The Puzzled Heart

by Amanda Cross

  “I have a proposition,” Toni said then, “a plan which I think will be a good, if chancy idea. But it’s you two who will have to implement it, so let me outline it and then you can tell me what you think. Here’s my plan. So far, no one knows that Reed has been found and liberated, except those four tootsies locked in the room with Harriet. I have no doubt they are getting very nervous and regretting their part in this kidnapping.”

  “From what I saw of them,” Reed interrupted, “I think you are right, except perhaps for the blonde with the short skirt. She seemed almost to be enjoying herself.”

  “We’ll have to watch out for her with special care,” Toni responded, while Kate looked at Reed with speculation and concern. “What I should do at this moment is call the police and turn them in on a kidnapping charge. The police will, I think, certainly with your lawyerly help”—she nodded at Reed—“persuade the girls to turn state’s evidence, that is, to gain immunity in exchange for ratting on the others—that is, the boys. That would be a very useful thing to do, and I certainly would like to nab those boys and scare the shit out of them. However, there’s another way.” She paused, making certain she had the attention of her listeners.

  “This would be a lot harder on you two,” she said, “and whether or not we do it depends on how eager you are to catch, not the boys and girls, but the grownups and the organization, if any, behind all this. I don’t think the boys originated this plan, but I could be mistaken. Reed, Kate had a theory involving disaffected students of hers, and she was certainly right up to a point. But I think those students were simply instruments of a larger and more dangerous purpose.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Reed said.

  “Good.” Toni looked at Kate. “What I suggest is this: we don’t rescue Reed publicly. We don’t call the police. We hold the girls for a time, let Kate write the article the kidnappers demanded—let me get this whole plan out,” she insisted, as Kate started to object, “and keep the girls happy while, at least for a few days, we try to root out the adult manipulators.”

  “I won’t write an article saying I’ve repudiated feminism and joined the Christian right, and that’s final,” Kate said with some asperity.

  “I agree with her,” Reed said. “Even if we later set forth all the reasons for her having done it, the harm would be done.”

  “All right, all right,” Toni said. “I won’t argue the point. But let’s say that Kate writes something—what is yet to be decided. Will you go along with the rest of the plan?”

  Reed and Kate looked at each other. “I’m sorry you haven’t more time to consider,” Toni said, “but if I’m going to call the police I have to decide that soon. Delays are hard to explain.”

  Reed took Kate’s hand. “Let’s say we won’t call them, if Kate agrees. What next, or haven’t you got that far? And do Kate and I just camp out here?”

  “I thought you might have a friend you can impose on,” Toni said. “Preferably one without any doormen or lobby attendants.”

  “There’s Leslie,” Kate said. “She lives in a loft. It’s just a matter of pressing buttons and then having them send the elevator down. Of course, there’s always the chance of someone else in the building coming in or out.”

  “We’ll have to risk that. Can you call her?”

  Kate looked at Reed, who nodded. “All right,” Kate said, walking over to the phone. The telephone conversation was short. Leslie, being an old and true friend, had simply said, if you’re in trouble, come and stay. I’ll give you the bedroom.

  “Which,” Kate explained to Reed on the way down there in Toni’s car, “means that they are giving us the only enclosed room in the loft. They’ll sleep on a futon in the living room. Very good of them. There’s privacy as to sight, though not a lot as to sound, if you see what I mean.”

  “We’ll whisper,” he said, consoling her.

  But when they arrived, Leslie and Jane, having welcomed them, exclaimed suitably over Banny asleep in Reed’s arms, and asked if there was anything they needed, announced they were going out for the evening. “Previous engagement,” Jane said, before their protests reached expression. “A friend is doing a gig and we’ll stay for the party afterward. Help yourself to anything you want. We’ll satisfy our curiosity in the morning.” Leslie hugged Kate again, and they left.

  Reed pointed to a bottle of Scotch prominently offered on the kitchen counter.

  “Would you rather have a brandy?” Kate asked.

  “Well, surely it’s never too early to begin to train her to bring brandy, though she does look rather young,” Reed remarked. He put Banny down on the couch beside Kate, and went for the Scotch. “How old is she? Where did you get her, and is she to be part of the family? As to your question, Scotch would be fine.” He poured some for himself and Kate. “Is there something for Banny?”

  Poor Banny, Kate thought, destined to be our only topic of conversation. “She isn’t ours to keep,” Kate said as they returned to what Kate called the living room, although it was only a section of the loft with living room furniture. “She’s on loan, as the excuse for undetected messages. I’ll explain it all sometime. You talk, Reed. Tell me what happened. Are you really all right?”

  “I think we should keep her as our mascot. She’ll give us an excuse to meet in the park and exchange kisses. All right, yes, I’m all right. I got nabbed, was kept for a day or two in the smelly room of one of the guys who nabbed me, and then I was moved to the place where you found me. It was only a matter of a few days, though it seemed like forever.”

  “It seemed that way to me too. Were they mean to you?”

  They sipped their Scotch. To Kate’s discomfort, conversation between her and Reed, which had not seemed possible in Toni’s presence, was still a bit stilted, awkward, not at all what she had supposed it would be when finally—or if, as for a time she had thought—they met.

  “Not mean.” Reed contemplated his glass, emptied it, and then took Kate’s hand. “Just seductive,” he said, “continually, and more and more persuasively. That was after we got to the girls’ apartment, of course.”

  “What did they want to seduce you to do?”

  “Screw them. As acrobatically as possible, I assumed.” Reed took a large swallow of Scotch and got up to fetch more. He took Kate’s glass too.

  “Did you resist,” Kate asked, “and if so, why, and if not, why not?” She realized that her tone did not achieve quite the quality of playful indifference for which she had aimed.

  Reed answered flatly enough. “Good question. I’d like to say it was out of determined fidelity to you, despite the temptations and their temporary nature, but the truth my darling is that if a fuck would have got me out of there, I would have been more than willing, even without the flaunted lusciousness of the seducers. The last nymph, the blonde, half naked and alluring, did her best. I suggested that we repair to a hotel where we could enjoy ourselves in guaranteed isolation. When she declined that, I knew I’d been right.”

  “Right about what? Am I being particularly stupid?”

  “No, just insufficiently male. I’d suspected from the beginning that what they wanted were photographs, video, and stills. Think what they could have done with them. ‘Feminist’s husband finds relief at last,’ or whatever nastiness they, with the eager help of the media, might have made public. Not to mention that such pictures would not do my career any particular good, whatever delight they might have given the majority of my colleagues. They went on about wanting mature men like me, blah, blah, but when the blonde refused the hotel, I knew they had to stay where the cameras were operating. I do hope Harriet looks for them.”

  “Hadn’t we better let her know?”

  “I daresay she and Toni will have thought of searching the place. They were clever to figure out where I’d be.”

  “I figured it out,” Kate said, with a degree of insistence that surprised her. “Not that they didn’t do good work. Oh, damn.”

  “Please do
n’t cry, Kate, that is a quite unsuitable response to my return. Finish your drink. Tell me about every moment you spent since I failed to show up at that restaurant. Because Toni is right. We’ve got to get our wits working. We’ve got to figure out, starting tomorrow, who was behind all this. Sure, it was boyish and girlish pranks, but they didn’t invent it, and they didn’t work out the details. They told me that I would be kept until you wrote an article saying you were no longer a feminist but were embracing all the family values of the Christian right. I said no one would believe it, but they said you had only a short time in which to comply. I hope like hell you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t, but I would have if we hadn’t found you. And I can’t stop crying. Did you really want to screw those girls?”

  “Passionately. Have you ever heard the phrase to fuck somebody, as in ‘He really fucked me over, man?’ I would have enjoyed fucking them over nine ways to Christmas. But I didn’t. Kate, what’s happened to your sense of humor?”

  “I think I’ve lost it,” Kate said.

  “No you haven’t,” Reed said. “Never, never. It must have been horrible for you. I was just locked up, fed regularly, and shown a parade of seductive young things. You were sick with worry. If you want to really laugh, try to think of our positions reversed.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Kate said.

  “No,” Reed said, “it’s not. It was a mean and horrible thing to do to you, and I have every intention of finding the people behind this and making them pay. It’s not any different, except in degree, from fundamentalist violence everywhere. If people don’t see things their way, they deserve to suffer. I knew this country had become vulnerable to terrorists, and now I know it personally. So do you. Shall we get really drunk? I wish we could switch to champagne, however inadvisable that would be, but we’re lucky to have what we do. You have good friends, Kate.”

  And at last she smiled.

  Six

  THE next morning four of them, Kate and Reed and Toni and Leslie, held a council of war in Leslie’s loft. Harriet was guarding the “girls,” as Toni and Reed continued to call them. Jane, who—as Leslie the artist liked to put it—worked for a living, had left earlier. She was in their confidence but was not able to be part of their consultation. Leslie, who had been brought up to date on the events and discussions of the previous evening, announced her agreement with Toni’s plan.

  “You two can stay here as long as you like,” she said to Reed and Kate. “After grandchildren, believe me, you will hardly be noticed.” But of course they would be. Lofts are designed for one or two people, never more, not unless one built a lot of rooms—in which case why not rent an ordinary apartment? Leslie and Jane had raised the bedroom walls to assure themselves of privacy in case of guests, but otherwise it was all open space.

  “That’s generous of you and Jane,” Toni said, “but I think it will make most sense to let Kate and Reed go home. Kate can go home in the ordinary way. We’ll have to sneak Reed in, wrapped in a Persian rug like Cleopatra if necessary. He’ll have to pretend not to be there with Kate, which, once he’s in, shouldn’t be too hard. But what about your teaching?” she asked Reed.

  “If I’m kidnapped, I can’t teach. I’ve already missed classes. It’s true that when they learn that I could have returned and didn’t there’ll be a certain amount of explaining to do, but I think I can straighten it all out and make it up to the students. The question is, once Kate and I are returned home, what next?”

  “Let’s get you home first,” Toni said. And by providing suitable diversions for the doorman and arranging for the fire stair to be opened for Reed’s ascent (the elevator being closely monitored), getting him in the apartment was accomplished without too much difficulty. Toni, Kate was mildly amused to observe, went into her sexy act to distract the doorman while she, Kate, having returned to the apartment in the elevator, descended the stairway to the ground floor and from inside released the gate for Reed and Toni, who by that time had persuaded the doorman to look around the corner to see if her car was likely to be ticketed. It was all a matter of a few moments. The doorman, having earlier been memorably greeted by Kate, was prepared to swear that she had returned to the apartment alone with the cute puppy.

  The three of them, once home, and after Reed had changed his clothes, settled down to continue their council.

  Toni began. “With the girls held in their apartment incommunicado—that’s going to be Harriet’s job, dealing with the phone, visitors, whatever comes up—everyone but those girls will assume Reed is still properly kidnapped. Either the powers that be, the ones we’re searching for, will get in touch with the girls about Reed or they won’t. If they don’t, fine. If they do, we have to have a plan. The point is, you see, that with Kate willing to write her article, they have every reason to wait patiently.”

  “But surely they’re going to want a report from the girls.”

  “Surely, and with Harriet’s threats the girls, or the one she selects, will tell them what we want them to hear. This can’t go on for very long, as you can see, so I suggest that Kate send in her article today or tomorrow.”

  “Saying what exactly?” Kate asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Reed said. “If you don’t send in an article, they’ll threaten to do something terrible to me, but since I’m here, they can hardly do it. They would then, of course, find out I wasn’t where they thought I was. If you do send in the article it will come to exactly the same thing in the end, since the article, however cleverly you devise it, will not be what they want. So”—here he turned to Toni—“why should Kate bother writing?”

  “Here’s my reasoning,” Toni said. “They’re planning to run the article in one of their right-wing journals or papers, so you know that what you write will be printed. Why not write something in code, like every other word says what you mean while the whole reads as though you were saying what they wanted? Then, when the article is picked up by the media, you can tell the whole story. And the code will indicate that you haven’t really done what they wanted but rather the opposite.”

  “Where will that get us?” Kate asked.

  “Probably nowhere. But it will give us a short time in which to trap them before they discover that Reed has eluded them. In that short time, we’ll try to set up a case of kidnapping and blackmail against the bastards. If you don’t send in the article in a day or so they’ll take immediate action of some sort and discover that Reed’s gone, and we’ll have lost the testimony of the girls, who when that happens will have every reason to deny their part in the kidnapping.”

  “You overestimate me,” Kate said. “I’ve never been any good at word games or codes, much as I admire those people who can break them. But I know what I’ll do. When I was visiting Radcliffe many years ago, a young man gave a graduation speech that the whole audience applauded, all about law and order, getting crime off the streets, that sort of thing, and when they had finished their wild expressions of appreciation, he told them his words had been written by Hitler. I’ll bet I can find a passage from Hitler that they will accept as my perfect renunciation of all women’s rights. Later, I’ll identify the author.”

  “Sounds okay—if you think they’ll go for it. I suspect they will.”

  “The first thing Hitler was against was women outside the home. Family values, provided the family was Aryan, were his ideal. He didn’t get around to killing the Jews till later.”

  “The things you know,” Toni said. “Well, I’m off. Reed, do take care not to be seen by anyone like a delivery man, or the man on the back elevator, or someone cleaning the hall—you know.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Reed said.

  “I know, I know.” Toni smirked at him. “You think, and Kate thinks, and Harriet certainly thinks, that I’m too bossy and too eager to take charge. But I get things done, and I figure results are better than smooth manners. If you disagree, I’m always dischargeable.”

  “We’ll take it
under advisement,” Reed said, smiling. “While Kate’s searching out the perfect passage from Hitler, don’t forget to let us know what the next step is.”

  “Check your e-mail,” Toni said. “I’ll be back.”

  “I thought you thought they were keeping a watch on me,” Kate said.

  “So they probably are. But with Leslie visiting and maybe Jane and Harriet, they can’t keep track of everybody. And do remember, dear Kate, we are no longer worried about Reed’s safety.”

  And with that, she swept from the room and the apartment.

  “Bossy but probably effective,” Reed said.

  “I’m holding my opinion in abeyance,” Kate responded. “Must I rush off and contemplate the writings of Adolf Hitler?”

  “Not immediately,” Reed said. “We’ll both work on it in a little while. Right now, I could use a bit of a nap. Where does Banny sleep, by the way?”

  “In our bed, I’m afraid. She was a comfort.”

  “Are we keeping her?”

  “We can’t, Reed. That was made very clear. She’s a dog with outstanding conformation, apparently evident at her birth. She’s wanted by her owners, for breeding and I hope love.”

  “We’ll keep her for now. We may need her for more messages. Do you think she can manage to sleep in the kitchen if we shut the door?”

  “Absolutely not,” Kate said. “Under the bed is the most we can hope for.”

  “Well,” Reed said, “she’ll be a nice change from incarceration by nymphs. You’d be a nice change too.” And Banny, pleased with that, jumped up on the couch and licked his face.