“Talk about what? You been smoking something or what?”
“We’re going away. The baby and I. We’re not staying here any more.”
He watched her very closely. He hardly seemed to be breathing.
She plunged on. “We’re just going away for a while, that’s all. Call it whatever you want. Say I want to get my act together. Say I need an ocean voyage. Call it a vacation. I need air.”
“Call it leaving me. Call it walking out on me. What the fuck are you talking about? You’re my wife. Ellen’s my daughter. What’s this you need a change, you need air, you want to go away for a while? What’s this shit? Who the fuck you think you’re talking to?”
“Please don’t make a bigger thing out of it than it is. I just need a little space to breathe for a while.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to unlace his shoes. He kicked them off and stared at them. Finally he looked up at her and she could see his disbelief and she realized her tentative approach had been cowardly. It would have been better to tell him the truth from the outset.
She tried to make up for it. “All right. Let’s have it out in the open. I’m leaving you.”
He looked a little punchdrunk. She’d caught him so badly off balance she nearly felt sorry for him.
She pounded it home: “She’s not going to grow up in a dope dealer’s home. My daughter’s not going to live in that environment. I can’t allow that. I’m taking her away from here.”
A deep breath: don’t run out of gas now. Keep going.
Finish it. “I’m sorry, Bert. You should have been content with the construction business. I can’t go on living with the kind of thing you’ve turned into. I can’t expose my daughter to that.”
He stared at her, his face closing up as she spoke—and then his continuing silence made her break out in a cold sweat.
She felt a growing desperation. “We can do this like civilized people or we can do it the hard way, you know. If that’s what you want I’ll have to get a lawyer and believe me I’ll get the nastiest bastard I can find. I don’t imagine any court in the world would grant custody of a baby girl to a dope peddler.”
She gathered up her handbag and the wrap she’d been wearing; still in evening clothes, stalking on high heels, she went toward the door. “We’re going now. I’ll let you know where to send our things.”
“Like hell you will.”
It wasn’t his words; it was the low even rasp of his voice that stopped her.
He said to her back, “Just stay put. I need some time to think about this.”
“Fine. Think about it all you want. I’ll let you know where you can reach me when you want to talk about it.”
“You want me to sleep in the other room tonight? Fine. All right. But nobody’s leaving right now.”
She turned to face him. “You can stop me from taking her tonight, of course. You’re strong enough. But I’ll just get a court order. Is that what I have to do?”
He shook his head—more in bafflement than in visible anger. “No divorce. No custody. That’s all. Okay? Understand?”
“You’re having some kind of Corsican dream. Let’s talk about reality.”
“I’ll tell you reality. Reality is you don’t take my daughter away from me. Reality is you don’t walk all over me in a divorce court. You don’t like it here any more? I’m sorry about that. But you made a bargain. You took my name, you took my money.”
“You can have them both back. I don’t need your money.”
“Yeah. How noble. Okay. Reality, now, reality is you don’t walk out on Albert LaCasse. And Ellen stays with her daddy.”
“Jesus, haven’t you heard a word I said?”
“Sure I heard you. Let’s discuss one simple fact.” He’d gone glacial; his enunciation became angrily precise:
“You file against me, you try to take Ellen away, anything at all along those lines, the whole thing comes to an end for you right then and right there.”
She gaped at him. “Are you actually threatening to kill me?”
“Kill you? What the fuck am I now, some kind of murderer? Christ almighty. Who said anything about killing anybody?” The big shoulders lifted; the expressive hands gesticulated, then subsided. He had control of his alarm now.
He descended into dark weary sadness. It was only partly an act, an aspect of his voluble Corsican theatricality; it was also a manifestation of genuine pain and loss. He brooded; he scowled; he searched for thoughts he could express.
And finally without heat he said: “I don’t think you have any idea how many subsidiaries I run, how many people owe me consideration.”
He looked up. She was watching him, puzzled, not able to anticipate where this might be leading.
“I got a truck-leasing lot on Northern Boulevard and twenty percent of a cable TV outfit in Trenton, okay? I got a piece of a resort hotel down in the Bahamas. I got nursing homes in Staten Island I built and I own, you know that?”
He was sitting on the bed, elbows on knees; his hands dangled from the wrists. He wasn’t looking at her.
“I got half of a little private hospital out in Amityville. What this leads up to, Madeleine, the point I’m trying to make, you’ve been acting very strange all of a sudden here and I think maybe you’re having a little nervous breakdown or something, and if you were to go and see some lawyer or try to steal my daughter out of her home or anything like that, then I guess I wouldn’t have any choice but to have you committed to a mental facility for observation and treatment. For however long it might take to straighten out your head.”
Then he looked up and smiled.
It was a warm smile full of bright pleased triumph: it was the most frightening expression she’d ever seen on a human face.
After that it was a question of opportunity and even more of courage.
Neither came easily. She realized belatedly how stupid it had been to forewarn him. Now the baby was always under supervision: there were nurses and nannies around the clock. No one prevented the mother from being with the baby; no one limited the mother’s freedom of movement—so long as the baby remained in view of employees—but the unspoken rules were manifest. She never doubted Bert had meant every word he’d said, quite specifically and literally. He was entirely capable of putting her away in a rubber room somewhere and locking it for the rest of her life.
He would grieve, of course. He would be mortally offended. He would be the suffering injured party, filled with pain. As the little girl grew up he would explain to her how her mother had gone mad and tried to break up the family and actually tried to kidnap poor baby Ellen from her loving daddy.…
She moved into the guest bedroom of the condominium. Bert allowed that much. He had enough dignity not to wish to share a bed with a woman who reacted catatonically to his advances; and he had enough concern for appearances to keep his liaisons discreet.
Evidently he convinced himself she was making her way through the confusions of some temporary emotional aberration. Every second or third day they’d cross paths or he’d seek her out; on those occasions he would say, “Come back when you’re ready,” and “Maybe you ought to talk to a shrink, what do you think? Might help you straighten yourself out,” and “Must be kind of lonely in that guest bedroom,” and “I’m not putting any pressure on. You let me know now, hey?” He had cast himself as the innocent, waiting for her to recognize her error—waiting her out with humble seraphic patience.
She was free to come and go. With acquaintances like Diane and with the few friends she had left from modeling days she kept up appearances because she didn’t know what else she could do; but regardless of outward appearances of unrestricted freedom she was imprisoned—tethered to a chain leash that Bert might yank at any time.
Of course it was intolerable. You could go mad this way in no time at all. Soon if they put her in a mental home it wouldn’t be a fiction.
The decision to escape was anticlimactic, really. There were only qu
estions of when and how. She had to find, or design, a way to abduct the baby and to disappear so neatly that Bert could neither follow nor find her.
That was when she went to Newark and pumped Ray Seale about the mechanics of skip-tracing and disappearance.
After that she set out methodically to lay her plans.
They nearly worked.…
He may have forgotten she had a key to the front hall closet; more likely he had forgotten nothing but simply could not credit the idea that even in this estrangement she might steal from him.
The suitcase of cash appeared in the closet on the occasional Thursday or Friday, whence it would be taken to Fort Keene on the weekend. There presumably it would be handed over to a pilot at the airstrip.
Heretofore she had believed these clandestine shipments of cash to be headed for numbered bank accounts in tax-haven countries where they would be deposited in behalf of a union leader or building inspector or zoning-ordinance politician.
Bert had done nothing to disabuse her of the idea. She’d even confronted him with it once and he’d retorted with predictable rationalizations—that if you wanted to do business at all you had to do it this way; when in Rome, etc.
Now she knew better. The pilots were accepting that cash in return for shipments of narcotics.
You can go with the kid. Or you can go with the kid and a suitcase full of cash. It’s Ellen’s legacy—Bert owes it to her—and besides let’s face it, disappearing with a year-old infant is going to be hard enough without having to scratch for a living at the same time.
So it needed to be a Thursday night when he came home from his banking rounds and locked the suitcase in the closet.
She was taken by surprise, therefore, when one Monday afternoon he came back from the office at half-past-three with Jack Sertic. She heard them in the living room; she heard the clink of ice in glasses and Bert’s voice: “Here you go. Okay, we can leave about midnight, drive up there easy, no traffic, meet the plane six o’clock in the morning. Get back here by one, two in the afternoon.”
“I think you’re right. It’s safer than sending errand boys.”
“Aeah. Go on home, take a nap. I’m going to get some sleep myself. Can’t keep the kind of hours I did when I was a kid. Meet me back here eleven thirty. I’ll tell Quirini to put up a couple Thermoses of coffee.”
She sat in the dining room ostensibly reading the Times until she heard Jack take his leave. Bert’s footfalls thudded along the carpeted hall. He looked in at her. “How you doing?”
“All right.” She returned his glance stonily, giving him nothing.
He gave her the benediction of a saintly smile—Take your time, darling, I’ve got all the patience in the world—and went away toward his room.
She decided to give it half an hour but the first twenty minutes took forever and that was all she could stand. She put her handbag on the hall table by the front closet, unlocked the door and looked inside. The suitcase was there. Locked—but heavy. No doubt of its contents. And the leather jacket with the diamonds sewn inside.
She hadn’t planned it this way. She hadn’t packed—not even a diaper in her handbag.
Hell, Matty, you can buy whatever you need. This is the bird in hand. Grab it.
Go. Run. Now.
She left the closet unlocked, left the handbag on the table, left her coat on its hanger; no point arousing the employees with clues. Unnerved and empty-handed she went back through the apartment toward the nursery.
When she passed the kitchen door she saw Philip Quirini emptying the dishwasher.
The nursery had been a second guest bedroom before Ellen’s birth. Now it was brightly wallpapered and stuffed toys were strewn everywhere on the floor and in the crib.
Marjorie was with the baby, feeding her with upended bottle.
Don’t hesitate. Look natural. Come on.
She swept right in. “I’ll do that.”
Marjorie surrendered the baby and the formula without remark and retreated into the corner with arms folded.
Cradling the baby, cooing while Ellen sucked at the nipple, she went out the nursery door with her pulse pounding so heavily it poured little black waves across her vision.
Past the kitchen door. Philip putting cups away on their hooks. Don’t go straight down the hall now; might make them suspicious. Go into the living room. Keep talking to the baby. Make it seem aimless—a random wandering through the apartment.
The glasses, half full with the ice mostly melted in them, remained on the bar from Jack Sertic’s visit. She carried the baby to the window and looked down at the avenue. Nothing remarkable down there: traffic crawling uptown in its usual afternoon snarl.
The subway was the best bet at this hour. There was an entrance just a block uptown on Lexington. She’d already decided that; she knew precisely where she’d go with the baby—down the Lexington Avenue line to Grand Central Station, change for the crosstown shuttle, get off at Eighth Avenue, walk two blocks to a car rental agency and hope they had something immediately available. If not, walk straight down the street into the Port Authority bus terminal and catch a bus to any town across the river in Jersey where they rented cars.
Speed was the trick. Get out of Manhattan; get into a car. After that there’d be time to breathe, time to find an open supermarket, time to study maps. But first she had to get the baby out of this apartment.
She carried Ellen to the front hall closet. The bottle wasn’t empty but the baby must have sensed her distress. Probably felt the bashing of her heartbeat. Ellen spurned the nipple and began to cry.
She put the bottle down on the hall table, hooked her handbag over her wrist and reached into the closet: folded the leather jacket over her forearm and picked up the suitcase, cradling the wailing baby in one arm, and turned to struggle with the deadbolt on the front door.
A torrent of adrenaline slammed through her; her palsied hand was barely able to turn the knob.
When Philip Quirini cleared his throat she nearly dropped the baby.
Perhaps it was the tone of the baby’s yelling; perhaps something else. Whatever it had been, she was caught. The Quirinis, husband and wife, came down the hall with carefully expressionless faces, their eyes taking in everything: the suitcase, the baby, the half-open apartment door.
Philip Quirini said very politely, “Let me give you a hand with that suitcase, Mrs. LaCasse.”
Marjorie contrived a sliver of a smile. “I’ll take the baby for you now.”
He had his hand on the edge of the door, blocking her exit; Marjorie was reaching for Ellen. Over the infant’s howls Marjorie said, “The baby’s not supposed to go out in this weather”—what weather? It was a normal day for early summer—and she saw Marjorie’s glance fall upon the suitcase again and saw the determined set of Marjorie’s jaw under the polite cool subservient smile and she knew it was no good: she couldn’t get away with the baby but neither could she turn back now because within two minutes Bert would be told what she’d tried to do and her next stop, and last one, would be commitment to that rubber room.
No choice. None at all.
She surrendered the baby. “Tell my husband I’ll be away for a few days. Tell him not to worry.” And picked up the suitcase and took it with the jacket through the door. They didn’t move to stop her. That wasn’t included in their instructions. They only smiled and she watched the door swing shut, cutting off her view of the baby.
She could still hear Ellen’s yowling when she crossed the vestibule and put her key in the switch that summoned the elevator. The sound dwindled as the baby was carried away toward the nursery.
Would they awaken Bert right away?
Probably.
Chances were she only had a minute or two to get away. Where was the damned elevator?
What else could I have done? There must have been something. Can I go back now and get her? Isn’t there some way?
She scrambled feverishly amid the labyrinth of visions. But all of them we
re dead ends.
She heard the elevator mechanism. At least it was moving. But where was the car?
Back in the apartment she thought she heard a door slam.
My God. Come on!
Nothing to do but run for it. Hide. Set up a nest somewhere safe. Then come back when he’s no longer expecting it and take the baby away from him.
Footsteps in the apartment. Pounding hard on the carpet. Coming forward. Bert’s stride.
The car arrived; the doors slid open. She kicked the suitcase into the elevator, swung inside, jabbed her key into the slot.
The doors were closing and she just had a glimpse of Bert as he came plunging out of the apartment. He was stretching forward, trying to claw at the closing doors, but they came together before his hand reached them.
The car lurched and began to slide downward.
She wept and wept and wept.
47 All the way up the seventeen miles of one-lane blacktop she’s tense and rigid at the wheel. If you get trapped on this road—if Bert’s decided to come up a day early this week or if one of them is driving toward you from the house right now and recognizes you …
She remembers evenings on this road when you had to stop and wait for the deer to finish bounding across the road—counting them as they leaped: five, six, seven. One time, with Ellen hardly ten weeks old in her arms, she counted out twelve of them.
A car coming forward: she glimpses a glitter of sun reflection as it moves toward her beyond a bend in the trees.
Oh Jesus. If it’s one of ours …
Every quarter mile or so there’s a pullout to allow oncoming traffic to pass. This one happens to be on her left as she approaches it; that’s good in this case because it will put her on the far side of the vehicle—harder for the oncoming driver to see clearly; and her door opens directly onto the woods in case she’s forced to duck and run.
It comes in sight—a white Lincoln, muddy and bug-spattered. She pulls her head back into the shadows of the cab and peers through her sunglasses. The driver of the car—quick glimpse of a black man in a grey windbreaker—waves his thanks and drives by. The car has M.D. plates.
Necessity Page 15
