shelf at the bole of one of the slender eucalyptus covered with dry leaves and dark green Spanish moss. I sat down on that, in the deep shadow of the tree, and looked into the darkness beyond the opposite bank, where thick undergrowth obliterated the rear grounds of another home. The orange-slice moon was visible between the branches of the trees overhead.

  I had been there about five minutes, sitting motionless on the natural bank chair, when I heard the sound of footfalls shuffling through the foliage at the base of the redwood fence, coming around it. There was silence for the space of several heartbeats, and then voices, clear and distinct, came drifting to me on the scented night air.

  “Oh God, Dean, hold me, just hold me!”

  “Easy, honey, easy now.”

  “I just couldn’t stand it another minute in there!”

  “I know, I know.”

  Proxmire and Karyn Martinetti. I turned my head without moving my body, and I could see them standing back against the fence, two dark forms blended together, embracing. I held my breath, listening, not wanting to listen at all.

  Several seconds passed before they parted, but they remained standing very close together. Karyn Martinetti’s voice said fervently, “Dean, tell me everything is going to be all right. Tell me Gary will come home safely.”

  “He will, honey, he will.”

  “I’m so afraid!”

  “Don’t let yourself be.”

  “If … if anything happens to him, I don’t know what I’ll do!”

  “Shh, now, nothing is going to happen to him.”

  “I wish I could believe that!”

  “You can believe it, you have to believe it.”

  “God, oh God, why did this nightmare have to happen? Everything seemed to be perfect for us, you and Gary and me. I could have left Lou just as we planned, and gone to Massillon to my parents and let a lawyer handle the whole matter …”

  “It can still work out that way.”

  “No, no, don’t you see? I always thought Lou was indifferent where Gary was concerned, that he didn’t really care about him at all. But I was wrong, Dean, because he’s about to pay three hundred thousand dollars to get him back. I didn’t think he would, but I thank the Lord that he is, and I can’t hate him any more.”

  “No, you can’t hate him, but you can’t go on living with him either, Karyn.”

  “I know that. But he won’t just let me leave with Gary now. He’ll fight me for custody, if only because he’s made an investment and he hates to lose on any kind of investment. That’s the way he is, Dean, I know!”

  “If he wants a court battle, we’ll give him one.”

  “Suppose he charges me with adultery?”

  “He can’t prove anything.”

  “But he knows. Isn’t that enough?”

  “In a court of law, no.”

  “The scandal would be sufficient to give him custody of Gary, and I couldn’t bear that!”

  “Not if we fought it long and hard enough.”

  “We don’t have the money for that kind of battle.”

  “There are ways of getting money.”

  “How?”

  “You let me worry about that.”

  The shadows blended together again.

  “Oh, darling, I love you so very much!”

  Soft, liquid sounds-the sounds of a woman weeping. I felt suddenly very cold, sitting there, embarrassed for them and more embarrassed for myself. There could not have been a worse time for me to overhear a conversation like that; it made this whole damned affair that much more painful, my own position that much more awkward. I felt a little sorry for Martinetti, but I felt a whole lot sorrier for his son.

  The shapes divided again, after a couple of minutes, and Proxmire’s voice said, “We’d better be getting back, honey, before we’re missed. Are you all right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything will work out, believe me. Try to be brave.”

  “I’ll try.”

  I listened to their footfalls moving away, not watching them, not moving. I gave them five minutes to get back inside the house, and then I got up slowly and walked back along the creek bed to a spot opposite the outdoor bar. I climbed up the bank and went across the grass and onto the terrace and inside through the sliding glass door at the side of the bay window.

  There was no one in the living room; maybe she’d gone upstairs to lie down, and he’d gone with her. It was just as well, because I did not want to have to look at either of them. I sat down on the couch and poured some cold coffee into my cup and balanced the saucer on my knee. My wristwatch said that it was a quarter past seven. I had two hours yet; it was going to be more like two days. I wanted nothing so much as I wanted to be finished with this whole thing.

  A half-hour went by, dragging chains. I got
up finally and stepped to where a console color television sat at an angle against the near wall, and turned it on just to have some sound, some movement. When Proxmire put in an appearance ten minutes later, I was watching a guy in an astronaut suit exhibit the patience of Job with a five-year-old kid who kept demanding another cartoon.

  He looked at me as if I were committing an unnatural sin. “For Christ’s sake, do you have to have that thing on now?”

  “Would you rather I locked myself in the coat closet until it’s time to leave?”

  “Listen, you don’t have to get snotty.”

  “No,” I said, “I guess I don’t.”

  “We’re all on edge around here, you know,” he said, and went over on the other side of the planter wall and stared at the empty fireplace.

  Another half-hour crawled away, and then it was eight-thirty. I lit a cigarette and coughed my way through it and went outside again for more air. I walked around. I sat by the pool. I came back into the living room and sat on the couch some more. Nine o’clock.

  I gave it another five minutes; then I went out through the entrance hall and down the side hallway and knocked on the study doors. Martinetti’s voice said to come in, and I opened one of the doors and walked inside.

  Martinetti was standing at the bar, but not drinking, and Channing was sitting on the couch; they looked like a couple of old, old men in the pale light from the lamp on the desk-perhaps for different reasons. The suitcase was on the desk, too.

  I said, “I think it’s about time I was going.”

  Martinetti nodded and rubbed wearily at his haunted eyes. “I was going to give you another ten minutes, but maybe it’s better if you leave a little early.”

  “Maybe so.” I had trouble meeting his gaze, after what I had overheard by the creek.

  “You know exactly what you are supposed to do?”

  I said I knew.

  He nodded again. “I’m very grateful to you,” he said. “For being here today and for doing this tonight.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Martinetti took the suitcase off the desk and started toward the door. Channing got to his feet wordlessly, and we followed Martinetti out into the entrance hall. Proxmire was there, and when we stepped outside he came tagging along. We looked like a single file of grim-visaged bank examiners walking along the gravel path and through the gate and across the footbridge.