Plink.
After that tiny sound, of the key hitting the comic book sheet on the hall floor, Jimmy waited, tense, his ear to the keyhole, until he was sure the sound had not been heard downstairs. Then, slowly, carefully, he drew the sheet of paper back into the room, and there was the key, athwart Jughead.
Operating now in darkness, the flashlight in his hip pocket, Jimmy unlocked the door and tiptoed out to the corridor. Could it really be this easy, or were they testing his resourcefulness, leaving one of them hidden on guard upstairs here, to see what he might do?
But apparently not. A little light showed from his right, and when he moved that way he could hear the voices downstairs. He already knew there were five of them, and when he reached the head of the stairs and looked down all five were there. One of the men and the older woman were putting on coats. The other woman was fiddling with a hibachi in the fireplace. The second man was playing solitaire at a card table (and from the looks of things cheating), and the third one was prowling back and forth, holding a wet shirt out and shaking it as though to hurry its drying.
Five. They were either underestimating him or overestimating themselves; probably both. He waited till the couple with coats on went out and then, turning away from the staircase, he went exploring.
It took ten minutes to discover that all the windows up here were boarded, and that there was no second staircase down. He also discovered, in that time, a wire coat-hanger, an eight-inch-piece of galvanized pipe, and a hall-full squirt can of 3-in-i oil.
But the big finds were in the attic, which he gained access to via a trapdoor in a bedroom closet. In the mountain school in Switzerland last summer he’d learned the chimney climb, going up funnel-type openings by pressing one’s back against one side and walking one’s feet up the other. He went up the closet walls that way, got into the attic, and made both finds almost at once. In an old metal toolbox were several rusty abandoned tools: a hammer, a screwdriver, pliers, a long slender tweezers. And off in a corner, behind several stacks of Grit, was a good long coil of rope.
Pleased with himself, Jimmy used the rope to lower the toolbox, then dropped the rest of the rope down after it and walked his way back down the closet walls. It took two trips to carry everything back to his room, and on the second trip he paused at the head of the stairs again to see how his kidnappers were doing. The woman was now boiling water on the hibachi, and the two men were playing rummy. From the looks of things the woman would be bringing him food pretty soon so he shouldn’t stand around here wasting time.
Going back to his room, he put the key in the lock on the outside, went into the room, and pulled the door shut. Then, using the tweezers from the toolbox, he carefully turned the key from inside; one revolution all the way around and the lock clicked into place.
Now, to work.
17
HANGING UP the phone after talking with the kidnapper, Herbert Harrington said, “Well. I can’t say I cared for that at all.”
“Let’s listen to it,” the head FBI man said, and they all waited in silence while the technician ran the tape back to the beginning again.
Herbert Harrington plucked his white handkerchief from his suit coat’s breast pocket and patted the tiny beads of perspiration that gleamed on his pale high forehead. A calm, methodical, successful corporation attorney of fifty-seven, he was used to emergencies and crises that ran at a Wall Street pace: weeks of gathering storm clouds, spotted with occasional conferences or public rumor denials, then a flurry of phone calls, a massing of capital along the disputed border, and then perhaps three days or a week or even a month of concentrated buying, selling, merging, bankruptcy declarations and the like. Drama with sweep to it, emotional climaxes as carefully grounded and prepared for as in grand opera.
But this. They kidnap the boy at four o’clock in the afternoon, and by nine o’clock the same night they’re demanding one hundred fifty thousand dollars for him. In old bills. In an equivalent situation on Wall Street, it would be three or four working days before anybody even admitted the boy had been taken. Then, there’d be a period of weeks or months when the kidnappers would publicly maintain the posture that they meant to keep the boy, had no interest in selling him,, and wouldn’t even consider any offers that might come their way. This logjam, assisted by continued denials from Herbert Harrington or his spokesmen that (a) he was interested in negotiating a repurchase, (b) that he was in a cash or tax position to make such a repurchase possible, or (c) that in fact he had ever had such a son at all, would eventually be broken by tentative feelers from both sides. Dickering, threats, go-betweens, all the panoply of negotiation would then be mounted and gone through like the ritual of High Mass, and it would be even more weeks before anything like a dollar amount was ever mentioned. And in fact dollars would be the very least of it; there would be stock options, rebates, one-for-one stock transfers, sliding scales, an agreement with some meat on it. Instead of which- “All set,” the tape technician said.
“Run it,” the head FBI man said. They all talked in clipped little sentences like that; Harrington felt himself getting a headache.
From the machine, a voice said, “Hello?” and another voice said, “Is that Herbert Har-”
Talking over the second voice, Harrington said, “Is that me? It doesn’t sound like me.”
“Hold it,” the head FBI man said, and the technician stopped the tape and ran it backward again. To Harrington the head FBI man said, “Let’s just listen.”
“Oh, of course,” Harrington said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, I was merely startled.”
“Run it,” the head FBI man said, and the tape started forward again.
“Hello?” His own voice sounded lighter to him than he would have guessed; not so manly. He didn’t much like it.
“Is that Herbert Harrington?” It was a female voice, middle-aged, New York City accent, rather truculent. An irascible-sounding woman, like one of your lady cabdrivers.
“Yes, it is. Who’s calling, please?”
“We have your boy.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, ‘We have your boy.’ It means we kidnapped him, we’re the kidnappers. I’m one of the kidnappers, this is the phone call.”
“Oh, yes! Of course, I’m sorry. Maurice phoned me when he got home.”
“What?”
“My chauffeur. He was very upset, he said it was extremely difficult to drive while chained to the steering wheel.”
Small pause. Then, the woman’s voice again: “Look, let’s start all over. We have your boy.”
“Yes, you said that. And this is the phone call.”
“Right. All right. Your Bobby’s fine. And he’ll-”
“What say?”
“I said, ‘Your Bobby’s fine. And he’ll stay-”
“Are you sure you have the right number?”
“Jimmy! I didn’t mean-I meant Jimmy. Your Jimmy’s fine. And he’ll stay fine just as long as you cooperate.”
Silence. Far in the background one of those telephone company noises took place: boopboop-boopboop-boopboop-beep-boopboop-boop.
The woman’s voice: “Did you hear me?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well? You gonna cooperate or aren’t you gonna cooperate?”
“Of course I’ll cooperate.”
“At last. Okay. That’s good. And the first thing is, you don’t call the police.”
“Oh, dear.”
“What?”
“I do wish you’d told me before. Or told Maurice, that would have been best.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, the fact is, I’ve already called them. In fact, they’re here right now.” (That had been the moment when the head FBI man had started waving his arms back and forth in a negative manner; Harrington remembered now his decision at that point not to mention to the woman that the call was being recorded. But weren’t there court decisions to the effect that people had to be informed if their calls were being recorded?)
“You already called them.”
“Well, it did seem the thing to do. Maurice said you people carried guns and seemed extremely menacing.”
“All right, all right. We’ll forget that part. The point is, you want your kid back, right?”
Slight hesitation. “Well, of course.” (Listening to the tape now, Harrington could see where that hesitation might very easily be misconstrued. But he hadn’t been thinking it over, or anything like that, it was merely that the question had been raised so suddenly it had startled him. Naturally he wanted Jimmy back, he was a fine lad, an excellent boy. There were times when Harrington wished he’d named this son Herbert, rather than having thrown the name away on his first son by his first marriage; the actual Herbert, now a twenty-eight-year-old hippie on a commune in Chad, had little to recommend him. In fact, nothing. In fact, it was good sound business sense on the kidnappers’ part to steal Jimmy rather than Herbert Jr., since Harrington doubted very much he would pay one hundred fifty thousand dollars for the return of that clod.)