Protocol for a Kidnapping

by Ross Thomas

  They didn’t notice my approach, perhaps because they were both only half-turned toward me, but more likely because neither of them could see much of anything through those wraparound shades. I tapped the shorter one on the left shoulder and said, “Did you remember the detonators, Vladimir?”

  Park Tyler Wisdom III turned and beamed. “Ah,” he said, “it’s Philip St. Ives, known and feared by the scum of two continents.”

  I looked at Henry Knight who wore the fedora with the toadstool brim. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

  “Hardbitten adventurers, chief,” Knight said. “We all dress like this.” He paused to frown at my tweed topcoat and hatless head. “Except you,” he added.

  “I’m the clean-cut one in the trio,” I said. “Obviously the leader.” I reached into my coat pocket and handed each of them an envelope. “Here’re your tickets. It’s Pan Am flight two and it’s due out at seven. We arrive in Frankfurt at ten-fifteen tomorrow morning and change to JAT flight three fifty-one at twelve forty-five. We land in Belgrade at three twenty-five.”

  Wisdom looked at his ticket. “On the cheap, I see,” he said.

  “I thought it would be cozier, three abreast,” I said. “Any trouble about your visas?”

  Knight shook his head. “They just asked business or pleasure and I said pleasure.”

  “Let’s hope you were right,” I said.

  It had taken me only eleven minutes to convince Henry Knight that he should come along. It might have taken longer, except that when I called he was in the middle of a fight with Winifred, his tall, leggy wife who looked like a show girl but who wrote and illustrated remarkably tender and successful children’s books. When I was about two-thirds of the way through my pitch, Knight had said, “Hold on a second, Phil.”

  I could hear Winifred yell something at him and, perhaps because he couldn’t resist the opportunity, he had yelled back, “Why don’t you just write me about it in Belgrade!” Then he returned to the phone with, “When do we leave?” Pride, I long ago found out, often causes the decisions made in the heat of a domestic argument to be just as irrevocable as they are stupid. But Knight’s quick decision may have been influenced by the fact that he had been in between plays for eight weeks and Winifred was on a tight deadline and since I was offering all expenses plus double the Equity scale, it probably sounded better than sitting around the house waiting for his agent to call with some fanciful explanation about how Knight had just missed getting on Carson next week. I didn’t worry about the domestic spat. After fourteen years of marriage, Henry and Winifred Knight still thought of each other as the world’s most interesting person.

  Park Tyler Wisdom III, holder of the Silver Star and some Purple Hearts for performing what he had once called “an extraordinary deed of incredible pusillanimity in the face of overestimated odds” while spending two years in Vietnam, was more difficult to convince than Knight. I had to talk twelve minutes, although four of them were spent declining an urgent invitation to join Wisdom and some friends that evening in a planning session whose aim was to deluge the Pentagon with the nation’s worn-out ballpoint pens. The idea, it seemed, was to start a nationwide rumor that the military desperately needed the pens for use in some top secret testing project.

  “We could use your help, Phil,” Wisdom said. “What do you think of ‘Pens for the Pentagon’?”

  “That should get them a million or so.”

  “Rumor has it that they need fifty million.”

  “I’ve got a dozen or so I’ll send tomorrow. What about the trip?”

  “How long?”

  “Four days, maybe five.”

  “Winifred’s going to let Henry stray?”

  “They’re in the middle of a fight and she’s on a deadline.”

  “And we’ll bring out the poet and his granddaughter?”

  “It could change,” I said. “You might just be going along for the ride.”

  “I never could say no to my President,” Wisdom said.

  “He didn’t ask you,” I said. “I did.”

  “Why me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you could use the money.”

  “You’ve always worked these go-between things alone before, haven’t you?”

  “Until now.”

  “Why the change?”

  “I can’t be in two places at once and if something happens in the place I’m not in, I need someone who won’t panic or who at least is a good enough actor not to show it.”

  Wisdom was silent for a moment. “And you think I won’t panic?”

  “No,” I said. “I think you’re a hell of a good actor.”

  There was another brief silence and when Wisdom spoke against the gentle self-mockery that was usually in his tone had gone. “Since you seem to know what you’re getting, I’ll go.”

  “I know what I’m getting,” I said. “That’s why I asked you.”

  “Thanks,” he said in that same quiet, thoughtful tone. “I really mean it.”

  “I know,” I said

  Before Wisdom had gone off to Vietnam and his something less than meteoric rise to buck sergeant in the First Air Cavalry division, he had been to all the right schools, starting when he was six, and seemed destined to live the pleasantly well-ordered life of one who, having inherited seven million dollars at twenty-two, had nothing more bothersome to ponder than what to do with the twenty-one million or so that he’ll inherit at thirty-five.

  After his first one-year tour was over, he signed on for another one. “It was early 1965 then and I honest to God liked it,” he once told me. “I liked being Sergeant Wisdom and soldiering and yelling at privates and the rest of it. Even combat. It was neat and tidy and I knew who the hell I was. I was Sergeant Wisdom of the goddamned infantry. It was my own clearly defined niche in a highly structured framework that just happened to be a war.”

  Then he got hit the second time and while wounded led what was left of his ambushed platoon back through the Vietcong, and in the process killed what later was officially estimated to be 136 of the enemy. “We didn’t care if they were VC or not,” Wisdom told me. “We killed anything that moved—men, women, children. It didn’t matter, we just panicked. When I got back I expected to be court-martialed, but they gave me the Silver Star instead and I couldn’t keep a straight face while the Colonel pinned it on so I laughed at him. I’ve been laughing ever since. It’s either that or cry.”

  Park Tyler Wisdom and his appreciation of the absurd, I’d decided, could be nothing but useful during the next few days.

  The flight to Frankfurt was uneventful, except for the twenty-two dollars that Wisdom won from me at gin. We positioned Knight on the aisle seat where his actor’s profile assured us of proper attention from the stewardesses, all of whom claimed to have seen his last play.

  “Highly doubtful,” Knight told us, “since it closed after two performances.”

  “They’re probably thinking of the one before that,” Wisdom said.

  “It closed after six.”

  Although the Frankfurt airport seemed to have grown smaller since my last trip there, the beer was still the same, and I was enjoying a half-liter of it when Knight said, “Do you have any relatives here?”

  “None tìiat I know of.”

  “There’s a guy at the end of the bar behind you who could almost be your double except that he doesn’t yet have your dyspeptic glow.”

  I didn’t turn. “Does he have on a gray topcoat?”

  “Yes.”

  I turned then and used the mirror to look at the end of the bar. When Artur Bjelo’s eyes met mine in the mirror they didn’t hesitate or flicker in recognition. They just kept on going, not hurriedly, but indifferently, as if they were looking for something more interesting to light on than the face of someone they’d apparently never seen before.

  I moved down to the end of the bar and tapped him on the shoulder. “Mr. Bjelo,” I said.

  He turned at the tap
and smiled boyishly and then said something in a language I didn’t understand, but assumed to be Serbo-Croatian.

  “We met day before yesterday,” I said, matching his smile in width, if not in years. “We had a drink or two together and talked about poetry.”

  He shrugged and smiled again and shook his head helplessly in the universal gesture of apologetic incomprehension.

  “You almost got run over,” I said.

  An Englishman standing next to Bjelo was casually following the abortive dialogue. “I’m afraid he doesn’t understand a word you say,” he said. “He says he speaks nothing but Serbo-Croatian. I know a bit of it, if you’d like me to tell him something.”

  “Thank you,” I said to the Englishman who rattled something off to Bjelo who nodded and smiled his appreciation.

  “Now what would you like me to tell him?” the Englishman asked.

  “Tell him he’s a goddamned liar,” I said, turned, and went back up the bar to my beer.

  “Did you know him?” Knight asked me.

  “I thought I did, but he thought I didn’t. Where’s Park?”

  “He’s gone to buy a cuckoo clock. One of those Black Forest things.”

  “What for?” I said.

  Knight sighed and drank the rest of his beer. “I somehow thought it best not to ask.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said.

  The three of us were among the first half-dozen passengers to board JAT flight 351 and after we sat there for nearly thirty-five minutes and nothing moved, Knight turned on his charm and asked the Yugoslav stewardess about the delay.

  “We are waiting for a passenger,” she said. “It should not be much longer now.”

  The passenger boarded the plane five minutes later and he didn’t seem any more concerned about causing the delay than he had been about telling me in English that his name was Artur Bjelo and denying it in Serbo-Croatian two days later. He sat in the aisle seat nearest the exit and neither read nor slept during the three-and-one-half-hour flight. Neither did I.

  Bjelo was the first passenger off when we landed at Surcin International Airport near Belgrade and although I looked for him as we went through customs, he seemed to have already cleared them, possibly because he had nothing to declare, not even any more lies.

  8

  AFTER WE GOT THROUGH customs I started looking around for something young and about six feet tall in a nicely tailored dark suit whose center vent might be a full fourteen inches but whose lapels wouldn’t be wide enough to cause any stir at the embassy’s annual Fourth of July tea and fireworks do.

  I was looking for something male with a slightly superior, world-weary expression who couldn’t quite hide his irritation at having been assigned to meet us at the airport, and who could rattle off instructions to the baggage handlers in fluent Serbo-Croatian which he’d picked up in six weeks or so because he had a sponge for a brain and languages came just ever so easy for him.

  That’s what I was looking for out of prejudice or propaganda or both, so when I got jabbed in the ribs and turned I wasn’t prepared for a mop-haired blonde, about five-one in a brown dress that barely covered the V where her legs joined together, and who wore a saucy, go to hell grin, and who dragged a long, suede coat, and who wanted to know if I, for Christ sake, was Philip St. Ives.

  “I’m St. Ives.”

  She frowned at a slip of paper she held. “Where the hell are the other two, Mr. Costly and Mr. Expensive?” She thrust the paper at me. “That’s what it says, Jack; I didn’t make it up.”

  I wondered if Coors had chuckled over his little joke.

  “They couldn’t come,” I said. “Instead, I brought Mr. Wisdom, who’s the solid-looking gentleman on your left, and Mr. Knight, the handsome devil on your right.”

  She grinned and stuck out her small hand and gave me a firm grip and then did the same thing to Wisdom and Knight. “I’m Arrie Tonzi,” she said, “and I’m your official embassy escort and if you don’t like girls, then you’ll have to see somebody about it tomorrow, because you’re stuck with me this afternoon.”

  “I think you’re beautiful, Miss Tonzi,” Wisdom said and smiled mournfully.

  “I think the State Department has been most thoughtful,” Knight said, giving her his best smile.

  “You’re right,” she said to me, “he is goddamned handsome.”

  “He’s an actor feller,” I said. “Sneaky.”

  “Hey! I know you!” she said to Knight.

  “I’d rather have money than fame,” Wisdom said to no one in particular.

  She put her face up close to Knight’s and stared at it. Then she snapped her fingers with a loud pop. In his face. “You did the lonesome fireman in all those deodorant commercials about two years ago.”

  “Yes,” Knight said. “We’d fallen upon hard times.”

  “If it weren’t for his residuals, he’d be a pauper,” Wisdom told the girl. “I, on the other hand, am rich beyond your wildest dreams and am I not fair of countenance?”

  “Who’re you,” she said, “Wisdom or Knight? I’m no good at names.”

  “I’m Wisdom,” he said. “Knight’s the prettied-up, married one over there.”

  “Did your wife come?” she said to Knight.

  “She couldn’t make it.”

  “Good,” she said and turned to me, dragging her long coat over the floor. “What are you, St. Ives, the tour leader?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You do this for a living?”

  “What?”

  “Ransom ambassadors.”

  “It’s my first ambassador,” I said. “I started out West, first ransoming sheep, then worked up to horses, and finally to people. But this is my first ambassador and I hope you don’t mind if I’m just a little nervous.”

  She widened her stance, put her fists on her hips, and looked up at me. “I would say you’re putting me on, but I can’t stand the phrase. You are bullshitting me, aren’t you?”

  Wisdom sidled up behind her and whispered hoarsely into her ear. “Look at his pallor, doll. The guy’s no more’n a week out of Dannemora.”

  “Who is he?” she demanded of me.

  “Mr. Wisdom provides our comic relief,” I said seriously. “He’s young and brash and fun-loving. Mr. Knight, a wiser, older head, will shortly pull out a briar pipe and suck on it to demonstrate his sadly gentle disapproval of Mr. Wisdom’s exuberance. I serve as the levelheaded balance, equally tolerant of youth’s foolish foibles and middle age’s dull despair.”

  “I think you’re also the chief bullshitter,” she said.

  Knight gestured with his pipe and leered at her. “You holding, baby?”

  “Jesus,” she said. “One actor and two nuts. I’m attached to the press attaché and he assigned me to stick with you and guide you around and see that you don’t get lost and order your meals and wipe your noses and buy presents for your wives.”

  “The actor there’s the only one who’s married, ma’am,” Wisdom said. “I’m a single man myself and Mr. St. Ives here’s become sort of a rakehell since his divorce.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “I wish I were Catholic so I could pray.” She looked up at me. “I’m also your translator if any of you ever shut up long enough to need one.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s our hotel?”

  “I booked you in at the Metropol,” she said.

  “Je Metropol hotel jedan dobar hotel?” Wisdom asked her quickly.

  She turned on him. “I thought none of you spoke the language.”

  Wisdom smiled and patted her rounded butt. “Don’t worry, love,” he said, winking. “It’s the only phrase I know.”

  “You do speak it, Arrie?” I said.

  “My father was a Hungarian who got us out in fifty-six,” she said. “My mother’s a Yugoslav. A Serb. We speak everything. We have to.”

  “How long have you been with the State Department?” Knight asked her.

  “Four years,” s
he said. “Hell, it’s almost five now. I was in Prague for two and I’ve been here nearly two. Have you got all of your luggage or have you lost half of it?”

  “We didn’t bring much since we’re not staying long.”

  “The car’s outside. When do you want to start tomorrow, early?”

  “What’s early?”

  “Eight—eight thirty.”

  “It’s the middle of the goddamned night,” the actor stated and then looked around for someone to contradict him. Nobody did.

  “Nine,” she said. “They speak English at the Metropol so you can manage breakfast by yourselves. The only thing I have you scheduled for in the morning is the Ministry of Interior. You’re to meet a Mr. Bartak there at eleven.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I thought you knew,” she said, “I don’t. They haven’t told me a goddamned thing because everybody’s got their bowels in an uproar about old grab-ass being kidnapped.”

  “Still at it, huh?” I said.

  “He never misses a chance and the younger the better.”

  “All right,” I said. “We see Mr. Bartak and then what?”

  “Then lunch. After that, you go calling on a Nobel poet. Anton Pernik.”

  “Does he speak English?”

  “I don’t know if he does, but his granddaughter does. If you want me to translate for you, I will.”

  I said, “We’ll see,” and then we pushed through the entrance to the airport and waited for the black embassy four-door Ford sedan which seems the standard U.S. conveyance for those who are greeted at foreign airports by the assistant to the press attaché. If you rank slightly higher up the protocol scale, you get a big new Mercury, also black.

  It was my first trip to Belgrade so I couldn’t compare it to what it had looked like before the Germans flattened it in 1941, or what it had looked like five or ten years ago when the building boom was on, or even 1500 years ago when the Huns sacked and razed it or when the Crusaders wandered through it in the eleventh century or when it was captured by the Turks in 1521. But on the twelve-mile trip into the city it looked new and fairly clean with lots of glass and concrete apartment buildings. In fact, it looked very much like Bonn and Barcelona and Birmingham (either England or Alabama) and I wished that it didn’t, but most cities look very much alike today.