Protocol for a Kidnapping

by Ross Thomas

  “Stepinac was younger than you, all right,” the old man said, “but I don’t know about the eyes. His seemed—well—steadier. Who was he? There’s no secret. He was Arso Stepinac and he said he was an official or something with the UDBA, the State Security Police. I never did learn why he was questioning me.”

  12

  THEY CAME FOR ME at three o’clock in the morning. There was the knock at the door, loud enough for me to hear, but not so loud as to disturb the neighbors. Still, it disturbed Arrie Tonzi who rolled over in the bed and sleepily asked, “What time is it?”

  “Three o’clock,” I said, fumbling for my trousers. “Go back to sleep.”

  I still like to think that Arrie was in my bed at three o’clock that morning because my virtues were admirable, my personality engaging, and my charms irresistible. But it was probably because of the wine that we’d begun dinner with the night before. We had dined together alone in my room because I wanted to stay by the phone in case the kidnappers called and when I’d invited Arrie to join me, she accepted. Wisdom and Knight had gone off to explore Belgrade.

  The wine had led to talk and the talk had led to shared intimacies which had led to that first, tentative embrace, the one where two lonely persons know they can stop if they want to, but neither of us had wanted to, so we had made love to each other pleasurably, fondly, tenderly, even humorously, and that had led to me groping for my trousers at three o’clock in the morning.

  There were two of them at the door, but only one of them had a gun, an automatic whose make I didn’t recognize. They were both young, in their mid-twenties, and the one with the automatic motioned me back into the room. I backed into it and they came in, closing the door behind them. The one without the gun said something in Serbo-Croatian and when it was apparent that I didn’t understand him, he started making motions with his hands.

  “He wants you to get dressed,” Arrie said.

  They turned toward the bed where she was sitting and the one with the gun grinned at her. She hadn’t bothered to pull the sheet up any higher than her lap, but it seemed to concern the two young men more than it did her.

  “I’ve figured out that he wants me to get dressed,” I said. “Why don’t you ask him what happens after I do?”

  She said several sentences or a long paragraph in Serbo-Croatian to the pair and the one with the gun answered her briefly. “You’re to go with them,” she said. “They’ll bring you back.”

  “Ask them why the gun,” I said and before she could, I said, “Never mind, it’s obvious. Ask when I’ll be back.”

  I was putting on my shoes and socks when she said, “They say that you’ll be back by four thirty.”

  “If I’m not,” I said, “call the cops.”

  “You want me to call them anyway?”

  “Tell those two that you will if I’m not back by four thirty.”

  She told them and I watched their reaction. The blond one with the gun shrugged, but kept it pointed carelessly at me. The other one, who had brown hair, grinned at Arrie who drew the sheet up around her shoulders. Probably because she was cold.

  “You don’t seem very excited,” she said to me in an accusing tone as I shrugged into my topcoat.

  “Neither do you,” I said.

  “Maybe they’re the kidnappers,” she said.

  “Ask them.”

  She asked them and they both looked puzzled and the one with the gun waved it at me. I nodded and smiled at him and said, “Excuse me.” I crossed over to the bed and tilted Arrie’s face up to mine and kissed her gently.

  “I can call down to the desk and—” I interrupted her with another kiss.

  “I think they speak English,” I said, “and I don’t think we’re going near the desk.”

  “Why?”

  “It snowed late last night, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  I kissed her again and one of them grunted impatiently. I gave him a backhanded wave without turning. “Look at their boots,” I said. “They’re bone-dry.”

  She peered around my shoulder. “By Jove, Holmes, you’re right.”

  “As usual,” I said and turned toward the door. The one without the gun opened it and all three of us went through it and turned left toward the stairs rather than right toward the elevator. We went up two flights of stairs, down the corridor, and stopped in front of a door. The man without the gun knocked twice and then pushed the door open. He gestured for me to go through and when I did, the first thing I saw was the man who couldn’t make up his mind whether his name was Artur Bjelo or Arso Stepinac.

  “I saw some old friends of yours yesterday,” I said.

  He remained seated in a chair by the writing desk and looked at me casually, as if I’d dropped by to borrow a cup of brown sugar. “Pernik,” he said.

  “And his granddaughter. I can see now why you wrote her all those letters. Congratulations. She’s lovely.”

  He stood up and crossed to a window and looked out of it, his back to me. The two he had sent to fetch me were still in the room, the one with the gun by the door, the other one in a chair near the bath. The gun was no longer in sight.

  “I am not engaged to Gordana Panić, Mr. St. Ives, and my name is not Artur Bjelo.”

  “Is it Arso Stepinac?”

  He turned and nodded slightly. “When it suits me, it is.”

  “Why the brush at the Frankfurt airport?”

  “Brush?”

  “You know. The me no speaka the English routine.”

  “That should be obvious,” he said. “I wanted to avoid being seen with you.”

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t think that matters. Not to you.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll try another one. Who attempted to run you down in New York?”

  He smiled and it was the familiar boyish grin, but I was sure he would smile just that same way when he was sixty, if he lived that long, but it wouldn’t mean anything then either. “I’ve wondered about that,” he said. “It may have been that someone mistook me for you, Mr. St. Ives. You’ve probably remarked our resemblance. Curious, isn’t it?”

  It was also curious that his English was better than it had been when I first met him.

  “And you think that someone was after me?”

  He shrugged. “It must be.”

  I decided to try a pre-prebreakfast cigarette and fumbled in my pockets for it without success. “You have a cigarette?” I said to Stepinac, but before he had a chance to say no the man with the gun was at my elbow offering me one of his, along with a light.

  I looked at him. “You speak English after all,” I said.

  He smiled slightly. “A little. Your friend is very nice, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you know Miss Tonzi well?” Stepinac asked.

  “Is that supposed to be a remark or a question?”

  “Yes,” he said and nodded apologetically. “I did not put it too well considering the circumstances. What I meant to ask is, did your Mr. Coors brief you on Miss Tonzi? Your instructions did come from Coors, we know that.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Really, Mr. St. Ives, we seem to do nothing other than supply questions as answers to each other’s questions.”

  “I’m sorry as hell,” I said, “but that’s how I answer questions at three o’clock in the morning after I’m rousted out of bed at the point of a gun by somebody I know nothing about except that he tells an awful lot of lies. But I’ll answer one of your questions, the one about Arrie Tonzi. The answer’s no, no one briefed me about her, no one called Coors or anything else, and if you think you’re going to add to my day by telling me that she’s a top U.S. agent, what the hell else do you think I expected to be saddled with on a deal like this? If she is an agent, I don’t care which outfit she’s with—State, CIA or what have you. I don’t even know if she’s tops; she may be just mediocre, but you’d know more about that than I do and you’d certainly care a hell of a lot
more.”

  After I’d finished, Stepanic looked a bit discomfited, but he overcame it with his ever ready smile, remarking, “She’s CIA, but very junior.”

  “What kind of a cop are you? I said.

  “You’re certain that I am one?”

  “We’re back to questions to questions,” I said. “Of course I’m sure. Nobody but a cop would try that jilted lover routine that you tried on me in New York. I’ll admit that your poet act’s not bad.”

  “Well, we can only try, can’t we, Mr. St. Ives? That’s why we’re seeing each other this morning. Again I’m going to try to convince you to delay the exchange of Anton Pernik and his granddaughter for your ambassador.”

  “For how long?” I said.

  “Five days. No more.”

  “What happens then?”

  “That is not your concern.”

  “It’s out of my hands.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do. I’m in a sellers’ market and when the kidnappers offer I have to buy or it may not be offered again. If I stall, they may grow suspicious, and if they grow suspicious, Ambassador Killingsworth might never be heard from again. And if that happened, I’d have nobody to blame but you, but you’d have what you wanted because the exchange of Pernik and his granddaughter would be delayed not for five days, but forever.”

  “You have a very suspicious mind.”

  I nodded. “That’s right, I do, and that’s because most of my business associates are either policemen or thieves. It would make anyone suspicious, just like you make me suspicious. Guess what I did when you left my hotel in New York?”

  “You called the delegation at the United Nations to see if an Artur Bjelo was employed there. They said no, of course.”

  “Anton Pernik says that you’re a cop and that you’re with the UDBA. What if I called them and asked if they happen to have an Arso Stepinac on the payroll?”

  Stepinac smiled at the suggestion. “I would strongly advise you not to do that, Mr. St. Ives.”

  “All right,” I said. “I won’t. What’s next, the threat?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It seems logical enough. Since I’ve refused to stall the kidnapping exchange, you make a threat, preferably a dire one.”

  Stepinac turned and walked over to the window again and looked out at the weather. “I think you’re forgetting something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Money.”

  “You’re right,” I said, “I did forget that. It’s not like me.”

  “Are you very expensive, Mr. St. Ives?”

  “I don’t think you can afford me.”

  “I could offer you ten thousand pounds.”

  “Don’t.”

  “It would not interest you?”

  “Ten thousand pounds always interests me,” I said. “But what I have to do to earn it doesn’t.”

  “You really have to do nothing.”

  That’s what a broker in Cleveland had said to me once. I’d been called in to buy back a half-million dollars’ worth of stolen negotiable securities for the bargain basement price of $100,000. It had gone smoothly and as the broker was counting out the securities on his desk, he’d said, “Insurance is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” Before I could agree with him he’d gone on to say, “If something had gone wrong and the thieves hadn’t shown up, I would have been fully covered.” He’d counted out $50,000 worth of securities and pushed them toward me. Then he’d looked at me, much as Stepinac was looking at me now, trying to gauge whether he’d placed too low a price on whatever it was he was trying to buy, my integrity, I suppose, perhaps my conscience, or maybe just my silent acquiescence, which, in the broker’s opinion, wasn’t worth more than $50,000 because, after all, as he’d said, “You don’t really have to do anything.”

  He had been right, of course, and so was Stepinac. I didn’t have to kill anyone or steal anything. All I had to do was lie a little, and that was painless, especially for me, and after I was through lying I would be richer by $50,000 or £10,000 or whatever my going rate was and none would be the wiser.

  “You hesitate, Mr. St. Ives,” Stepinac said. “Is my offer too low?”

  I sighed and looked around for an ashtray. “No,” I said, “it’s just that my price is too high.”

  Stepinac nodded and said, “Your answer has some interesting overtones and it’s too bad that we don’t have more time to explore them. We Serbs are partial to such discussions. In fact, you may have noticed, even in your short time here, that we enjoy any kind of a discussion, regardless of topic.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said.

  Stepinac walked over to the writing desk, picked up a sheet of paper, looked at it, put it down, and then tapped his lower lip thoughtfully. The man with the gun yawned and looked at his watch. The man in the chair by the bath caught the yawn and repeated it. Stepinac turned back toward me and I could see that he had another question.

  “Do you take pride in this profession of yours, Mr. St. Ives?”

  “Pride?”

  “Yes, pride. Do you ever sense a feeling of accomplishment after one of your successful negotiations, a feeling of craftsmanship perhaps?”

  “Pride’s too weighty a word,” I said. “Satisfaction’s better, I suppose, but there’s no feeling of creative accomplishment, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Nothing like that felt by the artisan, or the lawyer, or the artist, or the doctor?”

  “Or the cop?”

  “Yes,” he said, not smiling, “even the cop.”

  “I perform what should be an unneeded service,” I said. “That rules out pride, right there.”

  “An unneeded service,” Stepinac said thoughtfully, and then, catching the scent of a discussion, added, “If you wish to carry that to a philosophical extreme, a doctor, a lawyer, even a policeman performs the same thing.”

  “No,” I said. “Doctors and lawyers and policemen would be unnecessary only if we lived in a moral and physical Utopia. That’s still a few years off. A go-between is called in when the victim and the representatives of the system, usually the police, agree that the system’s broken down and that they must operate outside of its framework for a while. So a go-between is hired and the rules are suspended while he does his job. Afterwards, the rules are reinstated and the system again tries to catch and punish whoever violated its rules. So I work only outside the system and only when its rules have been suspended. You don’t find much recognition in that territory, and pride or sense of accomplishment is usually dependent upon recognition of some sort.”

  Stepinac tapped his lower lip again. “Then why do you do it if it offers none of the usual rewards? Not for financial gain, surely. You can make as much at some less bizarre occupation.”

  “Money’s only part of it,” I said. “I’m lazy and this way I don’t have to work too hard or too often. I can usually choose or reject my employer, depending upon whether his problem interests me. There’s no competition and that’s good for a man who has no ambition. And then it might be that I like other persons’ troubles better than my own.”

  “Interesting,” Stepinac said, picked up the sheet of paper from the writing table again, glanced at it, and put it down. “I was hoping that I might bribe you, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “I seem to have failed.”

  “It could be that you didn’t try hard enough.”

  He smiled boyishly. “Somehow I don’t think so, which is to your credit, of course. Now I must employ another method to delay the exchange.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t tell you. However, what I’m about to say is not a threat, dire or otherwise.”

  “All right.”

  “And I’ll apologize in advance for its melodramatic note.”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s only this, Mr. St. Ives. Before the week is over you will wish you had taken the bribe. Good night.”

  Arrie was up and pacing the floor when I got back to
my room.

  “Who was it?” she said.

  “Nobody you know.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They want me to delay the exchange.”

  “Why?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Jesus, what did they say?”

  “That you work for the CIA.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let’s go back to bed,” I said.

  “They know,” she said. “Huh.”

  I unbuttoned my shirt. “Didn’t you expect them to?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “What did you say?”

  “When they told me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told them I didn’t mind—that you probably needed the job.”

  13

  THE CALL FROM THE kidnappers came through at 11:05 that morning and the one who did the talking sounded Italian and spoke English with an American accent, but since World War II most of them speak it that way.

  “We can’t talk over this phone,” he said.

  “I agree.”

  “At eleven thirty a note’s gonna be delivered to you at the hotel. Be at the hotel desk to get it in person. It’ll tell you what to do. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said and hung up.

  At eleven thirty I was strolling up and down before the hotel desk trying to pick out the plainclothesmen in the Metropol lobby. There were two possibles and three probables. A taxi driver came in and handed an envelope over to the desk clerk who glanced at it, nodded at me, and smiled when I thanked him for it. The taxi driver looked surprised when he was led off by two men, one of whom I’d scored as a possible, the other as a probable.

  I went back up to my room to read the note. It was hand lettered—printed would be better—with a ballpoint pen and it said: “Be at public phone at NE corner Strosmajerova and Risanska near central train station at one sharp! Don’t be followed!! Burn this!!!”

  All right!!! I thought and spent a few moments trying to memorize the street names before I gave up, located them on a city map, and marked the location with a big, black X. I used the toilet to dispose of the note.