The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  Could he really be, in other words, the mysterious Paris? Maybe so, I was starting to think.

  I realized with a start that he had been staring intently at me for several seconds. He waited until my eyes met his. “You still don’t know who I am, do you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “No.

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re lying.”

  He was getting antsier, more excited. Some impulse told me I’d be better off standing, and I got up again. “Rules of the game,” I said. “My chances of getting out of here alive are better if I don’t see anybody’s face.”

  “You think so? Then let me give you something to worry about.” To my surprise he snatched the mask from his head.

  I peered at his tense, unremarkable face for a moment, then shook my head. “I’m guessing you’re the one they call Paris.”

  “Yes.” The word was as much question as assent, as if he were prompting me to add something. “And that’s it?” he said, when I shook my head, looking puzzled. “You expect me to believe you have no idea who I am?”

  “I just said—you’re Paris . . . aren’t you? You’re a professional kidnapper. You—”

  The thin-lipped mouth firmed. “You know me better than that, Bryan. We’re old friends.”

  I studied him hard, then shook his head. “You’ve got me mixed up with someone else. I never saw you before in my life.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” He was whispering now, a hoarse, harsh whisper, “What’s the point of that? You remember me, all right. I’m warning you, you’re just making it worse for yourself in the end.”

  “Look, Paris—whoever you are—I’m telling you—”

  “Shut up, you goddamn . . .” He was openly angry now. Discs of color had popped out at the sides of his throat. “Don’t you tell me—” He caught himself, pulled the ski mask back over his head, turned on his heel, and stalked furiously out, slapping at the entrance flap when it caught against his shoulder.

  “Hey,” I called. “What about that razor?”

  Chapter 28

  Advantage, Bennett. Of course I knew who the guy was. His name was George Henry Camano, and while not exactly an old friend, he was an old acquaintance. I think it had begun to dawn on me with his repeated insinuations about my lying, and then, once I saw his face, that settled it. In fact, he had changed very little since my brief association with him. Until this moment, it would never have crossed my mind that the hapless George Camano I’d known and the famous, elusive Paris could conceivably be the same man. Well, people did learn from their mistakes, after all; they grew, they changed, and Camano had had a dozen years to do plenty of each.

  The last time I’d seen him had been back in September of 1998, that most climactic month of my adult life, in which I’d reached both the high-water mark of my brief career as a negotiator and, with the catastrophic shootout deaths of the Houghey twins, the low point that had ended it.

  The high-water mark had involved the man who’d just stormed out.

  George Camano—he had yet to metamorphose into “Paris”—had been part of the gang of three men and one woman in Los Angeles who had abducted Leslie Goldwin, the fifteen-year-old grandson of Linda Smith Rutledge, the president of Le Sport Cosmetics. Camano, a one-time political science instructor at a junior college in Santa Monica, had been the leader. He and another member of the foursome had waited for the kid in the parking garage under the company’s boutique on La Cienega Boulevard, where he parked his bike. They bundled him into the trunk of a waiting car and followed up with a demand for $3 million dollars. Two days later they made telephone contact with the Goldwin family, who then called me in to negotiate on their behalf.

  It was Camano who did most of the talking for them, and over the course of two week’s telephone-jockeying, the ransom had been brought down to $1.25 million. But it had been dangerous, touchy work. The kidnappers were flaky and unstable, sometimes highhanded and confident, sometimes on the ragged edge. I thought that some of them might be on drugs. They changed their demands without warning, reneged on their commitments, argued among themselves even while on the phone with me, and made wild threats and then withdrew them, always with the prospect of death hanging over the boy. On the very second day of contact, Camano had stated that the family would receive one finger a day until the ransom was paid.

  “If it takes longer than ten days, we’ll come up with something else,” he had said coldly. “Take long enough, and you’ll have all of him back for free.” Fortunately, it was one of the threats he didn’t live up to. In the end, it turned out that Leslie had been slapped around a few times, and he had been sedated most of the time, but nothing worse.

  By the sixth day the police, with whom I’d been working closely, had determined where the boy was being held: a rented duplex on Normandie Avenue near Santa Monica Boulevard. Worried about Leslie’s continuing safety, the captain in charge of the operation was in favor of a raid. He wanted to send in a tactical team to surround the building and force the kidnappers’ hands. The deputy chief of operations for the West Bureau, who was overseeing the case, tentatively agreed.

  But I was afraid that if they spotted the police, the delicate give-and-take I’d achieved with them would be tipped, and they might kill the boy. I had another plan: Hold off one more day to let the family pay the ransom. In the meantime, inasmuch as they had identified the two cars the kidnappers were using, the police would plant homing devices and bugs on both vehicles. After the gang picked up the ransom, even if they split up into two cars, it would be possible to follow them.

  I offered my plan in the deputy chief ’s office on Venice Boulevard, with the captain present. The chief, an unlikely cop with a doctorate in public administration, had reservations. “I thought you didn’t believe in lying to them,” he’d said.

  “I don’t—not if they could come back and hurt the Goldwin boy or anyone else,” I had replied. “But here we break faith after the fact, once we already have Leslie. Anyway, what would we be lying about? We tell them we’ll follow their instructions on the ransom—and we do. What else is going on, what happens next, we’re not required to tell them.”

  “But it’s still breaking faith with them. You’re not leveling with them. The result is the same.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “So what happened to all this bullcrap about trust that you’ve been feeding us?”

  “It still stands. What I said was that the kidnappers have to trust me for me to be effective. They have to believe I respect them as people and sympathize with their position. That’s not the same thing as saying I actually do. These are bad people. That’s a scared, friendless fifteen-year-old kid they’re terrorizing in there. I don’t respect them, and I don’t sympathize with their position. I’m just good at pretending.”

  The chief was shaking his head. “So all this leveling with them, all this trust-building . . . it’s just a tool? There’s nothing wrong with lying to these people as long as you can get away with it? Is that the way it works? Is that the way you negotiator-types see it?”

  No, not by a long shot, it wasn’t. Many—maybe most—of my colleagues would have problems with what I was suggesting. Some would call it an unacceptable violation of trust or impartiality. But then, none of my colleagues had quite the hands-on experience with kidnapping and captivity that I had. I had never claimed to be impartial. I despised the people who would do this, and I would do whatever I could, short of jeopardizing the innocent, to see them put away.

  “No,” I said, “just me.”

  He stood, walked to the double window, and stood looking down on the steady traffic of Venice Boulevard. “Look,” I said, “I have a single, number-one goal: getting Leslie out of there in one piece without anybody getting hurt—especially cops or innocent civilians. But I have secondary goals too—getting the ransom money back and locking up these cre
eps. Trust is a tool to accomplish those goals. In this case, not leveling with them is a tool too.”

  A slow smile spread across the chief’s face. “Son of a gun,” he said to the captain. “You know, I’m starting to like this guy.”

  My plan won out. The next day, after I asked for and got a final proof-of life indication to make sure the boy was still all right, a not unusual wild-goose chase ensued. Per Camano’s instructions, $1.25 million in used twenty- and fifty-dollar bills was bundled into five closed, unwrapped grocery cartons and placed in the trunk of my car. As directed, I then drove to a bar on Slauson Avenue and went to the pay phone. As soon as I got there, a call came in directing me to another public telephone, this one at the Burbank airport. From there I was sent back across Los Angeles to a parking lot at the far end of Huntington State Beach in Orange County, where I was to await yet another call. When it came, I was told to remove the parcels from my own car and place them in a green Plymouth family van parked near the telephone booth. The keys would be found taped to the underside of the rear license plate.

  Finally, I was to drive the Plymouth back to Los Angeles to the Fern Dell parking area in Griffith Park, leave the van there, walk down Fern Dell Drive to the corner of Western and Franklin Avenues, and hop on the first southbound bus that came along on Western, getting off anytime after Sunset Boulevard. From there I was on my own, free to find my way back to Huntington Beach to pick up my car. Leslie Goldwin would be released, Camano promised, when the ransom money was safely in their possession.

  As indeed, he was. The boy soon wandered, mumbling and dazed, into a carpet store in Santa Monica, thinking it was a police station. The four members of the gang, having meticulously taken all the right precautions—excepting a meticulous examination of the two cars in which they were traveling—were arrested at a date stand near Indio before the day was out. All but $800 of the $1.25 million was recovered as well. They had stopped on a whim to buy cowboy hats and boots in Palm Springs. The clerk recalled afterward that they’d made him nervous because they couldn’t stop laughing. He’d thought they were high—which they were, but not on drugs.

  When they were tried, one of the four turned state’s evidence against the others and was given a suspended sentence and put on probation. The rest all went to prison, with Camano getting the longest term. For me, it was the sweetest possible ending, and I took real pride in my part: Leslie Goldwin was back home; nobody had been hurt, let alone killed; the ransom, except for that $800, had been recovered; and the kidnappers got what was coming to them.

  Months later, at the end of the trial, Camano had spotted me in the courtroom. It was the first time we’d met face-to-face.

  “You son of a bitch, I trusted you!” he snarled at me as he was being taken out.

  “I guess next time you’ll know better,” I had replied.

  At the time it had seemed like a good answer. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  Chapter 29

  “I don’t have a lot of free time right now, Professor Parkington,” Teddy said when Zeta cornered him by the psychology faculty mail slots in the giant Rubik’s Cube that was Guthrie Hall. It had been two days since she’d asked for his research assistance, and she had finally taken matters into her own hands and gone looking for him.

  “I don’t think this will take very much of your time,” Zeta said. “And it is important.”

  “Well, actually, I already—”

  “Come into my office for a minute, will you?”

  Teddy rolled his eyes a little when he thought Zeta wasn’t watching (she was), searching for sympathy from the faculty secretary (there wasn’t any), and even said, “Sheesh!” under his breath, but he clumped resignedly behind her down the corridor to the cluttered lair of an office that was her due as an emeritus.

  “Now, then,” she said, plumping down behind her desk and indicating the lone visitor’s chair. “Sit.”

  Teddy looked at the two blue-bound volumes of the Journal of Experimental Psychology on the seat. “Where should I put these?”

  She gave him an ambiguous wave. “Anyplace you want.”

  Why her off-campus office should be as neat as a monk’s cell, while the office here in the department had never been anything but a shambles, was something that she found interesting, but not enough to devote any serious thought to.

  Teddy put the tomes on the floor and looked at her, radiating reluctance. Zeta knew what his problem was. For one thing, Teddy was not happy in his work. He had been brought on as a graduate research assistant for a joint psychology-anthropology project studying the reasons for turd-throwing in monkeys, but this year’s cutbacks had eliminated the study, and he was now functioning twenty hours a week as a general research dogsbody, available to one and all. For another, as an emeritus professor, Zeta would have no say in whether his assistantship would be renewed the following year, so any effort he spent in pleasing her was a waste of his time, as he saw it.

  “I need you to do some research for me. I want any newspaper references you can find from 1978—better check plus or minus a couple of years too—that relate to the kidnapping of a child named Bryan Bennett in Istanbul. His father’s company was called Driscoll Construction Enterprises.” She wrote it out for him as she spoke. “Bryan Bennett. Driscoll Construction Enterprises. Istanbul. 1978.”

  He looked at the paper and shrugged.

  “And I need a couple of journals.” These she’d already written out, and she handed the slip to him now. “Psychiatric Annals, volume 25, number 12, December 1995, and American Psychologist, volume 58, number II, November 2003.”

  Another look, another world-weary shrug.

  She eyed him. “Is there a problem here, Teddy?”

  “Professor Parkington, with all due respect, you could do this yourself in about twenty minutes.”

  “Computers and I don’t get along very well. We have issues.”

  “There’s nothing to it. You just enter the terms in a couple of search engines. You use the university code—”

  Zeta held up her hand. “Please. I’m a psychologist. I know how the mind works. There is only so much space in the brain, Teddy. The number of neurons is finite, and at my age mine are already filled to the brim. If I add inconsequential items like input parameters for search engines, then other things will have to go to make room, and I can’t take the chance of losing something I really need.”

  He looked uncertainly at her. “You’re . . . are you joking?”

  “Do I look as if I’m joking? Now be a good boy and get to work.”

  Chapter 30

  I knew that I was bound to pay for irritating Camano the way I just had, but, boy, it had felt great. In a way, though, I was almost sorry for him. I mean, imagine: years and years of stewing about how I misled and lied to him and ruined his life, of fantasizing about someday getting even with me. And then, out of nowhere, an astonishing stroke of luck drops me into his lap. His moment of retribution, of sweet revenge, of triumph has finally arrived. He snatches off his mask . . . and I don’t even remember the guy! Understandably, it had provoked the hell out of him, which had done my morale a world of good.

  Having said that, I thought it might be a good idea to “remember” him the next time we met.

  AS the evening wore on, I didn’t make any effort to force myself to stay awake. The experiences of the last two nights had given me some sense that, against all expectations, I might at long last be making some headway against the attacks. (Nice to think that something good might actually come out of all this.) And so, if anything, I was eager to see how I handled the next one.

  Well, maybe eager isn’t the right word. Let’s say curious.

  IT didn’t take long to find out. At some point in the night I woke up, choking and terrified, fingers clawing at the collar around my neck that wasn’t there. As always, the illusion held for just a second or two; as always, for another couple of seconds, there was relief at realizing that it wasn’t really there and that I wasn�
�t really back in my dungeon cave; and then—as always—the paralyzing, all-consuming fury of a panic attack had me by the throat more tightly than any collar could, blotting everything else out and curling me into a panting, fetal ball on the cot.

  I tried my best to fight back. Against every instinct, I made myself concentrate on what I was feeling, I kept up a steady drone of “self-limiting”—and found little relief. It wasn’t working. It was as bad as ever. Had I made no progress at all?

  I was probably fifteen excruciating minutes into it when I realized that something was different. Yes, I was endlessly suspended just off that cliff edge; yes, my heart felt as if it had knocked its way out of my chest and was bouncing around on the floor; yes, those wobbly wheels in my head were spinning loose and flying away, and yet . . . It took me a while to figure out what the difference was. It was this: At some level I knew that this unbearable state would end, that I wasn’t locked into it forever. It was as if there were a gauzy, shimmering curtain that had never been there before, on the other side of which, dimly perceived, was the “other” world, the real world. And this frenzied, delirious world that I was in was the imposter, a temporary state that I would soon emerge from . . . as I’d always done before.

  And that, believe me, changed everything: I wasn’t going crazy; I wasn’t dying; I was having a panic attack: a short-term, self-limiting panic attack. It made all the difference in the world. I fought back with renewed energy and could practically feel my enemy give way, bit by bit. Now, suddenly, a panic attack wasn’t so different from a headache or an upset stomach: wretched while it lasted, but bound to go away in time. I could feel the rigid tendons in my neck loosen, feel my heart slow down and climb back into my chest where it belonged, feel myself able to stop panting and take a deep, full, wonderful breath.